The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  Mahbub Ali Khan (d.1857)

  The Chief Eunuch of the Palace and Zinat Mahal’s notoriously ruthless ‘enforcer’ beyond the walls of the zenana Like his mistress he was deeply suspicious of the Uprising, and he was a leading member of the pro-British faction in the Palace after the outbreak. His death on 14 June 1857 followed a prolonged illness, but was widely rumoured to be the result of poisoning.

  Mirza Asadullah Khan – ‘Ghalib’ (1797–1869)

  The greatest lyric poet in Urdu, and from 1854 – following the death of his great rival Zauq – the Poet Laureate of Mughal Delhi. A mystical Sufi by inclination, self-consciously rakish and aristocratic by temperament, Ghalib in his writings provides some of the most sophisticated and melancholy records of the destruction of Mughal Delhi in the siege and fall of the city in 1857.

  Zahir Dehlavi (1835–1911)

  An attendant to Zafar at the Mughal court who had been working in the Fort since his thirteenth birthday. By 1857 he was twenty-two and had risen to the post of Darogah of the Mahi Maraatib, or Keeper of the Dynastic Fish Standard of the Mughals. A pupil of Zauq, he was a highly polished and cultured courtier and poet. His Dastan i-Ghadr, which has never been previously translated or used in any English language account of the Uprising, gives the fullest and most richly detailed surviving account of the course of the siege and Uprising from the point of view of the Palace.

  THE REBEL ARMY

  General Bakht Khan

  A subahdar of artillery prior to 1857, Bakht Khan was a much-garlanded and battle-hardened veteran of the Afghan wars. A tall, portly and heavily built man, with huge handlebar moustache and sprouting sideburns, Bakht Khan had been elected General by the Bareilly troops and arrived in Delhi with a reputation as both an administrator and an effective military leader. When he arrived in Delhi halfway through the siege, on 2 July 1857, it initially looked as if Bakht Khan and his 3,000 men would bring a swift victory to the rebels, but the General’s tactless treatment of other rebel leaders – and particularly of Mirza Mughal quickly made him enemies, as did his ‘Wahhabi’ religious views. By the middle of August his failure to dent the British defences led to his demotion from rebel Commander in Chief.

  General Sudhari Singh and Brigade Major Hira Singh

  The leaders of the Nimach Brigade and the principal rivals of Bakht Khan. They refused to accept the latter’s authority and worked to undermine his position, especially after he left their troops to their fate when ambushed by Nicholson’s column at Najafgarh on 25 August.

  Brigade Major Gauri Shankar Sukul

  Leader of the Haryana Regiment who became the most important British mole and agent provocateur within the rebel ranks.

  Maulvi Sarfaraz Ali

  Bakht Khan’s spiritual mentor, the ‘Wahhabi’ preacher Maulvi was soon known as ‘the imam of the Mujahedin’. Prior to the Uprising, he had spent many years in Delhi and was well-connected to both the court and the city. He had been one of the first clerics to preach jihad against the British in the days leading up to the outbreak, and as the siege progressed and the number of jihadis increased, his influence as a rebel leader grew.

  OTHER DELHIWALLAHS

  Munshi Jiwan Lal

  Prior to the outbreak of the Uprising, Jiwan Lal had for long been the hugely fat Mir Munshi (Chief Assistant) of Sir Thomas Metcalfe at the British Residency. Although restricted to the cellar of his house during much of the course of the siege, Jiwan Lal ran a highly effective intelligence operation from his hideaway, every day sending out ‘two Brahmins and two Jats for the purpose of obtaining news of the doings of the rebels from every quarter’, which he in due course passed on to William Hodson, the British chief of intelligence on the Ridge.

  Mufti Sadruddin Khan – ‘Azurda’ (d.1868)

  Mufti Sadruddin Azurda was a close friend of both Zafar and Ghalib, and played an important role as bridge between the British and Mughal elites in the early days of the British ascendancy in Delhi. For thirty years Azurda balanced his roles as chief Muslim judge (Sadr Amin) in Delhi, leading literary figure at court and prominent madrasa teacher with a mild Anglophilia, but in 1857, alienated by the Company’s encouragement of missionaries, he threw in his lot with the rebels. A natural mediator, he was responsible for reconciling the jihadis, the court and the sepoys during the crisis over cow killing which took place during the ‘Id of 1 August 1857, so avoiding a potential civil war within rebel ranks.

  Muin ud-Din Husain Khan

  At the outbreak of the Uprising, Muin ud-Din Husain Khan was the Thanadar, or Head Police Officer, at Paharganj police station, a little to the south west of the walled city. Muin ud-Din was from a minor branch of the noble Loharu family; his cousins included both Ghalib and Nawab Zia ud-Din Khan. Having helped to save Theo Metcalfe’s life, he joined the rebels and was elevated to the position of Kotwal for most of the Uprising, before being replaced by Sa’id Mubarak Shah. After the suppression of the Uprising, both former Kotwals survived to write excellent Urdu accounts of life in the city during the months of the siege.

  Sarvar ul-Mulk

  A young Mughal nobleman, probably aged around twelve at the time of the outbreak. During the conflict, his Afghan tutor became a jihadi and his father had to defend the family house against the assaults of plundering sepoys. The family escaped from the city just after 14 September and made it safely to Hyderabad, where Sarvar ul-Mulk eventually wrote a fine description of the siege in his autobiography, My Life.

  2. THE BRITISH

  THE METCALFES

  Sir Charles Metcalfe (1785–1846)

  The first of the Metcalfes to come to Delhi, in his first spell – initially as assistant to Sir David Ochterlony from 1806 and as Resident from 1811 – Charles Metcalfe had fitted in with the tone set by his principal, building himself a house in the Mughal Shalimar Gardens and fathering three sons by a Sikh bibi who (according to family tradition) he married ‘by Indian rites’. By the time of his return to Delhi as Resident in 1826, Metcalfe had however jettisoned his bibi and begun to take a very different attitude to India and its Mughal rulers. ‘I have renounced my former allegiance to the house of Timur, ‘he announced to Lord Bentinck in a letter of 1832, shortly after he had left Delhi to take up a position as Member of the Council in Calcutta.

  Sir Thomas Metcalfe (1795–1853)

  Sir Thomas arrived in Delhi in 1813 as assistant to his elder brother Sir Charles Metcalfe and stayed there for his entire career, rising to become Resident in 1835. A very particular and fastidious man, much of Metcalfe’s professional life was dedicated to negotiating a succession settlement that would allow the Company to expel the royal family from the Red Fort on the death of Zafar. He had some affection, but little real respect, for the man he was determined should be the last of the Timurid line. Although to Zafar’s face he was always polite, in private he was less generous. ‘[Zafar] is mild and talented,’ he wrote, ‘but lamentably weak and vacillating and impressed with a very erroneous notion of his own importance.’ Having negotiated a succession agreement with Mirza Fakhru that entailed the Mughals leaving the Red Fort, Metcalfe died in 1853 from a digestive disorder that his doctors believed was caused by poison, which his family believed was administered on the orders of Zinat Mahal.

  Sir Theophilus Metcalfe – ‘Theo’ (1828–83)

  In 1857 Theo Metcalfe was a junior magistrate in the Company’s service, and a very different figure from his father. Where Sir Thomas was reserved and particular, Theo was sociable and expansive and also, when he wished to be, extremely charming. If the father liked solitude and disliked the business of entertaining, Theo was noisy and convivial, and enjoyed parties, riding, horses and dogs. If his father was resolutely self-disciplined and law-abiding, Theo had a tendency to cut corners and get into what his father described as ‘scrapes’. At the outbreak of the Uprising on II May 1857, Theo was one of the only British officials within the walls successfully to make his escape, and after joining the Delhi Field Force he took the lead i
n the bloodthirsty work of revenge.

  Sir Edward Campbell (1822–82)

  Son-in-law of Sir Thomas Metcalfe and Prize Agent during the siege of Delhi. Campbell had been a protege of Sir Charles Napier, the former Commander in Chief of the British Army in India, with whom Sir Thomas Metcalfe had had a serious disagreement. Moreover, despite his title, Campbell was more or less penniless, all of which led Sir Thomas initially to try and block Campbell’s engagement to his daughter Georgina (known in the family as ‘GG’). Campbell’s regiment, the 60th Rifles, was one of the first to try out the new Enfield rifles; after his regiment mutinied, Campbell joined the Delhi Field Force on the Ridge and at the end of the siege was voted Prize Agent, responsible for administering the legalised looting of the captured city, a job for which his gentle and religious temperament was quite unsuited.

  THE BRITISH IN DELHI

  Reverend Midgeley John Jennings (d.1857)

  Padre Jennings had come out to India in 1832 and, though initially posted to various quiet hill stations, had long dreamt of opening a mission in Delhi and getting stuck into some serious work as ‘Missionary to the Heathen’. He finally got the job of chaplain in the Mughal capital in 1852 and moved straight into the front line, the Red Fort itself, having been invited to share the Lahore Gate lodgings of Captain Douglas, Commander of the Palace Guard. His unctuous yet tactless manner won him few friends, and he was regarded as a ‘bigot’ by much of the British community in Delhi. The people of Delhi disliked him even more, especially after he succeeded in converting two prominent Delhi Hindus – Master Ramchandra and Chiman Lal – in 1852. Jennings was personally responsible for convincing many of the people of Delhi that the Company intended to convert them, by force if necessary.

  Robert and Harriet Tytler (Robert d.1872, Harriet d.1907)

  Tytler was a veteran of the 38th Native Infantry and an officer of the old school who was close to his sepoys, concerned for their well-being and completely fluent in Hindustani. Tytler appears to have been a kind and sensitive man, a widower with two little children who had recently remarried, this time to the brisk and resilient Harriet. Harriet was half his age, and as fluent in Hindustani as her husband. Together the two Tytlers pursued their amateur artistic enthusiasms and – unexpectedly for an army couple – became pioneering photographers. At the outbreak, the couple escaped from Delhi to Amballa, where they eventually joined the Delhi Field Force. Harriet’s memoirs are among the best sources on life on the Ridge during the siege of Delhi, and on the fate of the city after the fall.

  Edward Vibart

  In 1857 Edward Vibart of the 54th Bengal Native Infantry was a nineteen-year-old company commander in Delhi, from an Indian army family: his father was a cavalry officer in Kanpur. During the Uprising, Vibart’s father was killed at the Kanpur massacre, while the son narrowly escaped from the city at the outbreak and survived to take part in the siege and recapture. His memoirs, and particularly his letters, are one of the best sources for the atrocities commited by the British during the taking of the city and during the extended reprisals that followed.

  THE DELHI FIELD FORCE

  General Sir Archdale Wilson (1803–74)

  A small, neat, cautious gentleman of fifty-four, Archdale Wilson was one of the station commanders of Meerut at the outbreak of the Mutiny, and later led a column from the garrison which defeated Mirza Abu Bakr at the Hindan Bridge on 30and 31 May. He rendezvoused with the Delhi Field Force at Alipore shortly before fighting the battle of Badli ki Serai on 8 June. Following the death of General Barnard and the resignation of General Reed, he took over command of British forces at the siege of Delhi from 17 July. He quickly put in place a defensive strategy, much criticised at the time but which successfully preserved British strength until reinforcements arrived shortly before the assault on 14 September. During the taking of the city Wilson’s nerve finally failed him, and at one point John Nicholson threatened to shoot him if he should order a retreat.

  Brigadier General John Nicholson (1821–57)

  A taciturn Ulster Protestant, Nicholson was said to have personally decapitated a local robber chieftain, then kept the man’s head on his desk. He had ‘a commanding presence, some six feet, two inches in height, with a long black beard, dark grey eyes with black pupils which under excitement would dilate like a tiger’s’. For reasons that remain unclear Nicholson inspired a religious sect, the ‘Nikal Seyn’, who apparently regarded him as an incarnation of Vishnu. During the Uprising Nicholson became a legend among the British in India. His mixture of piety, gravity and courage, combined with his merciless capacity for extreme brutality, were exactly the qualities needed to put heart into the British troops on the Ridge, and there were few who remained immune to the hero-worship of this great imperial psychopath. Shortly after his arrival at the siege, Nicholson led a forced march to ambush a column of sepoys at Najafgarh on 25 August. On 14 September he personally led the assault on the city, and was mortally wounded the same day.

  William Hodson (1821–58)

  Prior to 1857 William Hodson had been regarded by most of his colleagues as a black sheep. Hodson was the bright, university-educated son of a clergyman, and had risen rapidly to be Adjutant of the new Corps of Guides. His fall from grace was equally sudden. In 1854 Hodson was relieved of his command after an investigation declared that he had embezzled regimental funds. During the Uprising he founded an irregular cavalry regiment known as Hodson’s Horse, and ran the remarkably efficient British intelligence service on the Delhi Ridge. On his own authority he negotiated the surrender of Zafar and Zinat Mahal, and on 21 September he brought them captive into Delhi. The following day he went back to bring in princes Mirza Mughal, Khizr Sultan and Abu Bakr; then, having separated them from their followers and disarmed them, he told them to strip naked and shot all three dead at point blank range. He was killed a few months later, in March 1858, at the siege of Lucknow.

  OTHER BRITISH OFFICIALS

  Lord Canning (1812–62)

  Canning was a handsome and industrious – if somewhat reserved – Tory politician in his early forties, who had accepted the appointment of Governor General of India only because of his frustration at his consistent failure to gain a senior Cabinet berth in London. Before his departure he had had no previous interest in India, and having only arrived in there in February 1856, had yet to leave the heat and damp of Calcutta by the time of the outbreak. However, none of this prevented him from taking a confidently dismissive attitude towards ‘the farce of Mughal pretensions’ and putting in place plans to depose the Mughals within a few weeks of his arrival. After the suppression of the Uprising he attempted to limit the vindictiveness of the bloody British retribution, with mixed results.

  Sir John Lawrence (1811–79)

  Younger brother of Sir Henry Lawrence, who in 1857 was Chief Commissioner in Avadh, Sir John was a former deputy of Sir Thomas Metcalfe in Delhi. John Lawrence had risen rapidly through the ranks of the Company’s civil service thanks to his reputation for hard work and efficiency, and in 1853 he was made Chief Commissioner of the newly conquered Punjab. He forbade his officers from going up to the hills for the hot weather, and made known his disapproval of ‘”a cakey man”, by which he meant someone who, besides presumably liking cakes, “pretended to much elegance and refinement’”. In 1857 he proved to be arguably the most capable of all the British officials in North India, disarming mutinous sepoys, raising new irregular regiments and quickly pacifying the Punjab so that the maximum number of troops could be sent to the Delhi Ridge. After the fall of the city he worked hard to minimise the scale of the retribution, and personally saved Mughal Delhi from a plan to level the entire metropolis.

  INTRODUCTION

  At 4 p.m. on a hazy, humid winter’s afternoon in Rangoon in November 1862, soon after the end of the monsoon, a shrouded corpse was escorted by a small group of British soldiers to an anonymous grave at the back of a walled prison enclosure.

  This enclosure lay overlooking the
muddy brown waters of the Rangoon river, a little downhill from the great gilt spire of the Shwe Dagon pagoda. Around the enclosure lay the newly constructed cantonment area of the port – an anchorage and pilgrimage town that had been seized, burned and occupied by the British only ten years earlier. The bier of the State Prisoner – as the deceased was referred to – was accompanied by two of his sons and an elderly, bearded mullah. No women were allowed to attend, and a small crowd from the bazaar who had somehow heard about the prisoner’s death were kept away by armed guards. Nevertheless, one or two managed to break through the cordon to touch the shroud before it was lowered into the grave.

  The ceremony was brief. The British authorities had made sure not only that the grave was already dug, but that quantities of lime were on hand to guarantee the rapid decay of both bier and body. When the shortened funeral prayers had been recited – no lamentations or panegyrics were allowed – the earth was thrown in over the lime, and the turf carefully replaced so that within a month or so no mark would remain to indicate the place of burial. A week later the British Commissioner, Captain H. N. Davies, wrote to London to report what had passed, adding:

  Have since visited the remaining State Prisoners – the very scum of the reduced Asiatic harem; found all correct. None of the family appear much affected by the death of the bed-ridden old man. His death was evidently due to pure decrepitude and paralysis in the region of the throat. He expired at 5 o’clock on the morning of the funeral. The death of the ex-King may be said to have had no effect on the Mahomedan part of the populace of Rangoon, except perhaps for a few fanatics who watch and pray for the final triumph of Islam. A bamboo fence surrounds the grave for some considerable distance, and by the time the fence is worn out, the grass will again have properly covered the spot, and no vestige will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests.1