The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  5

  THE SWORD OF THE LORD OF FURY

  In 1857, Monday, 11 May in the Christian calendar corresponded to the sixteenth day of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting and penance.

  During this Islamic Lent, the usual rhythms of city life changed dramatically. The day began much earlier than usual, an hour before sunrise, when the moon was still high in the sky, with the sound of a gong ringing repeatedly in the Jama Masjid. Lamps would be lit, meals hurriedly prepared. Mendicants would earn a few paise by knocking on the doors of anyone who seemed still to be sleeping, for this would be the last chance to grab some refreshment – and for the orthodox, even a drop of water – before sunset, more than twelve hours away.1

  It was now high summer, and the terrible, desiccating Delhi heat was at its worst. In the pre-dawn glimmer, in courtyards across Delhi, Muslim families would be sitting outside, leaning against bolsters, eating their sahri, the pre-fast meal of sweet sivayan (semolina), and for those who could muster the appetite so early in the day, kebabs too, all to be wolfed down before the sound of a cannon-shot from the Fort announced the sun’s imminent appearance over the horizon. In these days of fiery winds, the early morning had the added attraction of the day’s only cool breezes.

  By 7 a.m. Zafar had finished his breakfast, and was saying his morning prayers in his river-front oratory, the tasbih khana. As he rose, leaning on a stick, he noticed that in the middle distance to his left, beyond the meandering river at the far end of the Bridge of Boats, a tall pillar of smoke was bellowing out of the Toll House, silhouetted now against the rising sun. More ominously still, the far bank of the Yamuna was cloudy with rising dust. According to the account of his young attendant, Zahir Dehlavi, Zafar shouted to Mir Fateh Ali, the Chief of his Palanquin Bearers, who was waiting outside the oratory to take him on his morning tour of the Palace. Zafar told him to send an express camel messenger to find out the cause of the fire and the rising dust; he also summoned his prime minister, Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, and Captain Douglas, the Commandant of the Palace Guards, who was responsible to the Resident for security in the Palace.2

  By the time the hakim and the commandant appeared, the messenger had already returned. He had ridden only as far as the bastion of Salimgarh, a few thousand yards away, and from there could clearly see that Indian cavalrymen (or sawars) in their Company uniforms were clattering across the Bridge of Boats, swords drawn. They had already looted and burned the Toll House on the east bank of the river. They had also attacked and killed both the toll keeper and the manager of the city telegraph office, Charles Todd, who had just half an hour earlier set off in his buggy to try to find the cause of the break in the telegraph line to Meerut. Some servants of British officials whom they happened to meet on the way had also been hacked down as they passed. The messenger added that the early morning bathers were now running in panic from the river ghats and were scrambling to get into the city through the Calcutta Gate, just to the north of the Palace. On hearing this, Zafar gave immediate orders that the gates of the city and the Fort should all be closed, and that if it was not too late, the bridge should also be broken.3

  Captain Douglas and Ahsanullah Khan were alarmed but hardly very surprised by Zafar’s dramatic news. It was not just that rumours of a mutiny in the army had been circulating in the Palace for months now, and of late growing increasingly insistent and precise.4 Twenty minutes earlier, Douglas had been summoned by the guards of the Fort’s Lahore Gate, who had told him that a lone cavalryman was making a disturbance. Douglas had come straight down from the quarters immediately above the gate that he shared with Padre Jennings. Asked what he wanted, the sawar had coolly replied that he had mutinied at Meerut, and that he and his brothers would no longer serve the Company: the time had come, he said, to fight for their faith. But now that he had arrived in Delhi he had come to the Fort in search of a pipe and a drink of water: could Douglas go and find him one? Douglas had given orders to the guards to seize the insolent sawar, but before they could do so, he had ridden off laughing.5 The hakim was just coming down the covered bazaar of the Fort to investigate the disturbance when the summons came from Zafar; both men arrived at the Emperor’s oratory together.

  As the three were still conferring on what action to take, a group of twenty cavalrymen trotted calmly up along the strand separating the Palace from the river: ‘some had their swords drawn; others had pistols and carbines in their hands; more were coming from the direction of the bridge, accompanied by men on foot, apparently grooms, with bundles on their heads’.6 There were also in the middle distance a crowd of ‘convicts from the Meerut Jail and Gujar tribesmen* and other badmashes (ruffians or ne’er-do-wells) from the villages round about Delhi’, who had presumably followed the sepoys as they headed south.7 They halted under the gilt dome and latticework screens of the Saman Burj, where the Mughals had for centuries attended to petitioners; then they began loudly calling for the Emperor. According to Zafar’s record of the event, ‘they said, we have come from Meerut after killing all the Englishmen there, because they asked us to bite bullets with our teeth that were coated with the fat of cows and pigs. This has corrupted the faith of Hindus and Muslims alike’.8

  At this, Douglas offered to go down and talk to the men, but the Emperor forbade it, saying that he was unarmed and that the men were murderers and would surely kill him. ‘I did not let him go … Then the Qiladar Bahadur [Douglas] went to the window and spoke to them,’ saying:9 ‘“Don’t come here; these are the private apartments of the ladies of the Palace; your standing opposite them is a disrespect to the king.” On this they gradually, one by one, went off in the direction of the Rajghat Gate [to the south].’10

  ‘After that,’ according to Zafar, ‘the Qiladar said, “I will go and take care of this”, and took my leave.’11

  Douglas ran off ‘in a state of excitement’ to make sure that all the city’s many gates had followed the orders to close. But within minutes Zafar, sitting on his terrace, could see great black plumes of smoke rising to the south, from within the walls, apparently from the smartest quarter of the city – Daryaganj – where five years earlier Zafar had processed with his family to witness the wedding of Mirza Jawan Bakht.

  The sepoys, Zafar could plainly see, were now inside his city.12

  For Theo Metcalfe, 11 May meant the beginning of a six-monthlong sabbatical from work in Kashmir.

  He was suffering from exhaustion and depression – an intense ‘numbness of feeling that weighs me down’. Moreover his left eye was now so inflamed that he had to wear an eyepatch; indeed, the people of Delhi had begun calling him ‘One-eyed Metcalfe’. He was under no illusions about the critical nature of the situation in India – he had recently told a friend who was returning to England, ‘you are lucky to be going home, for we shall soon be kicked out of India, or we shall fight to the death for our existence’. He badly needed a holiday, and now could not wait to get into the dak palki that would take him to join GG and his son Charlie in the cool green valleys of the Himlayas – his first proper break since he had arrived in India seven years earlier.13

  He rose early, finished closing up Metcalfe House, and then around 7 a.m. set off at a leisurely place to his office at the Kutcherry Court House, just inside Kashmiri Gate, to hand over charge to his successor. There, to his surprise, he found the courts empty,

  with only the Assistant Magistrate [Arthur Galloway] present, who was waiting, not knowing what to do … [It was] reported that the Treasury Guard had been overheard the night before saying that the Government had been tampering with their religion, and ‘what would be, would be.’ The report was followed by one from the Darogah [officer] of the Yamuna Bridge, that the mutineers [from Meerut] were hastening towards the city.14

  Theo looked out through the river-front window at the back of his office: there on the far bank, haloed in dust but still quite unmistakable, was a large body of infantry, led by a troupe of sawars, heading for the Bridge of Boats and making ready to cros
s.

  Jumping back into his buggy, Theo drove straight to the fortified magazine that lay a little to the south, next to the new premises of the Delhi College, with which it shared the former site of the great Mughal haveli of Shah Jahan’s son, Dara Shukoh.*15 There he met his friend Lieutenant George Willoughby of the Bengal Artillery, who was in charge of the arsenal. Theo asked Willoughby for two guns to place at the end of the bridge so as to prevent the mutineers from crossing. But looking out over the riverside bastion at the rear of the compound, directly overlooking the bridge, the pair saw they were already too late: several hundred mutineers were now marching in open column over the bridge, and the foremost sepoys had already taken possession of the Delhi bank of the Yamuna.16 Leaving Willoughby to close and barricade the magazine, Theo set off at breakneck speed to see whether he might yet close the Calcutta Gate, which commanded the passage from the bridge into the city.

  Here Theo was, for once, in time. Simon Fraser, the Resident, and Theo’s senior colleagues, the two chief magistrates of Delhi, John Ross Hutchinson and Charles Le Bas, had already arrived at the gate and managed to get it closed before the sepoys got there. From there, Theo could hear the tramp of feet as the sepoy infantry retraced their steps, having failed to push open the gate. They were now heading south along the sandy bed of the river to try to find an alternative route into the city. The four Englishmen stood on the parapet of the gate, anxiously watching the sepoys through their binoculars; behind, a crowd of frustrated would-be bathers and increasingly restive spectators was massing between the gate and Anguri Bagh, Zafar’s beloved Grape Garden, ‘the riff raff of the city every moment adding fresh recruits to the already turbulent mob’.17

  Guessing that the sepoys now planned to try to enter through either the Rajghat or Zinat ul-Masajid Gates of the city, Fraser asked Theo to head as fast as he could to the south of the Palace, to make sure that both these gates had also received, and obeyed, the orders to close. Theo jumped back into his buggy and galloped around the Palace walls; but after only a couple of thousand yards, as he neared the great Lahore Gate of the Palace, and at the crossroads with Chandni Chowk, he was met by a body of mutinous cavalry coming in the opposite direction. They were probably the same sawars who had earlier petitioned Zafar from below the Saman Burj. Either way, they had succeeded in entering the city, and were now hunting down any Christian they could find, ‘with their swords in the air and shouting’, according to the memoir of Theo’s sister, Emily Metcalfe.

  When they saw Sir Theophilus in his buggy, some of them rushed at him and tried to strike him and his horse, but [Theo lashed them with his riding whip and they] only succeeded in slashing the hood … Sir Theophilus noticed that an enormous mob had already collected on the open ground in front of the palace, and that they were all dressed in white as if expecting a gala day. So he drove his buggy at full tilt amongst them, and seeing he was still pursued by the mounted mutineers, he jumped out into the middle of the mob.18

  Here Theo threw off his dark coat and removed his trousers so that he wouldn’t stand out from the rest of the crowd.19 Pushing on in his undergarments, he

  elbowed his way through the crowd, till he reached a group of mounted police standing under some trees as if in expectation of a row. As these men were under his orders as Joint Magistrate, he told them to charge the mutineers, but they would not stir. So he knocked the principal officer off his horse (Sir Theophilus was a very powerful man) and jumping onto it himself, wrenching the reins from his hands, he galloped into the heart of the city to see the Kotwal [head of the native police].

  By now the whole city was in state of uproar. Shopkeepers were trying to close their shops; some of the bazaars were already being looted, and smoke was rising from the European mansions in Daryaganj; moreover, there was still no sign of any British troops from Meerut pursuing the mutineers – as Theo had assumed they would. Before long, however, Theo heard that the Indian troops stationed in the Delhi cantonments to the north had now reached Kashmiri Gate and were forming up to mount a counter-attack. Getting back on his horse, and still wearing only his ‘shirt and underdraws’, he headed up through the maze of gullies and backstreets in the direction of the Kashmiri Gate and the troops he hoped would save him.

  As he galloped past a mosque, however, a large brick thrown from an upper window hit him squarely in the back of the neck. Theo fell from his horse, and rolled off into a ditch, still and silent.20

  Shortly after Theo had galloped off, Simon Fraser heard shooting and the cries of the sawars coming from within the city.

  Realising that the sepoys were now within the walls, and that he and his colleagues were trapped with their backs to a barred gate, and an increasingly angry mob – now 500 strong – just a short way down the street, Fraser came down from the parapet. He ordered his small escort of irregular cavalry – provided for him by the supposedly Anglophile Nawab of Jhajjar – to form up in line with their swords drawn, facing down the street. Hutchinson, Le Bas and Captain Douglas, who were all unarmed, stood to one side by the sentries’ guardroom at the base of the gate. According to one eyewitness, a news-crier called Chunni who was in the crowd,

  This had just been done when about seven troopers and two men mounted on camels galloped up by the road along the palace from the direction of Daryaganj, and immediately on coming within pistol shot distance the whole party fired at the European gentlemen at the gate … The Jhajjar sawars made no resistance, but deserted Mr Fraser and fled.21

  Hutchinson, the senior magistrate, was wounded in the right arm, just above the elbow.22 Fraser, however, ran to the guardroom, seized a musket from the hands of a guard and shot one of the troopers dead. At the sight of the sawar falling, the crowd massing up the street became angry and began to head menacingly for the party. Deserted by Fraser’s bodyguard, and trapped with the gate behind them, Douglas and Hutchinson jumped into the ditch of the Palace moat; the former fell badly and broke his ankle as he hit the bottom. Helped by Makhan, his mace bearer, who jumped down after him, Douglas limped along the ditch towards the Lahore Gate, supported on the other side by the wounded and bleeding Hutchinson.

  Fraser, meanwhile, being too fat to jump, charged straight at the crowd with his buggy, and to his own surprise emerged unscathed on the far side. In the half-mile between him and the Palace, he was again attacked by several sawars who fired their pistols at him; but the shots missed, and the Resident arrived safely at the Lahore Gate of the Palace. There, the upright figure of Padre Jennings could be seen scanning the city with his telescope from the topmost chatri. His daughter Annie, and her friend Miss Clifford – Fraser’s two choirmasters – were at his side.23

  Makhan, the mace bearer, helped the two wounded men out of the ditch. According to his later testimony, Douglas ‘being considerably hurt, asked to be taken into the Kuliyat Khana till he should recover a little from the shock he had received. In the meantime, the Revd Mr Jennings came down to him, and he and Mr Hutchinson conveyed him to the apartments over the gate’.24 There Annie Jennings and Miss Clifford laid Douglas on a bed and gave him some tea, dressed his ankle and attended to Hutchinson’s wound.

  While Captain Douglas was being carried upstairs, Fraser had remained below, and attempted to mount a defence of the Lahore Gate. He ordered the gate to be closed and sent to Zafar for two cannon and a troop of armed guards. He also asked for two palanquins to remove Annie Jennings and her friend to the imperial zenana. But ‘such was the confusion that neither the guards, nor the palkis, were forthcoming’.

  No heed was paid to the orders given. The will to obey was wanting; the king’s household had become rebellious, refusing to obey. Fraser remained for some time awaiting the palkis. Seeing that no attention was likely to be paid to his orders, he turned away as if to enter Captain Douglas’s house. Pressed by the crowd, he ordered them to stand off. The gateway was guarded by a company of native infantry who he now ordered to load and close the gate; but they refused. Mr Fraser then remonstrated
with the men for their behaviour. They remained silent.25

  By this time a great crowd of men and boys had collected [and] began clapping their hands as a kind of insolent bravado at what was occurring. Mr Fraser, on seeing such marked feelings of hostility, began to return to Captain Douglas’s quarters, and as he reached the foot of the stairs, Hajji, a lapidary, raised his sword to make a cut at him. Mr Fraser who had a sheathed sword in his hand, turned sharply round, and thrust at him with the sword in its sheath, saying to the havildar of the gate guard, ‘What kind of behaviour is this?’ Upon which the havildar made a show of driving off the crowd; but no sooner was Mr Fraser’s back turned than the havildar nodded to the lapidary, to signify to him that now he should renew his attack. The lapidary, thus encouraged, rushed upon Mr Fraser, and inflicted a deep and mortal wound on the right side of his neck. Mr Fraser at once fell, whereupon three other men who had been concealed in the outhouse adjoining, rushed out and cut him with their swords, over the head, face and chest till he was quite dead.26

  ‘I was at the head of the stairs,’ testified Makhan, ‘and this was perpetrated at the foot of them.’

  After this the crowd made a rush to the upper apartments, where the gentlemen, viz Captain Douglas, Mr Hutchinson and Mr Jennings had retired. Attacking them with swords, they at once murdered them and the two young ladies … [Padre Jennings being cut down just as he got as far as the door to escape down a second staircase.] On reaching the room where Captain Douglas was, I saw that he was not quite dead. Mamdoh, a bearer in the service of the King, perceiving this also, hit him with a bludgeon on the forehead, and killed him immediately. I saw the other bodies, including those of the two ladies. Mr Hutchinson was lying in one room, and the bodies of Captain Douglas, Mr Jennings and the two ladies in another on the floor, except Captain Douglas who was on the bed.