The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

For many, the Mughals symbolise Islamic civilisation at its most refined and aesthetically pleasing—think of the great white dome of the Taj Mahal that Akbar’s grandson, Shah Jahan, raised in Agra in memory of his favourite Queen, or the fabulously intricate miniatures of the Padshahnama and the other great Mughal manuscripts.

While the British progressively took over more and more of the Mughal Emperor’s power, removing his name from the coins, seizing complete control even of the city of Delhi itself, and finally laying plans to remove the Mughals altogether from the Red Fort, the court busied itself in the obsessive pursuit of the most cleverly turned ghazal, the most perfect Urdu couplet.

Yet Zafar was not a natural insurgent either. It was with severe misgivings and little choice that he found himself made the nominal leader of an Uprising that he strongly suspected from the start was doomed: a chaotic and officerless army of unpaid peasant soldiers set against the forces of the world’s greatest military power, albeit one that had just lost the great majority of the Indian recruits to its Bengal Army.

The siege of Delhi was the Raj’s Stalingrad: a fight to the death between two powers, neither of whom could retreat. There were unimaginable casualties, and on both sides the combatants were driven to the limits of physical and mental endurance.

He left his beloved Delhi on a bullock cart. Separated from everything he loved, broken-hearted, the last of the Great Mughals died in exile in Rangoon on Friday, 7 November 1862, aged eighty-seven.

Above all it is the city’s relationship with its past which continues to intrigue me: of the great cities of the world, only Rome, Istanbul and Cairo can even begin to rival Delhi for the sheer volume and density of historic remains. Crumbling tomb towers, old mosques or ancient colleges intrude in the most unlikely places, appearing suddenly on roundabouts or in municipal gardens, diverting the road network and obscuring the fairways of the golf course. New Delhi is not new at all; instead it is a groaning necropolis, with enough ruins to keep any historian busy through several incarnations.

It was this intriguing and unexpected period which dominated the book I wrote about Delhi fifteen years ago, entitled City of Djinns, and which later ignited the tinder that led to my last book, White Mughals, about the many British who embraced Indian culture at the end of the eighteenth century. The Last Mughal is therefore my third book inspired by the capital. At the centre of it lies the question of how and why the relatively easy relationship of Indian and Briton, so evident during the time of Fraser, gave way to the hatreds and racism of the high-nineteenth-century Raj. The Uprising, it is clear, was the result of that change, not its cause.

For, by the early 1850s, many British officials were nursing plans finally to abolish the Mughal court, and to impose not just British laws and technology on India, but also Christianity. The reaction to this steady crescendo of insensitivity came in 1857 with the Great Mutiny. Of the 139,000 sepoys of the Bengal Army—the largest modern army in Asia—all but 7,796 turned against their British masters.15 In some parts of northern India, such as Avadh, the sepoys were joined by a very large proportion of the population. Atrocities abounded on both sides. Delhi was the principal centre of the Uprising.

the Mutiny Papers contain an unrivalled quantity of unique material. Cumulatively, the stories that the collection contains allow the Uprising to be

seen not in terms of nationalism, imperialism, orientalism or other such abstractions, but instead as a human event of extraordinary, tragic and often capricious outcomes, and they allow us to resurrect the ordinary individuals whose fate it was to be accidentally caught up in one of the great upheavals of history.

and regional situations, passions and grievances.

are still arguing over the old chestnut of whether 1857 was a mutiny, a peasants’ revolt, an urban revolution or a war of independence.

The answer is that it was all of these, and

many other things too: it was not one unified movement but many, with widely differing ca...

it is still highly significant that the Urdu sources usually refer to the British not as angrez (the English) or as goras (whites) or even firangis, but instead almost always as kafirs (infidels) and nasrani (Christians).

On every side, rings of new suburbs are springing up, full of back-office processing units, software companies and fancy apartment blocks, all rapidly rising on land that only two years ago was billowing winter wheat. This fast-emerging middle-class India is a country with its eyes firmly fixed on the future.

Whatever the reason, the result is a tragic neglect of Delhi’s magnificent past. Sometimes it seems as if no other great city of the world is less loved, or less cared for.

I find it heartbreaking: often when I revisit one of my favourite monuments it has either been overrun by some slum or container park, unsympathetically restored or

reconstructed by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) or, more usually, simply demolished. Ninety-nine per cent of the delicate havelis, or Mughal courtyard houses, of Old Delhi have been destroyed, and like swathes of the city walls have disappeared into memory.

Either way, the loss of Delhi’s past is irreplaceable; and future generations will inevitably look back at the conservation failures of the early twenty-first century with a deep sadness.

Partly as a result of this lack of regular contact with Europeans, Delhi remained a profoundly self-confident place, quite at ease with its own brilliance and the superiority of its tahzib, its cultured and polished urbanity. It was a city that had yet to suffer the collapse of self-belief that inevitably comes with the onset of open and unbridled colonialism.

After all, Urdu was born in Delhi:*9 it was a language the poet and literary historian Azad described as “an orphan found wandering in the bazaars of Shahjahanabad.”17 According to Maulvi Abd ul-Haq, “Anyone who has not lived in Delhi could never be considered a real connoisseur of Urdu. It is as if the steps of the Jama Masjid are a school of fine

language.” There was no other city like this. In Delhi poetry “was discussed in every house,” for “the Emperor himself was a poet and a connoisseur of poetry” and “the language of the exalted fort was the essence of refinement.”

“Abstinence I do not approve: dissoluteness I do not forbid. Eat drink and be merry. But remember that the wise fly settles on the sugar and not on the honey.” Well I have always acted on his counsel. You cannot mourn another’s death, unless you live yourself…Give thanks to God for your freedom, and do not grieve…When I think of

paradise and consider how if my sins are forgiven me and I am installed in a palace with a houri, to live forever in the worthy woman’s company, I am filled with dismay and fear…How wearisome to find her there—a greater burden than a man could bear.