The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  From Jhajjar, he walked to Panipat, where he was reunited with the rest of his family at the house of his aunt. But again, after a few days, the English surrounded the town on all sides and started conducting house-to-house searches, looking for mutineers and Mughal nobles and courtiers. Zahir had a narrow escape, as he happened to be out of the house when the English broke in, but his uncle, brother and brother-in-law were all taken away and hanged.87 Zahir escaped at night, in the company of Jang Baz Khan, another former attendant at the Fort; avoiding the British dragnet, they managed to cross the Ganges and make it to Bareilly. Here they finally succeeded in catching up with the fleeing rebel army, only for both boys promptly to be arrested as British spies. They were about to be taken away and shot, when Mir Fateh Ali, a Delhi nobleman who had thrown in his lot with the rebels, happened to ride past and recognised them:

  He saw me, and jumping off the horse, with his sword cut the ropes with which I and Jang Baz had been fastened, held our hands and took us to that General Sahab [Bakht Khan], and abused and scolded him. He said, ‘you traitors, you ruined the house of my King, and ruined Delhi. You destroyed his subjects and rendered them homeless and still you continue with your mischief. These are the servants of the King, and the poor fellows are running away to save their lives from the English, and you are treating them as informers. If I had not come this way you would have killed these innocent men.’88

  Narrowly escaping arrest by the British a third time in Rampur, Zahir managed to find shelter and a position as poet and courtier in the durbar of the Maharaja of Jaipur. From here he made his way to Hyderabad, where, like Sarvar ul-Mulk, he eventually made a new life in the service of the Nizam.89

  It was here, in the first years of the twentieth century, that Zahir finally wrote up ‘in the language of Zauq, Ghalib and Momin’ the notes he had kept of his life in, and escape from, Mughal Delhi: ‘My age is past seventy now,’ he wrote at the end of his manuscript. ‘I have become weak in body and mind, and my memory is beginning to go. I am hard of hearing and can no longer see so well. My heart has been broken by the tragedies I have witnessed.’90

  Zahir Dehlavi never saw Delhi again. He died in 1911 and was buried in exile in Hyderabad.

  Zahir’s life on the run was typical of the fate of most of the salatin and courtiers of Zafar’s durbar. Few avoided British search parties for long, not least because of the generous bounty put on the heads of everyone associated with the Red Fort.

  Throughout October and November search parties were sent out to track down the members of the royal house. The first to be brought in were two of Zafar’s younger children, Mirza Bakhtawar Shah, aged eighteen, and Mirza Meandoo, aged seventeen. The two had commanded the Meerut troops and the regiment called the ‘Alexander Pultun’ respectively. They were promptly tried by Major Harriott and sentenced to death.

  ‘Waterfield came down here to tell the two prisoners that they were to be executed tomorrow,’ noted Ommaney in his diary for 12 October.

  I was with him. They did not appear to feel it at all, they only wished to see their women and children. I took Meerza Meandoo’s two women and a child to see their husband and father for a few minutes … [The following day] they were taken to the ground in a bullock cart, which marched behind the artillery which led the way. On arrival at the place of execution [the sand bank in front of the Palace] the column was drawn in line and prisoners brought out of the cart and blindfolded. 12 riflemen were then ordered to within 12 paces.91

  The Gurkhas of the firing squad deliberately fired low, however, so as to ensure a slow and painful death, and the officer in charge eventually had to finish the two off with his pistol. ‘Nothing could have been more ill favoured and dirty than the wretched victims,’ wrote Charles Griffiths, ‘but they met their fate in silence and with the most dogged composure.’92

  Most of Zafar’s sons and grandsons met the same end, sooner or later. As Major William Ireland noted, the princes ‘had every opportunity of making off. It is surprising, however, how many were caught hovering about the neighbourhood; [in the end] twenty-nine sons of the royal house were taken and put to death’.93 So many members of the royal family met dire ends that Ghalib changed the traditional Urdu name for the Palace – the Auspicious Fort – to the Inauspicious Fort.94

  Only two sons of Zafar are known to have succeeded in making their escape. At the same time as Mirza Bakhtawar Shah and Mirza Meandoo were arrested, two other princes – Mirza Abdulla and Mirza Qwaish – were picked up, still sheltering hopelessly in Humayun’s Tomb, and kept under a Sikh guard. According to the Delhi oral tradition recorded by the Urdu writer Arsh Taimuri in the early years of the twentieth century,

  The Sikh Risaldar felt pity for these young men, and asked them, ‘Why are you standing here?’ They replied, ‘the sahib has asked us to stand here.’ He glared at them and said, ‘Have mercy on your lives. When he returns he will kill you; run whichever direction you can. Beware and don’t stop even to take a breath.’ Saying this, the Risaldar turned his back and both princes ran away in different directions. After some time, Hodson came back and saw that the prisoners had fled. He asked the Risaldar, ‘Where did those men go?’ ‘Who?’ the Risaldar asked, as if he was ignorant. Hodson said, ‘The princes who were standing here.’ He said, ‘I don’t know. What princes?’

  Mirza Qwaish went straight to Nizamuddin to his brother-in-law and told him that he had escaped from the custody of Hodson. His brother said, ‘Brother, run away from here.’ So he got his head shaved, tied a cloth on the head and wrapped a loin-cloth around his waist; and thus changing his appearance into a fakir, managed to reach Udaipur [in Rajasthan]. There he met one of Maharaja’s eunuchs who also came from Delhi. The eunuch appealed to the Maharaja that a dervish had come, and if some salary is fixed for him then he would stay and keep praying for your life and wealth. The Maharaja granted the wish and fixed for him two rupees per day. After the mutiny he lived for 32 years. He spent his entire life in Udaipur, and was popularly known as Mian Sahib.

  Hodson continued his search for Mirza Qwaish and searched every nook and corner, but could not find him. The government even released a poster for his arrest and announced a huge reward. Allured by this, several people went to Udaipur, and with the help of the Kotwal of the city reached the house where Mirza Qwaish was living in disguise, but he never fell into their hands, and died a free man in Udaipur.

  Mirza Abdullah meanwhile lived in the princely state of Tonk in extremely difficult conditions, roamed about as a tattered beggar in a pathetic condition and finally died in the same state.95

  Once they were arrested there was no clear policy on what should happen to the various princes. Those who could be shown to have been in any way implicated in the Uprising were immediately hanged, but that still left large numbers of princes who were not obviously guilty of any crime other than that of belonging by birth to the Mughal dynasty. The records of the British administration in Delhi at this period, preserved intact in the Delhi Commissioner’s Office archive, show the arbitrary and astonishingly chaotic nature of the British response to this problem.96 Some of these princes were hanged, others transported to the new imperial gulag set up on the hot and impossibly humid Andaman Islands, some sent into internal exile. Most were imprisoned in Agra, Kanpur or Allahabad, where large numbers died within two years owing to the harsh conditions of their imprisonment. These included ‘a cripple, a boy of 12 years of age, and a very old man’.

  A review of some of these cases was held by Saunders in April 1859 on orders from John Lawrence. The Delhi Commissioner had to admit that for almost all of the imprisoned princes and salatin ‘the enquiries I have made have not resulted in bringing blame to any of the above parties’, and it was impossible in most cases ‘to prove any overt act of rebellion’.

  None of the prisoners have been proved guilty of any more serious offence than that of being members of the ex-King’s family. In the eyes of many this would be considered sufficient to warrant
them severe punishment for it is notorious that the whole of the House of Taimur were (as might very naturally have been expected) elated with the prospect of their dynasty being once more in the ascendant and so took a very zealous and active part in the hostilities and dreadful scenes which were enacted in the palace.

  The retribution which has fallen upon the members of the house has however been severe, and the mortality among the prisoners whose cases have come before the commission it will be seen has been very great [annexed was a list of fifteen princes who had died in prison in the previous eighteen months]. I therefore beg to recommend that the surviving prisoners be removed to a distance from Delhi to Rangoon where they are not likely to acquire any local influence, or Benares which is a Hindu city, or Multan if it be considered necessary that they should remain under the charge of the Punjab government.97

  It was at this point that the full chaos of the penal regime became apparent, as it strained to cope with the vast number of captives imprisoned after the Uprising. Successive prisons sent letters to Saunders denying having any of the prisoners they were on record as having received; prisoners exiled to Burma turned out to have been sent instead to the Andamans or to Karachi; and the death toll in only two years turned out to be much higher even than previously realised. One unfortunate group of salatin thought to be imprisoned in Agra, and then sought for in Kanpur, were eventually found to have been in Allahabad Jail, but recently had moved to Calcutta for forwarding to the Andamans; they were on the point of embarking there when they were sent instead into exile in Karachi at the other end of India. In the end, the survivors – including several who had not been arrested and were living peaceably in Delhi – were divided between a small number who were sent to Karachi, and the great majority of the male salatin who were exiled to Moulmein in Burma.

  None was allowed to settle in Delhi, even if they could establish their complete innocence, though five of the Karachi princes later ‘absconded’ and were believed to have made it back to the Mughal capital incognito.98

  It was not just the royal family which the British were intent on arresting and bringing to trial. Most of the local landowners had sat on the fence throughout the Uprising, and while attempting to placate both sides, had supported neither. Nevertheless, neutrality was taken by the British to mean guilt, and one by one, the nawabs and rajas of Zafar’s court were brought in, imprisoned, tried and hanged.

  Ghalib’s friend Nawab Muzaffar ud-Daula was arrested in Alwar with two other leading Delhi noblemen and hanged near Gurgaon ‘as the collector of the district said there was no reason to send them back to Delhi and so executed them there’.99 The Shia leader Nawab Hamid Ali Khan, who had left Delhi with Zahir Dehalvi’s family, was hunted down near Karnal. Hakim Mohammad Abdul Haq, the agent of the Raja of Ballabgarh, and Nawab Mohammad Khan, Mirza Khizr Sultan’s mukhtar, who had commanded a wing of the rebel army at the two battles of the Hindun Bridge and at Badli ki Serai, were arrested together ‘in the territory of the Nawab of Jhajjar’, and after being brought back to Delhi for trial ‘suffered the extreme penalty of the law’ on 25 November.100 The Farrukhnagar Nawab was brought in from his palace and turned out to be an opium addict, so that he suffered terrible withdrawal symptoms when his supply was peremptorily stopped under Ommaney’s no-nonsense prison regime. He was later hanged.101

  Theo Metcalfe went personally to arrest the Nawab of Jhajjar, who had refused him shelter on the first week of the Uprising. Ommaney was particularly impressed by the Jhajjar Nawab’s bearing and bravery, describing him as ‘a fine looking man, stout and rather handsome’.102 He was also moved when news came through of his death sentence: ‘the two young sons of the Jhujjur Nawab on seeing their father, the little fellows cried very much, a striking and still a painful scene … I felt pity for the Nawab; he was a fine looking man and bore his sentence and death very well. His servants made low salaams when he left for execution’.103

  Ommaney was not alone in being moved by the hanging of all these noblemen. Another witness, Mrs Muter, was particularly impressed by the ‘startling justice’ and logic of the Jhajjar Nawab’s defence in court, arguing that ‘it was England who had armed and trained the ruffians who had brought the calamity on the land; and it was not fair to expect him to compel that obedience in his followers which the rulers of the country and his judges had failed in compelling among their own’.

  The Prince met his fate on the gallows with a calmness, fortitude, and gentlemanly bearing that inspired my husband, who commanded the escort, with the greatest respect. More melancholy still was the death of the Rajah [of Ballabgarh], whose sympathies as a Hindoo were probably as much with the English as with the Moslem Emperor. Gentle in manner, and young and handsome in person, it was a hard fate of this noble to be placed in circumstances wherein every path was fraught with peril and to be tried when death was the award of any act hostile to our rule. There was something touching in the last words he spoke before his judges: ‘I was securely seated on a goodly bough of a flourishing tree, and my own act has sawn asunder the branch on which I rested’.104

  Theo Metcalfe soon proved himself one of the most enthusiastic bounty hunters and hangmen. His desire for revenge seems to have continually grown ever since he reached the British camp at the end of his wanderings; and by October he even went so far as to erect a gallows in Metcalfe House. There he strung up from the charred beams any Indian he took to be an offender – an explicit statement of retribution for the destruction of his family’s seat and the betrayals he believed he had personally suffered. One case recorded in the Delhi Gazetteer concerned a village that had given up one of Theo’s servants to the rebels. In retaliation, Theo is said to have summarily shot twenty-one of the leading villagers.105

  From his new home in Zinat Mahal’s magnificent Lal Kuan haveli, Theo terrorised the region around Delhi, swooping down on groups of refugees sheltering in tombs and in shrines, and hanging any men he fancied had been involved in the Uprising.106 According to a letter published in The Times in January 1858, Metcalfe was ‘every day trying and hanging all he can catch … he is held in great dread by the natives’. ‘Metcalfe went on a shooting spree,’ noted Zahir Dehlavi. ‘Whenever he spotted a young man he would shoot him there and then with his pistol, without any reason or questioning of right and wrong.’107

  Indeed, so frightening was Theo’s reputation that he soon became a sort of Delhi bogeyman whose name alone was enough to cause terror. According to the formidable Mrs Coopland,

  When I was in Delhi he was busy hunting out, trying and hanging mutineers and murderers: he had a lynx eye for detecting culprits. One day, when passing General Penny’s house, amongst a guard of sawars, he detected a murderer, and instantly singled him out, tried and condemned him; he also found out poor Mr Fraser’s murderer, and had him hanged. One day a native jeweller came to offer his wares to Mrs Garstin who thinking he charged too much, said ‘I will send you to Metcalfe Sahib;’ whereupon the man bolted in such a hurry that he left his treasures behind and never again showed his face.108

  This was a period when daily hangings and murders were the norm rather than the exception, and were looked upon by the British with something approaching boredom. So while the details remain hazy, the fact that Theo was singled out for his readiness to shoot and hang implies that he was believed responsible for a quite exceptional number of arbitrary killings. Rumours of his excesses even began to reach Sir John Lawrence in Lahore, who quickly became concerned at the reports that ‘civil officers [are] hanging at their own will and pleasure’. Before long Lawrence began to make enquiries as to whether Theo needed reining in, or even to be suspended from the service. ‘If what I have heard is at all true,’ wrote Lawrence to Saunders, ‘it is our duty to interfere and not allow Metcalfe the power of life and death. [My informants] seemed to feel strongly that his fervor is opposed to the just deliberation required in a Special Commisioner, and that the sooner the direct power of death is taken from him the better for the int
erests both of the people and of our administration.’109

  The more Lawrence heard, the more anxious he became: ‘He [Theo] has good soldierly qualities,’ Lawrence wrote to Saunders, ‘and distinguished himself at the storm of Delhi. But he is wrong-headed and injudicious, and just now more particularly so, owing to the exasperations he feels against the Mussalmen. It is very difficult to manage him … Metcalfe’s parents were among my oldest and best friends. Personally I would be glad to help him; but there are higher considerations than even these.’110

  Edward Campell’s job as Prize Agent meant he was also involved in the work of vengeance, but he showed much less enthusiasm for the task than his increasingly violent and bloodthirsty brother-in-law. He wrote regularly to GG from his various excavations: ‘I am digging for treasure in the city,’ he scribbled on one occasion, ‘and have found an old blank book, out of which I am taking a leaf to write to you, and have sent to see if I can get some ink from a Bunneah [moneylender]. I have got some little things for you from the prize, only trifles, but I think you will like them, and I will send them up the first opportunity.111

  Being a Prize Agent was a highly paid and potentially very lucrative post, but it was not something that appealed to Campbell: ‘It is very dirty work frightening Bunneahs into disclosing where they stowed away their wealth,’ he wrote to GG that week.

  You know, dearest, how I never have anything to do with torture. Wriford is the great one for extracting their wealth. I am assured I don’t look cruel and severe enough – but the fact is you cannot go long on the same beat. The people hear what is going on and make their escape and unless you have one [person for every] ten houses to show you where their money is secured, you might dig for ever. But it is very sickening work,* my own wife, and I have given you enough of it.112