Six or eight rebels are hanged every morning and they are being brought in daily from the surrounding villages. A resident of Delhi, in peaceful times, might recognise in them the betinselled equestrians who (dis)graced the Chandnee Chowk, and sported their figures every Sunday evening. But how changed! Their features may be recognised but such a set of miserable crestfallen wretches, were never before beheld in the city of palaces.33
Subsequent issues of the paper kept Wagentrieber’s readers up to date with the ongoing slaughter: ‘Fourteen rebels were strung up opposite the Kotwalee yesterday morning,’ observed an approving Wagentrieber a couple of weeks after his return, ‘and some more this morning.’ This was not nearly enough for Wagentrieber, who attacked Saunders in his columns for his weakness and leniency:
We have one man in Delhi, so full of the milk of human kindness that whilst there is a universal cry for vengeance against the King of Delhi and his whole progeny for their inhuman cruelties and barbarities, his ‘bowels yearn’ for the innocent son and heir, and in the fullness of his compassion for the little boy of eighteen [Mirza Jawan Bakht] he endeavours to lessen the indignities the little urchin is exposed to … [He] never approaches the royal prisoner without the most profound reverence.
Only Metcalfe, he wrote, was going about the business of retribution and hanging with the ‘appropriate energy … under the immediate instruction of Sir Theophilus we have won a good riddance of the budmashes [rascals], either by their non-appearance in the city, incarceration or – by the best of all means – the gallows’.34
On Sunday, 27 September, a special thanksgiving service was held by Padre Rotton in the Diwan i-Khas. Rotton preached from the text, ‘What shall I render unto the Lord, for all the benefits which he has done to me?’
As far as Rotton was concerned, the service represented a thanksgiving for deliverance of Good from the hands of Evil: ‘It would hardly be possible to conceive anything more impressive than this assembly,’ he wrote, ‘a small but victorious Christian force assembled within the Imperial Palace of the ancient Moslem capital of Hindustan, lining the four sides of that marble hall wherein the King and his advisers had not long before convened, plotting and determining evil against the British cause.’
And now the councils of evil men had been brought to naught, and every foul purpose of theirs completely frustrated, the triumphant army – the means which God had been pleased to employ in order to bring about these gracious ends – stood devoutly in the Divine presence, ascribing unto Him praise, and saying glory and honour, power and dominion are thine.35
One of the few women present, Mrs Coopland, took Rotton’s view of events to an even more perverse extreme: ‘In this splendid hall,’ she wrote, ‘which once echoed to the mandates of a despotic Emperor, with sole power of life and death over millions of submissive slaves, now echoed the peaceful prayers of a Christian people.’36
Early the following morning, a column of troops moved off towards Agra in belated pursuit of Bakht Khan and his rebel sepoys, though by this stage only 2,600 men of the Delhi Field Force were left to carry on the fight to Agra, and hence to the last great battle of 1857, the relief of the besieged British Residency in Lucknow. Their first trial was simply crossing the deserted city: ‘The march was simply awful,’ wrote Richard Barter.
Our advance guard consisting of Cavalry and Artillery had burst and squashed the dead bodies which lay swelled to an enormous size in the Chandni Chowk, and the stench was fearful. Men and officers were sick all round and I thought we would never get through the city. It was a ride I don’t care ever to take again, and the horse felt it as much as I did, for he snorted and shook as he slid rather than walked over the abominations with which the street was covered.37
Fred Roberts was equally horrified. ‘The march through Delhi in the early morning light was a gruesome proceeding. On our way to the Lahori Gate by Chandni Chowk, not a sound was to be heard but the falling of our own footsteps; not a living creature was to be seen.’
Dead bodies were strewn about in all directions in every attitude that the death struggle had caused them to assume, in every stage of decomposition. In many instances the positions of the bodies were appallingly life-like. Some lay with their arms uplifted as if beckoning, and indeed the whole scene was weird and terrible beyond description … The atmosphere was unimaginably disgusting, laden as it was with the most noxious and sickening odours.38
Though the departing troops were heading back into conflict, and many would lose their lives in the fierce battles that lay ahead in Lucknow, few of the column envied the Prize Agents or the small garrison that was left behind in the stink of this City of the Dead.
One of those who had just received the bad news that he was to stay in Delhi was the young Lieutenant Edward Ommaney. A promising linguist, Ommaney had been part of Nicholson’s Moveable Column and had written in his diary of his horror at the latter’s brutal treatment not only of the mutineers but even of his unfortunate cook boys. Since then, however, he had himself been scarred and brutalised by the violence he had seen and participated in; and his diary, like Edward Vibart’s letters, oscillates between sensitive observation and moments of startling savagery.
Indeed, he was himself aware of the changes that the daily violence were bringing about in the British army of occupation: ‘How little the death of anyone affects people,’ he wrote in his diary for 1 November, after hearing about the death of John Clifford, whose sister had been murdered with Annie Jennings and whose bloodstained appearance during the capture of the city had so shocked Charles Griffiths. ‘[Clifford was] so young and full of spirits when I last saw him a few days ago. I was telling some fellows [about Clifford’s death] and all they said was, “Oh, I heard somebody telling so, poor fellow,” and that is all. One dies, and only intimate friends mourn – and how few they are.’39 Yet the same man was capable of writing only a few weeks later, ‘coming back, we thrashed every native who did not salaam’.40
Two days before the departure of the columns, Ommaney had received orders from Saunders that he was to be Zafar’s jailer. His first job had been to find a secure prison for the former monarch within the walls of the Red Fort. He had just found a suitable-looking house at the back of the bazaar – formerly the residence of a junior shahzada named Mirza Nili – when he was told that in addition to Zafar and his immediate suite, he would also be in charge of eighty-two women, forty-seven children and two eunuchs of the imperial harem. These had just been brought into the Fort from Humayun’s Tomb in a procession of fourteen heavily loaded gharries (carts), and placed ‘in strict confinement’ under Ommaney’s charge.41 The following day, before he had even been able to begin thinking about how he was to feed or organise sanitary arrangements for this many people, cholera broke out among his royal prisoners, claiming the life of the first of the begums the following night.
The new quarters of Zafar and his family were both filthy and basic in the extreme: ‘we entered a small, dirty, low room with white-washed walls’, wrote Mrs Coopland when she took her turn to come to stare at the prisoner. ‘There on a low charpoy cowered a thin, small old man, dressed in a dirty white suit of cotton, and rolled in shabby wraps and razais [quilts]. At our entrance he laid aside the hookah he had been smoking and he, who had formerly thought it an insult for anyone to sit in his presence, began salaaming us in the most abject manner, and saying he was “burra kooshee” [very glad] to see us.’42
‘He is confined to a little room containing only one charpoy,’ observed another visitor, ‘and is allowed but two annas (3d) a day for his food. He is treated with great disrespect by the officers and soldiers, though Mr Saunders is civil to him.’
The Begums and princesses of his house share his prison with him. These unfortunate ladies, to whom no guilt could be attached, were exposed to the gaze of officers and soldiers who could go into the room where they were at their pleasure. To a native woman of the very lowest class this is an unutterable shame. [Whenever any man ente
red] they all turned their faces to the wall.43
Many of Zafar’s British visitors actively relished the humiliation they could now inflict on the family simply by breaking the women’s purdah: ‘It seemed absurd to humour thus their silly prejudices,’ wrote Mrs Coopland, ‘when they had spared no European in their power any indignity or insult.’44 In addition, Zafar was forbidden access to his hakim, whom he continually asked for, as well as his dhobi and barber.45 Even John Lawrence, who in most matters acted as a moderating influence on British excesses at this period, advised Saunders not to be too solicitous to the ex-King: ‘Neither the King, nor any member of the family, deserve anything at our hands,’ he wrote in December. ‘In the present state of feeling it would be a great mistake for us to show him any consideration.’46
Whatever injustice this implied, Lawrence was quite correct in his estimation of British public opinion: when Ommaney took Mirza Jawan Bakht out for an elephant ride in Daryaganj, hoping to extract information about the origins of the Uprising from the boy by separating him from his parents, the Lahore Chronicle lambasted the Delhi administration for ‘keeping the King in luxury’ and started a campaign calling for Zafar to be hanged and his city levelled: as if it were not bad enough for ‘the King [to be] spared and living in state’, harrumphed the Chronicle in an editorial,
[now] his youngest son is playing the prince in this city, still reeking with English blood, pounding up and down Chandni Chowk with an English officer behind him. Oh! God that an Englishman should be found base enough to accept the task, and that an English officer should be found playing the part of a lackey to the spawn of the viper!47
The campaign to flatten Delhi proved especially popular with the Chronicle’s readers: ‘Having just seen your issue of the 18th instant,’ wrote one reader, ‘in which you most properly, as in most of your late issues, uphold the necessity for the destruction of Delhi “in toto” and no sparing of the Jumma Masjid etc for fear of offending the Moslem, I consider it a duty to my country, as it should be of all Englishmen, to assist you in the national cry of “A bloody revenge” and “Down with Delhi”.’48 The campaign also struck a chord among the British troops in Delhi. Hugh Chichester was typical. ‘There are several mosques in the city most beautiful to look at,’ he wrote to his father. ‘But I should like to see them all destroyed. The rascally brutes desecrated our churches and graveyards and I do not think we should have any regard for their stinking religion.’49 Charles Raikes thought the Jama Masjid should be saved, but converted into a church, ‘and name each stone after a Christian martyr’.50
Mrs Coopland, not uncharacteristically, was even more outspoken. ‘I could not but think it was a disgrace to England’, she wrote in her memoirs, ‘that this city, instead of being razed to the ground, should be allowed to stand, with its blood-stained walls and streets – an everlasting memorial to the insult offered to England’s honour.’
Many would forget this insult; but it cannot, and ought not to be forgotten … If it were destroyed, being their most sacred city, and one that reminds them of their fallen grandeur, it would do more to manifest our abhorrence of their crimes, and our indignation against them, than the hanging of hundreds. Delhi ought to be raized, and on its ruins a church or monument should be erected, inscribed with a list of all the victims of the mutinies – if it be possible to gather all the names of ALL those who were massacred – and the funds for its erection should be raised by a fine levied on every native implicated in the mutinies.51
Amid such self-righteous hysteria, only one man dared call publicly for Zafar to be better treated. Henry Layard, the former MP for Aylesbury, came to visit Zafar and was horrified by what he saw. ‘Many persons regret that the King of Delhi has not fallen in just punishment for his offence,’ Layard told an audience in London. ‘I saw the King of Delhi; and I will leave the meeting to judge, when it has heard me, whether he is punished.’
I will not give any opinion as to whether the manner we are treating him is worthy of a great nation. I saw that broken-down old man – not in a room, but in a miserable hole of his palace – lying on a bedstead, with nothing to cover him but a miserable tattered coverlet. As I beheld him, so remembrance of his former greatness seemed to rise in his mind. He rose with difficulty from his couch; showed me his arms which were eaten into by disease and by flies – partly from want of water; and he said, in a lamentable voice, that he had not enough to eat. Is that the way, as Christians, we ought to treat a King? I saw his women too, all huddled up in a corner with their children; and I was told that all was allowed for their support was 16s a day! Is that not punishment enough for one that has occupied a throne?52
Ommaney, who firmly believed that the British had been too soft on Delhi and should have exacted a more violent retribution, was not readily inclined to ameliorate the conditions of the imprisonment. Yet to his own surprise he slowly came to be fond of Zafar, whom he thought looked ‘very like Sir C Napier’. Indeed, he quickly concluded that Zafar was so old, senile and distraught that ‘he was perfectly unaccountable for his actions’ during the Uprising.53 Before long the elderly King began to return his jailer’s unexpected affection: by mid-October, Ommaney was recording in his diary how Zafar ‘appeared as if he was going to embrace me, [but instead] put his right arm on my left shoulder and patted me’.54
Ommaney also grew to be increasingly intrigued by Zinat Mahal – who, he said, henpecked her ailing and senile husband; but of the sixteen harem women at his disposal, only she seemed to look after the old man.55 Zafar, wrote Ommaney in his diary, ‘is kept greatly in order by his favourite wife, Zeenut Mehul, who if she is speaking and he puts in a word, tells him to keep quiet as she is speaking. He is always wanting trivial things, which if they do not please him, he throws away, which at times, enrages the Ex-Queen who holds the purse. His own servants and sons treat him with the greatest respect’.*56
As for Zinat Mahal herself, he wrote in his diary that ‘She talks prettily, but with difficult language for a novice.’ Later he added, ‘Zeenut Mehul I have never seen, [though] one day I saw her hand and arm which she showed to let me see part of her clothing at the time she wanted money. She talks nicely, but I believe she is not good looking. She strikes me as being a very clever and intriguing woman.’57
Only one member of the family did Ommaney instantly dislike. This was Zinat Mahal’s beloved son, Mirza Jawan Bakht. Spoiled and callous, Jawan Bakht soon proved himself more than willing to give evidence about any of his family’s activities during the Uprising. Early on in his captivity, Jawan Bakht laughed when he saw Ommaney ‘thrash’ Zafar’s tailor, who had entered the prison without permission. The young prince was warned by Ommaney ‘that if he laughed when I punished a man, he would probably get the same’.58 Within a short time he was offering to show Ommaney the whereabouts of his mother’s buried treasure in return for 100 cheroots, which Ommaney procured from the Parsi merchants Cowasjee and Co., who had now moved from the Ridge into the Fort bazaar.59 ‘He [Jawan Bakht] is apt to get very familiar if he fancies he is encouraged,’ wrote Ommaney in his diary. ‘He possesses in my opinion, not the slightest spark of honor and affection, according to English ideas of those qualities.’
He has told me of many things which implicate his father in the rebellion, he has told of the jewels and property of his mother, who declared she had none, indeed he has as much told me that his mother is a liar. After his showing his brother’s treasures, he in fear and trembling went to his father and mother, telling lies as to where he had been. He has no affection for his brothers, calling them Budmashes. What more can be required to show the degeneracy of the once proud and powerful race of Taimoor than seeing this young descendant traitor.60
By the middle of November, news came through from Calcutta that the details of the military commission to try all the princes and nobles of Delhi, including the King, had all been finalised. Shortly afterwards Major J. F. Harriott arrived in Delhi as Deputy Judge Advocate General to begin work
on the various trials. Ommaney was instructed to help Harriott with the translations of the documents that had been found in the Palace. These, it was assumed, would provide the evidence for the conviction of the entire Mughal family and their court.61 It was also hoped that the trial of Zafar, now seen by many of the British as the central conspirator behind the Uprising, would act as a sort of Commission of Enquiry into the causes of the Uprising.
‘Judging from Harriott’s appearance and manner,’ wrote Ommaney after their first meeting on 27 November, ‘none of the prisoners have much chance of getting off.’62
However bad the conditions suffered by the royal family, they were preferable to the situation of the ordinary people of Delhi, most of whom were now dotted around the surrounding countryside, sheltering in tombs and ruins, foraging for wild fruits or begging for food as best they could. Only a very few still remained within the city walls, and most of those were starving. According to Charles Griffiths:
The tai-khanas, or underground rooms of houses, scattered all over the city, were found to be filled with human beings – those who, by age or infirmity, had been unable to join in the general exodus which had taken place during the last days of the siege. Hundreds of old men, women and children, were found huddled together, halfstarved, in these places, the most wretched looking object I ever saw.
There was no means of feeding them in the city, where their presence would have raised a plague; so by orders of the General, they were turned out of the gates of Delhi. It was a melancholy sight seeing them troop out of the town, hundreds passing through the Lahore Gate … We were told that provision had been collected for their use at a place some miles distant, and it is to be hoped the poor creatures were saved from starvation; but we had our doubts on the subject, and, knowing how callous with regard to human suffering the authorities had become, I fear that many perished from want and exposure.
The Last Mughal Page 46