The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  In orthodox Islam, the object of creation is the worship of God – a relationship of subordination in which God is the master and the devotee is the slave. This relationship is a very straightforward one: if you worship God in the proper way you will be rewarded – on the Day of Judgement you will go to paradise – and if you do not, you will go to hell. The Sufi-minded poet-princes of the Mughal court and their circle in the Delhi ashraf elite completely rejected this idea. They argued instead that God should be worshipped not because he had commanded us to it, but because he was such a lovable being. As a result all traditions were tolerated: anyone was capable of expressing his or her love for God, and that ability transcended religious associations, gender or indeed one’s place in the social order. This was one of the reasons why the Sufi Islam practised so enthusiastically in the court was also so popular across the city, and also why the court circle were so violently anathematised by the more Orthodox ‘ulama.

  Visits to Delhi’s ancient Sufi shrines – which then as now are venerated by Delhi’s Hindus every bit as much as by Delhi’s Muslims – are an almost weekly occurrence in the court diary of Zafar’s reign, and far outnumber any mention of visits to mosques. Zafar also gave generously to the shrine keepers whenever they presented themselves at court, and paid to have flowers placed on saints’ graves, something of which the school of Shah Waliullah especially disapproved.67

  Indeed, Zafar was himself regarded as a Sufi pir, and used to accept pupils or murids.68 The loyal Dihli Urdu Akbhar went so far as to call him ‘one of the leading saints of the age, approved of by the divine court’.69 Zafar even dressed the part, and in his youth, prior to his accession, made a point of living and looking like a poor scholar and dervish, in striking contrast to his three notably dressy younger brothers, Mirzas Jahangir, Salim and Babur: ‘he was a man of spare figure and stature, plainly apparelled, almost approaching to meanness’, reported Major Archer in 1828, when Zafar was fiftythree, and still a decade away from succeeding to the throne. ‘His appearance was that of an indigent munshi, or teacher of languages.’70

  Zafar’s Sufism took two very distict forms. As a poet and dervish, he imbibed the highest subtleties of mystical Sufi writing. But he was also deeply susceptible to the magical and superstitious side of popular Islam. He seems to have believed, for example – as did many of his people – that his position as both Sufi master and Emperor gave him tangible spiritual powers. Thus when one of his followers was bitten by a snake, Zafar attempted to cure him by sending ‘a Seal of Bezoar [a stone antidote to poison] and some water on which he had breathed’, and giving it to the man to drink.71

  The Emperor also had a great belief in charms or ta’wiz, especially as a palliative for his perennial complaint of piles, or to ward off evil spells.72 During one period of illness, he gathered a group of leading Sufi pirs and told them that ‘several Begums suspected that some party or other had cast a spell over him. He therefore requested them to take steps to remedy this so as to remove all apprehensions on this account. They replied that they would write out some charms &c for his Majesty. They were to be mixed in water which when taken [i.e. drunk] would guard him from all evil’.73 Such pirs, wonder workers and Hindu astrologers were in constant attendance on the King, and on their advice he regularly sacrificed buffaloes and camels, buried eggs, and arrested supposed black magicians, as well as wearing a special ring to cure indigestion.74 He also, on their advice, regularly donated cows to the poor, elephants to Sufi shrines and a horse to the khadims (clergy) of the Jama Masjid.75

  Zafar’s poetry, however, existed on a higher plain than this. Like much verse of the period, it was deeply imbued with the Sufi ideals of love, which were regarded as much the surest route to a God who was seen to be located not in the heavens, but deep within the human heart. For if the world of the heart lay at the centre of Sufism, it also formed the cornerstone of the principal literary form in late Mughal Delhi – the ghazal, which derived its name from the Arabic words ‘talking to a woman about love’76 The love of the ghazal poet was ambiguous – it was rarely made entirely clear whether it was sacred or worldly love to which the poet referred. This ambiguity was deliberate, for just as the longing of the soul for union with God was believed to be as compelling and as all-embracing as the longing of the lover for the beloved, both loves could be carried to the point of insanity or what Sufis called fana – self-annihilation and immersion in the beloved.77 In the eyes of the Sufi poets, this search for the God within liberated the seeker from the restrictions of narrowly orthodox Islam, encouraging the devotee to look beyond the letter of the law to its mystical essence. As Ghalib put it,

  The object of my worship lies beyond perception’s reach;

  For men who see, the Ka’ba is a compass, nothing more78

  Look deeper, he tells the orthodox: it is you alone who cannot hear the music of His secrets. Like many of his Delhi contemporaries, Ghalib could write profoundly religious poetry, yet was sceptical about literalist readings of the Muslim scriptures. Typical were his bantering meditations on paradise, which he wrote in a letter to a friend: ‘In Paradise it is true that I shall drink at dawn the pure wine mentioned in the Koran,’ he wrote,

  but where in Paradise are the long walks with intoxicated friends in the night, or the drunken crowds shouting merrily? Where shall I find there the intoxication of Monsoon clouds? Where there is no Autumn how can Spring exist? If the beautiful houris are always there, where will be the sadness of separation and the joy of union? Where shall we find there a girl who flees away when we would kiss her?79

  In the same spirit in Ghalib’s poetry the orthodox Shaikh always represents narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy:

  The Shaikh hovers by the tavern door,

  But believe me, Ghalib,

  I am sure I saw him slip in,

  As I departed.

  In his letters too Ghalib frequently contrasts the narrow legalism of the ‘ulama, ‘teaching the baniyas and brats, and wallowing in the problems of menstruation and post-natal bleeding’, with real spirituality, for which you had to ‘study the works of the mystics and take into one’s heart the essential truth of God’s reality and his expression in all things’.80

  Like the rest of the court circle, Ghalib was prepared to take this insight to its natural conclusion. If God lay within and could be reached less by ritual than by love, then he was as accessible to Hindus as to Muslims. So it was that on a visit to Benares he could playfully write that he was half tempted to settle down there for good, and that he ‘wished he had renounced the faith, put a sectarian mark on my forehead, tied a sacred thread around my waist and seated myself on the bank of the Ganges so that I could wash the contamination of existence away from myself and like a drop be one with the river’.81

  This was an attitude to Hinduism that Zafar – and many of his Mughal forebears – shared. It is clear that Zafar consciously saw his role as a protector of his Hindu subjects, and a moderator of extreme Muslim demands and the chilling Puritanism of many of the ‘ulama.82 One of Zafar’s verses says explicitly that Hinduism and Islam ‘share the same essence’, and his court lived out this syncretic philosophy, and both celebrated and embodied this composite Hindu-Muslim Indo-Islamic civilisation, at every level. The Hindu elite of Delhi went to the Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin, could quote Hafiz and were fond of Persian poetry. Their children – especially those of the administrative Khattri and Kayasth castes – studied under maulvis and attended the more liberal madrasas,* bringing offerings of food for their teachers on Hindu festivals.83 For their part, Muslims followed the Emperor in showing honour to Hindu holy men, while many in the court, including Zafar himself, followed the old Mughal custom, borrowed from uppercaste Hindus, of drinking only Ganges water.84 Zafar’s extensive team of Hindu astrologers rarely left his side.85

  The court diary records how Zafar would play the spring festival of Holi, spraying his courtiers, wives and concubines with different-coloured paints, initiating the celebratio
ns by bathing in the water of seven wells.86 The autumn Hindu festival of Dussera would be marked in the Palace by the distribution of presents and nazrs to Zafar’s Hindu officers, and (more unexpectedly) the colouring of the horses in the Royal Stud. In the evening, the King would then watch the Ram Lila – the celebration of the Hindu godking Ram’s defeat of evil in the shape of the demon Ravana, annually celebrated in Delhi with the burning of giant effigies of the demon and his brothers.87 Zafar even asked for a change in the route of the Ram Lila procession so that it would skirt the entire flank of the Palace, allowing it to be enjoyed in all its glory.88 On Diwali, Zafar would weigh himself against ‘seven kinds of grain, gold, coral &c and directed their distribution among the poor’.89

  The diary is full of the daily consequences of this marked sensitivity to Hindu feelings. One evening, when Zafar was riding out across the river ‘for an airing … a Hindoo waited on the King intimating his wish to become a Mussalman. Hakim Ahsanullah Khan [Zafar’s prime minister] represented that it would not be proper to attend to his request and HM directed that he should be removed from the place’.90 During the Flower-sellers’ Fair, the Phulwalon ki Sair held annually at the ancient Jog Maya temple and the Sufi shrine of Qutb Sahib in Mehrauli, Zafar announced that ‘he would not accompany the pankah into the shrine as he could not accompany it into the temple’.91 On another occasion, when a party of two hundred Muslims turned up at the Palace demanding to be allowed to slaughter cows – holy to Hindus – at ‘Id, Zafar told them in a ‘decided and angry tone that the religion of the Musalmen did not depend upon the sacrifice of cows’.92 Like Ghalib, Zafar had a deep disdain for narrow-minded Shaikhs: one evening’s entertainment at the Palace consisted of ‘Kadir Bakhsh the actor personating a Maulvi [Muslim cleric] in the presence of the King. HM was much pleased and ordered Mahbub Alee Khan [the Chief Eunuch] to give him the usual present’.93

  The Delhi ‘ulama returned the disdain of the court. According to Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, ‘Many of the Delhi moulvies and their followers considered the king to be little better than a heretic. They were of the opinion that it was not right to pray in the mosques to which he was in the habit of going and which were under his patronage.’94 Zafar’s devotional attachment to Imam Ali was especially galling to the orthodox Sunni: the Shia festival of Muharram – the incarnation of Islamic heresy in the eyes of the resolutely Sunni Shah Waliullah – was celebrated with enthusiasm in the Palace, with Zafar listening to the marsiya mourning poems. Partly because of this there were persistent rumours that Zafar had actually converted to Shiism. This led to the Emperor receiving several outraged delegations from the Delhi ‘ulama threatening to take the ultimate sanction of excluding his name from the Friday prayers – effectively excommunicating him and delegitimising his rule – if the rumour ever proved true.95

  As the nineteenth century progressed, such rigidly orthodox views gathered strength in Delhi, and the position of the ‘ulama solidified, so that by the 1850s the tolerant Sufi ways of Zafar and his court slowly came to look as old-fashioned and outdated as the hybrid lifestyles and open-minded religious attitudes of the White Mughals did among the now solidly Evangelical British. The stage was being set for a clash of rival fundamentalisms.

  There was a strong class aspect as well to this fundamentalist opposition to the heterodoxy of Zafar’s spirituality.

  If Sufism and ghazal writing were the marks of court and high sharif culture, then patronising the Islamic reformist movement became the signature of the rising Punjabi Muslim merchant class, who though rich and literate felt themselves excluded from the elitist Sufi literary culture of the court. Shah Waliullah’s theologian son Shah Abdul Aziz was a prolific giver of fatwas, or legal opinions, and it is significant how many of these concern economic matters – about the permissibility of letters of credit, or of gaining income through trade in slaves, and so on – which implies that many of those seeking his opinion were heavily involved in trade and commerce. It was certainly rich Punjabi Muslim traders who financed the radical madrasas of Delhi, especially those who called for jihad against the kafirs and who aimed to create an Islamic society pruned of all its non-Islamic accretions.96

  The most outspoken of all was Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi, a notably militant alumnus of the Madrasa i-Rahimiyya, who embarked on an ill-fated jihad against the Sikhs and British on the North West Frontier in 1830. From here he wrote to the rulers of Central Asia, asking them to join hands in liberating India from British rule, the ‘subversion of Islamic culture and the disruption of Islamic lifestyle by the Christians’, and from the unlslamic ways of the Mughal court.97 Though Barelvi, betrayed by the Afghans, died with his jihadis under the swords of the Sikhs in 1831, remnants of his mujahedin network survived underground along the trading route that linked Peshawar, Ambala, Delhi and Patna, the other principal centres of the jihadis.

  In September 1852, five months after the wedding of Mirza Jawan Bakht, and two months after the conversion of Master Ramchandra and Dr Chaman Lal by Jennings, Metcalfe’s police in Delhi came increasingly to suspect that the mujahedin network had begun to revive. Acting on a tip-off, they conducted a dawn raid on the premises of various known extremists and found evidence for what they believed was ‘a Wahhabi conspiracy’ in Delhi itself, seizing ‘the correspondence of the Fanatic Moulvies [who were] preaching a crusade’ against the British.98 The figure at the centre of the ‘conspiracy’ was Shaikh Husain Bakhsh, a prominent Delhi trader from the Punjabi merchant community who was closely associated with the more radical imams of the Madrasa i-Rahimiyya circle.

  It was again the ‘ulama of the same radical madrasa that had led the opposition to Jennings and his missionaries, especially when, after the baptism of Ramchandra and Chaman Lai, Padre Jennings succeeded, in May 1853, in converting an unnamed Sayyid ‘of good family’.99 If the missionaries reinforced Muslim fears, increasing opposition to British rule, driving the orthodox towards greater orthodoxy and creating a constituency for the jihadis, so the existence of ‘Wahhabi conspiracies’ strengthened the conviction of Jennings and his supporters that a ‘strong attack’ was needed to take on such deeply embedded ‘Muslim fanatics’.

  The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and European imperialism have very often been closely, and dangerously, intertwined. In a curious but very concrete way, the fundamentalists of both faiths have needed each other to reinforce each other’s prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the other.

  3

  AN UNEASY EQUILIBRIUM

  By 1852, although the British and the Mughals inhabited the same city and sometimes lived in close physical proximity to each other, the two peoples were growing farther and farther apart.

  Where intermarriage – or at least cohabitation – was once very common among the small British community in Delhi, now there was virtual apartheid. There was less and less everyday contact, and still less attempt at mutual understanding. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Delhi’s two leading journals; indeed, there is perhaps no better indication of the growing crevasse of misunderstanding opening up at this time between the British and Indian inhabitants of Delhi than a simple comparison of the columns of the two papers. If the Dihli Urdu Akbhar and the Delhi Gazette were in agreement about Padre Jennings’ more extreme missionary activities, there were few other points on which the two saw eye to eye. Reading the newspapers’ coverage of the events of 1852, there are times when it would be possible to believe that they were recording the news of two completely different cities.

  The Dihli Urdu Akbhar officially regarded its job as being to encourage its readers to ‘imbibe virtues and shun vices’.1 Others took a different line: according to a rival Urdu newspaper, ‘This is a dirty paper, full of personal gossip which attacks respectable people who do not share the religious views of the editor.’2 Both apparently contradictory statements have their origin in the same tendency: the vigour with which the Dihli Urdu Akbhar, under its forthright Shia editor, Maulvi Muham
mad Baqar, spoke out against corruption in the court, among the ‘ulama, and even in the British government.

  While unwaveringly loyal to Zafar, the paper castigated the Palace administration for the corrupt way it delayed the disbursement of monthly stipends (‘only those having access to the Emperor, the Mukhtar or the Royal Physician can get their salary paid’) and gloated when some of the more badly behaved princes got their come-uppance – for example, when the raffish Mirza Shah Rukh was ambushed by the Delhi moneylenders as he made his way to the shrine of Qadam Sharif.3 Wrongdoing the newspaper ascribed to the machinations of evil courtiers who were pulling the wool over the saintly Emperor’s eyes.4

  Maulvi Muhammad Baqar was a Delhi man, an alumnus of the Delhi College who had taught there for a while before leaving on account of the low salary. He had gone on to work briefly for the British, before setting up a lucrative bazaar for foreign merchants and building an imambara, a Shia religious hall, in which he sometimes preached.5

  Reflecting his own interests, the concerns of the Dihli Urdu Akbhar centred mainly on local political and religious matters: it talked of the conversion of Master Ramchandra, described the latest miracles witnessed in the Sufi shrines, and reported on Delhi festivals, as well as the occasional fracas that occurred in them, such as Sunni-Shia riots during the Muharram of 1852. It also relayed such gossip as the punishment of yet more Palace serving girls for ‘sexual vice’.6