The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  In the days that followed, from their observation posts on top of the spine of the Ridge, the British could soon see regiment after mutinous regiment pouring into the city over the Bridge of Boats, and also, more alarmingly, from their own rear down the Grand Trunk Road. Every new body of mutineers arriving only emphasised that there was no prospect of relief, at least on a similar scale, for their own small force.

  The next day, as shelling from the rebel batteries in the city began hitting the exposed British positions with surprising force and accuracy, and a steady succession of day and night attacks from the city began to wear away at British numbers, many started to realise that a strange reversal of roles was in the process of taking place. As the chaplain of the Field Force, the Reverend John Edward Rotton, succinctly put it:

  To a civilian like myself, I freely confess it did seem to savour of rashness to dream of the capture of Delhi with little more than two battalions of infantry, a small force of European cavalry, and no great strength of artillery … We came to besiege Delhi, but we very soon learnt that, in reality, we were the besieged, and the mutineers the besiegers69

  8

  BLOOD FOR BLOOD

  The shelling of Delhi began on 10 June.

  Initially only very slight damage was done. The British at this stage had relatively few cannon, and no large siege guns, and for most Delhiwallahs the artillery duels provided little more than entertainment. The British were hopelessly outgunned by the lines of heavy cannon massed along the bastions of the city walls and, as William Hodson himself observed on the first day of the siege, ‘they are splendid artillerymen, and beat ours in accuracy of fire’.1 So the people of Delhi poured out on to their flat roofs, while ‘the King and the royal family took their seats at the top of the Palace’ and the salatin watched from the bastions of the Red Fort.2 ‘It was hot weather at the time,’ remembered Sarvar ul-Mulk, ‘and every night we used to watch the glare of the cannon balls passing overhead; and we considered them pyrotechnics.’3

  It was less entertaining, however, when one of the balls landed on your house, as happened a month later in Sarvar ul-Mulk’s family haveli. ‘A cannon-ball tore through the roof of the upper storey,’ he wrote, ‘and fell on the verandah where we were having our meal. My uncle at once ran towards it and threw pots full of water onto it.’4

  The Palace proved an easy target for British gunners, and one British howitzer was soon fixed permanently so as to lob shells inside Shah Jahan’s red stone walls.5 Zahir Dehlavi noticed the way the British were singling out the beautiful white marble royal apartments for their shelling. ‘Every day there was firing from posts all along the Ridge,’ he wrote,

  and as they perfected their range, the shells used to create havoc on bursting. If a cannon ball fell on a several-storey building it would go in right through it to the floor, and if it fell on a flat surface it would dig deep – at least ten yards into the ground – destroying everything around it. Shells were worse: the old Shahjahani houses of the fort were completely blown apart if they received a direct hit. Later in the siege, on bad nights, it was like hell on earth, with ten shells fired at a time in the dark, and bursting one after the other6

  One cannonball soon damaged the great Shah Burj tower looking out on to the Yamuna river front, while another landed near the Lal Purdah, killing a stable boy and a public crier. A third landed on the zenana apartments at the south of the Palace, where it crushed Chameli, one of Zinat Mahal’s maids; soon afterwards Zinat moved out of the Fort to her private haveli in Lal Kuan, which she considered to be less exposed – and perhaps also more independent of the sepoys, who were now ubiquitous in the Palace. It also allowed her to put some physical distance between herself and her beloved only son, Mirza Jawan Bakht, on one hand, and the rebels on the other.7

  Soon after this, a volley of shells narrowly missed the Emperor himself. Sa’id Mubarak Shah, who had recently been made the kotwal in place of Muin ud-Din, was in the Palace at the time. ‘About 8 o’clock one morning,’ he wrote,

  before the King had come out of his apartments, thirty or forty of the nobles were seated round the hauz [ornamental tank] in the palace courtyard waiting for his arrival. Just as the monarch emerged from his private rooms, three shells fell directly in front of and behind him and burst, but miraculously without injury to anyone. The King immediately retired and all the others who had been seated there got up and left. That same evening the king called up the chief officers of the army and addressed them thus. ‘My brothers, there is no longer any safe place for you, or the citizens of this city, or even for me to sit. The ceaseless shower of shot and shell have already prevented that for, as you see, by the very hauz where I was in the habit of sitting every day, the round shot and shell are now falling. You say you came here to fight and drive away the Christians. Can you not do so even so far as to stop this rain of shot and shell falling into my palace?’8

  For Zafar it was the second upsetting event in a week: on 14 June his chamberlain, the chief eunuch, Mahbub Ali Khan, had died quite unexpectedly. He had been ill for some time, but Palace gossip put the death down to poison.9

  Everywhere in the city, spirits were sinking. According to Sa’id Mubarak Shah, between the pillage of the rebel sepoys and the shelling of the British, the people of Delhi ‘whether bad or good, well-disposed or hostile to the English, now felt that they were like rats shut in a cage, from which there was no escape’.10

  For Ghalib the shelling was the final straw. For the last month he had endured the sight of rustic provincials lording it over his friends in the muhallas of his beloved city – as he put it,

  every worthless fellow, puffed up with pride, perpetrates what he will; [while] men of high rank who once in the assemblies of music and wine lit the bright lamps of pleasure and delight with the rose’s fire, lie now in dark cells and burn in the flames of misery. The jewels of the city’s fair-faced women … fill the sacks of vile, dishonoured thieves and pilferers … Lovers who never had to face anything more demanding than the perverse fancies of a fair-faced mistress, must suffer now the whims of these scoundrels.11

  Worse still for such an addicted letter writer was the disruption all this caused to the mail: ‘The postal system is in utter chaos,’ he wrote in his account of the siege, Dastanbuy, ‘and service has virtually stopped. It is impossible for postmen to come and go: thus letters can neither be sent or received.’12

  Now, to increase the poet’s irritation and sufferings, there was the bombardment from the Ridge: ‘The heavy billows of smoke from the fire-breathing guns and lightning-striking cannons are like dark clouds hanging in the sky, and the noise is like a rain of hailstones,’ he wrote.

  Cannon fire is heard all day long, as if stones were falling from the skies. In noblemen’s houses there is no oil for the lamps. In total darkness they must await the flash of lightning, and so find the glass and jug with which to quench their thirst … In this anarchy brave men are afraid of their own shadows, and soldiers rule over dervish and king alike.13

  For most of the people of Delhi, however, the cessation of the postal service and the intermittent shelling were the least of their worries. A month after the outbreak, life was now proving very hard for the ordinary people of the city, especially the poor. With many of the bhistis and sweepers pressed into service for building and maintaining the city defences, the sanitation of the city had fallen apart: dead camels lay rotting even in the streets of the elite quarter of Daryaganj.14

  The presence of sepoys billeted all over the city continued to be a problem. Even when they were not looting, fear of their violence and exactions paralysed business in the city. In July, Ratan Chand, the daroga (officer) of the royal estates, sent a beautifully composed Persian letter to Zafar, begging him to take action to bring Chandni Chowk back to life, ‘for the militia horsemen have taken quarters in the shops at the crossroads and tied up their horses there. Therefore most of the wholesalers who rent shops have fled, and those that remain are busy emp
tying their shops. This means that no income is available from rents, and even the shops that were repaired by the government have now gone out of business’.15

  The rich moneylenders continued to bear the brunt. On 1 July the partners Jugal Kishor and Sheo Prasad complained that they were receiving daily visits from the cavalry, ‘who come for the sake of looting, wanting to frighten us to death or imprison us. For the last three days we have been forced to go into hiding, while our employees and servants have been harassed and persecuted. Now we flee our homes in distress and confusion. All our honour and reputation has gone with the wind’.16

  Yet even the most humble tradesmen found that the presence of sepoys billeted anywhere in their vicinity meant people were too frightened to come out and buy their goods. On 20 June the thanadar in charge of the Chandni Chowk police station, Hafiz Aminuddin, wrote to the kotwal that

  the person named Anandi, a woodseller, has pleaded that for the last eleven days a cavalry regiment has been quartered near Bagh Begum where his shop is located. As a result out of fear nobody comes to his shop to purchase anything and he is losing all his income. I was therefore wondering if the said shopkeeper may be allowed to move his shop from this place. Your command shall be executed.17

  Although business was at a standstill, prices were now rising fast. This had little to do with the arrival of the British, and still less to do with any plan they might have had of encircling and besieging the city. Rather, it was caused by the Gujar and Mewati tribesmen around the city, who now effectively controlled most of Delhi’s hinterland. Robbing anyone who attempted to move along the roads in and out of the capital, they kept the city in a far more effective state of blockade than anything achieved by the British to the north. Typical was the experience of the Haryanvi horse trader Mehrab Khan from Sohna. Realising that his horses would be worth a premium in war-torn Delhi, he brought three mares into town. He managed to sell two of the mares to some sawars stationed in Daryaganj, and was riding back home on the third horse, his takings in his pocket, when ‘near Mehrauli the Gujars pounced on me and looted me’.18

  The result of this anarchy-induced blockade was rapidly dwindling supplies in the city and fast-rising prices. ‘People are beginning to suffer greatly for want of essential commodities,’ wrote Maulvi Muhammad Baqar in the first issue of the Dihli Urdu Akbhar to be published after the arrival of the British on the Ridge.

  Even if the essentials can be found they cannot be afforded because the prices are so high. Either the shops are shut, or when they are open there are a thousand people queuing for only one hundred pomegranates. The stuff that is there is of very poor quality, but hunger is the greater master and neediness a true slave driver, so people will take what they can get and consider it a boon. As is rightly said, ‘if one cannot find wheat, barley will do.’

  Bitter and dirty ghee sells for two sers a rupee; flour is almost impossible to find; white wheat has become like the [mythical] Anqa bird. Even then your problems are not over: when you give it to the miller and after a thousand excuses he agrees to grind it; by the time you come back he says a Tilanga has seized it from him, and what could he do?

  From the gardens inside the city, some mangoes and other produce does reach a few places, but the poor and the middle class can only lick their lips and watch as these fresh delicacies pass into the houses of the rich. The dandies of the city, and especially the ladies who are used to paan and tobacco suffer greatly since paan is now only available in one place – the bazaar outside the Jama Masjid – and there for as much as two paise a leaf, too expensive for most of us. Look at the lessons the Almighty has taught us: we used to be so fussy that we would reject the finest wheat and complain that our flour was too smelly and only good to be given to faqirs. Now we don’t hesitate to fight for the poorest left-overs from the bazaars.19

  Muhammad Baqar concluded by reverting to his favourite theme of loyalty to the Emperor, whom he refers to as God’s representative on earth; and he obliquely criticises the sepoys for not paying him more respect:

  Before long we can be sure that these goras [whities] will be put to eternal sleep, and we should pray for the realms of our Exalted Majesty, the Shadow of God on Earth, to increase many times. This King of ours is one of the leading saints of the era, and has been appointed by the divine court. He spent many years virtually in British imprisonment, and though he never incited anyone to rise up, nor coveted either the throne or riches for himself, now this divine boon has come his way, brought about by the army of God. We must be sure the King does not ever again become a prisoner in the hands of anyone, and it is incumbent on both the army and the people to treat the King’s decisions as akin to the approval of God and his Prophet. No one should be in awe of the British: what they achieved was done through fraud and the breaking of their contract [of loyalty to the Mughals].20

  Others took a less metaphysical attitude to the city’s food shortages. The petitions presented to Zafar at this time included a number from the royal gardeners, who complained that the Tilangas were raiding their fruit trees, despite the presence of the Palace Guards:

  My Lord, our crop worth Rs 1000 consisting of bananas and grapes and plums was ready, but the Tilangas came and plundered it and whatever was left they are making away with too. The guards deployed by the government at the gate of the garden are wholly ineffective because the Tilangas do not heed them at all, and when they protest they merely snatch away their guns.21

  Yet for all the increasing hardship, there was nevertheless a strong undercurrent of confidence about the imminent confrontation with the small British force now entrenched on the Ridge. Once the city people had got over their shock at seeing the British return, the apparent fragility and small scale of the British Field Force soon became apparent, as did the rapidly growing strength of the rebel garrison within the city walls.

  All eyes were now on the attempts of the different sepoy regiments to dislodge the hated Christians from their well-fortified entrenchments; but as the first few attempts demonstrated, it was not going to be as easy as it looked.

  In the two weeks after the British returned to the Ridge, the rebel forces received several thousand reinforcements – from Ambala and Jalandhar in the north, and Haryana and Nasirabad in the west. Larger than any of these was the enormous rebel army heading slowly towards Delhi from Bareilly, 200 miles to the east. Across Hindustan, of the 139,000 sepoys in the Bengal Army, all but 7,796 had now risen against the Company, and over half were now either in Delhi or on their way to it.22 There were also reports that a large force of between three and four thousand armed civilians – Jat peasant farmers who had risen up under their leader Shah Mal Jat – had just attacked the British force left to guard the bridge to the rear of the British lines at Baghpat, so cutting off the Field Force’s communications, reinforcements and supplies coming to and from Meerut.

  To add to British woes, and introduce a new element to the already volatile mixture of civilians, rebels and refugees gathering within the city walls, there had also arrived at Delhi several large bodies of freelance jihadis made up of a ragtag assortment of ‘Wahhabi’ maulvis, militant Naqshandi faqirs and, most numerous of all, pious Muslim civilians – especially ‘weavers, artisans and other wage earners’ – who believed it was their duty to free what they regarded as the Dar ul-Islam from the rule of the hated kafirs23 Four hundred marched in during the first week of the siege from nearby Gurgaon, Hansi and Hissar, but much the largest contingent – well over 4,000 strong – came from the small Muslim principality of Tonk in Rajasthan, which had a history of welcoming extreme ‘Wahhabi’ preachers, and which had long been regarded by British intelligence officers as a hotbed of fanaticism and an underground centre of the mujahedin movement.

  On arrival the jihadis set up camp both in the courtyard of the Jama Masjid and that of the riverside Zinat ul-Masajid, the most beautiful of all the Delhi mosques. It is a measure of the distrust and tension between the sepoys and the jihadis that although
they often fought side by side, the sepoys seem none the less to have regularly searched individuals going in and out of both mosques, and detained several people whom they regarded as suspicious.24 Occasionally the tension between the overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys and the militantly Muslim mujahedin erupted into full-scale street fights.25

  The mujahedin and their firebrand maulvis calling for jihad in the city’s mosques appealed to a few of Delhi’s more extreme Islamists, among whom were the ‘Wahhabis’ of the Punjabi Muslim community.26 Sarvar ul-Mulk’s Afghan tutor, a huge bear of a man, was also one of those who went off to fight with the jihadis on the Ridge:

  This moulvi, a strongly built man, with a big head and hair falling down his shoulders, was an expert in telling beads and reciting prayers. One day he came to my father, and said that God Almighty had conferred a great boon on men these days, and it was a pity we did not avail ourselves of it; and when my father asked what the boon was, he replied, ‘jihad and martyrdom.’ My father tried to do his best to dissuade him, but he was in ecstasy for martyrdom, and finally with a turban on his head, a sword at his waist, and a rifle in his hand, he departed.27

  By and large, however, the people of Delhi, already alarmed by the number of violent, unpaid and hungry sepoys gathering within their walls, remained dubious about the pleasure of hosting in addition several thousand fanatical holy warriors. This was especially so given the jihadis’ far from friendly attitudes towards Delhi’s Hindus – half the city’s population – and the importance the Delhi elite placed on not upsetting the delicate equilibrium between Hindus and Muslims in the city: ‘Their stated object was a crusade against the infidel,’ wrote Sa’id Mubarak Shah, ‘their real one was plunder. In this manner fully five thousand men from various quarters poured into Delhi as ghazees, the majority armed with gundasahs [battleaxes] and dressed in blue tunics and green turbans’.28