The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  In contrast to the mild tut-tutting of Father Angelo, the intrusion of Jennings and his overtly Islamophobic mission into this overwhelmingly hybrid landscape was something quite new, and it dramatically changed the atmosphere. It undermined the hopes of those in the Mughal elite who had endeavoured to create a working relationship with the Christians, while confirming the prejudices of those who had argued all along against any attempt at accommodation with the infidel kafirs.

  For while there had been several other missionaries passing through Delhi in the course of the early nineteenth century, preaching, debating and distributing pamphlets, none had adopted quite such a blatantly confrontational approach as Jennings. In his first report to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), Jennings had talked of his relish in taking on Delhi’s ‘261 mosques and 200 temples’ and had made no secret of his willingness openly to attack both Islam and the Prophet.43 Nor did the earlier missionaries have the same degree of official patronage as Jennings, who had, among others, the Governor of the North West Provinces and the Commissioner of the Punjab on his Mission Committee. As Delhi chaplain, he also had his salary and travel arrangements paid for by the Company.

  Moreover, Jennings arrived in Delhi at a time when both Muslims and Hindus were beginning to feel increasingly alarmed by the degree to which the British were beginning to use their new power to curb what had previously been regarded as legitimate religious activities, and instead to aggressively and insensitively promote Christianity. Sati, the burning of Hindu widows, had been outlawed in 1829, alarming many orthodox Hindus; another law allowing the remarriage of Hindu widows horrified many more. Since then stories had been circulating of the ways in which the British were using government orphanages to convert parentless children, a tendency that seemed to be confirmed by the legislation introduced in 1832 allowing converts to inherit ancestral property, something explicitly forbidden by the sharia. There were also claims that missionaries had been allowed a free hand to preach to the (literally) captive audience in the Company jails: not an unlikely charge, since the Superintendent of Jails for the region was also on Jennings’ committee.44

  More seriously still, in the British land settlement that had followed the conquest of Hindustan, many hundreds of temples, mosques, madrasas and Sufi shrines had had their endowments ‘resumed’ – effectively confiscated – on a variety of pretexts, and wherever documents proving the grantees’ rights could not be produced; among the land grants resumed were the revenues bequeathed to no fewer than nine mosques in Delhi. There were other cases where the Company casually demolished revered temples and mosques to make roads – something that especially upset the influential theologian Shah Abdul Aziz.*45 In a few cases land was taken from mosques and awarded to missionaries in order for them to build churches; on other occasions, with equally astonishing insensitivity, missionaries and the regular Christian clergy were given confiscated or ruined mosques to live in.46

  Although the missionaries were in general notably unsuccessful in their trawl for conversions in northern India, such was the atmosphere of suspicion generated by the growing missionary phobia that even quite innocent British initiatives began to generate alarm: the construction of a hospital in Saharanpur to the north of Delhi led to a wave of anxiety that the British were going to abolish the purdah system, since veiled women had been asked to go there rather than being treated at home. By the same token, all British schools and colleges came to be regarded as covert organs of missionary activity.47

  It was no accident that it was in 1852, the year of Jennings’ arrival in Delhi, that the first signs emerged of an intellectual counterattack by the Delhi ‘ulama. It was in this year that the learned Maulana Rahmat Allah Kairnawi wrote a widely circulated tract, Izalat al-awham (The Remover of Doubts), in which he provided a very articulate defence of Islam and an attack on the scriptural inconsistencies and corruptions of the Christian Gospels, based partly on the new findings of German biblical scholars. As the Maulana explained:

  For a time the ordinary Muslims shrank from listening to the preaching [of the missionaries] and from studying their books and pamphlets, therefore none of the Indian ‘ulama paid any attention to the refutation of these pamphlets. But after some time had passed there began to be a weakening in some of the people, and some of the illiterate [Muslims] were in danger of stumbling. Therefore some of us scholars of Islam turned their attention to their refutation …48

  The new attitudes of the Evangelicals were only part of a more widespread and visibly growing arrogance on the part of the increasingly powerful British. Since they had finally succeeded in conquering and subduing the Sikhs in 1849, the British finally found themselves the masters of South Asia: every single one of their military rivals had now been conquered – Siraj ud-Daula of Bengal in 1757, the French in 1761, Tipu Sultan of Mysore in 1799, and the Marathas in 1803 and again, finally, in 1819.

  For the first time there was a feeling that technologically, economically and politically, as well as culturally, the British had nothing to learn from India and much to teach; it did not take long for imperial arrogance to set in. This arrogance, when combined with the rise of Evangelical Christianity, slowly came to affect all aspects of relations between the British and the Indians.

  The Delhi College, initially more a madrasa than a Western university, was remodelled by the Company in 1828 to provide, in addition to its oriental studies, an education in English language and literature. The object was ‘to uplift’ what the new college committee now saw as the ‘uneducated and half-barbarous people of India’. Behind the move was Charles Trevelyan, the brother-in-law and disciple of Thomas Babingdon Macaulay, the same Macaulay whose minute famously declared that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’:

  the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England … The languages of Western Europe civilized Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar.

  Trevelyan now put such views into action at Delhi College, declaring that: ‘Only the pure fount of English literature [can make] headway against the impenetrable barrier of habit and prejudice backed by religious feeling.’49 Shortly afterwards, in 1837, the British abolished Persian as the language of government and replaced it with English (and occasionally the regional language as well). From now on, it was clear, the British were setting the agenda and India would be governed entirely according to their tastes, traditions and judgements.

  Yet even Indians who were educated in the new English college found it did little to improve their treatment at British hands. According to Mohan Lal Kashmiri, who was a pupil in the first batch of students taught in the Delhi English College, ‘the distant and contemptible manner with which we are treated by the generality of English gentlemen, wounds our hearts and compels us to forget the blessings of the British rule’. He added a word of warning: ‘you may crush down the populace and keep them in awe with your arms, but until you conquer and win the hearts of the people, the peace and affection will be more an outward word of talk’ than reality.50

  To the White Mughals who had tried to bridge the two cultures, the change in tone and the sheer ever–growing rudeness of the British were deeply dispiriting. William Gardner was profoundly embedded in the tolerant and hybrid court culture of the Mughals; to him, attempts by missionaries like Jennings to force their customs and religions on an unwilling India were as horrifying as they were inexplicable. He was especially irritated by the degree to which the British seemed to have lost touch with Indian opinion. As he wrote to a cousin, over and over again the British succeeded in giving offence ‘for want of knowledge of the natives … Injustice and Tyranny were never exceeded by any government that ever existed’.51 His feelings were shared by Ochterlony, who in his old age was equally horrif
ied by the way his younger colleagues treated the Emperor and his family: ‘the House of Timoor far from being thought worthy to command the least consideration,’ he wrote to a sympathetic William Fraser, ‘is apparently sinking into the very lowest state of contempt. I fear … we do not gain much Popularity in the eyes of the natives by such marked degradation’.52

  When Fanny Parkes was in Delhi, she paid a call to an old princess who was a cousin of the Gardners in the zenana of the Red Fort. At the beginning of the British ascendancy, such visits would have been routine and unremarkable. But by the late 1840s the reaction from the British community in Delhi was one of nearhorror. ‘I heard that I was much blamed for visiting the princess,’ wrote Fanny afterwards.

  Look at the poverty, the wretched poverty of these descendants of the Emperors! In former times strings of pearls and valuable jewels were placed on the necks of departing visitors. When the Princess Hyat-ool-Nissa Begum in her fallen fortunes put the necklace of freshly gathered white jasmine flowers over my head, I bowed with as much respect as if she had been the Queen of the Universe. Others may look upon these people with contempt, I cannot. Look at what they are, what they have been. One day a gentleman, speaking to me of the extravagance of one of the young princes, mentioned that he was always in debt, he could never live upon his allowance. The allowance of the prince was twelve rupees a month! Not more than the wages of a head servant.53

  By the late 1830s, White Mughals like Fraser, Gardner and Ochterlony were becoming few and far between; they and their way of life were beginning to die out. The wills of Company officials show that it was at this time that the number of Indian wives or bibis (consorts or girlfriends) being mentioned begins to decline: from turning up in one in three wills in the period 1780–85, the practice had gone into steep decline. Between 1805 and 1810, bibis appear in only one in every four wills; by 1830 it is one in six; by the middle of the century they have all but disappeared.54

  The speed of the decline of such liaisons far outstrips the speed of the arrival of the white women, whose numbers really increased dramatically only after, rather than before, 1857. This was a result of a changing pattern of Company recruitment: reforms to the Civil Service in 1856 meant that after 1857 civil servants began to come out in their mid-twenties, after undergoing competitive examinations following university, and by that time often arrived in India already married; in contrast, in the earlier period young men had to apply to join the Company before their sixteenth birthday, and thus arrived still malleable and unattached. The drift apart cannot therefore be blamed on the memsahibs, as generations of schoolchildren have been taught.

  More than twenty years earlier, by the early 1830s, Englishmen who had taken on Indian wives or customs had already begun to become objects of surprise and even derision. By the mid-nineteenth century there was growing ‘ridicule’ of Company servants ‘who allow whiskers to grow and who wear turbans &c in imitation of the Musalmans’. Pyjamas – common dress in eighteenth-century Calcutta and Madras – for the first time became something that an Englishman slept in rather than something he wore during the day. As the Delhi Gazette put it in an editorial of 1856:

  Instances have been known of Englishmen coming out to India early in life and becoming in the course of time so throughly Indianized, so identified with the natives (usually with the Mohammedan natives) in habits and feelings as to lose all relish for European society, to select their associates and connections from among the Muslims, to live in every respect in Mussalman fashion, and to either openly or tacitly adopt the Mussalman creed, at any rate ceasing to manifest any interest in Christianity … These have frequently been men of very superior ability … and their familiarity with the ways of the natives may have paved the way for successes otherwise dubious or impracticable.

  It is evident however that such time has gone by, and we must be careful not to be misled by their opinions, however applicable to the task of their day. It is now clear that the present practical influence of such a class, a class fast dying out, can only be to retard the progress of knowledge in India, to abet the native in his adherence to his ancient ways, to keep him tenacious to his old ideas of Oriental conservatism and hostile to all innovation …55

  Comfortably settled in his rooms in the Red Fort, Padre Jennings was clear in his own mind that he represented the new broom that was needed to sweep away such morally corrupt attitudes. Before long he was joined by two junior assistants, one of whom learned Urdu and Persian with a view to targeting the Muslims, and the other Sanskrit, aiming at the Hindus. Together they quickly realised all the fears and suspicions of the Delhi elite by beginning secret Bible classes in the officially secular Delhi College.56

  For several months, however, there was a notable absence of conversions and a growing hostility to Jennings’ attempts to produce some. Then in July 1852, four months after the wedding of Jawan Bakht, Jennings pulled off a major coup. Two prominent Delhi Hindus, Dr Chaman Lai, one of Zafar’s personal physicians, and his friend Master Ramchandra, a talented mathematics lecturer at the Delhi College, both announced they wished to convert. Jennings was only too anxious to oblige, and arranged to baptise them in a very public ceremony at St James’s Church on Sunday, 11 July. As Jennings wrote to the SPG soon afterwards, in a report glowing with self-satisfaction,

  Never was a field riper for missionary efforts than this one … These men have many connections in Delhi and were high in esteem, and their baptism consequently caused the greatest excitement throughout the city … The whole Hindu population assembled around the church on Sunday evening …57

  Soldiers were on hand in case of trouble, but there was no immediate uproar, although there was, for many days afterwards, a ‘violent agitation throughout the city’.58 Respectable families quickly removed their children from the Delhi College where Master Ramchandra worked. Meanwhile even the most pro-British of the ‘ulama now began to have second thoughts about their increasingly militant Christian masters.

  One of these was Mufti Sadruddin Azurda, a close friend of both Zafar and Ghalib, who had played an important role as bridge between the British and the Mughal elite in the early days of the British ascendancy in Delhi, and who had been a friend and protégé of Sir David Ochterlony. For thirty years Azurda had balanced his place as the chief Muslim judge (Sadr Amin) in Delhi and a leading literary figure and mufti at court, with a mild Anglophilia: a natural mediator, he had argued that employment by the Company was entirely legitimate in Muslim law, and that any notion of jihad was quite inappropriate since the British had allowed full religious freedom.59 Now, however, even Azurda began to have serious doubts about the direction British policy was taking, and quietly went about dissuading his students at Delhi College from paying any attention to ‘Christian propaganda’.60 Others were more outspoken. According to one missionary: “The Muslims would gladly overthrow the English. They tell [us] plainly, “If you were not the rulers, we would soon silence your preaching, not with arguments but with the sword.”61

  Just as militant Christians were a growing force among the British in the early 1850s, so among Delhi’s Muslims there was a parallel rise in rigid fundamentalism that displayed the same utter certainty and disdain for the faiths of others, as well as a similar willingness to use force against the infidel.*

  If the great abolitionist William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect had helped generate the spread of fundamentalist Evangelical attitudes in English Christianity, on the Muslim side the father of the radical Islamic Reform movement was Shah Waliullah, an eighteenth-century Delhi divine who had gone to study at Medina in the Hejaz at the same time as Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of the Arabian Wahhabis.† While there is no evidence that the two ever met, they shared an almost identical theology, and when he returned to India, Shah Waliullah quickly declared war on what he saw as the perverted and deviant interpretations of Islam practised in Delhi.62

  Shah Waliullah and his sons – notably William Fraser’s friend Shah Abdul Aziz – stron
gly opposed the Sufi veneration of saints, which they likened to idol worship, and were especially outspoken about the syncretic practices they believed Indian Muslims had picked up from their Hindu neighbours: making pilgrimages to Hindu holy places, consulting Hindu astrologers, piercing the noses of women for nose studs, lighting lamps on tombs, playing music in holy places, and celebrating Hindu festivals. Even the practice of eating on banana leaves was anathematised. The Shah’s solution was to strip out all non-Islamic accretions and innovations, and to emphasise instead a strictly Koranic monotheism in which prayers could be directed only to God, and never through any saintly intermediary.63

  Judging human reason to be incapable of reaching divine truth on its own, Shah Waliullah emphasised the importance of revealed divine revelation and urged a return to the text of the Koran and the Hadiths. In order to make those texts easily available to ordinary people, the Shah translated the Koran into Persian while his sons later translated it into Urdu and disseminated both translations through the new Delhi printing presses.64 Like the Wahhabis, Shah Waliullah also opposed what he saw as the corrupt Muslim rulers of his day, and from his family stronghold in the Madrasa i-Rahimiyya he and his sons and grandsons encouraged Delhiwallahs to defy what he perceived as the decadence of the Mughals and not behave like ‘camels with strings in their noses’.65

  Shah Waliullah’s dislike of the Mughals was as much theological as political. For generations the Mughal emperors had intermarried with Hindus – Zafar was quite typical in having a Rajput mother – and the slow seepage of Hindu ideas and customs from the harem into the rest of the Palace had led the later Mughal emperors to subscribe to a particularly tolerant and syncretic form of Sufi Islam, aligned to the liberal Chishti brotherhood, at the very opposite end of the theological spectrum from the hard-line views of Shah Waliullah; many fundamentalists regarded such liberal views as bordering on infidelity – kufr.66