The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  Such was the coolness of the reception given to the jihadis that it was not long before one of their maulvis came before Zafar to complain that they were being unjustly neglected. The petition addressed Zafar with a new title: ‘Oh Generous and Affectionate Killer of the Degenerate Infidels,’ wrote the maulvi. ‘We Jihadis have displayed great valour and dedication but until now we have received no appreciation for it, nor have there even been any enquiries as to how we have fared … We only hope that our services will be recognised and rewarded, so we will be able to continue to participate in the battle.’29

  A similar petition came from a man who described himself as the Principal Risaldar of the Tonk Jihadis. In his case the complaint was more serious: his jihadis had been deserted by the sepoys during an assault and left to take on the kafir infidels all by themselves:

  We joined in the attack yesterday, and 18 infidels were despatched to Hell by your slave’s own hands, and five of his followers were killed and five wounded. Your Majesty, the rest of the army gave us no help whilst we were engaged in combat with the infidels. Had they even stood by, only to make a show of support, as was to have been expected, with the help of Providence a complete victory yesterday would have been achieved … I trust that now some arms, together with some trifling funds, may be bestowed on my followers, so that they might have the strength to fight and slay the infidels, and so realise their desires.

  Scribbled on the back is a note by Mirza Mughal saying the imperial armoury was now empty, but to send some funds.30 The money was clearly not enough: by the end of July parties of jihadis were coming before Zafar saying ‘that they had no food and that they were starving’.31

  The one thing that the jihadis did succeed in doing was alarming – and potentially alienating – Delhi’s Hindus. Initially there had been no visible difference in the response of Delhi’s Hindus and Muslims to the outbreak. During May and June, militant Hindu preachers were every bit as outspoken as their Muslim counterparts: ‘in Chandni Chowk and other markets’, wrote the Urdu historian Zakaullah, ‘pandits were communicating commandments from the Shastras that they should fight the English mlechchhas [foreign barbarians]’.32 One Brahmin in particular, Pandit Harichandra, seems to have been especially prominent and appears in several British intelligence reports: ‘he tells the officers’, reported one spy,

  that by virtue of his astrological and esoteric arts he has learned that the divine forces will support the army. He has named an auspicious day when he says there will be a terrifying fight, a new Kurukshetra [the battle at the climax of the Mahabharat] like the one between the Kauravas and the Pandavas of yore. He tells the sepoys that their horses’ feet will be drenched in British blood and then the victory will be theirs. All the people in the army have great faith in him, so much so that the time and the place designated by the Pandit are chosen for the fighting.33

  There are references to Hakim Ahsanullah Khan paying Brahmins – presumably on Zafar’s instructions – to make daily prayers for victory ‘before the [sacred] flame’, and there is even one reference to a Brahmin who told Zafar that ‘if he were placed in a well-protected house for three days and allowed whatever materials he required for creating oderous fumes he would contrive that the king would be victorious’. Zafar appears to have been appropriately impressed and duly gave him what he needed.34 In all the proclamations of the Mughal court emphasis was laid again and again on Hindu-Muslim unity, on ‘the fight about the cow and the pig’, and for ‘din and dharma’. One revolutionary pamphlet called Fath e-Islam (The Victory of Islam), despite its title, emphasised the need for cooperation and co-existence between Hindus and Muslims and the degree to which its author believed the Mughal emperors had always looked after their Hindu subjects:

  The Hindus should join the Emperor with a view to defending their religion, and should solemnly pledge themselves; the Hindus and Mahomedans, as brethren to each other, should also butcher the English, in as much as the Mahomedan Kings protected the lives and property of the Hindus with their children in the same manner as they protected those of the Mahomedans, and all the Hindus with heart and soul were obedient and loyal to the Mahomedan Kings … The Hindus will remain steadfast to their religion, while we also retain ours. Aid and protection will be offered by us to each other.35

  In the same way, many of the sepoy regiments mixed Hindus and Muslims, to the extent that, as Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan later noted, they came to consider each other as brothers.36 Indeed, some Hindu sepoys started using Islamic language in their petitions to court, talking of the Uprising as a jihad, and describing the British as kafirs.*37

  Nevertheless, as the numbers of the jihadis in the city increased and the Uprising in Delhi assumed an increasingly Islamic flavour, so the dormant underlying tensions seem to have were exacerbated, and many Hindus became increasingly anxious and disturbed. Certainly some of the jihadis were convinced ‘that the entire Hindu population is with them [the British]’, and that ‘the money changers and Hindus were in alliance with the Christians’.38 There is also a telling petition to Zafar from one elderly begum who clearly saw the Uprising as little more than an excuse for provincial Hindus to come and loot her haveli. ‘Please send five mounted guards of the Turk variety [i.e. Muslims],’ she asks Zafar, whom she addresses as ‘dear relative, apple of my eye, corner of my liver’, ‘to protect me from evil and corruption of the Hindus. For as you know, the Hindus of the Sita Ram Bazaar are ill-disposed to us and have a deceitful headman full of trickery. God forbid that the Hindus might by trickery introduce some spy into the army, and so have my house plundered and looted.’39

  Against this background, it is probably no coincidence that soon after the arrival of the jihadis, Maulvi Muhammad Baqar included in his columns a call for the Hindus of the city not to lose heart – which of course implied that he suspected that they were beginning to do just that. A remarkable letter aimed at his Hindu readers was included in Baqar’s issue of 14 June. In it, he called for all Delhi’s citizens to pull together against the common British enemy, whom he compared to Ravana, the demon king in the Hindu epic the Ramayana. ‘O my countrymen,’ he wrote,

  Looking at the strategy and devious cleverness of the English, their ability to make arrangements and to order the world in the way they wish, the wide expanses of their dominions and their overflowing treasuries and revenues, you may feel disheartened and doubt that such a people could ever be overcome. But my Hindu brothers, if you look in your Holy books you will see how many magnificent dynasties have come into being in the land of Hindustan, and how they all met their end. Even Ravana and his army of demons was beaten by Raja Ramchandra [the Hindu king and deity, Lord Ram] … Except the Adipurush, the primaeval Deity, nothing is permanent …

  If God brings all these magnificent kingdoms to an end after a short period, why do you not comprehend that God has sent his hidden help [to defeat] this hundred-year-old kingdom [of the British], so that this community [the Christians] who regarded the children of God with contempt, and addressed your brothers and sisters as ‘black men’, have now been insulted and humiliated? Realise this, and you will lose your fear and apprehension. To run away and turn your back now would be akin to denying divine help and favour …40

  The jihadis may have alarmed the Hindus, but in the weeks to come their suicidal bravery often put the sepoys to shame – especially when some of the most prominent jihadis turned out to be women. According to a surprised and impressed Sa’id Mubarak Shah,

  Several of these fanatics engaged in hand to hand combat, and great numbers were killed by the Europeans. Frequently two old withered Musalman women from Rampur would lead the rebels going far in advance with naked swords, bitterly taunting the sepoys when they held back, calling them cowards and shouting to them to see how women went in front where they dared not follow: ‘we go without flinching among the showers of grape you flee from.’ The sepoys would excuse themselves saying ‘We go to fetch ammunition,’ but the women would reply ‘you stop and
fight, and we will get your ammunition for you.’ These women frequently did bring supplies of cartridges to the men in the batteries, and walked fearlessly in perfect showers of grape, but by the will of God were never hit. At length, one of the two was taken prisoner … When the band of ghazees moved off to the assault, the women invariably went in advance of all.41

  The reason for the repeated failure of the attacks on the Ridge, it soon became clear, was not any lack of bravery so much as the absence of any real strategic imagination, ingenuity or co-ordination. ‘The insurrection would have died out, but for the constant fresh infusion of mutinous troops,’ wrote Hervey Greathed on 25 June. ‘They get beaten in detail, and apparently fight without any defined object.’42 Moreover, the same problem that frustrated all attempts to restore order in the city – the lack of a clear and recognised figure of executive authority – also wrecked their attempts at fighting coherently or effectively.

  From the very first day of the British return to the Ridge, the rebels had daily poured out of the Lahore Gate on the western side of the city, and made their way up the slope of the Ridge, usually through the western suburb of Sabzi Mandi (the vegetable market), in full view of their British adversaries. There they mounted a series of fearless frontal attacks on the British position, usually directing their full fury at the key British strongpoint on the front line – the white Palladian mansion erected in happier times by William Fraser, and now known after its subsequent owner as Hindu Rao’s House.

  Yet despite the sepoys’ often insane bravery, time and time again they were driven back by the Gurkhas, who had been billeted in the house and who had quickly and artfully fortified it. It was a strong position, and behind their sandbags the Gurkhas were determined to hold it: ‘we heard this morning that two new regiments of mutineers had arrived in the city’, wrote Major Reid, the Gurkha commander, on 13 June, four days into the siege.

  [We were told] that they were being armed and would attack us at 4pm. Sure enough, on they came … I was all ready for them, and allowed them to come within twenty paces, when I opened with grape and musketry on all sides. I charged them with a couple of companies … over the hill … My loss 3 killed and II wounded; 3 right arms amputated … They marched up the Grand Trunk Road in columns headed by the Sirdar Bahadoor of the regiment, who made himself very conspicuous, calling out to his men to keep distance, as he intended to wheel to his left. They fought most desperately. The Sirdar Bahadoor of the 60th was killed by my orderly Lall Sing. I took the Ribbon of India from his breast. The mutineers were about 5000 strong, infantry and cavalry.43

  The courage of the sepoys invariably impressed their old officers; their tactics did not. The massed bodies of troops certainly looked magnificent when seen from the city walls – Zahir Dehlavi thought the contest was ‘a strange and fascinating war which one had never heard of or seen before, for both the armies belonged to the British government, and the rebels had also been trained by the experienced English Officers, so that it was like a fight between a teacher and his student’.44 But the sepoys’ uncoordinated attacks, single regiment after single regiment, taking it in turn to attack the prepared British positions front on, day after day, rarely taxed the British despite their small numbers. Hodson was being characteristically dismissive and overconfident when he claimed, ‘they do little more than annoy us, and the only great evil they cause is keeping our men out for hours in this scorching heat’.45 Nevertheless, the sepoys’ strategy did strikingly fail to make use of their overwhelming numerical advantage and reflected the fact that, owing to army regulations, none of the rebel leaders had any training in commanding units above company (100 men) level, nor had they learned how to run the larger logistical or strategic sides of a big military operation. To make matters worse, each morning the ground gained the day before had to be regained, for each night the sepoys returned to sleep in the city and in their different camps, beyond the range of British cannon, leaving the Ridge and its approaches in British hands.

  At this stage in the siege, the jihadis made even less impression than the sepoys, since they rarely got close enough to the British trenches to use their axes. According to the great Times correspondent William Howard Russell, who saw them in action to the east of Delhi,

  The Gazees were fine fellows, grizzly-bearded elderly men for the most part, with green turbans and cummerbunds, and every one of them had a silver signet ring, [with] a long text of the Koran engraved in it. They came on with their heads down below their shields, and their tulwars flashing as they whirled them over their heads, shouting ‘Deen! deen!’ [The Faith!] and dancing like madmen. The champion as he approached shouted out to us to come on, and got within a yard of the line amid a shower of bullets. Then a young soldier stepped out of the ranks, blazed away with his Enfield between his two eyes, and followed it by a thrust of the bayonet in the face, which finished the poor champion.46

  Initially the scale of the losses did not seem to matter to the rebels, given that new arrivals were daily pouring into the rebel camp, swelling the rebels’ numbers – and filling the shoes of those mown down each morning. But as the siege dragged on from June into July, the enthusiasm of the sepoys to face either the grapeshot of the British artillery or still less the kukhris and bayonets of the Gurkhas understandably diminished. Among the Mutiny Papers, orders start to appear that indicate a slackening of rebel enthusiasm. One petition from the keepers of the shrine of Qadam Sharif complains that the sepoys were shirking their duties and hiding in the shrine; while there, they threatened the pirzadas (custodians of the Sufi shrine) and plundered planks, beams, rings and cots: ‘they have already rendered desolate the habitations of the birdcatchers, limemakers and several others. But if we try to stop them from coming here, they show their guns to us and threaten to kill us …’47

  More telling still is a desperate order from Mirza Mughal in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, dating from as early as 23 June, begging the sepoys to finish the work they have begun. The order is addressed ‘To all the Officers of the Platoons and the Sawars who have not gone to the trenches’.

  Despite the fact that this war started over faith and religion, many of you have not gone to battle, and instead while your time away in gardens or shops. Others are hiding inside their quarters, protecting their lives. His Highness the Emperor has made you all swear on his salt that all the platoons would go on the attack and annihilate the Kafirs, but you no longer show the will to do so. How sad that when this confrontation is about religion and faith, and when His Highness gave you his protection, you still refrain from going for battle. Remember, the platoon that does not go to battle will have its allowances stopped from tomorrow, but those platoons and cavalry units who show courage and fortitude today, and indeed have showed it before, will receive rewards, medals and honours from the Court. Moreover His Highness the Emperor will be highly gratified.

  To this same order is added a postscript:

  To All the Officers of the 2nd Platoon,

  The order had been issued to you that you should go towards Teliwara and attack. But it has now been learnt that that you did not go to the front and instead are currently lounging in the gardens near there. This is completely unacceptable. You should go there immediately and destroy the Kafirs.48

  The saddest aspect of the slaughter faced every day by the sepoys was that, without realising it, they had actually found the Achilles heel of the British early on in the siege. On 19 June, the sepoys broke from their normal routine to mount a far more imaginative night assault on the Ridge from three directions, stretching British resources to their limits. An hour before sunset, a major surprise attack began from the rear of the Ridge, coming not just from the Sabzi Mandi but also from Mubarak Bagh to the north-west, and Metcalfe House to the east, and led by the well-equipped rebel force from Nasirabad. The fight continued all night, allowing the British no time to recover their strength. According to the British chaplain, the Reverend John Rotton,

  The enemy came out in
overwhelming numbers, with artillery, cavalry and infantry … We often wondered that such [rear] attacks were never made by them, and made systematically and regularly: their effect must have told on us in the end, if not much sooner than we foresaw … We remained fighting desperately, under a very severe and unpleasant fire; the darkness of night coming on apace …

  The result of this engagement made a very melancholy impression on most men’s minds in camp; not because our success was questionable, though very dearly bought, but rather because it was at first naturally regarded as the enemy’s mode of intimating to us the plan he intended to pursue in future: that his eyes were open to the advantage he might gain over us, if he only harassed us in the rear. The fact is that knowing our own weakness better than our opponent did, we were not without fears, which luckily, proved groundless.49

  It was a measure of the rebels’ critical lack of intelligence that they had no idea quite how close to victory they had come so early in the siege. Fatally for themselves, the rebels never made another attempt to mount a really concerted attack on the British rear until much later; and by then it was too late.

  At the beginning of July, Theo Metcalfe’s brother-in-law Edward Campbell arrived on the Ridge and was posted near Hindu Rao’s House, just in time to face the full fury of a major sepoy attack. Like everyone else in the British camp, he was profoundly shaken by the precariousness of the British position. The following evening he picked up his pen and wrote to his pregnant wife GG in Simla. The last time he had been in Delhi was five years earlier, at Christmas, when he was courting her at the far end of the same Ridge, in Metcalfe House, under the disapproving eyes of Sir Thomas.

  The letter began with family news: GG had written asking for more details of Theo’s escape, and about how the family’s two Delhi houses now looked: ‘Have you been over the ruins of the old house? Is the Kootub House destroyed?’50 In reply, Campbell explained that Theo had been sent out with Hodson’s Horse almost simultaneously with his own arrival, and that they had yet to have a proper conversation: her brother was now off disarming some villages to the rear of the British position. But Theo’s eyes had become swollen and painful again, Campbell told GG, and he thought his brother-in-law should take leave and go up to Simla to recover properly from the ordeal of his escape from Delhi. This would also allow him to help look after his pregnant sister. ‘I cannot see the use of his being here,’ added Campbell, ‘except for the information he gives of the country, which they do not seem to care much [about].’51