The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  Certainly, the British in Delhi were always to some extent looking over their shoulder to the more Anglicised station of Meerut, which with its huge cantonment and large English community was famous for its theatre and its lavish regimental balls. But Delhi could boast almost none of that: ‘There is little society here,’ complained one junior Residency official, adding that after he had finished his court work he had little option but to take refuge in the company of his classical library: ‘I have not quite forgot old Latin – Greek long since fled – but Livy, Tacitus or Caesar still now and then employ an hour agreeably – and Virgil & Horace often peeped into.’72

  Theo Metcalfe, not one to waste time on classical studies, looked for other amusements. He tried his hand at after-dinner musicmaking with some of the ladies of the British community: ‘I have joined the Philharmonic Society,’ he told his sister GG in one letter, ‘and pass a pleasant enough evening – the only apparent drawback to the harmony is the presence of the Gorgons. “Hell-in-er” looked at me the other day with green eyes, just like an angry dog, but could hardly have enjoyed herself for she was not spoken to the whole evening. Miss Forrest meanwhile is currently only being worshipped by 5 Lieutenants and 3 Ensigns. Mrs Balfour [the surgeon’s wife] encourages them in a very indelicate manner.’73 Theo’s sister GG also enjoyed a musical evening, though in her case piano playing was often merely an excuse to see her fiancé Edward Campbell, whose style of singing – when she was honest with herself – she admitted was a little slow for her taste, much as she adored his fine tenor.74

  Theo also tried his hand at the Delhi Amateur Dramatics, taking parts in Who’s the Dope? and The Polka Mania to raise money ‘for the distressed of the Scotch Highlands and Islands’, though according to the Delhi Gazette it was not he but ‘Robin Roughhead as Jimmy [who] convulsed the house with laughter … the curtain fell with a hearty and well deserved applause’.75

  None of this sort of thing was at all to the taste of Sir Thomas, who liked to be the first to bed: ‘In the evening he only made a very light meal,’ remembered his daughter Emily,

  for it was his invariable custom to leave the dining room at eight o’clock in order to go to bed early. It used to be a great source of amusement… to watch his proceedings as soon as the ‘retiring gun’ fired and the clock struck eight. He immediately got up from the chair where he was smoking his hookah, said goodnight to everybody at the table, undid his neckcloth, threw it on the ground while he was walking to the door, unfastened his waistcoat buttons and then turned and gave a wave of his hand as he disappeared behind the curtain into his dressing room …76

  For the people of Delhi, however, the best part of the day lay ahead. Chandni Chowk really came alive only after sunset, as the pavements swelled with wide-eyed boys from the mofussil or Jat farmers and Gujar herdsmen in from their villages in Haryana, ogling the gamblers locked in the stocks outside the kotwal or heading off to ask for blessings and good fortune at the city’s matrix of bustling Sufi shrines. Elsewhere could be seen gentlemen visiting from Lucknow in their distinctive cut of wide-bottomed pyjamas or tall, bearded Pathan horse traders fresh in from Peshawar and Ambala, spilling out of the sarais and into Ghantawallahs, the famous sweet shop, whose laddus were supposed to be the best in Hindustan. The coffee houses – the qahwa khanas – were filling up now too, with poets reciting their verses at some tables, scholars locked in debate at others.

  On the steps of the Jama Masjid, the storytellers would be beginning their recitations, which could go on for seven or eight hours with only a short break. The most popular of all the tales was the Dastan i-Amir Hamza, a chivalrous epic romance which collected together a great miscellany of fireside yarns, legends, religious discourses and shaggy-dog stories which over time came to gather around the story of the travels of Hamza, the uncle of the Prophet. Any factual backbone the story might once have had was swamped over the centuries with a flood of subplots and a cast of dragons, giants, sorcerers, princesses and flying carpets, as well as flying pots, the preferred mode of travel for the magicians in Hamza.

  In its fullest form, the tale grew to contain a massive twenty thousand separate stories, and would take several weeks of all-night storytelling to complete; the printed version filled forty-six volumes. As listeners gathered around the Dastan-go, who was telling of the handsome, courageous and chivalrous Hamza, his beautiful Persian princess lovers and Hamza’s terrible nemesis, the cruel necromancer and arch-fiend Zumurrud Shah, at the other side of the steps Jani the celebrated kebab man would now be fanning his charcoal. Delhiwallahs used to like to surprise visitors from outside by taking them to eat there without telling them of ‘the pot of hot chillis’ with which Jani would marinate his kebabs. Maulvi Muhammad Baqar’s son, the young poet Azad, told of one stranger to Delhi who ‘hadn’t eaten for a whole day. He stretched his jaws wide and fell on it [the kebab]. And instantly it was as if his brains had been blown out of his mouth by gunpowder. He leapt back with a howl. [But the Delhiwallah who brought him replied:] “we live here only for this sharp taste.”’77

  Zafar was also fond of a little chilli in his dinner, which he began to eat no earlier than 10.30 p.m., a time when most of the British were already well tucked up in their beds. Quail stew, venison, lamb kidneys on sweet nan called shir mal, yakhni, fish kebabs, and meat stewed with oranges were Zafar’s favourite dishes, though on festive occasions the Red Fort kitchens were capable of producing astonishingly varied and prodigious quantities of Mughlai cuisine: the Bazm i-Akhir describes a feast consisting of twenty-five varieties of bread, twenty-five different kinds of pilaos and biryanis, thirty-five different sorts of spiced stews and curries, and fifty different puddings, as well as remarkable varieties of relishes and pickles, all eaten to the sound of singers performing ghazals, while the fragrance of musk, saffron, sandalwood and rosewater filled the air.78

  Whatever the dish, Zafar was known to like his food heavily spiced – and he was most upset when his friend, prime minister and personal physician, Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, banned him from eating ‘cayenne pepper’ in August 1852, following a series of digestive disorders.79 Another of Zafar’s great pleasures, mango jam, was also forbidden by the hakim, who said that Zafar’s excessive indulgence in it gave him diarrhoea. When Zafar continued to ignore his advice and then suffered from a bad stomach, the hakim ‘was very annoyed and replied that if the King would act in this way he had better dismiss him at once. HM excused himself and promised greater abstinence in future’.80

  For Ghalib, the late evening was also the time for indulging in mango-related pleasures, especially the exquisitely small, sweet chausa mango, a taste he shared with many other discerning Delhiwallahs, past and present. At one gathering, a group of Delhi intellectuals were discussing what qualities a good mango should have: ‘In my view,’ said Ghalib, ‘there are only two essential points about mangoes – they should be sweet and they should be plentiful.’81 In his old age he became worried about his declining appetite for his favourite fruit and wrote to a friend to express his anxieties. He never ate an evening meal, he told his correspondent; instead, on hot summer nights he would ‘sit down to eat the mangoes when my food was fully digested, and I tell you bluntly, I would eat them until my belly was bloated and I could hardly breathe. Even now I eat them at the same time of day, but not more than ten or twelve, or if they are of the large kind, only six or seven’.*82

  There was one other great pleasure that Ghalib reserved for the cover of darkness. ‘There are seventeen bottles of good wine in the pantry,’ he wrote to one friend, describing his idea of perfection. ‘So I read all day and drink all night.’83

  As Ghalib was finishing his mangoes and looking forward to his bottle of wine,† as the exhausted labourers were heading home to their villages before the muhalla gates were locked for the night, and as Saligram and the moneylenders began finally shutting up their shops in Chandni Chowk, so in the Fort dinner was drawing to a close. This was the signal for Zafar’s hookah to be
brought and the evening’s entertainment to begin. This could take a number of forms: ghazals from Tanras Khan; the instrumental playing of a group of sarangi players, or the court storytellers and troupes of the Fort’s dancing girls. Most celebrated of all was Himmat Khan, Zafar’s famous blind sitar player: ‘Nobody could come close to him in Dhrupad,’ thought Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan.

  If [Akbar’s great musician] Tansen were still alive, he would have humbly become a disciple … Rulers and notables from all corners pleaded with him to join their service and offered him lots of money and riches, but he refused to budge from Delhi out of that self-containment and self-contentment that is the particular preserve of Men of Art. Any singer who arrived in Shahajahanabad claiming distinction in the art would forget their sur and taal [note and beat] after hearing only one bar of his music and would accept the dust of his feet as the decoration of their eye … His inner pain and the joy of holy wisdom suffused the singing of this extraordinary and notably self-effacing genius.84

  On other occasions, when Zafar felt the need for some peace, one of his great pleasures was to play chess while waiting for the new moon to come up. At other times he is described as simply sitting after dinner and ‘enjoying the moonlight’.85

  If Zafar wanted an early night – which meant one that ended around midnight – singers might be admitted to his bedchamber, where they would sing behind screens, while his masseuses worked on his head and feet, and the Abyssinian guards took their place at his door.86 In 1852, after the disgrace of Tanras Khan, Zafar’s preferred serenader was the woman referred to simply as ‘Khanam the Singer’.87 Sometimes it is clear that such singers came out from behind the bedroom screens: one of Zafar’s last marriages was to a singing girl named Man Bai, who became known as Akhtar Mahal following her wedding in 1847, when Zafar was seventy-two.

  On such nights, when Zafar retired relatively early, many of the princes would head out into the town as things began to wind down in the Fort. Some might have assignations in the kothis of the Chauri Bazaar, where lights and the movement of dancing could be seen from behind the lattices of the upper floors, and the sounds of tabla and singing could be heard from as far away as Chandni Chowk. ‘The women deck themselves in finery,’ noted one visitor, ‘and position themselves at vantage points to attract the attention of men, either directly or through pimps. An atmosphere of lust and debauchery prevails here and the people gather at night and indulge themselves.’88

  The beauty and coquettishness of Delhi’s courtesans were famous: people still talked of the celebrated courtesan Ad Begum of a century earlier, who would famously turn up stark naked at parties, but so cleverly painted that no one would notice: ‘she decorates her legs with beautiful drawings in the style of pyjamas instead of actually wearing them; in place of the cuffs she draws flowers and petals in ink exactly as is found in the finest cloth of Rum’. Her great rival, Nur Bai, was said to be so popular that every night the elephants of the great Mughal umrah completely blocked the narrow lanes outside her house, yet even the most senior nobles had ‘to send a large sum of money to have her admit them … whoever gets enamoured of her gets sucked into the whirlpool of her demands and brings ruin in on his house… but the pleasure of her company can only be had as long as one is in possession of riches to bestow on her’.89

  Nevertheless, in 1852, at the height of the career of Zauq and Ghalib, the biggest draw was not the courtesans but the mushairas of the poets, especially those held in the courtyard of the old Delhi College just outside Ajmeri Gate, or in the house of Mufti Sadruddin Azurda.

  Farhatullah Baig’s Dehli ki akhri shama (The Last Musha’irah of Delhi) is a fictionalised but well-informed account of what purports to be one of the last great mushairas held in Zafar’s Delhi. Around the illuminated courtyard of the haveli of Mubarak Begum, the widowed bibi of Sir David Ochterlony, sit several poet-princes of the royal house, as well as forty other Delhi poets, including Azurda, Momin, Zauq, Azad, Dagh, Sahbai, Shefta, Mir, a celebrated wrestler named Yal and Ghalib himself. There was also a last White Mughal, Alex Heatherly, ‘one of the great poets of the Urdu language’, according to one critic,90 who was related to the Skinners and so a cousin of Elizabeth Wagentrieber.

  The courtyard has been filled so as to raise it to the level of the plinth of the house. On the wooden planks were spread cotton rugs. There was a profusion of chandeliers, candelabra, wall lamps, hanging lamps and Chinese lanterns so that the house was converted into a veritable dome of light… From the centre of the roof were hung row upon row of jasmine garlands … the whole house was fragrant with musk, amber and aloes … Arranged in a row, at short intervals along the carpet, were the huqqas, burnished and brightly polished …

  The seating pattern was arranged so that those assigned places on the right of the presiding poet had connections with the Lucknow court, and on the left were seated the Delhi masters and their pupils. All those who came from the fort held quails in their hand as the craze for quail and cock fighting was very strong at that time …91

  The often extremely complex metre and rhyme patterns would be set well in advance; many of the participants would know each other well, and a spirit of friendly competition would be encouraged. The hookahs would be passed around, as would paan and sweets. Then the president – in this case Mirza Fakhru – would say the Bismillah.

  At this proclamation there would be pin-drop silence. The guests from the court put away their quails in their quail pouches and disposed of them behind the bolsters. The servants removed the water pipes and in their place put down spittoons [for betel chewers], the khasdans with betel leaf and trays with aromatic spices in front of each guest. In the meantime the personal representative of the king arrived from the court with the king’s ghazal, accompanied by several heralds … He sought permission to read the ghazal. Mirza Fakhru nodded his assent …

  From this point the poets began their recitation, passing couplets backwards and forwards, half singing, half reciting, applauding and wah-wah-ing those they admired for their witty or subtle nuances, leaving those less accomplished to sink in leaden silence. The versifying would continue until dawn, when it would be the turn of Zauq and Ghalib to bring the night to its climax. But long before that, from the north, would come the distant sound of the morning bugle. Two miles away, in the British cantonments, a very different day was beginning.

  In 1852, the British and Mughals found themselves in an uneasy equilibrium: at once opposed yet in balance, living lives in parallel. Despite the tension over who was to be heir apparent, and Zinat Mahal’s refusal to accept the succession of Mirza Fakhru, between the Palace and the Residency a temporary truce was maintained.

  This balance was, however, broken most dramatically in 1853, by a series of deaths. By the end of that year all three British officials who had signed the succession agreement with Mirza Fakhru were dead, all in suspicious circumstances. The most suspicious – a straightforward case of poisoning, according to the doctors who attended him – was the slow and lingering death of Sir Thomas Metcalfe.

  4

  THE NEAR APPROACH OF THE STORM

  Sir Thomas began to suspect that he had been poisoned towards the end of the summer of 1853.

  He was not a man who usually suffered from ill health and by sticking to his carefully regulated schedule, by eating in moderation and by rarely going out or staying up late, he made sure he remained fit and well. Then, quite suddenly, at the beginning of the monsoon of 1853, he began to feel horribly sick. The vomiting started soon afterwards. For weeks on end he found he was unable to keep any food down. His daughter Emily was horrified by the speed with which he sank: ‘He was looking thin and ill – so white,” she wrote after she saw him. ‘He continually suffered from sickness – an irritating vomiting of watery stuff. The small pox marks on his face, generally very slight, became more pronounced. It was easy to see he was ill, though he suffered no pain whatever.’1

  The previous December the whole family had gathered to c
elebrate a Delhi Christmas amid the roaring wood fires of Metcalfe House. Theo was there, as more unusually was his wife Charlotte, who had chosen to stay on in Simla after her husband was posted to Delhi; it was on this trip to Metcalfe House that she became pregnant with their first child. Also in the house was Georgina, whose hunger strike had eventually had the desired effect of forcing her father to permit her to correspond with Edward Campbell; shortly afterwards she had accepted Sir Edward’s proposal of marriage. To this her father had finally given his consent, to the delight of GG and the relief of all the rest of the family. Georgina’s elder sister Emily was in Delhi too, down from Kangra with her new baby Annie and husband Edward, who had just been given one of the most sought-after jobs in the service, that of Commissioner of that cool and beautiful hill region: ‘It was a long journey for only one month’s leave,’ wrote Emily.

  But father decided we should go. We had all a most happy meeting there and such a joyous Christmas … Dear Daddy was so proud of his grandchildren and thought ‘Motee’ Annie [Emily’s baby daughter], the most beautiful child he had ever seen and in fact, she was a most lovely babe … There were some other guests in the house and altogether we were a large party, and such a bright happy one. Daddy was so well and in great spirits in having so many of his children around him at once. The weather was glorious with plenty of riding and driving and picnics and dinner parties going on. But alas! It was the last Christmas …2

  In the course of the celebrations, Sir Thomas had confided the details of his secret agreement with Mirza Fakhru to Emily and her husband:

  The officials through whom these negotiations were being carried on were the foreign secretary, Sir Henry Elliot, the Lieutenant Governor, Mr Thomason, and the Resident at Delhi – my Daddy, Sir Thomas … The negotiations had been going on for more than a year and a half, until at last the Heir Apparent agreed to the terms offered … So far matters had gone on more favourably than my father expected, because he knew that there was a powerful clique in the palace, who were straining every nerve to prevent the Heir Apparent giving his adhesion to the proposals of Government. This clique was headed by the Queen – a clever, wicked woman … Her rage, therefore, when she heard that the Heir Apparent had consented to the arrangements was unbounded and she determined to take her revenge. My father knew her character well, and that she would not let any obstacle stand in the way of her ambition. My Father knew also that her revenge would not stop, and he said to us, ‘The first act in the drama is played out – what will be the next?’3