The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  As late as March 1859 George Wagentrieber was pleased to record in the Delhi Gazette that ‘a good deal of blowing up’ was still going on in the Palace. Some of the finest buildings were the first to go, such as the Chhota Rang Mahal. Even the Fort’s glorious gardens – notably Hayat Bakhsh Bagh and Mehtab Bagh – were swept away. All that was left by the end of the year was about one fifth of the original fabric – principally a few scattered, isolated marble buildings strung out along the Yamuna waterfront. These were saved owing largely to the fact than they were in use as offices and messes by the British occupation troops, but their architectural logic was completely lost once they were shorn of the courtyards of which they were originally a part.

  All the gilded domes and most of the detachable marble fittings were stripped and sold off by the prize agents. As Fergusson noted,

  when we took possession of the palace, everyone seems to have looted after the most independent fashion. Among others, a Captain (afterwards Sir) John Jones [who had blown in the Lahore Gate during the capture of the fort] tore up a great part, but had the happy idea to get his loot set in marble as table tops. Two of these he brought home and sold to the Government for £500, and were placed in the India Museum.33

  These fragments included the rightly celebrated ‘Orpheus panel’ of pietra dura inlay which Shah Jahan had placed behind his Peacock Throne.

  Meanwhile, what remained of the Mughal’s Red Fort became a grey British barracks. The Naqqar Khana, where drums and trumpets had once announced the arrival of ambassadors from Isfahan and Constantinople, became the quarters of a British staff sergeant. The Diwan i-Am became a lounge for officers, the Emperor’s private entrance a canteen, and the Rang Mahal an officers’ mess. The Mumtaz Mahal was turned into a military prison. The magnificent Lahore Darwaza was renamed the Victoria Gate and became ‘a bazaar for the benefit of the Fort’s European soldiers’. Zafar’s contribution to the Palace architecture – the Zafar Mahal, a delicate floating pavilion in a large red sandstone tank – became the centrepiece of a swimming pool for officers, while the surviving pavilions of Hay at Bakhsh Bagh were turned into urinals.34

  While all this was going on, throughout 1858, Hindus were slowly being readmitted to the city, but Muslims remained almost entirely banned from within the walls. As Ghalib wrote in Dastanbuy,

  In the entire city of Delhi it is impossible to find one thousand Muslims; and I am one of these. Some have gone so far from the city it seems as if they were never residents of Delhi. Many very important men are living outside the city, on ridges and under thatched roofs, in ditches and mud huts. Among those people living in the wilderness are many who are anxious to return to Delhi, relatives of the imprisoned, and those living on alms.35

  A passing traveller in 1860 was horrified by ‘the old withered Musulmanis and gypsy-like Mughals [still] camping out at the Qutb’. Even the imperious Matilda Saunders was aware that ‘numbers of people are daily dying of starvation and want of shelter’.36

  In December 1859 the Muslims of Delhi petitioned the government to be allowed to return to their houses. They wrote to Queen Victoria praying (according to the translation commissioned by Charles Saunders)

  That they may be permitted to return to their houses in the city of Delhi. They are in the greatest distress, excluded rigorously from the town, they can obtain neither shelter nor means of subsistence. The cold weather is now at hand and they beg that they may not be exposed to its severity in their present state of destitution and misery. They trust that Her Majesty following the example of other magnanimous sovereigns, would pardon their misdeeds and permit them to reinhabit their old houses – otherwise they see nothing but beggary before them.37

  Even when their plea was granted and they began to be given permission to return in 1860, many Muslims who could not prove their loyalty found that their houses had been confiscated. Things got so bad that even some of the British papers in India began to feel sympathy with the Delhi Muslims: ‘When will agitation of European nerves subside?’ asked the Mofussilite in June 1860. ‘There is no reason for it …’

  The people are abject because they are starved out, banished and plundered. Thousands of Muslims are wandering houseless and homeless; the Hindus, pluming themselves on their assumed loyalty, strut about the streets giving themselves airs. Let not the public think that Delhi has not been punished. Wend through the empty grass-grown streets, mark the uprooted houses, and shot-riddled palaces.38

  Most of the confiscated Muslim properties put up for auction by the British were bought en masse by the Hindu khatri (clerical caste) and Jain bankers of the city, such as Chhunna Mal and Ramji Das. These were the only Delhiwallahs who still had access to liquid cash, their main centre of Nil ka Katra having bought immunity from the depredations of the prize agents on the payment of a large sum soon after the fall of the city.39 Hindu traders and bankers even bought up two of the city’s most famous mosques: Chhunna Mal bought the Fatehpuri Masjid, while a Hindu baker bought the beautiful Zinat ul-Masajid, one of the main jihadi centres throughout the Uprising.*40

  All this exacerbated the sudden shift of power from the Muslim elite, who had dominated the city before the Uprising, to the Hindu bankers, who were its most wealthy citizens afterwards. ‘The capital is in the hands of one or two men like Chhunna Mal and Mahesh Das,’ wrote Edward Campbell in 1858.41 What remained of the court circle and the Mughal aristocracy were by and large left penniless. A few survived on a pittance as schoolteachers and tutors. For many, such as Maulvi Zaka’ullah, the shock of the utter devastation of their world was ‘beyond all bearing’, and Zaka’ullah later admitted that for a time he had succumbed to ‘a melancholy that bordered on blank despair’.42

  ‘Alas my dear boy,’ wrote Ghalib to a friend in January 1862. ‘This is not the Delhi in which you were born, not the Delhi in which you got your schooling, not the Delhi in which you used to come to your lessons with me, not the Delhi in which I have passed fifty-one years of my life.’

  It is a camp. The only Muslims here are artisans or servants of the British authorities. All the rest are Hindus. The male descendants of the deposed King – such as survived the sword – draw allowances of five rupees a month. The female descendants, if old, are bawds; if young, are prostitutes …43

  What Ghalib did not say was that many of the Delhi begums were set on the path to prostitution by the mass rapes that followed the fall of the city. Believing that the British women in Delhi had been sexually assaulted at the outbreak – a rumour that subsequently proved quite false, as a full inquiry commissioned by Saunders later proved – British officers did little to stop their men from raping the women of Delhi. At the same time as Saunders’ inquiry completely exonerated the rebels of any single instance of rape, another inquiry found that perhaps as many as three hundred begums of the royal house – not including former concubines in the Palace – had been ‘taken away by our troops after the fall of Delhi’, and that many of those who had not been abducted were now making their livings as courtesans.44 The fate of the women of the royal family was clearly something that deeply shocked Ghalib, and he returns to it again and again in his letters: ‘Had you been here,’ he told his friend Mirza Tafta, ‘you would have seen the ladies of the Fort moving about the city, their faces as fair as the moon and their clothes dirty, their paijama legs torn, and their slippers falling to pieces. This is no exaggeration …’45

  With the loss of the Mughal court went much of the city’s reputation as a centre of culture and learning. Its libraries had been looted, its precious manuscripts lost. The madrasas were almost all closed, and their buildings were again mostly bought up – and in time demolished – by Hindu moneylenders. The most prestigious of all, the Madrasa i-Rahimiyya was auctioned off to one of the leading baniyas, Ramji Das, who used it as a store.46

  By 1859 Ghalib was complaining that he could not even find a single bookseller, binder or calligrapher in this once most bookish of cities.47 Still less were there any poet
s: ‘Where is Mamnun? Where is Zauq? And where is Momin Khan? Two poets survive. One, Azurda – and he is silent: the other Ghalib, and he is lost in himself, in a stupor. None to write poetry, and none to judge its worth.’ To make matters worse for Ghalib, much of his own verse – his life’s great achievement – had been lost: he had never kept copies of his ghazals and the two private libraries in which his friends had stored his poetry had both been sacked and destroyed by the British. ‘A few days ago a faqir who has a good voice and sings well discovered a ghazal of mine somewhere and got it written down,’ he wrote in one letter. ‘When he showed it to me, I tell you truly, tears came to my eyes.’48

  ‘This whole city has become a desert,’ wrote a melancholy Ghalib to a friend in 1861. ‘Delhi people still pride themselves on Delhi language! What pathetic faith! My dear man, when the Urdu Bazaar is no more, where is Urdu? By God, Delhi is no more a city, but a camp, a cantonment. No Fort, no bazaars, no watercourses …’49 ‘Four things kept Delhi alive,’ he wrote to another friend who enquired what Delhi was like these days. ‘The Fort, the daily crowds at the Jama Masjid, the weekly walk to the Yamuna Bridge, and the yearly fair of the flower-men. None of these survives, so how could Delhi survive? Yes, there was once a city of that name in the realm of India.’50

  In such a situation Ghalib often wondered what the point of carrying on was when everything he had lived for was finished. ‘A man cannot quench his thirst with tears,’ he wrote. ‘You know that when despair reaches its lowest depths, there is nothing left but to resign oneself to God’s will. What lower depths can there be than this: that it is the hope of death that keeps me alive?’51 ‘My soul’, he wrote in June 1862, ‘dwells in my body these days as restless as a bird in a cage.’52

  Without the Delhi College and the great madrasas, without the printing presses and the Urdu newspapers, and without the Mughal court – whose immense cultural prestige always compensated for the monetary constrictions on its actual powers of patronage – and most of all without the Emperor there to act as a focus and, to some extent, catalyst, the driving force behind Delhi’s renaissance and artistic flourishing was gone. The beating heart of Indo-Islamic civilisation had been ripped out, and could not be replaced. As Ghalib wrote as he neared death: ‘All these things lasted only so long as the King reigned.’53

  On 1 April 1859, Edward Ommaney said farewell to Zafar and his family, and set off back to India with his regiment; with him went four more of Zafar’s Indian attendants who had found themselves homesick in Burma and wished to return to their families in India.

  Three weeks later, Zafar was moved a short distance through the cantonment to his new quarters, half a mile below the Shwe Dagon Pagoda.54 ‘The house is situated within a few yards of the Main Guard, & like wooden houses of the country is considerably raised off the ground,’ reported Zafar’s new jailer, Captain Nelson Davies. ‘It is in an enclosure 100 ft square, and is surrounded by palisading 10 ft high.’

  The accommodation consists of four rooms each 16 feet square, one of which is allotted for the use of the ex-King, another for Jawan Bukht and his young Begum, a third is appropriated by the Begum Zinat Mahal. To each of these rooms a bathing area is attached. Shah Abbas and his mother occupy the remaining room.

  The attendants either lounge about the verandahs or put up underneath the house, which is covered by pounded brick to keep the place dry. A drain all around the house also contributes to this object. There are two bathrooms & a double necessary for the use of the servants, also a place to cook in.

  The verandahs in the upper storeys of the house are surrounded with chicks battened down. Here the old and enfeebled ex-King & his sons generally sit, and as the floor of the upper storey is raised nearly to the level of the pallisading, they enjoy the benefit of the prevailing sea breeze, and also an extended and cheerful view. Watching the passers by, & gazing at the shipping, somewhat relieves the monotony of their prison life, & reconciles them in some measure to their present quarter.

  Davies went on to describe the security arrangements for the guarding of the royal family: ‘Two sentries mount guard by day, usually three at night.’ The prisoners were visited and checked twice a day. As for the cost of feeding the Emperor and his family, it ‘greatly exceeds here what it would be in India, averaging about 11 Rs a day, and as provisions are rising in price it is probable that the daily expenditure will exceed that amount. Since I have taken charge, an extra rupee is allowed to them every Sunday’, continued the magnanimous Davies, ‘and on the first of each month, 2 Rs extra’.

  This allows them to indulge in a few articles for the toilet without the necessity of asking me for every trifle in a way they may require. Pen, ink, paper are of course strictly forbidden. Previous to my taking charge they had supplied themselves with many little necessaries they required, and also their entire wearing apparel, from their own resources, but now they state that all their funds are expended, an assertion which may admit of some doubts. I daily ascertain both by personal inspection & enquiry that the food supplied them is sufficient and good. A supply of clothes has recently been provided, but their old stock being in a very dilapidated state, I shall presently be obliged to replenish it still further.

  The establishment kept up for the prisoners is on the lowest possible scale, and consists of one Chupprassie whose business it is to procure their daily supplies, & he is a sort of confidential agent between myself and them. The man I at present have is a Burman but speaks Hindoostanee sufficiently well to receive orders from the prisoners regarding their bazaar requirements. His pay is rather higher than what I could get a Hindoostanee man for, but I thought it advisable to employ a man of a different race, where such constant intercourse was required.

  The only other servants employed are a bheestie [water carrier], dhoby [washerman] & sweeper. These are necessarily Hindostanee men, but they are all attached to my service & as I oblige them all to live in my compound which is next to the prisoners, I thus have them constantly at hand & can also keep a close supervision over them. The public are of course not allowed to hold intercourse with the prisoners, & the servants can only gain admission under a pass from myself which is issued daily and must be inspected by the officer on main guard ere they gain admission. For better security these tickets are printed and checked by a system of numbering in addition to every signature.

  Davies went on to discuss Zafar’s health, which he described as ‘tolerably good … since his removal from the former confined quarters, his heath has considerably improved, and although much enfeebled, yet he is not more so than might be expected from a native of India at the advanced age of 86’.

  His memory is still good, when time is allowed him to fix his ideas, but his articulation is indistinct consequent on the loss of his teeth. He certainly now does not give the impression of being capable of any extended mental energy or capacity, but on the whole he appears to bear his weight of years remarkably well. He passes his days in listless apathy, manifesting considerable indifference to all but eternal affairs. This apparently has been his normal state for a long time past, and may continue so for some time to come, until all of a sudden his career may come to a close, without taking anyone by surprise.

  Davies was not able to see Zinat Mahal, who remained in pardah, but he sent in his wife to report back. She ‘is described by Mrs Davies, who occasionally visits both the Begums, as a middle-aged woman’.

  She enjoys very good health. I have had several conversations with her from behind the screen. She frequently enlarges on the step she took at the time of the outbreak at Delhi in writing to the late Mr Colvin, the Lt Gov of NW Provinces [at Agra], begging him to come to her assistance implying thereby that at the time the Royal Family were at the mercy of the Rebels, & she constantly avers that they were thus helpless even to protect the unfortunate European girl who sought her protection.

  She also frequently alludes to the loss of her private treasure and jewels, & states that Major Hodson pledged his word
and gave her a written document as security for the safety of her personal property. I am unacquainted with the exact particulars, but I consider it as well to relate the Begum’s version of this circumstance. She states that her property was not disturbed until after Major Hodson’s death, when she was required to give up the document he had given her as a protection. She was then dispossessed by Mr Saunders, the Commissioner at Delhi, of all her valuables to the extent of 20 lakhs (£200,000) in value, and he refused to return her the document.

  I have explained to her that on her husband being convicted of Rebellion all the property of the family became escheated to the Government, that her establishment being distinct from that of the King’s, and her residing in a separate Mahal, has nothing whatever to do with it. She seemed however to think that the sequestration of her personal property is somewhat contrary to custom. However I gave her no hopes of ever being placed in a position by the possession of wealth to work the mischief her talents might render possible, were she so inclined, for she appears to be a woman of a masculine turn of mind judging from her conversations and deportment. Of the two, she most probably had more to say to the intrigues of the rebels than her imbecile husband.*

  Davies then revealed the degree to which both Zafar and Zinat Mahal blamed their situation on their former confidant, personal doctor and prime minister, Hakim Ahsanullah Khan. According to several eyewitnesses, including the usually impeccably reliable Zahir Dehlavi, it was the hakim who had pressed Zafar to stop blocking the rebels’ attempts to murder the European prisoners in the Fort; but while presiding over the massacre was one of the principal charges levelled against Zafar, the hakim had got off without hanging or even imprisonment in return for standing up in court and giving evidence against his former employer. ‘The statement of prisoners must of course always be received with caution,’ wrote Davies,