The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  The soldiers of the victorious army suddenly entered the house. They flourished their rifles and shouted: ‘Leave here at once!’ The world turned black before my eyes. A whole houseful of goods was before me and I stood petrified: ‘What shall I take with me?’ All the jewels and jewellery were locked in a box and were thrown into a well. But my eye fell on the packet of [Zauq’s] Ghazals [of which Azad, Zauq’s devoted pupil, was meant to be preparing the critical edition for publication following his master’s death in 1854]. I thought, ‘Muhammad Husain, if God is gracious, and you live, then all these material goods can be restored. But where will another ustad [master] come from, who can compose these ghazals again? While these exist Zauq lives even after his death; if these are lost his name cannot survive either.’

  So I picked up the packet [of Zauq’s verse] and tucked it under my arm. Abandoning a well-furnished home, with twenty-two half dead souls, I left the house – or rather the city. And the words fell from my lips, ‘Hazrat Adam left paradise; and Delhi is paradise too. But if I am Adam’s descendant – why shouldn’t I leave my paradise just as he did?’70

  As Azad’s family limped out of Delhi, a stray bullet or a piece of shrapnel from an exploding shell struck Azad’s year-old baby daughter; she slipped into a coma, and after a few days, she died.

  That night, Azad’s family also took shelter in the same Ice House in which Zahir was sheltering, though neither Azad’s account nor that of Zahir mentions the other. Like Zahir’s family, Azad’s had left in a great panic, but by pooling their resources, they found they had a little flour, ‘which was now as expensive as gold’, and kneaded it on a piece of broken pot. A fire was built of leaves and dry twigs, and from some of the other refugees they borrowed garlic, chilli and salt to make chutney. Despite the conditions and the primitive nature of the food, Azad used to tell his children that he ‘enjoyed the garlic chutney and half-cooked rotis more than any of the finest biryani, kormas or pullao’ that he was to enjoy later in life.71

  The next day bullock carts were found, and the party left for Sonepat under the care of a maulvi. But Azad did not go with them. He had already lost his home and his daughter, but he still had a father. Despite the extraordinary risk, the following day he headed back into Delhi to try to find and help Maulvi Muhammad Baqar, who was now locked up in British custody. Azad somehow managed to track down a Sikh general who was a friend of his father, and who agreed to help him. He also gave him both shelter and a cover by pretending that Azad was his groom. In this disguise, the general led Azad to the field where Baqar and the other prisoners were awaiting their trial and execution. Under these conditions, as Muhammad Baqar was led to the scaffold, father and son exchanged a long last look.

  Soon afterwards, Maulvi Muhammad Baqar was hanged, and Azad, who believed that there was an arrest warrant out for him, was smuggled out of the city and began a life of wandering that would see him spend four years drifting alone and in extreme poverty through the length and breadth of India – to Madras and the Nilgiri Hills, then Lucknow, and eventually to Lahore, carrying his master’s ghazals all the way.

  It was only in 1861, when he managed to secure a low-level job in the postmaster general’s office in Lahore, that he was able to begin rebuilding his life. It was here that he set to work preparing the edition of Zauq’s work he had promised his master he would produce, and which would stand as a monument to a city, and a moment of intellectual and artistic creativity, that had now been utterly destroyed.72

  In the middle of the following morning, 18 September, the sun was completely eclipsed for five minutes. The city darkened ominously for nearly three hours, before the light slowly returned.

  The British soldiers were unnerved by the event since no one had warned them to expect it. But for the Hindus it was an event of far greater significance. Even today in India, some high-caste Hindus will not go outside during an eclipse, and for twenty-four hours either side of the moment of eclipse Hindu temples are all locked and barred. In the syncretic atmosphere of Mughal Delhi, and especially in the Mughal court where Hindus were employed as astrologers, the eclipse was an event of terrifying significance: it was the ultimate ill omen, a signal of extreme divine displeasure.* Although an eclipse was considered the worst possible moment to begin any journey, it was on this occasion taken as indicating that for the last lingering sepoys now was the moment to abandon the hopeless fight, and to escape the doomed city.73

  That evening, as the heavens opened for a late monsoon downpour, the sepoys fled down the Agra road – which was already clogged with trudging Delhiwallahs heading away as fast as they could from the advancing British and their no less violent Sikh, Pathan and Gurkha allies. ‘The darkness worked on their superstitious fears,’ wrote Charles Griffiths, ‘and hastened their flight from the city on which the wrath of the Almighty had descended.’

  That night it was reported that the rebels in great numbers were evacuating the city by the south side, and the Bareilly and Nimach brigades making off in the direction of Gwalior. Certain it was from this period that signs of waning strength appeared among the enemy, and fewer attempts at assault were made on our outposts …

  Few crossed the Bridge of Boats by day owing to it being commanded by our guns. But on the night of the 19th, when sitting in the church compound watching the shells exploding over the Palace and Selimgarh, we heard distinctly, through the intervals of firing, a distant confused hum of voices, like the murmur of a great multitude. The sound came from the direction of the river, and was caused by multitudes of human beings, who, escaping by the Bridge of Boats, to the opposite side, were deserting the city which was so soon to fall into our hands.74

  On the afternoon of the 19th the British finally captured the Burn Bastion, having been repulsed yet again with huge losses the day before. Later that evening they captured the Delhi Bank building, and so positioned themselves for an assault on the Palace the following morning, the 20th.

  The fate of the Delhi refugees of the 17th, 18th and 19th September was every bit as grim as that of their British predecessors in early May. Passing along the same roads, in the same panic, they were attacked and robbed by the same predatory Gujar and Mewati tribes who had stripped the British earlier in the summer. Although there are few surviving contemporary first-person accounts of these Indian refugees surviving, certainly compared to the voluminous British accounts of 11 May which appeared in print within a few months of the end of the Uprising, there still survives among some old Delhi families a rich oral tradition of the misadventures that befell their great-grandparents in 1857. Some of these were collected from old people in the early twentieth century by Khwaja Hasan Nizami in a book called Begmat ke Aansu (Tears of the Begums), finally published in 1952.

  Typical was the story of Mirza Shahzor, who fled Delhi with his pregnant wife, younger sister and mother in a pair of carts ‘soon after Emperor left the court’. Like many of the Mughal refugees, they headed first for the shrine of Qutb Sahib in Mehrauli, where they spent a night. The following morning they set off again, but were attacked and looted by Gujars a few kilometres away near Chhatarpur. The tribesmen took everything they had, but spared their lives. ‘The women were crying,’ remembered Mirza Shahzor. ‘I tried my best to console them. There was a village nearby. My mother would stumble at every step and kept lamenting the fate that was making her see such severe hardships at that age. But the village was inhabited by Muslim Mewaties, who gave us shelter in the communal chaupal at the centre of the village.’

  The villagers took the refugees in, and fed them, but after a few days asked Mirza Shahzor to make some sort of contribution in return:

  ‘Why do you sit all day?’ they asked. ‘Why don’t you do something?’ I said I was happy to work: ‘I come from a martial family. I can fire a gun and known how to wield a sword.’ But at this the villagers started laughing saying, ‘here we don’t need you to fire bullets, but to manage the plough and dig the earth.’ There were tears in my eyes at this and
seeing this the villagers took pity and said, ‘alright, why don’t you look after our fields, and your women can sew things and we will give you a share of the harvest.’ So that was how our lives developed: I would be in the fields all day, chasing birds, and the women sewed clothes at home.75

  For two years they lived with the villagers and suffered as they did: they learned what it was to experience real hunger; monsoon floods nearly washed them away; and with no doctor to attend her, Mirza Shahzor’s wife died in childbirth. Soon after, what remained of the family was able to return to Delhi, to begin a new life on the pension of five rupees a month that the British offered the few surviving members of the imperial family.

  Many others suffered a similar fate. Zafar Sultan was the favourite son of Mirza Babur, the Emperor’s Anglophile younger brother, who was famous for wearing foppish British clothes and for building an English-style bungalow within the Red Fort. On 19 September, as the fall of the Palace drew nearer, he put his blind mother in a bullock cart and got a driver to take them through the Ajmeri Gate and up the road to Karnal. The first night, having successfully evaded both the British and the Gujars, they halted near a village, and fell fast asleep. The following morning they woke to discover that the driver had made off alone, taking the bullocks with him.

  They found shelter in a Jat village, where they were given a meal, but before long the Jats fell on them, suspecting – correctly – that they had brought with them some priceless jewellery. When Zafar Sultan came to, he saw everything had been taken from them, they had been dumped in the jungle, and that his elderly mother, who had been struck on the head with a lathi, was now dying. ‘I asked her how she was, and she said, “I am the sister-in-law of the Emperor of India and look at my fate – I am dying in the jungle, and will not even get a shroud for a burial.” So saying she passed away. I somehow gathered the strength to bury her as well as I could.’

  Zafar Sultan became a fakir, travelling from city to city. He went to Bombay, and thence to Mecca, where he lived for a decade on the charity of pilgrims. Eventually he returned, via Karachi, to Delhi, ‘because I could not forget this city … Here I worked as thelewala, carting bricks to help build the new railway, and eventually saved up enough to buy my own brick cart’. He refused the offer of a government pension because he thought it was better ‘to earn a living by hard work than to survive on a pension’.

  When Khwaja Hasan Nizami came across Mirza Zafar Sultan in 1917, he was a deaf old man. His identity had been revealed when he had been taken to court after getting into a fight ‘with a rich intoxicated Punjabi businessman’ who had taken out his riding whip and started beating the old man after his brick cart had collided with the businessman’s car. He had taken the first few blows quietly, but finally had mustered the courage to resist, and hit the businessman so hard he broke his nose. ‘The rich do not think anything of the poor,’ Zafar Sultan told the court. ‘But sixty years ago this man’s forefathers would have been my slaves. And not just them, but the whole of Hindustan used to obey my orders. I have not forgotten my lineage, so how could I tolerate such insults? Just look how that coward ran away when I hit him. It is not easy to endure a Timurid’s slap.’76

  On 20 September, the British advanced on the Red Fort from their front-line position in the ruins of the Delhi Bank. During the night of the 19th the guns lined up in front of the Palace were spiked, and at ten o’clock on the morning of the 20th an explosion party ran forward under covering fire to place the powder bags under the gates. Unlike the taking of the Kashmiri Gate, at the Palace there was virtually no resistance, and it became obvious that most of the Palace’s defenders had already fled, except for a few determined jihadis who had preferred to die rather than hand over the seat of their emperor – Caliph of the Age, He who is Surrounded by Hosts of Angels – without a struggle.77

  Edward Campbell was one of those commanding the assault, but much the fullest account was left by his deputy, a young army captain named Fred Maisey. ‘After an interval of suspense, the powder bags blew up with a tremendous explosion,’ he wrote to his mother and sisters in Switzerland. ‘Half of the huge gate fell heavily over, then with a shout in we all went: officers, sappers, Europeans, natives, all pell mell, and with a want of order which had there been any steady resistance, would have made a terrible mess.’

  I tried to get one or two officers to get their men into something like order – but away they all scampered, and all I or anyone else could do was to scamper also. There was some brisk musketry firing in the arched passage leading to the first courtyard and sundry Pandies, who were idiotic enough to fight, were slain. There was more danger from our own bullets than from theirs, so we were glad to get out of the passage and into the open.

  I went to the left as that was the way towards Selimgarh, and someone said that the King was in that direction. I led the party accompanied by an Afghan sirdar, Meer Khan, who had aided our side with a body of very irregular horse. Such a handsome, black bearded eagle-eyed fellow, and so excited at the thought of capturing the King (whom he would most infallibly have killed). We went plunging along through several gateways and narrow streets, for you must understand that there is a complete town within the palace walls. We expected every moment to meet with a volley, but we only saw two men on our route – both of whom our Afghan friend fired on and dropped like partridges …

  [Eventually] I caught hold of a man who peeped out of a doorway and made him come along by my side. He was not armed and appeared to be a bullock driver. I told him if he would stay near me and show us the way and give good information, I would see that he would come to no harm – but my guarantees that day were worthless. My Afghan friend was at my heels. I told him that the old fellow was my prisoner and that I had promised him that he should not be hurt. The man rubbed his head on the ground and thanked him as well as his fright would allow him. The poor wretch ran along by my side pointing out the way. We had scarcely gone ten yards when I felt a whiz and a flash, and down fell my prisoner shot through the body. That rascally Afghan had shot him, and almost set me alight in doing so. I was very angry – but the sirdar was quite independent of me, and could not understand why a promise made to a badmash caught in the enemy’s stronghold should be binding.

  After a while, Maisey and his companions heard firing from the centre of the Palace enclosure, and decided to join the centre party, as their part of the Palace seemed completely deserted.

  We found the party – men, officers and horses all jumbled together, brought to a standstill by huge metal studded gates [of the Naqqar Khana Darwaza] strongly padlocked. What with bangs with heavy beams, shots from muskets, and other violent measures, the gates were forced, and then, with a rush, we went pell mell into the central square of the palace, at the far side of which is the Diwan-i Am, or Public Hall of Audience. The court was full of looted carriages, buggies, carts, palanquins. A gun or two was there, evidently hastily abandoned.

  On we pressed to the Diwan-i Am which we found had been made into a sort of barrack. There were some fifteen sick or wounded men there whom the men sorely wanted to fly at. However, the officers held the men in check and we began to question the fellows. One young Musalman, evidently very ill, was close to me and I asked him where the troops were, and where was the king … The man begged for his life, and I told him I would protect him if he could come with me, on the condition that he disclosed where the King was. He declared the King and his wife and younger sons were in the Private Apartments which were in the next or innermost court. The rascal lied. The King had gone days before and he knew it well. However we believed him. Then a shout was raised to search the next court.

  Just then up came Black Beard, and no sooner did he see the Pandies than he flew at them with his men. No one could stop him and indeed I do not think the men wished to. As to the officers, such was the crash and confusion that we scarcely knew what was going on and we were quite powerless even had we known. A few screams and groans told the tale. I left the man I
had spoken to alive and in the care of some privates – for I could not stay there when all were rushing ahead – but he too was afterwards killed. I heard that out of 12 or 15 men, Meer Khan had himself killed eight. I never saw such a bloodthirsty savage.78

  It was a measure of the secrecy with which Hodson had conducted his negotiations that no one in the storming party seemed to know that the Emperor was no longer in his palace, although Hodson was in direct communication with Mirza Ilahe Bakhsh, and knew the exact whereabouts of almost all the senior members of the imperial family. Having broken through the Lal Pardah, the British troops then poured into the inner courtyards, running down the cloister arcades searching for the royal family, who they believed still to be there.

  Soon the armed heel and the ring of weapons clashed through the cloistered precincts of the Diwan-i Khas and within the still more exclusive chambers where never before had English feet trodden: the private rooms of the Mughal Emperors, the bowers of Nur Mahal and odalisques unnumbered, store rooms, pantries, cubbies, baths, all were ransacked by the outside barbarian without any thought at first save of discovering the King and his family. But we soon found that ‘the cupboard was bare’, and then the genie of plunder arose and such a scene ensued as I fancy has never yet been equalled.

  A motley crowd of troops and followers ransacked every hole and corner, turning everything topsy-turvey (themselves included very often) in the search for loot. Muskets were being fired right and left to force the locks off doors. As the men got more and more scattered, the bullets flew more and more avidly, and the risk was considerable. I never saw such confusion. All sorts of loot had been brought into the palace by the mutineers and presented to the king and members of the court, and this and the palace furniture, men and women’s clothing, dancing girls’ frippery, vessels of food and drink, rich hangings and trappings, books and manuscripts had all been tumbled higgledy piggledy into various small rooms about, and were all retumbled and tossed over and over again by our excited soldiery.