The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  Not one hundred yards distant, and coming in a direct line towards us, we perceived a body of some eight or ten sepoys, stragglers from Meerut, two of whom were mounted on ponies. The imperfect light of the dawning day was just sufficient to show us they were armed, though only half were dressed in uniform. They were making for Delhi by a country track, and were bearing down straight for the spot where we lay concealed … We had barely time to creep under the bushes and hide ourselves as well as we could when they were upon us. We watched them in breathless anxiety, not daring to move, and scarcely to breathe.

  Now they slowly pass in Indian file within a few feet of us … One of them stoops and picks up something from the ground, and whispers to his comrades, and then all come to a sudden halt. Alas! Our water bottle has betrayed us! In our hurry and confusion we had left it lying in the open … There was complete silence, broken only by the low mutterings of the sepoys … I involuntarily cocked my gun … [But] after a brief interval we saw them silently move off …9

  During the following days, however, the group’s luck ran out. Wandering aimlessly in the heat through a bare plain in what they hoped would be the direction of Meerut, without food or money, they watched as Forrest descended into distracted madness, hiding in bushes and refusing to follow, ‘saying he felt so thoroughly worn out from all he had gone through that he would far rather be left in peace to die where he was’. Two days later, they met another equally ragged party of Delhi refugees, led by Vibart’s commanding officer, Colonel Knyvett, raising the number in the party to seventeen. Shortly afterwards, however, they were all surrounded

  by fierce looking men, armed with spears and bludgeons. These were none other than the dreaded Gujars themselves. Their numbers increased rapidly, and, in whichever direction we looked, we observed others, similarly armed, running towards us. At length when they had completely hemmed us in, they gave a fearful shout, and rushed upon us. We stood back to back, and made a vain attempt to beat them off; but, being [outnumbered] ten to one, we were soon overpowered. One rascal laid hold of my sword, and tried to wrench it out of my hand. In vain I resisted; a blow from behind stretched me on my back …

  In the midst of all this melee I saw Colonel Knyvett levelling the gun he was carrying point-blank at one of the wretches … fortunately someone shouted out to him not to fire; so, deliberately removing the caps, he gave it up. It was as well we permitted ourselves to be disarmed for had we continued the struggle, our lives would undoubtedly have been sacrificed.

  Having once got us down, they set to work stripping us of everything. Studs, rings, watches, etc. were all torn off. They did not even spare my inner vest … One of the ladies literally had the clothes torn off her back, whilst the others were treated with similar barbarity. At last when they had appropriated everything, leaving only our shirts and trousers, and the ladies their upper garments, the entire band retreated a short distance and commenced quarrelling over the spoil.10

  Three further days of parched, thirsty wandering later, after Forrest had again disappeared and been found, a second Gujar war band surrounded the party, but ‘finding nothing to rob us of, contented themselves with pulling off the gilt buttons on the colonel’s frockcoat, which the other rascals had overlooked, and permitted us to pass on’.11

  Help, when it finally arrived a full week after the party had fled Delhi, came from the most unlikely quarter. Franz Gottlieb Cohen, who wrote ‘a camel load of poetic works’ in Persian and Urdu under the pen-name ‘Farasu’, was one of the last of the White Mughals, an eighty-year-old relic of a very different and less polarised era.12 The son of a German-Jewish soldier of fortune who had married a Mughal princess, Farasu was born in 1777 while his father was in the service of the enigmatic Begum Sumru of Sardhana.13

  The Begum Sumru presided over one of the most fascinatingly hybrid courts in India. She was originally said to have been a Kashmiri dancing girl named Farzana Zeb un-Nissa, born 1751, whose rapid rise to fortune began when she became the bibi of a German mercenary, Walter Reinhardt, known as ‘Sombre’ (Indianised to ‘Sumru’) after his severe expression. When the Mughal Emperor gave Reinhardt a large estate in the Doab north of Delhi, Reinhardt’s begum went with him and turned the village of Sardhana into their capital, with a ruling class drawn from both Mughal noblemen and a ragged bunch of over two hundred ne’er-do-well French and central European mercenaries, many of whom apparently converted to Islam.14 Among these mercenaries was Farasu’s father, John-Augustus Gottlieb Cohen.

  After Sombre’s death, his begum ruled in his stead, partly from Sardhana, and partly from her large Delhi palace on Chandni Chowk. She converted to Catholicism – while continuing to cover her head in the Muslim manner – and appealed directly to the Pope to send a chaplain for her court. By the time the intriguingly named Father Julius Caesar turned up in Sardhana, the begum had already begun to build the largest cathedral in northern India, in a style that promiscuously mixed baroque and Mughal motifs, with a great classical dome rising from Mughal squinches decorated with honeycombed Persian murqana motifs.*15

  As the architecture of her cathedral indicated, there was nothing orthodox about the begum’s Christianity. The three-day-long Christmas festivities at Sardhana were opened by high mass, while ‘the following two days [were enlivened] by a nautch and a display of fireworks’. This was an opportunity for the Sardhana poets, including Farasu, to recite their Urdu verses.16 Dussera, Diwali and Holi were celebrated with equal enthusiasm; in addition to which the begum also dabbled in witchcraft – the diary of her heir, the wonderfully named David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre, contains several references to the begum’s employing women to cast spells and conduct exorcisms.17

  Three of the begum’s European mercenary officers became major Urdu poets, of whom the most distinguished was Farasu; he was even included in the list of the most prominent Indian poets produced by the principal of Delhi College, Alois Sprenger. According to the Persian inscription on Farasu’s tomb, ‘he was in the service of Her Highness for 50 years, the last 32 as tahsildar of Budhana’.18

  After the British unilaterally annexed the begum’s estate on her death, Farasu, now an old man, continued as tahsildar under the British, based in his rambling haveli in the village of Harchandpur.* It was from here that he sent out search parties as soon as news reached him that half-naked British refugees were wandering around his estates, starving and thirsty. ‘[When] a messenger arrived from Harchandpore, saying his master, a Mr Cohen, hearing of our miserable plight, had sent him to express his sympathy at our situation, and begging us to take shelter with him … we were naturally overjoyed,’ wrote Vibart.

  Arriving there between seven and eight o’clock, we were cordially welcomed by the old man and his two grandsons. It appeared they owned several villages round about, for which they annually paid a certain sum to the government. The old man himself had lived here all his life – so long in fact that he had almost forgotten his own language, and had become thoroughly native in all his habits; but his two grandsons were somewhat different in this respect, and lived in a more European fashion.

  We were soon refreshed with a cup of hot tea, after which clean clothes were brought, and we proceeded to divest ourselves of the soiled rags we were wearing, and enjoyed the luxury of soap and water. A room was set apart for the ladies of the party, and they too managed to procure a change of apparel, in the shape of some clean koortas and snowy white chuddahs of fine nankeen, which later they wore over their heads and draped around their shoulders in native style, and really looked so spruce and tidy in their novel costume, when they joined us at breakfast [the following morning], that we could scarcely recognise them as the forlorn creatures of yesterday …

  As for Forrest … he remained shut up in old Mr Cohen’s ‘sanctum sanctorum,’ enjoying the luxury of a punkah and smoking a fragrant hookah … At four o’clock pm a plentiful repast was set before us, and to our no small astonishment, several bottles of beer produced, followed, when dinner was re
moved, by a bottle of excellent cognac …19

  Shortly afterwards, alerted by Farasu, a rescue party and an escort of cavalry arrived from Meerut. It was now eight days since the party had fled Delhi. By the following night, all seventeen refugees were safe within the shelter of the now heavily fortified and entrenched British cantonment at Meerut.

  Eight days later, on the evening of 27 May, General Wilson finally gathered enough bullocks to leave Meerut in belated pursuit of the mutineers. His small force numbered only 2,000 infantry, fifty cavalry and six guns; its destination was Alipore, 8 miles north of Delhi, where it was supposed to rendezvous with the main Field Force heading south from Ambala.

  Before leaving, Wilson – a small, neat, goateed gentleman of sixty – wrote confidently to his wife, who was up in the hill station of Mussoorie, that ‘the mutineers … show no wish to come and attack us’.20 In this, as in so many other things, General Wilson was proved quite wrong. Zafar had in fact been urging an attack on Meerut for some time, largely with a view to getting as many sepoys as he could out of both his palace and his city. The expedition also had the added recommendation of providing a way to remove from the Red Fort Zafar’s troublesome grandson, the new commander of the cavalry, Mirza Abu Bakr.

  Since his promotion to lead the rebel sawars a fortnight earlier, Mirza Abu Bakr had become a major liability. Liberated from his former status as a minor princeling, he had begun swaggering around with his troops, committing outrages both in the city and around about. Sent out to defend the suburbs against Gujars, he had looted both the Sabzi Mandi, the area around Safdarjung’s Tomb, and Gurgaon: ‘the said Mirza plundered the region and set fire to it’, recorded one Urdu newsletter.21 Shortly afterwards he had led an expedition to Rohtak with Mir Nawab, ‘the leader of the city rebels’, where, according to one eyewitness, they

  plundered and burnt every house in the Civil Lines, looted the city, maltreated the males and outraged the women. Mir Nawab himself carried off three fair Hindoo girls loaded with costly ornaments. Mirza Abu Bukr and his army of oppressors then returned to Delhi bringing the whole of the government treasure and accompanied by the traitorous sepoy guard.22

  Since then he and the Mir Nawab had amused themselves attacking the haveli of the leader of Delhi’s Shia community, Hamid Ali Khan, ‘bringing up guns against the house to blow him away on the [quite unfounded] pretext that he was in league with the English’. Zafar was outraged when a distress message from Hamid Ali Khan reached him and demanded that the assault stop immediately. But when he instructed the cavalry not to obey Abu Bakr’s orders they refused, replying, ‘He is our officer. Why should we not go where he tells us?’23 Abu Bakr was briefly suspended from command of the cavalry, but the order seems to have been ignored.24 So when Zafar heard that Mirza Abu Bakr now wished to lead an expedition against the British in Meerut, he was only too pleased to let him go, ordering him ‘to go with his troops towards Meerut where there are English cannon which he must capture and deliver as soon as possible’.25

  An expedition to Meerut had in fact been canvassed for some time by Maulvi Muhammad Baqar in the Dihli Urdu Akbhar, and recently his editorials had begun to complain about the unnecessary delays in the departure of the expeditionary force: ‘Every day there is news that the troops are about to leave for Meerut, but it never seems to happen,’ he wrote on 31 May.

  The wise have long been saying that no delay should be made in taking Meerut and Karnal, and the Christians cannot prosper when opposed by the Almighty … The exalted Murshidzada Mirza Abu Bakr is very keen to lead such an expedition and has in fact pleaded before his Majesty to let him take a sizeable contingent. He should be given his way as then the matter could be quickly settled.26

  There followed one final delay when the sepoys insisted that Zafar accompany them to battle, saying:

  ‘You will then see how we will fight for you.’ The King replied that he was old and infirm, could with difficulty move about, and had been unable to go even as far as the ‘Idgah on the great day of prayer [‘Id], even though it was close outside the city walls. Nor had he or his ancestors from the time of Furuksiyar, a period of 108 years, ever seen a battle, adding, ‘I know nothing of military tactics, but you do.’ The officers replied that if unable to go himself he must send one of his sons.27

  Finally, two days before Wilson left Meerut, on 25 May, ‘under pressure from the King’, a large force of sepoys, supported by field and horse artillery under Mirza Abu Bakr, set off from Delhi in a bid to take Meerut.28 Neither side had any idea that an army belonging to the other was heading in its direction.

  Wilson’s march from Meerut proved as chaotic as Anson’s had been from Simla. No camels could be found, and the rustic bullock carts the British had commandeered proved quite unsuitable for transporting an army.29 ‘It was a dreadful mess of confusion this first march,’ he admitted to his wife on the 28th, ‘but I hope we shall do better tonight. Our carriage is chiefly hackeries, a source of very great trouble and inconvenience.’30

  Wilson did not mention it, but his march had also been remarkable for its brutal and unfocused attempts at taking revenge on any of the local population who were unfortunate enough to come in the way of his column: according even to the Anglophile policeman Sa’id Mubarak Shah, who was no critic of the British, ‘Reprisals were taken as the troops advanced, and hundreds of innocent travellers, as well as [genuine] dacoits and highway robbers were seized and hanged.’31

  The two rival expedionary forces finally met, to the great surprise of both, at the new British-built steel suspension bridge over the Hindan river, at half past four in the afternoon of 30 May. The first short engagement ended in the British crossing the bridge and driving back the sepoys with only light casualties; but the rebels returned at 1 p.m. the following day for a much more fiercely fought engagement.32 According to Muin ud-Din,

  The battle began with artillery fire. [Mirza Abu Bakr] mounted onto the roof of a house near the River Hindan close to the bridge across the river and watched the battle. From time to time he sent messages to his artillery to tell them of the havoc their fire was creating in the English ranks.

  Near the bridge he placed a battery with which he carried on an exchange of fire with the English, which became like a conversation of question and answer. Presently a shell burst near the battery, covering the gunner with dust … [Mirza Abu Bakr] experiencing for the first time the effects of a bursting shell, hastily descended from the roof of the house, mounted his horse, and galloped off with his escort of sawars far into the rear of the position, not heeding the cries of his troops.

  A general stampede then took place. When the news reached Delhi that the troops had been defeated, orders were issued to close the gates and exclude the sepoys. When these arrived they found the Yamuna Bridge [of Boats] had been broken down.* In a hurried attempt to cross it the bridge gave way, and about two hundred were drowned.33

  Although Wilson had won an important and symbolic victory, the artillery of the sepoys had been much more effective than anticipated and British casualties had been severe; indeed, it almost stopped Wilson’s advance dead in its tracks: ‘My loss has been heavy,’ he wrote that evening to his wife, ‘and such as I can ill afford with my small force. Another such victory would annihilate me.’34 He himself was nearly killed twice when showers of grape twice whistled around him, but left him miraculously unhurt.35

  Moreover, there was still no sign of General Barnard’s Delhi Field Force, and the horse artillery of Major Tombs, whose rapid manoeuvres had been the key to the British victory, was now virtually out of ammunition: ‘I am left with my small force to withstand the whole strength of the insurgents,’ Wilson wrote anxiously on 1 June.36 Briefly he considered retreating back to Meerut, but the following day he was unexpectedly reinforced by the Sirmoor Regiment of Gurkhas and a party of sappers who had marched down from Dehra Dun, and who were also looking for General Barnard.37 ‘I found Brigadier Wilson in rather an awkward predicament,’ wrote C
olonel Reid, the commander of the Sirmoor Regiment, ‘and dreading another attack … He was rejoiced at my having joined him so soon, and was quite taken by surprise.’38

  In the meantime, however, as Wilson hesitated, the momentum of the victory at the Hindan Bridge was lost. As Muin ud-Din noted,

  The sepoys had now contended with the English on the open field. They had felt certain of success, but they had been worsted, and were filled with grave apprehension for the future … [But] the English did not follow up the victory; they were not to be seen, and gradually the sepoys forgot their fright.39

  If Barnard’s force was making frustratingly slow progress to the rendezvous with Wilson, one reason was the number of Indians it casually slaughtered as it passed down the Grand Trunk Road: ‘I don’t consider niggers in the same light as I would a white man,’ one officer wrote to his brother from the march. ‘To be gracious or merciful to these cruel brutes, these cowardly monsters, is nothing more nor less than to be absurd in their own eyes whilst you certainly don’t advance your own cause.’40

  The night before the Field Force met up with Wilson, a particularly bloody incident had occurred at the village of Rhai after ‘a man of the 9th Lancers found under the bridge of a small dried up watercourse a little [British] child’s foot still in the shoe, cut off at the ankle joint’.41 Richard Barter, a twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant with the 75th Gordon Highlanders, was asleep in his tent when the foot was brought in at the height of the day’s heat, around 2 p.m.

  Immediately after there arose the hum of voices like the sound of some huge bee-hive disturbed, there was a rush of many feet, and in an incredibly short space of time every village within reach of the camp was in a blaze; several officers joined in the performance … nine [villagers] were hung from a large tree by the roadside after parade.42