The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  Since Baqar’s son, the promising young poet Muhammad Husain who wrote under the pen-name Azad, used to help his father with the paper, the Dihli Urdu Akbhar also took a strong interest in literary matters, reprinting the most acclaimed new ghazals recited in the mushairas and firmly siding with Baqar’s friend – and Azad’s ustad (guru) – Zauq in his rivalry with Ghalib: when the latter was arrested for gambling, the scandal was gleefully covered by the Akhbar. If the paper made any reference to the world outside the walls of Delhi, it tended to be about the surrounding towns of Hindustan, and at a stretch Calcutta. Britain hardly appears in its columns – in the entire 1840s there were just seven mentions of the Company’s home island, far fewer than there were about proper, civilised Muslim countries such as Egypt or Persia, where Baqar’s family had originated.7

  By contrast, the focus of the Delhi Gazette was that of the mistyeyed expatriate, eternally dreaming of the green hills around Cheltenham. There are a few references in its columns to the lighting of the canal in Chandni Chowk or to the ruts in the road near the Gazette’s Kashmiri Gate offices.8 There are also the occasional anxious mentions of ‘most daring dacoitees’, reports of sad defeats suffered by the Delhi Cricket Club at the hands of a Calcutta team, and the complete results from the Delhi Derby. These included the announcement of the annual Locomotive Race ‘for all bonafide wheelbarrows, to be coached by the Band boys of the regiments, one Band boy to sit in each barrow, winner to receive Rs 8’.9

  Very special events occasionally, briefly, bring the two diverging worlds of the British and the Mughals together. But while in the early days of the British ascendancy the British and Indians had tended to come together by mutually participating in the life and festivities of the Mughal court, by the 1850s this contact now tended to take place firmly on European terms: at the Delhi horse races, when the local nobility would descend on the town from their country estates to take part in the Mogul Cup,10 or in the Delhi Freemasons’ Lodge, which admitted Indian members.11

  One such event was the arrival of Messrs Trood and Co., who brought their travelling exhibition to Delhi. This exhibition included several microscopes, which were reported by the Delhi Gazette to have caused ‘great consternation among native gentlemen [at] the curiosities revealed to their wondering eyes’.12 Another such occasion was the coming of Monsieur Jordain and his Travelling Circus:

  The graceful riding and dancing of Madame Jordain called down repeated plaudits from the European portion of the audience, while the natives testified their delight with involuntary wah wahs. Monsieur Jordain astonished not only the natives, but all beholders, with feats of strength, while Monsieur Oliver’s novel feat on the ball, which he propelled round the circus, and up an inclined plane at the same time balancing himself on the summit … called forth well merited praise, as did also the performance of the obedient Pony Rajapack, who did all that he was told, and finished the evening by going to bed on a litter, and was thus carried off the ground.13

  Yet the heart of the Delhi Gazette, like that of its readers, and indeed that of its restless editor, George Wagentrieber, was really elsewhere. There are frequent reports of the expansion of the British Empire – of the cannons fired to mark the end of the Second Anglo-Burmese war, the annexation of Pegu and the occupation of Rangoon; there are dispatches from the imperial front lines in the Crimea, Afghanistan and Persia. Most of all, however, the paper is full of news from home, of advertisements for comfortingly faux-English cottages in Simla and Mussoorie named Bridge View and Roseville, and for nice families in Sussex willing to take in children for an education so as to avoid their acquiring an Indian accent.14 ‘TO PARENTS AND GUARDIANS,’ reads one advertisement. ‘A Lady returning to England will be happy to obtain charge of a few children, and see them safe to their friends’ destination on arrival.’15 Another comes from ‘a married clergyman residing on his living in a healthy part of Somersetshire, wishes to receive into his family one or two children … to share in the education of his own children, under his own charge. Terms from 60 guineas to 100 pounds.’16

  This was a paper that knew exactly how to assuage the anxieties and nostalgia of impecunious exiles. But the people of Delhi, if they appear at all, are by the 1850s referred to only very occasionally, and then invariably with deep condescension, as ‘natives’ or ‘our black bretherin’.17 Wagentrieber’s attitudes, however, were a little more complicated than these terms might indicate. For he was married to Elizabeth, the Anglo-Indian daughter of the famous James Skinner of Skinner’s Horse, and a pillar of White Mughal society in Delhi.

  James Skinner was the son of the Scottish mercenary Hercules Skinner, himself the son of the Provost of Montrose; his mother was a Rajputni, the daughter of a Rajput zamindar* from ‘the Bojepoor country’.18 Having fought bravely for the Marathas, Skinner eventually found himself ejected from their ranks because of his British father; later he fought for the English, only to be increasingly discriminated against by the East India Company because of his Indian blood: ‘I imagined myself to be serving a people who had no prejudice against caste or colour,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘But I found myself to be mistaken.’ His mixed inheritance was, he concluded, ‘like a two-edged blade made to cut both ways against me’.19 Skinner’s services for the Mughal emperors led to him being given a title which his Montrose grandfather would have raised his eyebrows at: Nasir ud-Daulah Colonel James Skinner Bahadur Ghalib Jang, which the people of Delhi shortened to Sikandar Sahib, for the populace of the Mughal capital looked on him, it was said, as the reincarnation of Alexander the Great.

  Skinner was a Christian who took his religion very seriously, and towards the end of his life he built St James’s, the first church in Delhi,† and became a pillar of the Delhi Anglican community. This did not, however, prevent him from having a large number of bibis – ‘there are any number of beautiful Mrs Skinners’, wrote an impressed Fanny Eden,20 fourteen according to one estimate21 – and Skinner restored a beautiful Mughal mosque near his Delhi haveli for the Muslims among them, as well as (at least according to Delhi legend) building a temple for those who professed the Hindu faith. Fanny Eden described him as

  a native colonel, very black [and] much better society than any of the white colonels we meet here, and who has done many warlike wonders. He is staying here and is a very fine old man. We went on Sunday to a large church he had built, and there is a mosque he has also built very near it. He told me that where is God, there is religion, but I suppose he calls himself a Musalman.22

  Eden was wrong to make this assumption, but since Skinner lived in an entirely Mughal style, and his English was stilted and ungrammatical,23 the mistake was understandable. His chief wife – who may well have been Wagentrieber’s mother-in-law – was certainly Muslim: her name was Ashuri Khanam and she was a landowner in her own right, while her father, a powerful Haryana zamindar named Mirza Azim Beg, was Skinner’s administrator at the barracks of Skinner’s irregular cavalry regiment at Hansi.24

  After the death of Sikandar Sahib, his different children ‘of all hues and colours’ remained prominent landowners and courtiers in Delhi, trying with increasing difficulty to bridge the widening gap between the Mughal court and the British community, a task not made any easier by the eccentric dress sense of some members of the family. Even William Gardner could not help being amused by Sikandar’s brother, Robert Skinner: ‘a greater dandy than ever, and has more gold and silver chains around him than Baron Frank had in the Magdeburg Dungeon’.25 Some of the Skinners clearly found being strung between two different worlds more of a strain than did others: at one point Theo Metcalfe reported to his sister Georgina (or GG, as everyone seems to have referred to her) that, ‘Mr. J Skinner has been intoxicated for two months and 14 days without a lucid interval’.26 Hence the complex undercurrents present in the piece that Wagentrieber published in the Gazette bidding a firm farewell to the era of the White Mughals, of whom his wife’s own family were so prominent a part, and whose day Wagentrieber
now clearly believed to be over. Whatever his feelings for his Skinner inlaws, Wagentrieber clearly thought he knew where the future lay, and which side to back.

  It would not be long, however, before he would be very grateful for his connection to this ‘thoroughly Indianized’ family, and for his wife’s dark skin colour, her fluency in Hindustani and her ability to carry off a sari – all things which for Wagentrieber, and maybe also his long-suffering wife, had up to now been a cause of mild but unmistakable embarrassment.

  During the early 1850s, it sometimes seemed as if the British and the Mughals lived not only in different mental worlds, but almost in different time zones.

  The British were the first up: in the cantonments to the north of the Delhi Civil Lines, the bugle sounded at 3.30 a.m., a time when the poetic mushairas of the Mughals were still in full flow in the Red Fort, and while in the kothis* of the courtesans in Chauri Bazaar the dancing and ghazal singing were drawing to a close, and the girls were progressing to the more intimate stage of their duties. As the Mughal poets and the courtesans raised their different tempos, sleepy, yawning Englishmen like Captain Robert Tytler, a fifty-year-old veteran of the 38th Native Infantry, or Lieutenant Harry Gambier, an eighteen-year-old Etonian newly arrived in India, would be sitting up in bed as their servants attempted to shave them and pull on their master’s stockings.27 A long session of drill in the cantonment parade ground lay ahead.

  Two hours later, by the time the sun was beginning to rise over the Yamuna, and the poets, the courtesans and their patrons were all heading back to bed to sleep off their long nights, not only the soldiers but also the British civilians would be up and about and taking their exercise. A woman like Harriet Tytler, the brisk and no-nonsense wife of Robert, or the English community’s great beauty, the lovely young Annie Forrest, to whom Harry Gambier was already writing politely admiring letters, would have been back from their morning rides round the cantonment: in order to protect a lady’s complexion, it was not considered advisable to ride much after sunrise.28

  By six, Harriet would be busy supervising her large staff of servants in her screen-darkened bungalow. The first task was preparing for the enormous breakfast without which no Englishman in Victorian India would consider starting his day: at the very least a selection of ‘crumbled chops, brain cutlets, beef rissoles, devilled kidneys, whole spatchcocks, duck stews, Irish stews, mutton hashes, brawns of sheep’s heads and trotters, not to mention an assortment of Indian dishes such as jhal frazie, prawn dopiaza, chicken malai and beef Hussainee. Added to this list were a number of Anglo-Indian concoctions such as kidney toast Madras style, Madras fritters, and leftover meat minced and refried with ginger and chillies’.29 Then of course there was the ultimate Anglo-Indian breakfast dish of kedgeree, a perennial favourite, even though in Delhi it was considered most inadvisable to eat fish in high summer.*

  As the cantonment memsahibs awaited the return of their menfolk from the parade ground, inside the city walls Padre Jennings would be conducting the early morning service in the hush of St James’s Church. Soon the courts to one side of the graveyard would come to life too: the two chief magistrates, John Ross Hutchinson and Charles Le Bas, would already be in their offices, as would their assiduous assistant, Arthur Galloway, and the Sadr Amin Mufti Sadruddin, often known by his pen-name, Azurda. At the same time, riding in through Kashmiri Gate, Theo Metcalfe, the other joint magistrate, would be heading late towards his day’s work, regretting that he had not prepared his briefs as thoroughly as he might have, and that he had not been up as early as his father, who had already conducted half his day’s business, besides taking a swim, organising the household and reading the papers. George Wagentrieber would be up too. Having kissed his wife Elizabeth goodbye, he would now, like Theo, be heading down from the Civil Lines to the Kashmiri Gate offices of the Delhi Gazette, to begin his day of writing and proofreading the latest issue.

  Among the people of Delhi, the poor woke long before the rich. As the sun rose, and as the British were returning from their morning rides and preparing for breakfast, up near the shrine of Qadam Sharif the first bird catchers were laying their nets and baiting them with millet, to catch the early birds out for their morning feed. Past them on the dusty road came the sellers of fruit and vegetables, some on bullock carts, most trudging on foot, streaming in from the villages of the Doab down the Alipore road, bringing their goods to the new suburb of Sabzi Mandi just outside the Kabul Gate, to the north-west of the city.

  At the Raj Ghat Gate, the earlier-rising Hindu faithful – at this time of day women in their cotton saris far outnumbering the men – were streaming out to perform their pujas and have their morning bathe in the waters of the holy Yamuna before the crowds gathered and the dhobis appeared. Only the pandits kept them company this early in the morning: in small shrines lining the banks of the river up to Nigambodh Ghat, where according to Delhi legend the Vedas emerged from the waters, the bells were ringing now for the morning Brahma Yagya, celebrating the creating and re-creating of the world over and over again, morning after morning. As the differently pitched bells sounded against the Sanskrit chants, so in the dark of the inner sanctum the camphor lamps circled the images of Vishnu and the marigold-strewn black-stone Shiva lingams.

  From deep inside the city – from the Masjid Kashmiri Katra in the south to Fatehpuri Masjid in the west, to the great Jama Masjid itself and on through to the elegant riverside minarets of the Zinat ul-Masajid – the last cries of the dawn Azan could now be heard, each call slightly out of time with the one before it, so that the successive cries of spiritual longing and assertion came to the listener on the riverbank in a series of rolling waves. In the silence that followed the end of the call to prayer, the songs of the first Delhi birds could suddenly be heard: the argumentative chuckle of the babblers, the sharp chatter of the mynahs, the alternating clucking and squealing of the rosy parakeets, the angry exclamations of the brain fever bird, and from deep inside the canopy of the fruit trees in Zafar’s gardens at Raushanara Bagh and Tis Hazari, the woody hot-weather echo of the koel.

  By now in the city itself, in the high-walled privacy of the courtyards of the grander houses like that of the young courtier Zahir Dehlavi in Matia Mahal, the servants were beginning to stir, throats were being cleared, and bamboo blinds were being rolled up to reveal water channels and fountains in the cloister gardens. Soon bolsters and sheets were being tidied away to leave the verandas of the courtyards free for breakfast – of mangoes or aloo puri for the Hindus, or perhaps some mutton shorba for the Muslims. Servants would draw water from wells, or head out to buy fresh melons from the Sabzi Mandi; in some of the richer houses coffee might be prepared. From the masculine side of the house came the first gurgle of the hookah. In the zenana, children were being dressed, cholis, ghagras and angiyas buttoned and laced, peshwaz and saris wrapped. In the kitchen the daily ritual of chopping onions, chillies and ginger would begin, and the chickpeas and channa dal set to soak; elsewhere, the different inhabitants of the zenana would begin their day praying, sewing, embroidering, cooking or playing.

  Before long the older boys would be heading off down the lanes to arrive at the madrasas in time for the beginning of the day’s study: to work on memorising the Koran by heart, or to hear an explication of its mysteries by the maulvi; or maybe it would be a day for studying the arts of philosophy, theology and rhetoric. Far from being a tedious chore, this was for many a thrilling business: one eager pupil who came to Delhi from a small town on the Grand Trunk Road used to go to the lectures at the Madrasa i-Rahimiyya even in the pouring monsoon rain, carrying his books in a pot in order to protect them from getting wet.30 The elderly Zakaullah remembered running at breakneck speed through the galis of Shahjahanabad, such was his excitement at the new learning – and especially the mathematics – he was being taught at the Delhi College. Even Colonel William Sleeman, famous for his suppression of the Thugs and a leading critic of the administration of the Indian courts, had to adm
it that the madrasa education given in Delhi was something quite remarkable: ‘Perhaps there are few communities in the world among whom education is more generally diffused than among Muhammadans in India,’ he wrote on a visit to the Mughal capital.

  He who holds an office worth twenty rupees a month commonly gives his sons an education equal to that of a prime minister. They learn, through the medium of Arabic and Persian languages, what young men in our colleges learn through those of Greek and Latin – that is grammar, rhetoric, and logic. After his seven years of study, the young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the young man raw from Oxford – he will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna; (alias Sokrat, Aristotalis, Alflatun, Bokrat, Jalinus and Bu Ali Sena); and, what is much to his advantage in India, the languages in which he has learnt what he knows are those which he most requires through life.31

  The reputation of Delhi madrasas was certainly sufficient to inspire the young poet Altaf Husain Hali to flee his marriage in Panipat and walk the 53 miles to Delhi, alone and penniless and sleeping rough, in an attempt to realise his dream of studying in the famous colleges there: ‘Everyone wanted me to look for a job,’ he wrote later, ‘but my passion for learning prevailed.’32 Delhi was after all a celebrated intellectual centre, and in the early 1850s it was at the peak of its cultural vitality. It had six famous madrasas and at least four smaller ones, nine newspapers in Urdu and Persian, five intellectual journals published out of the Delhi College, innumerable printing presses and publishers, and no fewer than 130 Yunani doctors.33 Here many of the new wonders uncovered by Western science were being translated for the first time into Arabic and Persian, and in the many colleges and madrasas the air of intellectual open mindedness and excitement was palpable.34