The Mughal Empire (Mughal is the Persian word for Mongol) was established in the early sixteenth century by the Muslim Bābur, great-grandson of Tamerlane, reached its peak about 1700, and declined in power after the death of the harsh emperor Aurangzeb in 1707. A series of lesser rulers culminated in the accession of Bahādur Shāh Zafar II, who occupied the throne with Britain’s compliance from1837 to 1857. Zafar was himself a talented mysticalpoet, and he created around him a brilliant court starring two great lyric poets, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib and Mohammad Ibrahim Zauq. The end came for Zafar and the city he loved when in May of 1857 three hundred sepoys (Indian infantry privates employed by the East India Company) rode into Delhi from Meerut and massacred every Christian they could find. DUR SH{AMACR}H ZAFAR II[BAHADUR SHAH ZAFAR II];Last Mughal, The (Dalrymple)}
Zafar reluctantly let himself be identified as the “nominal” leader of what William Dalrymple calls the “Uprising,” but after four months of chaos the British regained Delhi on September 14, 1857, and immediately began looting the city and massacring its inhabitants. Zafar was exiled to Rangoon, where he died in 1862.
In The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty—Delhi, 1857, although Dalrymple asserts that the Uprising was “not one unified movement but many, with widely differing causes, motives and natures,” he argues that the collapse of the good feelings between Indians and British that prevailed in the eighteenth century “gave way to the hatreds and racism of the high-nineteenth-century Raj” largely for two reasons: the rise of British power with its “undisguised imperial arrogance” and the “specific imperial agenda” of the Evangelicals and Utilitarians.
Under the rule of Sir Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe, the British Resident and de facto authority over the Mughal court, Zafar was left virtually powerless by 1852. (Metcalfe was “a notably fastidious man, with feelings so refined that he could not bear to see women eat cheese.”) The Mughal court was domiciled in the large and splendidly turned out Red Fort, an architectural marvel with marble domes, a swimming pool, a library of twenty-five thousand books, Georgian furniture, and—among other indulgences—a Napoleon Gallery replete with memorabilia of Bonaparte. Metcalfe challenged the excess of the Red Fort by establishing his own “parallel dynasty,” Metcalfe House, a “palatial Palladian bungalow” on the banks of the nearby Yamuna River. In his zeal to match Zaraf’s cultural refinement, Metcalfe also commissioned a series of paintings of Delhi ruins, palaces, monuments, and shrines by the Delhi artist Mazhar Ali Khan. This innovative work became known as the Company School.
The Reverend Midgeley John Jennings arrived in Delhi in early 1852 to serve as its Christian chaplain. Jennings was a rigid man of no charm, with the serious aim of uprooting old faiths and winning conversions. His convictions were shared by many other British officials who regarded the British Empire as a reward for their Protestantism. The ulema, or Islamic clergy, were made nervous by this attitude, as were those who participated in mixed Anglo-Indian marriages. Jennings’s arrival coincided with a rise in the “growing missionary phobia” and the swelling of British imperial arrogance.
By 1852, Bombay enjoyed less intermarriage of British and Mughals, and “virtual apartheid” was becoming the rule. This “uneasy equilibrium” was exacerbated when in 1853 three British officials died in suspicious circumstances, the most prominent case being the obvious poisoning and lingering death of Metcalfe. The British widely believed that Zinat Mahal, Zafar’s favorite wife, was behind Metcalfe’s death. Metcalfe was succeeded by Simon Fraser, who at the death in 1856 of Mirza Fakhru, the heir apparent to Zafar, convinced Lord Canning, the governor general, to discontinue the royal line altogether.
The introduction of the new Enfield rifles caused morale problems with the Indian troops of the East India Company. These new weapons had rifled barrels instead of smooth ones, which made them more accurate, but the balls had to be greased to get them down the barrels. The grease often fouled the barrel, and the loading procedure demanded biting off the top of the cartridge, a repellent step on two grounds: The grease was unpleasant to taste, and it was made of cow fat mixed with pig fat, making it offensive to both Hindus and Muslims. Sepoys who bit the cartridges were deemed outcastes by their fellows. On March 29, 1857, a Bengal sepoy named Mangal Pandey wounded two officers in a failed revolt and was hanged, but despite this obvious sign of resentment, a request by British officers to withdraw the Enfields was ignored, and eighty-five sepoys who refused to fire the cartridge were given ten years penal servitude. Finally, on May 10, 1857, the sepoys of Meerut massacred the Christians of that city and soon poured into Delhi.
May 11 was fateful. The sepoys killed several important figures in Delhi, including the Reverend Jennings. British converts to Islam were spared, while all Hindu and Muslim converts to Christianity were cut down, including twenty-three members of the extended family of Thomas Collins. The lower classes were quick to join the sepoys, but the Hindu and Muslim elite kept their distance. The jihadis of the underground mujahideen network fought their own war in the Uprising quite separate from the sepoys. Muid ud-Din Husain Khan, the police chief of a nearby village, begged Zafar to stop the massacre, but the emperor wavered and finally supported the sepoys, thereby changing, Dalrymple says, “the whole nature of the rebellion.”
Once the sepoys dominated the city, Delhi became the setting for all kinds of grievances to be settled by violence, and the ordinary citizens suffered the most in the looting and chaos. Conditions outside the city were worse. The royal house was divided in its sympathies, with five young princes supporting the rebels. One of them, Mirza Mughal, was ambitious and capable and may have conspired with the sepoys before their attack. Zinat Mahal opposed the rebellion because she feared it would hurt the chances of her only son, Jawan Bakht, to inherit the throne. When secret correspondence with the British surfaced on May 16, the sepoys slaughtered fifty-two prisoners. It soon became clear that the rebels had no discipline, and one of the most disturbing developments occurred on May 19 when a conservative mullah tried to turn the Uprising into “an exclusively Muslim holy war.” Zafar quieted this threat, but only temporarily, as eight weeks later fanatic Wahhabi mujahideen poured into Delhi.
The conflict wore on with the British claiming victory in a battle under General Archdale Wilson at the bridge over the Hindan River, and on June 7 Wilson joined General Sir Henry Barnard’s field force at Alipore. With Barnard was William Hodson, the ruthless chief of intelligence and commander of Hodson’s Horse, a new regiment of irregular cavalry. His spies in Delhi were vital in the ultimate victory of the British forces. On June 8, Hodson led the British into battle against a large rebel force on the Grand Trunk Road and after bitter fighting captured the sepoys’ field guns, leaving their infantry vulnerable.
Barnard then halted his troops at the ridge overlooking Delhi and positioned their guns to cover the north wall of Delhi. This seemingly enviable location, however, left them isolated with thousands of rebels swarming into the city.
The British began shelling Delhi on June 10, and the horrific results were rotting corpses soon piled up on the slopes of Delhi Ridge. With them came myriads of flies, and the monsoon rains turned the ridge into a “humid, stinking, stagnant quagmire” and a breeding ground for cholera. Moreover, on July 1 a huge rebel force arrived under the command of General Bakht Khan and his Wahhabi spiritual mentor, Maulvi Sarfaraz Ali. Bakht Khan’s daily assaults exhausted the British, who often turned brutally on their servants. Dalrymple says this of the whole bloody contest: “It was, all in all, a very odd sort of religious war, where a Muslim Emperor was pushed into rebellion against his Christian oppressors by a mutinous army of overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys.” Finally, “If the Uprising in Delhi started as a contest between the British and a largely Hindu sepoy army drawn mainly from Avadh, it ended as a fight between a mixed rebel force, at least half of which were civilian jihadis, taking on an army of British-paid Sikh and Muslim mercenaries from the North West Frontier and the Punjab.” Despite Bakht Khan’s constant pressure, a stalemate ensued, and the British enjoyed a much-needed rest after Bakht Khan’s demotion. By late July, they were gaining the military advantage.
The last stage of the carnage began on August 14 when Brigadier General John Nicholson arrived at Delhi Ridge with one thousand British troops and six hundred Punjabi Muslims, soon followed by sixteen hundred Sikhs. At the same time, food shortages were forcing many rebels to abandon the city, while others indulged their appetites riotously. When Bakht Khan led nine thousand men out of Delhi on August 14, Nicholson pursued them with twenty-five hundred men and sent Bakht Khan’s force back to Delhi in defeat. The arrival at the ridge a week later of sixty howitzers and mortars enabled the British to pound the city and advance on its walls.
British victory was inevitable despite heavy losses, and it was followed by unconscionable butchery as “the British found it possible to justify such brutal war crimes with the quasi-religious reasoning that they were somehow handing out God’s justice on men who were not men, but were instead more like devils.” In the confusion, Zafar slipped out of the city and took refuge in the tomb of Humāyūn, the second Mughal emperor. On September 21, Delhi was in British hands, and William Hodson soon captured Zafar, whose trial dragged on from January, 1858, through March 9. The whole sorry drama wound down in December when the last Mughal emperor arrived in Rangoon, where he was imprisoned until he died on November 7, 1862.
Dalrymple was helped in writing this excellent study by his discovery of the valuable Mutiny Papers in Urdu in the Indian National Archives, as well as by his access to many other files and to private papers. The book is jargon-free and includes fourteen pages of dazzling color plates. The Last Mughal is a model of historical narrative.