The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  Partly as a result of this messianic streak, Nicholson needed careful handling at the best of times, and the frank and forthright Lawrence was not necessarily the best man for the job. The previous year, after Lawrence ‘insulted’ Nicholson by giving him a mixed-race Anglo-Indian subordinate, Nicholson’s response was to threaten to murder Lawrence, or, as he put it, ‘commit justifiable homicide … Individuals have their rights as well as nations’, as he wrote to Edwardes,

  and as an individual I have as good a casus belli against Lawrence, as England as a nation, had against Persia or China … I consider that he humiliates me in the eyes of the whole Punjab … I am sure there would be less injustice and oppression in the world, if men similarly circumstanced took their redress into their own hands, more frequently … As for ‘praying for grace to forgive him,’ I can’t do it, it would be rank hypocrisy uttering the words while so different a feeling was in my heart.24

  Nicholson may have been, as one observer put it, ‘the very incarnation of violence’, yet his near-psychopathic temperament was ideally suited to the crisis in hand. Where the Ansons and Wilsons dallied and hesitated, Nicholson immediately began marching and countermarching, disarming regiments of sepoys, putting down mutinies, then hanging their leaders – he abandoned the practice of blowing mutineers from the mouths of cannon, in the time-honoured Mughal fashion, not out of compassion, but because he believed ‘that the powder so expended might be more usefully employed’.25 His actions quickly became the source of Victorian legend, and as his own letters and dispatches are the only source for many of his actions it is difficult to tease out the truth from the myth: it was said that he never slept and knew no fear; that he stormed almost single-handed the fortress of Attock; cut up several regiments of mutinous sepoys with only a small body of Pathan irregulars; and on one occasion he actually cleaved a man in two with a single sword stroke, merely remarking afterwards ‘not a bad silver, that’.26 He took no prisoners. One officer who was part of Nicholson’s Moveable Column overheard the following exchange:

  ‘Jack, the General is here.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Why, look there; there’s his mark!’

  The ‘there’ the fellow-soldier was told to look at was a pair of gallows, each of which was adorned with six hanging mutineers, while close-by were several bullock-carts, all filled with sepoys who had revolted, and who were waiting for their turn … Few court martials were held by Nicholson.

  When Sir John Lawrence wrote to him asking for ‘a return of courts-martial, held upon insurgent natives, with a list of various punishments inflicted’, the implacable Nicholson simply sent back the dispatch, having written on the back ‘THE PUNISHMENT FOR MUTINY IS DEATH’.27

  On the journey to Delhi, he continued to monitor security. One hot summer night in the middle of May, a group of hungry British officers attached to Nicholson’s Moveable Column were sitting in a mess tent near Jalandhar waiting for their dinner. The food had been expected an hour before, but a messenger sent to the cooking tent returned with the information that it would be served a little late. Eventually the tall, craggy Nicholson strode in, and coughed to attract the attention of the company: ‘I am sorry gentlemen to have kept you waiting for your dinner,’ he apologised, ‘but I have been hanging your cooks.’

  According to Nicholson, he had discovered through his spies that the regimental cooks had just laced his brother officers’ soup with aconite. He first invited the cooks to taste the soup, then, when they refused, force-fed the hot liquid to an unfortunate monkey. It writhed for a few seconds, then expired. Within minutes, as one of the officers present put it, ‘our regimental cooks were ornamenting a neighbouring tree’.28

  One other British soldier of a similar temperament also rose to prominence during this uncertain period.

  Prior to 1857, William Hodson had been regarded by most of his colleagues as a black sheep. Hodson was the bright son of a clergyman, and unlike most of his army contemporaries in India, he had a university education behind him, at Trinity College, Cambridge. But according to his clergyman brother, books had a tendency to give Hodson headaches, and he was much more interested in his vocation as ‘a Christian soldier’.29

  One acquaintance described him as ‘a tallish man with yellow hair, a pale, smooth face, heavy moustache, and large, restless, rather unforgiving eyes’.30 Others talked of his impulsive, even reckless nature, and his skills as a ‘perfect swordsman’. Having arrived in India in time to fight in the Sikh Wars, he had risen rapidly to be a District Commissioner in Amritsar, before heading to the North West Frontier to take up a position as Acting Deputy Commissioner of the Yusufzai tribal area, and adjutant of the new Corps of Guides. His fall from grace was equally sudden. In 1854 Hodson was relieved of his command after an investigation declared that he had misused and embezzled regimental funds, and had been guilty of corruption and falsification of the accounts, as well as gross negligence. ‘My ruin is absolute and complete,’ he wrote at the time.31

  He was later acquitted of all the charges, but gossip continued to circulate about him – concerning the improper imprisonment without trial of a Yusufzai chieftain and his twelve-year-old-son, as well as the suspicious killing of a moneylender who was believed to have lent money to him.32 It was said that he was conducting personal vendettas against ‘the greater part of his Pathans and Afridis’; he was also personally unpopular with his men.33 As a result, he continued to carry with him an extremely dubious reputation, and many agreed with the surgeon Edward Hare that he was too unscrupulous to be a good soldier and was really ‘fit only to lead Italian banditti’. Shortly before the outbreak of the Uprising, on 21 March, his former patron, John Lawrence’s elder brother Henry, effectively washed his hands of him, writing, ‘I doubt if any man could help you just now.’34

  At the outbreak, Hodson was still pressing for a formal, public inquiry to exonerate him of all the accusations ranged against him. But as with Nicholson’s unstoppable rise in the face of the new crisis, Hodson’s energy, ruthlessness and sheer brazen confidence brought him quickly to the attention of the Commander-in-Chief, and before long he had become the star of Anson’s staff. Within five days of the outbreak he was appointed Assistant Quartermaster General, and was permitted to recruit his own small private army of Sikh Irregular horse ‘for service in the intelligence department and as a personal escort’. A few days later, while Hodson was in Karnal scouting ahead of the main army – where he shared his lodgings with a group of Delhi refugees including Annie Jennings’ fiancé, Charlie Thomason, and the entire Wagentrieber family – news came from Anson that Hodson’s force was to be expanded into an entire new regiment of irregular cavalry, under his own name, Hodson’s Horse.35

  One of Hodson’s first duties was to ride through the turbulent countryside to Meerut, with a small escort of Sikh cavalry, and reestablish communication with the regiments stranded there. This Hodson did with a remarkable ride, setting off at nine o’clock at night on 21 May, reaching Meerut at dawn the following day. He delivered his message to Wilson (having found the other general, Hewitt, ‘in a state of helpless imbecility’), had a bath, breakfast and two hours’ sleep, and then headed straight back to Karnal, having to fight his way through the last 30 miles. He reached Anson at Ambala on the 23rd, a journey of 250 miles in two days at the height of the summer heat. That night he headed back yet again to Karnal: ‘as I have only had one night in bed out of five I am tolerable weary’, he wrote to his wife the following evening.36

  Like Nicholson, Hodson soon gained a reputation for dispensing with legal niceties, especially with any mutinous sepoys he captured: ‘There is a tendency to treat these rebellious sepoys with a tenderness as misplaced as it would be pernicious,’ he wrote to his wife on 16 May. A little later he was more explicit: ‘I never let my men take prisoners,’ he explained, ‘but shoot them at once.’37 He was also notorious for the pleasure he took in the kill. ‘A beautiful swordsman, he never failed to kill his ma
n,’ wrote one of his officers. ‘The way he used to play with the most brave and furious of these rebels was perfect. I fancy I see him now, smiling, laughing, parrying most fearful blows, as calmly as if he was brushing off flies, calling out all the time, “Why, try again now,” “what’s that?” “Do you call yourself a swordsman?” &c … If only there was a good hard scrimmage he was as happy as a king.’38

  Less dramatically, but ultimately more significantly, Hodson proved himself a ruthlessly efficient Chief of Intelligence: ‘He even used to know what the rebels had for dinner,’ noted one admiring officer.39 On the march to Delhi, Hodson recruited as his principal assistant a one-eyed maulvi named Rajab Ali, who had previously worked as the Head Munshi of Sir George Clerk, the Political Agent for the Sikh States, then later with Sir Henry Lawrence across the Punjab.40

  Rajab Ali immediately made his way into Delhi, where he set up an extensive network of spies and informants, ranging from leading Hindu bankers and Anglophile Mughal aristocrats, through former British officials, to one of Wagentrieber’s former subeditors at the Delhi Gazette. Most remarkably of all he managed to enlist as an informant one of the most prominent sepoy commanders, Brigade Major Gauri Shankar Sukul of the Haryana Regiment, who provided a regular stream of vital strategic information, as well as acting as agent provocateur, disrupting sepoy councils by accusing several other quite innocent (and often very prominent) sepoy officers of spying and collaboration. Rajab Ali also quickly established contact with Zinat Mahal; with Zafar’s prime minister, Hakim Ahsanullah Khan; and with the pro-British faction in the Palace led by Mirza Fakhru’s Anglophile father-in-law, Mirza Ilahe Bakhsh.

  The centre of Hodson’s spy network in the city was the Residency’s corpulent Mir Munshi, Jiwan Lal, who, despite being confined to the dark of his tehkhana (underground cool room), soon became the most important British intelligence operator within the walls. Every day he sent out ‘two Brahmins and two Jats for the purpose of obtaining news of the doings of the rebels from every quarter, from the Fort, the city gates, &c, so that I might record everything for the information of my masters’.41 According to Jiwan Lal’s own diary, as early as 19 May he received instructions to stay in the city and gather intelligence from a blue-eyed European ‘disguised as a faquir’.

  The man wore a kurtah of gairwa [reddish] colour such as is worn by Hindu Faquirs, called ‘sadhs’, had a bead of Tulsi around his neck, and on his forehead was painted a ‘Ramanandi’ mark. Only his eyes were blue … He also had some yellowish paint, such as of ‘peori’ over his face; and he told me that he had lived for a long time at Benares, and had acquired a thorough knowledge of Sanskrit and Urdu, so that no one could detect him in his speech … He sat for two hours talking about and describing his own account, and about the ignorance and stupidity of the rebels.

  He took out from the folds of his dhoti – a long one, which he was wearing like Brahmins – letters … with instructions that I was desired to forward to the chiefs of Jhujjur, Bahadurgarh and Bullubgarh … He advised me [to stay in the city] … furnishing such news of the rebels as might be of use to the government. ‘And,’ added he, ‘our own men will be coming to you for the purpose of carrying away the news from you.’

  The great difficulty was that all persons passing by roads or through the city gates were minutely searched by the rebels who did not leave even trousers and shoes unsearched. If anything was found the man was put to death. If it was discovered he was a messenger, the sender’s house was plundered, and no mercy was shown to the sender’s life. But I sent the letters … through my own servants disguised as beggars, promising them very liberal rewards for the service …*42

  Thousands of notes from such spies – many of which were carried out of the city through a network of runners masquerading as sadhus and mendicants – still survive in the Mutiny Papers of the National Archives of India. They range from long and detailed analyses of the rebel positions – the gun emplacements, barracks, water supplies, regimental magazines and armouries – and the rebels’ problems: from the lack of percussion caps, for example, to the squabbles and disagreements between the different sepoy regiments. They include many tiny fragments of papers designed to be sewn into shoes and clothing, and written in microscopic script, giving warning of imminent attacks and telling when and where they should be expected. They also give advice about how to improve the effectiveness of shelling, how to exploit the weak spots in the fortifications and how to damage the Bridge of Boats.43

  Not all of the material proved either reliable or accurate; frequently the spies exaggerated the scale of the despair and disaffection within the city, and told their British paymasters what they wanted to hear – as Hodson and his fellow British intelligence officers quickly came to realise. But in the months to come, the sheer quantity of intelligence that the British received from the city, and the lack of it in the rebels’ camp, did as much as anything to determine the outcome of the struggle for Delhi. As the senior city policeman, Sa’id Mubarak Shah, later put it, ‘The fact was that the rebel army possessed no really trustworthy information as to the number and position of the British troops. Nor had they a single spy on whose word they could rely.’44

  By the beginning of the first week in June, Hodson was leading the Delhi Field Force as it lumbered south along the Grand Trunk Road from Karnal towards Delhi. Its new commander, the sixty-year-old General Sir Henry Barnard, had taken the advice of Sir John Lawrence: ‘Act at once, march with any body of European troops to the spot, and the danger will disappear. Give it time, it will flame through the land.’45 At his disposal Barnard now had a modest force of around 600 cavalry and 2,400 infantry, supported by a small siege train of around fifty cannon and field guns.

  Hodson and his irregular cavalry travelled ahead of the main column, scouting ahead to anticipate ambushes; on one occasion Hodson rode up as far as the Delhi Race Course, above the burnedout cantonments, before meeting any rebel sentries.46 Nicholson, meanwhile, was busy in the Frontier, gathering Sikh and Pathan levies of irregular horse to help replace the Hindustani troops lost to the Mutiny.*

  It would not be long before Hodson and Nicholson would together bring the full weight of British vengefulness to the very gates of Bahadur Shah’s newly independent Mughal Delhi.

  Zafar marked the afternoon of 12 May by mounting a procession. Processing around Delhi had always been Zafar’s favourite and most effective means of ceremonially proclaiming and asserting his sovereignty; and on 12 May that sovereignty badly needed proclaiming.

  As on the previous day, the streets of Delhi were empty but for gangs of looters: ‘Things were still so bad that bands of plunderers were carrying empty sacks and were pillaging houses of any respectable citizen they could get into,’ wrote Zahir Dehlavi.

  They picked the houses of the rich and instigated rioters by saying that there is a memsahib hiding inside this house, or there are sahibs in that one. Hearing this, mobs of rioters stormed into the house, led by the sepoys, and before long the city rabble could be seen leaving the ruins with all their collected booty.47

  Several of the leading Mughal aristocrats were manhandled, and had their premises ransacked. These included Hamid Ali Khan, the powerful leader of Delhi’s Shia community, who was accused of sheltering Europeans and dragged to the court, where Zafar had to intervene to save him from execution.48 Large areas of the city were still burning from the fires started the day before, while the Fort now contained so many sepoys, who placed their own guards at the Palace gates, that, according to Maulvi Muhammad Baqar, ‘the Palace now resembles a cantonment’.49

  The jewellers, moneylending baniyas and the famous cloth merchants in the Chota Dariba bore the brunt of the violence. So did Delhi’s celebrated sweetmeat makers, whose fame had obviously reached Avadh and Bihar, as, according to the news-writer Chunni Lal, ‘the infantry troops forcibly entered and plundered the shops of the confectioners in all the streets of the city’.50 The moneylender Mahajan Narayan Das had his house lo
oted and its entire contents removed. A jeweller named Mohan Lal was kidnapped by the sepoys and kept at gunpoint until he bought his way out of trouble by giving them 200 rupees.51

  The courtesans were also vulnerable: several kothis found themselves besieged by crowds of soldiers, and at least one courtesan was abducted: the dancer Manglo, who was carried off and raped by the sawar Rustam Khan.52 Sometimes the Delhiwallahs fought back: ‘The infantry and cavalry made an attack on Nagar Seth street with the view to plundering it,’ recorded Chunni Lal. ‘But the inhabitants closed the gates and attacked the soldiery with brickbats, and drove them off.’53 In other places too the townspeople took the law into their own hands: in Hauz Qazi, for example, there was a riot ‘between some Tilangas and the residents of the Mohalla’.54

  Occasionally the mob would find some last group of surviving Christians and drag them from their hiding place to the kotwal, where they were duly dispatched; among those killed on the morning of the 12th was the scholarly principal of Delhi College, Francis Taylor, who was discovered trying to escape in disguise, and was at once promptly beaten to death in the street. A little later, Elizabeth Wagentrieber’s alcoholic cousin, Joseph Skinner, was taken from his haveli and lynched at the kotwali; Skinner’s house was then comprehensively looted. Many victims remain unnamed: one typical account in the narrative of Chunni Lal records how