The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  Sir Thomas therefore strongly suspected what was happening as his digestion disintegrated in the autumn of 1853 – although, of course, he had no proof; nor was he at all surprised when he heard that Sir Henry Elliot and Mr Thomason were reporting similar symptoms. Despite his illness, however, he was determined to keep his promise to attend GG’s wedding in Simla in October, particularly as the trip would also allow him to see Theo’s new baby, the future heir to the family baronetcy. He made only one condition. His wife Felicity had died in Simla a decade earlier, on 26 September, and he said he was unwilling to go to the town until the anniversary had passed.

  The family began collecting in Theo and Charlotte’s house near the church in Simla towards the end of August. GG had been there since the beginning of the hot weather, helping look after her pregnant sister-in-law, and Emily joined them on the 31st, having ridden over from Kangra. A week later, a little prematurely, and before Theo had arrived from his work in Delhi, Charlotte gave birth to a healthy little boy. ‘The infant was a fine child and all seemed full of promise for a speedy recovery,’ wrote Emily.

  She was kept perfectly quiet … when Theo arrived unexpectedly on the eighth day after the Baby’s birth. It was a surprise to her – but a great pleasure and both were intensely happy over their boy. On the 9th day, she was moved to a sofa and I went out for an hour, leaving Theo sitting by her side. When I returned home, I was told she had had a shivering fit. She did not seem ill, but from that evening, she seemed to be less and less conscious of what was going on, took less interest in her baby, apparently dozing a great deal, and did not appear to be awake even while taking food.

  The doctors looked graver and graver each day, and both looked as shocked as I was to hear her harping on one thing, What day is it? Your mother died on 26th September, did she not? It was the only idea that seemed to fill her thoughts and though in accordance with the doctor’s orders we tried to reassure her that that date was passed, it would not do – ‘No,’ she said, ‘your mother died on that day, and I too shall die on the 26th.’

  September 22nd she was so ill that the Holy Communion was administered to her. Theo quite broke down. The next day she lay in a stupor, not turning in her bed and not taking notice of anything… At last the Doctor told Theo to ask if she had any particular wish to express to him or about the baby. She simply shook her head, and Theo thinking she did not understand said – ‘Darling, do you not know who I am?’ She looked at him with the sweetest smile and said – ‘Yes, I know, you are little baby’s papa.’ Poor Theo! He broke down completely, and had to be taken out of the room, wild with grief.

  Then began a series of convulsions which lasted through several hours, and were terrible to witness by those who loved her so dearly. At last, when she was quieter, she turned to me and said – ‘Annie don’t you hear them?’ I said – ‘What is it you hear darling?’ ‘Oh!’ she said, ‘the angels singing and the harps. I can hear them plainly.’ After a little while, in the dead of the night, she turned to me and said – ‘Annie, when will be September 26th?’ I tried to persuade her by the doctor’s orders, that the date was already passed, for they said, this idea fixed in her mind was killing her. But though dead to all else, her mind was clear on that point. After midnight the convulsions began again …

  Just as the sun was rising and shining on her bed, she suddenly rose up in her bed and poured forth a song so wild and unearthly, not a word in it – only music – with her face in a rapturous glow that we could only look on in silence and wonder. She had not moved for days, and yet with supernatural strength, she raised herself thus suddenly. Theo rushed to support her with his arm – she took no notice of him, but when her song ceased, she fell back in her bed and never moved again. She died at 3 PM, on September 26th … Dearest Charlotte was buried by my mother’s grave in the old cemetery in Simla, on 28th September, 1853. Her loss wrecked dear Theo’s life.4

  The news was taken down to Sir Thomas, who was camping at Kalka on the edge of the plains and at the foot of the road leading up to Simla, waiting for the anniversary of his wife’s death to pass. He was now severely ill himself, pale and drawn and unable to keep down anything more than a thin soup. When the family saw him, they decided to cancel the grand church wedding that had been planned for GG and Edward Campbell, and instead to have a sombre family service in Theo’s sitting room. A week later, after the bride and groom departed for their honeymoon in the hills beyond Simla, the now skeletal Sir Thomas set off back to Delhi accompanied by a greiving Theo. They made slow progress. Sir Thomas was now clearly dying. According to Emily,

  he suffered no pain, only sank from weakness caused by perpetual vomiting and retching. I followed him as quickly as possible, but on reaching Ambala – I received a message from Theo, that my loved father had died quite peaceably [in Metcalfe House] on November 3rd. The poisons which were undoubtedly used were vegetable [based and] prepared in such a way as to leave no trace behind them. But they do their work, slowly but surely – a secret well known to the famous native hakims.5

  According to the court diary prepared every day for Sir Thomas, on the final night, a distraught and desperate Theo had sent for Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, Zafar’s personal physician, to ‘ascertain if possible the disease under which the Agent was suffering’. The hakim had duly driven up to Metcalfe House, but on arrival ‘the surgeon in attendance however had observed there was no necessity for consulting him [the hakim] and he had therefore left’.6 The desperate situation can easily be imagined: Sir Thomas in his death throes; Theo willing to try anything to save his father; Dr Ross refusing to allow in a man he strongly suspected could have been involved in Sir Thomas’s demise.

  By the end of the year, both Sir Henry Elliot and Mr Thomason were also dead, though as with Sir Thomas there was no hard evidence to show they had been poisoned, other than their suspicious symptoms.7 As Hakim Ahsanullah Khan boasted to Harriet Tytler when asked many years later if he could poison ad libitum, he replied: ‘I can. Show me your victim and tell me when you want him to die. In a year? Six months? One month or a day? He shall die, and what is more, your physicians will never find out the real cause of his death.’8 True or not, the rumours of Metcalfe’s poisoning, and Zinat Mahal’s culpability, came to be widely believed in Company circles, and helped make its officials regard the Mughal family with an even more jaundiced eye than before.

  Before he died, Sir Thomas had predicted that Mirza Fakhru would not long outlive him. It was therefore something of a surprise to everyone that he lived for nearly two and a half years longer, and that when he died in the prime of his life, on 10 July 1856, it was in fact of cholera, and not of poisoning.

  If anyone in the Palace had hoped that a new Resident would reverse Sir Thomas’s policy on the Mughal court, they were soon to be disappointed.

  Simon Fraser was a distant kinsman of Ochterlony’s old assistant William Fraser, but as different a man as could be imagined: an amiable, pious, plump and somewhat lonely old widower who was fond of singing and whose principal pleasure in life was to organise small musical evenings for his friends. A cousin of the Evangelical East India Company director Charles Grant, who had initially helped him to get a job in India, Fraser agreed on arrival to be the Patron of Padre Jennings’ mission: ‘Altho’ I do not agree with him on many of his opinions,’ wrote Fraser, ‘he is a good Christian and I have a great regard for him.’9

  Shortly afterwards Simon Fraser went as far as joining the choir of St James’s Church, which was now being organised by Jennings’ newly arrived daughter: a pretty, enthusiastic blonde twenty-one-year-old named Annie. Since Annie and her equally attractive friend Miss Clifford had begun to organise the singing, the number of soldiers driving in from the cantonments to attend the lengthy Sunday services at St James’s had increased to a remarkable degree, and before long not only was the tenor and bass portion of the choir wonderfully consolidated, but one of the basses, Lieutenant Charlie Thomason of the Bengal Engineers, had succeeded in
becoming engaged to the padre’s daughter.10

  As with Sir Thomas, Simon Fraser’s wife had died young; but unlike Metcalfe, he had never been properly reunited with his children, who had been brought up in English boarding schools and then had chosen to stay on in England, barely even corresponding with their father, except occasionally to ask for money. As he chided his eldest son, ‘I have literally no details of your private life. This is no doubt a very unsatisfactory state of affairs but a horror of epistolary correspondence appears to be more or less the characteristic of the members of our family.’11 When another of his children, the Reverend Simon J. Fraser, was posted to India, Fraser went to meet him, but the two walked past each other without recognition.12

  Fraser had spent a lifetime in the service of the Company without greatly distinguishing himself in any way. As Delhi was to be his last posting, and he had no further ambitions, he was determined to enjoy himself and make the most of the opportunities this appointment afforded. ‘I am very well satisfied with my position,’ he wrote to his son Simon in 1854.

  Delhi agrees with me and I am shaking off the little ailments which for some time I have suffered from … We have lately been making great exertions [in the choir and] got up a beautiful anthem, appropriate of course to the day. Nothing untoward occurred, and all our church going community expressed themselves highly gratified with the effort. We have one or two very fair performers at this place and I hope that throughout the hot weather I might be able to bring people together every fortnight for a little secular music, although the whole trouble always devolves upon me as master of the ceremonies. Whether the assemblies are at my own house or elsewhere, people become so apathetic that although they will take part in all that you arrange for them, still they will not take the trouble of arranging for themselves, and music cannot be properly got up without practising.13

  Busy with his choir practice, Fraser had no intention of letting his official duties take up more of his time than they had to, and he spent an entire month in Delhi before bothering to visit the Emperor. He even failed to turn up to the first reception arranged for him by Zafar on 1 December 1853, in the great Mughal garden of Raushanara Bagh. This left Zafar’s begums, who had come to camp in the garden for the duration of the welcoming ceremonies, complaining of the ‘extreme cold’, while ‘several concubines complained that sepoys about the Garden indulged in improper remarks’.14

  Fraser had announced his forthcoming retirement from the service two days before news came through of the death of Mirza Fakhru, and his response to this new succession crisis bore all the marks of an old man who had had his peaceful slumbers interrupted: ‘The surviving sons of the King, have no special marks of nobility, or peculiar recommendations calculated to attract the sympathy of the native population,’ he wrote to the new Governor General, Lord Canning, though there is no record that Fraser had actually bothered to meet any of them before running them down to Calcutta.15

  The day after the death of Mirza Fakhru, he explained in his letter, he had paid a rare visit to the Palace to commiserate with the Emperor. Far from the scene of mourning that might have been expected, he found instead a dry-eyed Emperor with a letter to the Governor General ready written in which he pressed yet again for the succession of Mirza Jawan Bakht; the body of Mirza Fakhru, he heard, had already been interred near the Sufi shrine of Qutb Sahib in Mehrauli. Zafar’s letter argued that Jawan Bakht was suitable for the position, on the basis that his birth was legitimate and that he was, in the eyes of his adoring father at least, ‘gifted with all the endowments, qualifications and virtuous habits necessary for a Prince, he having obtained a complete education under my guidance. The rest [of my sons] have no comparison with him. He [alone] merits my favour’.16

  Fraser, however, had other ideas. He strongly urged Canning that none of the princes should be recognised as heir apparent – least of all Jawan Bakht – and argued that the death of Mirza Fakhru, following closely upon the momentous annexation of the rich and independent kingdom of Avadh five months earlier, in February 1856, provided the perfect opportunity to prepare the Mughals for the imminent extinction of their line. This, he believed, should take place on the death of Zafar – an event which could not now be far away: ‘It appears to me inexpedient to recognise any of the sons as Heir Apparent,’ he concluded. ‘The princes generally are not men of prominent influence or high personal character … little public interest is felt in the fortunes of the family and a favourable opportunity is presented, by the removal from the scene of the most respected member of the family, for the introduction of changes adapted to the altered condition of the family and the Country.’17

  It was an idea that the new Lieutenant Governor, C.B. Thornhill, wholeheartedly supported. From his summer retreat in the hills of Nainital he wrote to Calcutta urging Canning to listen to Fraser and seize the moment, saying he would ‘much regret if advantage were not taken of the favourable and easy opportunity now afforded for introducing a change which while it is obviously fitting in the actual condition of the Indian Empire, [is also] for the best interests of the Princess themselves’. He went on to explain why he believed it was in the best interests of the Mughal princes to be expelled from their homes and for them to have their privy purses – their only source of income – immediately stopped: ‘The abolition of the names and forms of royal state will, it may reasonably be hoped, wean them the more readily from the habits of idle, and too often vicious and discreditable frivolities, with which their lives have hitherto been wasted.’

  Lord Canning did not hesitate to take the advice offered him. After all, he had arrived in India only five months earlier, to take over from his predecessor Lord Dalhousie. Canning was a handsome, industrious if somewhat reserved Tory politician in his early forties, who had accepted the appointment of Governor General 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 by July he had yet to leave the heat and damp of Calcutta. Indeed, for almost all of his first few months in India he had found himself imprisoned in the ‘miserably furnished’ if outwardly magnificent Government House (which, he was horrified to note, did not possess a single water closet, ‘there being no fall for drainage in Calcutta’, surrounded by his Himalayan piles of dispatch boxes. It was a life he described as ‘little better than [that of] a galley slave’.18

  None of this, however, prevented him from taking a confidently dismissive attitude to ‘the farce of Mughal pretensions’: ‘Nearly all the everyday signs of authority which the native mind associates with royalty have for state reasons already been taken from the Crown of Delhie,’ he wrote in a minute in response to Fraser’s recommendations.

  The presents which were at one time offered to the King by the Governor General and the Commander in Chief have been discontinued; the privilege of a coinage bearing his mark is now denied to him; the Governor General’s seal no longer bears a device of vassalage; and even the native chiefs have been prohibited from using one. It has been determined that these appearances of subordination and deference could not be kept up consistently with a due respect for the real and solid power of the British Government. This may also be said of the title of the King of Dehlie,* with the fiction of paramount sovereignty which attaches to it.19

  Despite his lack of Indian experience, Canning was quite clear that now was the moment to take the dramatic and historic step of deposing the Mughal dynasty, which had ruled northern India for more than three hundred years: Babur, the first Mughal, took Delhi while Henry VIII was just beginning his rule in England. Britain’s Indian Empire, wrote Canning, had never been so strong, so secure or so happy: ‘The last few years have seen not only an extension but a remarkable consolidation of British power in India; its supremacy has become more uniform and unbroken even within the earlier limits of the Empire.’ For this reason, ‘the preservation of a titular King Paramount of Hindustan has thereby grown to be a greater anom
aly than ever’, and he therefore decided, in agreement with Fraser’s views, that no Mughal prince would now be recognised as heir apparent. He concluded, ‘The Upper Provinces of India are not now, as they were in 1849 or 1850, in an unsettled and uneasy condition. There is every appearance that the presence of a Royal House in Dehlie has become a matter of indifference even to the Mahometans.’20

  Given his situation and his recent arrival in India, Canning could not have been expected to know better. But as events were shortly to show, his minute represented as comprehensive a misreading of the situation in northern India as could possibly be contained within a single passage. So removed had the British now become from their Indian subjects, and so dismissive were they of Indian opinion, that they had lost all ability to read the omens around them or to analyse their own position with any degree of accuracy. Arrogance and imperial self-confidence had diminished the desire to seek accurate information or gain any real knowledge of the state of the country.

  More specifically, as far as Delhi was concerned, by extinguishing even the faintest hope of any of the princes of the royal house ever succeeding Zafar, the British created a situation where no one in the imperial family had anything to lose, and all were sufficiently disaffected to risk anything to try to save their position. It was a fatal error for which the British would shortly pay a high price.