The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  Kendal Coghill was among the troops pinned down on this north-western front between the Mori Bastion and the Kabul Gate, and found the jihadis – ‘a race of devils and fanatics’ – especially fearsome adversaries. Like many of his colleagues he was surprised to discover that his earlier bravado and bloodlust quickly give way to naked fear: ‘the natives were defending every place inch by inch’, he wrote. ‘It was a tough fight, and they had numbers and field guns against our few remaining men with muskets.’

  But as our orders were peremptory to take and hold it, there was no help. It was then that I found we most wanted pluck. The men and officers were fatigued to death, the excitement over for the time. Our orders being to hold each gateway to the last, at each gateway and bastion we had left a detachment, so that at the Kabul [Gate] we had only about 200 men. The enemy regularly mobbed us with about 3000 men and 2 light guns attacked our front. If we had attacked them, they would have taken us in flank and retaken the gate. So we had to lie down flat and let the guns fire over us until they came near, and then our bayonets always told. The work continued from 9 a.m. till 4 p.m. and we were being picked off from a distance without a hope of retaliation or assistance coming to us, and we did not know what was going on to the left or rear, as we were the advanced right …

  We had nothing to eat or drink the whole day and were awfully done. My sole consolation was a soda water bottle of weak brandy and water hanging to my side, and that had now been shot through and the liquor wasted. We were under arms all night, as they attacked us all through the dark.28

  Unnerved by the loss of Nicholson, aware that Bakht Khan’s advance up to Hindu Rao’s House threatened to encircle and cut off his troops from their camp, and becoming hourly ‘more anxious and depressed’, Wilson was now visibly cracking under the strain. He was prevented from ordering an immediate withdrawal from the city only by his officers, led by the engineer Richard Baird-Smith, the man who had planned the details of the assault and who now ‘insisted that “we must hold on” in such a determined and uncompromising tone that it put an end to all discussion’.29

  One of Wilson’s senior officers, Neville Chamberlain, wrote to Lawrence in Lahore to express his urgent concern that Wilson’s frazzled nerves were going to lose the battle for Delhi single-handedly: ‘he has frequently been more like an insane man than a General commanding a victorious army,’ wrote Chamberlain, ‘and it is so clear that his head, as he so frequently informs everyone, is gone’.

  You must take these matters in hand or otherwise nothing will be done. The General attends to no one except in fits and starts when in difficulties; his answer to all suggestions is, ‘It is impossible,’ and he is always raising difficulties. He told me once that it was his intention to go to the hills after the fall of Delhi, and [frankly] it is a pity that he does not carry out this intention.30

  When news of Wilson’s wish to retreat reached the dying Nicholson up in the field hospital on the Ridge, he was, characteristically, even more forthright. Despite his pain and exhaustion, he reached for his pistol: ‘Thank God’, roared Nicholson, ‘that I still have the strength yet to shoot him, if necessary.’31

  The following day, calmer, he got a surgeon to take down a note to Lawrence in Lahore, seconding Chamberlain’s letter. ‘Tell Sir John’, he dictated, ‘that I recommend his doing what he can to supersede Wilson, who is broken down, and is moreover aware of it himself. I consider it trifling with our National Destiny keeping a man like Wilson in command of this force.’32

  Zahir Dehlavi had woken early on 14 September and rode as usual across town to his duties in the Red Fort. Used by now to the sound of heavy gunfire, he was quite unaware of the significance of the fighting taking place less than a mile to the north. The first sign he saw of anything unusual was when he emerged from Chandni Chowk and encountered another royal official, heading in the opposite direction, who told him there was no point going on, since the Fort gates were locked.

  It was only then that I noticed that nearly all the shops of the city were closed, and that the bazaar was unusually deserted, with only one or two men walking around. I thought that I should go and see for myself what the matter was, but when I reached the Lahore Gate [of the Fort] I saw it was barred, and that in front of the gate there were two loaded cannon. Nearby a crowd was standing around listening to a havildar give an account of the morning’s fighting.

  At this point a regiment of mounted soldiers rode up from within, and shouted to the guards to open the gates as they wanted to get out. The Havildar instructed them to go to the city’s Kabul Gate as that was where the reinforcements were gathering. Hearing this, I turned towards my house.

  I had not gone far when I saw the Purbias running out fast from the side of Bhawani Shankar’s house, clearly fleeing from the fighting. The townspeople were disgusted at the sight of the cowardly Tilangas and asked them, ‘after involving our city in this war, why are you now running away?’ On hearing this, the Purbias threw down their guns and swords and said, ‘we have been fighting, now why don’t you give it a try?’33

  Zahir decided it was time to head home, and warn his family; but when he got to Ballimaran, he found that the muhalla gate had already been locked. He then ran back towards the gate of the Chota Dariba on Chandni Chowk. There also the gate was locked, but the small wicket had been left open. He squeezed through it, only to find that the fighting had now reached the kotwali: by pure bad fortune he had run straight into Theo’s column heading for the Jama Masjid:

  A volley of shots was now directed towards me from the side of the Kotwali, and the shots came and hit the road and the drains just like a hailstorm. A unit of the English army was standing directly in front of the Kotwali, shooting anyone they could see. A man standing next to me doubled over, shot in the stomach. I pulled him to safety through the wicket of the gate and then ran straight home …

  On arrival I went to my room, and lay down, shocked to the marrow. I had just seen with my own eyes that the English army had entered the city, that the Purbias had run away, and now the English soldiers were going to come inside homes and start murdering. I thought the time to die had arrived, and that there was nothing to do but to pray, and wait and see what was going to happen.

  I did not tell my mother or the members of my family anything that I had seen, and instead stayed in my room praying. After about an hour and a half there was a loud series of reports from a cannon, which sounded like it was coming from just outside my house. I was surprised as to how a cannon had entered our lane, so I took along two or three servants, and went out of the house to see what was happening.34

  When Zahir’s party reached the main road they asked the passers-by where the English Army had gone, and someone said that they had just been chased out. Zahir then went to the Chauri Bazaar, behind the Great Mosque, and there they saw that people were moving around armed with swords, knives, sharpened bamboo lathis and whatever weapons they could find.

  When I came to the side of the Jama Masjid I saw such a huge pile of dead bodies that for a moment it looked like a woodseller’s stall. More dead bodies lay scattered all around the Kilhih Bazaar and the lanes between the mosque and the Kotwali. I asked the people in the streets what had happened, and they told me that a unit of the English army had come right up to the stairs of the Jama Masjid; at the same time some of the English soldiers had gone into the homes of the people and started looting them.

  Then the soldiers had tried to enter the Jama Masjid, and the men who were inside thought that if they come in they will start killing inside the sanctuary, so it is better to go out of the mosque and confront them. So they charged out of the mosque with their guns … Many of the English troops were killed and injured … Eventually they retreated towards the Kashmiri Gate. There the English made their stand and positioned their cannon.35

  Zahir went home again, and tried to get some sleep. The following morning, however, rumours were spreading through the city that the English troops had gone from house
to house during the night, climbing into rooms through ladders, and barging into people’s zenanas, where they killed the women as they slept, then stole their jewellery. It was not clear how much truth there was to the rumour – the looting at this stage seems to have been limited to the areas that had already fallen to the British around Kashmiri Gate – but the feeling of triumph that had swept through the town the previous day after the English had been driven back from the Jama Masjid quickly began to give way, in house after house across the city, to feelings of increasing panic.

  Sarvar ul-Mulk’s family had heard at breakfast on the 14th that the British had got within the walls, and decided not to wait to be killed: instead they consulted with a cousin, Nawab Zia ud-Daula, and decided to take their chances and attempt to make it through to their cousin’s house in Alwar in Rajputana while it was still possible to escape. Only Sarvar ul-Mulk’s uncle was against the plan: he had decided from his astrological calculations that the English were definitely going to be defeated.

  My father with great regret returned [to his house near] the Delhi Gate, so that he should escort his own people, with the necessary things, to his elder brother’s house; but he did not succeed in this, for suddenly a great hue and cry was raised in the [northern portion of the] City, and in every street and by-lane, hand-to-hand fights ensued. White soldiers, together with their Indian and Pathan allies, armed with all sorts of weapons, drunk with victory and full of the spirit of looting, made no distinction between woman and child, or young and old; and rivers of blood flowed. Then entering the zenanas, the various bodies of men began to loot and rob while the ladies – of whom Firdausi has correctly said, ‘Not even the sun had penetrated to the skin of their bodies, which were so closely veiled’ – unaware of the fate of their husbands, fled in all directions.

  The [Delhi, or southern] gate of the city was close to our house, and my father and my maternal uncle, with the ladies and children and servants, fled through it in a great hurry and terror, and took refuge in a saint’s tomb [outside the walls]. It was only when we were joined by our old servants, that we learned of the death of my uncle and Nawab Zia ud-Daula. It appeared that having armed themselves, they had left the house on foot with the ladies of the house and the children and servants, but that in the Chowk or close to it, they had encountered ‘One-eyed Metcalfe’ [Theo] and that in the fighting that ensued, both had been killed. It was not known what had become of the women and children.

  The effect of this news on the audience was so sad it can barely be described. Our own state was little better, for we were in fear of our lives and property from both sides – on the one hand the Mutineers, and on the other, the English and their supporters; and it appeared to us that the two parties were vying with each other as to which should carry the day in pillage or robbery?36

  Sarvar ul-Mulk’s family was not alone. In all the areas that the British now precariously controlled – the north-eastern quarter of the city – all the houses were considered fair game for plunder, and no males of fighting age were considered non-combatants. A significant proportion of the inhabitants of Delhi, especially the moneylenders and those with property or businesses, having suffered four months of plunder at the hands of the sepoys, had longed for the end of the anarchy, believing that the return of the Company, for all its irritations and manifest injustices, would at least bring a return of law and order to the town. Moreover, the British were well aware of this tacit support through their many spies. None of the inhabitants of Delhi had expected a general plunder, still less a mass slaughter. But once within the walls, the British conveniently forgot all their allies and supporters. Even their most devoted spies were not safe, as Maulvi Muhammad Baqar discovered on or around 15 September when, without explanation, he was picked up and arrested.37

  The extreme injustice of all this was something that horrified even the most sycophantic Anglophiles: ‘In the city no one life’s was safe,’ wrote Muin ud-Din Husain Khan. ‘All able-bodied men who were seen were taken for rebels and shot.’ Ghalib, who had disliked the sepoys from the beginning, was now no less horrified by the barbarity of the returning British. ‘The victors killed all whom they found on the streets,’ he wrote in Dastanbuy. ‘When the angry lions entered the town, they killed the helpless and weak and they burned their houses. Mass slaughter was rampant and streets were filled with horror. It may be that such atrocities always occur after conquest.’38

  Some of the most brutal killers were those who had lost friends or members of their own family at the outbreak. Soon after the British entered the city, Charles Griffiths met John Clifford, the former collector of Gurgaon, who was the elder brother of Annie Jennings’ friend and fellow choir-mistress, Miss Clifford. John had dropped his sister off to stay with the Jenningses in the Red Fort the night before the outbreak, and now blamed himself for her death, preceded – so British myth had it – by gang rape. Griffiths was no peace-loving liberal, but he was profoundly chilled by what he saw: ‘My old school friend had become a changed being,’ he wrote. ‘All his passions were aroused to their fullest extent, and he thought of nothing but revenge.’

  Armed with sword, revolver and rifle, he had been present at almost every engagement with the mutineers since leaving Meerut … dealing death with his rifle and giving no quarter. Caring nothing for his own life, so long as he succeeded in glutting his vengeance on the murderers of this sister, he exposed himself most recklessly …

  I met him in one of the streets after we had gained entrance into the city. He shook my hands, saying that he had put to death all he had come across, not excepting women and children, and from his excited manner and the appearance of his dress – which was covered with blood stains – I quite believe he told the truth … There were other officers of the army in camp who had lost wives and relations at Delhi who behaved in the same manner as Clifford.39

  Over and over again, however, the British found it possible to justify such brutal war crimes with the quasi-religious reasoning that they were somehow handing out God’s justice on men who were not men, but were instead more like devils. In the eyes of Victorian Evangelicals, mass murder was no longer mass murder, but instead had become divine vengeance, and the troops were thus executors of divine justice. Padre Rotton, for one, was quite explicit about the degree to which the mass murder of the inhabitants of Delhi was actually, in his view, God’s own work: ‘I thought of God, and what He had already done for us … and then I thought of man, and the precious blood which he must shed in copious and living streams, ere God, by him, could avenge atrocity and wrong without parallel in the history of nations both ancient and modern.’40 Even Edward Campbell, a gentle figure who was by the standards of the time no fundamentalist, still wrote of the assault on Delhi as ‘my Saviour’s battle’ and liked to think of himself performing his duty as ‘a good soldier of Christ’.41

  ‘Truly these were fearful times,’ agreed Charles Griffiths, ‘when Christian men and gallant soldiers, maddened by the foul murder of those nearest and dearest to them, steeled their hearts to pity and swore vengeance against the mutineers.’

  The same feelings to some extent pervaded the breasts of all those who were engaged in the suppression of the Mutiny. Every soldier in our ranks knew that the day of reckoning had come for the atrocities which had been committed, and with unrelenting spirit dedicated himself to the accomplishment of that purpose … It was a war of extermination, in which no prisoners were taken and no mercy shown – in short one of the most cruel and vindictive wars this world has seen … Dead bodies lay thick in the streets and open spaces, and numbers were killed in their houses … Many non-combatants lost their lives, our men, mad and excited, making no distinction. There is no more terrible spectacle than a city taken by storm.42

  The attitude of many of the British to the people who fell under their sway was well put by one soldier, who wrote from Delhi to the Bombay Telegraph decrying what he called General Wilson’s ‘hokum’ that women and children must be spared
. This ‘was a mistake’, he wrote, as they were ‘not human beings but fiends, or, at best, wild beasts deserving only the death of dogs’.

  All the city people found within the walls when our troops entered were bayoneted on the spot; and the number was considerable, as you may suppose when I tell you that some forty or fifty persons were often found hiding in one house. They were not mutineers, but residents of the city, who trusted to our well-known mild rule for pardon. I am glad to say that they were to be disappointed.43

  Throughout the 15 and 16 September, the fate of Delhi hung in the balance.

  The British made no further advances, except to inch forward from Delhi College and, on the morning of the 16th, to take the magazine immediately to its south; they also moved slowly from house to house from Skinner’s haveli in the direction of Chandni Chowk. As Charles Griffiths put it, ‘A few houses were taken in advance of our positions, but no further movement on any large scale was attempted, owing to the demoralised state of the great proportion of the European infantry.’44

  These modest advances now brought the British within mortar range of the Red Fort: unable to move any further owing to the strength of the resistance, they took out their frustration by setting up a battery in the garden of Delhi College and pouring shells down on Shah Jahan’s magnificient palace. On the western front, they made no further advances of any sort along the city walls, and remained pinned down by Bakht Khan’s troops and his artillery massed on the Burn Bastion. Frustrated, the British troops slowly dissipated themselves in drink and plunder, and soon lost all semblance of discipline. Our men were disorderly and unmanageable,’ wrote Major William Ireland, ‘and even the sense of the danger of our position could not keep them to the ranks.’45