City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

by William Dalrymple

Twenty-two years later the period was brought to a bloody close by the uprising of 1857. The hopes of a happy fusion of British and Indian culture, promised during the Twilight, were forgotten in the massacres which initiated and the hangings which followed the Indian Mutiny. The recapture of Delhi by the British on 14 September 1857 led to the wholesale destruction of great areas of the city. The Red Fort was plundered and much of it razed to the ground; what remained of one of the world’s most beautiful palaces became a grey British barracks. It was only by a hair’s-breadth that the great Mughal Jama Masjid was saved from similar destruction and the city spared the planned replacement, a hideous Victorian Gothic cathedral. Three thousand Delhi-wallahs were tried and executed—either hanged, shot or blown from the mouths of cannon—on the flimsiest evidence. British soldiers bribed the hangmen to keep the condemned men ‘a long time hanging, as they like to see the criminal’s dance a "Pandy’s hornpipe" as they termed the dying struggles of the accused’. The last Emperor was sent off to exile in Rangoon in a bullock cart; the princes, his children, were all shot. The inhabitants of the city were turned out of the gates to starve in the countryside outside; and even after the city’s Hindus were allowed to return, Muslims remained banned for two whole years. The finest mosques were sold off to Hindu bankers for use as bakeries and stables. The behaviour of the British in the we...