The Last Mughal Read online

  Jennings’ plan was to rip up what he regarded as the false faiths of India, by force if necessary: ‘The roots of ancient religions have here, as in all old places, struck deep and men must be able to fathom deep in order to uproot them.’2 His method was simple: to harness the power of the rising British Empire – clearly the instrument ‘of the mysterious sway of God’s Providence’ – towards converting the heathen.

  The British Crown, argued Jennings in his prospectus for his proposed Delhi Mission, was now the proud possessor of the Kohi-noor diamond, once the property of the Mughals, India’s greatest dynasty. In gratitude, the British should now endeavour in earnest to bring about the conversion of India and so ‘give in return that “pearl of great price” [the Christian faith]… As the course of our Empire is so marvellously taking its course from the East of India towards its West’, so should the British be preparing to conquer the subcontinent for Anglicanism and the one true God.3 There should, he believed, be no compromise with false religions.

  Jennings had come out to India in 1832 and had quickly gained a reputation, in the words of his daughter, for ‘striving against carelessness and neglect in religious observance’. Having initially been posted to various quiet hill stations, and forced to focus his energies on such peripheral concerns as designing suitably modest headstones for the Christian cemeteries there, he had long dreamt of opening a mission in Delhi and getting stuck into some serious work as ‘Missionary to the Heathen’.4 He finally got the job of chaplain in Delhi in 1852 and moved straight into the front line, the Red Fort itself, having been invited to share the Lahore Gate lodgings of ‘the peculiarly upright’ Captain Douglas and his invalid wife, whom Jennings described as ‘as churchy as myself… a warm supporter of the mission’.5

  The Douglases apart, however, Jennings’ brash and insensitive yet silkily unctuous manner – strikingly similar to that of Obadiah Slope in the Barchester Towers – won him few friends. He was strongly disliked by the Metcalfes: Sir Thomas regarded him as ‘duplicitous’ and badly mannered (‘He returned a book of mine through Douglas without a word or line of thanks’) while Theo thought him simply ‘a bigot’.6 If Jennings was a rare subject on which Sir Thomas and Theo could wholeheartedly agree, he was also, even more remarkably, a rare point of agreement between the English-language and very British Delhi Gazette and the Urdulanguage and wholeheartedly Mughal Dihli Urdu Akbhar.

  While it was hardly surprising that the pious Maulvi Muhammad Baqar, editor of the Dihli Urdu Akbhar, would think Jennings a ‘fanatic’, it was more surprising that the Delhi Gazette would find Jennings’ missionary activities a touch over-enthusiastic.7 Yet when Jennings went to the great Hindu festival, the Kumbh Mela, and began trying to convert the millions of pilgrims who had collected by the banks of the Ganges, loudly denouncing their ‘Satanic paganism’, the Gazette was moved to point out that Jennings and his two assistants should perhaps be a little more restrained in their approach: ‘The zeal of the missionaries is greater than their discretion in selecting this Heathen pandemonium as the theatre of their exertions,’ wrote a correspondent to the Gazette. ‘They have been daily preaching to the masses, but I should say without a shadow of success, having to compete with the four great anti-Christian powers – trade, crime, pleasure and idolatry – in all their most frantic forms.’ Especially angered by Jennings’ appearance were the militant naga sadhus, ‘a particularly impudent clan of mendicants who wear no garb but that of nature’, who were to be found ‘stalking about in the thick of the congregation, abusing or driving out any non-Hindoo interloper who crosses their presence’.8

  Jennings was not much more popular with his own flock. According to Sir Thomas, he told one old lady who complained of the winter cold in St James’s Church that ‘if her heart was warmer her feet would be so also’.9 Nor was Jennings known in Delhi as an especially engaging preacher: ‘I went to evening service at the church,’ wrote a British magistrate around this time. Jennings’ face, he noticed, wore a

  dogged expression … as of one who should say ‘I know this is a little burdensome but I think you must bear it…’ [By the time he was well into his lengthy sermon] it was growing dark, and soon a candle had to be sent for. This slender, solitary light in the darkening church and the loud voice proceeding from the figure partially occupying the small disk of brightness, had a most singular effect. The sermon, which the preacher would not curtail by a syllable on account of the lateness, dwelt as far as I remember on the vicissitudes of life, and urged how unwise was the postponement of repentance in the face of the absolute uncertainty of the future. I felt at the time a most unaccountable sinking of spirits.10

  Whatever his personal failings, however, Jennings’ views and outlook were shared by increasing numbers of the British in India. When the indomitable Indophile Fanny Parkes had visited Hindustan a decade earlier she had found that attitudes were changing and that extreme religiosity was ‘gaining ground very fast in Cawnpore. Young ladies sometimes profess to believe it is highly incorrect to go to balls, plays, races, or to any party where it is possible there may be a quadrille. A number of the officers also profess these opinions, and set themselves up as New Lights’.11

  India in the 1840s and 1850s was slowly filling with pious British Evangelicals who wanted not just to rule and administer India, but also to redeem and improve it. In Calcutta Jennings’ colleague Mr Edmunds was vocal in making known his belief that the Company should use its position more forcibly to bring about the conversion of India. ‘The time appears to have come’, he wrote in a widely read circular letter, ‘when earnest consideration should be given to the subject, whether or not all men should embrace the same system of religion. Railways, steam vessels and the electric telegraph are rapidly uniting all the nations of the earth … The land is being leavened and Hinduism is being everywhere undermined. Great will some day, in God’s appointed time, be the fall of it.’12

  Nor was it any longer just the missionaries who dreamt of converting India. To the north-west of Delhi, the Commissioner of Peshawar, Herbert Edwardes, firmly believed an empire had been given to Britain because of the virtues of English Protestantism: ‘The Giver of Empires is indeed God,’ he wrote, and He gave the Empire to Britain because ‘England had made the greatest effort to preserve the Christian religion in its purest apostolic form’.13 It followed that the more the British strove to propagate that pure faith, the more Providence would smile on their efforts at empirebuilding. In this spirit, the district judge of Fatehpur, Robert Tucker, had recently set up large stone columns inscribed with the Ten Commandments in Persian, Urdu, Hindi and English and used ‘two or three times a week to read the Bible in Hindoostanee to large numbers of natives who were assembled in the compound to hear him’.14

  Such Evangelical enthusiasms had even spread to the British Army in India. According to one trooper of the Dragoon Guards, ‘a religious mania sprang up and reigned supreme … the adjutant and sergeant major having become quite sanctimonious, attending religious meetings every morning’.15 It became a watchword in such regiments that ‘no soldiers ever show themselves more invincible than those who can pray as well as fight’.16 It was a similar case in the Company’s own army, where officers like Colonel Steven Wheler, commanding officer of the 34th Native Infantry, were in the habit of reading the Bible to his sepoys as well as proselytising to ‘natives of all classes … in the highways, cities, bazaars and villages … [hoping that] the Lord would make him the happy instrument of converting his neighbour to God or, in other words, of rescuing him from eternal damnation’.17

  Similar views were also echoed by the growing band of Evangelicals among the Company’s directors, the first and foremost of whom was Charles Grant. Believing that ‘it is hardly possible to conceive any people more completely enchained than they [the Hindus] are by their superstitions’, Grant proposed hugely to increase missionary activity so as to convert a people whom he characterised as ‘universally and wholly corrupt … depraved as the
y are blind, and wretched as they are depraved’.18 Providence, he believed, had clearly brought the British to this sink of iniquity for a higher purpose:

  Is it not necessary to conclude that our Asiatic territories were given to us, not merely that we might draw an annual profit from them, but that we might diffuse among their inhabitants, long sunk in darkness, vice and misery, the light and benign influences of Truth?19

  The missionaries’ main ally within India itself had been the bishop of Calcutta, Reginald Heber. Heber had worked hard offering encouragement to the different missionary societies and cooperating with Company officials across India to allow the missionaries to spread throughout British-controlled territory. This was something that had been explicitly banned by the Company charter as recently as 1813, and only altered after a mass petition of Parliament organised in London by the Evangelical ‘Committee of the Protestant Society’, which demanded the alteration of the charter to allow ‘the speedy and universal promulgation’ of Christianity ‘throughout the regions of the East’.

  Heber was the man who oversaw the process of putting this regime into place; he also wrote a series of hymns which acted as rallying cries for the aggressively self-confident new mission. His stirring verses, still sung today, are full of the imagery of Holy War and Christian militarism, as Christian Soldiers battle their way to Salvation, Fighting the Good Fight ‘through peril, toil and pain’: ‘The Son of God goes forth to war,’ begins one hymn, ‘his blood red banner streams afar.’ Heber’s hymns are also revealing of the attitude of the missionaries towards their potential converts:

  From Greenland’s icy mountains,

  From India’s coral strand …

  They call us to deliver

  Their land from error’s chain.

  What though the spicy breezes,

  Blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle;

  Though every prospect pleases,

  And only man is vile.

  In vain with lavish kindness

  The gifts of God are strewn;

  The heathen in his blindness,

  Bows down to wood and stone.

  Heber’s views about the vile heathen of India exactly echoed those of Padre Jennings. ‘A strong attack must be made somewhere,’ wrote Jennings soon after arriving in Delhi, ‘and I hope we shall see it made here.’20

  The learned Muslim ‘ulama* had initially been ambiguous in their response to the arrival of the British in Hindustan at the end of the eighteenth century. While some had discussed the notion of whether Hindustan was now Dar ul-harb, the Abode of War, and so a legitimate focus for a Muslim jihad, most had taken the view that the British could only be an improvement on the Hindu Marathas who preceded them as the dominant power in the north, and so accepted work in the Company’s employment as lawyers, munshis and teachers.21

  There were a number of high-profile marriages between leading maulvis (Muslim clerics) and British women, most of whom converted to Islam.22 There was also a degree of genuine intellectual interest in Christianity in learned circles in Delhi: the Mughal court was so pleased to receive an Arabic version of the New Testament in 1807, soon after the arrival of the British in Delhi, that they ‘returned their thanks and requested that the supply might be continued’.23

  Moreover, many of the Delhi ‘ulama quickly formed friendships with the notably Indophile officials who filled the British Residency in the early days of the British ascendancy: Shah Abdul Aziz, for example, had developed a great affection for Sir David Ochterlony’s assistant, William Fraser, who came to him twice a week to improve his Persian and Arabic.24 A linguist and scholar from Inverness, Fraser pruned his moustaches in the Delhi manner and fathered ‘as many children as the King of Persia’ from his harem of ‘six or seven legitimate [Indian] wives’.25 Shah Abdul Aziz was impressed by Fraser’s sympathetic understanding of Muslim ways, and gave him advice on subjects as diverse as what shrines to visit on the road to Peshawar and the finer points of sharia law.26

  Fraser returned the affection. Soon after his arrival in Delhi he began seeking out ‘learned natives … [of whom] there are a few, and in poverty, but those I have met with are real treasures’.27 Among them was the poet Ghalib, who later wrote that when Fraser was assassinated, he ‘felt afresh the grief of a father’s death’.28 Fraser gave up eating pork and beef so that he could share his table with both Hindu and Muslim guests. He also wore Mughal clothes, and lived in a wholeheartedly Mughal style. Before long he gained a reputation for ‘consorting with the grey beards of Delhi… almost all of them Musalmans of Mogul extraction, the wreck of the nobility of that court’.29 As the French traveller and botanist Victor Jacquemont put it:

  [Fraser is] half-asiatick in his habits, but in other respects a Scotch Highlander, and an excellent man with great originality of thought, a metaphysician to boot … His mode of life has made him more familiar, perhaps, than any other European with the customs and ideas of the native inhabitants. He has, I think, a real and profound understanding of their inner life, such as is possessed by few others. Hindustani and Persian are like his two own mother tongue …30

  As Fraser wrote home to his parents on 8 February 1806, in his first letter describing Delhi: ‘My situation is as desirable as any one I could hold … I read and study with pleasure the languages. They are the chief source of my amusement, [although] Delhi affords much [other] food besides. I am also making a good collection of oriental manuscripts.’31

  He was not alone in these Mughal enthusiasms. Fraser’s superior, Sir David Ochterlony, was equally enamoured of Delhi courtly culture. With his fondness for huqqas and nautch girls* and Indian costumes, Ochterlony alarmed Bishop Heber, when the two met by chance in the wilds of Rajasthan, by receiving him sitting on a divan wearing Hindustani pyjamas and a turban, while being fanned by servants holding a peacock-feather punkah. To one side of Ochterlony’s own tent was the red silk harem tent where Ochterlony’s women slept, and on the other side the encampment of his daughters, all, according to the amazed bishop, ‘hung around with red cloth and thus fenced in from the eyes of the profane … it was [as if] an Eastern prince [was] travelling …’32

  Ochterlony was reputed to have had thirteen wives, but one of these, a former Brahmin dancing girl from Pune who converted to Islam and was referred to in his will as ‘Beebee Mahruttun Moobaruck ul Nissa Begume, alias Begum Ochterlony, the mother of my younger children’,33 took precedence over any others.34 Much younger than Ochterlony, she certainly appears to have had the upper hand in her relationship with the old general, and one observer remarked that ‘making Sir David Commissioner [of Delhi was the same as] making Generallee Begum’.35

  In such mixed households, Islamic customs and sensitivities were clearly understood and respected: in one letter, for example, it is recorded that ‘Lady Ochterlony has applied for leave to make the Hadge to Mecca’.36 Indeed, Ochterlony even considered bringing up his children as Muslims, and when his children by Mubarak Begum had grown up, he adopted a child from the family of the Nawabs of Loharu, one of the leading Delhi Muslim families.37 Brought up by Mubarak Begum, the girl eventually married her cousin, a nephew of Ghalib.38

  In addition to the mixed households of the British Residency, in the vicinity of Delhi there were a number of landed dynasties who also tried with varying success to bridge the gap between Islam and Christianity, between Mughal culture and that of the British. The Skinners of Hansi, the Gardners of Khasgunge and the circle around the Begum Sumru of Sardhana were all descended from eighteenth-century European mercenaries who had married into the Mughal elite of Delhi and developed a hybrid lifestyle, so forming a sort of Anglo-Mughal Islamo-Christian buffer zone between the Mughal world of the court and the world of the Company’s Residency. All three dynasties nominally professed Christianity, while speaking mainly Persian and Hindustani, and living in an almost entirely Islamicised Mughal style.

  This fusion of civilisations could sometimes be confusing. The American-born William Linnaeus Gardner had marri
ed a begum of Cambay, while his son James had married Mukhtar Begum, a first cousin of Zafar. Together they fathered an Anglo-Mughal dynasty, half of whose members were Muslim and half Christian; indeed, some of them, such as James Jahangir Shikoh Gardner, seem to have been both at the same time.*39 In 1820, Gardner’s begum came to Delhi to negotiate a marriage alliance between her dynasty and that of the Begum Sumru, using Sir David Ochterlony as intermediary: ‘I believe James [Gardner’s eldest son] is to be contracted at the next Ede,’ wrote William Gardner to a cousin,

  but can say nothing certain as I am not in the secret. Eunuchs and old women are going between daily [between the two households] … The only thing I have interfered in was to place my veto on the whole Royal Family coming to the shadee [marriage] as I cannot afford it …40

  Finally, just as everything seemed to be arranged, there was a death in the entourage of the Begum Sumru, who did not hesitate to declare forty days’ mourning, in the Muslim manner: ‘the Old Begum has thought proper to make a very expensive and tedious mourning,’ reported an increasingly irritated Gardner, ‘and has been feeding all Delhi besides beating herself Black and Blue, and expects Sir David as hakim … to take off her sogh [mourning clothes] at the end of the 40 days’. Ochterlony duly offered his assistance at the mourning rituals, but confided to one friend ‘that the old Begum so mixes Christian customs with the Hindoostanee that though anxious to do that which would please the old lady, he simply did not know what was required.’41

  The way in which the Christian converts continued doggedly to keep to their old Mughal customs was not necessarily to everyone’s taste. Father Angelo de Caravaggio, the Capuchin who was sent to minister to the Begum Sumru, found it a particular struggle: ‘My four years at Sardhana saw the construction of a church and a house,’ he wrote to his superiors in Rome. ‘Since I was unable to bring about the abandonment of Muslim customs, and seeing no chance of improvement, I took the decision to devote myself to the education of children … seeing that despite my efforts, Christianity did not affect the customs of the Muslims, I [eventually] returned to Agra with the children.’42