Book Review

Mutiny that destroyed an emperor

The Last Mughal: the fall of a dynasty, Delhi, 1857

Next year will be the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Indian Mutiny, an event which William Dalrymple calls "the largest rebellion against their empire that the British would face in the course of the entire nineteenth century". Drawing on virtually untapped sources in Delhi, Lahore and Rangoon, above all in the National Archives of India, he uncovers first and foremost the native side of this momentous story, but also British material on the future of the Mughal dynasty, the mutiny itself and the imprisonment of the emperor.

The fate of Bahadur Shah Zafar II, a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, runs through The Last Mughal like a thread. But this highly cultivated, fatally vacillating ruler is overshadowed by characters of a more determined stamp. Among them are Sir Thomas Metcalfe, British Resident in Delhi between 1835 and 1853; the Revd John Jennings, the Evangelical chaplain in the capital; Mirza Mughal, the emperor's fifth son, who played a key role in organising resistance to the siege; Maulvi Sarfaraz Ali, preacher of jihad against the colonial power; Brigadier John Nicholson, who led the assault on Delhi until he was mortally wounded, and is described by Dalrymple as "this great imperial psychopath"; William Hodson, who founded his own irregular cavalry and off his own bat negotiated the surrender of the emperor and his senior wife, Zinat Mahal; and Ghalib, the poet laureate of Mughal Delhi who lived through, and recorded, the horrors of 1857.

Zafar had a clear objective: to preserve a dynasty that had ruled India for over 300 years. But he was never a prime mover. When the Hindu sepoys, the infantry privates employed by the East India Company, came to ask his blessing on the mutiny, he gave it. But, following the looting of his city by the rebel soldiery, he had second thoughts. And, at a key moment in the siege, when the enemy had been checked, he funked leading a counter-attack.

By the time of the mutiny, Mughal authority had been drastically and humiliatingly circumscribed by the British, who viewed Zafar as the last of his line. Nevertheless, the prestige of his name among Hindu rebels was such that they considered the approval of the Muslim emperor essential to their cause. They had invested their hopes in an octogenarian lacking both funds and the will, at critical junctures, to seize control of events.

The other important actor in the book is Delhi, which during the course of this narrative is reduced from Mughal splendour to a smoking necropolis, and would have been further devastated but for the intervention of Sir John Lawrence, Chief Commissioner of the Punjab. Dalrymple shows us a self-confident city with, as yet, little Western-style architecture, proud of its urbanity and glorifying in the beauty of its language, Urdu, supremely exemplified in the ghazals or love lyrics of Ghalib. At its head sat the emperor, mystical poet, calligrapher, patron of painters of miniatures and creator of gardens. "...Partly through his patronage there took place arguably the greatest literary renaissance in modern Indian history," Dalrymple writes. From Venice in the eighteenth century to the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the First World War, that artistic burgeoning before political collapse is familiar. In India's case, the ruler was exiled to Burma, his prerogatives shortly to pass to the British Crown, the court dispersed and the culture destroyed.

Unlike an earlier generation of East India Company employees, who adopted Mughal ways, the colonial protagonists at the time of the mutiny generally regarded this rupture as the welcome end to an effete, heathen way of life. The most fascinating aspect of Dalrymple's book, because of its burning relevance today, is the rise of rival religious fundamentalism. The Christian version was epitomised by Mr Jennings, who wanted to harness the power of the British Empire to achieve mass conversion; the Muslim one by Sarfaraz Ali, known as the "imam of the Mujahidin". He was the spiritual mentor of Bakht Khan, a man of Wahhabi persuasion who briefly commanded rebel forces.

The spiritual gulf which opened up between the two sides helps to explain their savagery, whether the killing by the sepoys of 52 European men, women and children who were their prisoners, or the bloodlust of the British during the siege, despite orders from the commanding officer, General Sir Archdale Wilson, that women and children were to be spared. In modern parlance, this was a clash of civilisations. British scorn of Indian Muslims grew and rubbed off on the Hindus. Religious tolerance died with the Mughal dynasty.

Access to material in Urdu and Persian has enabled Dalrymple further to elucidate the paradoxical nature of the mutiny. At a basic level it was a native uprising triggered by a colonial power's arrogance, displayed by the initial use of cow and pig fat to grease rifle cartridges and the passing of an act requiring all sepoys to serve abroad. But what started as a Hindu-British confrontation developed into "a fight between a mixed rebel force at least half of which were Muslim civilian jihadis, taking on an army of British paid mercenaries of Sikh, Muslim Punjabi and Pathan extraction". It is hardly surprising that the course of the rebellion was erratic, and the reaction to it so dilatory that the sepoys might have dislodged the small British force on the ridge above the city if they had continued to attack its rear.

In Dalrymple, the Indian mutiny and concomitant collapse of the Mughal dynasty have found a worthy chronicler. He has unearthed a mass of information which has filled out the native side of the story and he expresses his learning in elegant prose. Above all, he has an abiding love for the theatre of action, Delhi, which, he believes, only Rome, Istanbul and Cairo can begin to rival "for the sheer density and volume of historic remains". Much of that glorious but precarious legacy we owe to the dynasty whose fall he charts.

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