The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  All the murders were perpetrated within a quarter of an hour of Mr Fraser’s death, and it was now between 9 and 10 o’clock a.m. After the death of the gentlemen, the crowd began plundering their property. Fearing for my own life I ran off to my own house in the city, and never returned to the palace.27

  By the time Padre Jennings was cut down, one of his two star converts had also been killed. Dr Chaman Lal had been attending to his patients at his hospital in Daryaganj when the sawars first charged through the Rajghat Gate. Hearing the uproar, he had gone out of the hospital to investigate, whereupon he was pointed out by the people in the street. Immediately ‘one soldier pinned him down, sat on his chest, and asked what religion he was. When Dr Lal replied that he was a Christian, the sawar shot him dead at point blank range with his pistol. The cavalry then ransacked and burned the clinic’.28

  The religious nature of the Uprising was becoming immediately apparent. British men and women who had converted to Islam were invariably spared, yet all Indian converts to Christianity – Hindu or Muslim – were sought out and hunted down. While Chaman Lal was one of the very first victims, as were Jennings and his two missionary assistants – both cut down as they ran to escape along the Chandni Chowk – an Anglo-Indian Christian named Mrs Aldwell managed to save herself because she knew the kalima, the Islamic profession of faith, and told her captors that she was a Muslim. The soldiers replied that if they were to kill a Muslim ‘they would [themselves] be as bad as infidels; but that they were determined on killing all the Christians’.29

  One British convert to Islam, a former Company soldier who had taken the name Abdullah Beg, remained throughout the Uprising one of the most active insurgents against British rule. On 11 May, ‘on the arrival of the Mutineers, he immediately identified himself with them and became virtually a leader and advisor’; later he was seen manning the rebel artillery, assisted by another presumed convert, Sergeant-Major Gordon, ‘a tall sturdylooking man, with a naturally fair face, though extremely sunburnt, and a fine soldier-like figure’, who had been spared in the massacre of Christians at the outbreak of the Uprising at Shahjahanpur on account of what his sepoys took to be his Muslim faith. In due course he was taken to Delhi, where he was said to have manned the guns on the northern face of the city walls.*30

  Whatever its causes, the response to the Uprising fractured along distinct class lines. From the morning of 11 May onwards, the most enthusiastic insurgents among the people of Delhi were the workmen of the lower middle class – especially the Muslim weavers and textile merchants – and the same Punjabi Muslim manufacturing and merchant class who had long supported the mujahedin movement. It was these people who immediately swelled the ranks of the initially very small number of sepoys who had arrived in the Mughal capital, creating a panic and allowing many of the poorer Delhiwallahs to set off on an orgy of looting.*

  In contrast, the Delhi elite, both Hindu and Muslim, remained divided on the merits of joining the Uprising, and were from the start dubious about playing host to large numbers of desperate and violent sepoys from the east of Hindustan. According to one angry eyewitness, the nobleman Abdul Latif: ‘The teachings of all religions were ignored and violated; even the poor women and children were not spared. The elite and the respected gentry of the city were appalled at the actions [of the insurgents] and were seen pleading with them. Ah! An entire world was destroyed, and as a result of these sins this city was struck down by the evil-eye.’31 Ghalib was also quite clear that he didn’t like the look of what was happening: ‘Swarming through the open gates of Delhi, the intoxicated horsemen and rough foot soldiers ravished the city,’ he wrote.

  Shut in my room, I listened to the noise and tumult … From all sides one could hear the foot soldiers running and hoof beats of the horsemen coming, wave upon wave. Looking out, there was not so much as a handful of dust which was not stained with the blood of men … Woe for those fair ladies of delicate form, with faces radiant as the moon and bodies gleaming like newly mined silver! A thousand times pity those murdered children whose step was more beautiful than that of the deer and the partridge. All were sucked into the whirlpool of death, drowned in an ocean of blood.32

  For Ghalib, the Uprising was more about the rise of the rabble of the lower classes than it was about the fall of the British. For him the most terrifying aspect of the revolution was the way his own courtly elite seemed to have lost control to a group of ill-educated ruffians of dubious ancestry: ‘Noble men and great scholars have fallen from power,’ he wrote,

  and nameless men with neither name nor pedigree nor jewels nor gold, now have prestige and unlimited riches. One who wandered duststained through the streets as if blown by an idle wind, has proclaimed the wind his slave … In its shamelessness the rabble, sword in hand, rallied to one group after another. Throughout the day the rebels looted the city, and at night they slept in silken beds … The city of Delhi was emptied of its rulers and peopled instead by creatures of the Lord who accepted no lord – as if it were a garden without a gardener, and full of fruitless trees … The Emperor was powerless to repulse them; their forces gathered around him, and he fell under their duress, engulfed by them as the moon is engulfed by the eclipse.33

  The young Mughal nobleman Sarvar ul-Mulk, who was then probably around twelve years old, was equally frightened by what he saw. He was being taken by a servant, Rahim Bakhsh, to visit his maternal aunt’s house in Kuchah Bulaqi Begum, near the Jama Masjid, and was just crossing the Dariba on Chandni Chowk when ‘we saw people running in all directions in fright’.

  Rahim Bakhsh, a strong man, at once lifted me on his back and bolted. When we reached my aunt’s house, the gate was being closed, but Rahim Bakhsh struck at the gate, and entered it with such force, that inside we both fell prone, and hurt ourselves badly … The ‘Poorbyas’ [sepoys from the east] one and all considered themselves to be under the orders of nobody. After their arrival, we kept our houses well guarded.34

  Zafar’s page Zahir Dehlavi was also profoundly alarmed by the outbreak. The King had summoned his attendants to him when he first saw the sepoys approaching. As the streets burned around him, Zahir buckled on his sword and knife, ‘which had lain unused for years’, and set out into the chaos to try to obey the Emperor’s summons. Outside, Zahir could hear the sound of shooting; at some distance mobs were rampaging, alternately hunting down Christians and looting the richer shops. Steeling his nerve, he mounted his horse and set off through his deserted and shuttered muhalla of Matia Mahal and off towards the Jama Masjid.

  When I reached the small gate I saw three or four mounted soldiers wearing kurtas and dhotis and a small scarf tied to their heads, and swords in their belt, standing under the Peepal tree against the canal wall. Hindu men were talking to them and entertaining them, some had brought them newly fried puris, some had brought sweets, some were bringing them water. I did not pay attention to them but passed on towards the fort.

  Soon after I saw a mob of badmashes led by a big man who looked like a wrestler. He was wearing kurta dhoti, a cap on his head, a long bamboo lathi on his shoulder, and he was leading a large number of men dressed in the same way. Near the house of Ashraf Beg, the leader hit the road lantern with his bamboo stick and it broke and shattered on the road. He laughed to his friends, and said ‘Hey look I have just killed another kafir’; then they started breaking the lock of a cloth merchant’s shop. I moved quickly on on my horse.

  Near the Kotwali had gathered a large crowd of miscreants, and all the shops on the way were being looted … The criminals in the city had seen that there was a great opportunity in the unrest, and quickly decided to join the rebels. Full of greed and excitement, they took the rebels to the gate of the bank, brutally killed the men, women and children [of the Beresford family] who were inside, and broke open the treasure trunks and looted the notes inside them. These rebels and rioters were the rebellious soldiers, the criminals who had been freed from the jail and the chamars [untouchables and sweepers], loaf
ers, dhobis [laundrymen], barbers, butchers and the paper makers of the Kaghazi Gali, pick-pockets, wrestlers and other vagabonds. No person from a decent family was a part of this crowd of rioters, for the respectable people of the city were all locked inside their houses, and were quite unaware of what was going on in the city.

  The rioters looted money to their hearts’ content. They took away as much as they could carry from the bank, the chamars, cobblers and vagabonds taking away three bags of money each, and the residents of the Kaghazi Gali were able to pile their homes with the loot as they were just across the wall [from the ruins of the bank]. At least fourteen lakh rupees were looted in the space of an hour. There was rioting all around [Chandni Chowk], people were running amok, blood was flowing like a river, and the rioters were mercilessly creating hell on earth without any guilt or fear, each trying to enrich himself, and not thinking about anyone else.

  When I reached the Gate of the Palace, I saw that near the moat of the Fort about fifty mounted men were lined up guarding the entrance. There was a strong breeze and torn pages from an English book were flying towards the Fort …35

  Anyone who was associated with the old regime was an immediate target. Jiwan Lal, the enormously fat Head Munshi (Chief Secretary) of the British Residency, was at first anxious to do what he could for his employers, hearing how one after another of his friends among the British officials had been hunted down and killed: ‘I wept to feel how utterly powerless I was,’ he wrote. But he soon realised that his own position was far from secure:

  I was a man of corpulent habit of body and well known, so that I could not go out without being discovered … Crowds of badmashes were pointing out to the soldiers the residences of the Europeans and the wealthier natives … Then a man reported that the badmashes were naming me as being the Mir Munshi, and as one worthy of death, and offering to point out my house. Terrified, I ordered the gates to be locked. The house had been built in the days of the [fourteenth-century] Emperor Firoz Shah [Tughluq], and was of solid stone, and as strong as a fort. The doors and windows were all closed. There were underground apartments, into which my family all entered, and there remained concealed. I arranged all the servants for watch and ward, both in front and behind, with orders to admit no one … The city was panic struck – all houses and shops were closed, their inmates concealed inside, praying to God for his mercy and protection.36

  Many were looted simply because they were rich. Some of the first targets were Delhi’s wealthy but unpopular Marwari and Jain moneylenders, though these were in no way directly connected with the British regime. Immediately after the sepoys entered Delhi, the banking partners Mathura Das and Saligram became among the first victims of the looters: ‘The Tilangas assaulted the house of Saligram with the intention of looting it but at first could not loosen the screws,’ recorded an anonymous news-writer the following day. ‘At midnight the Tilangas finally broke through the gate, along with Muslims of the city, and [together they] looted all the goods of the kothi.’37 The partners, who had previously incurred the enmity of the Palace by having Mirza Shah Rukh seized in an attempt to recover their debts, were forced to come before Zafar begging for protection: ‘Your slave’s house has been plundered of everything it contained and all it possessed,’ they pleaded. ‘All our banking and mercantile transactions have been utterly ruined and suspended … We are now with difficulty able to procure even the daily necessities of life.’38

  Others less wealthy than Saligram suffered a similar fate. According to the Chief of Police, Sa’id Mubarak Shah, ‘bodies of sepoys, troopers and others went through the streets plundering and maltreating the respectable citizens’.

  In the general confusion a party of eight Ranghuirs [Muslim Rajputs] who had been putting up at the serai assembled a body of dacoits and gutted one whole portion of the town, loaded their camels with gold mohurs, jewellery and other valuables and set out for their village … The plundering continued the whole of that day and night.39

  Soon so many of the richest havelis had been broken into and looted, usually with the excuse that the inhabitants were sheltering Christians, that Mufti Sadruddin Azurda helped form a private police force to protect himself and his circle. The men he turned to were the only Delhiwallahs with sufficient arms and military training to take on the sepoys. These were the jihadis of the underground mujahedin network, whose brotherhood, bound to fight the jihad by oaths of allegiance (or bayat) to a leader (or amir), now cast off their veil of secrecy and began to mass in Delhi, ready for the holy war they had so long dreamt of.* Before long the jihadis would become a significant force in the Delhi Uprising, operating alongside but quite independently of the rebel sepoys.

  Such was the prevalence of jihadi rhetoric at the outbreak that some went so far as to term the sepoys mujahedin, even though the overwhelming majority of them were Brahmins and other highcaste Hindus. Maulvi Muhammad Baqar certainly wrote up the outbreak in his Dihli Urdu Akbhar as a jihad. In his view the sepoys were guided by the hand of an angry God, outraged at the attacks made on the true faith by the British. For this reason, unlike most of the educated Delhi elite, Baqar was from the beginning an enthusiastic cheerleader for the Uprising. By eight in the morning he was out on the streets, carefully noting what was happening: ‘This humble writer, having heard the sound of gunshots, for the sake of Islam, came out of his house, and caring more for enjoyment and distraction of his readers than for his own life, without hesitation started moving towards the disturbance in order to inquire into the details,’ he wrote.

  In the Kashmiri bazaar, people were running in large numbers … Several Englishmen with naked swords were running in a frenzy and behind them ran a body of Tilangas with their guns chasing them. Not far behind, the residents of the city, one holding a plank, another the leg of a charpoy, someone else holding a bamboo lathi were running after the Tilangas. Some of the city’s populace even tried to throw bricks at the Englishmen, shouting and screaming at them …

  In front of Fakhr ul-Masajid a motley group of some twenty Tilangas were standing around and people were pointing them towards the mosque [where some of the English had taken sanctuary]. I saw the Tilangas go inside the mosque and there they shot the people and sent them on their journey to the hereafter. Further ahead I saw the Church [St James’s] and Collins Saheb’s kothi where three hundred Tilangas and Turk Riders [Muslim cavalrymen] were standing.*

  From there, different groups were spreading out, and asking everyone where the English are. If anybody gave any information four or five soldiers would immediately accompany that man, and in no time, in every lane, Christians were found lying dead. They entered each Kothi and killed the Englishmen with their women and children, and all the houses were plundered. All the movables from the Church and Kutcherry, including the chairs and tables and even the marble slabs of the floors were taken away. After a while I saw the corpse of Nixon Saheb, the head clerk of Commissioner’s office. Some wit had even placed a biscuit in his mouth …

  When I looked towards the Delhi College I saw that all the goods including the portraits, pictures and instruments, chemicals and medicines and a library of English and Persian books as well as maps worth thousands of Rupees were all being taken as loot, and it reached such a pass that even the flooring and the joints of the gates were dug out. The sound of gunfire came from all sides …40

  In his account of the events of 11 May, Muhammad Baqar remained as much the preacher as the curious journalist and war correspondent. Almost the entire front page of the 17 May edition of the paper was given over to Koranic verses concerning worldly vanity and the power of God, along with a lengthy theological exposition. For Baqar was determined not just to describe what happened, but also to interpret it – and to highlight the divine hand he believed was behind the unprecedented events:

  Some people swear that when the Turk troopers came here, there were female camels ahead of them on which rode green-robed riders and then they instantly vanished from sight. Only the troop
ers remained and they killed whichever Englishman they found …

  Truly the English have been afflicted with divine wrath by the true avenger. Their arrogance has brought them divine retribution for, as the Holy Koran says, ‘God does not love the arrogant ones.’ God has given the Christians such a bodyblow that within a short time this carnage has utterly destroyed them … For He has power over everything, and has overwhelmed all their schemes and ploys. It is now incumbent upon you, people of Delhi, to have faith in God and all those who should expend all their energy in protecting and being loyal to the Shadow of God on Earth, his Exalted Majesty [the Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar]. They should always remember that they have the help and support of the Almighty himself.41

  No less excited by the new turn of events was Baqar’s twentyseven-year-old son, Muhammad Husain, later to become famous as the poet Azad. The second edition of the paper to be published after the arrival of the sepoys in Delhi, that of 24 May, contained Azad’s first-ever published poem, entitled ‘A History of Instructive Reversals’. The ghazals began with a series of rhetorical questions – where now was the empire of Alexander? Where the realm of Solomon? – before moving on to the fate of the Christian empire in India, whose days were now so clearly at an end:

  Yesterday the Christians were in the ascendant,

  World-seizing, world-bestowing,

  The possessors of skill and wisdom,

  The possessors of splendour and glory

  The possessors of a mighty army.

  But what use was that,

  Against the sword of the Lord of Fury?

  All their wisdom could not save them,

  Their schemes became useless,

  Their knowledge and science availed them nothing –

  The Tilangas of the East have killed them all.

  An event such as no one has ever seen or heard of –