The Last Mughal is a really great history book that reads like a novel. Again and again, I was struck by how fascinating the characters were and how well Dalrymple told this story. A great example of his writing is about the morning after the first day of the Indian Rebellion of 1857:
The morning of 12 May saw Delhi almost completely emptied of the British, who had dominated it since the British defeated the Marathas in 1803.
As Theo woke in ill-fitting Hindustani clothes, hidden in a back room in the house of a stranger; as the Tytlers in Karnal and the Wagentriebers in Panipat wolfed down their breakfasts; as James Morley, swaying on his bullock cart, pondered life without his wife and family; as Edward Vibart and his party hid in a bunch of tall grass in the fields towards Meerut, avoiding the sepoy search parties out looking for British refugees; as Ghalib peered disapprovingly through his lattices at the sepoys swaggering through his muhalh of Ballimaran; as Maulvi Muhammad Baqar began writing up for the Dihli Urdu Akbhar all the strange sights and portents that he had seen the day before; as the young Muhammad Husain Azad composed his poem on the Uprising; as Zahir Dehlavi and Hakim Ahsanullah Khan began trying to remove the sepoys from the most crucial ceremonial parts of the Palace; as all this was happening, Zafar too was anxiously trying to envisage his future.
In another passage, Dalrymple introduces the reader to the merciless Irish officer John Nicholson:
BackgroundA taciturn and self-contained Ulster Protestant, it was said that while he was District Commissioner in Rawalpindi, Nicholson had personally decapitated a local robber chieftain, then kept the man's head on his desk as a memento. He was, moreover, a man of few words; one typical note in the archives is a letter to Lawrence which reads, in full: 'Sir, I have the honour to inform you that I have just shot a man who came to kill me. Your Obedient Servant, John Nicholson.' For reasons that remain unclear, Nicholson inspired an entire religious sect, the Nikal Seyn,' who apparently regarded him as an incarnation of Vishnu. Nicholson tolerated his devotees as long as they kept quiet; but if 'they prostrated themselves or began chanting they were taken away and whipped'. The punishment never varied: 'three dozen lashes with the cat-o'-nine-tails'.
Despite - or maybe partly because of - this inexplicable adoration, Nicholson loathed India with a passion ('I dislike India and its inhabitants more every day') and regarded only the Afghans as worse ('the most vicious and blood thirsty race in existence'). These views he had already formed before he was captured and imprisoned during the disaster of the 1842 Afghan War. By the time he was released, only to discover his younger brother's dead body, with his genitalia cut off and stuffed in his mouth, his feelings about Afghans - and indeed Indians and Muslims of any nationality - were confirmed: he felt, he said, merely 'an intense feeling of hatred'. Only his wish to spread the Christian Empire of the British in this heathen wilderness kept him in the East. Indeed his survival amidst the carnage of the Afghan War left him with a near-messianic sense of destiny: if the God of Hosts had saved him when so many other Christians Soldiers had been killed, it must be for some higher purpose of Providence.
In The Last Mughal, William Dalrymple tells the story of the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion through the lens of Emperor Bahadur Shah II, also known as Bahadur Shah Zafar, or Zafar for short. Zafar was the elderly Mughal emperor who ruled over a realm no further than Delhi's city limits. In 1739, the Mughals had fallen to the Persian invader, Nadir Shah, and in 1788, when Zafar was thirteen, the marauder Ghulam Qadir took the city, personally blinding Zafar's grandfather Shah Alam II, and forcing Zafar's grandfather Akbar Shah II to dance for his pleasure. Zafar inherited a small empire, shrinking with every year, and functionally a vassal of the British.
While the British nominally paid homage to the Mughal emperor, by the 1850s that was no more than an illusion. For example, no nobleman from outside Delhi could enter the Red Fort (Zafar's citadel and palace) without the permission of the British Resident, a sort of diplomat/governor who indirectly worked towards the interests of the Crown in India. Furthermore, Zafar could not enforce his right to rent from his own lands without applying to the British, he could not present gems from crown jewels to his own family members without informing the Resident, and if he gave an unauthorized gift he could be made to request its return. The British only nominally recognized Zafar's sovereignty, with coins being struck with his image, and the East India Company officially calling itself the Shah's "devoted dependent." But in the 1830s and 40s, the British officials began to remove the Shah's image from rupees, and reduced their ceremonial duties to the Mughal Emperor, essentially seeking to officially demote Zafar to a subject nobleman.
Perhaps because of his intense official restrictions and inability to properly govern his so-called "empire," Zafar focused on developing a world-renowned court in Old Delhi. He was an accomplished poet, and many of his poems deal with his submission to British authority. In one he writes, "I want to shatter the bars of my cage, With the fluttering of my wings. But like a caged bird in a painting, There is no possibility of being free." He continues and explicitly writes that "Whoever enters this gloomy palace, Remains a prisoner for life in European captivity."
Outside of Zafar's palace, his lifetime had seen the British become the masters of India. From before he was born, the British had defeated Siraj ud-Daula of Bengal in 1757 and the French in 1761. The British went on to topple Tipu Sultan in 1799 in Mysore, and then defeated the Marathas twice, in 18013 and again in 1819. In 1849, the British subdued the Sikhs as well. With military triumph came arrogance and the end of more cordial relations. In the 18th century and early 19th century, there had been a class of Europeans who had adopted Islam or other Indian customs, known as White Mughals. But by the middle of the century they were disappearing. By the late 1830s, the wills of East India Company officials show a decline in the number of Indian wives and girlfriends, who had turned up in one in three wills in the 1780s. This was solidified later on with a change in Company recruitment. Whereas the Company used to contract young men before their sixteenth birthday, in 1856 a change in policy required men to come out in their mid-twenties, after completing university. Of course, this does not explain the changes that occurred earlier. It seems to me that a culture's appeal only goes as far as its perceived success. People are willing to believe in a culture's superiority when that culture wins wars, makes money, and gains the respect of others. As soon as that stops happening, the number of people willing to call that culture "superior" will decline. Maybe there is some truth to it, and some cultural values are in the right place and right time to achieve "success," whatever that means. But I think it's more likely that it's all reasoning backwards. A certain threshold of people see a culture as successful and try to determine what made it that way and copy it. So is a culture successful just based on its reproduction in others?
As the British became less interested in imitating Indian culture, perhaps now seeing it as defeated before their own, Indians were also less interested in imitating British Culture. Rigidly orthodox views or religion gathered strength in Delhi in the 19th century, and the tolerant Sufi practices of Zafar were no longer in accord with the rest of the population. The British became more evangelical and the Muslim and Hindu populations were less willing to be evangelized.
Back in the Red Fort, there was serious plotting over the succession. By 1853, Zafar was 78 years old, and his oldest surviving son, Mirza Fakhru, wanted to make sure he would inherit. However, Zafar's newest wife, Zinat, was intent on her own son, Jawad Bakht, inheriting the throne. These machinations led to three British agents negotiating a secret deal with Fakhru that would have seriously reduced the Mughals' power in exchange for the British backing his claim. But all three British agents were poisoned in 1853, and Fakhru was dead of cholera in 1856. That left Jawad Bakht in a stronger position, but as the youngest son, it would be difficult to inherit even though his father Zafar favored him. So by the mid to late 1850s, the Mughals had an unclear succession path for an elderly ruler.
By 1857, Indians across the subcontinent were becoming extremely worried about the increase in British power and its extent across the region. In February 1856, the British unilaterally annexed the powerful and prosperous kingdom of Awadh (Oudh as the British called it), which especially upset the sepoys (privates in the British Indian army, derived from the Persian "sipahi"), who were mainly drawn from Awadh. Additionally, the British were introducing new Enfield guns at that time, which were a new innovation with rifled barrels, rather than smoothbore. However, the grooves in the barrel made it more difficult to push the ball down the barrel, so each cartridge required grease, and the riflemen would need to bite off the top of the cartridge before stuffing the ball in. Critically, the ingredients for the grease were initially derived from animal fats, which was highly offensive to the Indian soldiers, as beef fat would cause ritual impurity for the Hindus and pig fat would do the same for the Muslims. The British quickly changed the ingredients, and allowed sepoys to use beeswax and ghee, clarified butter, however, rumors had spread that this was part of a plan to turn all the Indians Christian in a mass conversion plot.
The rumors found fertile ground in the already-unhappy sepoys. By the 1850s, many sons of established sepoy families were unable to find jobs as sepoys because the recent British victories led to an influx of Gurkhas (Nepalis) and Sikhs into their ranks. Even if a sepoy could get hired, getting promotion was difficult, and after years of service, there was a ceiling above which only the British could rise. And the British officers had become dismissive. Whereas in earlier decades, British officers had delighted in Indian culture and intermingled with the Indians, now they stayed away. The benefits of being a sepoy declined, as the bhatta, a bonus in wartime pay, was whittled down, as was the free postage that was once offered. And then the General Service Enlistment Act came into effect, requiring all sepoys be available to serve abroad. But crossing the sea was forbidden to orthodox high-caste Hindus, so this compounded the fears that there was an attempted mass-conversion of Indians coming.
The Revolt
Towards the end of April 1857, the 3rd Light Infantry stationed in Meerut, about 38 miles from Delhi, refused to fire the new cartridges. When they were found guilty at a court-martial on May 9, placards went up at the Meerut bazaar calling on all Muslims to rise up and kill the Christians. The uprising corresponded with Ramadan, which began that year on May 11, initiating a month of Muslim fasting and penance. The uprising was religious in nature, as British men and women who had converted to Islam were spared while Indians who had converted to Christianity were hunted down. From the morning of May 11, the most enthusiastic insurgents were the working class of Delhi, especially Muslim weavers and textile merchants who had long supported the mujahedin, and they were quickly supported by the poorer residents who set off a wave of looting.
May 11 was chaos, and by lunchtime, virtually all the British within the city who had not reached the bridgehead at the Kashmiri gate had been killed. As the looting went on, the mutineers of Meerut reached the Red Fort and entered it, being the first time large numbers of soldiers had entered the palace since Ghulam Qadir had seized the Red Fort and blinded Zafar's grandfather in 1783. The mutineers expected the Emperor to shower them in gold, and they had declared that it was he who should rule over them, not the British. But Zafar saw them as invaders. He was openly hostile at first, and demanded that they put a stop to the chaos they had caused. But after long conversation, and seeing that he was completely powerless to stop them, he accepted that he had little choice but to give them his blessing.
The initial reaction from official British forces was inept. It was no reaction at all. The Commander-in-Chief of British forces, General George Anson, who had not seen active military service since the battle of Waterloo over forty years earlier, dithered. Anson moved slowly, and took four days to travel the 150km (90 miles) from Simla, his summer residence in the Himalayan foothills, to Ambala, the major British base. When he arrived, he discovered logistical issues. As a cost-cutting exercise, the army's baggage camels had been sold, and they could not advance to Delhi. To make matters worse, none of the regiments had any ammunition beyond the twenty rounds they kept in their pouches, and the baggage train of at least one regiment was lost on the way to Ambala. And then as the cherry on top, Anson had refused to disarm disaffected sepoy units, who promptly mutinied and proceeded on to Delhi taking with them their British guns and ammunition. Anson did not set out until May 24 from Ambala to make the 250km (150 miles) journey to Delhi, and then he died of cholera three days later on May 27. Holy shit what a mess. By that time, mutinies were breaking out all around in concentric circles radiating out of Delhi. Not all of these mutinous troops rose up violently. In some garrisons, the mutinying troops event saluted their officers as they left.
In the capital, Zafar had resumed daily audiences, or durbars, for the first time since the Persian sack of the city in 1739, and he was hailed again throughout Hindustan as the Mightiest King of Kings, Emperor son of Emperor, Sultan son of Sultan. Five of Zafar's more senior sons and grandsons became leaders of the military forces (against Zafar's wishes, but with his reluctant consent), and his fifth son, Mirza Mughal, became Commander-in-Chief of the rebel forces. Meanwhile, Zafar's favored wife, Zinat, kept her son, Jawan Bakht, away from the rebels, taking the opposite course to better position him in the succession if the rebellion failed, in which case the British would certainly punish the rebels.
Things soon went bad for the rebels. Mirza Abu Bakr, one of Zafar's son's, led a force towards Meerut, where he met the British. However, his forces were routed when the prince first experienced a shell exploding nearby and fled, prompting a chaotic retreat for his army. The only positive for the rebel forces was that the clash slowed the British advance towards Delhi. On June 10, the British arrived and set up camp on a ridge outside Delhi, and began shelling the city from that spot. Despite that, rebel forces in the city kept growing, as the British didn't have the capacity to stop reinforcements from arriving across the river to the East. These reinforcements, of course, were more sepoys trained by the British themselves. Of the 139,000 sepoys in the Bengal army, only 7,796 had not risen against the East India Company. But most of those who rebelled never made it to Delhi. But with more reinforcements there was more disunity. The jihadis in the city alienated the Hindus, and the revolt took on a much more Islamic flavor. Each side had its own advantages. The British had a better food supply than the rebels in the city, full of mouths of soldiers but not shipments from farmers. But the British were worse off in regards to shelter, with only their tents to protect them, and many died from sunstroke, and their water sources were impure.
Over and over again, rebel forces sallied out of the city to attack the British on the ridge, with over twenty attacks by mid-July. But the frontal, disorganized attacks were unable to take the hill, although they seriously damaged British morale and weakened them severely. The author is careful to note though, that while we say "British" soldiers on the ridge, over half of the soldiers and almost all of the support staff were Indian. The reinforcements that the British brought from the West were overwhelmingly Muslim if not Sikh, so it was somewhat ironic that they fought against a Muslim emperor with a largely Hindu army. Those religious differences came to the forefront with the feast of Bakr 'Id, when jihadis in the city announced that they would eat beef, something extremely offensive to Hindus. But somehow Zafar managed to broker a deal and back the jihadis down from the bovine sacrifice.
Despite Zafar's success in avoiding that calamity, the rebels were totally unable to establish a well-governed area within the city or in its surroundings. They failed to organize logistics or food supplies, which would cost them dearly. On September 12, the British launched a massive artillery attack at all hours of the day and overnight before storming the city walls. After easily closing the distance to the walls, the British were stopped once on top of the walls and in the city, as Mirza Mughal had built a system of barricades that funneled the British into killzones and the British lost their organizational advantages. The British assaulted the city with over 3,000 men and had lost 1,100 by sunset. At this critical moment, it may have been possible to defeat the British and force them back out of the city, and Zafar pledged to lead his troops from the front on September 16. The rebels had a massive numerical advantage, with supposedly 70,000 men. But later in the day, Zafar renegued on his promise. The rebels, despite their momentum and major advantages suffered an absence of leadership. They had put their hopes in an octogenarian king who was fundamentally indecisive and didn't have much interest in fighting the British. And then there was a solar eclipse on September 18. While this was unnerving for all involved, many sepoys took it as an ill omen, and they began leaving the city en masse. On the 19th, the British recaptured their momentum and on the 20th they were assaulting Zafar's palace.
The British embarked on a massive slaughter of basically everyone they found, from refugees fleeing the city to those who had remained in their homes. Survivors described heaps of dead bodies and indiscriminate killing. British agents executed the sons of Zafar who had been leaders in the rebellion, Mirza Mughal, Khizr Sultan, and Abu Bakr. But Zafar was promised his life in exchange for his surrender, which was later condemned by British authorities. Afterwards, the British searched for deserters, offering two rupees for every deserter found and allowing those who made accusations to keep all the money and gold found on the person of captured mutineers. Of course, this encouraged accusations to get completely out of control, being used as a way to settle scores and kill one's personal enemies. There were also massive numbers of rapes as the British took the city. Additionally, the British revoked earlier promises of amnesty, which meant executing many of those who had helped them take the city in exchange for amnesty. Eventually, Queen Victoria announced an amnesty in November 1858, after a full year of slaughter. At the same time, the British Crown assumed all governmental responsibilities from the East India Company, and incorporated its 24,000-man army.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Because the Mughal emperors had so many wives and concubines in their harems, they produced huge numbers of children, known as sahtin. These princes and princesses, when they had no use, were thrown into a quarter of a palace reserved for them, where over two thousand of them lived in poverty.
There was a popular outcry against the British destruction of the architecture of Delhi, mostly the beautiful Mughal mosques and the Red Fort. 80% of the Red Fort was demolished, and a portion turned into a barracks.
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