The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  Though there are no references to Mirza Mughal’s whereabouts on the day that the sepoys arrived in Delhi, by the morning of the 12th he appeared in the durbar with his younger brothers, and together they ‘applied for the principal commands in the army’. Zafar dismissed the request on the advice of Zinat Mahal and Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, who argued that ‘they were not of sufficient age and experience for such appointments, nor would they understand any of the duties [of soldiers]; they were much displeased in consequence’. But the following day the princes returned with ‘officers of the army, to join them in their request’. Again Zafar and Hakim Ahsanullah Khan opposed the plan: ‘You don’t know the work,’ said Zafar. ‘What will you do as officers?’ But the princes and the sepoys held their ground ‘and accordingly, two days after [on the 15th] they were severally nominated to commands and received dresses of honour’. With the consent of the sepoys, Mirza Mughal was given the title Commander-in-Chief.82

  It is possible that Mirza Mughal, along with his brothers Abu Bakr and Khizr Sultan, had secretly been in contact with the sepoys prior to the outbreak; certainly this was what Zinat Mahal maintained afterwards.* This would help explain the speed with which Mirza Mughal established a rapport with the sepoys, while the rest of the Palace kept a suspicious distance. Either way, from this point onwards Mirza Mughal threw himself energetically into the business of managing the army and trying to administer the town, which he did in collaboration with Theo Metcalfe’s friend and saviour, Muin ud-Din Husain Khan, whom he made kotwal the day after his own appointment.

  One of the biggest surprises contained in the Mutiny Papers is the sheer quantity of paperwork produced by Mirza Mughal and his office: the papers contain many thousands of Mirza Mughal’s orders; indeed, several whole collections contain nothing else.* Collection 60 alone contains 831 orders from Mirza Mughal’s secretariat.

  It is striking how many of the Indian nationalist accounts of 1857 make the assumption, common among imperial British historians, that any Mughal prince must necessarily be a lazy fop, and Mirza Mughal is generally written off as an effete and useless aristocrat. Yet to judge from the documentation contained in the National Archives, Mirza Mughal was one of the most energetic and industrious of all those who espoused the cause of the Uprising in 1857. More than anyone else, it seems, Mirza Mughal realised the importance of providing some organised logistical back-up to the Uprising, and a coherent administration for Delhi. As it turned out, his administration rarely got beyond crisis management, and never succeeded in turning itself into a force able to control either the different sepoy regiments or the growing numbers of freelance jihadis collecting in Delhi; but if it failed, it was certainly not for lack of industry.

  From the first week, Mirza Mughal produced an incessant stream of orders and commands: attempting to get the sepoys out of the city and into a series of coherent military camps; sending policemen or Palace guards to rescue any bazaars that were being plundered or noblemen whose houses were being attacked; promising the sepoys pay and raising the money to provide it; finding sufficient food for both the sepoys and the people of Delhi; receiving and attending to the petitions of individual sepoys; providing spades, shovels, axes and sandbags for entrenchments and defence works; imposing a strict code of conduct on the military so that, for example, there could be no house searches without a permit; negotiating to restrain the Gujar tribes outside the walls; establishing a mint to produce coins with Zafar’s portrait upon them; and not least, attempting to rally his increasingly depressed father and control his own brothers.

  Mirza Mughal was almost certainly behind a circular letter sent out in Zafar’s name to all the princes and rajas of India, asking them to join the Uprising and appealing for their loyalty on the grounds that all faiths were under attack by the British. The letter refers specifically to the laws banning sati and allowing converts to inherit, and the Company’s facilitation of missionary activity, and the alleged conversion of prisoners locked in British jails: “The English are people who overthrow all religions,’ it states. ‘You should understand well their object of destroying the religions of Hindustan … It is now my firm conviction that if the English continue in Hindustan they will … utterly overthrow our religions. As the English are the common enemy of both [Hindus and Muslims, we] should unite in their slaughter … for by this alone will the lives and faiths of both be saved.’83

  One document that probably was not, however, produced by Mirza Mughal or his chancery was a remarkable declaration known (quite erroneously) as the Manifesto of the King of Delhi or (more accurately, since it had nothing to do with Zafar) as the Azamgarh Proclamation. Unlike the circular letter, the proclamation is almost wholly secular in tone, and is aimed at a broad base of different interest groups; indeed, it is the nearest thing produced during the Uprising to a manifesto of national independence. Its opening sentence sets the tone, a cry to arms noting that ‘both Hindoos and Mohammedans are being ruined under the tyranny and oppression of the infidel and treacherous English’. While noting that ‘at present a war is ranging with the English on account of religion’, and calling on ‘pundits and fakirs’ to join with Mughal armies, most of its space is given over to complaints that the English have overtaxed the landowners, monopolised ‘all the posts of dignity and emolument’ in the civil and armed services, and put Indian artisans out of business by flooding the market with cheap British imports.

  Some historians, pleased to have found a rare document from 1857 that explicitly mentions economic and social grievances, have linked this remarkably modern document with the Red Fort, and thereby perhaps exaggerated its influence and importance. For its author was actually the rather obscure and enigmatic Mughal prince Firoz Shah, who, while probably a grandson of Zafar, fought exclusively in Avadh and Lucknow, and never once came to Delhi in the course of the Uprising. Perhaps partly because of this, the more secular issues he raises are intriguingly different, in both tone and content, from those being articulated as major grievances at the time in the Mughal capital.84

  If most of the princes threw in their lot with the Uprising, having little to lose and much to gain, Zinat Mahal and her beloved only son, Jawan Bakht, took the opposite course – and for the same reason.

  Zinat Mahal was wholly opposed to the course her husband was pursuing, and regarded it as ruinous for the chances of Jawan Bakht. It was also the first time since their marriage that Zafar had publicly gone against her advice on a major issue. According to the memoir of Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, the Queen ‘remonstrated that the King paid no attention to her. [But] he [merely] replied, “Let what God wills happen.”’85

  Zinat Mahal had apparently calculated that the British would soon return and rout the sepoys, and that loyalty to them might yet result in their recognising the succession of her beloved son; either way, whatever the reasoning, it was she who encouraged Zafar to send an express camel messenger to the Governor of the North West Provinces in Agra on the night of the outbreak.86 Later, she made sure Jawan Bakht kept his distance from the insurgents and did not become in any way implicated in their violence. When Mirza Mughal was made Commander-in-Chief, Jawan Bakht was given the nominal title of Vazir, but he was kept far away from the sepoys and did not become involved in the administration of the city.87

  Ranged alongside Zinat Mahal and Mirza Jawan Bakht in the discreetly pro-British faction in the Palace were the head eunuch and Zinat Mahal’s enforcer, Mahbub Ali Khan; Zafar’s prime minister, Hakim Ahsanullah Khan; and Mirza Ilahe Bakhsh, father-in-law of the late Mirza Fakhru. In 1852, Ilahe Bakhsh had been the bitter rival of Zinat Mahal, Jawan Bakht and Mahbub Ali Khan. Now the crisis resulted in an unexpected realignment of the old court factions: Mirza Mughal, formerly Zinat’s protégé, now became her rival; while Mirza Ilahe Bakhsh, formerly her enemy, became her ally.88

  Zafar himself stood slightly apart from his wife and principal advisers. While well aware of the dangers posed by the sepoys, disgusted by their manners and profoundly alar
med and depressed by the looting of his city, he nevertheless recognised the possibility that the Uprising could yet save the House of Timur, and ensure a future for his dynasty, something he had consistently worked for since his accession in 1837. He therefore gave his blessing and public support to the Uprising, and took seriously his role as newly empowered Mughal Emperor, while doing all he could to limit the depredations of the sepoys.

  The degree to which Zinat Mahal, Mahbub Ali Khan and Hakim Ahsanullah Khan were operating their own policy in regard to the Uprising, quite independent of the Emperor, and in direct opposition to Mirza Mughal and the other princes, became apparent in the most dramatic fashion five days after the outbreak, at the morning durbar on Saturday, 16 May. According to the diary of the news-writer Chunni Lal, who was present,

  The troopers and infantry soldiers, accompanied by their officers, attended and presented a letter bearing the seals of the physician Ahsanullah Khan and Nawab Mabub Ali Khan, which they said had been intercepted at the Delhi Gate of the city. They complained that the physician and the Nawab had sent this letter to the English, inviting them to come to the city immediately, and promising that provided that the English should agree to acknowledge Mirza Jawan Bakht, the son of the King by the Queen Zinat Mahal, as heir apparent, they would on their part engage to seize and make over all the soldiery now in Delhi.89

  Both the hakim and the eunuch – who was ill and had to be brought to court prostrate in his palki – swore than the document was a forgery, but they were not believed. Things began to look very bad for both courtiers: ‘The men of the cavalry and infantry drew their swords and surrounded the physician declaring their firm belief that he maintained an understanding with the English.’90

  It was at this point that one of the sepoys mentioned the British prisoners that Zafar had kept in safe custody in the Palace. Their number had now grown to fifty-two after the new kotwal, Muin ud-Din, had brought in several families who were about to be killed, after having been discovered hiding in the city. The sepoys accused the hakim and the eunuch of keeping the prisoners alive so that ‘when the English came he might make them over, and would have the soldiers killed’ – no doubt very much what the men did indeed have in mind.91

  The sepoys then called for the prisoners, who were being kept and fed by Zafar in a room beside the Palace kitchens, not far from the Lahore Gate. They bound them and took them to a peepul tree near the shallow tank in front of the Palace drum house, the Naqqar Khana, and began to taunt them that they were about to be slaughtered.

  According to Jiwan Lal, ‘the King and his courtiers stood like dumb puppets’ at first, horrified by what the sepoys were contemplating. ‘Then the King ordered the sepoys to separate into parties, Mahommedans and Hindus, and he appealed to each to consult their religious advisers to see if there was any authority for the slaughter of helpless men and women and children.’92 Their murder can never be allowed,’ said Zafar, adding that the Queen was also wholly opposed to any massacre.93 Sa’id Mubarak Shah recorded that

  The king wept and besought the mutineers not to take the lives of helpless women and children, saying to them ‘take care – for if you commit such a deed the vengeance and angel of God will fall on us all. Why slay the innocent?’ But the Mutineers refused to listen and replied ‘we’ll kill them, and in your palace, so that whatever the result you and we shall be considered one in this business, and you will be thought equally guilty by the English.’94

  Both the kotwal, Muin ud-Din, and the courtier Zahir Dehlavi, who were also present, recorded that the King continued to argue with the sepoys and refused to give his consent to the murder, but was eventually silenced by Hakim Ahsanullah Khan. The hakim had been deeply shaken by the exposure of his correspondence, and warned the King that if he continued to argue both their lives would be taken.

  When Zahir saw that the sepoys were preparing to go ahead with the slaughter, he begged the hakim to make a last effort to stop the massacre: ‘I told him that I had seen the prisoners being taken out,’ he recorded later,

  and I was afraid that they were about to kill them, and that he must do something quickly to stop them. To this I got a reply, ‘What can I do?’ I told him this is the time to prove our loyalty, and that if he wanted to save the King then he had to try and persuade the rebels to stop this crime and save the prisoners, otherwise the English would come and level Delhi and turn it into an empty wasteland in revenge for this spilling of innocent blood. Ahsanullah Khan replied, ‘You are still a child. You do not realize that in public life a man must use his reason rather than give way to his emotions. If we try to dissuade the rebels now they will kill us before they kill the English, and then they will kill the King.’95

  It was anyway too late. By the time Ahsanullah had finished speaking, the sepoys and the Palace mob had got to work.

  They made the prisoners sit down, and one of them fired his carbine at them. After this two of the King’s personal armed retainers killed all the Europeans, men, women and children, with their swords. There were about 200 Mussalmans standing at the tank, uttering the coarsest abuse at the prisoners. The sword of one of the king’s retainers broke. After the slaughter, the bodies were taken on two carts, and thrown into the river. This occurrence caused a great excitement amongst the Hindus throughout the city, who said that these Purbeas who had committed this heinous and atrocious cruelty could never be victorious against the English.96

  For Zafar the massacre was a turning point. The sepoys were quite correct that the British would never forgive the mass killing of innocents, and Zafar’s failure to prevent it proved as fatal for him and his dynasty as it was for them.

  By the end of the second week of the Uprising even the formerly enthusiastic Maulvi Muhammad Baqar was beginning to have second thoughts about what was going on: ‘The population is greatly harassed and sick of the pillaging and plundering,’ he wrote in an editorial in the Dihli Urdu Akbhar on 24 May.

  Whether people of the city, or outsiders from the East, everybody is busy looting and plundering. The police stations do not have even an iota of control and authority. Colonel James Skinner’s kothi was plundered so badly that it cannot be described. In the city and around and about, the Gujars and Jats have created havoc. The roads are blocked, and thousands of houses have been plundered and burnt. Great peril confronts all the respectable and well-off people of Delhi … the city is being ravaged.97

  Baqar emphasised, however, that it wasn’t just the sepoys who were looting: the city mob was equally responsible, some of whom had disguised themselves as soldiers. ‘Having pillaged the guns, arms and ammunition from the magazine and from English kothis, people have taken to dressing up like Tilangas and committing plunder,’ he wrote.

  Five men were arrested yesterday. It was eventually revealed that some were cobblers who worked in the cantonment, and that two more were chamars [an untouchable caste]. They were taken to the platoon they claimed to belong to, and when their lies were uncovered the Subahdar and the sepoys gave them a heavy lashing and they are now in captivity.98

  Baqar understood that behind the anarchy there lay a fundamental problem of authority. While there was clearly a certain amount of collusion and communication between the different regiments prior to the outbreak, each regiment had mutinied individually, had come to Delhi under its own steam and, once there, looked to its own subahdars for leadership. The regiments remained self-contained: they camped separately, accepted no overall sepoy general, and strongly resisted the idea of a commander of any other regiment having authority over them. The princes remained associated with individual regiments, and Mirza Mughal’s attempts to act as a coordinating commander-in-chief had only very limited success. Since the Mughals were never able either to pay or to properly punish errant sepoys, or indeed disobedient regiments, there was a limit to how much authority they could ever actually wield over the rebel forces, and to some extent the regiments remained a collection of disparate private armies, each under its own su
bahdar, who acted as a semi-independent warlord. ‘The rebels are without a leader,’ was how the news-writer of the Raja of Kapurthala succinctly put it.99

  To make matters worse, by the end of the second week fights between the infantry regiments and the cavalry sawars were becoming increasingly common. The Meerut and Delhi sepoys remained on especially bad terms, and frequently came to blows over the division of the loot from the city.100 As Ghalib wrote in his diary at the time, the sepoys rapidly gathering in his city were ‘a thousand armies marshalled without marshals, unnumbered bands, led by no commander and yet ready for war’.101 The Emperor was equally depressed. According to the report of a spy, after one bout of bloodshed in which the Delhi and Meerut regiments had refused to obey their commanders and had instead fought with each other, Zafar had shaken his head and said, ‘The skies have fallen down upon us.’102

  Baqar was also alarmed: ‘Everyone is full of praise for the efficiency of the Kotwal of the city,’ he wrote in his paper, ‘but both high and low are helpless because of the lack of control over the Tilangas. Many of the poor are said to be bordering on starvation … moneylenders are lying low because of fear of the Tilangas. The arrangement of two things is highly imperative and urgent: first the distribution of salaries, and secondly the restraining of the Tilangas.’103

  If the sepoys refused to obey the subahdars of other sepoy regiments, still less did they relish taking orders from the Delhi police; when the police attempted to prevent them from looting, they instantly fought back. At the Lahore Gate a policeman who tried to stop the Tilangas looting was badly beaten up: ‘Below the ramparts a barqandaz [armed police constable] noted some sacks of loot stashed by the wall and he challenged the owner,’ the local police chief afterwards reported to the new kotwal, Muin ud-Din.