The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  Others kept up their spirits by dreaming of the riches of Delhi spread out below them, hoping to pick up ‘a nice little diamond or two’ from the ‘rich old niggers’.19 ‘Delhi was in 1857 one of the largest, most beautiful and certainly the richest city in Hindostan,’ wrote Charles Griffiths. ‘We knew well there was wealth untold within its walls, and our hearts were cheered even at this time when we thought of the prize money which would fall to our share at the capture of the rebellious city.’20

  The force of the monsoon was now ebbing, and the steaming bogs of July had given way by August to lush and glossy greenery. Some of the more aestetically sensitive British officers came to realise what they had not before noticed: the astonishing beauty of their position. One who did so was the articulate and intelligent Harry Gambier. Only twenty-three years old, and not long out of Eton, he had been in Delhi on 11 May, and had fled that night with Colonel Knyvett. Several days later he and Knyvett had joined up with Vibart’s party, where Gambier fell head over heels in love – as so many had done before – with the lovely Annie Forrest, whom he had long admired from a distance.

  Harry and Annie had become close through the shared ordeal of being robbed by Gujars and wandering hungry and half naked through the villages of the Doab, before their party was finally rescued by Farasu. From the Ridge, Gambier now wrote cheery and poetic letters to Annie at Meerut. He described his daily life on the Ridge, ranging from the melon-and-mango fool he had every day for breakfast, through to the military manoeuvres that he witnessed. He and Annie had both spent some time together at Delhi parties before the outbreak; now he wrote to tell her how very different the place looked under siege. ‘The scene is very beautiful,’ he wrote.

  Imagine yourself at the Flagstaff Tower at sunset. Behind is a glowing bank of clouds, a green undulating horizon, a white broad streak of tumble down lines, fallen pillars and blackened bungalows. Now look towards the city. The ridge is on the right and left, at your feet a level plain, exquisitely green and in places thickly planted, stretches to the City walls. The racquet court looks clean, and officers play occasionally; beyond it is the next house where Mr Curl lived – opposite them the Assembly Rooms, roofless and charred, [which provoke] very different reminiscences: of lights, music, skirts, ‘bodies’ and hanging head dresses, pumps, Le Bas, Lancers, and last Polkas and, as you will say it if I do not, I may as well add Miss H., with her nice angles and sulky face …

  Beyond the Assembly Rooms one can see Ludlow Castle [formerly the house of the Resident, Simon Fraser], behind it the two pukka houses in one of which latterly the Galloways lived … Through a telescope Pandies can be seen swarming about, sneaking up under the cover of walls and stones for a shot at our pickets, though they always miss! The city stretches out to make one’s mouth water if one were an artist. The river sweeps down in a broad silver sheet spanned by a delicate line which is the still intact bridge of boats; a flash, a column of smoke, and bang comes a shot from the Water Bastion into Metcalfe’s stables … The dome of the church is minus the cross, the Jama Masjid looks provokingly erect and towering in majesty beside it – as if Christianity lay low before the false Prophet’s faith. The [guns in the] ruins of the Cashmere gate send their shot crashing into the old mosque [up on the Ridge] and the shells burst all about it. Hindu Rao’s [House] receives the same little attentions from the Mori, Cabul and Lahore Gates, while the [guns on] Ajmere Gate play down Subjee Mundi.21

  While Gambier was sensitive enough to notice and describe the beauty of the scene, he was aware that the brutality of the fighting was hardening and coarsening him, and was candid enough to write this to Annie. He described how in one engagement a force of sepoy cavalry had been beaten back, and

  a horse wandered riderless after they had retired. Two men went down the road under cover of walls & captured the horse and near him found a sawar slightly wounded, so they kicked him in the head and he died. My heart is hardened and it does not excite the pity that a similar act would in the case of a nobler enemy. It was a beautiful white arab, but a shot through the body had done its work. Doubtless it was once an officer’s charger. The deathsweat dimmed his glossy coat, and the strained eye and inflated nostril and trembling limbs betrayed his agony. A bullet ended his pain, and I gave the horse the regret that I could not feel for the man.22

  Even more changed was Edward Vibart. Harry Gambier had learned that his sister had moved from Kanpur to Lucknow just before the outbreak, and that she had therefore escaped the massacre there; Vibart was less lucky. After a period of recuperation from the ordeal of his escape from Delhi, he had discovered just before he left Meerut that both his parents, his younger brothers and two of his sisters had all been killed in the Kanpur massacre; and he suspected – wrongly as it turned out – that his sisters had been raped before being murdered.

  Vibart had kept his good humour and his humanity throughout the trauma of 11 May and his subsequent flight to Meerut. But now he had lost everything he had lived for, and yearned only for revenge, to kill or be killed. Indeed, he soon convinced himself that God had spared him for this specific purpose: ‘To avenge my parents – my darling mother, my little brothers and sisters – my poor father.’23

  I feel now that nothing could ever give me any pleasure or happiness again,’ he wrote to his Uncle Gordon one of his few surviving relatives, in England.

  All I think of are my poor slaughtered parents – and I go about mechanically as it were, little caring what becomes of me. Oh God! Why was I spared so mercifully, and then my parents taken from me? With an aching heart I take up each paper as it comes in and read it through – each harrowing detail of their misery at Cawnpore. Sometimes I fancy that God would never have thus afflicted them, and I think them still alive, and my beloved mother’s face comes before me and I see it as she wrote me that letter as she heard of my escape, ‘To my dying hour,’ she wrote, ‘I will bless the Almighty & remember my feelings of gratitude to him, that you my boy, my own beloved boy, have been so mercifully spared to us,’ – and now I have lost that loving mother. All I have to remind me of her is that one precious letter.

  My own father too – I see him as I wished him goodbye to return to Delhi, only four days before the fearful outbreak. As he held my hand, he said ‘God bless you my boy,’ – and now I am alive, and he is gone … When I think of what he may have had to suffer, with no one near him to comfort him or give him consolation, Oh I’m driven wild and I vow vengeance on these wretches, murderers and fiends …

  I came over here [to the Ridge] – not caring for death, but only for revenge – to be able to say, if I lived, ‘Yes, I was there too, I too was at Delhi and helped to revenge my parents.’ Sometimes I do feel a shudder at seeing these black creatures killed, yet it is only momentary: I have seen five sepoys lying dead, and I have gone and spat on them. I saw two shot yesterday, and when they were dead they were thrown into the river – may each murderer die thus … Slay on and spare not ye soldiers! Remember Cawnpore!24

  News of the astonishing violence and viciousness of the British response to the Uprising elsewhere was now filtering through to Delhi. Recently there had arrived within Delhi a detachment of sawars fleeing the carnage of the British ‘Army of Retribution’ at Kanpur, who told stories of the mass murder committed by General Neill’s troops after they had retaken the site of the massacre: of how every village in the path of the army was torched, and old men, women and children burned to death in their houses; of how the Sikhs were allowed to torture, impale and burn alive the captured sepoys; how others were being made to lick clean the floor of the massacre site, and then, having been ritually outcaste by having ‘pork, beef and everything which could possibly break caste’ stuffed down their throats, they were sewn into pigskins and hanged. But even that was not the end: Neill ordered that, contrary to the dictates of both faiths, all Hindus were then to ‘be buried, and the Mohammedans burned’.25

  Everywhere the British convinced themselves that the atrocities committed
by the sepoys against their women and children absolved them of any need to treat the rebels as human beings: ‘Since they had butchered our defenceless women and children,’ wrote Colonel A. R. D. Mackenzie, ‘we would have been more than human, we would have been less than men, if we had not exterminated them as men kill snakes wherever they meet them.’26 It soon became exceptional among the British to regard anyone on the opposite side of the battle lines as even belonging to the same species: ‘I [simply] cannot consider these sepoys human beings,’ wrote Captain J. M. Wade, ‘and it is only common practice to destroy them as reptiles.’27 George Wagentrieber helped fan such flames from his new Delhi Gazette Extra printing press in Lahore: ‘our army is exasperated almost to madness by what they have seen of the brutality of the insurgents’, he expostulated in one editorial.28

  Moreover, as far as many of the British troops were concerned, their fury and thirst for revenge were not so much a desire as a right enshrined in the Bible. One British soldier, ‘Quaker’ Wallace, was in the habit of bayoneting his sepoy adversaries while chanting the 116th Psalm. As General Neill put it, ‘The Word of God gives no authority to the modern tenderness for human life.’29 Padre Rotton was in full agreement. The rebels did not realise, he wrote, that the Uprising was in fact

  a battle of principles, a conflict between truth and error; and that because they had elected in favour of darkness, and eschewed the light, therefore they could not possibly succeed. Moreover, they had imbrued their hands in the innocent blood of helpless women and children, and that very blood was [now] appealing to heaven for vengeance. The appeal was unquestionably heard. The Lord could not do otherwise than be avenged on such a nation as this.30

  Hervey Greathed was not sorry to hear of the fear spreading through Delhi at reports of the brutal British vengeance: ‘The sawars who have reached the city from Cawnpore give dismal accounts of their defeat,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘They estimate the slaughter at 10,000 and tell terrific tales of the [kilt-wearing Scottish] Highlanders; they say they are men in petticoats, who come from Ceylon, and are Cannibals, to whom the Gurkhas are mere mice.’

  He added, however, that the people and sepoys within Delhi now had many other more pressing worries, and the British now thought that rebels might flee the city altogether, so untenable had their position become in the face not of a military but rather a logistical catastrophe. ‘They are badly off for money, ammunition and food,’ he wrote. I am beginning to get letters from the princes, declaring that they have been all along fondly attached to us, and that they only want to know what they can do for us. They must find out for themselves, for I shall not answer and tell them.’31

  As the soldiers on the Ridge found themselves with more to eat and less to worry about, their counterparts in Delhi were now every day growing closer to starvation.

  The military and strategic limitation of the sepoys had been apparent for some time now, especially their failure to gather intelligence, to co-ordinate effectively with other rebel centres such as Kanpur and Lucknow, or to persuade most of the independent rajas of central India and Rajputana to come off the fence and join with the cause. In particular, the Delhi rebels failed to recognise how very easily they could have taken the British from the rear on the Ridge: ‘I think Wilson has hitherto had considerable cause for anxiety,’ wrote Nicholson on 28 August. ‘Had the enemy had the enterprise to detach a strong force to his rear, we could not have sent more than five or six hundred men against it. But it is too late for them to try that game now, and they know it, and are at their wits’ end to devise some new plan of action.’32

  It was, however, only as the siege wore on that it became apparent that it would be the failures of the rebels’ administrative and financial organisation, every bit as much as their military and strategic shortcomings, which would lead to their ultimate undoing. They had created turbulence and chaos, but could not restore order. This was particularly fatal for them in the countryside around Delhi. Their failure to establish a well-governed ‘liberated area’ or Mughal realm from which they could draw tax revenue, manpower and, most of all, food supplies, ultimately proved the Delhi rebels’ single most disastrous failure. This was something Maulvi Muhammad Baqar recognised at the time and wrote about repeatedly in his editorials: ‘What strange indifference,’ he wrote, ‘that we have not attempted to collect one single rupee of tax revenue.’

  God knows what design or purpose there is in this failure, and what is causing such slackness … Some or other Amir or nobleman should be deputed to collect tribute and revenue from the Rajahs and other notables, so that the administration and control of his exalted Majesty is established. At all places and districts where the Collectors of the Kafirs used to be posted, there a representative of his Exalted Majesty, as Ziladar, should be placed, along with some troops and the Islamic standard. The villages are already identified and marked, and money can be collected from there as prescribed. Everywhere a platoon or platoons should be posted. There is no doubt that without measures like this the notables and local potentates around these regions would not be able to give up the awe of the Kafirs which they still harbour in their hearts, and they will not give up of their deepest hope of seeing their own [Mughal] government restored.33

  The accuracy of this observation became clearer and clearer as June gave way to July and August, and the city grew hungrier, and thirstier. The British had cut off the flow of the Yamuna canal into the city early in June, so that the only water now came from the brackish wells within the city and the river to the east, where water carriers and bathers found themselves exposed to British shellfire.34 Despite this, many still came to take water, and even to sit and fish, exposed in the open, risking a stray shell in the hope of hooking a fresh catch.35 The food situation was equally dire. Ever since June, petitions from starving citizens, jihadis and sepoys begging for food and sustenance had been piling into the Red Fort, and the intense hunger on the streets of the city had become a prominent theme of the spies’ reports.

  As early as 7 June, even the employees of the royal household were complaining that they had received no rations for a month.36 On 12 June the deputy kotwal wrote to his assistants begging them to find some food for the new battalions from Haryana who had just marched into Delhi. At the bottom is the reply: ‘It is submitted that there is nothing left in the shops, no flour, no pulses, nothing. What should we do?’37 By 15 June, the officers of the different regiments were coming to the Fort and complaining that their troops could not attack the British on empty stomachs, and that their sepoys had begun returning, ‘driven back by hunger before the battle is over’.38

  Six weeks later, on 28 July, Kishan Dayal and Qadir Bakhsh, subahdars of the Meerut sepoys, came to court to say their men were now starving. They had left behind in Meerut all their possessions when they mutinied, ‘so are now very hard pressed. Some eight-ten days have passed and we have not even received a single chick-pea. My men are dismayed at the expense of everything, and there are no money-lenders who will give them loans’.39

  It was not just the moneylenders: the traders and shopkeepers too refused to provide credit; on 4 August, the Delhi confectioners went en masse to the kotwal, and announced that since they had not been paid for past supplies, they would no longer provide sweets without payment in cash.40 By 14 August, the newly arrived Nimach brigade were openly threatening to desert if they were not fed. The brigade’s two subahdars came before Zafar to tell him of the full desperation of their situation:

  My Lord, this submission is about the Nimach force that arrived in the capital after traversing a great distance and overcoming many obstacles, with the expectation of serving your Imperial Majesty. Until now your obedient servants have themselves been paying the expenses of the horses, cavalry, artillery, cattle, elephants and camels. My Lord the cavalry and the artillery and the elephants and the camels belong to the Sarkar [British government] and until now whatever the circumstances, their allowances were always paid. But now, for four or five da
ys, the entire force including the soldiers and the animals have been starving and there is no money left to pay even their basic expenses. All the soldiers are determined to fight, but they ask us: how can a man who has been fasting for two three days do battle?

  Therefore we hope that out of your largesse and largeness of heart can you please provide for all the expenses incurred by the Royal force and honour these humble ones with a reply. Otherwise kindly inform the soldiers, for until arrangements are made for payment, no soldier is ready to do battle. Please do not construe this as disobedience, but should you not want the Nimach brigade to remain, then kindly give us a clear answer. Whatever is ordained will happen. Innumerable petitions have been sent earlier but we have yet not received any response.

  With the greatest respect, and devotedly,

  General Sudhari Singh and Brigade Major Hira Singh41

  In the event, the Nimach brigade were persuaded to stay, even though no money or food was immediately available; but spies reported a growing haemorrhage of deserters from the rebel army: according to the spy Turab Ali, in the first week of August alone 750 cavalrymen and 600 jihadis went ‘to their native place … because they could not obtain their daily bread in the city’.42

  Throughout July and August the Court of Administration, led by Mirza Mughal, made frantic efforts to raise the money to pay for food and cover the expenses of the soldiers. At first they tried borrowing from the city’s moneylenders, but succeeded in raising only 6,000 rupees, enough for just a few days’ supplies. The thanadar of Chandni Chowk, who was given the job of extracting the money from the bankers and baniyas of Katra Nil, reported ‘that some of these people disappear into their houses; others do not give any response, while most make one excuse or another to keep this servant at bay, and are forever on the lookout for ways of evading their dues’.43 A month later it was the same story: ‘whenever this servant goes to their houses,’ reported the thanadar, ‘they shut their doors and do not give any reply. They vanish away’. A note at the bottom in Mirza Mughal’s hand, and stamped with his seal, suggested a more vigorous approach: ‘Proclaim an order’, suggested the Prince, ‘that if these money-lenders remain hidden you will blow them from a cannon.’44