The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  In Delhi, one sign of the growing unrest showed itself only eight months after the death of Mirza Fakhru. Early in the morning on 18 March 1857, a flyer – ‘a small dirty piece of paper, with a naked sword and shield depicted’, according to Theo – was placed on the back wall of the Jama Masjid in Delhi.21 Purporting to be a proclamation from the Shah of Iran, it announced that a British expeditionary force had just suffered a massive defeat in Persia, and that the Persian Army had crossed the Afghan border and was now marching from Herat to come and liberate Delhi from Christian rule:

  God willing, the time is not far when I shall appear in the land of Hind and shall delight and make happy both the rulers and subjects of that place. Just as the English have deprived them of food and comfort, to the same measure I shall endeavour to increase their prosperity, and let it be known that I have no objections to anyone’s religion … By the 6th March, 900 Irani soldiers, along with senior officers will have entered India and there are already five hundred soldiers present in Delhi disguised in dress and appearance … [In the meantime] the Muslims must refrain from helping or supporting the Christians, and it is necessary that so far as possible they should remain loyal and faithful towards their fellow Muslims.22

  The notice was posted for three hours and a huge crowd gathered to read it, until Theo Metcalfe, who happened to be passing, rode up and ripped it down. The following day, however, the contents of the notice were reprinted in full in the court newspaper, the Siraj ulAkabhar, creating a ripple of excitement across the city, although the paper also questioned – rightly – both the veracity of the proclamation and the truth of the claim of a Persian victory over the British.

  Already there had been brief reports in the Urdu newspapers of mysterious chapattis (or ‘fried puris’, as the Delhi papers reported) being passed by nightwatchmen from village to village across Hindustan: one report in the Nur-i Maghrebi in February had mentioned their passing between some villages near Bulandshahr; by early March they had reached Mathura, on the main road to Agra. But they do not seem to have got any closer to Delhi than this, and even there no one seems to have understood what their significance was;* as far as the Delhi papers were concerned, it was certainly a matter given far less space than the reports of a fatwa being posted in Madras, ‘calling on all believers to rise against the infidels … he who fell in such a war would be a martyr’, and the excitable rumours that either the Russians or the Persian Army, or possibly both, were on the march and about to appear in Delhi. Most prominent of all were reports, which began to appear from late March onwards, of unrest in the army in Bengal, especially at Berhampore and Barrackpore: according to Theo, by the spring of 1857, the people of Delhi ‘were perfectly aware of the want of fidelity in the sepoy army and the subject was frequently discussed’.23

  This growing unrest in Delhi could be traced back at least to the previous winter when, on 7 February 1856, the British had unilaterally annexed the prosperous kingdom of Avadh (or Oudh, as the British called it), to the east of Delhi. The excuse for this was that its Nawab, the poet, dancer and epicure Wajd Ali Shah, was ‘excessively debauched’.* The people of Delhi were used to the British bullying and plundering the Nawabs as they had done for nearly a century now; but the outright annexation of the kingdom had nevertheless caused far more alarm across northern India than the British seem to have realised or indeed anticipated, and increased awareness of the precariousness of the Mughals’ own position. More importantly, it greatly unsettled the sepoys of the Company’s army, most of whom were drawn from uppercaste Hindu families in rural Avadh, and who now found themselves compelled to reduce their own country to vassalage.

  The venal and occasionally brutal way the annexation had been carried out caused particular distress. Even British officials were aware that what had happened was not one of the more honourable episodes in the history of the Honourable Company. One Company servant, Robert Bird, had gone so far as to produce an anonymously published book entitled Dacoitee in Excelsis, or the Spoliation of Oude by the East India Company24 In it Bird, an insider in all that had happened, exposed the degree to which a largely fictional dossier – eventually published as the parliamentary Oude Blue Book – had been assembled by interested parties within the Company to push for Avadh’s annexation. The dossier had depicted a province ‘given up to crime, havoc, and anarchy by the misrule of a government at once imbecile and corrupt’. This image, wrote Bird, was little more than ‘a fiction of official penmanship, [an] Oriental romance’ and was refuted ‘by one simple and obstinate fact’ – that the people of Avadh clearly ‘preferred the slandered regime’ of the Nawab ‘to the grasping but rose-coloured government of the Company’.

  Bird pointed out, in particular, ‘that those who had experience of both [governments], to the number of some 50,000 employed as sepoys by the Company’, felt and resented the difference in the two regimes especially strongly:

  Not only does the annexation itself appear to have been accompanied by acts of violence and spoliation wholly indefensible, but the foundation of all property seems to have been unsettled to an extent unheard of under any civilised rule. We hear on all sides of landowners dispossessed – in short of the Company dealing with the province as if it were not merely entitled to the revenues of it, but as if all the property within it had become the spoil of its bow and spear; as if, in fact, it was an uninhabited island newly discovered with which the discoverers had a right to do what they willed.25

  Already many smaller kingdoms had been quietly – and profitably – annexed by the Company. The policy of Governor General Dalhousie (1812–60), known as the Doctrine of Lapse, had banned the age-old Hindu practice of adopted sons succeeding to their father’s throne, and led to the unpopular and deeply resented annexations of Satara in 1848, Jhansi in 1853 and Nagpur in 1854; but Avadh was an acquisition on a far different scale from anything yet attempted, and was practised on ‘a faithful and unresisting ally’ without even the nominal justification of the absence of a recognised heir, and with only the ‘fictitious charges’ and ‘fallacious bearings of the Oude Blue Book’ as an excuse.26

  After the annexation of Avadh and the death of Mirza Fakhru, the end of the Mughal line was clearly imminent.

  For Zafar, now aged eighty-one, it was a particular shock. He had long made it clear that he had no wish for anything other than to preserve and hand on what little he had inherited. As early as 1843 he had attempted to write direct to Queen Victoria, asking for this bare minimum: ‘From unfortunate circumstances’, he wrote,

  the flower of my kingdom has faded, and the dominion of this house is placed in your hands … to diminish or enhance its dignity … I am now old, and have no ambition left for grandeur. I would devote my days entirely to religion, but I feel anxious that the name and dignity of my predecessors should be maintained, and that they may descend to my children unimpaired, according to the original engagements made by the British Government.27

  Now, with the example of Avadh in front of him, Zafar set his sights much lower. His first action on hearing of the annexation of Avadh was to write a series of anxious begging letters to Dalhousie, saying that as the ‘days of our pilgrimage on Earth are numbered … [and] as no reliance can be placed in one’s life at the advanced age of 80 years, we have been of late engaged in reflecting on the future welfare of our family, especially of the Nawab Zinat Mahal Begum and her offspring, the Prince Mirza Jawan Bakht Bahadur, that no distress or hardships be experienced by them’. Zafar asked only for a guarantee that both would be looked after following his death. Yet Dalhousie’s response was, characteristically, both dismissive and ungenerous; he got one of his secretaries to reply that ‘the grants which your Majesty has made to the Begums and Prince your Majesty must be sensible cannot be upheld; they may be maintained during your Majesty’s own lifetime, but cannot now be extended beyond that; for this would be contrary to former practice’.28

  Zafar was not alone in his alarm. The demise of the Mughal and his c
ourt was something that could only cast a cloud over the whole of Delhi, much of whose prosperity and patronage derived directly or indirectly from the Red Fort. With the end of the Mughals, many in the city would find themselves out of a job: the courtiers and Palace civil servants, the jewellers and silversmiths, the cooks and palanquin bearers, the guards and eunuchs, the musicians and the dancing girls. None of these could expect employment under British rule, whose administrators for the North West Provinces were anyway based 150 miles to the south in Agra.

  It also boded extremely badly for the court poets: ‘Although I am a stranger to Avadh and its affairs,’ wrote Ghalib on 23 February 1856, ‘the destruction of the state depresses me all the more, and I maintain that no Indian who was not devoid of all sense of justice could feel otherwise.’29 Ghalib had received a small pension from the Nawab which he lost at the annexation in February; with the death of his pupil in poetry, Mirza Fakhru, in July, his income was further reduced: ‘You must bear in mind’, he wrote to a friend on 27 July 1856,

  that the death of the heir apparent has been a great blow to me. It means that my ties with the court will now last only as long as the king does. God knows who the new heir apparent will be. He who appreciated my worth has died. Who will recognise me now? I put my trust in my Creator, and resign myself to His will. And there is this immediate loss: he [Mirza Fakhru] used to give me ten rupees a month to buy fruit for my [two adopted] boys. Who will give me that now?30

  Ghalib, like many writers before and since, suffered from the potentially combustible combination of expensive tastes, a keen sense of his own worth and insufficient financial resources to support either. Always precarious, his finances had become especially troubled after his sense of personal honour compelled him to turn down the lucrative chance to become the Persian Professor at Delhi College. Ghalib had arrived at Delhi College in his palanquin having being invited to apply for the new post. But after reaching the college gate, he refused to enter until Mr Thomason, the secretary, came and welcomed him, as he insisted his aristocratic status dictated. After a long stand-off, Mr Thomason

  came out personally and explained that a formal welcome was appropriate when he attended the Governor’s durbar, but not in the present case, when he came as a candidate for employment. Ghalib replied, ‘I contemplated taking a government appointment in the expectation that this would bring me greater honour than I now receive, not a reduction in those already accorded to me.’ The secretary replied, ‘I am bound by regulations.’ ‘Then I hope you will excuse me,’ Ghalib said, and came away.31

  In such a situation, it was an increasing irritation to Ghalib that Zafar did not value him more highly, and instead bestowed most of his favour, and the bounteous pension that went with it, on that obvious second-rater Zauq. It was something Ghalib could never understand, as he was once bold enough to point out to Zafar: ‘I swear that you too must feel pride’, he wrote,

  in the great kindness of fortune, that you possess a slave like Ghalib, whose song has all the power of fire. Turn your attention towards me as my skill demands, treasure me as the apple of your eye and open your heart for me to enter in… See my perfection, look upon my skill … Why talk of the poets of the Emperor Akbar’s day? My presence alone bears witness that your age excels his.32

  When Zauq died in 1854, Zafar finally appointed Ghalib as his ustad (guru or master, but in this case poetry teacher), with the salary that went with it, and Ghalib (at least according to Delhi tradition) was able to breathe a sigh of relief that ‘the man who spoke in the language of a lodging house keeper’ was no more.33 Insufficient as Zafar’s regard for Ghalib’s skills may have been, the court still represented a financial lifeline Ghalib depended on. As early as 1852, when the King had been ill, Ghalib had written anxiously: ‘What will happen now? And what will become of me, who sleeps in the shade of his wall?’34 A little later he added, ‘The Mughal princes gather in the Red Fort and recite their ghazals … This court will not last many days more. How can it be permanent? Who knows if they will meet tomorrow, and if they do whether they will meet after that? The assembly can vanish at any moment.’35

  One reason for Ghalib’s pessimism was that, unlike many in Delhi, he had always been aware of the scientific advances achieved by the West, which he had seen on display on a visit to Calcutta in 1827. When Sayyid Ahmad Khan tried to interest him in writing an introduction to an edition of the Ain i-Akbari, the celebrated account of the court of the Emperor Akbar, Ghalib had written back that Khan should not always be looking back to the Mughals of old, but should embrace the future: ‘See the sahibs of England!’ he wrote.

  They have gone far ahead of our Oriental forebears. Wind and wave they have rendered useless. They are sailing their ships under fire and steam. They are creating music without the use of the mizrab [plucker]. With their magic, words fly through the air like birds. Air has been set on fire … Cities are being lighted without oil lamps. This new law makes all other laws obsolete. Why must you pick up straws out of old time-swept barns while a treasure trove of pearls lies at your feet?36

  Now, after the death of Mirza Fakhru and the annexation of Avadh, Ghalib thought it prudent to take immediate steps to look for other sources of income, while also teaching the English the courtly manners they so clearly lacked. To this end he forwarded a Persian ode or qasida to Queen Victoria via Canning. After a brief introduction praising the Queen for being ‘as splendid as the stars’ and flattering her Governor General ‘as magnificent as Alexander, as splendid as Feridun’, Ghalib quickly moved on to the main business: namely reminding the Queen of the long-established convention that sovereigns should support the poets of their dominions in return for being immortalised in verse.

  As the great Begum of London was clearly not as familiar with the delicate etiquette of these matters as she should have been, Ghalib made himself a little more explicit in his covering letter. The truly great rulers of history, he reminded Queen Victoria, ‘rewarded their poets and well wishers by filling their mouths with pearls, weighing them in gold, and granting them villages and recompense’. In the same way it was the duty of ‘the exalted Queen to bestow upon Ghalib, the petitioner, the title of Mihr-Khwan, and present him with the robe of honour and a few crumbs from her bounteous table – that is, in plain English, a “pension”37

  Ghalib waited eagerly for the Queen’s grateful response, and her gift of a generous stipend. It never came; but this ode would soon perform the far more important function of helping to save his life.

  If Ghalib found himself deeply anxious and depressed as 1856 gave way to 1857, then Theo Metcalfe was also in a very bad state.

  After the sudden loss of his wife and his father, he tried to throw himself into his work and to soldier on as Joint Magistrate in Delhi. But the stress of bringing up his child on his own, and the depressing job of selling his father’s library, as well as much of the other contents of Metcalfe House, all weighed down on him. He clung to his son as a last memory of his wife: ‘I never can part with him,’ he wrote to GG early in 1856. ‘Altho’ I feel the great disadvantage of leaving him many hours alone everyday, without the company of a lady, I do try to show him an affection which I never experienced when a child, the loss of which I always mourned.’38

  As 1856 progressed, however, the stress of his mental state began to have an adverse physical effect on him, and especially on his eyes. ‘You will be sorry to hear that I have been suffering greatly from pain and weakness in my left eye for months,’ he finally admitted to GG in August 1856 from Meerut,

  which has necessitated the abandonment of all use of it and has compelled me to give up work for a period of three months … It is quite possible that even this rest may not be quite sufficient for its perfect recovery … I am ordered to live in a dark room so that I have no very cheering prospects before me; at present to go to Delhi to put all our father’s things [in Metcalfe House] in order. If I find that my eye is stronger at the end of a month, I propose taking a trip
to the hills … Do you know any widow who wants to take care of a single gentleman, for I am comparatively helpless and am forbidden all reading or writing.39

  Georgina, who was summering in Kashmir, immediately offered to look after Charlie, Theo’s son. Theo reluctantly, but gratefully, agreed. Soon after ripping down the flyer from the walls of the Jama Masjid, he wrote to his brother-in-law, Edward Campbell, repeating how much he needed a holiday, and that with luck, in May 1857, he would be able to join him and GG in the hills: ‘I cannot account for this numbness of feeling that weighs me down and makes me helpless,’ he wrote sadly to Edward. ‘I think without a relief from all work, without a long and perfect holiday, I will never rise.’40

  Edward was less sympathetic than GG to Theo’s plight. Following the departure from India of his patron, Sir Charles Napier, to whom he had been ADC at headquarters in Fort William, Calcutta, Campbell’s career had floundered. He and his company of the 60th Rifles were now employed in the far from prestigious or lucrative job of surveying the area around Multan on the Punjab-Sindh border, reputedly the hottest place in the entire subcontinent; it was certainly a far cry from the luxuries of Fort William. To hear how much of his meagre income was now being eaten up by Theo’s baby and nanny made him furious: ‘I am very much vexed with Theo,’ he wrote to GG in Kashmir.

  About the rent, I think there is no use asking him, and not the slightest in giving hints for he will not take them. I think we might just make out a little memo, showing him the actual expense we were put to by having Mrs Baxter and Charlie boarded on us, and then ask him to pay.41

  But Campbell had other worries that were causing rather more irritation than his lack of money and his insensitive brother-in-law. For the army had just put him in charge of training the troops in the Punjab with their latest and most advanced new armament: ‘I am deep in all sorts of regimental affairs,’ he explained to GG,