* Nikal Seyn in Urdu means something like ‘let the army come out’.
* Some recent academic post-colonial writing has ridiculed the idea of Europeans acting effectively as spies disguised as Indians, and dismissed such claims – later the subject of much Victorian fiction – as ‘fantasy’ – see, for example, Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination, Cambridge, 2005, especially ch. 5, ‘Counter-insurgency and Heroism’. Yet there seems no good reason for doubting Jiwan Lal’s own diary on this matter, as it seems otherwise to be an impeccably reliable if somewhat sycophantic document. See A Short Account of the Life and Family of Rai Jiwan Lal Bahadur, Late Honorary Magistrate of Delhi with extracts from his diary relating to the time of the Mutiny 1857 compiled by his son, Delhi, 1902, p. 30.
* The Sikhs proved especially keen recruits, for although they had themselves fought two major wars with the British, the most recent only in 1849, any dislike they may have felt for the British was outweighed by their long hatred of the Mughals, who had martyred two of their greatest gurus – Guru Arjan Dev in 1606 and Guru Tegh Bahadur in 1675. There was also, of course, the lure of the celebrated wealth of Delhi.
* A traditional mildly narcotic drink in which milk and spices are mixed with marijuana.
* When Zinat Mahal was imprisoned at the end of the Uprising, her jailer, Lieutenant Edward Ommaney, recorded this revealing (if blatantly self-serving) conversation in his diary for Wednesday, 30 September1857: ‘Saunders came down this morning … had a long conversation with the Ex-Queen, Zeenut Mehul, but only got the same information that she gave me viz. that she, her son Jumma Bakht and the old Ex-King, had had nothing to do with this rebellion, that his sons of the Harem, Meerza Moghul, Kidr Sooltan and grandson Aboo Bukur were the ones who held a prominent part in the occurrences and there was no previous intention of rebellion to her knowledge, except as regards these three men, which she did not know till afterwards and further that the old Ex-King, herself and son, were kept in a sort of confinement. They tried to prevent the commandant of the Palace, Douglas, from exposing himself and when they heard that he had been wounded, had sent food and words of consolation to him … She said also that she had no idea of the mutiny till the mutinous regiments arrived.’ See NAM, 6301–143, Diaries of Col. E. L. Ommaney. On the other hand, it is clear that the princes were not standing by, waiting to receive the Mutineers, and making sure the Fort gates were open. While the actions of the Delhi regiments on II May strongly suggest a degree of collusion in advance with the Meerut mutineers, there is simply no evidence from their actions that the princes in the Fort were waiting for the outbreak, ready to take command.
* See, for example, Collections 57, 59, 60, 61, 62 and 63.
* Stranger still is the graveyard, now an overgrown and little-visited place hidden behind the Sardhana bus station, where the begum’s European mercenaries, including Farasu and his father, are buried in miniature Palladian Taj Mahals covered with a crazy riot of hybrid ornament, where baroque putti cavort around Persian inscriptions and where latticed jali screens rise to round classical arches. At the four corners of the dome, at the base of the drum, where you would expect to find minarets or at least small minars, there stand instead four baroque amphorae.
* Deprived of the right to inherit the estate, the begum’s heir, David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre, went to England to seek justice, where he was eventually elected to Parliament from Sudbury in Suffolk on the Whig Radical (Liberal) ticket, so becoming the first Asian MP. The election was subsequently declared invalid owing to the scale of the bribes Sombre had paid, while his English wife, Mary Anne Jervis, later succeeded in having him declared insane and committed to a lunatic asylum. Sombre somehow managed to escape and made his way to France, where he was certified as perfectly sane and filed a suit alleging that his wife had bribed a doctor to have him locked up so that she could seize his fortune; he also published a 591-page book, Mr Dyce Sombre’s Refutation of the Charge of Lunacy. He continued to sue unsuccessfully in an attempt to get his fortune back, his case not helped by his increasingly eccentric and publicly immoral behaviour with a succession of prostitutes, until he eventually died, dejected and alone, on I July 1875. His story has some striking parallels to Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White; it is also said to have provided the basis of the Jules Verne novel The Begum’s Fortune. See the excellent account in chapter eight of Michael Fisher’s Counterflows to Colonialism, New Delhi, 2005.
* Presumably for fear of a British pursuit.
* Victorian slang for the generic British infantryman, hence Tommies for a group of British soldiers.
* If a Tommy was the generic slang for the British soldier at this time, then a Pandee (or Pandey) was the slang for an insurgent sepoy. The name derived from Mangal Pandey, who was one of the first sepoys to rise up against the Company, shooting and wounding two of his officers from 19th Native Infantry on 29 March at Barrackpore in Bengal while shouting, ‘It’s for our religion. From biting these cartridges we will become infidels.’ See Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s brief but brilliant Mangal Pandey: Brave Martyr or Accidental Hero?, New Delhi, 2005.
* It is possible, of course, that the usage reflected the language of the probably Muslim scribe at the Palace translating their letters into Persian rather than the actual phrase used by the Hindu general.
* A bell of arms was a conical, bell-shaped building used for storing weapons.
* When Felix Rotton surrendered to British forces in 1858, he claimed that he had intended to go to the Residency ‘but was asleep when Indian troops entered the city’. See Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, A Fatal Friendship: The Nawabs, the British and the City of Lucknow, New Delhi, 1992, pp. 32–3.
* The Pathan, whose life Nicholson was once said to have saved, also slept outside his tent at night so that anyone entering had to step over his prostrate body. See R. G. Wilberforce, An Unrecorded Chapter of the Indian Mutiny, London, 1894, pp. 28–9.
* The Corps of Guides was founded in 1846 with the intention of policing the turbulent North West Frontier with Afghanistan.
* Before long the moneylenders of Mathura were actually raising armies to aid the British. See Eric Stokes, The Peasant Armed: The Indian Revolt of 1857, ed. C. A. Bayly, Oxford, 1986, p. 232. To understand why, see the excellent account of how the hated baniyas of Mathura were attacked, looted and tortured at the outbreak of the Uprising in Gautam Bhadra’s essay ‘Four Rebels of 1857’ in Subaltern Studies, IV, ed. R. Guha, Delhi, 1985, p. 254. This helps explain why Laxmi Chand may not actually have been in a position to help the rebels, even if he felt inclined to do so. It is worth noting how much the rise of British rule in general, but especially in its infancy in Bengal, owed to the collusion of Indian moneylenders.
* Crucially, the elephants to move the siege train had been provided by the rajas of the Punjab. Had they not provided them, the siege might have had a very different ending.
* Lieutenant Coghill thought the jihadis made up at least half the rebel numbers: ‘The enemy had about 25 or 30,000 actual sepoys,’ he wrote to his brother, ‘and about 30,000 more ghazis, a race of devils and fanatics.’ See NAM, 6609–139, Coghill Letters, letter From Lt Coghill to his brother, datelined Delhi, 22 September 1857. If the rebel army was changing dramatically, so was the British force, which was now probably around four-fifths made up of ethnic Indians. If the Uprising in Delhi started up as a contest between Hindustani sepoys and the British, it ended as a fight between a mixed rebel force at least half of which were Muslim civilian jihadis, taking on an army of British paid mercenaries of Sikh, Muslim Punjabi and Pathan extraction.
* One of the letters of guarantee that Hodson wrote to Zinat Mahal was dated 18 September and read:
Translation of the Guarantee given by Captain Hodson to the Begum Zeenut Muhul
After compliments states that the punishment of parties who have taken part in the insurrection is desirable, but that the lives of herself, her son Jawan Bukht and her father are guaranteed to
them and they need not be apprehensive, but continue to occupy their premises [in Lal Kuan] as usual. That as he is to make some particular enquiries, and requests that some trustworthy man from herself may be sent to him immediately and that a guard will be furnished for the protection of her house. Dt 18th September 1857
(DCO Archive, Mutiny Papers, File no. 10, Letter no. 3, copy contained in letter from W. L. R. Hodson to C.B. Saunders, Delhi, 30 October 1857.) A later letter referred to in the correspondence, but now lost, guaranteed the life of Zafar as well.
* According to the Palace diary, after the eclipse of 2 July 1852 Zafar had attempted to counter the malignant effects by having himself weighed ‘against several kinds of grain, butter, coral etc and then distributed the results among the poor.’ See National Archives of India, Foreign, Foreign Dept Misc., vol. 361, Precis of Palace Intelligence, entry for 2 July 1852.
* This was indeed the case. Nadir Shah’s legendary massacre of 1739 lasted only a few hours. According to legend it was stopped when an Indian petitioner came before him and recited a verse:
None is left now for you to kill with your coquettish sword,
Unless you bring them back to life and then kill them again.
* In giving this piece of information, Mirza Ilahe Bakhsh was betraying his own grandson: Mirza Abu Bakr was the son of Mirza Fakhru by Ilahe Bakhsh’s own daughter. He was afterwards known even by the British as ‘the traitor of Delhi’.
* In the end, the blame – as it was seen – was pinned on Hervey Greathed, who being dead was unable to confirm or deny Hodson’s claim that he had given the authorisation to offer Zafar his life.
† This was an image than sprang readily to the pens of several visitors, not least because the same courtyard also contained Zinat Mahal’s pet tiger: ‘There is a Tiger here which I think had better be removed as there is no-one to feed it,’ wrote Zinat’s jailor on 24 September. ‘It might be sold profitably to some natives. Probably if it cannot be taken away it had better be shot. There is also a magnificent Buck Antelope here.’ Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, CB Saunders Papers, Eur Mss E 186, no. 122, Ommaney to Saunders, 22 September 1857.
‡ Zafar was in fact fully eighty-two.
* Mrs Coopland gives a similar account, saying that she had ‘heard that the king and queen did not live on very good terms. She said that he would still consider himself a king, and when she sent for things from the bazaar he pronounced them not good enough; and that he would not smoke tobacco when it came because he did not consider it nice enough. He complained that she had plenty of concealed money and jewels, which she would not sacrifice to his comfort; so that Mr Omanney was obliged to allow him about sixpence a day’. R. M. Coopland, A Lady’s Escape from Gwalior and Life in the Fort of Agra during the Mutinies of 1857, London, 1859, p. 277.
* The officer in question may well have been Edward Ommaney, who wrote in his diary that he ‘thrashed every native who did not salaam’ at exactly the time in question, and who would have had reason to be heading into the Red Fort. National Army Museum, 6301/143, Diaries of Col. E.L. Ommaney, vol. A, entry for 24 November.
* Lieutenant A. H. Lindsay left a description of this ‘very sickening work’ that Edward forbore to trouble GG with: ‘They caught a very nice fat sleek-looking Hindoo who they felt assured was a man of property. He refused for a long time to confess where his money was concealed, so they shut him up in a dark cellar and fired pistols over his head until he got into such a state of alarm that he told them where they could find Rs 50,000 of his own and Rs 40,000 of a friend of his, who he was determined should not get off scot free. The next day they got hold of another corpulent nigger, who however was up to the dodge of the pistols, and did not even care [about] knives being thrown, after the manner of the Chinese jugglers, so they loaded a pistol before his eyes, and sent a bullet through his turban, which he thought was getting a bit beyond a joke, so he divulged the whereabouts of his Rs 40,000.’ Cited in Christopher Hibbert, The Great Mutiny: India 1857, London, 1978, p.321.
* Grass and bamboo blinds that were kept wet and fragrant during hot weather.
* In addition to Mirza Jawan Bakht, one other son was spared the British slaughter of the imperial family. This was Zafar’s youngest son, Mirza Shah Abbas, the sixteenth of Zafar’s boys. He was the illegitimate son of one of Zafar’s concubines, Mubarak unNissa, and born in 1845; thus he was thirteen when he left Delhi along with Zafar and his mother.
* The fort of Allahabad was the place of exile to which the British had formerly exiled Zafar’s younger brother, Mirza Jehangir. It was also here that a despairing Mirza Jehangir had eventually died from ‘an excess of Hoffman’s Cherry Brandy’ in 1821.
* Upstream from Diamond Harbour in Calcutta lived the exiled remnants of the two other recently deposed Muslim dynasties: the household of Wajd Ali Shah, the former Nawab of Avadh, and that of the sons of Tipu Sultan of Mysore. Both families lived in some style – Wajd Ali Shah had a fine house at Garden Reach, while the Tipu sons were given the house of what is now the Tollygunge Club; but throughout 1857 they were all locked up in Fort William to prevent them becoming the focus of dissent.
* The second veiled woman was in fact Shah Zamani Begum, his daughter-in-law.
† That is, Kashmiri shawls.
‡ Actually two sons.
* Theo returned to India in 1863 after five years in England, but Lawrence, who had by then been promoted to Viceroy, blocked him from receiving any ‘creditable appointment’ and he was forced permanently to retire from the ICS and return to England. According to a family memoir, now in the British Library, ‘Years after, Lady Bayley [Theo’s sister Emily] asked Lord Lawrence [formerly Sir John] why he had been so unfriendly to her brother, and he replied because he had hanged so many people without proof of their guilt. She answered that she had asked Sir Theophilus about this, and he said he had never done so, and the only thing he could reproach himself for was the burning of Alipore, where on first going through it he had found three little white feet, a proof that Europeans had been murdered there.’ Theo never returned to India after 1863, and lived on for twenty years in retirement in London, where his nephews and nieces often ‘heard him telling tales of his adventures in 1857’, and remembered him as ‘a charming and entertaining companion’, with ‘a great sense of mischief’. There was little hint of the man who in 1857 was regarded as the most callous and enthusiastic hanging judge in the city. He remarried in 1876, but died only seven years later, aged only fifty-five. See Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, Hardcastle Papers, Photo Eur 31 1 A.
* What remained of the Company was finally dissolved on 1 January 1874, when the East India Stock Dividend Redemption Act came into effect.
* A modest tomb of the saint is, however, still extant in the Pigeon Sellers’ Bazaar in Old Delhi.
† Shia religious hall used to hold mourning ceremonies during Muharram.
* The panorama appears to have been completed, but has since disappeared. The British Library does, however, possess another complete panorama of the Fort commissioned before 1857 by Sir Thomas Metcalfe, which is partially reproduced here. Some time after this, in 1862, Harriet Tytler accompanied her husband Robert, who had been appointed superintendent of the terrible British gulag in the Andaman Islands. Harriet ‘hated the place from the very first day,’ though she is still commemorated in the name of the highest mountain in the archipelago, Mount Harriet. Here the Tytlers attempted with little success to bring down the appalling mortality rate of the convicts which, when they arrived, stood at around seven hundred fatalities a year. Many were dying of disease within months, if not weeks, of arrival in the Andamans’ humid and insalubrious jungles, and at one point only forty-five of the 10,000 convicts were pronounced ‘medically fit’ by the prison camp’s own doctors. Others died from the frequent attacks on the prison camp by the island’s aborigines, some of whom were cannibals. A large number of the transported convicts subject to th
is appalling regime were from Delhi: a single petition sent to the King on any subject during the Uprising was enough to earn the petitioner transportation to the Andamans for life. Among those sentenced was one of Ghalib’s most brilliant and talented friends, the poet and intellectual Fazl i-Haq. Fazl had originally been a protégé of Ochterlony, and was a friend with whom Ghalib used regularly to play chess. He was accused of encouraging the Muslims of Delhi to wage jihad against the British, a charge he refused to deny in court, despite being told he would otherwise qualify for the amnesty. He died just before orders arrived for his release. Robert Tytler died a decade later in 1872. Harriet travelled to British Columbia, where she lived for some time with her daughter, but returned to India and lived in Simla, where she wrote her memoirs, before dying in 1907 at the age of seventy-nine.
* Neither was returned to the Delhi Muslims until many years later – the Fatehpuri Masjid in 1875 and the Zinat ul-Masajid by Lord Curzon in the early years of the twentieth century. Sikh troops remained occupying the Jama Masjid until it was returned in 1862. See S. M. Ikram, Muslim Rule in India and Pakistan, Lahore, 1966, p. 462.
* This was actually the opposite of the truth: Zinat Mahal always kept her distance from the rebels and remained consistently opposed to them, not least because Jawan Bakht’s rivals for the succession had so enthusiastically embraced their cause.
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