The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  May I request an immediate reply by telegraph stating what aid in reinforcements you can afford me and when I may expect them to join my camp,

  Yrs etc

  Archdale Wilson75

  One reason for Wilson’s extreme gloom was the arrival at the Bridge of Boats, on 1 July, of the largest rebel force the British had yet encountered. From the Ridge the columns of the Bareilly brigade could be seen stretching back as far as the eye could see, before they disappeared into the heat haze. The force consisted of no fewer than four regiments of foot – around 2,300 men, as well as 700 cavalry, 600 artillery guns, including some much-needed horse artillery, 14 elephants, 300 spare horses, a train of a thousand bullock carts and camels carrying tents, ammunition and supplies, treasure worth 400,000 rupees and, bringing up the rear, a further ‘three or four thousand ghazis’76

  On the 2nd these troops marched in across the Bridge of Boats, welcomed at the Calcutta Gate with fruit and sweetmeats by Zinat Mahal’s father, Nawab Quli Khan. As the British looked on helplessly through their binoculars, they marched in, colours flying, their sepoy bandsmen playing ‘Cheers Boys Cheers!’ – the very same tune to which a much smaller British force from Ferozepur had marched into the British camp that morning.77 ‘There was no open place in the city sufficient for this vast assemblage,’ noted Sa’id Mubarak Shah, ‘so the brigade encamped outside the Delhi Gate [south of the city] … This was found necessary as the crowds of sepoys already in the town were occupying all the houses and most of the shops. The entire 73rd NI had for example taken over the whole of the Ajmeri Bazaar – with six or seven sepoys [billeted] in every shop.’78

  Just as important as the sheer scale of the Bareilly force was its leadership: two men who seemed capable of providing the direction and unity that had so far been eluding the rebels. One of these two was a subahdar of artillery, Bakht Khan, a much-garlanded and battle-hardened veteran of the Afghan wars. A tall, portly and heavily built man of Rohilla stock, with huge handlebar moustache and sprouting sideburns, Bakht Khan had been elected general by the Bareilly troops, and arrived in Delhi with a reputation both as an administrator and an effective military leader.

  As chance would have it, Bakht Khan was known personally to several of the British officers on the Ridge. Colonel George Bourchier had learned Persian from him at his house in Shahja hanpur and wrote that he was ‘very fond of English society … [and] a most intelligent character’.79 Others were less generous: some British officers dismissed him as fat, socially ambitious and, most damning of all to the military men on the Ridge, ‘a bad horseman’.

  The other rebel leader was Bakht Khan’s spiritual mentor, the Islamist preacher Maulvi Sarfaraz Ali. The maulvi, who was now already known as ‘the imam of the Mujahedin’, had spent many years in Delhi and was well connected to both the court and the city. He had been one of the first clerics to preach the jihad against the British in the days leading up to the outbreak: on 1 May at Shahjahanpur he made a speech telling his audience, ‘… Our religion is now in danger. Having lost the sovereignty of the land, having bowed in subjection to the impure kafir, shall we surrender the inalienable privileges which we received from the Prophet, upon whom be peace?’80

  Yet crucially, before that, Sarfaraz Ali had taught in Delhi at Mufti Sadruddin Azurda’s madrasa, the Dar ul-Baqa, to the south of the Jama Masjid, where thanks to his learning in algebra and geometry he had become one of the most respected members of the Delhi ‘ulama; indeed, before the Mutiny, he was singled out by Sayyid Ahmad Khan for praise as one of the brightest jewels in Delhi’s intellectual crown.81 The nature of the relationship between Sarfaraz Ali and Bakht Khan before the outbreak is unclear, but according to some sources it was Sarfaraz Ali who persuaded Bakht Khan to join the rebellion; certainly by the time the army reached Delhi, Bakht Khan was firmly under his influence. Nor was Bakht Khan alone: the four thousand jihadis who came with the army also looked to the maulvi for spiritual direction. If anyone could unite the sepoys, the jihadis and the Delhi elite, here potentially were the two men to do it.

  There may have been mixed opinions about Bakht Khan up on the Ridge, but Zafar and his advisers seem to have had no such doubts. Within a day of their arrival, Bakht Khan and Maulvi Sarfaraz were summoned to the Palace and given a state reception. It was in the course of this reception that some of Bakht Khan’s less diplomatic qualities first surfaced. For like many ‘Wahhabis’, Bakht Khan disdained earthly rulers, whom he regarded as unIslamic, and longed instead for a properly Islamic regime.

  Bakht Khan and the maulvi arrived with 250 of their officers, all in full dress uniform, and disrespectfully rode straight past the Diwan i-Am into the private apartments without dismounting.82 It was clear that whatever his qualities on the battlefield, and however energetic an administrator he might be, Bakht was certainly no diplomat; soon his discourteous attitude to the Emperor’s court immediately began to ruffle feathers. Hakim Ahsanullah Khan was present at the audience, and was not impressed: ‘Bakht Khan presented himself before the King,’ he wrote,

  along with the officers of his regiment and the jihadis who were with him. But contrary to etiquette he did not make his obeisance at the Lal Pardah [the Red Curtain at the entrance to the King’s private apartments], nor did his companions, and though many people remonstrated with him, he paid no attention. When he came near the King’s chair in the Diwan-i Khas, he salaamed as though to an equal, and merely taking his sword from his side, he presented it to the King. The King was appalled by this lack of courtesy, but praised the bravery of his troops …

  [Two of Bakht Khan’s officers] said, ‘Your Majesty should bestow a sword and buckler on Bakht Khan, for he deserves them and such a favour is proper for such a chief.’ At first the King excused himself saying that they are not ready, but being importuned called for them from the armoury, and bestowed them on Bakht Khan. But even then he offered no nazr to the King. [Instead] he said, ‘I hear you have given the Princes jurisdiction over the army. That is not good. Give the power to me, and I will make all the proper arrangements. What do these people know of the customs of the English army?’ The King answered, ‘The Princes were appointed at the request of the officers of the army.’ He was then dismissed.83

  Despite his behaviour, Zafar clearly still believed that he could trust Bakht Khan, and over the following days he gave him the titles ‘Farzand’ [Son] and Sahib i-Alam [Lord of the World] with supreme military authority over all the rebel armies, replacing the former Commander-in-Chief, Mirza Mughal; later Zafar appointed Bakht Khan Governor General while Mirza Mughal was given the title Adjutant General, which effectively turned him from military commander into head of the administration.84

  In return Bakht Khan made an energetic attempt to solve the many problems that had paralysed the rebels despite their overwhelming numerical superiority to the small British-led force shelling them from the Ridge. He also attempted to sort out the problems caused by the sepoys’ looting of the city, and made arrangements for the payment of all the royal salaries. Stern instructions were given to the kotwal and his police to arrest all looters, and commands were issued that the sepoys should be removed from the bazaars and relocated in the new camp outside Delhi Gate. According to Munshi Jiwan Lal, the following days were a whirlwind of orders and innovation:

  The General ordered a proclamation, by beat of drum, that all shopkeepers were to keep arms, and that no one was to leave his house unarmed. Persons having no arms were to apply to the headquarters for them and were to be given them free of charge. Any soldier caught plundering was to have his arm severed from his body. All persons having [looted] ammunition were to give it over to the magazine on pain of severe punishment … The General inspected the Magazine, and ordered the stores and material to be properly ordered … An order was issued instructing the [younger] princes that they were relieved from all further duties connected with the army … Orders were issued for the whole of the troops to parade in the morning … Three spies from th
e English camp were executed … The troops were paraded from the Delhi Gate to the Ajmere Gate; the General spoke kindly to the men and comforted them … [but] warned [them] not to harass and plunder the people of the city.85

  More impressive still was the new military strategy that Bakht Khan put in place. An attempt at a flanking operation – sending a force up along the Yamuna to Alipore on 3 July – was a partial failure, after it was spotted and ambushed by the British on its return from burning their supply base in the village; but it was at least an imaginative innovation. At the same time, Bakht Khan developed a new rota system so that the British would be kept continually off balance. Their spies informed the British of the new rule: that ‘not a single day should pass without a skirmish, and for this purpose the army has been divided into three parts so that at least one fights every day’.86

  The increase in the tempo of the attacks had an almost immediate effect: according to Richard Barter, thanks to the ‘system organised by Bakht Khan … we were scarcely able to stand …Worn out, and knowing that there would be no hope of relief, some soldiers grew desperate and dashed at the Enemy, getting killed on purpose to be rid of such an existence as soon as possible, their idea being that as it must come sooner or later, the sooner it is over the better’.87

  The ninth of July, exactly a week after his arrival in Delhi, was the day that Bakht Khan set for a concerted attempt to finish the British position for good.

  It started brilliantly at 5 a.m., with a massive cannonade from the city followed, in pouring rain, by a rear attack by some of Bakht Khan’s irregular cavalry dressed in the same white uniforms as the British irregulars. Thanks to the confusion caused by this disguise, they managed to get deep inside the British camp – the first rebel soldiers successfully to penetrate the defences – before the alarm was sounded. They cut up some of the artillery and almost succeeded in capturing the crucial British horse guns before they were driven out.

  At the same time the full force of the Bareilly army poured out of the city and made for the suburb of Kishenganj with the intention of turning the right flank of the British. The British managed to drive them back; but rather than fleeing, the sepoys lured the British away from their entrenchments and continued the fight farther down the slopes, where the British had far less cover. Lieutenant Charles Griffiths was impressed by the steely discipline with which they continued retreating in perfect order, turning at intervals and file-firing their muskets, while every now and then their guns were faced about, and round-shot and grape sent among the exposed British ranks.

  The rain now descended in a steady downpour, soaking through our thin cotton clothing, and in a few minutes drenching us to the skin … Many of our men fell … It was a perfect feu d’enfer, and the loss on our side became so heavy that a temporary check was the result, and it was only with great trouble that the men could be urged on … The losses on this day exceeded that of any since the siege began. Out of our small force engaged, 221 men were killed and wounded.88

  Elsewhere, a little to the west, Bakht Khan, supported by the jihadis, led an attack that captured the outlying British picket at the garden of Tis Hazari. It was a measure of the fragile mental state of the army – the fear, frustration and strain that the British were under – that, according to Major William Ireland, after incursion into their camp, several of the British troops

  turned their rage on a number of defenceless Indian servants, who had collected for refuge near the churchyard. Several wretches were butchered, some hiding behind tombs. One woman was shot through the breast … So many sanguinary fights and executions had brutalised our men, who now regarded the life of a native as of less value than that of the meanest of animals; nor had their officers endeavoured, either by precept or example, to correct them …

  Servants who behaved with astonishing fidelity were treated even by the officers with outrageous harshness. The men beat and ill-used them … Many were killed. The sick syces [grooms], grass cutters and dooly bearers, many of whom were wounded in our service, lay for months on the bare ground, exposed to the sun by day and the cold at night … The tone of conversation in the mess was wild and fierce: a general massacre of the inhabitants of Delhi, many of whom were known to wish us success, was openly proclaimed …89

  The passage highlights something that is often forgotten in accounts of life on the Ridge: the fact that just over half the soldiers, and almost all the vast support staff, were not British, but Indian. It was, all in all, a very odd sort of religious war, where a Muslim emperor was pushed into rebellion against his Christian oppressors by a mutinous army of overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys, who came to him of their own free will (and initially against his) to ask for the barakat of a Muslim blessing and the leadership of the Mughal they regarded as their legitimate ruler.

  It is even odder that one of the greatest threats to the cohesiveness and unity of the Mughal’s new forces was the arrival of groups of Muslim jihadis who eventually came to make up at least half of the rebel army in Delhi; and that when the British counter-attacked against those forces they did so by raising against the Mughal a new army that consisted largely of Pathan and Punjabi Muslim irregulars. As the casualty figures on the Delhi Mutiny memorial show, no less than a third of the ‘British’ casualties among officers, and fully 82 per cent among other ranks, were classified as ‘native’.90 By the very end of the siege, by the time the last reinforcements reached the Ridge from the Punjab, the ‘British’ force was probably around four-fifths Indian. If the Uprising in Delhi started as a contest between the British and a largely Hindu sepoy army drawn mainly from Avadh, it ended as a fight between a mixed rebel force, at least half of which were civilian jihadis, taking on an army of British-paid Sikh and Muslim mercenaries from the North West Frontier and the Punjab.

  Moreover, for all the rhetoric in letters from the Ridge about the ‘British pluck’ and ‘native cowardice’, this racist language came from a group whose own family backgrounds were anything but perfect Anglo-Saxon exemplars of racial ‘purity’; indeed, in the cases where details are available they were in fact, perhaps to their own embarrassment, splendidly multicultural. Elizabeth Wagentrieber had of course all her Skinner cousins, many of whom – including probably her own mother – were Indian Muslims. Theo and GG Metcalfe had a number of Punjabi Sikh cousins through James Metcalfe, son of Sir Thomas’s elder brother, and predecessor as Delhi Resident, Sir Charles, by the lovely Sikh bibi he met at the court of Ranjit Singh in Lahore and, according to family tradition, married ‘by Indian rites’.91 As a teenager the half-Punjabi James had grown up with his first cousins in England, and was currently living in London, where Theo’s younger brother Charles, later to be the translator of the Mutiny Narratives of Munshi Jiwan Lal and Muin ud-Din, used to visit him and took rather a shine to his cousin’s beautiful wife, ‘a jolly regular girl, and such a one as I should have no hesitation to marry when my time comes’, as he wrote to GG. ‘In fact to say it outright I really like her exceedingly. The very moment I saw her, I said to James, Mrs J is the very image of GG.’92

  Padre Rotton was an even more striking case. For all the padre’s rhetoric about the English as God’s Chosen People, the padre had a whole tribe of Anglo-Indian first cousins. These included James Rotton, who could not speak English, and the twenty-two Muslim sons of his convert cousin, Felix Rotton, by various Indian wives (‘complete natives in every sense of the word’), all of whom were at that moment engaged in fighting on the rebel side in Avadh, where they took an active part in besieging the British Residency in Lucknow. According to Company documents in the India Office Library, ‘Mr [Felix] Rotton seems voluntarily to have remained with the Rebels till July last [i.e. July 1857], to be the father of rebels, and to labour under the strongest presumption of disloyalty.’ He did nothing to help the British, ‘though the descendant of a European himself, [and] all his sons capable of bearing arms were hostile to us, and he is answerable for the sons he begot’.*93

  Even Fred Rober
ts, for all his letters back home full of expletives about the ‘vile natives … a despicable set of cowards’, had a Muslim Anglo-Indian half-brother, John Roberts, also known as Chhote Saheb, who, like the padre’s cousins, was at that moment engaged in the struggle against the British in Lucknow. John ‘lived entirely in the style of Indians and was a devout Muslim, who was very particular about his religious observances such as namaz [prayers] and roza [fasts]’; and he had married a Lucknavi lady called Shahzadi Begum, granddaughter of Nawab Ramzan Ali Khan. John shared Fred’s facility with the pen and was an Urdu poet of note under the pen-name ‘Jan’ though he was unable to read or write English. Their father, General Sir Abraham Roberts, KCB, was furious when he heard that John had sided with the rebels at the same time as his half-brother was being hailed as a hero on the Ridge, and promptly cut off his allowance. ‘I hope you can get some help from the Rajah for whom you made gun carriages to go against the English,’ wrote the fuming general. ‘Had you gone like the others to the Resident you would have been saved, but now there is no chance of you getting anything.’94

  As far as the rebels were concerned, the 9 July attack on the British was certainly the most successful yet. But expectations in both the Palace and the city had been too high, and there was still a strong sense of disappointment that there was as yet no great breakthrough, and that the British remained as firmly entrenched as ever on the Ridge.

  This feeling of frustration deepened in the weeks that followed. The lack of intelligence reaching the city meant that no one among the rebels realised how successful Bakht Khan’s tactics were proving: unaware of the fragility of the British position and the pressure Bakht Khan was putting on it, they could see only that the lines remained unchanged, and muttering against Bakht Khan soon set in. Mirza Mughal had strongly resented the manner in which he had his command taken from him, while the other sepoys disliked obeying a commander from a different regiment. Slowly, as the attacks failed to produce any clinching victory, Bakht Khan’s prestige, and his grip on the sepoys, began to slip.