*His full titles, as he occasionally reminded his correspondents, were ‘Sahib-i-Vala, Manaqube Ali Mansib, Farzand Arjmand, Paivand-e-Sultani, Muassam ud-Daula, Amin ul-Mulk Sir Thomas Metcalfe, Baron Bahadur, Firoze Jung, Sahib Kalan Bahadur of Shahjahanabad’.
*So punningly named not for its similarity to the castle in Shropshire but after its original builder, Dr Ludlow, and its castellated Gothic battlements.
*At the same time, the title of the Resident changed to Agent, then later to Commissioner. For ease of comprehension, however, I will use the title Resident throughout. The Resident initially acted as the Governor General’s ambassador to the Mughal court; by the 1850s, however, the Agent reported to his immediate superior, the Governor of the North West Provinces in Agra, who dealt with the day-to-day matters of British-Mughal relations, and the Agent discussed only more serious matters – such as the succession – directly with the Governor General in Calcutta.
* In Arabic, ‘ulama means ‘the ones possessing knowledge’, hence the ‘community of learned men’. In effect it means the Islamic clergy, the body of men with sufficient knowledge of the Koran, the Sunna and the Sharia to make decisions on matters of religion. ‘Ulama is an Arabic plural – the singular is ‘alim, a learned man.
* Professional dancers and courtesans.
* Both the Gardners and the Skinners began to give Mughal and European names to their children – thus Susan Gardner was known in the zenana as Shubbeah Begum. The Muslim branch of the Skinner family maintain the practice to this day and Frank Skinner, who controls the bicycle rickshaw rental trade in Meerut, has on the reverse of his business card his Mughal name, Sultan Mirza, written in Urdu script.
* This was also one of the principal complaints of Begum Hazrat Mahal of Lucknow when explaining what had led her to fight the British. In her proclamation issued in the dying days of the Uprising, she mocked the British claim to allow freedom of worship: ‘To eat pigs and drink wine, to bite greased cartridges and to mix pigs’ fat with sweetmeats, to destroy Hindoo and Musalman temples on pretence of making roads, to build churches, to send clergy men into the streets and alleys to preach the Christian religion, to institute English schools, and pay people a monthly stipend for learning the English sciences, while the places of worship of Hindoos and Musalmans are to this day entirely neglected; with all this, how can the people believe that religion will not be interfered with?’ Proclamation of Begum Hazrat Mahal; the translation of the original is in the NAI, Foreign Department, Political Consultation 17 December 1858, from J. D. Forsyth Sec. to Chief Commr Oudh, To G. J. Edmonstone, Sec. GOI, For. Dept, Dt Lucknow, 4 December 1858.
* The Hindu reformist movement led by groups such as the Arya Samaj, which would in time form a Hindu parallel to these reformist tendencies in Islam and Christianity, did not reach Delhi until two decades later, in the late 1870s. While there were many prominent Hindus in Zafar’s Delhi, there was no unified Hindu leadership in the city at this time to form a coherent counterweight to the missionaries and the ‘ulama. There was, however, some stirring of Hindu reformist movements in Bengal: in January 1857, General Hearsey at Barrackpore was complaining of ‘some agents of the religious Hindoo party in Calcutta (I believe it is called the “Dharma Sobha”) spreading rumours about the Government being intent on converting the sepoys’. See Irfan Habib, ‘The Coming of 1857’, Social Scientist, vol. 26, no. 1, January-April 1998, p.11.
† Followers of the puritanical reformed Islam first taught by Ibn Abd al-Wahhab in Medina in the eighteenth century.
* Given the somewhat dubious and sectarian reputation of madrasas today, it is worth remembering that many of the most brilliant Hindu thinkers, including, for example, the great reformer Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), were the products of madrasa educations.
* A zamindar was a landholder or local ruler.
† A small and little-known Armenian funerary chapel, attached to the old Armenian cemetery in Kishenganj, precedes St James’s by a century or so. The chapel still remains in regular use near the Kishenganj railway station, and seems to be a last surviving fragment of the old Firangi Pura, the suburb of the European mercenaries, which was established in the late Mughal period near the later Sabzi Mandi.
* A substantial town house, often facing on to a network of courtyards.
* Overeating remained a leitmotif of British life in India right up until 1947. As late as 1926 Aldous Huxley was astonished by the sheer amount of food the imperial British were capable of consuming: ‘Five meals a day – two breakfasts, luncheon, afternoon tea and dinner – are standard throughout India. A sixth is often added in the big towns where there are theatres and dances to justify late supper. The Indian who eats at most two meals a day, sometimes only one – too often none – is compelled to acknowledge his inferiority … The Indians are impressed by our gastronomic prowess. Our prestige is bound up with overeating. For the sake of the Empire the truly patriotic will sacrifice his liver and his colon, will pave the way for future apoplexies and cancers of the intestine. I did my best while I was in India. But at the risk of undermining our prestige, of bringing down the whole imperial fabric in ruin around my ears, I used from time to time unobtrusively to skip a course. The spirit is willing, but the flesh, alas, is weak.’ Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate, London, 1926, p. 108.
* The Indian head of the city police. A kotwal was also the chief magistrate, and in some Mughal cities the chief administrator too. A kotwal’s office was called the kotwali.
* One late Delhi source describes Zafar setting out hunting at 3 a.m. on a winter’s morning, attended by sixty shikaris, beaters and torchbearers. According to this Urdu source, Zafar would shoot from his palanquin while the beaters drove the game towards him, or if looking for duck and waterfowl, they would drive the birds ashore. See Arsh Taimuri, Qila-i Mua’lla ki Jhalkiyan, ed. Dr Aslam Parvez, Urdu Academy, Delhi, 1986. The section on Zafar’s hunting expeditions gives the impression of an enthusiastic and energetic sportsman, but the source was written a generation after Zafar’s exile so its accuracy may be dubious.
† Zafar was known for setting his court difficult poetic tasks. Azad tells of his fondness for making his court poets practise the difficult art of tazmin – adding an extra line to their couplets so as to turn them into three-liners without losing the sense or the rhythm. See Muhammad Husain Azad (trans. and ed. Frances Pritchett and Shamsur Rahim Faruqi), Ab-e Hayat: Shaping the Canon of Urdu Poetry, New Delhi, 2001, p. 377.
* From her name, Piram Jan would appear to be a courtesan. The fact that Zafar was prepared publicly to instruct courtesans is interesting evidence of the high social status of the better courtesans in Mughal Delhi, and the degree to which many of them were renowned for their poetic talents.
† Modern Urdu critics are divided as to the merits of Zafar’s poetry, but at the time contemporary descriptions of Zafar’s poetic gifts often gave way to hyperbole. ‘Mazmuns [themes] of submission in his poetry are equal in rank to pride and coquetry,’ wrote the critic Sabir in 1855. ‘The radiance of meaning is manifest through his words.’ Not just the words, but the very letters were like magical charms: ‘The sequences of lines, through the reflections of mazmuns are lampwicks for the bedchamber of the page. The circular letters, through the effect of meaning, are the wine marks on the flagon in the festive gathering of the pages. The colourfulness of festive meaning is the glistening of wine; in martial verses, the wetness of the ink is blood and perspiration. In mystical verses, the circular letters are seeing eyes; and in romantic verses, tear-shedding eyes. And in verses concerning the coming of Spring, the decorations between the lines are flower beds.’ Just as the Emperor was the centre of the universe, the axis mundi, ‘refuge of both worlds, for whom angels do battle, ruler of time and space, lord of crown and seal… at whose command, which is the twin of fate, the revolution of the sky is established’, so the themes of his poetry encompassed the whole world. As Sabir put in an Urdu pun, ‘from the east/opening verse [matla] to the
West/closing verse [maqta] is the excursion ground of that Sun whose domes are the skies.’ See Pritchett, Nets of Awareness, p. 11.
* Zafar composed a volume of verse in four of his five languages; only Arabic was omitted.
* In northern India opium was drunk rather than smoked, and judging by the frequency with which opium shops appear in miniatures of the period, opium addiction seems to have been a major problem. Since the Company had the monopoly on the growing and trade in the substance, which by the 1850s provided an astonishing 40 per cent of their exports from India, it of course made no attempt to control the problem.
* One pair of visiting noblemen who wished to ingratiate themselves with Zafar arrived with ‘carts laden with fruit, trees and flowers which they had brought from Lucknow’. They had judged their nazr well, and were both immediately rewarded with senior positions at court. See NAI, Precis of Palace Intelligence, entry for 2 August 1852.
† Part of the reason for this may have been that Zafar’s kite flying often seems to have drawn an admiring crowd. When Debendrenath Tagore visited Delhi shortly before 1857 the first thing that he saw as he approached the city was a large crowd ‘gathered to watch the Emperor’s prowess as a kite flyer’. Cited by Narayani Gupta, Delhi between Two Empires 1803–1931, New Delhi, 1981, p. 13.
* ‘You can curry anything,’ advised Mr Arnot of Greenwich in one Raj cookbook, ‘old shoes should even be delicious, some old oil cloth or staircarpet not to be found fault with (though gloves if much worn are too rich).’ See David Burton, The Raj at Table, p. 76.
* There is a famous story that one day Ghalib was walking with Zafar in the Mahtab Bagh of the Red Fort at a time when the mangoes were in fruit. The mangoes were reserved for the royal family, but as they walked Ghalib kept craning his head to look with great concentration at the mangoes hanging there. ‘The King asked him, “Mirza, what are you looking at so attentively?” Ghalib replied with joined hands, “My Lord and guide, some ancient poet has written:
Upon the top of every fruit is written clear and legibly:
This is the property of A, the son of B, the son of C
and I am looking to see whether any of these bears my name and those of my father and grandfather.” The King smiled and the same day had a big basket of the finest mangoes sent to him.’ Ralph Russell and Khurshid Islam, Ghalib: Life and Letters, New Delhi, 1994, p. 98.
† Like many writers, Ghalib was not completely averse to a wee tipple during the day too, but on these occasions tended to drink it diluted with rosewater, and sip it gradually while writing.
* Even though the people of Hindustan always referred to Zafar as Padshah, or Emperor, the British made a point of calling him by their own less exalted name for him, the King of Delhi.
* It is still unclear what the exact significance of the famous chapattis or puris was. Judging by the various explanations given at the time in different towns and villages, they were interpreted differently across the region. Many certainly understood them as signalling that dramatic upheavals were about to take place across Hindustan; but there is no evidence that they impinged much upon the consciousness of the people of Delhi.
* Although it hardly justified annexing Avadh, it was certainly true that Wajd Ali Shah was no blushing violet. The Royal Library at Windsor Castle contains a large folio volume entitled the Ishq Nama (Love History) of Wajd Ali Shah, which contains several hundred portraits of his different lovers, one to each page, and annotated with a short poem praising the qualities and amorous talents of each.
* In some Company regiments high-caste Hindus made up about 80 per cent of recruits, but in others this proportion had fallen slightly by 1857, which was itself a major cause of unrest. Overall, in the Bengal Native Infantry, high-caste Hindus made up around 65 per cent of the infantry at the time of the outbreak. The caste breakdown in 1842, for which detailed figures are available, was as follows: Rajputs, 27,993 (34.9 percent); Brahmins, 24,480 (31 per cent); low-caste Hindus, 13,920 (17.3 per cent); Muslims, 12,411 (15.4 per cent); Christians, 1,076 (1.3 per cent). For more on the Company’s army, and the ‘Sanskritisation’ of the military, see Seema Alavi’s groundbreaking study, The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India 1770–1830, New Delhi, 1995. See also Saul David, The Indian Mutiny, which is especially good on the military aspects of 1857.
* The Gujars were Hindu herders and pastoralists, many of them semi-nomadic, who for centuries had roamed with their cattle and horses throughout north-west India and especially in Rajasthan. They had their own traditions and deities, and even their own oral epic of origin, about the herder-hero Dev Narayan, whose festival at Sawai Bhuj near Ajmer brought about – and still does – a great annual gathering of the different Gujar clans and their livestock. The Gujars were always treated with great suspicion by their urban neighbours who regarded them, rather as Europeans at the same period used to look on Gypsies, as thieves and criminals. Many of the watchmen or chaukidars in Mughal Delhi were from Gujar backgrounds, and were recruited on the basis that a former poacher made the best gamekeeper. The pacification and settlement of the Gujars and Mewaties was the great achievement of the early British administration in Delhi, and the failure of the rebels to do the same was a major cause of their defeat, as the Gujars and Mewaties effectively blockaded the town and robbed anyone entering or leaving it. The Gujars thus effectively achieved what the British were unable to bring about: a genuine siege of the city.
* Sylvia Shorto argues convincingly in her thesis that the gateway to the magazine – which still survives as a public urinal on a traffic island on Minto Road in Old Delhi – marks the site of the great gate of Dara Shukoh’s haveli. See Sylvia Shorto, Public Lives, Private Places, British Houses in Delhi 1805–57, unpublished dissertation, NYU, 2004.
* Later in the Uprising, Mr Powell, the Moradabad postmaster, and four other Englishmen who were believed to have converted to Islam (or rather that ‘the Regiment had made them Mohammedan’), but who refused to fight for the rebels, were brought into Delhi with the troops who had mutinied in Shahjahanpore. They were kept under an armed guard of jihadis in the kotwal throughout the rest of the siege, but were not harmed and eventually escaped during the British assault on the city in September. See OIOC, Eur Mss B 138, Account of Said Mobarak Shah.
* According to the testimony of Mohan Lal Kashmiri, who was an eyewitness: ‘They [the sepoys] were soon joined by the bad character of the city, and the prisoners let loose from the jail increased the numbers of these miscreants. The residents of the Khanam Bazaar and the Nahur [where the Punjabi Muslims concentrated] were foremost of the lines of the mutineers, after this they began to pillage and slaughter the Christians and their dependants.’ OIOC, Home Miscellanous, 725, pp. 389–422, Letter Written by Munshi Mohan Lal to Brigadier Chamberlain dated November 8th 1857 at DEHLIE.
* According to Jiwan Lal’s diary the force was operational by 15 May. During the trial of Azurda at the end of the Uprising, the three commanders of his jihadi guard were named – ‘Abd ur-Rahman Ludhianawi, his son Sayf ur-Rahman and Muhammad Munir – and the reasons for their employment were discussed in court. Later in the Uprising the jihadis did succeed in fending off an attack on Azurda’s house, according to Jiwan Lal: ‘The house of Moulvie Sadarud-Din Khan was attacked today by fifty soldiers; but, seeing that there were seventy jihadis ready to oppose them, they retreated, but carried off two colts from the house of Ahsanullah Khan.’ Even more unequivocal is the report of Azurda’s refusing a demand for money, saying that the ghazis he had employed would be used for his defence. See Swapna Liddle’s excellent essay on Azurda in Margrit Pernau’s Delhi College, New Delhi, 2006. For Azurda’s trial see NAI, Foreign Dept, 1859, Political, 113/5. Bayats, or oaths of allegiance to an amir, are still standard practice among modern jihadi groups such as al-Qaeda, as well as among other less aggressive Muslim brotherhoods such as certain Sufi tarikhas.
* The extended family of Thomas Collins, Fraser’s deputy, suffered th
e largest number of casualties of any British family in Delhi. According to a plaque still up on the wall of St James’s Church, no fewer than twenty-three members of the family were ‘all barbarously murdered at Delhi on or about the 11th of May 1857’. Nearby are plaques to Padre Jennings, the Beresfords of the Delhi Bank and Dr Chaman Lal, who is described as ‘a native Christian and a Worshipper in this church’.
* Such was the strength of the link between religion and the Uprising that throughout 1857 all Indian loyalists were routinely labelled Christians. See Rudrangshu Mukherjee, ‘“Satan Let Loose upon Earth”: The Kanpur Massacres in India in the Revolt of 1857’, Past and Present, no. 128, p. 116, where he cites the Deposition of Khoda Bux, in Depositions at Cawnpore.
* The proper name of the Ochterlony Gardens was Mubarak Bagh. It was built on land that Ochterlony purchased from his assistant William Fraser especially for his wife Mubarak Begum, a short distance to the south of Shalimar Bagh. Ochterlony’s tomb was a wonderfully hybrid monument, whose central dome was apparently the model for the Delhi church, St James’s, and was surmounted by a cross, though the side wings were enclosed in a forest of small minarets: it was thus the perfect architectural expression of the religious fusion Ochterlony seems to have achieved in his marriage. In the event, Ochterlony died away from Delhi and was buried in Meerut, while the empty tomb was destroyed during the fighting of 1857, in which the widowed Mubarak Begum, by then remarried to a Mughal amir named Vilayat Ali Khan, fought on the rebel side. It is an extraordinary and completely forgotten moment in architectural history: the last of the great Mughal garden tombs – a tradition that had already reached its finest moment in the Taj Mahal – being built not by the last of the Mughals, but by a Scottish-American general. For a picture of Ochterlony’s mausoleum see Emily Bayley in M. M. Kaye (ed.), The Golden Calm: An English Lady’s Life in Moghul Delhi, London, 1980, p. 181.
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