The Last Mughal Read online

  Delhi was the principal centre of the Uprising. As mutinous troops poured into the city from all round northern India – even the rebel regiments at Kanpur intended to head straight to Delhi until diverted to attack their officers by Nana Sahib – it was clear from the outset that the British had to recapture Delhi or lose their Indian empire for ever. Equally the sepoys rallying to the throne of Bahadur Shah, whom they believed to be the legitimate ruler of Hindustan, realised that if they lost Delhi they lost everything. Every available British soldier was sent to the Delhi Ridge, and for the four hottest months of the Indian summer, the Mughal capital was bombarded by British artillery with thousands of helpless civilians caught up in the horrors.

  While in the first weeks of the Uprising troops came to Delhi from all over Hindustan, thereafter the city, and especially its besiegers, remained to a great extent cut off from news of developments elsewhere. In that sense the siege of Delhi was always a war within a war, relatively independent of the momentous developments to the south and east. Until the very end of July, the British on the Delhi Ridge were still daily expecting to be relieved by General Wheeler’s army at Kanpur, less than 300 miles to the south-east, quite unaware that Wheeler’s army had surrendered and been slaughtered, almost to a man, more than a month earlier, on 27 June. Equally, the Delhi defenders were convinced they were about to be saved by two non-existent Persian armies, one heading down from the Khyber Pass, while the other was supposed to be making its way north-east from a seaborne landing in Bombay.

  Most narratives of 1857 cut back and forth between Delhi, Lucknow, Jhansi and Kanpur in a way that suggests far more contact and flow of information than there actually was between the different centres of the Uprising. In this book I have chosen to limit references to developments elsewhere, except in cases where the Delhi participants were explicitly aware of them, thus attempting to restore the sense of intense isolation and lonely vulnerability felt by both the besiegers and the besieged engaged in the battle for control of the great Mughal capital.

  Over the last four years, I and my colleagues Mahmoud Farooqi and Bruce Wannell have been working through many of the 20,000 virtually unused Persian and Urdu documents relating to Delhi in 1857, known as the Mutiny Papers, that we found on the shelves of the National Archives of India.16 These allow 1857 in Delhi to be seen for the first time from a properly Indian perspective, and not just from the British sources through which to date it has usually been viewed.

  Discovering the sheer scale of the treasures held by the National Archives was one of the highlights of the whole project. It is a commonplace of books about 1857 that they lament the absence of Indian sources and the corresponding need to rely on the huge quantities of easily accessible British material – memoirs, travelogues, letters, histories – which carry with them not only the British version of events but also British attitudes and preconceptions about the whole Uprising; in that sense little has changed since Vincent Smith complained in 1923 ‘that the story has been chronicled from one side only’.17

  Yet all this time in the National Archives there existed as detailed a documentation of the four months of the Uprising in Delhi as can exist for any Indian city at any period of history – great unwieldy mountains of chits, pleas, orders, petitions, complaints, receipts, rolls of attendance and lists of casualties, predictions of victory and promises of loyalty, notes from spies of dubious reliability and letters from eloping lovers – all neatly bound in string and boxed up in the cool, hushed, air-conditioned vaults of the Indian National Archives.

  What was even more exciting was the street-level nature of much of the material. Although the documents were collected by the victorious British from the Palace and the army camp, they contained huge quantities of petitions and requests from the ordinary citizens of Delhi – potters and courtesans, sweetmeat makers and overworked water carriers – exactly the sort of people who usually escape the historian’s net. The Mutiny Papers overflow with glimpses of real life: the bird catchers and lime makers who have had their charpoys stolen by sepoys; the horse trader from Haryana looted by Gujars on the outskirts of Delhi as he walks home from selling his wares, his pocket full of cash; the gamblers playing cards in a recently ruined house and ogling the women next door, to the great alarm of the family living there; the sweetmeat makers who refuse to take their sweets up to the trenches in Qudsia Bagh until they are paid for the last load.18

  We meet people like Hasni the dancer, who uses a British attack on the Idgah to escape from the serai where she is staying with her husband and run off with her lover. Or Pandit Harichandra, who tried to exhort the Hindus of Delhi to leave their shops and join the fight, citing examples from the Mahabharat. Or Hafiz Abdurrahman, caught grilling beef kebabs during a ban on cow slaughter and who comes to beg the mercy of Zafar. Or Chandan, the sister of the courtesan Manglo, who rushed before the emperor as her beautiful sister was seized and raped by the cavalryman Rustam Khan: ‘He has imprisoned her and beats her up and even though she shouts and screams nobody helps her … Should this state of anarchy and injustice continue the subjects of the Exalted One will all be destroyed.’19

  As a source for daily events, for the motivation of the rebels, for the problems they faced, the levels of chaos in the city, and the ambiguous and equivocal response of both the Mughal elite and the Hindu trading class of the city, the Mutiny Papers contain an unrivalled quantity of unique material. Cumulatively the stories that the collection contains allow the Uprising to be seen not in terms of nationalism, imperialism, orientalism or other such abstractions, but instead as a human event of extraordinary, tragic and often capricious outcomes, and allow us to resurrect the ordinary individuals whose fate it was to be accidentally caught up in one of the great upheavals of history. Public, political and national tragedies, after all, consist of a multitude of private, domestic and individual tragedies. It is through the human stories of the successes, struggles, grief, anguish and despair of these individuals that we can best bridge the great chasm of time and understanding separating us from the remarkably different world of mid-nineteenth-century India.

  As the scale and detail of the material available from the Mutiny Papers became slowly apparent, and as it became obvious that most of the material had not been accessed since it was gathered in 1857, or at least since it was catalogued when rediscovered stored in a series of trunks in Calcutta in 1921, the question that became increasingly hard to answer was why no one had properly used this wonderful mass of material before.20 For at a time when ten thousand dissertations and whole shelves of Subaltern Studies have carefully and ingeniously theorised about orientalism and colonialism and the imagining of the Other (all invariably given titles with a present participle and a fashionable noun of obscure meaning – Gendering the Colonial Paradigm, Constructing the Imagined Other, Othering the Imagined Construction, and so on) not one PhD has ever been written from the Mutiny Papers, no major study has ever systematically explored its contents.

  Certainly, the shikastah (literally ‘broken writing’) script of the manuscripts is often difficult to read, written as it is in an obscure form of late Mughal scribal notation with many of the diacritical marks missing, and at times faded and ambiguous enough to defy the most persistent of researchers. Moreover many of the fragments – especially the spies’ reports – are written in microscopic script on very small pieces of paper designed to be sewn into clothing or even hidden within the person of the spy. Yet the collection could not have been in a better-known or more accessible archive – the National Archives of India lies in a magnificent Lutyens-period building bang in the centre of India’s capital city. Using the Mutiny Papers and properly harvesting their riches as a source for 1857 felt at times as strange and exciting – and indeed as unlikely – as going to Paris and discovering, unused on the shelves of the Bibliothèque Nationale, the entire records of the French Revolution.

  No less exciting was it to discover that Delhi’s two principal Urdu newspapers, the won
derfully opinionated Dihli Urdu Akbhar and the more staid and restrained Court Circular, the Siraj ul-Akbhar, had continued publication without missing an issue throughout the Uprising, and that the National Archives contained almost complete sets of both. Again only fragmentary translations of these have previously been available.21

  Outside the National Archives, other libraries in Delhi turned out to contain equally remarkable treasures. The Delhi Commissioner’s Office Archive, not far from Zafar’s summer palace in Mehrauli, contained the full records of the revived British administration as the officials calmly went about their business of expelling the citizens of Delhi, rounding up and hanging any Delhiwallahs they suspected of involvement in the Uprising, and demolishing great swathes of the city. The documents allow for the first time the full scale of the viciousness and brutality of the British response to 1857 in Delhi to be properly grasped. As far as the Mughal elite were concerned, the fall of Delhi was followed by something approaching a genocide. Only the Victorian British, one feels, would keep such perfect bureaucratic records of what in many cases would today be classified as grisly war crimes.

  Several fine first-person Mughal accounts of 1857 in Delhi also turned up, previously untranslated into English. Most memorable was the moving account of the destruction of an individual’s entire world contained in the Dastan i-Ghadr of the sensitive young poet and courtier Zahir Dehlavi, written on his deathbed in Hyderabad years later, apparently from earlier notes. Unlike many other writers on 1857 he feels no compunction about recording what he believed to be the truth about what happened, and speaks equally frankly of the failings of the Mughal court, the sepoys and the British.

  The longer I worked, the clearer it became that there were in fact two parallel streams of historiography, which utilised almost completely different sets of sources. The British histories, as well as a surprising number of those written in English in post-colonial India, tended to use only English-language sources, padding out the gaps, in the case of more recent work, with a thick cladding of post-Saidian theory and jargon. The Urdu histories written by contemporary Muslim scholars in India and Pakistan, on the other hand, tend to make use of an entirely separate and often very rich seam of Urdu primary sources. Moreover, in the case of Delhi there exist some wonderful works of secondary scholarship, such as Aslam Parvez’s fine Urdu biography of Zafar, which remain unknown to English-speaking readers. One of the principal aims of this book is to bring the voluminous Persian and Urdu primary and secondary sources on Delhi in 1857 before an English language readership for the first time.

  But it was not just Delhi which turned out to have great stashes of new material. Other almost unused repositories of documents kept turning up across South and South-East Asia. In Lahore the spectacular Punjab Archive, kept within the huge domed tomb of the Emperor Jahangir’s favourite dancing girl, was the resting place not only of Anarkali herself but also of the complete pre-Mutiny records of the British Residency in Delhi, archives that historians had long assumed were destroyed in 1857.22

  Here could be read all the correspondence between the British Resident and his superiors in Calcutta about their plans for extinguishing the Mughal court. The archives also contained much material from 1857, including sets of spies’ reports and the two famous telegrams sent from Delhi on 11 May that warned the British in Lahore of what had taken place, so allowing them to disarm the sepoys of the Punjab before they themselves heard of the events in Meerut and Delhi. The tomb, then as now, is part of the Punjab Secretariat complex, from which in 1857 John Lawrence masterminded the British effort to retake Delhi. During the period I worked on the Delhi Residency archives in Anarkali’s tomb, I found myself scribbling on a desk just ten feet from the marble sarcophagus said to be that of the courtesan immortalised in the great Bollywood movie Mughal-e Azam, and only a couple of hundred yards from the office from which John Lawrence had planned his moves to suppress the mutiny of his sepoys and restore British control of northern India.

  An even bigger surprise was the remarkable National Archives in Rangoon (or Yangon, as it has been rechristened by the military government). I had gone to Rangoon mainly to visit the site of Zafar’s exile and death – and perhaps at some level to seek the barakat (blessings) his devotees still pray for at his shrine. I thought of attempting to visit the archives only when prompted by a friend there, who knew someone who knew the director. Yet it turned out that here lay all Zafar’s prison records, efficiently catalogued, scanned and digitally stored in Acrobat PDF files – something the British Library has so far failed to achieve – so that I was able to leave the archives at the end of one morning with a shelf full of research contained on a single, shining CD.

  What I have found at the end of all this confirms a growing conviction of many of the more recent historians of 1857. Instead of the single coherent mutiny or patriotic national war of independence beloved of Victorian or Indian nationalist historiography, there was in reality a chain of very different uprisings and acts of resistance, whose form and fate were determined by local and regional situations, passions and grievances.

  All took very different forms in different places – which goes some way to explain why, 150 years after the event, scholars are still arguing over the old chestnut of whether 1857 was a mutiny, a peasants’ revolt, an urban revolution or a war of independence. The answer is that it was all of these, and many other things too: it was not one unified movement but many, with widely differing causes, motives and natures. Thanks to the fine regional studies of Eric Stokes, Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Tapti Roy, scholars have already seen how different were the situations in Muzaffarnagar and the Doab, Lucknow and Bundelkhand.23 The form that 1857 took in Delhi was again quite distinct from the uprisings elsewhere.

  For Delhi has always been quite clear about its superiority to the rest of the country. It was the seat of the Great Mughal and the place where the most chaste Urdu was spoken. It believed it had the best-looking women, the finest mangoes, the most talented poets. While many in the city initially welcomed the sepoys in their endeavour to restore the Mughal to power and to expel the hated kafir interlopers, nevertheless the people of Shahjahanabad* soon tired of hosting a large and undisciplined army of boorish and violent peasants from Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh. For the people of Avadh, the sepoys were local lads, and for them 1857 was a genuine popular uprising that touched a chord across the region.24 In contrast, for Delhi the incoming sepoys remained strangers, with different dialects, accents and customs. The Delhi sources invariably describe them as ‘Tilangas’ or ‘Purbias’† – effectively, outsiders. Neither of these words is ever used of the sepoys in Avadhi sources.

  The changing attitudes to the sepoys are well encapsulated in the shifting views of Maulvi Muhammad Baqar, the garrulous and outspoken editor of the Dihli Urdu Akbhar, and father of the Urdu poet and critic Muhammad Husain Azad. At the outbreak of the Uprising, in May 1857, he was one of the most enthusiastic cheerleaders of the new regime, writing in his columns of how the rebellion had been sent by God to punish the kafirs for their arrogant plan to wipe out the religions of India. For him the speed and thoroughness of the reverse suffered by the British were proof of miraculous divine intervention, and it was no surprise therefore that such an event should be accompanied by dreams and visions:

  One venerable man had a dream that our Prophet Mohammed, Praise Be Upon Him, said to Jesus that your followers have become an enemy of my name and wish to efface my religion. To this Lord Jesus replied that the British are not my followers, they do not follow my path, they have joined ranks with Satan’s followers … Some people even swear that the day the troopers came here, there were camels ahead of them on which rode green-robed riders … These green riders instantly vanished from sight and only the troopers remained, killing whichever Englishman they found, cutting them up as if they were carrots or radishes …25

  Only two weeks later, however, in the edition of 24 May, after the unpaid sepoys had looted most of the Delhi
bazaars, destroyed the library of the Delhi College, attacked the havelis of his friends and monopolised all the city’s most desirable courtesans, Baqar’s tone had completely changed: ‘The population is greatly harassed and sick of the pillaging and plundering,’ he wrote. ‘Great peril confronts all the respectable and well off people of the city … the city is being ravaged.’26 By August he was filling the columns of the Dihli Urdu Akbhar with details of the way the lazy and boorish Bihari sepoys – as he saw them – had become softened by their discovery of the luxuries and sophistication of Delhi:

  The moment they drink the water of the city and do a round of Chandni Chowk and … go around Jama Masjid and enjoy the sweetmeats of Ghantawala [the most famous Delhi sweet shop], they lose all urge and determination to fight and kill the enemy, and they become shorn of all strength and resolution … A lot of people maintain that many sepoys go for battle without bathing after spending nights at the courtesan’s quarters.* The setbacks they have suffered and the general mayhem we endure is partly the result of this unseemly practice.27

  By this time, Baqar had already secretly changed sides and become a British informer. His intelligence reports, smuggled out of the city to the British camp on the Ridge, still survive in the archives of the Delhi Commissioner’s Office.

  A large proportion of the Mutiny Papers are the petitions of ordinary Delhiwallahs who have suffered at the hands of the sepoys; invariably they are addressed to Zafar, who they hope will protect them against the increasingly desperate Tilangas. Significantly, in their petitions to the court, the words the ordinary people of Delhi used to describe what was happening in 1857 were not Ghadr (mutiny) and still less Jang-e Azadi (freedom struggle or, more literally, war of freedom) so much as fasad (riots) and danga (disturbance or commotion). For the people of Delhi, the daily reality of what happened in 1857 was not so much liberation as violence, uncertainty and starvation. Indeed, reading through the Mutiny Papers there are times when it seems almost as if the siege of Delhi had become a three-cornered contest, with the sepoys and the British fighting it out, and with the people in Delhi caught in the middle, their lives wrecked by the violence of both. Clearly Zafar saw his job as protecting the people of Delhi from both firangi (foreigners, Franks) and Tilanga.