The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  The honeymoon did not last long. The man who began the erosion of the Mughal’s status was Thomas Metcalfe’s cold elder brother, Sir Charles, who preceded him as Resident. ‘I have renounced my former allegiance to the house of Timur,’ he announced in a letter of 1832, before persuading the Governor General unilaterally to declare an end to the old tradition of giving the Emperor the ceremonial gift or nazr – which represented a public confirmation of the status of the British as liegemen of the Emperor. Charles Metcalfe accepted that the British were technically still the feudal inferior of the Mughal, but was determined that given the reality of British power and Mughal weakness, this must no longer be acknowledged in public: ‘We have on the whole behaved generously to the King from the first,’ he wrote to the Governor General, ‘and I never found him unreasonable or assuming.’ But, he continued, if the Emperor refused to accept the new realities, ‘I think it is our best policy in future to let him sink into insignificance instead of upholding his dignity as we have done.’32

  The following year the Emperor’s name was removed from East India Company rupees, and when Lord Auckland visited Delhi he did not even bother to pay a courtesy call on the Emperor Akbar Shah II. By 1850 his successor, Lord Dalhousie, was banning any British subject from accepting titles from the Mughal: ‘covering the English with the Mughal ceremonial mantle’ was dismissed as ‘a solemn farce’.33 It was a very different approach from that promised by Lord Wellesley, and amounted to an attempt by the British to try to demote their feudal lord to the status of a subject nobleman. Henceforth, more and more of the Mughal’s rights and privileges were stripped away, until by 1852 Zafar was left with nothing but his palace and the lingering reputation of his dynasty.

  But despite everything Zafar was still allowed his processions. Deprived of most other ways of expressing his increasingly in- tangible sovereignty, he took full advantage of the right, and the miniatures of Zafar’s reign contain an almost touching number of scrolls showing processions: trips to Sufi shrines, the annual exodus to the summer palace in Mehrauli, journeys to celebrate the festival of ‘Id at the old Id Gah, and expeditions to watch the Flowersellers’ Fair, the Phulwalon ki Sair, at the ancient Jog Maya temple and the Sufi shrine of Qutb Sahib.

  Seen from this point of view, the spectacular marriage procession of Jawan Bakht was less a symbol of strength than the last desperate fling of a terminally ill dynasty.

  Understandably, the surviving official accounts of the wedding do not dwell on the various squabbles that we know erupted in the course of the night.

  The least surprising of the spats that took place was the one between the two great court poets, Ghalib and Zauq. Almost everything about the two men’s styles and backgrounds contained possibilities for disagreement. Zauq wrote verse of startling simplicity; while Ghalib’s verse was notoriously complex.* Zauq was from a humble background – his father had been a common footsoldier; but it was he, not the self-consciously aristocratic Ghalib, who had been made Zafar’s ustad† in poetry, and so Poet Laureate of Mughal Delhi.

  Moreover, while Zauq led a quiet and simple life, composing verse from dusk until dawn, rarely straying from the tiny courtyard where he worked, Ghalib was very proud of his reputation as a rake. Only five years before the wedding, Ghalib had been imprisoned for gambling, and subsequently wore the affair – deeply embarrassing at the time – as a badge of honour. When someone once praised the poetry of the pious Sheikh Sahbai in his presence, Ghalib shot back, ‘How can Sahbai be a poet? He has never tasted wine, nor has he ever gambled; he has not been beaten with slippers by lovers, nor has he once seen the inside of a jail.’34 Elsewhere in his letters he makes great play of his reputation as a ladies’ man. To one close friend whose mistress had just died and who had written to Ghalib from the depths of misery, he replied:

  Mirza Sahib, I don’t like the way you are going on. In the days of my lusty youth a man of perfect wisdom counselled me, ‘Abstinence I do not approve: dissoluteness I do not forbid. Eat drink and be merry. But remember that the wise fly settles on the sugar and not on the honey.’ Well I have always acted on his counsel. You cannot mourn another’s death, unless you live yourself …Give thanks to God for your freedom, and do not grieve …When I think of paradise and consider how if my sins are forgiven me and I am installed in a palace with a houri, to live forever in the worthy woman’s company, I am filled with dismay and fear …How wearisome to find her there – a greater burden than a man could bear. The same old palace, all of emerald made; the same fruit tree to cast its shade. And – God preserve her from all harm – the same old houri on my arm. Come to your sense, brother, and take another.

  Take a new woman each returning spring

  For last year’s almanac is a useless thing.35

  The squabble at the wedding was over a single verse in Ghalib’s sehra (or wedding oration36) where he appeared – characteristically – to suggest that no one in the gathering could write a couplet as well as he. Most critics today would argue that it was a well-justified boast, but at the time it was taken to be a slight not just to Zauq, but also to Zafar, who was of course a considerable poet himself, and who had expressed his belief in the superiority of Zauq’s talents when he appointed the latter to correct his own verses. Zafar quickly made his views apparent, presenting to Zauq a khilat and the honorary position of Superintendent of the Palace Gardens, while ostentatiously neglecting to provide an honour of any sort for Ghalib.37 Zafar also encouraged Zauq to reply to Ghalib’s unprovoked sally. The fine sehra that the Poet Laureate came up with ended with a couplet tossing the challenge back to Ghalib:

  The person who claims poetic skills,

  Recite this to him and say,

  ‘Look – this is how a poet

  Weaves a real wedding veil.’

  According to the account of Azad, who was admittedly a pupil and adoring partisan of Zauq’s: ‘Singers were in attendance and the verse was at once given to them. By evening it had spread through every street and lane of the city, and the next day it was published in the newspapers.’38

  This particular round of the feud between the two poets went to Zauq.

  One of the principal trials in Zafar’s old age appears to have been the strains that existed between his different queens and concubines, and the degree to which they all seem to have been perennially conducting intrigues with younger men. These were serious tensions which formed a strong undercurrent to the wedding celebrations of 1852.

  Fifteen years earlier, at the time of Zafar’s accession to the throne in 1837, his chief wife had been Taj Mahal Begum, the beautiful daughter of a humble court musician, and it was she who presided over the celebrations that accompanied his accession ceremonies.39It was not, however, a position she was able to retain for long. Only three years later the relatively aristocratic nineteen-year-old Zinat Mahal was presented to Zafar; he was sixty-four. Within a few months she had married him, effectively toppling Taj from her position as head of the harem.

  Thereafter Zinat Mahal managed to retain her position as Zafar’s favourite wife until his death. This did not, however, stop the septuagenarian Zafar from contracting four further marriages in the years that followed, all to wives of relatively low status, as well as taking several new concubines: in 1853 there seem to have been at least five such women attached to the imperial bedchamber, judging by the fact that in July that year Zafar had five sets of silver feet made for their beds.40 Zafar’s harem seems in general to have been a remarkably active place, even into the Emperor’s early eighties. Zafar fathered in all no fewer than sixteen sons and thirty-one daughters, his last son, Mirza Shah Abbas, being conceived as late as 1845 when the emperor was fully seventy years old.

  There is no record of Zinat Mahal taking against any of the concubines – indeed, when one of them became pregnant by Tanras Khan, the court musician, Zinat intervened to spare her severe punishment.41 But she seems to have remained permanently in a state of war with Taj Begum, and at one point even
managed to have the latter imprisoned on suspicion of having an affair with one of Zafar’s nephews, Mirza Kamran.42 Taj denied the charge, but her conduct was widely believed to have been suspicious, and judging from the Palace diary she certainly seems to have spent more time at her house in the city, and to have come and gone from it at night by the back door more frequently than might have been wise for a queen concerned about maintaining proprieties.43

  Zafar’s harem was in general notoriously lax as far as discipline and security were concerned: as well as Piya Bai, who became pregnant by Tanras Khan, several other of his concubines were publicly accused of ‘improprieties’ at various times, and at least one other illicit pregnancy occurred: two months before Jawan Bakht’s wedding, one of the sepoys stationed at the water gate on the Yamuna river frontage just below the Palace took advantage of his station to conduct an affair with another unnamed slave girl who may well have been one of Zafar’s concubines, and was sentenced to ‘a whipping and confinement with irons’ for his pains. The girl got off relatively lightly: she was merely ‘sentenced to grind grain’.44

  Only three days after the discovery of the pregnant slave girl, other strangers were found to be defying the guard eunuchs. According to the diary entry for 1 February 1852, Zafar immediately sent for the chamberlain, telling him ‘he was much displeased at the arrangements of the zenana [harem]; that the chaukidars [guards] and chobdars [mace-bearers] were never present and that strangers were allowed access to the zanan-khana; that it was represented to him by Chand Bai Concubine that Nabi Bakhsh had forcibly entered the house of Sultan Bai, although the eunuch tried to prevent his doing so …’. The general impression is one of complete chaos, of a once-great establishment unable to maintain basic proprieties in reduced circumstances; it is certainly a very different picture to the closely guarded and impenetrable Mughal harem of orientalist myth. Whatever his other qualities, running the domestic arrangements of the Red Fort was clearly not one of Zafar’s talents, at least in his old age.

  Life for the senior princes could be extremely comfortable and Zafar’s own children had a fair degree of freedom to live their own lives and follow their own interests and amusements, whether these lay in scholarly and artistic directions, or in hunting, pigeon flying and quail fighting. But the options open for the junior salatin, or Palace-born princes and princesses, could be extremely limited. Besides the senior princes, there were over two thousand poor princes and princesses – grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren of previous monarchs – most of whom lived a life of poverty in their own walled quarter of the Palace, to the south-west of the area occupied by Zafar and his immediate family.45 This was the darker side of the life of the Red Fort, and its greatest embarrassment; for this reason many of the salatin were never allowed out of the gates of the Fort, least of all on so ostentatious an occasion as the very public festivities in Daryaganj. According to one British observer:

  The salatin quarter consists of an immense high wall so that nothing can overlook it. Within this are numerous mat huts in which these wretched objects live. When the gates were opened there was a rush of miserable, half naked, starved beings who surrounded us. Some men apparently nearly 80 years old were almost in a state of nature.46.

  Zafar, absorbed in his other worries, seems to have had fairly limited patience with the sufferings and misdemeanours of his more distant relatives. They tended to be responsible – so he believed – for most of the thefts and disturbances that took place within the Palace: on one occasion, when a thief was spotted darting along the walls of the Red Fort, Zafar remarked that ‘it must have been one of the salatin’; on another Zafar was quoted as remarking that ‘the salatin were in the habit of stealing from one another’ and ‘of drinking and creating a disturbance’.47 When Zafar was informed that one of the junior salatin, ‘Mirza Mahmoud Sultan had become insane and was in the habit of wandering around the Palace at night’, he did not hesitate to order that he should be ‘confined with chains upon his feet’.48

  Occasionally, however, the salatin broke their silence and created a more serious embarrassment for Zafar. Twice they had put together mass petitions addressed to the British Resident claiming that their basic rights were being abused. Ten years into Zafar’s reign, in 1847, one hundred salatin signed a petition complaining to Metcalfe of oppression:

  Our conditions have approached to the extreme of humiliation and poverty owing to the character and conduct of the King of Delhi who is entirely subject to the control of his servants and bad advisers … the subordinate members are exposed to every species of degradation and insult by [the chief eunuch] Mahbub Ali Khan and the favourites of the king.’49

  A second revolt of the salatin took place a year later and was timed to coincide with the visit to Delhi of the British Lieutenant Governor of the North West Provinces. This time a large piece of parchment containing the seals of more than 150 salatin was presented to the governor asking for protection, and claiming that Zafar was trying to dissuade the heir apparent from meeting Metcalfe to discuss their grievances.50

  This second petition touched on the most sensitive of the tensions within Zafar’s household. For of all the restrictions that the British had imposed on Zafar, the one that rankled most of all was the withdrawal of his right to choose his own successor. Instead the British had imposed on the Mughals the alien European notion of primogeniture.

  Zafar’s attempts to appoint his own choice as heir apparent first surfaced when his oldest living son, Mirza Dara Bakht, died from a fever in 1849. The British assumed that Zafar’s next son, the talented and popular poet, calligrapher and historian Mirza Fakhru, should become the heir apparent in Dara’s place; but Zafar, pressed by the increasingly domineering Zinat Mahal, tried instead to insist on the succession of Mirza Jawan Bakht, then barely a boy of eight years old, and the fifteenth of Zafar’s many sons.51 As Zafar explained it in a letter written to the Lieutenant Governor:

  among my other sons, no one appears to me so fit for the office as Mirza Jawan Bakht, who I am glad to say is endowed with natural good propensities. He has not as yet attained the age of maturity and has not been allowed to mix with people who are not upright. Besides, he is from my lawful wife, who is of very high family, Nawab Zinat Mahal… Under these circumstances therefore, he is most fit for the high office of Heir Apparent and he always remains under my Eyes, and devotes all his time to learning in different branches of education. I feel satisfied that he will never do anything contrary to my wishes.52

  Zafar’s objection to primogeniture was somewhat ironic, given that it was solely thanks to the British insisting on this principle that Zafar had himself come to the throne, much against the will of his father, Akbar Shah II. The latter had strived instead for the succession of Zafar’s raffish younger brother Mirza Jahangir, and in the process developed so strong an objection to his eldest son that on 21 March 1807 he wrote a letter to the then British Resident, Archibald Seton, which closely prefigured that written by Bahadur Shah about Mirza Fakhru forty-two years later: ‘My eldest son [i.e. Zafar]’, wrote Akbar Shah, ‘is wholly devoid of every qualification for occupying the throne.’ He also accused him, without giving any evidence or details, ‘of an offence against nature too delicate to admit explanation from us’.*

  Zafar now acted just as his father had done to him, and continued to push for Mirza Jawan Bakht. Meanwhile his passed-over eldest son, Mirza Fakhru, began learning English, and along with his ambitiously Anglophile father-in-law, Mirza Ilahe Bakhsh, began to ingratiate himself with both Metcalfe and the senior officers of the British military stationed in Delhi. It was in the end a successful campaign. After much negotiation, Mirza Fakhru met with Metcalfe and the Lieutenant Governor in January 1852, three months before the wedding, and signed a secret understanding: the British agreed formally to recognise him as heir apparent, contrary to his father’s wish; but there was a quid pro quo. After more than two centuries, Mirza Fakhru would move the court from th
e Red Fort to the distant suburb of Mehrauli, handing over the old fort of Shah Jahan to the British, who would use it as a barrack and a powder magazine; and when he became Emperor, Fakhru would drop the Mughal’s long-standing claim of superior status to the British Governor General, and would henceforth meet him on terms of equality.53

  When Zafar came to hear rumours about the terms of the agreement, he reacted with fury, believing that his son had bargained away two of the most sacred cornerstones of Mughal prestige: ‘A tawny coloured dog may be mistaken for a jackal’s brother,’ he spat angrily – if somewhat enigmatically – to his attendants.54 Mirza Fakhru was quickly subject to a boycott at court: ‘anyone professing friendship with Mirza Fakhru was his declared enemy’, announced Zafar – and Mirza Fakhru’s various positions at court, his allowances, houses and estates, were all one by one given to his younger brothers, notably his ambitious and hard-working younger brother Mirza Mughal, the leading Anglophobe among the princes.55

  As it gradually became clear, however, that nothing was going to change the British position, Zafar sank increasingly into impotent gloom, as he often did when frustrated. He announced that if his wishes were to be so blatantly ignored, he desired to abdicate and go on the haj: ‘It is plain … that to this House nothing remains now but the bare name,’ he wrote to Metcalfe.