The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  † Davies was wrong about this. Zafar may well have succeeded in his attempt to save the prisoners if the hakim had not begged him to stop protesting.

  * Maharaja Dalip Singh, the youngest son of the celebrated one-eyed Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh of Lahore, became ruler of the Punjab at the age of ten, before being deposed by the British after the Anglo-Sikh war of 1849. In 1854 he went to Britain, where he became a Christian and a favourite of Queen Victoria, who often invited him to stay with her at Osborne. He bought a country house at Elveden in East Anglia and the British came to regard him as a model of the ‘Anglicised native gentleman’, especially approving of his fondness for grouse shooting.

  * Two celebrated ghazals long attributed to Zafar – ‘Lagtaa nahii hai dil meraa’ (Nothing brings happiness to my heart) and ‘Naa kissii kii aankh kaa nuur huun’ (‘I bring no solace to heart or eye’) – are popularly known in the subcontinent largely because of Mohammed Rafi, who sang them for the Bombay film Lal Qila. But before that they had already become popular in the late fifties thanks to the version sung by one Habeeb Wali Muhammad on Radio Ceylon’s talent show, Ovaltine Amateur Hour. In the sixties, the Rafi version then became a favourite on All India Radio. Recent research by the Lahore scholar Imran Khan, and backed by several other leading scholars of Urdu literature, has, however, cast doubt on Zafar’s authorship of both verses. Certainly the ghazals do not appear in any of Zafar’s four published divans, nor in the periodical Hazoor-e Wala, where Zafar also published poems. I would like to thank Professor Fran Pritchett and Sundeep Dougal for bringing these developments to my attention, and also C. M. Naim, who, before becoming a distinguished scholar of Urdu literature, was an enthusiastic listener to Ovaltine Amateur Hour.

  * It is trae that not everyone – even among Indian Muslims – looked to the Mughals: Tipu Sultan of Mysore, for example, made a point of seeking the blessing of the Ottoman Caliph. Yet it is surely significant that the court of Lucknow, which had been encouraged by the British to look to Calcutta rather than Delhi, sent an embassy to Zafar in 1857 asking him to confirm the title Wazir for the young heir apparent, Birjis Qadir, who was already minting his coins in the Emperor’s name.

  * His descendants still live in Rangoon today.

  * It was not by any means a total divide: religious education at Aligarh, for example, was in the hands of the Deobandis.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1. National Archives of India (hereafter NAI), Foreign Department, Political, November 1862, p. 204/62.

  2. Frances W. Pritchett, Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994, p. 10.

  3. NAI, Foreign, Foreign Dept, Misc., vol. 361, Precis of Palace Intelligence. For oil rubbing see entry for Monday, 29 March 1852; for hunting, see entry for Thursday, 13 April 1852; for visiting gardens, see Friday, 16 April 1852; for enjoying moonlight, see entry for Saturday, 10 September; for infidelities of BSZ’s concubines, see entry for Saturday, 17 April; for other pregnancies among the imperial concubines, see entry for Tuesday, 30 August 1853.

  4. Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library (hereafter OIOC), Vibart Papers, Eur Mss 135/19, Vibart to his Uncle Gordon, 22 September 1857.

  5. Major W. S. R. Hodson, Twelve Years of a Soldier’s Life in India, London, 1859, p. 302.

  6. Sir George Campbell, Memoirs of My Indian Career, 1893, vol. 1.

  7. W. H. Russell, My Diary in India, London, 1860, vol 1, p. 60.

  8. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 51.

  9. Cited in Pritchett, Nets of Awareness, p. 29.

  10. Cited in Ralph Russell and Khurshid Islam, Ghalib: Life and Letters, Delhi, 1994, p. 269.

  11. Ralph Russell, The Oxford Ghalib: Life, Letters and Ghazals, New Delhi, 2003, pp. 166, 188.

  12. James Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, London, 1876, p. 594.

  13. Lieutenant William Franklin in the 1795 edition of the new Asiatick Researches.

  14. Lady Maria Nugent, Journal of a Residence in India 1811–I5, 2 vols, John Murray, London, 1839; vol. 2, p. 9.

  15. Irfan Habib, ‘The Coming of 1857’, Social Scientist, vol. 26, no. 1, January-April 1998, p. 6.

  16. The collection was catalogued in 1921. See Press List of Mutiny Papers 1857 Being a Collection of the Correspondence of the Mutineers at Delhi, Reports of Spies to English Officials and Other Miscellaneous Papers, Imperial Records Dept, Calcutta, 1921.

  17. Vincent Smith, Oxford History of India, Oxford, 1923, p. 731.

  18. NAI, Mutiny Papers: bird catcher – collection 67, no. 50, 14 July; horse trader –collection 67, no. 76, 27 July; gamblers – collection 62, no. 80, 3 August; confectioners – collection 61, no. 296, 4 August.

  19. NAI, Mutiny Papers: Hasni the dancer – collection 62, no. 84 (no date); kebab seller – collection 103, no. 132, 10 July; Manglu the courtesan – collection 60, no. 605, 29 August.

  20. It is true that several scholars – notably Aslam Parvez and Mahdi Hussain – have already drawn glancingly on some of the material in the Mutiny Papers, and Margrit Pernau has used it extensively for her forthcoming study of the Muslims of nineteenth-century Delhi, but I believe this book is the first time a properly systematic use has been made of the material for the study of Delhi in 1857.

  21. Margrit Pernau is currently embarking on a project to translate and publish these riches as well as the court Akhbarat, which preceded the printed newspapers. Up to now scholars have used only the brief passages which are translated in Nadar Ali Khan’s A History of Urdu Journalism 1822–1857 (New Delhi, 1991).

  22. The only historian of Delhi who seems to have used the Punjab Archive seems to be Sylvia Shorto, who drew on the material for her fascinating thesis, Public Lives, Private Places, British Houses in Delhi 1803–57; unpublished dissertation, NYU, 2004.

  23. Eric Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj – Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India, London, 1978; Stokes, The Peasant Armed: The Indian Revolt of 1857, ed. C. A. Bayly, Oxford, 1986; Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Avadh in Revolt 1857–8 – A Study of Popular Resistance, New Delhi, 1984; Tapti Roy, The Politics of a Popular Uprising: Bundelkhand in 1857, Oxford, 1994.

  24. See Mukherjee, Avadh in Revolt.

  25. Dihli Urdu Akbhar, 17 May 1857.

  26. Ibid., 24 May 1857.

  27. Ibid., 23 August 1857.

  28. Ghalib routinely referred to the mutineers as ‘blacks’ in both his public works – such as Dastanbuy – and his private correspondence. See, for example, Russell, The Oxford Ghalib, p. 167.

  29. This is well argued by Rudrangshu Mukherjee in his excellent short monograph, Mangal Pandey: Brave Martyr or Accidental Hero?, New Delhi, 2005, p. 63.

  30. Though of course there were those who resisted the Mughal claim, such as the Nawabs of Avadh and, farther away, Tipu Sultan.

  31. Rudrangshu Mukherjee, ‘“Satan Let Loose upon Earth”: The Kanpur Massacres in India in the Revolt of 1857, Past and Present, no. 128, pp. 110–11.

  32. Akhtar Qamber, The Last Mushaiirah of Delhi: A Translation of Farhatullah Baig’s Modern Urdu Classic Dehli ki Akhri Shama, New Delhi, 1979, p. 62.

  33. Emily Eden, Up the Country, Letters from India, London, 1930, p. 97.

  34. This important point was well argued by F. W. Buckler (1891–1960) in his righly celebrated essay ‘The Political Theory of the Indian Mutiny’, Trans, of the Royal Historical Soc., 4 series, 5, 1922, pp. 71–100 (also reprinted in Legitimacy and Symbols: The South Asian writings of F. W. Buckler, ed. M. N. Pearson, Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, c. 1985.

  35. Mark Thornhill, Personal Adventures and Experiences of a Magistrate, during the Rise, Progress and Suppression of the Indian Mutiny, London, 1884, p. 7.

  36. NAI, Mutiny Papers, collection 60, no. 830.

  37. OIOC, Eur Mss B 138, The City of Delhi during 1857, translation of the account of Said Mobarak Shah.


  38. Quoted by the prosecution in the concluding speech at the trial of Zafar, Proceedings on the Trial of Muhammad Bahadur Shah, Titular King of Delhi, Before a Military Commission, upon a charge of Rebellion, Treason and Murder, held at Delhi, on the 27th Day of January 1858, and following days, London, 1859, p. 142.

  39. OIOC, Montgomery Papers, no. 198, 7 September 1857.

  40. Fazl ul-Haq, ‘The Story of the War of Independence, 1857–8’, Journal Pak. Hist. Soc., vol. V, pt 1, January 1957.

  41. See footnote on p. 473.

  1: A Chessboard King

  1. National Archives of India (hereafter NAI), Foreign, Foreign Dept Misc, vol. 361, Precis of Palace Intelligence, entry for Friday, 2 April 1852. Also Delhi Gazette (OIOC microfilms), hereafter DG, issue of 31 March 1852; Munshi Faizuddin, Bazm i-Akhir, Yani sehr e-Delhi ke do akhiri badshahon ka tareeq i-maashrat (The Last Convivial Gathering – the Mode of Life of the Last Two Kings of Delhi), Lahore, 1965, ch. 7; Zahir Dehlavi, Dastan i-Ghadr: An eyewitness account of the 1857 Uprising, Lahore, 1955 pp. 17–18; Aslam Parvez, Bahadur Shah Zafar, pp. 78–9. Additional details about Mughal processions have been taken from the description given by Captain Robert Smith in his journals, cited by Sylvia Shorto, Public Lives, Private Places, British Houses in Delhi 1803–57, unpublished dissertation, NYU, 2004, p. 136, and from the many images that survive of such processions, such as that shown in Niall Hobhouse, Indian Painting for the British 1780–1880, London, 2001, item 26, or Emily Bayley (ed. M. M. Kaye), The Golden Calm: An English Lady’s Life in Moghul Delhi, London, 1980, pp. 41–3, and especially pp. 150–59. For an intriguing indication of how the Mughals lit such night-time wedding processions, albeit two hundred years earlier, see the images of the night-time barats of Shah Shuja and Dara Shukoh in Milo Cleveland Beach and Ebba Koch, King of the World: The Padshahnama, an Imperial Mughal Manuscript from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, London, 1997, pp. 61 and 71.

  2. Schoefft was actually in Delhi in 1842 but seems to have painted all his Mughal portraits from more recent sketches, miniatures or photographs than those he made on his visit, as the ages of all three of his sitters – Zafar, Mirza Jawan Bakht and Mirza Mughal – all correspond to their ages in the mid-1850s – perhaps 1854–55 – rather than ten years earlier. There are precedents for this in Schoefft’s work: for example, his portrait of Ranjit Singh, who died shortly before his arrival in Lahore, and must presumably therefore have been painted from pre-existing miniatures. The pictures were exhibited for the first time in 1857. I would like to thank Jean-Marie Lafont and F. S. Aijazuddin for their help in solving this conundrum.

  3. The two portraits, along with one of Mirza Mughal, hang today in the Mughal room of the Lahore Fort in Pakistan.

  4. Zahir Dehlavi, Dastan i-Ghadr, Lahore, 1955, p. 19.

  5. DG, 31 March 1852.

  6. For mehndi procession see NAI, Precis of Palace Intelligence, entry for 31 March, and DG, 31 March 1852. For other celebrations and the sehra, see also Dehlavi, Dastan i-Ghadr, p. 19. A wedding chaplet is referred to in the entry for the wedding in the Precis of Palace Intelligence, Friday, 2 April 1852, and its pearls referred to in the celebratory poems of Ghalib and Zauq; see Muhammad Husain Azad (trans, and ed. Frances Pritchett and Shamsur Rahim Faruqi), Ab-e Hayat: Shaping the Canon of Urdu Poetry, New Delhi, 2001, pp. 410–13. From the references to strings of pearls in the poem, this chaplet would seem to be the same object that is being placed over the face of Dara Shukoh by his father Shah Jahan in Beach and Koch, King of the World, p. 68, item 25.

  7. See, for example, the complaints against him in the Punjab Archive, Lahore (hereafter PAL), Case 1D, item 8, November 1847, where one of the princes describes himself as being ‘put to extreme distress by the conduct of Mehboob, the servant of his Majesty’.

  8. DG, 31 March 1852.

  9. See, for example, NAI, Precis of Palace Intelligence, entries for 1 and 4 March.

  10. Bishop Reginald Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India, London, 1828; vol. 1, p. 563

  11. NAI, Precis of Palace Intelligence, entry for Friday, 2 April 1852.

  12. Mir Taqi Mir, quoted in M. Sadiq, History of Urdu Literature, Oxford, 1964, p. 100.

  13. Muhammad Saleh Kanbu, quoted by Narayani Gupta, ‘From Architecture to Archaeology: The “Monumentalising” of Delhi’s History in the Nineteenth Century’, in Jamal Malik (ed.), Perspectives of Mutual Encounters in South Asian History, 1760–1860, Leiden, 2000.

  14. Azad (ed.), Divan-e-Zauq, p. 145, cited in in Frances W. Pritchett, Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and its Critics, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994, p. 6.

  15. Muhammad 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. For apes and hogs, see Farhan Ahmad Nizami, Madrasahs, Scholars and Saints: Muslim Response to the British Presence in Delhi and the Upper Doab 1803–1857, unpublished PhD, Oxford, 1983, p. 175.

  16. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Asar us Sanadid, Delhi, 1990, vol. 2, pp. 11–13.

  17. Azad, Ab-e Hayat, p. 53.

  18. Cited in Pritchett, Nets of Awareness, p. 10. The introduction to the English translation of My Life by Nawab Sarvar ul-Mulk remarks, ‘the original autobiography is in Urdu and is written in the choice language and in a style which would only be attained by a Delhi man, and one who had intimate associations with the Red Fort, where the best and most elegant Urdu was spoken’. Sarvar ul-Mulk, My Life, Being the Autobiography of Nawab Server ul Mulk Bahadur, trans, from the Urdu by his son, Nawab Jiwan Yar Jung Bahadur, London, 1903.

  19. Pritchett, Nets of Awareness, p. 10.

  20. NAI, Precis of Palace Intelligence, entry for Friday, 2 April 1852.

  21. François Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, 1656–68, ed. Archibald Constable, trans. Irving Brock, Oxford, 1934, p. 373.

  22. British Library, Warren Hastings papers, William Palmer to Warren Hastings, Add. Mss 29, 172, vol XLI, 1790, p. 184; 21st NOVEMBER 1790 AGRA: ‘I applied to the Shah [Alam] in your name for permission to transcribe his copy of the Mahbharrut, and was assured that it would have been most cheerfully granted if the book had been in his possession, but his library had been totally plundered & destroyed by that villain Ghullam Khauder Khan, and he added, not without some degree of indignation, that part of the books had been purchased at Lucknow, that is by the Vizier; & upon enquiry find this to be the case, for his Excellency produced some of them to the English Gentlemen, boasting that they were the “King’s”.’

  23. Quoted in Pritchett, Nets of Awareness, p. 3.

  24. NAI, Precis of Palace Intelligence, entry for Thursday, 23 January 1851: ‘A petition was received from Mirza Shoojat Shah stating that a chief had arrived from the District at Dehlee and was desirous of visiting the Palace. HM replied that without the Agent’s permission no chief of a foreign territory could be allowed entrance.’

  25. For example, NAI, Precis of Palace Intelligence, entry for 5 December 1851.

  26. For example, NAI, Precis of Palace Intelligence, entry for 14 March 1851.

  27. Ibid., entries for 3 and 8 April 1852. A khilat was a symbolic acceptance of the fealty offered in the nazr.

  28. Parvez, Bahadur Shah Zafar, pp. 351–6. Parvez is undoubtedly right to point to the degree to which these themes dominate Zafar’s verse, but it is also true that the cage, the bulbul and the garden are common tropes in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century ghazal writing. The unusual degree of pain and frustration expressed in Zafar’s poetry has however also been commented on by Arsh Taimuri.

  29. Naim Ahmad, Shahr ashob, Maktabah Jami’ah, Delhi, 1968, p. 196. Cited in Pritchett, Nets of Awareness, p. 5.

  30. Quoted in J. K. Majumdar, Raja Rammohun Roy and the Last Moghuls: A Selection from Official Records (1803–1859), Art Press, Calcutta, 1939, pp. 319–20.

  31. Ibid. p. 4.

  32. For Metcalfe renouncing his allegiance, see Benti
nck Papers, Nottingham University, Charles Metcalfe to Lord W. Bentinck, Pw Jf 1637, Calcutta, 18 April 1832; for ceasing to give nazrs, see Charles Metcalfe to Lord W. Bentinck, Pw Jf 1620, Calcutta, 18 December 1831; also, Charles Metcalfe to Lord W. Bentinck, Pw Jf 1607, Calcutta, 13 November: talking of giving nazrs, Metcalfe remarks: ‘It is what in some degree what will be probably be done by the King of Dihlee & was done to Lord Amherst & there it is not amiss, because the superiority of the King is acknowledged and the nature of the acknowledgement cannot be mistaken.’

  33. Shorto, Public Lives, p. 134.

  34. Quoted by C. M. Naim in his forthcoming essay on Sahbai in Margrit Pernau (ed.), Delhi College, New Delhi, 2006.

  35. This wonderful translation is by Ralph Russell. See Russell, The Oxford Ghalib: Life, Letters and Ghazals, New Delhi, 2003, p. 18.

  36. The name of the poem is a reference to the wedding veil of pearls that the Mughals used to fix over the face of princes who were getting married. See note 6 above.

  37. NAI, Precis of Palace Intelligence, entry for 17 April 1852.

  38. Azad, Ab-e Hayat, pp. 410–13.

  39. Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, ‘A Year in Pre Mutiny Delhi – 1837 A.C.’, Islamic Culture, 17, pt 3, 1943, pp. 282–97.

  40. For Zafar’s wives, see Parvez, Bahadur Shah Zafar, pp. 81–5; for concubines, see NAI, Precis of Palace Intelligence, entry for Friday, 29 July 1853.

  41. NAI, Precis of Palace Intelligence, entry for Saturday, 17 April 1852.

  42. Delhi Commissioner’s Office (hereafter DCO) Archive, Delhi, File 65A, 7 December 1858, Report on the Character and Conduct of the Attendants of the ex royal King, remarks: ‘This lady was once a reputed beauty and attracted the admiration of the ex-king who contracted marriage with her notwithstanding that she was of low caste, a mere dommee. Their matrimonial life was not without its troubles. The Begum Zeenat Mahal, the King’s favourite wife and the mother of MJB incited a great aversion to her and for two or three years before the outbreak Taj Mahal was in disgrace and imprisoned in consequence of her reputed intrigue with Mirza Kamran, a nephew of the ex-King, but as she alleges on account of Zeenat Mahal’s jealousy and distaste.’