The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  In the meantime, Zafar had a medical check. The doctors’ report decided that ‘allowing for the natural decay attending his advanced age, his general physical condition is good beyond what we anticipated to find, that he is hale and vigorous for his age, and free from diseases’.

  The committee can see no objection on professional grounds to his removal by sea to Rangoon or to his future residence there or some other place in the Province of Pegu [southern Burma]. On the contrary, as compared with the Upper Provinces [of Hindustan], the climate of Pegu is mild and soft and equable throughout the year, and not liable to the considerable vicissitudes of temperature experienced in the North Western Provinces of India, and on this account possessing conditions generally considered favourable to the prolongation of life in its advanced stages.”11

  Having made his decision regarding to which country he wanted Zafar to be sent, Canning then wrote to Major Phayre, the Commissioner in Rangoon, laying down the ground rules than were to govern the future treatment of the imperial family: ‘It is the desire of His Excellency the Governor-General,’ Major Phayre was informed,

  that the prisoners should be kept in close custody, and permitted to hold no communication whatever, either verbal or written, with any person or persons, other than those who as will be precisely mentioned, will accompany them … Care should be taken that the prisoners should be treated with care and civility, and be exposed to no indignity, and to no other discomfort than may be necessary for their safe custody … Maintenance is to be liberal in every respect, but it is not expedient that any of them should receive allowances in money.

  ‘Lt Ommaney will remain in immediate charge of the prisoners and their companions,’ added Canning. ‘He should be required to visit the prisoners daily and to attend to their wants, bringing to your notice, without delay, any circumstances which seem to him of any significance or importance.’12

  The reduced party of fifteen continued on from Allahabad on 16 November. Two days later they reached Mirzapur and embarked on the steamer Thames. ‘The state prisoners do not show any anxiety,’ reported Ommaney, ‘and the old man seems quite jolly, saying “It is the first time he has ever been on board a ship.”’13 They steamed slowly down the Ganges, past the magnificent ghats and temples of Benares. Shortly afterwards they passed a pair of British gunboats patrolling for rebels who might be crossing the river near the site of the battle of Buxar. Here the Mughals and the British had first come into conflict in 1764, during the reign of Zafar’s grandfather Shah Alam – a battle than had begun the British territorial advance from Bengal up the country towards Delhi.14 At Rampur they changed boats to the steamer Koyle, after the Thames developed engine trouble, and arrived at Diamond Harbour, the anchorage below Calcutta, on 4 December.*

  Here Zafar’s party were quickly transferred to the HMS Magara. The ship let slip its moorings, and the last Mughal Emperor steamed away from his homeland, never to return. According to an observer on the riverbank,

  On the 4th December, at ten in the morning, the ex-King of Delhi was taken aboard Her Majesty’s good ship of war, the Magara, which for a vessel of the Royal Navy presented a curious spectacle at the time, crowded as her main deck was with household furniture, live and lifeless stock in the shape of cattle, goats, rabbits, poultry, rice, peas &c &c, brought by the Royal prisoner and his attendants, for their consumption and comfort. Lt Ommaney of the 59th, who has had charge of him ever since he was taken, conducted him on this, probably the last conveyance that will ever again serve him on his peregrinations.

  He had two wives* with him, so impenetrably veiled that they were led below by guides. He looked utterly broken up, and in his dotage; but not a bad type of Eastern face and manner – something King-like about his deeply furrowed countenance, and lots of robes and Cashmeres.† He was quite self-possessed, and was heard to ask some of the officers what their respective positions were on board, &c.

  A son and grandson‡ are with him, and their very first care on touching the deck with their feet was to ask for cheroots – took things easy in short. The ex-King meanwhile went below, and was said to have stretched himself forthwith upon a couch of pillows and cushions, which his folk had arranged for him in a twinkling. The whole operation of transferring him and his companions was quickly effected; and then the guard of the 84th regiment returned to Calcutta, while the Magara steamed away down the Hooghly for its destination.

  The voyage lasted five days. On 8 December, the Magara left the open ocean and sailed up the muddy brown waters of the swampy tidal creeks bordering the Irrawaddy Delta and into the Rangoon river. From far away, the passengers could see the great golden spire of the Shwe Dagon pagoda rising up above the thick tropical greenery of the riverbank: ‘The pagoda is a magnificent object,’ wrote Ommaney. ‘I saw it 20 miles off directly we entered the river. There are three terraces of brickwork. From the centre of the upper one rises a heap of chaotic architecture which again throws up an elegant structure to a great height, all gilded with gold leaf.’15

  On arrival at the port of Rangoon, according to an irritated Ommaney, ‘a very large crowd of Natives and Europeans assembled to see the prisoners land and proceed to their quarters’.16 Further annoyances followed. Food proved far more expensive in Rangoon than it was in India, as did domestic staff, whose failure to salaam like the defeated and terror-stricken Delhiwallahs angered Ommaney: the ‘independence and impudence of the servants exceeds belief, he wrote to Saunders a week later. ‘Their manner appears as if they thought they were conferring a favour by entering your service. I am positively struck dumb by their cool insolence.’

  Most irritating of all, the Commissioner, Major Phayre, had done little to prepare for Zafar’s arrival, and no proper housing was ready for their reception: ‘Major Phayre does not know where the prisoners are to be permanently confined,’ wrote Ommaney.

  At present two little rooms, neither so large as any in the house at Delhi are set apart for them [near the Main Guard in the new cantonment area just below the Shwe Dagon] and the attendants have 4 tents pitched adjacent, and surrounded by a kanat [or qanat, canvas zenana screening] enclosure. The prisoners now have scarcely any comfort. The Government is bound to treat them better than this.17

  If Rangoon was defiantly uncongenial for Ommaney, and for Zafar and his party, the town must have been above all strikingly unfamiliar: quite apart from the novelty of a hot tropical river port fringed with toddy palms and crowded with paddle steamers, rafts of teak logs and junk-like hnaw fishing boats with their billowing sails, there was the town’s Burmese architecture with its tiers of gilded spires and finials and flying eaves. Then there were the Buddhist monasteries with their massive bells and winged gryphons; their giant Buddhas and bodhisattvas; their carved wooden struts and bamboo partitions and cane latticework; their stupas and pilgrimage sites; and everywhere, red- and yellow-robed monks with their wooden begging bowls. The silken htamein wraps and sequined parasols of the women, and the pasoe sarongs of their menfolk; the gold lacquerwork and delicate decorative pottery; the music of the street bands; the calm blue lakes that once belonged to the Burmese kings; the strange form of the hle-yin bullock carts with their finely woven bamboo roofs and floral side panels; the pungent Burmese cooking smells – all would have been quite new to the Mughals.

  Yet for all that there was much in the abject political situation of the town which directly echoed that of the Delhi they had just left behind. In April 1852, on the very same day that Jawan Bakht was getting married to Shah Zamani Begum and processing in triumph through the streets of Mughal Delhi, an army of Company troops, including a regiment of Sikhs, had invaded Rangoon, following a show of defiance by the port’s Shwebo Wun (Governor) against two British sea captains accused of murdering Indian members of their own crews. After British naval artillery had breached the stockades and the Burmese troops had been driven back towards Mandalay, Prize Agents had been let loose to loot the holy shrines and smash the sacred idols in search of gems.


  As in Delhi, much unofficial looting had also taken place: ‘the work of delving into every image in the place’, reported the Calcutta Englishman, ‘of which there are many, was perseveringly carried out, but apparently not with the knowledge of the Prize Agents, as the European Artillery sold in great numbers the silver images and the bottles of rubies that were found inside’.18 One party of looters even tunnelled deep into the foundations of the great Shwe Dagon pagoda, determined to find the thick cladding of gems that legend said had been buried there. Now a regiment of Sikhs camped in the desecrated courts of the Shwe Dagon, just as their cousins sat lighting their cooking fires in the arcades of the Delhi Jama Masjid.

  Moreover, just prior to the arrival of the prisoners, the British had begun sweeping away the ancient fishing village of Mon on the Rangoon waterfront, with its hundreds of old Buddhist landmarks and pilgrimage shrines. Gangs of impressed Burmese labourers were now in the process of clearing the debris and laying out on its ruins a new colonial town on an ordered gridiron plan.

  Even as Zafar stepped ashore at Rangoon, a similar programme of mass destruction and colonial remodelling was beginning to remove many of the most familiar and beautiful landmarks of the former Mughal capital he had just left behind.

  ‘Here it seems as if the whole city is being demolished,’ wrote Ghalib about this time. ‘Some of the biggest and most famous bazaars – the Khas Bazaar, the Urdu Bazaar and the Khanum ka Bazaar, each of which was practically as a small town, have all gone without a trace. You cannot even tell where they were. Householders and shopkeepers cannot point out to you where their houses and shops used to stand … Food is dear, and death is cheap, and grain sells so dear that you would think each grain was a fruit.’19

  What Ghalib was describing was in fact a very reduced version of the plan, originally mooted by the Lahore Chronicle, to completely level Delhi as a punishment for being the centre of the defeated rebellion. The plan had many powerful supporters, both in India and London, one of whom, Lord Palmerston, wrote that Delhi should be deleted from the map, and ‘every civil building connected with the Mohammedan tradition should be levelled to the ground without regard to antiquarian veneration or artistic predilections’.20 Lord Canning had at first been quite open to the Chronicle’s suggestions, but was eventually, and reluctantly, persuaded not to order the levelling of the city. The man who persuaded him was John Lawrence.

  Lawrence had spent several years at the beginning of his career in Delhi, serving as an assistant to Sir Thomas Metcalfe, and had grown fond of the Mughal capital. As Chief Commissioner of the Punjab he had done as much as anyone else to facilitate the British victory in 1857, and so was in a good position to argue his colleagues out of their plans for mass destruction and legalised mass murder, both of which were currently taking place under the guise of a just retribution.

  One of Lawrence’s first actions when the administration of Delhi was formally transferred to the Punjab government in February 1858 was to get Theo Metcalfe sent back to England on extended leave. This he finally achieved on 2 March 1858 by direct application to Canning in Calcutta, writing that Theo had been guilty of ‘wholesale slaughters’.21 By April he was able to report that, ‘I stopped the different civil officers hanging at their own will and pleasure, and appointed a commission, since when matters have greatly improved and confidence among the natives greatly increased. It was most unfortunate Metcalfe being in power at Delhi,’ he added. ‘He did a great deal of harm. He has however now gone home.’*22

  In the same letter Lawrence described how he had begun pressing for a general amnesty for anyone who had not personally murdered British civilians in cold blood. It was an idea he later took up with Canning: some of the British, he argued, were acting as if they were now engaged in ‘a war of extermination’. Instead he recommended a complete amnesty, as ‘so long as all [mutineers] are classed under one head, all will hold together and resist to the death’. A perhaps unexpected supporter of Lawrence’s plan turned out to to be Disraeli, who was deeply shocked by the British bloodlust that the Uprising had triggered: ‘I protest against meeting atrocities with atrocities,’ he told the House of Commons. ‘I have seen things said, and seen written of late, which would make me suppose that … instead of bowing before the name of Jesus we were preparing to revive the worship of Moloch.’23

  The idea of a general amnesty eventually became official policy, and was proclaimed in Queen Victoria’s name on 1 November 1858. At the same time, in the Act for the Better Government of India, the British Crown finally assumed all governmental responsibilities held by the East India Company, and its 24,000-man military force was incorporated into the British Army. If Hindustan was to lose the Mughals, its rulers of nearly three hundred years’ standing, it would at least now be ruled by a properly constituted colonial government rather than a rapacious multinational acting at least partly in the interests of its shareholders.*

  Saving Delhi, and limiting the amount of house clearance carried out, took a more prolonged campaign. As late as 1863, Saunders’ replacement as Commissioner for Delhi was arguing that ‘the citizens of the rebellious City of Delhi, as a body, had entirely forfeited their rights’ by joining the Uprising. ‘It must not be forgotten’, he argued, ‘that the citizens of Delhi joined hand in hand with the Mutineers.’24 Lawrence, however, used his influence to drastically scale back the planned demolitions, arguing that Delhi ‘is a position of great importance and should be held by us’. He also pointed out, unfashionably at the time, that ‘We have been almost as much to blame for what occurred as have the people. I have yet neither seen nor heard anything to make me believe any conspiracy existed beyond the army, and even in it one can scarcely say there was a conspiracy … The army had for a long time been in an unsatisfactory state.’25

  Canning had already given orders to destroy the Delhi walls and defences, but Lawrence managed to get the orders rescinded, arguing that there was insufficient gunpowder in Delhi to blow up several miles of walls.26 By the end of 1859, Canning had agreed to his plan only to demolish what was needed to make the Fort and city more easily defensible. By 1863, the planned demolition of the eastern half of Chandni Chowk down to the Dariba had also been stopped.27 Even so, great swathes of the city – especially around the Red Fort – were still cleared away, as Ghalib recorded in a series of sad letters to his correspondents across Hindustan: ‘The area between Raj Ghat [on the city’s eastern edge, facing on to the Yamuna] and the Jama Masjid is without exaggeration a great mound of bricks.’

  The Raj Ghat Gate has been filled in. Only the niched battlement of the walls is apparent. The rest has been filled up with debris. For the preparation of the metalled road, a wide open ground has been made between Calcutta Gate and the Kabul Gate. Punjabi Katra, Dhobiwara, Ramji Ganj, Sadat Khan ka Katra, the Haveli of Mubarak Begum [Ochterlony’s widow], the Haveli of Sahib Ram and his garden – all have been destroyed beyond recognition.28

  Other letters of Ghalib mourned the destruction of some of the city’s finest mosques, such as the Akbarabadi Masjid and the Masjid Kashmiri Katra; great Sufi shrines such as that of Sheikh Kalimullah Jahanabadi;* the imambara† built by Maulvi Muhammad Baqar; the muhalla of Bulaqi Begum; the main gate of the Dariba; and the establishment of a cleared open space 70 yards wide around the Jama Masjid.29 Four of Delhi’s most magnificent palaces were also completely destroyed: the havelis of the recently hanged nawabs of Jhajjar, Bahadurgarh and Farrucknagar, as well as that of the Raja of Ballabgarh.30 The great caravanserai of Shah Jahan’s daughter Jahanara was demolished and replaced by a new town hall. Shalimar Bagh, where Aurangzeb had been crowned, was sold off for agricultural use. Even where old Mughal structures were allowed to continue, they were often renamed: Begum Bagh, for example, became the Queen’s Gardens.

  Tragically, the Red Fort was another area where Lawrence intervened too late to stop the wholesale destruction. He managed to save both the Jama Masjid and the Palace walls, arguing that they woul
d serve the British as well as the Mughals, but 80 per cent of the rest of the Fort was levelled. Harriet Tytler, who was living in an apartment above the Diwan i-Am at this time, was horrified by the decision and decided to paint a panorama of the city before it disappeared.* It confirmed her in her disgust at the way the British had behaved in Delhi since the assault began on 14 September. ‘Delhi was now truly a city of the dead,’ she wrote in her memoirs. ‘The death-like silence of that Delhi was appalling. All you could see were empty houses … The utter stillness … [was] indescribably sad. It seemed as if something had gone out of our lives.’31

  The demolitions started at the Queen’s Baths in November 1857, and continued through most of the Palace, destroying an area ‘twice the area of the Escorial’, as the horrified architectural historian James Fergusson pointed out twenty years later. ‘The whole of the area between the central range of the buildings south and eastwards from the bazaar, measuring about 1000 feet each way, was occupied by the harem apartments of the palace – twice the area of any Palace in Europe.’

  According to the native plan I possess, which I see no reason for distrusting, it contained three garden courts, and some thirteen or fourteen other courts, arranged some for state, some for convenience; but what they were like we have no means of knowing. Not one vestige of them now remains … The whole of the harem courts of the palace were swept off the face of the earth to make way for a hideous British barrack, without those who carried out this fearful piece of vandalism, thinking it even worthwhile to make a plan of what they were destroying or preserving any record of the most splendid palace in the world.32