The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  It is to be regretted that my wishes do not meet the sanction of government & I feel greatly distressed on this account. I therefore feel anxious that I should no more prove troublesome to the government and go on a pilgrimage to Mecca & pass the few remaining years of my life there. Because I see that I have lost this world, [but] I may not lose the other also, and I find myself unable in my old age to suffer grief.56

  Metcalfe was at a loss how to react, and blamed what he saw as the increasingly baleful influence of Zinat Mahal: ‘Hitherto when alone with HM I have always found him most plausible and rational,’ Metcalfe wrote to Calcutta. ‘But he has of late surrendered himself so completely to the guidance of the favourite wife, the Nawab Zinat Mahal, and her confidential advisor, the Chief Eunuch Mahbub Ali Khan, [that he] is induced to commit many unreasonable acts.’57

  By the middle of March 1852, however, Zafar seems to have cheered up slightly, and to have pinned his hopes on one last attempt to change the Resident’s mind. He abandoned his plan to go on the haj and threw himself into making arrangements for the wedding of Jawan Bakht. He seems to have believed – or to have been persuaded by Zinat Mahal – that if the wedding were made sufficiently magnificent, such would be the prestige of the bridegroom that the British might yet be forced to take Zafar’s choice of successor seriously. Certainly contemporaries assumed that the magnificent wedding was Zafar’s last-ditch attempt at persuading Metcalfe to recognise Jawan Bakht, and it did result in the Delhi Gazette openly referring to the young groom as the heir apparent.58

  Yet in the end, the whole ruinously expensive strategy – and indeed the whole project of the marriage – was a catastrophic failure. For Metcalfe, well aware of what was going on, did not make an appearance at any point during the twelve days of the wedding celebrations, thus comprehensively snubbing the entire affair.

  Sir Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe had been in Delhi nearly forty years by 1852, and knew well both the city and its ruler.

  He was a slight, delicate, bookish figure with an alert, intelligent expression, a bald pate and bright blue eyes. His daughter Emily thought ‘he could not be said to be handsome’ but believed he did have the redeeming feature ‘of beautifully small hands and feet’. Certainly he was a notably fastidious man, with feelings so refined that he could not bear to see women eat cheese. Moreover he believed that if the fair sex insisted on eating oranges or mangoes, they should at least do so in the privacy of their own bathrooms.

  He would never have dreamt of dressing, as some of his predecessors had, in full Mughal pagri and jama. Still less would he have dreamt of imitating the example of the first British Resident at the Mughal court, Sir David Ochterlony, who every evening was said to take all thirteen of his Indian wives on a promenade around the walls of the Red Fort, each on the back of her own elephant.59 Instead, a widower, he lived alone, and arranged that his London tailors, Pulford of St James’s, should regularly send out to Delhi a chest of sober but fashionable English clothes.

  His one concession to Indian taste was to smoke a silver hookah. This he did every day after breakfast, for exactly thirty minutes. If ever one of his servants failed to perform his appointed duty, Metcalfe would call for a pair of white kid gloves. These he would pick up from their silver salver and slowly pull on over his delicate white fingers. Then, ‘with solemn dignity’, having lectured the servant on his failing, he ‘proceeded to pinch gently but firmly the ear of the culprit, and then let him go – a reprimand that was entirely efficacious’.60

  Sir Thomas had enjoyed an exceptionally happy marriage, but his wife Felicity died quite suddenly of an unexplained fever in September 1842, at the age of only thirty-four. In the decade that followed, with his six children all in boarding school in England, Metcalfe withdrew in his grief into himself. He became so set in his ways that by the time his children began returning to India in the early 1850s, they found that their father had became a stickler for propriety and punctuality, and greatly resented any disruption to his routine. By the early 1850s this routine was so firmly established as to be something almost set down in stone: ‘He always got up at five o’clock every morning,’ wrote his daughter Emily,

  and having put on his dressing gown he would go to the verandah and have his chota haziri [small breakfast]. He used to take a walk up and down the verandah, and his different servants came at that time to receive their orders for the day. At seven o’clock he would go down to the swimming bath which he built just below the corner of the verandah, and then having dressed and had prayers in the oratory, he was ready for breakfast at eight o’clock.

  Everything was ordered with the greatest punctuality, and all the household arrangements moved as if by clock work. After he had his breakfast, his hookah was brought in and placed beside his chair… When he had finished his smoke he went to his study to write letters until the carriage was announced. This always appeared at exactly ten o’clock under the portico, and he passed through a row of servants on his way to it – one holding his hat, another his gloves, another his handkerchief, another his gold headed cane, and another his despatch box. These having been put into the carriage, his Jamadar mounted beside the coachman and drove away, with two syces standing up behind 61

  With no family to soften him, and a dislike for the noise of society, Metcalfe threw himself into his work, in particular negotiating a succession settlement that would allow the Company to expel the royal family from the Red Fort on the death of Zafar. He had some affection, but little real respect, for the man he was determined should be the last of the Timurid line. Although to Zafar’s face he was always extremely polite, and would write to the Emperor as ‘my Royal Illustrious friend … I beg to express the high consideration I entertain for your Majesty and subscribe myself as your Majesty’s sincere friend’, in private he was sometimes less generous.62 ‘[Zafar] is mild and talented,’ he wrote to Emily, ‘but lamentably weak and vacillating and impressed with very erroneous notions of his own importance, productive of great mortification to himself and occasionally of much trouble to the local authorities.’63

  Yet Metcalfe’s attitude to Delhi and its Emperor was much more ambiguous than this might suggest. He was very proud of the resounding Persian titles given to him by Zafar, and commissioned various calligraphed versions of them which he later had bound into an album.* Moreover, almost against his better instincts, he slowly came to be fascinated with the fabulous city he presided over: ‘There is something in this place to which the mind cannot be indifferent,’ he wrote.

  The ruins of grandeur that extend for miles on every side fill it with serious reflection. The palaces crumbling into dust… the myriads of vast mausoleums, every one of which was intended to convey to futurity the deathless fame of its cold inhabitant, and all of which are now passed by, unknown and unnoticed … These things cannot be looked at with indifference …64

  In due course, Metcalfe systematically visited all the different antiquities of the city and founded a Delhi Archaeological Society dedicated to uncovering the history behind Delhi’s monuments, of which the young Sayyid Ahmad Khan was an enthusiastic and energetic member. The society had its own journal, most of whose articles Metcalfe personally commissioned from the intelligentsia of the city, and duly translated himself from Urdu into English.

  Unlike most British officials – who regarded their stay in India as a temporary affair, and who waited eagerly for the moment when they could sail home with their accumulated savings to set themselves up back in Britain – Metcalfe took the decision to bring all his family possessions to India, and in Delhi built for himself not one but two large country houses, in addition to his new Residency office, known as Ludlow Castle,* which stood outside the city walls in the recently built British Civil Lines to the north of the city.

  In his letters, Metcalfe sometimes envisaged himself as an English country squire. In reality, however, he seems to have had slightly more exalted ambitions, and to some extent he set up his establishment as a rival court
to that of Zafar, with the Metcalfes as a parallel dynasty to the Mughals. Metcalfe House, also known as Jahan Numa (‘World Showing’), his expansive and palatial Palladian bungalow on the banks of the Yamuna to the north of the city, was an indirect challenge to the Red Fort, a little downstream of it. If the Red Fort had its marble domes, its scented night gardens with their bubbling irrigation runnels and floating pavilions, then Metcalfe House had its flower beds with its English blooms, its marble columns and its swimming pool, its cypress avenues and orange groves, a library of 25,000 books, fine oil paintings and rosewood Georgian furniture. It also had a Napoleon Gallery filled with memorabilia of Bonaparte, including the Emperor’s own diamond ring and a bust by Canova.

  To the south of Delhi, Metcalfe established a second country house, Dilkusha (or Delighter of the Heart), in a converted octagonal Mughal tomb near Mehrauli, which became Metcalfe’s answer to the nearby Mughal summer palace of Zafar Mahal; a Mughal garden – a four-part char-bagh – was laid out in front of the tomb house just to emphasise the parallel. Both Metcalfe’s houses were surrounded by extensive estates, and were entered through colossal Georgian gateways; both were decorated with follies, and even, in the case of Dilkusha, a lighthouse, a small fort, a pigeon house, a boating pond and an ornamental ziggurat.

  Like Zafar, Metcalfe was a generous patron of Delhi’s artists. Between 1842 and 1844 he commissioned a whole series of images of the monuments, ruins, palaces and shrines of the city from a Delhi artist named Mazhar Ali Khan, who was also a favourite artist of Zafar’s. Metcalfe had the images bound into an album, entitled The Dehlie Book, and wrote a long descriptive text as an accompaniment. This in due course he sent to his daughter Emily as she made her way home from an English schooling to join her father in Delhi. He also commissioned a remarkable panoramic scroll of the city, some 20 feet long. Together the two commissions remain the most complete visual picture of pre-Mutiny Delhi now extant.65

  The commissions are also great works of art in their own right. Mazhar Ali Khan had clearly been trained in the old Mughal techniques, but working for Metcalfe, using English watercolours on English paper, and taking English architectural elevations as his models, an extraordinary fusion of English and Indian artistic impulses took place, a fusion that resulted in a new type of painting, known today as the Company School.

  The brilliance and simplicity of the colours, the meticulous, almost hypnotic attention to detail, the gem-like highlights, the way the picture seems to glow, all these point unmistakably towards Mazhar Ali Khan’s Mughal training: no English artist would have thought of using the astonishing palette of colours that still stands out like a small aesthetic firework display; the tentative washes of a memsahib’s watercolour are a world away from this work. Yet the almost fanatical Mughal attention to fine detail is fused with a scientific European rationalism to produce an architectural painting that both observes and feels the qualities of a building. Thus while the picture of the tomb of Ghazi ud-Din in the Delhi College complex minutely reproduces the proportions and detail of the Mughal domes of the mosque behind it, the artist has also understood the ideal of lightness and delicacy that the architect was aiming at, and has produced an image of the building as fine and as fragile as a lace ruff: the tomb is so delicate and ethereal it could almost be blown away with a breath.

  But it was not just as a patron of the arts that Sir Thomas had much in common with Zafar: in many other ways too their situations shared unexpected parallels. Politically, they both had a faint sense that they had somehow been passed over: however grandly Metcalfe might swagger through the muhallas of Delhi, the truth was that many of Metcalfe’s juniors had long since shot past him in the Company’s service: John Lawrence, for example, once one of Metcalfe’s assistants, had now risen several ranks above him and was Governor of the newly conquered Punjab. More galling still, Metcalfe’s elder brother Charles, who had preceded him as Resident in Delhi, had now acquired a peerage and been promoted from acting Governor General in Calcutta to actual Governor General in Canada. Thomas Metcalfe, meanwhile, remained firmly ensconced in his old position in Delhi. It was a good but hardly very senior position in the Company’s civil service, despite Delhi’s long history as the capital of Hindustan and the centre of the Mughal Empire. This was especially so after 1833 when the new Presidency of the North West Provinces was created, administered by a lieutenant governor based in Agra, so further reducing the authority of the Delhi Resident.*

  Moreover, the family situations of Metcalfe and Zafar were in many ways surprisingly similar. If Zafar increasingly found himself at odds with his eldest son and heir, then so too did Metcalfe. For Metcalfe’s son Theophilus (or Theo as he was known), a junior magistrate in the Company’s service, newly returned to India after ten years’ absence at school in England, was a very different figure from his father. Where Sir Thomas was reserved and particular, Theo was sociable and expansive and also, when he wished to be, extremely charming. If the father liked solitude and disliked the business of entertaining, Theo was noisy and convivial, and enjoyed parties, riding, horses and dogs. If his father was resolutely self-disciplined and law-abiding, Theo had a tendency to cut corners, and get into what his father described as ‘scrapes’.66 It was hardly surprising, therefore, that the two had a somewhat strained relationship.

  For this reason, Sir Thomas was more than a little alarmed when in April 1851, exactly a year before Jawan Bakht’s marriage, he received a letter from Theo announcing that he had just been posted to Delhi. ‘I tell you candidly that I fear our reunion,’ Sir Thomas wrote to his middle daughter Georgina, known in the family as GG.

  At my time of life, I do not wish to be put out of my way and play second fiddle in my own house. Your brother I know from experience: all must give way to his wishes. My temper is hasty too, and I keep it always under control. But I feel the result [of this]. [Moreover] I shall have to set him up with buggy and horses. I was snubbed the other day by a friend of mine who said – ‘if you do not insist on his living within his salary, he is quite right to draw upon you’. This is a troubling letter [to write] – but my bile will evaporate …67

  In the postscript, however, Metcalfe’s tone grew more apprehensive still:

  After I wrote to you yesterday, dearest GG, the Delhi Gazette came in and in a paragraph of the ‘Calcutta correspondents” letter, is one allusion to an illegal act of a civil nature which, I fear has reference to your brother. If so, he has not only angered Lord Dalhousie and will be removed, but also in all probability will be prosecuted in the Supreme Court, and is likely to be [fined] cash in damages of some 10 or 12,000 rupees, which I of course, shall have to pay rather than he have to go to jail. This is a precious mess and if all I fear takes place, I cannot afford to bring out your sister [from England]. How frightening it is that Theo could not act with discretion and judgement. His extravagance is bad enough.68

  Sir Thomas had always found his relationships with his daughters easier than those with his sons, and his correspondence with both Emily and GG was invariably warm and intimate. In 1852, however, at the same time as Zafar was struggling with the affairs taking place in his harem, Sir Thomas was busy trying to forbid the passionate love affair of the twenty-one-year-old Georgina.

  Much to Metcalfe’s horror, Georgina had fallen for a young Scottish army captain named Sir Edward Campbell. Campbell was a protégé and former ADC to his fellow Scot, Sir Charles Napier, the former Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in India, with whom Sir Thomas had had a serious disagreement; to make matters worse, despite his title, Campbell was more or less penniless. He and Georgina had met one morning in the house of the Company’s medical officer in Delhi, Dr Grant, over a pianoforte which GG had gone to tune; and by evening they were singing parlour songs together, chaperoned by Captain Douglas, Commander of the Palace Guards.69

  As soon as Sir Thomas found out about the affair he forbade the couple from corresponding and GG promptly went on a hunger strike. When Metcalfe took
her up to the newly built hill station of Mussoorie for a change of air, she sat waiting for her lover’s letters, each of which was promptly confiscated by her father on arrival. ‘My beloved,’ wrote the lovesick GG to Campbell from her Mussoorie bedroom after her father had retired for the night,

  It is so hard to see letters come from you & to feel I may not read or see them since I know they are come! Oh! Edward! I should be so purely happy if I might write to and hear from you! One little note a week Edward would give me such intense joy. I cannot see the indelicacy and find it appears to me incomprehensible how anyone can entertain such an idea under existing circumstances. Are we not sure? Oh yes in everything now … 70

  Metcalfe, who was so adept at controlling the many princes of the House of Timur, found himself powerless in the face of the pain and despair of a single twenty-one-year-old girl. He returned to Delhi, leaving GG in the hills, writing helplessly from Dilkusha that

  I trust you will allow the fine climate to have fair play with you and that you will eat and recollect that you have a father who loves you and is grieved to witness your present state both of body and mind, and that whatever annoyance he may have caused you proceeded from sincere affection and a sense of duty. No father can do more.71

  2

  BELIEVERS AND INFIDELS

  The Reverend Midgeley John Jennings, the chaplain of the Christian population of Delhi, was not a man to flinch from speaking his mind.

  Ever since he had arrived in Delhi three months before Jawan Bakht’s wedding, Jennings had been working on his plan to convert the people of Delhi to Christianity. For the Mughal capital, Jennings had concluded, was nothing less than the last earthly bastion of the Prince of Darkness himself: ‘Within its walls’, he wrote,

  the pride of life, the lust of the eye and all the lusts of the flesh have reigned and revelled to the full, and all the glories of the Kingdoms of this portion of the earth have passed from one wicked possessor to another. It is as though it were permitted the Evil One there at least to verify his boast that he giveth it to whom he will; but of truth, of meekness and of righteousness, the power has not been seen …1