History from a new, relevant angle
Karim Waheed studies a gripping narrative of Mughal collapse
The Last Mughal
The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857
Willliam Dalrymple
Penguin/Viking
Were laid in common graves;
No prayers were read for the noble dead,
Unmarked remain their graves.
Bahadur Shah Zafar II At 4 p.m. on a hazy, humid winter's afternoon in Rangoon in November 1862, a shrouded corpse was escorted by a small group of British soldiers to an anonymous grave at the back of a walled prison enclosure…The ceremony was brief. The British authorities had made sure not only that the grave was already dug, but the quantities of lime were on hand to guarantee the rapid decay of both bier and body…A week later the British Commissioner, Captain H. N. Davies, wrote to London, reporting: '…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…" William Dalrymple's narrative in his latest book, The Last Mughal (2006) may come across as sensational fiction but it is necessarily history. And this is how history should read. Dalrymple's intrigue with India and its past, in particular Delhi, dominated the travelogue, City of Djinns (1994). That passion was reignited in White Mughals (2002), about the many British who embraced Indian culture at the end of the eighteenth century. The Last Mughal tries to look into how and why the relatively easy relationship of Indian and British, evident in the early stages of the East India Company rule, metamorphosed into the hatred and racism of the high-nineteenth-century Raj. The title of the book clearly refers to Bahadur Shah Zafar II (1775-1862), the last Mughal Emperor, and the direct descendent of Genghis Khan and Timur, of Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, and Zafar does loom large over the narrative. However, at its heart lies the chronicle of a thriving metropolis on the brink of annihilation. Dalrymple's passion for Delhi becomes apparent yet again, as he delves deep into the cultural renaissance that flourished in the city under Zafar, and the dramatic closing acts of the Timurid dynasty. Dalrymple has accomplished a gargantuan feat, going over mountains of dust-ridden, never-before translated Farsi and Urdu documents, Indian eyewitness accounts and official records in archives in Delhi, Lahore, Yangon and London. A history emerges that challenges 150 years of British teaching. What triggered the Uprising (referred to as the 'Indian Mutiny' in Britain)? What changed the seemingly relaxed coexistence of the British and the Indians? Dalrymple points to two particular reasons. One was the British power on the rise: in a comparatively short period the British had defeated not only the French but also all their Indian rivals -- the Rajas and the Nawabs. The changed balance of power quickly led to an attitude of unashamed arrogance. The other reason was the escalating Evangelical Christianity that brought about a sea change in the way the British viewed the Indians. In a matter of years, Company servants who were mingling with and marrying Indians, started referring to them as "poor benighted heathens" or "niggers". Dalrymple writes, "It was not the British per se, so much as specific groups with a specific imperial agenda -- namely the Evangelicals and Utilitarians -- who ushered in the most obnoxious phase of colonialism…By the early 1850s, many British officials were nursing plans to abolish the Mughal court, and to impose not just British laws and technology on India, but also Christianity." The reaction to this mounting insensitivity came in 1857 with the Uprising. Of the 139,000 sepoys of the Bengal Army -- the largest modern army in Asia -- all but 7,796 turned against their British masters. Many contemporary Indian versions try to dub this movement as the 'First War of Independence', but as countless documents and records show, it was an out and out war for 'Dharma' or 'Din'. The word 'jihad' screams out over and over in the source manuscripts. It is a word which probably meant very little to Western historians of the '40s, '50s or even '80s, but today inhabits political conversations all around the globe. Though the rebellion did not originate in Delhi, 'the seat of the Mughal Emperor' did become the epicentre of the Uprising. Mutinous troops poured into the city from all around northern India. It was apparent that the British had to recapture Delhi or lose their Indian empire forever. On a May morning in 1857, the sepoys massacred every Christian man, woman and child they found in the city, and declared Zafar to be their legitimate leader and emperor. Zafar was not exactly fond of the British, who had taken away all his imperial rights and rendered him a 'chessboard kin', subjecting him to almost daily humiliation. Yet he was no revolutionary either. He was a benign, frail, octogenarian who was content nurturing the remarkable cultural flowering of his city where the denizens still swore 'by the throne of the Emperor'. The thriving cultural scene boasted names like Zauq and Mirza Asadullah Khan, otherwise known as Ghalib. It was with severe qualms and little choice that he found himself made the nominal leader of an Uprising that he strongly suspected to be doomed from the word go: a chaotic and officerless army of unpaid peasant soldiers pitted against the forces of the world's greatest military power. The magnificent Mughal capital was turned overnight into a battlefield. The rebels had limited ammunition, no money and few supplies. The chaos and anarchy that erupted in the countryside left the city in a besieged state. The price of essentials shot up and supplies rapidly dwindled. Soon both the people of Delhi and the sepoys were starving. All hell broke loose when the British took Delhi, plundering and ravaging the city, and massacring great swathes of the population. "The orders went out to shoot every soul," recorded Edward Vibart, a nineteen-year-old British officer. City dwellers who survived the mass murders were driven out into the countryside. Delhi was left an empty ruin. Though the royal family had surrendered peacefully, most of the emperor's sixteen sons were captured, tried and hanged, while three were shot in cold blood, having first freely given up their arms, then been told to strip naked. As Ghalib, one of the few survivors from the old Mughal court, wrote to a friend, "The male descendents of the deposed King -- such as survived the sword -- draw allowances of five rupees a month. The female descendents if old are bawds, and if young, prostitutes." At a farcical trial, Zafar was charged with 'rebellion, treason and murder' and 'not regarding his allegiance' as a British subject by a Military Commission. It was never discussed whether the Company was legally empowered to try Zafar at all. While the Company's 1599 charter to trade in the East derived from Parliament and the Crown, it was given the authority to govern in India by the Mughal Emperor, who had officially taken on the Company as his tax collector in Bengal in the years following the Battle of Plassey. In 1832, when Zafar was in his fifties, the Company acknowledged itself to be the Mughal Emperor's vassal. Since then nothing had happened to change the legal relationship of the two parties, for although the Company no longer proclaimed its vassalage, neither Zafar nor his ancestors had ever renounced their sovereignty over the Company. From this point of view, Zafar had never been a subject, and so could not possibly be called a rebel guilty of treason. Instead, from a legal point of view, a good case could be made that it was the East India Company, which was the real rebel, guilty of revolt against a feudal superior to whom it had sworn allegiance for nearly a century. Dalrymple wraps up with drawing a striking resemblance between the past and the present. The crushing of the Uprising created divisions among the Indian Muslims. One was led by the Anglophile Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who believed that Indian Muslims could revive their fortunes only by embracing Western learning. The other clan rejected everything Western in an attempt to return to what they regarded as pure Islamic roots. One hundred and forty years later, out of the madrasas in Pakistan and Afghanistan -- following that doctrine -- emerged the Taliban. Today, the West and the East again face each other uneasily across a divide that many see as a religious war. Jihadis again fight (what they regard as a defensive action) against their Christian enemies and Western Evangelical politicians cast their opponents in the role of 'incarnate fiends' and are blind to the effect their foreign policies have on the wider world. As history is repeated throughout the world, the question remains: have we learnt anything from history? Karim Waheed is cultural reporter, The Daily Star
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