The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  A message was sent to Laxmi Chand, the famously wealthy moneylender in Mathura, on the road to Agra, but although he was offered the position of Fotadar (Treasurer) in return for a loan of 5 lakh rupees, he said he was unable to help.*45 In retaliation, the moneylender’s Delhi agent was arrested and taken to the Bareilly troop’s camp, where he was ‘ill-treated’.46

  On 7 August, in desperation, Mirza Mughal arrested all the city’s leading baniyas and bankers and brought them to the Fort, where they were threatened with death if they did not produce their fortunes and offer them for the Uprising. Among those arrested were various former English officials, including Munshi Jiwan Lal, who was surprised by sepoys when he opened his haveli gates one evening to let in the water carriers. He was bound and taken to the Red Fort, where he was horrified by what he saw:

  I was taken upstairs before Mirza Mughal. There I saw that a great crowd of people was assembled, but in a strange irregular fashion. On one side sat Mirza Mughal reclining on his pillows … while in front of the Mirza was the famous Kuray Singh, the Tilanga Brigade Major, stretched at full length on his bed. There was not a semblance of court etiquette, and the King’s officials were moving here and there without order. Lala Saligram, Ramji Das Gurwala and about 25 bankers were sitting there under arrest; I was also ordered to sit in the same row with them.

  Money was demanded from us and we were threatened so far that guns were placed over our shoulders and fired. But in spite of this our hearts remained firm, and we made up our minds rather to die than to yield to the threats of the rebels, and so we were kept in this sad condition [all night] until 4pm [the following day].47

  Throughout the day and night, pistols were produced and the members of the group were threatened with death. In the end, however, Munshi Jiwan Lal and the other munshis were saved by the Anglophile Mirza Ilahe Bakhsh, who took Mirza Mughal aside and warned him, ‘The English will capture Delhi and you will fall into their hands. These men are the Munshis of the English and you will have recourse to their assistance. I advise you to set them free, and thus keep them under an obligation.’48

  When threatening the bankers had failed, Mirza Mughal tried to persuade the traders in the bazaar to supply 5 lakh rupees, and also to provide food to the army on credit with the promise that ‘money would be paid when the salaries were distributed’. But the traders refused to accept the court’s word, even when pressured by the kotwal and threatened with imprisonment and the systematic looting of their shops.49 By early August spies were reporting that many of the Punjabi merchants as well as ‘Marwarees of Ashrafee ka Katra’ had been thrown into jail until they paid up.50° Many other moneylenders joined them there, including one of the most prominent of all, Saligram.51 They remained in confinement until the first week of September when Zafar learned what had happened, whereupon ‘Mirza Mughal was ordered not to allow such ill treatment of the King’s subjects, and that it was better to take what each agreed and to realise it by gentle means’.52

  There were also various attempts to raise 300,000 rupees from the nobles of the city, and half-hearted efforts to tax the small area to the west of Delhi – the villages of Mehrauli and Gurgaon – that were still nominally under Zafar’s control; but again little money was forthcoming.53 By the end of the month, Mirza Mughal’s men were so desperate for money that they had begun digging for buried treasure in the Mughal Bastille of Salimgarh, opposite the Red Fort. ‘People say to the Emperor that the treasures of his forebears are buried here,’ recorded the spy Gauri Shankar. ‘Some even mention exact spots – but nothing has emerged yet.’54 Later, they dug up ‘some small field pieces’, but the promised treasure proved more elusive.55

  A similar degree of desperation fuelled the spurious rumours that the Persian Army was coming to save the rebels, that it had fought its way through Afghanistan and into India via Peshawar, and was now crossing the Indus at Attock. Another seaborne assault of Iranian troops was said to be on its way via Bombay. ‘We cannot verify the news,’ remarked Baqar in the Dihli Urdu Akbhar, ‘but it is not an impossibility.’56

  For it was not just money which was running out by the middle of August: supplies of gunpowder and gun caps were also running low. This was the single most startling example of negligence on the part of the rebel administration, for at the outbreak they had inherited the largest arsenal of weapons and ammunition in northern India. For the first ten days of the Uprising, however, no guard had been placed over the munitions that had survived the explosion at the magazine, so that the townspeople, and even the Gujars from the countryside, had come and helped themselves.57

  The result was that by late July fuses for shells and percussion caps were both in short supply; gunpowder had run out, and attempts to manufacture it ran into trouble from the lack of saltpetre and sulphur in the city. Various attempts were made to send out to famous firework manufacturers across Hindustan for assistance; one of these, ‘Akbar Khan, a resident of Meerut went to the Princes and offered to make a projectile of such size and power that it would destroy a whole section of men. Convinced of his ability to do so, they advanced him the sum of Rs 4000 for expenses and ordered him to commence the work at once in the Palace’; but the experiment does not seem to have been a success.58

  There was even an attempt to use the alcoholic spirits seized from English houses to manufacture explosive, and on 2 September ‘144 bottles of wine’ were sent to the gunpowder factory, but the results were mixed at best. English observers noted that while the marksmanship of the rebel artillery remained very good throughout the siege, from July onwards it became increasingly common for the rebel shells to fail to explode.59

  The most serious blow came on 7 August, when a stray British shell ignited one of the principal rebel gunpowder factories, located in Gali Churiwallan, incinerating the 500 people working there. The sepoys assumed there had been treachery at work, and attacked the haveli of Zafar’s prime minister, Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, whom they accused of treason. The haveli was burned to the ground, saddening Ghalib: he was a close friend of the hakim, and had spent many convivial evenings in the house. In Dastanbuy, he saw it as yet another assault on the civilised and highly cultured Delhi he loved and had helped to create. Although the hakim’s life was saved, wrote Ghalib, ‘the mischief was not finished until the house was completely devastated’.

  That mansion, which in beauty and ornament, was equal to the painted palaces of China, was looted and the roofs were burned. The great beams and the inlaid panels of the ceiling were reduced to ashes. The walls were so completely blackened by smoke it seemed that, in grief, the mansion wore a black mantle.

  Do not be misled by the fortunes the skies may bestow.

  The treacherous skies entangle,

  In anguish and torment,

  Those they formerly laid in the lap of love.60

  By mid-August, as the food shortages were beginning to bite, large numbers of hungry sepoys and jihadis had begun to drift away every day from the city, despairing of continuing the fight if there was nothing to eat.

  According to one intelligence letter received by Hodson on 16 August, Zafar was too depressed, detached and possibly now too unhinged even to attempt to prevent them going; in his own eyes at least he had now removed himself from participation in the Uprising: ‘Yesterday some two hundred Tilangas, fully armed, dressed and mounted, were on their way [out of the city] when some rebel forces stopped them, and reported it to the fort,’ wrote an anonymous spy.

  The King called them to the court and asked them why they were going. They said, ‘our wives and families would be worried about us; moreover there is nothing left to eat, that is the real reason why we are going.’ So the King asked them to submit whatever arms and cavalry accoutrements they had, and then allowed them to go. He then openly declared in court, ‘I do not care who goes or stays. I did not ask anybody to come here and I do not stop anyone [from leaving]. Whoever wants to stay can do so, otherwise they can go away. I have no objections. I have detained
these arms so that if the English come here, I can hand it over to them. If the troops want them they can take it. I have no stake in the matter.61

  No wonder that Maulvi Muhammad Baqar, Zafar’s most loyal supporter, should write at this time that ‘His Majesty’s state of mind remains unwell’.62 By the end of the month, the hunger had got worse still. On the 30th more disappointed, starving and emaciated troops came to the Palace to declare that they could not go on unless they were fed.

  My Lord, from the day we arrived here we devoted ones have prostrated ourselves at your feet. But you have not provided any upkeep for us, and whatever we brought has been expended. If you cannot provide for us then you must tell us. There is so much starvation that we have no option but to break from your Majesty and go somewhere else. Except for your Majesty, everybody else in the city of Delhi, including the civil servants, are in alliance with the English.63

  In the city, meanwhile, the people sat behind locked doors, trying to survive as best they could. As August progressed, the impression that emerges from the petitions in the Mutiny Papers is of a wrecked, semi-derelict and starving city. Gamblers and what the petitioners refer to as ‘rogues, rascals and bad characters’ sat playing cards in the burned-out houses that had been looted by the sepoys or received direct hits from British shells; one petition from Mir Akbar Ali of the Faiz Bazaar complains that the gamblers used to sit on the top of the ruins so that they could peer into his zenana courtyard, ‘ogle the women within and shout reprehensible abuses’.64 Most shops were shuttered and empty, unless they had been taken over as billets for the soldiery, in which case dispirited sepoys could be seen sitting on the steps, smoking ‘bhang and churrus [marijuana preparations]’.65

  Law and order remained as precarious as ever. Groups of hungry sepoys were still demanding protection money, most recently from the shop owners of Chandni Chowk.66 Others raided neighbouring houses just to stave off starvation. The Gwalior Cavalry, who had been billeted in the Delhi haveli of Franz Gottlieb Cohen – the poet Farasu – and had up to the middle of August behaved with unusual restraint, eventually went on the rampage in the adjacent muhalla, stopping in at the local police station on the way back to explain, ‘we do not get to eat, therefore we plunder the muhalla’.67 Outside the walls the situation was even worse: as early as June, Delhi’s grass-cutters were refusing to go beyond the city walls unless accompanied by a military escort.68

  For the poor, the moneylenders were as much an anxiety as either the sepoys in the city or the British on the Ridge. Though the baniyas claimed poverty to the city officials, and refused to give or lend money to help the Uprising, they stepped up their attempts to call in outstanding debts, and there are mountains of petitions surviving in the Mutiny Papers from poverty-stricken Delhiwallahs driven to distraction by their extortions. On 16 August, for example, a delegation from the area around Delhi Darwaza came to the King complaining about Lala Jatmal and his associates, who had come with horsemen and foot soldiers,

  threatening and extorting money even from helpless women and widows, and from the indigent … My lord, Lala Jatmal has used great force and coercion. He has collected money from each and every house … we poor ones are deprived of two square meals. He should be given a stringent punishment because he adopted illegal and crooked ways. If you do this, in future others will fear to oppress or cheat anyone.69

  With no effective police force, it was also easy to settle old scores: a petition received from the residents of Muhalla Maliwara complained that Radha and Kanhaiya, two powerful women whom they had previously prosecuted, were openly planning to take revenge: ‘Now these people threaten us and say, “what harm you have caused us by filing a suit. We will now attack you because there is no government.” We are all afraid for our lives. Please ask the Kotwal to investigate this matter.’70

  The breakdown of normal life did at least provide an opportunity for lovers to run off together, and judging by the number of petitions flowing in during that month, the growing anarchy of August seems to have facilitated a bacchanal of elopement. Balahiyya, wife of Suraj Bali, ran off with Bhikari, ‘having looted me of all my wealth which she took away by stealth’, according to her surprised and hurt husband.71 A former courtesan named Hussaini, who had married one Sheikh Islam, also took the opportunity to head off with a new man. The sheikh explained to Zafar that he was a convert from Hinduism who had fled from Meerut at the outbreak and come to seek shelter in Delhi. Not long after their arrival near the ‘Id Gah, Hussaini had met Khuda Bakhsh the Shoemaker, whom the sheikh described as ‘a spy and a gambler’. Perhaps missing the liveliness of her old life, and finding the company of the sheikh a little staid, Hussaini left Sheikh Islam, taking with her, said the sheikh, ‘all the valuables I had brought from home’.72

  Some of the lovers were sepoys for, as in many wars, dashing soldiers are rarely short of admirers. Certainly Pir Bakhsh the tinbeater and maker of pots and pans, who had been cohabiting not only with his own wife but also with his brother’s widow Ziya, and according to the neighbours regularly beating her up, lost her in late August to a sepoy named Zamir. The sepoy apparently gave her shelter after a bad domestic fight: ‘all the residents of Katra Muhalla can bear witness to Pir Bakhsh’s beatings’, Ziya told the court when they took evidence on the case. Pir Bakhsh denied the charge, claiming it was his wife who had beaten Ziya: ‘All I did was slap her once,’ he said in a statement. ‘It was a fight between women.’ He also said that he did not intend to marry Ziya, and it appears that Zamir was allowed to take Ziya away with him; certainly Pir Bakhsh had to sign an undertaking saying he would ‘not commit any oppression on that woman and if I cause any harm I will pay a fifty rupees fine’.73

  Others took the opportunity to satisfy their desires by abducting and raping women. The courtesans were particularly vulnerable, as they had been throughout the Uprising. The courtesan Manglo, who had been kidnapped early in May by the sawar Rustam Khan, was still in captivity in late July, despite his receiving two orders from the Palace to release her.

  Repeated petitions about her were received at the Palace both from her brother Chandan, who seems to have worked as her pimp, and a man who described himself as ‘Chhedi, a traveller from Camp Gurgaon’ and who said he had been ‘made homeless by the depredations of the godless Firangis’ – in other words he was one of the many refugees from the countryside fleeing homeless from the acts of retribution wreaked on villages deemed to have been hostile, or to have failed to help the British as they fled Delhi on the night of 11 May. According to Chhedi, ‘one gruesome incident has already taken place in this regiment when Farzand Ali, the court Dafadar [sepoy rank equivalent to a guard and petty officer], murdered a courtesan named Imamam by choking her to death. This slave fears that Rustam Khan will kill the said woman, as he threatens and beats her up all day and all night long’.74 When yet another order to release Manglo was torn up by Rustam’s risaldar (cavalry commander), a sawar named Faiz Khan, Chandan wrote again to the court, repeating that Rustam Khan

  has imprisoned her and beats her up and even though that courtesan shouts and screams nobody helps her. In spite of repeated summons the said Risaldar has not yet obeyed the orders. Should this state of anarchy and injustice continue the subjects of the Exalted One will be destroyed. Therefore I hope that another parwana [written order or edict] will be issued to the said Risaldar regarding the recovery of the courtesan … Her statement should be registered in the office so that this poor one is compensated, and he can sing prayers for the welfare and fame of the Exalted One.75

  It was not just the sepoys who were on the loose in the streets of the besieged city: the more delinquent princes were also at large, pursuing their pleasures as they wished. The worst offender, as ever, was Mirza Abu Bakr. One not untypical night saw him turn up at the haveli of Mirza Ghulam Ghaus, whose sisters were celebrated Delhi beauties. Mirza Abu Bakr allegedly told Ghulam Ghaus,

  ‘I am very drunk,’ and he began to say foul words. When I to
ld my sisters to hide themselves then he (Abu Bakr) raised his sword over me, and pointed his pistol, but I succeeded in pacifying him … In the meantime the gates of the Muhalla had been locked to prevent any untoward incident, and as there was some delay in getting the keys, he began abusing the residents and then he fired countless volleys from double barrelled guns at the gate … A Grenadier from the Faiz Bazaar came up and said something, but Mirza Abu Bakr struck him thrice with a sword. By then forty soldiers from the Alexander Platoon and other Tilangas gathered and began to establish order in the Muhalla. While this was happening, I got my sisters to jump over the wall, and had them sent around to Lal Kuan for their own safety.76

  It was just as well he did so. For before long, Mirza Abu Bakr and his companions broke into the house and looted it, even driving away with them ‘a horse and a pair of oxen’ they found in the inner courtyard. As they were leaving, the Prince was challenged by the deputy kotwal, who had now ridden up to investigate the disturbance, but Mirza Abu Bakr ignored his protestations and instead lunged at him with a sword, and in the mêlée managed to seize his horse too. At this point, however, Mirza Abdulla, son of Zafar’s eldest boy, the late Mirza Shah Rukh, rode up and rebuked his cousin for causing such a disturbance, and managed to persuade him to leave the place and return to the Red Fort.77