The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  In the headquarters at Skinner’s House, Wilson’s officers had their hands full trying to stop their general withdrawing altogether to the Ridge, or even, in his blacker moods, to Karnal. As he wrote to his wife on the evening of the 15th, ‘we are now holding what we have taken but nothing more … The Europeans in the column with me have got hold of lots of beer in the shops, and made themselves helpless … This street fighting is fearful work. We have lost very heavily, both in officers and men. I am knocked up and unequal to any exertion. Altogether our prospects are not good. I cannot write more’.46

  At this stage the city could have gone to either side, and a really concerted rebel counter-attack, especially one that aimed to take the now virtually undefended British rear, or captured the camp on the Ridge, would have forced an immediate British retreat from the city. What could have been achieved was shown on the evening of the 15th when a modest counter-attack, supported by the fire of the rebel artillery on the bastions of Selimgarh, drove the British from their new conquests back into their old Delhi College positions.47

  For many of the rebel leaders, as for the people of the city, the frustration at this failure to fight back more effectively grew more acute as the hours passed. There were further instances of fleeing and depressed sepoys being attacked by mobs of Delhiwallahs, ‘who in return for the bad treatment to which they had been subjected deprived them of their arms, beat them with shoes and disgraced them in every possible way, crying out “Where is your boasted courage? What has become of your power, that you can no longer oppress and tyrannize over us?”’48

  Then, in the late morning of the 16th, the people of the city spontaneously began to gather outside the Red Fort. With them were many of the jihadis, led by Maulvi Sarfaraz Ali, and ‘several of the principal officers of the mutineer army’, who went into the Palace and begged Zafar to lead them into battle, ‘assuring him’, according to Sa’id Mubarak Shah, ‘that the entire army, the citizens of Delhi, and the people of the surrounding country would all follow, fight and die for him and expel the British’.49 As more and more jihadis and city dwellers massed outside the Fort, ‘some armed just with sticks, a few with swords, others with old muskets’, this suddenly looked like a turning point.

  Inside the Palace, the mood had been growing progressively more sombre. On the 14th Mirza Mughal had sent an urgent message to Zafar, and begged him to provide additional funds to pay the troops so that they could eat and fight properly. Zafar replied, ‘send the horse harness, and the silver howdahs and chairs, to Mirza Mughal that he may sell them and pay all with the proceeds. I have nothing else left’.50° Shells were now falling almost every minute somewhere within the Palace walls: ‘The King’s residence must be a very warm one,’ reported Neville Chamberlain to Lahore on the evening of the 17th, ‘for we are pitting shells throughout the length of the palace enclosure, from north to south.’51 To add to the gloom, the trickle of food supplies into the city had completely stopped, and people – including the princes and salatin – were literally dying of starvation.

  Now, with the maulvis and jihadis gathering and asking him personally to lead a counter-attack, a moment of truth had come, but Zafar did not know what to do. Since ‘Id, the Emperor had oscillated incoherently between a depressed hatred of the sepoys and all they had done to his city and palace, and a tacit if unenthusiastic support of Mirza Mughal’s cause. At other times he seemed to have persuaded himself that he was a neutral observer in a struggle that had nothing to do with him. Now such indecision was impossible: however ambivalent and confused he felt, he must either lead the counter-attack, as requested, or refuse to do so. ‘The King, afraid for his life, hesitated,’ wrote Sa’id Mubarak Shah.

  But they now earnestly entreated him saying, ‘Your end is now approaching – you will be captured. Why die a shameful, dishonoured death? Why not die fighting and leave an imperishable name?’ The King replied that he would place himself at the head of the troops at 12 o’clock that day.

  As soon as the royal intention of leading the army to battle was known, further masses of mutineers, ghazees and townsmen collected in front of the Palace, not less than seventy thousand men. Presently the royal ‘tomjon’ [litter] was seen slowly issuing forth from the great gates, on which the troops and citizens advanced towards the magazine but halted about two hundred yards from it, as all who went further fell by the British bullets which bounced down the street like rain.

  The King’s tomjon had by this time almost reached another of the gates of the Palace and he sent continually to ascertain how far his army had advanced, but they were no nearer to the magazine when Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, forcing his way to his Royal master, told him that if he went any further he would to a certainty be shot, as European riflemen were concealed in the different houses. ‘Moreover’, whispered the Hakim, ‘if you go out with the army to fight, how can I possibly explain your conduct tomorrow to the British, what excuse can I advance for you after you have joined the mutineers in battle?’

  Zafar could no longer sit on the fence. He had to make up his mind one way or another, but still he hesitated, and as he dithered and swithered, the Anglophile hakim continued playing on his fears. According to his own account, he told his master, ‘God forbid that the sepoys should take your Majesty out to the front of the battle, and then run off and you be taken prisoner. Never … These people bring disgrace on your Majesty for nothing. You ought never to have ridden forth.’52

  ‘On hearing these words,’ wrote Sa’id Mubarak Shah, ‘the King left the procession and re-entered the Palace on the plea of going to the evening prayer. The mass of people and troops now became confused, then alarmed, and eventually they dispersed.’53

  If Zafar’s decision to bless the Uprising on the afternoon of 11 May was a crucial turning point that transformed an army mutiny into the largest rebellion against their empire that the British would face in the course of the entire nineteenth century, so Zafar’s catastrophic failure of nerve on the evening of 16 September was the decisive moment that marked the beginning of the end of that rebellion. The different Urdu sources are clear that the confidence and determination needed to resist the British, which had held up remarkably well up to that point, now began to fail the rebels in Delhi.

  It was not that they had been defeated. Far from it: the British were on the point of collapse, as the morale and spirit of their troops continued to disintegrate; as late as the 18th, Wilson was still writing home that ‘our men have a great dislike of street fighting … and get a panic and will not advance. I cannot see my way at all’.54 But the rebels’ confidence had been fatally eroded by Zafar’s frightened retreat, and panic, once begun, now proceeded to pass swiftly through their ranks. The two armies had eyeballed each other for three days now, and thanks at least partly to Zafar’s failure of leadership, it was the rebels who blinked first.

  The people of Delhi, aware now that collapse was imminent, began to pack up and flee to safety: the British lookouts stationed on the roof of Hindu Rao’s House reported that evening that ‘streams of people and animals have issued from Ajmeri Gate’.55 The trickle of sepoys leaving the city was now also becoming a flood, and Hodson saw from the ‘Idgah that the Bareilly troops had begun blowing up their ammunition stores in preparation for flight. It was also reported by spies that the Bareilly and Nimach troops had sent off their baggage down the road towards Mathura, intending to follow it by forced marches as soon as the opportunity to escape from the town presented itself.56

  ‘The spirit of the mutineers now completely deserted them,’ wrote Sa’id Mubarak Shah,

  and they contemplated the entire evacuation of the capital. Whenever the Europeans saw an opportunity, they made their way into the main streets and bazaars, and shot all who opposed them … Soon along the whole of the Chandni Chowk to the Palace, and even to the Lahore Gate, only scattered parties of sepoys and ghazees were to be seen – all the rest had fled.

  That night, the 16th, was the last, after more than two
hundred years, that a Mughal emperor spent in the Red Fort of Shahjahanabad.

  According to the tradition preserved by the family of his favourite daughter, Kulsum Zamani Begum, Zafar retired to the tasbih khana (his oratory), praying and thinking, as outside the sound of fighting drew closer and closer to the Red Fort. Then at eleven o’clock one of the eunuchs was sent to summon Kulsum Zamani Begum:

  There were gunshots everywhere … The Emperor told me, ‘I give you over into the hands of God. Go now with your husband. I don’t want to be separated from you, but it will be safer for you now to stay away from me.’ Then he prayed aloud for our safety, blessed us and handed over some jewellery and other valuables, and asked my husband Mirza Ziauddin to take us away. Our caravan left the Fort late at night. We reached the village of Korali, where we ate a simple meal of barley bread and yoghurt, but the next day, heading towards Meerut [the destination of so many of the British refugees from Delhi four months earlier], a party of Gujars attacked us and virtually stripped us naked.57

  Some time after midnight and before dawn, in the early morning of the 17th, Zafar quietly slipped out of the Red Fort by the water gate, without telling his prime minister or even Zinat Mahal. He was alone but for a party of attendants, and brought with him only a selection of his ancestral treasures, including ‘the state jewels & property with lists of the same’, as well as a palanquin.58 As dawn broke, Zafar took a boat down the Yamuna, probably to the jetty at the Old Fort, the Purana Qila, from where he made his way to the great Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin three miles southeast of Shahjahanabad.59

  According to traditions preserved by the family of the shrine keepers, the Nizami family, Zafar then handed over his ancestral relics into their safe keeping. These included a reliquary that he had specially carried from the Red Fort. The box contained three sacred hairs from the beard of the Prophet which had passed as a sacred trust from father to son in the House of Timur since the fourteenth century, and to which Zafar had been especially attached: the Palace diary and other accounts refer to him personally bathing the hairs in rosewater.60 Having prayed at the shine, and eaten a simple breakfast given to him by the pirzadas, Zafar then allegedly burst into tears, telling the head Sufi:

  I always thought these rebel soldiers would bring disaster down on our heads. I had apprehensions from the beginning; now they have come true. These soldiers have fled before the English. Brother! Though my inclinations are those of a faqir and a mystic, yet in my veins runs that great blood which would keep me fighting to the last drop in my body. My forefathers have had worse days than these and they never lost heart. But I have read the writing on the wall. I see with my own eyes the fast approaching tragedy which must end the glory of my dynasty. Now there is not a shadow of doubt left that of the great House of Timur I am the last to be seated on the throne of India. The lamp of Mughal dominion is fast burning out; it will remain but a few hours more. Since I know this, why should I cause more bloodshed? For this reason I left the Fort. The country belongs to God. He may give it to whomsoever he likes.61

  Saying this, Zafar delivered the relics into the custody of the shrine keepers, and set off by palanquin towards his summer palace abutting the Sufi shrine of Qutb Sahib in Mehrauli, where he had agreed to meet Bakht Khan. But after he had gone some way, Mirza Ilahe Bakhsh rode up, and told him that bands of Gujars were robbing anyone who set off in that direction, just as they had earlier robbed the British.

  What Ilahe Bakhsh said was quite true, but what Zafar did not know was that Ilahe Bakhsh was in the pay of Hodson, and that he had come directly on Hodson’s bidding, promising his paymaster that he would do his best to betray his cousin and to prevent Zafar from fleeing far from the city. In this way, although he had consulted no higher authority as to the terms he was busy negotiating, Hodson hoped to make his name as a great imperial hero, and so cement his return to grace by bringing in the Emperor to be imprisoned and tried.62 To the same end, Hodson had now quite separately concluded his deal with Zinat Mahal and her father, Mirza Quli Khan, who were still in Zinat Mahal’s haveli in Lal Kuan. After much indecision, they had also promised to persuade Zafar to surrender, in return for the guarantee of Zinat’s life, and that of the three men in her life: her father; her son Mirza Jawan Bakht; and her husband, Zafar. The guarantee that Zinat and her father negotiated very pointedly did not include any of her husband’s sons by different wives.*63

  Having been persuaded to change his mind, Zafar ordered that his palanquin be turned around and returned to Nizamuddin, where he waited for Zinat Mahal to join him.64 Then together they made for the great mausoleum of Zafar’s ancestors, which lay close by. This was the great marble-domed tomb of Humayun, the second Mughal Emperor. It was the first great monumental tomb to be built by the Mughals almost three hundred years earlier, in the mid-sixteenth century, and was still the most magnificent Mughal monument in Delhi.65

  Here Zafar sent a message, instructing that elephants should be sent to the haveli of Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, telling him to join the imperial family at the tomb.66

  Then Zafar retired into the tomb chamber of his ancestor, to wait and to pray.

  The news that Zafar had finally done what he had threatened to do for so long – to leave the Fort and make for the shrine of Khwaja Qutb – spread through the muhallas of the town like wildfire on the morning of the 17th.

  By mid-morning great streams of people were pouring out of the Ajmeri Gate, while others – wrongly – decided they had less to fear from the British than the Gujars, and took their chances, heading out of the British-occupied Kashmiri Gate. Here many men and teenage boys were shot dead, while the women and children were allowed to proceed only after they had been systematically stripped by the guards of the money, jewellery and bundles they carried.67

  Some of these refugees headed up the same routes – the Karnal and Meerut roads – that the fleeing British had taken four months earlier. Harriet Tytler, who herself had had to flee the town on 11 May, watched them go; almost alone among British observers, she found room in her heart to feel for them in their plight: ‘What an experience it was to behold the myriads of women and children coming out of the Kashmir and Mori Gates,’ she wrote.

  Women who had never seen the outside of their zenana walls or walked but a few steps across their tiny courtyards, surrounded only by their own family or their slaves, now to have to face the gaze of European soldiers as well as their own … I was sorry for the poor things, more especially for the poor high-casted Hindu women to whom it was agonizing pain to be jostled along with sweeperesses and other women of low birth and caste.68

  Zahir Dehlavi’s family anxiously watched the people around them leave throughout the morning of the 17th, unsure of what to do. That evening, however, Nawab Hamid Ali Khan, the leader of Delhi’s Shia community, came to beg the family to come with him and leave the city before it was too late.

  ‘How are you sitting so coolly in your house,’ he asked my father, ‘when the King has left the Fort, and now all his subjects are also leaving the city? For goodness sake, leave your house and flee the city with your family this evening. Can’t you see that killing and looting is going on all over Delhi? I am now going to take my wife and children, and leave this place. Please: put the women of your family with my family in the carriage.’

  Nawab Hamid Ali Khan’s house was next to the Kashmiri Gate, but a month earlier [after the British began shelling the area] he had rented a house next to mine [off Chandni Chowk] and was living there. My father decided to take the Nawab’s advice, and though the sun was now setting, he gave the order that we should leave. In the panic, everyone left in whatever dress they were wearing. My mother was so panicky that she did not carry even a ring other than those she was wearing at the time. At least my wife had kept her wedding clothes which were worth about two thousand five hundred rupees. She also had with her a small case of jewellery. She wrapped all the things in a cotton mattress and rolled it up like a bolster, then spread the mattress in
the bullock rath.

  The party set off through the streets of the city in which they had lived all their lives but which was now almost unrecognisable:

  In the streets there were terrible scenes: as we left we saw the agony and helplessness of the people, as well as their fear and poverty. We saw the plight of the women who had always observed pardah and had never come out like this on the streets, and who were evidently unaccustomed to walking. We heard the howling and crying of the children. It was such a heart-rending scene that only the person who has ever witnessed such a thing can really comprehend it.

  We all – men, women and children – came out of the Delhi Gate, and the ground outside was like a scene from Hell. Thousands of women in pardah with little children, along with their harassed and worried men, were all leaving the city. Nobody was conscious of what sort of condition they were in, or where they were heading, they were just moving. After a lot of trouble and problems, our group reached the Barf Khana [Ice House, situated under what is now Connaught Place]. The whole place had been hired from its owners by Nawab Hamid Ali Khan Sahab. We all spent the night there, glad to be safe and under cover, though none of us had anything to eat.69

  Late that afternoon, Bakht Khan’s troops had finally abandoned their forward positions in Kishenganj which had so seriously worried General Wilson. Now that his rear, the Ridge and the camp, were no longer threatened, the general at long last felt capable of pushing on with some vigour. Though the Burn Bastion still held out, and the western half of the town continued to defy the British, in the eastern half British troops were now making steady progress through the streets, and by the evening of the 17th, just after Zahir had left his house, they had taken up positions along Chandni Chowk.

  As they moved forward, the British troops paused to loot the houses that they passed. The lucky inhabitants were expelled, the unlucky ones killed. Either way, no house was left inhabited behind the advance of the British troops: the conquered parts of the city were left echoingly empty. Maulvi Muhammad Baqar’s son, the poet and critic Muhammad Husain Azad, was one of the luckier ones, at least relatively speaking. Unlike many of the young men of Delhi, he was not shot. He was in his house that evening with his wife and the whole joint family when, according to his later account,