Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

We smashed the wine cup and the flask; What is it now to us If all the rain that falls from heaven Should turn to rose-red wine?

Public, political and national tragedies, after all, consist of a multitude of private, domestic and individual tragedies.

In the Palace itself, the greatest treasures of the Red Fort had already been removed by the Persian invader Nadir Shah in 1739. Half a century later, in the summer of 1788, when Zafar was a boy of thirteen, the marauder Ghulam Qadir had taken the city, personally blinded Zafar’s grandfather, Shah Alam II, and made Zafar’s father, the future Emperor Akbar Shah II, dance for his pleasure; he then threw vinegar in the wounds by carting off Shah Alam’s fabulous library, most of which he then sold to the Nawab of Avadh, much to the Emperor’s fury.

Yet when Jennings went to the great Hindu festival, the Kumbh Mela, and began trying to convert the millions of pilgrims who had collected by the banks of the Ganges, loudly denouncing their ‘Satanic paganism’, the Gazette was moved to point out that Jennings and his two assistants should perhaps be a little more restrained in their approach:

Yet even Indians who were educated in the new English college found it did little to improve their treatment at British hands. According to Mohan Lal Kashmiri, who was a pupil in the first batch of students taught in the Delhi English College, ‘the distant and contemptible manner with which we are treated by the generality of English gentlemen, wounds our hearts and compels us to forget the blessings of the British rule’. He added a word of warning: ‘you may crush down the populace and keep them in awe with your arms, but until you conquer and win the hearts of the people, the peace and affection will be more an outward word of talk’ than reality.

For generations the Mughal emperors had intermarried with Hindus - Zafar was quite typical in having a Rajput mother - and the slow seepage of Hindu ideas and customs from the harem into the rest of the Palace had led the later Mughal emperors to subscribe to a particularly tolerant and syncretic form of Sufi Islam, aligned to the liberal Chishti brotherhood, at the very opposite end of the theological spectrum from the hard-line views of Shah Waliullah; many fundamentalists regarded such liberal views as bordering on infidelity - kufr.66

If the beautiful houris are always there, where will be the sadness of separation and the joy of union? Where shall we find there a girl who flees away when we would kiss her?

Like the rest of the court circle, Ghalib was prepared to take this insight to its natural conclusion. If God lay within and could be reached less by ritual than by love, then he was as accessible to Hindus as to Muslims. So it was that on a visit to Benares he could playfully write that he was half tempted to settle down there for good, and that he ‘wished he had renounced the faith, put a sectarian mark on my forehead, tied a sacred thread around my waist and seated myself on the bank of the Ganges so that I could wash the contamination of existence away from myself and like a drop be one with the river’.

The court diary records how Zafar would play the spring festival of Holi, spraying his courtiers, wives and concubines with different-coloured paints, initiating the celebrations by bathing in the water of seven wells.86 The autumn Hindu festival of Dussera would be marked in the Palace by the distribution of presents and nazrs to Zafar’s Hindu officers, and (more unexpectedly) the colouring of the horses in the Royal Stud. In the evening, the King would then watch the Ram Lila - the celebration of the Hindu god-king Ram’s defeat of evil in the shape of the demon Ravana, annually celebrated in Delhi with the burning of giant effigies of the demon and his brothers.87 Zafar even asked for a change in the route of the Ram Lila procession so that it would skirt the entire flank of the Palace, allowing it to be enjoyed in all its glory.88 On Diwali, Zafar would weigh himself against ‘seven kinds of grain, gold, coral &c and directed their distribution among the poor’.89

The Delhi ‘ulama returned the disdain of the court. According to Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, ‘Many of the Delhi moulvies and their followers considered the king to be little better than a heretic.

The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and European imperialism have very often been closely, and dangerously, intertwined. In a curious but very concrete way, the fundamentalists of both faiths have needed each other to reinforce each other’s prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the other.

Far from being a tedious chore, this was for many a thrilling business: one eager pupil who came to Delhi from a small town on the Grand Trunk Road used to go to the lectures at the Madrasa i-Rahimiyya even in the pouring monsoon rain, carrying his books in a pot in order to protect them from getting wet.30 The elderly Zakaullah remembered running at breakneck speed through the galis of Shahjahanabad, such was his excitement at the new learning - and especially the mathematics - he was being taught at the Delhi College. Even Colonel William Sleeman, famous for his suppression of the Thugs and a leading critic of the administration of the Indian courts, had to admit that the madrasa education given in Delhi was something quite remarkable: ‘Perhaps there are few communities in the world among whom education is more generally diffused than among Muhammadans in India,’ he wrote on a visit to the Mughal capital.

Then Zafar would take a quick round of the Palace, escorted by his troupe of Abyssinian, Turkish and Tartar women guards, all of whom wore male military dress, and were armed with bows and a quiver of arrows.

Ghalib, like many writers before and since, suffered from the potentially combustible combination of expensive tastes, a keen sense of his own worth and insufficient financial resources to support either.

Had the Company chosen to recruit their sepoy armies from the lower castes this would possibly have been less important. But it had long been British policy to enlist Hindus from the ritually sensitive higher castes, and particularly those from Avadh, Bihar and the area around Benares. Encouraged to regard themselves as an elite by the British, the northern Indian peasant farmers who became sepoys had grown to become very particular about the preparation and eating of their food, and notions of caste, which in India had traditionally been relatively fluid, underwent a process of hardening, or what some scholars have called ‘Sanskritisation’, as the sepoys came to understand such issues as being central to their notions of self-respect.

Since the Mughals were never able either to pay or to properly punish errant sepoys, or indeed disobedient regiments, there was a limit to how much authority they could ever actually wield over the rebel forces, and to some extent the regiments remained a collection of disparate private armies, each under its own subahdar, who acted as a semi-independent warlord.

Next, Zafar issued an order that all the town’s cows should be registered, with chaukidars and sweepers of the different muhallas instructed to report to the local police station all ‘cow-owning Muslim households’ and for each police thana then to make out a list ‘of all the cows being bred by the followers of Islam’ and to send it to the Palace.

Further orders followed, including one oddly surreal directive commanding that all the registered cows should now be given shelter in the city’s central police station, the kotwali. Zafar may have been unwilling or unable to lock up the jihadis, but he could lock up the cows.

The plan was duly dropped, and instead bonds were taken from the cow owners that they would not permit the sacrifice of their cattle.

Everywhere the British convinced themselves that the atrocities committed by the sepoys against their women and children absolved them of any need to treat the rebels as human beings: ‘Since they had butchered our defenceless women and children,’ wrote Colonel A. R. D. Mackenzie, ‘we would have been more .than human, we would have been less than men, if we had not exterminated them as men kill snakes wherever they meet them.’

Without the Delhi College and the great madrasas, without the printing presses and the Urdu newspapers, and without the Mughal court – whose immense cultural prestige always compensated for the monetary constrictions on its actual powers of patronage – and most of all without the Emperor there to act as a focus and, to some extent, catalyst, the driving force behind Delhi’s renaissance and artistic flourishing was gone.

The outbreak revealed the surprising degree to which the Mughal court was still regarded across northern India not as some sort of foreign Muslim imposition – as some, especially on the Hindu right wing, look upon the Mughals today – but instead as the principal source of political legitimacy, and therefore the natural centre of resistance against British colonial rule.

The profound contempt that the British so openly expressed for Indian Muslim and Mughal culture proved contagious, particularly to the ascendant Hindus, who quickly hardened their attitudes to all things Islamic, but also to many young Muslims, who now believed than their own ancient and much-cherished civilisation had been irretrievably discredited.

Just as the amateurish Mughal-led armies had proved unable to compete with British generals and British Enfields, and just as Mirza Mughal’s stumbling commissariat proved no match for the Company’s bureaucracy, so in the years that followed the still-living and even thriving Mughal miniature and architectural tradition would soon come to a grinding halt in the face of Tropical Gothic colonial architecture and other Victorian art forms. The elaborate politeness of Mughal etiquette and Indo-Islamic manners came to be regarded merely as anachronistic. The poetic world represented by Zafar’s mushairas would find it increasingly hard to attract young Indian intellectuals seduced by the siren call of Tennyson or the Wordsworthian naturalism now taught in English-medium schools.66 As Maulvi Muhammad Baqar’s son, the poet and critic Azad, wrote: ‘The important thing is that the glory of the winners’ ascendant fortune gives everything of theirs – even their dress, their gait, their conversation – a radiance that makes them desirable. And people do not merely adopt them, but they are proud to adopt them.’

Although a Bahadur Shah Zafar road still survives in Delhi, as indeed do roads named after all the other Great Mughals, for many Indians today, rightly or wrongly, the Mughals are still perceived as it suited the British to portray them in the imperial propaganda that they taught in Indian schools after 1857: as sensual, decadent, temple-destroying invaders – something that was forcefully and depressingly demonstrated by the whole episode of the demoliton of the Baburi Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992.

There was nothing inevitable about the demise and extinction of the Mughals, as the sepoys’ dramatic surge towards the court of Delhi showed. But in the years to come, as Muslim prestige and learning sank, and Hindu confidence, wealth, education and power increased, Hindus and Muslims would grow gradually apart, as British policies of divide and rule found willing collaborators among the chauvinists of both faiths. The rip in the closely woven fabric of Delhi’s composite culture, opened in 1857, slowly widened into a great gash, and at Partition in 1947 finally broke in two. As the Indian Muslim elite emigrated en masse to Pakistan, the time would soon come when it would be almost impossible to imagine that Hindu sepoys could ever have rallied to the Red Fort and the standard of a Muslim emperor, joining with their Muslim brothers in an attempt to revive the Mughal Empire.

Following the crushing of the Uprising, and the uprooting and slaughter of the Delhi court, the Indian Muslims themselves also divided down two opposing paths: one, championed by the great Anglophile Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, looked to the West, and believed that Indian Muslims could revive their fortunes only by embracing Western learning. With this in mind, Sir Sayyid founded his Aligarh Mohamedan Anglo-Oriental College (later Aligarh Muslim University) and tried to re-create Oxbridge in the plains of Hindustan.80 The other approach, taken by survivors of the old Madrasa i-Rahimiyya, was to reject the West in toto and to attempt to return to what they regarded as pure Islamic roots. For this reason, disillusioned pupils of the school of Shah Waliullah, such as Maulana Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi – who in 1857 had briefly established an independent Islamic state north of Meerut at Shamli in the Doab – founded an influential but depressingly narrow-minded Wahhabi-like madrasa at Deoband, 100 miles north of the former Mughal capital. With their backs to the wall, they reacted against what the founders saw as the degenerate and rotten ways of the old Mughal elite. The Deoband madrasa therefore went back to Koranic basics and rigorously stripped out anything Hindu or European from the curriculum.

One hundred and forty years later, it was out of Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan and Afghanistan that the Taliban emerged to create the most retrograde Islamic regime in modern history, a regime that in turn provided the crucible from which emerged al-Qaeda, and the most radical and powerful fundamentalist Islamic counter-attack the modern West has yet encountered.