The Last Mughal – Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857

The Last Mughal – Fall  of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857

William Dalrymple

Penguin Books, 2006

“Zafar”  meaning “Victory” was the pen name of  Bahadur Shah II, the last Mughal Emperor.  He was born in 1775.  When he succeeded his father to the throne, Zafar was already in his mid-sixties and Mughal power was in deep decline.  Zafar was a poet of great talent in four languages, Urdu, Persian, Brij Bhasha and Punjabi; he was also a Calligrapher, a patron of painters and an architect.

The sepoy mutiny of 1857 provides William Dalrymple the backdrop to chart the decline of Mughal power.  At the height of the mutiny, the writ of the emperor did not run beyond the city of Delhi.  The chaos resulting from mutiny, especially in Meerut, led to the movement of the mutineers to Delhi.  The mutineers forced Zafar to lead the war against the British, which he did with extreme reluctance and great ambivalence. 

William Dalrymple oft-repeated thesis about the mutiny was that a jihadist core led the Delhi mutineers and there was an ideological tussle for leadership  between the jihadist and the ‘purbian’ (eastern India) soldiers,  who represented the secular segment. Beyond these conflicts was the churning taking place in the Muslim society of Delhi itself.  The wahabists already had a vocal leader in  Shah Waliullah who represented   the revivalist sections which believed in ridding Muslim society of its corrupt rulers and to strip out non-Islamic  accretions and moving towards core Islamic values.  This section stood opposed to the liberal and tolerant ways of the emperor.

Dalrymple’s elucidation of the conflict between Sufi and Sunni religious views is revealing.  “Orthodox Islam views the object of creation as worship of God, a relationship of subordination between a Master and a slave.  Sufis on the other hand argued that God should be worshiped because he is a lovable being.  Therefore, all traditions of association with God were tolerated among the Sufis.” The Mughal court shared and practiced the Sufi tradition and, therefore, it was an object of antipathy among the jihadist elements. Even though there was no love lost between the Jihadists and the secular elements, in the end, they all gathered under the titular head of Zafar against their common enemy, the British.

But the irony of the war is brought out by William Dalrymple when he says that despite the presence of Jihadist elements, the 1857 mutiny was not a religious war as both sides saw it.  The mutineers were overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys who came on their own free will to accept Zafar’s  leadership.  In fact, Jihadists were a threat to the cohesiveness of the rebellious forces.  On the other hand, the British counter attack consisted largely of Pathan and Punjabi Muslim irregulars, Sikh and Muslim mercenaries from North West Frontier and Punjab.

The British retook the city, not out of any tactical brilliance but by sheer perseverance and because of the inability of the mutineers to present a critical front led by a decisive leader.  The mutineer soldiers were without proper logistics to sustain a rebellion of this size.  There was failure on other fronts as well on the rebel’s side;  their failure to gather intelligence, coordinate effectively with other rebels in Kanpur and Lucknow and link up with the independent Rajas of Central India and Rajputana were a few of them.  The other major shortcoming of the rebels was their failure to establish a territorial base of their rebellion which would sustain their war by providing them with a continuous source of manpower, revenue, food supplies and other logistics.  That would be placing too high a hope on their political consciousness, for the rebels were not led by a revolutionary leader but by a feudal monarch, that too very reluctantly.    Worse, Mao was not even born in 1857 much less his ‘liberated zones’, which was his signal contribution to a successful revolutionary war.

The British did not treat the vanquished with any degree of magnanimity.  The capital was razed down and the citizens of Delhi butchered in a war of extermination.  None better exemplified the conduct of the British than the treatment meted out to Zafar, their prisoner now.  The captive king sat ‘like a beast in a cage’ and parties of Britishers went to have a look at him.  One of the officers wrote home proudly saying how he forced him to stand up and ‘salaam’ him; another boasted of having pulled the king’s beard!

There is this heart-rendering description of Zafar in a report prepared by Henry Layard, a former MP, who visited Zafar in Red Fort where he was held prisoner, “I saw that broken down old man – not in a room, but in a miserable hole in his place – lying on a bedstead, with nothing to cover him but a miserable tattered coverlet.  He showed me his arms which were eaten into by disease and by flies and said in a lamentable voice that he had not enough to eat.”  Even after the passage of 155 years, such a plight of an emperor hovers in the mind’s eye and brings tears to one’s eyes.

At last, what was the place of Zafar in the history of India and his contribution to the political evolution of the country?  Was he to be remembered only as a toothless emperor who presided over the termination of a great dynasty?  The author answers these questions quite clearly, when he  says, “Contrary to the popular perception now, it was a signal contribution of Zafar that he was seen to be a sophisticated liberal, upholding plurality in the tradition of his forefathers Akbar and Dara Shukoh.  Zafar was in this respect an attractive symbol of Islamic Civilization.”   Darlymple also points out that Zafar, throughout the uprising protected his Hindu subjects by refusing to subscribe to the demands of the Jihadists and this was perhaps his greatest legacy.  Alas, that legacy did not find any resonance and could not be upheld when chaos visited the sub-continent again in 1947.