The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  Not all the changes, of course, were necessarily for the worse. The autocratic political structures of Mughal rule received a devastating death blow. Only ninety years separated the British victory at the gates of Delhi in 1857 from the British eviction from South Asia through the Gateway of India in 1947. But while memories of British atrocities in 1857 may have assisted in the birth of Indian nationalism, as did the growing separation and mutual suspicion of rulers and ruled that followed the Uprising, it was not the few surviving descendants of the Mughals, nor any of the old princely and feudal rulers, who were in any way responsible for India’s march to independence. Instead, the Indian freedom movement was led by the new Anglicised and educated Colonial Service class who emerged from English-language schools after 1857, and who by and large used modern Western democratic structures and methods – political parties, strikes and protest marches – to gain their freedom.

  Even after Independence, the arts that were cultivated by the Mughals – the miniature painting tradition, the ghazal, the delicate forms of Mughal architecture – never really regained their full vitality or artistic prestige, and remained – at least in some quarters – as discredited as the emperors who patronised them.

  Today, if you visit the old Mughal city of Agra, perhaps to see the Taj Mahal, the supreme architectural achievement of Mughal rule, note how the roundabouts are full of statues of the Rani of Jhansi, Shivaji and even Subhas Chandra Bose; but not one image of any Mughal emperor has been erected anywhere in the city since independence. Although a Bahadur Shah Zafar road still survives in Delhi, as indeed do roads named after all the other Great Mughals, for many Indians today, rightly or wrongly, the Mughals are still perceived as it suited the British to portray them in the imperial propaganda that they taught in Indian schools after 1857: as sensual, decadent, temple-destroying invaders – something that was forcefully and depressingly demonstrated by the whole episode of the demoliton of the Baburi Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992. The profoundly sophisticated, liberal and plural civilisation championed by Akbar, Dara Shukoh or the later Mughal emperors has only a limited resonance for the urban middle class in modern India. Many of these are now deeply ambivalent about the achievements of the Mughals, even if they will still happily eat a Mughal meal, or flock to the cinema to watch a Bollywood Mughal epic, or indeed head to the Red Fort to hear their Prime Minister give the annual Independence Day speech from the battlements in front of the Lahore Gate.

  As for Zafar, he remained the focus of much nostalgic sympathy, especially – though not exclusively – among Indian Muslims. But romantic longing for a lost empire was not enough to protect or preserve the Mughal culture he embodied. This was especially so given his equivocal attitude to the Uprising, only partly supporting it during its ascendancy, and then completely rejecting it in defeat. There was nothing left for his supporters to cling on to, not even a coherent political idea. With his death, followed seven years later by that of Ghalib, the self-esteem and confidence of an entire civilisation also passed away, so discredited it could never hope to be revived.

  The same year that Ghalib died in Delhi, 1869, there was born in Porbandar in Gujarat a boy called Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. It would be with the political movements headed by Gandhi, rather than those represented by Zafar, or indeed by Lord Canning, that the future of India would lie.

  After the death of Zafar, what survived of the Mughal royal family quickly fell apart. As Captain Davies wrote in his next report to Calcutta, the Mughals were now, like the civilisation they represented,

  A divided house … Begum Zeenat Mahul is a party in herself and until recently she and her son and Daughter in-law were in a deadly feud … Jawan Bukht and his wife form a second clique, and Shah Abbas his mother and grandmother are third. All three sections keep their premises distinct and cook and eat their meals separately and have little or no communication with each other.68

  As the years went on, things only got worse. In 1867 the family were allowed to leave the prison enclosure and to settle elsewhere in the Rangoon cantonment.69 But they were given such miserable allowances that by 1870, eight years after the death of Zafar, the house that Jawan Bakht shared with his mother and Nawab Shah Zamani Begum was described as ‘wretched … a mere hovel and much overcrowded’. As a young girl of no more than ten Shah Zamani Begum had paraded gloriously through the streets of Mughal Delhi on elephant-back to marry her Mirza Jawan Bakht. Now racked with disappointment at the way her life had turned out, she became ‘seriously ill … suffering from extreme depression’, and, to the alarm of the British officials who were meant to look after her, started to go blind.70

  Jawan Bakht and his wife were given another house, not far from the Rangoon jail, in the hope that this would improve matters. But despite his poverty, Jawan Bakht still spent more than he could afford on drink, and a government official reported to Calcutta that his pension was ‘scarcely sufficient to meet the actual requirements of the family …’

  Whenever therefore Jawan Bakht commits the least extravagance, or falls into the slightest improvident indulgence, it is his wife and children who are the real and only sufferers. Shah Zamani Begum is the only completely innocent member of the Delhi family and yet has been the greatest sufferer of all. On more than one occasion this blind lady has been obliged to pawn her clothes and the few ornaments she has left, to procure food for herself and her children; whilst Jawan Bakht will drown any remorse he may feel in a fit of hard drinking … I am really powerless to interfere; any interference would only lead him to threaten his wife and treat her very harshly.71

  By 1872, Shah Zamani Begum was reported to be ‘perfectly blind and helpless … The conduct of this lady has been exemplary; and her misfortunes, arising from no fault of her own, have been very great. Though Jawan Bakht’s conduct has of late greatly improved, her absolute dependence on him must at times be very great and frequently very trying … She is an object of great pity’.72

  Mirza Shah Abbas eventually married a girl from Rangoon – the daughter of a local Muslim merchant – and seems to have escaped some of the misery that struck down the rest of his family.* Zinat Mahal, meanwhile, lived on alone: ‘in a very frugal almost penurious way … in a wooden house, purchased by herself, with two or three female servants … This widowed Begum has allowed her house to fall into great disrepair … She lives a quiet retired life and bears herself with some dignity … [though] the house she now occupies is a tumbledown, discreditable building, an eyesore to the locality in which it is situated’. In her old age, she applied to be allowed to return to India, saying she was being ‘oppressed’ by her son Jawan Bakht, but the application was summarily turned down.73 Her one comfort and indulgence was opium, to which she became increasingly addicted towards the end of her life. She died in 1882, twenty years after her husband. By the time of her death, the exact place of Zafar’s grave had already been forgotten and could not be located, so she was buried in a roughly similar position near a tree that was remembered to be near by. Two years later, Mirza Jawan Bakht had a severe stroke and followed her to the grave. He was aged only forty-two.

  When a delegation of visitors from India came in 1903 to pay their respects at the burial place of Zafar, even the exact location of Zinat Mahal’s grave had been forgotten, though some local guides pointed out the sight of the ‘withered lotus tree’.74 In 1905, however, there was a protest by the Muslims of Rangoon demanding that Zafar’s grave should be marked, because, in the words of their application, ‘the Mahommedan Community of Rangoon is agitated over the resting place of the last King of the proud line of the Mughals … As a man or as a King, Bahadur Shah was not to be admired, but he should be remembered’. They asked to be ‘allowed by the government to purchase a strip of land enclosing the grave in question, of sufficient area to permit a monument worthy of Bahadur Shah being erected over it’.75

  The initial British response was not favourable. The application was forwarded to Calcutta, where a reply was sent straight back
to the effect that ‘the Viceroy concurs in your view that it would be very inappropriate for the Government to do anything to perpetuate or to pay respect to the memory of Bahadur Shah, or to erect over his remains a tomb which might become a place of pilgrimage’76

  Following a demonstration and a long series of newspaper articles, however, the British authorities finally agreed in 1907 to erect a ‘simple engraved stone slab marked, Bahadur Shah, ex-King of Delhi. Died at Rangoon November 7th 1862 and was buried near this spot’. A railing was also allowed around the supposed site of the grave, and according to the Rangoon Times of 26 August 1907, in due course a meeting was held at the Victoria Hall ‘to record the sense of satisfaction among the Mahommedan community for the erection of the present memorial’ and ‘on account of the sympathetic and beneficent interest taken by the government in the matter’.77 A memorial stone to Zinat Mahal was added later the same year.

  By 1925 the railing had become a makeshift shrine, covered with a roof of corrugated iron78 Eighteen years later it was in the road beside this basic mazar (shrine) that the Japanese billeted the troops of the Indian National Army during the Second World War. It was unclear whether it was deliberate or not, but one of these groups, posted directly next to the shrine in what was now Theatre Road, was the Rani of Jhansi Brigade, named after another of the leaders of the 1857 Uprising, who partly inspired their ill-fated (and, in Nehru and Gandhi’s view, wrong-headed) attempt to liberate India from British rule by joining hands with the invading Japanese.79

  Then, in 1991, on 16 February, workmen digging a drain at the back of the shrine uncovered a brick-lined grave. It was 3 feet under the ground, and about 25 feet from the shrine. The skeleton of the Last Mughal was found quite intact within.

  Today the brick grave of Bahadur Shah, now located in a sort of crypt below and to one side of the old shrine, is a popular place of pilgrimage for Rangoon’s Muslim population. The local Muslims regard Zafar as a powerful Sufi saint, and come to seek his barakat (spiritual blessing) and ask for favours, all of which would no doubt have pleased him since he enjoyed taking on murids (Sufi disciples) when he was alive. Zafar also receives fairly regular visits from passing politicians from South Asia, and dignitaries from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh compete to shower the grave with presents, the most generous of which is a large, though far from beautiful, carpet presented by Rajiv Gandhi.

  Despite this, Zafar has few supporters in the modern history books. In some ways, it is true, his life can be seen as a study in failure: after all, he presided over the great collapse of Indo-Islamic civilisation, and his contribution to the Uprising of 1857 was hardly heroic. He is blamed by some nationalist historians for corresponding with the British during the fighting, and by others for failing to lead the rebels to victory. Yet it is difficult to see what more Zafar could have done, at least at the age of eighty-two. He was physically infirm, partially senile and had no money to pay the troops who flocked to his standard. Octogenarians can hardly lead a cavalry charge. Try as he might, he was powerless even to stop the looting of Delhi by an insurgent army that proved almost as much a threat to Zafar’s subjects as it did to his enemies. Yet the Mutiny Papers bear eloquent witness to the energy he expended trying to protect his people and his city.

  But while Zafar was certainly never cut out to be a heroic or revolutionary leader, he remains, like his ancestor the Emperor Akbar, an attractive symbol of Islamic civilisation at its most tolerant and pluralistic. He was himself a notable poet and calligrapher; his court contained some of the most talented artistic and literary figures in modern South Asian history; and the Delhi he presided over was undergoing one of its great periods of learning, self-confidence, communal amity and prosperity. He is certainly a strikingly liberal and likeable figure when compared to the Victorian Evangelicals whose insensitivity, arrogance and blindness did much to bring the Uprising of 1857 down upon both their own heads and those of the people and court of Delhi, engulfing all of northern India in a religious war of terrible violence.

  Above all, Zafar always put huge emphasis on his role as a protector of the Hindus and the moderator of Muslim demands. He never forgot the central importance of preserving the bond between his Hindu and Muslim subjects, which he always recognised was the central stitching that held his capital city together. Throughout the Uprising, his refusal to alienate his Hindu subjects by subscribing to the demands of the jihadis was probably his single most consistent policy.

  There was nothing inevitable about the demise and extinction of the Mughals, as the sepoys’ dramatic surge towards the court of Delhi showed. But in the years to come, as Muslim prestige and learning sank, and Hindu confidence, wealth, education and power increased, Hindus and Muslims would grow gradually apart, as British policies of divide and rule found willing collaborators among the chauvinists of both faiths. The rip in the closely woven fabric of Delhi’s composite culture, opened in 1857, slowly widened into a great gash, and at Partition in 1947 finally broke in two. As the Indian Muslim elite emigrated en masse to Pakistan, the time would soon come when it would be almost impossible to imagine that Hindu sepoys could ever have rallied to the Red Fort and the standard of a Muslim emperor, joining with their Muslim brothers in an attempt to revive the Mughal Empire.

  Following the crushing of the Uprising, and the uprooting and slaughter of the Delhi court, the Indian Muslims themselves also divided down two opposing paths: one, championed by the great Anglophile Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, looked to the West, and believed that Indian Muslims could revive their fortunes only by embracing Western learning. With this in mind, Sir Sayyid founded his Aligarh Mohamedan Anglo-Oriental College (later Aligarh Muslim University) and tried to re-create Oxbridge in the plains of Hindustan.80

  The other approach, taken by survivors of the old Madrasa i-Rahimiyya, was to reject the West in toto and to attempt to return to what they regarded as pure Islamic roots. For this reason, disillusioned pupils of the school of Shah Waliullah, such as Maulana Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi – who in 1857 had briefly established an independent Islamic state north of Meerut at Shamli in the Doab – founded an influential but depressingly narrow-minded Wahhabi-like madrasa at Deoband, 100 miles north of the former Mughal capital. With their backs to the wall, they reacted against what the founders saw as the degenerate and rotten ways of the old Mughal elite. The Deoband madrasa therefore went back to Koranic basics and rigorously stripped out anything Hindu or European from the curriculum.*81

  One hundred and forty years later, it was out of Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan and Afghanistan that the Taliban emerged to create the most retrograde Islamic regime in modern history, a regime that in turn provided the crucible from which emerged al-Qaeda, and the most radical and powerful fundamentalist Islamic counter-attack the modern West has yet encountered.

  Today, West and East again face each other uneasily across a divide that many see as religious war. Jihadis again fight what they regard as a defensive action against their Christian enemies, and again innocent women, children and civilians are slaughtered. As before, Western Evangelical politicians are apt to cast their opponents and enemies in the role of ‘incarnate fiends’ and conflate armed resistance to invasion and occupation with ‘pure evil’. Again Western countries, blind to the effect their foreign policies have on the wider world, feel aggrieved to be attacked – as they interpret it – by mindless fanatics.

  Against this bleak dualism, there is much to value in Zafar’s peaceful and tolerant attitude to life; and there is also much to regret in the way that the British swept away and rooted out the late Mughals’ pluralistic and philosophically composite civilisation.

  As we have seen in our own time, nothing threatens the liberal and moderate aspect of Islam so much as aggressive Western intrusion and interference in the East, just as nothing so dramatically radicalises the ordinary Muslim and feeds the power of the extremists: the histories of Islamic fundamentalism and Western imperialism have, after all, often been closely, and dan
gerously, intertwined. There are clear lessons here. For, in the celebrated words of Edmund Burke,82 himself a fierce critic of Western aggression in India, those who fail to learn from history are always destined to repeat it.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book would have been quite impossible without the scholarship and industry of my colleague Mahmood Farooqui. For four years now we have been working together on this project, and much that is most interesting within it – notably the remarkable translations from the sometimes almost indecipherable shikastah of the Urdu files in the Mutiny Papers – is the product of his dedication, persistence and skill. I wish him the best of luck with his next project: to publish the first scholarly edition of this extraordinarily rich and almost unused archive. Mahmood also provided at all times a wonderfully intelligent and imaginative sounding-board: one of the most enjoyable aspects of working with him on Bahadur Shah Zafar has been gradually piecing together the events and shape of this book over a Karim’s kebab, a Kapashera biryani or, more usually, a simple glass of hot sweet National Archives chai.

  For invaluable help with other Persian and Urdu primary sources I would like to thank Bruce Wannell, Yunus Jaffery, Azra Kidwai and Arjumand Ara; and for assistance in a million other ways, the incomparably resourceful Subramaniam Gautam. Margrit Pernau, Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Saul David were at all times sources of generous advice and encouragement as panic gradually set in over the scale of the material that I had taken on.

  At the end, Professor Fran Pritchett at Columbia volunteered to give the book the most thorough edit that I think any manuscript of mine has ever received. It took me nearly two weeks to go through all her notes, improved transliterations and suggestions, so I can only imagine how much of her valuable time she gave up to produce them in the first place. Harbans Mukhia, Michael Fisher, C. M. Nairn, Maya Jasanoff, Sam Miller, Sachin Mulji and my lovely parents-in-law, Simon and Jenny Fraser, were also extremely generous in carefully going through the manuscript, providing comments and pointing out errors of fact or grammar.