The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

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  Footnotes

  * A sepoy is an Indian infantry private, in this case in the employ of the British East India Company. The word derives from sipahi, the Persian for soldier.

  * A muhatta is a distinct quarter or neighbourhood of a Mughal city – i.e. a group of residential lanes usually entered through a single gate which would be locked at night.

  * Shahjahanabad is the walled city now known as Old Delhi, built by the fifth Mughal Emperor, Shah Jahan (1592–1666), and opened as his new capital in 1648.

  † ‘Tilangas’ is apparently a reference to Telingana, in modern Andhra Pradesh, where the British originally recruited many of their sepoys during the Carnatic Wars of the eighteenth century. In Delhi the name seems to have stuck as an appellation for British-trained troops, although the British had long since replaced Telingana with Avadh as their principal recruitment field, so that in 1857 most sepoys would have come from modern Uttar Pradesh and parts of Bihar. ‘Purbias’, which in Delhi was used alternately with Tilangas, simply means Easterners. Both words carry the same connotations of foreignness, implying ‘these outsiders from the East’.

  * As Muslims are supposed to wash after having sex, the complaint is as much about ritual impurity as it is about hygiene.

  * Hindustan refers to the region of northern India encompassing the modern Indian states of Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and some parts of Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, where Hindustani is spoken, and the area often referred to in modern Indian papers as the ‘Cow Belt’. While the term ‘India’ is relatively rarely used in nineteenth-century Urdu sources, there is a strong consciousness of the existence of Hindustan as a unit, with Delhi at its political centre. This was the area that was most seriously convulsed in 1857.

  * A howdah is the seat carried on an elephant’s back; often in this period howdahs were covered with a canopy.

  * Nawab originally meant a viceroy or governor, but later it was simply used as a grand title, usually for men, but occasionally – as in this case – for women. (Duke or duchess would be the nearest English equivalent, which in its original Latin form Dux also meant governor.)

  † The Mahi Maraatib, a golden or pair of fish raised on a long golden standard, was the most important of the Mughal’s dynastic insignia, but despite Zahir’s grand-sounding official title of Daroga of the Mahi Maraatib, his daily duties appear to have been relatively humble and he was in effect the Emperor’s page or ADC.

  * Shah Abdul Aziz also judged that it was legal in the Sharia for Muslims to take employment from Christians. On the other hand, Shah Abdul Aziz had little faith in the intellectual abilities of the British and looked down on them for their abject failure to grasp the most elementary subtleties of Muslim theology. Every race has its own particular aptitude, he wrote. ‘The Hindus have a special inclination for mathematics. The Franks have a special aptitude for industry and technology. But their minds, with few exceptions, cannot grasp the finer points of logic, theology and philosophy.’ Quoted in Khalid Masud, ‘The World of Shah Abdul Aziz, 1746-1824’, p. 304, in Jamal Malik (ed.), Perspectives of Mutual Encounters in South Asian History, 1760-1860, Leiden, 2000.

  * The future Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Muslim reformer and founder of Aligarh Muslim University.

>   † Albeit from Deccani parents.

  * Palam being less than 10 miles from the Red Fort, near the modern international airport. There is some dispute over which of the two Mughal Shah Alams the verse refers to, or indeed whether it actually refers to a pre-Mughal Shah Alam of the Sayyid dynasty.

  * The Resident initially acted as the Governor General’s ambassador to the Mughal court, but as British power grew, and that of the Mughals diminished, he came more and more to assume the role of the Governor of Delhi and its surroundings.

  * As had the Marathas before them, and indeed the Rohillas too.

  * So much so that the poet Abd ur-Rahman Hudhud wrote a celebrated parody:

  The circle of the axis of heaven,

  Is not at the lip of the water

  The fingernail of the arc of the rainbow

  Does not resemble a plectrum.

  Another poet agreed:

  Kalaam-i Mir samjhey aur zubaan-i Mirja samjhey

  Magar inka kaha yeh khud hi samjhein ya khuda samjhey.

  We follow the poetry of Mir, and the language of Mirja,

  But of him [Ghalib] – only he can follow his verses, or maybe God alone can.

  †An ustad means the master of an art. In this context an ustad was a recognised master-poet who accepted his own shagirds or pupils.

  *Seton, incidentally, thought the charge very unlikely, writing to Calcutta that the young Abu Zafar was a ‘very respectable character’ but not being his favourite was ‘much neglected’ by the King. Instead Akbar Shah lavished his attention on Mirza Jahangir, of whom, said Seton, he was ‘devotedly fond’. Mirza Jahangir, irritated by Seton’s support of Zafar, eventually took a potshot at the Resident from the battlements of the Red Fort, and succeeded in knocking off his hat. He was exiled to Allahabad in 1809, where he eventually died ‘from an excess of Hoffman’s Cherry Brandy’ in 1821, aged only thirty-one. Akbar Shah’s dismissive treatment of Zafar in his youth no doubt added to Zafar’s perennial tendency towards paranoia and insecurity. At one point, for example, when his father sent Rajah Ram Mohan Roy to England as his envoy to try to increase his stipend, and to protest at the way the Company was consistently whittling down his status, Zafar assumed that the mission was aimed at disinheriting him and wrote angrily to both the Governor General and to Roy. The latter replied, calmly refuting Zafar’s accusations, and adding a little acidly ‘that those who do not comprehend their own good or evil cannot comprehend the good or evil of others’. There are good accounts of Zafar’s troubled youth and accession to the throne in Percival Spear’s Twilight of the Moghals (Cambridge, 1951), p. 41ff; also in the first chapter of Aslam’s Parvez’s Urdu biography of Zafar. See also the far less comprehensive English language volume by S. M. Burke and Salim al-Din Quraishi, Bahadur Shah: Last Mogul Emperor of India, Lahore, 1995, pp. 43–50.