The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  Towards the end of July, complaints against Bakht Khan began to be openly aired in the durbar. On the 29th one sepoy complained that ‘many days had passed and the general had not led his forces to fight’. Bakht Khan was furious, but the Emperor remarked that what had been said was true.95 A few days later, when a planned attack was called off owing to heavy rain, Zafar became angry and said, ‘You will never capture the Ridge … All the treasure you have brought me you have expended. The Royal Treasury is empty. I hear that day by day soldiers are leaving for their homes. I have no hopes of becoming victorious.’

  The following day petitions arrived from 2,000 troops in Gwalior and 6,000 jihadis in Nasirabad, saying they were ready to march on Delhi if the King gave the order. But Zafar dictated the reply: ‘Say there are 60,000 men in Delhi, and they have not driven the English army from the Ridge; what can your 6,000 do?’ When Bakht Khan then complained that the sepoys were no longer obeying his orders, Zafar replied, ‘Tell them, then, to leave the city.’96 A little later Zafar added that it was intolerable that the city should still be

  harassed and threatened by soldiers, who had come to the city with the avowed object of destroying the English, not their own countrymen. These soldiers are always boasting that they are going out of the safety afforded by the fortifications to destroy the English, and yet are always returning to the city. It is quite clear that the English will ultimately recapture this city, and will kill me.97

  There was little surprise, then, when, at the end of July, there was yet another change in the military command. Bakht Khan was effectively removed as Commander-in-Chief, and instead the supreme authority was given over to a Court of Administration, under the presidency of Mirza Mughal, who acted in the name of his father. The court was an odd institution: a sort of elective military junta, showing the strong influence of Western republican rather than Mughal political ideas, even to the extent of using English words for the different positions in the court. According to its remarkable twelve-point constitution, there were ten members. Six of these were chosen (muntakhab) from the military: two each from the infantry, cavalry and artillery. The four remaining members were from the Palace.

  The court met regularly and acted as a liaison committee linking the military and civil authorities.98 Occasionally the court intervened effectively, such as when it criticised Mirza Khizr Sultan for making arrests and collecting taxes from the town’s bankers without its authority.99 But it never acted as a unified central command, and Bakht Khan always kept his distance from it: in the records that survive among the Mutiny Papers it appears to have been very much the organ of Mirza Mughal and his military allies, from which the Bareilly brigade, still under Bakht Khan’s command, remained effectively independent.

  Given this, the court seems in fact to have achieved the direct opposite of what was intended for it. Rather than co-ordinating the different rebel regiments, it emphasised the existing divisions between them, polarising them even more dramatically than before into competing factions acting under their own independent warlords. Either way, the end of Bakht Khan’s military system brought instant relief to the British on the Ridge. As Richard Barter noted, ‘The King of Delhi in Durbar had taunted the leaders of the mutineers with their want of success; this gave rise to mutual recriminations, and refusal of some to carry out any longer the system organised by Bakht Khan. And so, when we were scarcely able to stand, the attacks ceased, as if by a dispensation of Providence, and gave our force the repose they so much needed.’100

  The speed of Bakht Khan’s fall was exacerbated by his hard-line ‘Wahhabi’ views. There were suggestions that he did not ‘supply the wants’ of high-caste Hindus, who duly applied to the King asking whether they could be transferred to the command of Mirza Mughal.101 Later, contrary to the King’s express wishes, he gathered all the ‘ulama of the city and dragooned them into signing a Fatwa of Jihad, declaring it mandatory for all Muslims to arm and fight the religious war under the command of the head of the jihadis, Maulvi Sarfaraz Ali; several maulvis, including Ghalib’s friend Mufti Sadruddin Azurda, afterwards said they had been forced into signing against their will, and that they had been threatened that if they refused ‘their families would be destroyed and ruined’.102

  Embolded by this fatwa, towards the end of July the jihadis made the most serious breach in the common front that had been so successfully maintained by both Hindus and Muslims. The feast of Bakr ‘Id was approaching; to the horror of the court, who had always made huge efforts never to allow the city to be divided on communal grounds, the jihadis went out of their way deliberately to offend Hindu feelings. Normally, across the Islamic world, Muslims celebrated Bakr ‘Id [or ‘Id ul-Adha] by sacrificing a goat or a sheep to commemorate the sacrifice of Abraham and God’s sparing of Ismail (who in the Koran is the son who is about to be offered up, not Isaac as in the Old Testament). But as Muhammad Baqar wrote,

  The Ghazees who have come from Tonk have determined to kill a cow on the open space in front of the Jama Masjid on the day of ‘Id, some three days hence. They say that if the Hindus offer any opposition to this, they will kill them, and after settling accounts with the Hindus they will then attack and destroy the Firangis. ‘For,’ say they, ‘we are to be martyrs for the faith and the honours of martyrdom are to be obtained just as well by killing a Hindu as by killing a firangi.’103

  Shortly afterwards, on 19 July, some Hindu sepoys cut the throats of five Muslim butchers they accused of cow killing. A full-scale crisis, dividing the city down its central religious axis, looked imminent. This was something Zafar had always dreaded. Since Delhi was almost exactly half Hindu, he had always clearly understood that it would be impossible to rule without the consent and blessing of half his subjects; moreover, he had a Hindu mother, and had always followed enough Hindu customs to profoundly alarm the more orthodox ‘ulama. Now he rose to the occasion with an unusually decisive response. The same day as the butchers were killed, Zafar banned the butchery of cows, forbade the eating of beef and authorised for anyone found killing a cow the terrible punishment of being blown from a cannon. The police reacted immediately, even going so far as to arrest any kebab-wallah who was found grilling beef kebabs. One of these, Hafiz Abdurrahman, wrote to the court swearing that he was not a butcher and could not be held responsible for cow slaughter; moreover, he had taken up his current profession of kebab grilling only after his usual business had been ruined by the rioting of the sepoys. He was not, however, released.104

  Next, Zafar issued an order that all the town’s cows should be registered, with chaukidars and sweepers of the different muhallas instructed to report to the local police station all ‘cow-owning Muslim households’ and for each police thana then to make out a list ‘of all the cows being bred by the followers of Islam’ and to send it to the Palace. This order the thanadars were instructed to carry out within six hours.105 On the 30th the kotwal, Sa’id Mubarak Shah, was instructed to proclaim loudly throughout the town that cow killing was absolutely forbidden since it would cause ‘unnecessary strife which will only strengthen the enemy’; anyone ‘who even harbours the thought or acts in defiance of the government order will receive severe punishment’.106

  Further orders followed, including one oddly surreal directive commanding that all the registered cows should now be given shelter in the city’s central police station, the kotwali. Zafar may have been unwilling or unable to lock up the jihadis, but he could lock up the cows. This order, however, proved much more difficult to carry out. Sa’id Mubarak Shah wrote back in alarm to point out that ‘if the cows of all the Muslims are called in then they would amount to something like five hundred to a thousand cows. For this purpose we need a large field or enclosure where they can be penned for a few days, but this loyal one does not know of any such place and the owners will only be suspicious and worried’. The plan was duly dropped, and instead bonds were taken from the cow owners that they would not permit the sacrifice of their cattle.107

 
Finally, Mufti Sadruddin Azurda was sent out to mediate with the mujahedin.108 It was a clever choice of emissary, and not just because Azurda was the most respected Muslim intellectual in Delhi, ‘the wisest of the wise’, according to Sayyid Ahmad Khan – the one who could, thought the Delhi poet Sabir, ‘kick the knowledge of Plato on the head’ and bring Aristotle ‘from the height of perfection to the dust of disgrace’.109 Azurda was a natural diplomat: a product of the puritan school of Shah Waliullah who was none the less a poet and the friend of poets; a leading member of the Delhi ‘ulama who used to mediate successfully between the Mughals and the Residency. Moreover, Azurda was not only a close adviser and ally of Zafar, but also the teacher and former employer of Maulvi Sarfaraz Ali, whose career he had shaped until the latter left Delhi. There is no record of what passed between the two, but at the end of it, Maulvi Sarfaraz agreed to persuade the mujahedin to forgo the pleasure of slaughtering cows and eating beef on ‘Id.

  Thanks to all Zafar’s precautions, ‘Id passed peacefully on I August. The British, who were aware through their spies of the growing communal tension, and who had been eagerly hoping for a major communal riot, were disappointed. Hervey Greathed was left merely to grumble in a letter to his wife ‘that it is a good satire on the Mahomedans fighting for their faith, that at this Eid, under the Mahomedan king, no one was permitted to sacrifice a cow’.”110

  For both Zafar and Maulvi Muhammad Baqar, the incident of the cows, the jihadis and the murdered butchers seems to have been a turning point.

  For two and a half months now their city had been looted and terrorised by waves of incoming sepoys and jihadis. But at least it had initially looked as if, once a period of transition was over, there might be hope of a new order and the restoration of the Mughal dynasty whose emperors both men looked upon as khalifas, the only legitimate and sacred rulers of Hindustan. But by the end of July, victory over the British seemed increasingly remote. A much more likely outcome, it now seemed, was the imminent unravelling of the central stitching that held Delhi together: the peaceful coexistence of Hindu and Muslim. This seemed to both Zafar and Baqar to be too high a price to pay. In the week following the killing of the butchers, both men, quite separately, put out feelers to the British camp, hoping to reach some sort of accommodation with the troops on the Ridge.

  For Zafar and Baqar, this decision had been a long time in coming. As July progressed, Zafar had become more depressed and emotionally detached from the Uprising. His loyalties had always been to his city and his dynasty, and it was becoming increasingly clear that the interests of neither were being served by this crisis; quite to the contrary, it was now much more likely that the Uprising would lead to the destruction of Delhi and the final fall of the Mughals after more than three hundred years in power. When Sarvar ul-Mulk’s uncle went to the King ‘in full court dress, with a turban on his head and a belt around his waist’ and asked for some troops to fight the British, Zafar replied, ‘I do not possess troops to give you. I am 80 years old and infirm. This fight is not mine. Mutinous troops are fighting. If you have a desire to fight, then go to the officers of these troops and settle it with them.’111

  Unable to lean on his queen, Zinat Mahal, who had now retired to her house in the city, furious at what she saw as her husband’s disastrous pro-rebel policies, and unable to fall back on the chamberlain, the eunuch Mahbub Ali Khan, Zafar’s behaviour became so erratic that it seemed he was beginning to crack – he was after all eighty years old, and had shown some signs of senility even before the Uprising.

  As the siege wore on, and the prospects grew bleaker, his reactions to events in the durbar became more petulant and selfcentred. Sometimes indeed they were eccentric to the point of madness, like those of some Indian King Lear, such as when he appointed his father-in-law to be Nawab of Oudh, a region the Mughals had not controlled since the mid-eighteenth century.112 Later, he tried to persuade a disaffected sepoy general to stay in Delhi by offering him the position of Subahdar of the Deccan and Gujerat, regions that had been out of Mughal hands for even longer.113 By early August, he had retreated into writing poetry, with verses that, like his moods, swung from gloom to unrealistic optimism: ‘The King is employed the whole day in composing poetical pieces,’ reported the spy Gauri Shankar on 7 August. ‘One verse composed by him is as follows:

  O Zafar, we are going to take London shortly,

  It is not far.’114

  When he was not writing poetry, much of his time was spent trying to get the sepoys out of his beloved gardens, many of which he had laid out himself. This he finally achieved in June, only to find a fortnight later that ‘200 soldiers of the 54th NI, and a doctor with his family have located themselves there’. As he wrote in exasperation to Mirza Mughal, ‘The Royal cortege frequently condescends to go in that direction, and much inconvenience is felt on such occasions. You our son are therefore directed to speak to the Officers of the Court on this matter, and to have these soldiers and the native doctor removed.’115

  At other times Zafar just seemed to wish to escape. His threat to leave Delhi and to go on haj, and there to live a life of prayer, was probably initially just a lever to try to bring unity to the Uprising, and to pressurise the sepoys to obey him and cease plundering his city. But by July it did seem to reflect a profound wish simply to escape the horror of his position; he had had enough of watching impotently as everything he had planned and worked for – the cultured and civilised oasis he had built, the survival of the dynasty he tried all his life to preserve – was torn apart and destroyed in front of his eyes.

  The degree to which Zafar was trapped is revealed in one of the most pathetic documents produced at his trial: a letter to his minor feudatory, Abd ur-Rahman Khan, the Nawab of the small bazaar town of Jhajjar – the same man who had refused to shelter Theo – begging the Nawab to come and rescue him. He addressed the Nawab – a foppish aesthete who had never seen a war in his life – as the ‘Tiger in Battle’ and explained

  that owing to the occurrence of many unpleasant circumstances, and being unable, in consequence of our advanced age and debility of body, to attend to the affairs of government and country, we now have no desire left but to engage in such good works as are approvable to God and mankind, to spend the remainder of our life in service and worship of God.

  He went on to spell out his wholly impractical plan: first to move ‘with all the members of the exalted house Taimur’ and ‘all the property and chattels of the whole of the members of the royal family’ to the Sufi shrine of Khwaja Qutb in Mehrauli and then, having gathered everything that was needed for the journey, to proceed through war-torn India to ‘the Holy Tabernacles’ of Mecca and Medina. So he begged the Nawab of Jhajjar, ‘our slave, to come quickly to our royal presence, with those of your retainers in whom you have fullest confidence … to protect our divine person till our departure for the holy house of God [Mecca]. In acting thus you will secure our entire divine approval and pleasure, and your fame will likewise spread throughout mankind’. There was, however, a small logistical difficulty: ‘There are no carriages whatever [procurable] here,’ wrote Zafar. ‘Be sure, therefore, to bring with you 400 or 500 carts, and 500 or 600 camels.’116

  The Nawab, who was determined to sit on the fence and commit himself to neither side, made his apologies: he was very sorry, he wrote, but such was the instability of the times that he was unable to come to the assistance of the Shadow of God. It was soon after this, according to one British spy, that Zafar recited the following couplet after the sepoy officers had left him one evening:

  The skies have fallen down on us,

  I can no longer rest or sleep.

  Only my final departure is now certain,

  Whether it comes in the morning, or night.117

  Zahir Dehlavi, who attended on Zafar as a page throughout the siege, saw him sink lower and lower as July gave way to August, until he reached a state approaching helpless despair. ‘He was always in a sad and melancholy mood,’ Zahi
r wrote long afterwards,

  and at all times his eyes were full of tears. In the evenings he used to go in and sit in his oratory, the Tasbih Khana, by himself and would curse the rebels. We were instructed to be present by turns, and one night while I was on duty, we heard the guard asking us all to be alert, and we all put on our turbans and got ready. When the King appeared, we all stood up and greeted him. The King sat in the Tasbih Khana on his low throne, leaning back against a bolster. Then he addressed us saying, ‘do you realize the full consequences of what is happening?’ Shahzada Hamid Khan replied, ‘After one hundred and fifty years your Majesty’s prestige has been restored, and the lost Empire of the Mughals has returned.’

  The King shook his head. ‘My children,’ he said, ‘you do not understand. Listen: I did nothing to attract this destruction. I did not have treasures and riches, nor land nor Empire. I was always a beggar, a Sufi sitting in a corner in search of God, with a few people around me, eating my daily bread. But now the great fire that was lit in Meerut has, by the will of the Lord, blown over to Delhi, and it has set this great city alight. Now it seems I and my line are destined to be ruined. The name of the great Timurid [Mughal] Emperors is still alive, but soon that name will be completely destroyed and forgotten. These faithless people [the sepoys] who have rebelled against their masters, and have come here for shelter, will all be gone before long. When these people have been unfaithful to their own leaders what can I expect of them? They have come to ruin my house, and once they have ruined it they will flee. Then the English will cut off my head, and those of my children, and they will display them on top of the Fort. They will not spare any one of you, and if any of you are saved, then remember what I am telling you: even when you will take a morsel of bread in your mouth it will be seized and flung far off from you, and the noblemen of Hindustan will be treated like base villagers.118