sejwaldeepak
March 11th, 2006, 09:12 AM
The Times Magazine
Delhi: in search of the last Mogul
As a young man, writer William Dalrymple fell in love with the fading beauty of old Delhi. Years later, his obsession with the city has taken him on another journey, to research the glittering twilight of the Mogul court and the sad tale of the end of a great dynasty
In June 1858 the Times correspondent William Howard Russell – a man now famous as the father of war journalism – arrived in the ruins of Delhi, which had been recently recaptured by the British from the rebels after one of the bloodiest sieges in Indian history. Skeletons still littered the streets, and the domes and minars of the city were riddled with shell holes; but the walls of the Red Fort, the great palace of the Moguls, still looked magnificent: “I have seldom seen a nobler mural aspect,” wrote Russell in his diary. Russell’s ultimate destination was, however, rather less imposing. Along a dark, dingy back passage of the Fort, Russell was led to the cell of a frail 83-year-old man who was accused by the British of being one of the masterminds of the Great Rising, or Mutiny, of 1857, the most serious armed act of resistance to Western imperialism ever to be mounted anywhere in the world.
“He was a dim, wandering-eyed, dreamy old man with a feeble hanging nether lip and toothless gums,” wrote a surprised Russell. “Not a word came from his lips; in silence he sat day and night with his eyes cast on the ground, and as though utterly oblivious of the conditions in which he was placed. His eyes had the dull, filmy look of very old age. Some heard him quoting verses of his own composition, writing poetry on a wall with a burned stick.”
The prisoner was Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last Mogul Emperor, direct descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamburlaine, of Akbar, Jehangir and Shah Jehan. As Russell himself observed, “He was called ungrateful for rising against his benefactors. He was no doubt a weak and cruel old man; but to talk of ingratitude on the part of one who saw that all the dominions of his ancestors had been gradually taken from him until he was left with an empty title, and more empty exchequer, and a palace full of penniless princesses, is perfectly preposterous.”
Zafar was born in 1775, when the British were still an insignificant coastal power clinging to three small enclaves on the Indian shore. In his lifetime he saw his own dynasty reduced to humiliating insignificance, while the British transformed themselves from humble traders into the most powerful military force India had ever seen. Zafar came late to the throne, succeeding his father only in his mid-sixties, when it was already impossible to reverse the political decline of the Moguls. But despite this he succeeded in creating around him a court of great brilliance. Personally, he was one of the most talented, tolerant and likeable of his dynasty, and through his patronage there took place the greatest literary renaissance in modern Indian history. Himself a mystic, poet and calligrapher of great charm and accomplishment, Zafar nourished the talents of India’s greatest love poet, Ghalib, and his rival Zauq – the Mogul poet laureate, and the Salieri to Ghalib’s Mozart.
While the British took over more of the Emperor’s power, removing his head from the coins, seizing complete control even of Delhi itself, and laying plans to remove the Moguls altogether, the court busied itself in pursuit of the most moving love lyric, the most cleverly turned ghazal. As the political sky darkened, the court was lost in a last idyll of pleasure gardens and courtesans.
Then on a May morning in 1857, 300 mutinous sepoys from Meerut rode into Delhi, massacred every British man, woman and child they could find, and declared Zafar to be their leader and Emperor. No friend of the British, Zafar was powerless to resist being made figurehead of an uprising he knew from the start was doomed: a chaotic and officerless army of unpaid peasant soldiers set against the forces of the world’s greatest contemporary military power. No foreign army was in a position to intervene to support the rebels, and they had little ammunition and few supplies. 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 on both sides. Finally, on September 14, 1857, the British attacked and took the city, sacking the Mogul capital. The entire population who survived the massacre were driven out of Delhi.
Though the royal family had surrendered peacefully, many of the Emperor’s sons were tried and hanged, while three were shot in cold blood, having first freely given up their arms, then been told to strip naked. Zafar himself was put on trial in the ruins of his old palace, and sentenced to transportation. He left his beloved Delhi on a peasant’s bullock cart. Separated from everything he loved, broken-hearted, the last of the Great Moguls died in exile in Rangoon on November 7, 1862, aged 87.
It is an extraordinary and tragic story, and one I have dedicated the past three years to researching. Archives containing Zafar’s letters and his court records can be found in London, Lahore and even Rangoon. Most of the material, however, lies in Delhi. The writing of the book therefore gave me a welcome excuse to flee the grey skies of Chiswick and move back to this, my favourite of cities; one that has haunted me for more than 20 years.
I first fell in love with Delhi when I arrived, aged 18, on the foggy winter’s night of January 26, 1984. The airport was surrounded by shrouded men huddled under shawls, and it was surprisingly cold. I knew nothing at all about India.
My childhood had been spent in rural Scotland, on the shores of the Firth of Forth, south-east of Edinburgh. My parents were convinced that they lived in the most beautiful place imaginable and rarely took us on holiday. At the age of 11, I begged my mother to take me abroad, as I was the only boy in the class who had not had a glimpse of life overseas. So she took me to Paris for the weekend. Perhaps for this reason Delhi – and India in general – had a greater and more overwhelming effect on me than it would have had on other, more cosmopolitan teenagers; certainly the city hooked me from the start. It was the ruins that fascinated me. However hard the planners tried to create new colonies of gleaming concrete, crumbling towers, old mosques or ancient colleges would intrude, appearing suddenly on roundabouts or in municipal gardens. New Delhi was not new at all. Its broad avenues encompassed a groaning necropolis, a graveyard of dynasties.
Slowly I grew to be fascinated with the Moguls who had once lived there, and began reading voraciously about them. The Red Fort is to Delhi what the Acropolis is to Athens, and by far the most substantial monument that the Moguls left in Delhi.
Yet however often I visited it, the Red Fort always made me sad. When the British captured it after 1857, they pulled down the gorgeous harem apartments, and in their place erected a line of some of the most ugly buildings ever thrown up by the British Empire – a set of barracks that look as if they have been modelled on Wormwood Scrubs. The barracks should of course have been torn down years ago, but the fort’s current proprietors, the Archaeological Survey of India, have lovingly continued the work of decay initiated by the British: white marble pavilions have been allowed to discolour; plasterwork has been left to collapse. The Mogul buildings that remain – a line of single-storey pavilions, the Emperor’s private apartments – stand still in their marble simplicity; superb and melancholy, but without their carpets, awnings and gorgeous trappings they look strangely uncomfortable. Only the barracks look well-maintained.
The first East India Company Officials who settled in the melancholy ruins of Delhi at the end of the 18th century were a series of sympathetic and notably eccentric figures who were deeply attracted to the high courtly culture that the capital still represented. Sir David Ochterlony set the tone. With his fondness for hookahs and nautch girls and Indian costumes, Ochterlony amazed Bishop Reginald Heber, the Anglican Primate of Calcutta, by receiving him sitting on a divan wearing Hindustani pyjamas and a turban while being fanned by servants. Although the people of Delhi knew Ochterlony as “Loony Akhtar”, when in the Indian capital he liked to be addressed by his full Mogul title, Nasir-ud-Daula, Defender of the State, and to live the life of a Mogul gentleman.
Delhi: in search of the last Mogul
As a young man, writer William Dalrymple fell in love with the fading beauty of old Delhi. Years later, his obsession with the city has taken him on another journey, to research the glittering twilight of the Mogul court and the sad tale of the end of a great dynasty
In June 1858 the Times correspondent William Howard Russell – a man now famous as the father of war journalism – arrived in the ruins of Delhi, which had been recently recaptured by the British from the rebels after one of the bloodiest sieges in Indian history. Skeletons still littered the streets, and the domes and minars of the city were riddled with shell holes; but the walls of the Red Fort, the great palace of the Moguls, still looked magnificent: “I have seldom seen a nobler mural aspect,” wrote Russell in his diary. Russell’s ultimate destination was, however, rather less imposing. Along a dark, dingy back passage of the Fort, Russell was led to the cell of a frail 83-year-old man who was accused by the British of being one of the masterminds of the Great Rising, or Mutiny, of 1857, the most serious armed act of resistance to Western imperialism ever to be mounted anywhere in the world.
“He was a dim, wandering-eyed, dreamy old man with a feeble hanging nether lip and toothless gums,” wrote a surprised Russell. “Not a word came from his lips; in silence he sat day and night with his eyes cast on the ground, and as though utterly oblivious of the conditions in which he was placed. His eyes had the dull, filmy look of very old age. Some heard him quoting verses of his own composition, writing poetry on a wall with a burned stick.”
The prisoner was Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last Mogul Emperor, direct descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamburlaine, of Akbar, Jehangir and Shah Jehan. As Russell himself observed, “He was called ungrateful for rising against his benefactors. He was no doubt a weak and cruel old man; but to talk of ingratitude on the part of one who saw that all the dominions of his ancestors had been gradually taken from him until he was left with an empty title, and more empty exchequer, and a palace full of penniless princesses, is perfectly preposterous.”
Zafar was born in 1775, when the British were still an insignificant coastal power clinging to three small enclaves on the Indian shore. In his lifetime he saw his own dynasty reduced to humiliating insignificance, while the British transformed themselves from humble traders into the most powerful military force India had ever seen. Zafar came late to the throne, succeeding his father only in his mid-sixties, when it was already impossible to reverse the political decline of the Moguls. But despite this he succeeded in creating around him a court of great brilliance. Personally, he was one of the most talented, tolerant and likeable of his dynasty, and through his patronage there took place the greatest literary renaissance in modern Indian history. Himself a mystic, poet and calligrapher of great charm and accomplishment, Zafar nourished the talents of India’s greatest love poet, Ghalib, and his rival Zauq – the Mogul poet laureate, and the Salieri to Ghalib’s Mozart.
While the British took over more of the Emperor’s power, removing his head from the coins, seizing complete control even of Delhi itself, and laying plans to remove the Moguls altogether, the court busied itself in pursuit of the most moving love lyric, the most cleverly turned ghazal. As the political sky darkened, the court was lost in a last idyll of pleasure gardens and courtesans.
Then on a May morning in 1857, 300 mutinous sepoys from Meerut rode into Delhi, massacred every British man, woman and child they could find, and declared Zafar to be their leader and Emperor. No friend of the British, Zafar was powerless to resist being made figurehead of an uprising he knew from the start was doomed: a chaotic and officerless army of unpaid peasant soldiers set against the forces of the world’s greatest contemporary military power. No foreign army was in a position to intervene to support the rebels, and they had little ammunition and few supplies. 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 on both sides. Finally, on September 14, 1857, the British attacked and took the city, sacking the Mogul capital. The entire population who survived the massacre were driven out of Delhi.
Though the royal family had surrendered peacefully, many of the Emperor’s sons were tried and hanged, while three were shot in cold blood, having first freely given up their arms, then been told to strip naked. Zafar himself was put on trial in the ruins of his old palace, and sentenced to transportation. He left his beloved Delhi on a peasant’s bullock cart. Separated from everything he loved, broken-hearted, the last of the Great Moguls died in exile in Rangoon on November 7, 1862, aged 87.
It is an extraordinary and tragic story, and one I have dedicated the past three years to researching. Archives containing Zafar’s letters and his court records can be found in London, Lahore and even Rangoon. Most of the material, however, lies in Delhi. The writing of the book therefore gave me a welcome excuse to flee the grey skies of Chiswick and move back to this, my favourite of cities; one that has haunted me for more than 20 years.
I first fell in love with Delhi when I arrived, aged 18, on the foggy winter’s night of January 26, 1984. The airport was surrounded by shrouded men huddled under shawls, and it was surprisingly cold. I knew nothing at all about India.
My childhood had been spent in rural Scotland, on the shores of the Firth of Forth, south-east of Edinburgh. My parents were convinced that they lived in the most beautiful place imaginable and rarely took us on holiday. At the age of 11, I begged my mother to take me abroad, as I was the only boy in the class who had not had a glimpse of life overseas. So she took me to Paris for the weekend. Perhaps for this reason Delhi – and India in general – had a greater and more overwhelming effect on me than it would have had on other, more cosmopolitan teenagers; certainly the city hooked me from the start. It was the ruins that fascinated me. However hard the planners tried to create new colonies of gleaming concrete, crumbling towers, old mosques or ancient colleges would intrude, appearing suddenly on roundabouts or in municipal gardens. New Delhi was not new at all. Its broad avenues encompassed a groaning necropolis, a graveyard of dynasties.
Slowly I grew to be fascinated with the Moguls who had once lived there, and began reading voraciously about them. The Red Fort is to Delhi what the Acropolis is to Athens, and by far the most substantial monument that the Moguls left in Delhi.
Yet however often I visited it, the Red Fort always made me sad. When the British captured it after 1857, they pulled down the gorgeous harem apartments, and in their place erected a line of some of the most ugly buildings ever thrown up by the British Empire – a set of barracks that look as if they have been modelled on Wormwood Scrubs. The barracks should of course have been torn down years ago, but the fort’s current proprietors, the Archaeological Survey of India, have lovingly continued the work of decay initiated by the British: white marble pavilions have been allowed to discolour; plasterwork has been left to collapse. The Mogul buildings that remain – a line of single-storey pavilions, the Emperor’s private apartments – stand still in their marble simplicity; superb and melancholy, but without their carpets, awnings and gorgeous trappings they look strangely uncomfortable. Only the barracks look well-maintained.
The first East India Company Officials who settled in the melancholy ruins of Delhi at the end of the 18th century were a series of sympathetic and notably eccentric figures who were deeply attracted to the high courtly culture that the capital still represented. Sir David Ochterlony set the tone. With his fondness for hookahs and nautch girls and Indian costumes, Ochterlony amazed Bishop Reginald Heber, the Anglican Primate of Calcutta, by receiving him sitting on a divan wearing Hindustani pyjamas and a turban while being fanned by servants. Although the people of Delhi knew Ochterlony as “Loony Akhtar”, when in the Indian capital he liked to be addressed by his full Mogul title, Nasir-ud-Daula, Defender of the State, and to live the life of a Mogul gentleman.