The deposed and broken emperor. This picture was taken at the emperor’s show trial in Delhi before Zafar was transported to Rangoon. |
Beginning and end of empires in India
The reign of the last Mughal emperor of India was a model of religious tolerance and intellectual sophistication writes Dilip Hiro
The Last Mughal – The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857, by William Dalrymple. Published by Bloomsbury. £25. order this book
THE epidemic of mutinies, uprisings, massacres, sieges, assaults and reprisals that followed the shooting of two British officers by an Indian soldier, Mangal Pandey, in late March 1857 at Barrackpore near Calcutta, coupled with his call to fellow-soldiers to rebel has been called the Great Sepoy/Indian Mutiny by the British, and the War of Independence/Great National Uprising by Indians, with neutral commentators opting for the Great Revolt/Uprising.
William Dalrymple, a celebrated student of the history and civilisation of the sub-continent, has opted for the Great Uprising – as did I in my book The Rough Guide History of India.
Of the British East India Company’s Bengal, Madras and Bombay armies, the Mutiny involved only the first. Backed by a popular uprising, triggered by a widespread belief in the northern sub-continent among Hindus and Muslims that the British wanted to convert all Indians to Christianity, the 300 mutineers in Meerut marched 40 miles to Delhi on May 11, 1857.
They persuaded Bahadur Shah Zafar, the 82-year-old nominal Mughal emperor, to become their leader. Their ranks swelled to 40,000 as thousands of rebels from all over northern India arrived in Delhi, killing any Europeans (ie, Christians) they encountered. Delhi thus emerged as the epicentre of the Great Uprising.
It was not until mid-September that the British recaptured Delhi. By early April 1858 they regained most of the remaining territories seized earlier by the rebels. Following his court martial in Delhi, Bahdur Shah Zafar was deposed and banished to jail in Rangoon. A call at the tomb is de rigueur for any visiting Indian or Pakistani, a discovery I made during my Burmese sojourn. By June the British finally ended the 13-month-long revolt.
The Great Uprising failed through lack of coordination, ineffective leadership, scarcity of arms and ammunition, poor intelligence, paucity of funds, and the mutineers’ inability to transform popular support into military strength.
Conversely, the British won due to better military leadership, ample supply of weapons and ammunition, spies at the highest level of the enemy camp – and above all else, divisions with Indian fighters. Of the 11,200 soldiers besieging Delhi, 7,900 were Indian.
Having reclaimed Delhi, the British dispensed the victor’s summary justice. Dalrymple is unsparing in his narration of the deadly reprisals the triumphant Britons took. They hanged or shot dead not just the mutineers but also almost any able bodied male they could seize. Those Britons whose families had been killed by the mutineers were given carte blanche to murder and maim at will. Mass rapes became commonplace. This continued until Calcutta – the capital of the East India Company – and later London sent restraining orders a year later.
Dalrymple focuses on the Great Uprising as it is played out in Delhi and its environs. Since the defeat of the Indian rebels resulted in the formal termination of the Mughal dynasty, that had governed the sub-continent since 1526, Bahadur (which literally means ‘Brave’) Shah Zafar became the last Mughal.
By the time Bahadur Shah – an accomplished poet with the pen name of Zafar (which means victory) – ascended the throne, he was 62-years-old. British Governor-General Lord Auckland told him that his titles would expire with his death and that the Mughal royal family would be moved out of the Red Fort in Delhi.
Though Mughal rule was in terminal decline, the court that Bahadur Shah Zafar maintained was, in Dalrymple’s view, a model of religious tolerance and intellectual sophistication. A son of a Hindu mother, he followed Hindu customs, which upset orthodox Muslim clerics but endeared him to his Hindu subjects who were as numerous as Muslims in the capital.
That explained why the predominantly Hindu defectors from the British army pleaded with him to become the leader of the Uprising and revive the faltering Mughal Empire.
Assisted by translators Mahmoud Farooqi and Bruce Wannel, Dalrymple pored over many of the 20,000 documents in Persian, the court language, and Urdu, the popular tongue, called the Mutiny Papers, stored in the air-conditioned National Archives of India. It is dispiriting to note that none of independent India’s history scholars or their assistants had examined this treasure before him and his associates.
The fresh research has enabled Dalrymple to include first-hand accounts of the Great Uprising and its aftermath by Indians, thereby producing a balanced chronicle which is as engagingly vivid as it is elaborate. His cast of characters, Indian and British – moneylenders, soldiers, memsahibs, clerics, spies, courtiers, dancing girls, traders, and generals – is impressive in its diversity.
In the course of chronicling the Great Uprising and the last days of an aging, infirm Emperor, Dalrymple also paints a portrait of Delhi, and their residents whom he fondly calls Delhiwallas. Overall, he has covered three interrelated subjects lucidly and seamlessly.
The absence of scales in the maps is rather puzzling. And the book badly needs a chronology so the reader can follow the highlights of the copious narrative at a glance.
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