My love for Delhi made this book catch my eye and so had it come about that I purchased it and have read and re-read it so many times over the last couple of years…..and visited Delhi again in my last India trip. However the breadth and depth of the book is such that even after one year of re-reading - I am still admiring and loving it as I would do from a Wodehouse or a Tintin/Asterix-Obelix though from a totally different angle!
This book is as much about Delhi as it is about Zafar and India. It starts with the pomp, verve, glamour and heights of cultural and economic activity that both Delhi and India were so much a part of. And takes us through the decline in fortunes and the ignominy of being trampled almost without a trace of the former self – for both Delhi and Zafar.
I would state that everybody must read such books which bring alive the magic of narating a story from History. The love, sorrow, joy, perspective and insights I got from this book are quite not measurable. To show the beauty and the richness of the book – am summarising some of the essential chapters, quoting form the book, and items that are close to my heart though there are innumerable other items which are indeed great in their own right. I myself would like to keep coming back and reading these every one in a while.
The book also brought back my long forgotten love for Urdu poetry...nay उर्दू की अदा , आदाब , आरज़ू, शेरो शायिरी जो वाकेयी गम की गहराई को शेहेद की डोर से तहज़ीब की साहिल में पेश करती है !
The most haunting feeling for me right through the book (along with the sadness that engulfs Delhi and Zafar) – was the sense of loss, that in the ‘Rising India’ of today, we are losing the traditional ways of our lives, our rich cultural traditions and those very things that are most precious in us. And the pity is we are losing all of these to just to mimic the west – whereas the era that we see in the initial chapters of this book show why the whole world looked up at India for being the cauldron of learning, culture, tradition and wealth. Also a hope that all of us can still retain the charm that is so Indian……and raises questions like - shouldn't we be wearing the traditional dhoti at least on weekends when I can see the Dutch albeit Hare-Rama-Hare-Krishna gentlemen doing the same on a daily basis? After all it is the traditional dress of not just the Mahatma but even our grandfathers! Not sure why the Fashion gurus are stuck to only the Kurta-pyzamas and did not get to the dhotis?
Also, the tale of Zafar made me remember some very Senior Corporate Moghuls I had opportunity to work with – and whom I have seen drop from the high-throne (not unlike that of Zafar, though from the contemporary corporate fiefdoms). Brings closer home the un-certainties of life and also how insignificant indeed each one of our individual lives and riches are in reality. Last India visit – made Delhi a part of my trip and spent some time at Qutub Minar, Taj, Agra…...as a personal salute to a piece of myself and my country!
A note on Zafar
Bahadur Shah Zafar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahadur_Shah_II ) was the last Mughal emperor of Delhi, and one of the most talented, tolerant and likable of his remarkable dynasty. Zafar was a mystic, poet and calligrapher of great charm and accomplishment, but his achievement was to nourish the talents of India's greatest love poet, Ghalib, and his rival, Zauq and also resulting in Delhi becoming the base of the greatest literary renaissances in Indian history. Born in 1775, when the British were still clinging to the Indian shore, he had in his lifetime seen his dynasty reduced to humiliating insignificance and the British transform themselves from simple traders into the most powerful military force India had ever seen.
Zafar was a good example of the sort of rounded renaissance man that a serious Mughal education sought to produce: he was fluent in Urdu, Arabic and Persian, but had also mastered Braj Bhasha and Punjabi sufficiently to write verse in both. He was also in his youth, a renowned rider, swordsman and archer, an expert kite flyer, connoisseur of plants and scents, and a crack shot with a rifle.
Over his life he had seen the power of Mughal empire diminish and towards the end of his life, Zafar, destitute and utterly broken, wrote his own epitaph with a burnt stick on his prison wall, since the British administration would not give him pen and paper to write with. A lament, his final song became an eternal symbol of several subsequent poets saddened by the loss of the earlier atmosphere, finding themselves in strange, foreign lands.
उम्र-इ-दराज़ मांग के लाये थे चार दिन - I asked for a long life, I received four days
दो आरजू में कट गए दो इंतज़ार में - Two passed in desire, two in waiting.
कितना ही बदनसीब ज़फर दफन के लिए - How unfortunate is Zafar! For his burial
दो गज ज़मीं भी न मिली कूह-इ-यार में - Not even two yards of land were to be had, in the land of his beloved
Initial chapters of the book talk about the life in Delhi where I love the aspects of :
• Shero-Shaairi with Ghalib and Zauq competing at the Mughal court,
• pure pursuit-of-knowledge by Muslim residents at the local Madrasas,
• culture of intelligent debate, learning and arts,
• everyday lives enriched by the Persian/Arabic/Urdu culture/language
Delhi at its heights
Delhi was the seat of the Great Mughal and the place where the most chaste Urdu was spoken. It is believed it had the best-looking women, the finest mangoes, the most talented poets:
“इन दिनों गरचे दखन में है बढ़ी कद्र-इ-सुखन, These days we hear that in Deccan they value their poets
पर कौन जाये जौक पर दिल्ली की गलियां छोड़ कर” But who, Zauq, would leave the gulleys of Dilli ?
--- Sher of Zauq on Delhi
For generations the Mughal emperors had intermarried with Hindus – Zafar was quite typical in having a Rajput mother. Thus Mughal empire was quite tolerant to Hindu ideas, Sufi Islam and even the liberal Chisti Brotherhood (who were regarded by fundamentalists as bordering on infidelity).
The Hindu elite of Delhi went to Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin; could quote Hafiz and were fond of Persian poetry, had their children study at the more liberal madrasas.
Delhi had a profoundly self-confident place, quite at ease with its own brilliance and the superiority of its tahzib, its cultured and polished urbanity and remained a bubble of conservative Mughal traditionalism in an already fast changing India. When one wished to praise another citizen of the city, one would still reach for the ancient yardsticks of medieval Islamic rhetoric, cloaked in time-worn poetic tropes. There was no question of Zafar turning up in durbar dressed as a British Admiral or even as a Vicar of the Church of England.
1800s: A typical day in Delhi
Across chapters, the daily life in Delhi during the 1800s is beautifully described by Dalrymple - and literally ties the picture-frames to our eyes (àla a telugu expression కళ్ళకు కట్టినట్టు ) the activities of two different but parallel worlds: that of British in India and Indians living along side the British Raj. This day in Delhi is the closest to my heart and is also is a seperate item on this blog!
Revolt of 1857
Trouble was brewing for a while before the Revolt of 1857 - but various factors merged into a single event of the Revolt: Instead of a single coherent mutiny or patriotic national war of independence – there was in reality a chain of very different uprisings and acts of resistance, whose form and fate were determined by local and regional situations, passions and grievances. All took different forms in different places and the revolt was all of a mutiny, a peasants’ revolt, an urban revolution and a war of independence.
Although the great majority of the sepoys were Hindus, in Delhi a flag of jihad was raised and many of the insurgents described themselves as mujahedin, ghazis and jihadis. For Delhi, the incoming sepoys remained strangers, with different dialects, accents and customs.
The Revolt of 1857 turned out to make a hell out of Delhi and and its residents. In the words of ordinary people in Delhi to describe what was happening in the city immediately after all the Indian sepoys started gathering in Delhi in 1957, it was not described as a ग़दर or जंग-इ-आज़ादी so much as दंगा- फसाद ! Much is made out today as if to portray the events as ''Struggle of Independence'' or ''The Great Mutiny'' - but in reality many of the Sepoys were just rascals and touble-mongers who joined in for the spoils and wreak havoc on the resodents of the city and under the cloak of a righteous case - exploited every opportunity.
Ghalib wrote about the atrocities committed by the insurgents and rioters who were creating hell on earth without any guilt or fear, people were running amok, blood was flowing like a river:
‘’The intoxicated horsemen and rough foot soldiers ravished the city. Woe for those fair ladies of delicate form, with faces radiant as the moon and bodies gleaming like newly mined silver! A thousand times pity those murdered children whose step was more beautiful than that of the deer and the partridge. All were sucked into the whirlpool of death, drowned in an ocean of blood. Throughout the day the rebels looted the city, and at night they slept in silken beds. The Emperor was powerless to repulse them’’.
The fact that Zafar gave his tacit support turned the army mutiny into a major political challenge to British dominance of India, and sparked off what would swiftly escalate into the most serious armed challenge to imperialism the world over during the course of the nineteenth century.
The fight between the British and the Sepoys saw death, disease and absolute ruin in the wonderful city of Delhi. In Dalrymple’s summary of the plight of Delhi in another related article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2003/aug/16/art.highereducation):
‘’The siege of Delhi was the Raj's Stalingrad: a fight to the death between two powers, neither of whom could retreat. For the four hottest months of the Indian summer, the beautiful Mughal capital was bombarded by British artillery.
There were unimaginable casualties, with both Indians and British starving, the city left without water and the combatants on both sides driven to extremes of physical and mental endurance. Finally, on September 14 1857, the British took the city, sacking, massacring and looting as they went. Anyone who survived the subsequent genocide was driven out into the countryside. Delhi was left an empty ruin.
In the weeks that followed, the vengeful British oversaw the wholesale destruction of great areas of Mughal Delhi. The Red Fort was plundered and much of it - including the exquisite harem courts - was razed to the ground.
Though the royal family had surrendered peacefully, all 10 of the emperor's surviving sons were shot in cold blood. The emperor himself was put on show trial in the ruins of his old palace and sentenced to transportation. He left his beloved Delhi on a peasants' bullock cart. Separated from everyone and everything he loved, broken-hearted, the last of the great Mughals died in exile in Rangoon on Friday November 7 1862, aged 87.''
Final Battle of the Ridge
The British gathered their troops, four-fifths of which was made up of ethnic Indians, Sikhs, Muslim Panjabi, pathan and Gurkhas. Britishers leading the charge were maddened by the foul murder of their nearest and dearest, steeled their hearts to pity and swore vengeance. The carnage of British response was astonishingly violent and vicious and every village on their path was torched, and old, men, women and children were burned to death in their houses. The Sikhs among the British troops were allowed to torture, impale and burn alive the captured sepoys. The British were just waiting to take revenge on Delhi and knowing it to be the largest, most beautiful and richest city in Hindustan – were just waiting to seize their share of the untold riches within its walls.
The British troops engaged the rebels who fled and left their posts on the ridge and surrendered it along with the cannons, tents and all the ammunition. The British were far outnumbered but held on to this Ridge for the next several months and from where they battered the city with cannon shells and finally captured it.
The rebels tried to attack the British on the ridge but failed every time. The reason for the repeated failure of the rebels was not any lack of bravery so much as:
• lack of administrative and financial organisation – so that supplies of gunpowder and gun caps also were not stored/guarded so that most of it was lost without any trace
• lack of any real strategic imagination, ingenuity or co-ordination
• disagreements between the different regiments and lack of a clear and recognised figure of executive authority
• sheer quantity of intelligence that the British received from the city and the lack of it in the rebels’ camp
• tax revenue, and
• most of all food supplies proved the rebels’ single most disastrous failures
Towards the end of the war, there were around 25,000 jihadis out of 60,000 estimated insurgents remaining in Delhi. At this stage Zafar failed to pick up the nerve to support an Uprising from the remaining army, citizens of Delhi and the people of the surrounding country. This decision was a t a critical juncture when the two sides eye-balled each other for three days and thanks to Zafar’s failure of leadership, it was the rebels who blinked first. From this stage the rebel camp was just deserting the city and gave away the city to the British who killed all whom they found on the streets including helpless and the weak and burned their houses. By the end of it all, out of about 150,000 inhabitants almost all of them had either fled or were dead and the British troops were looting empty houses.
Conclusion
The final chapters of the book talk about the final rustication and despatching of Zafar to Rangoon where he spends an isolated life with the four remaining members of his very-big family.
Compared to the style and the lap of luxury in which Zafar had spent most of his life, it is sad to read about the desolate/dismal existence of his last few years and especially the pathetic treatment he gets from the British.
The conclusion section at the end of the Book by the author is absolutely brilliant and shows the historical perspective of a very learned man with love, empathy and understanding of both the British and Indian sides of the story. We have read a few things about the 1857 revolt in our History text books during school days and later seen some other things in Hindi movies on this subject – but for getting the grit and grime of the event, understanding the context and getting the broader perspective on the same: I recommend you the Best in the Trade viz. Dalrymple.
It also shows the culture, way-of-life we seem to be part of in a new light: and that the present has its seeds in the history and that the seeds of the future are being sown by our actions right now especially with regard to the current top-of-mind issues like Islamic Terrorism – and we should have our perspective right in leading our lives and not just follow the current-trends which might even be learned/au-courant/logical
Changing views of the British and Western culture and education
Till the 1800s:
o In the profoundly sophisticated, liberal and plural civilisation championed by Akbar, Dara Shukoh and the later Mughal emperors: so prevalent was the belief among Delhiwallahs that Englishmen were the product of an illicit union between apes and the women of Sri lanka (or alternatively between apes and hogs) that the leading theologian, Shah Abdul Aziz, had to issue a fatwa expressing his opinion that such a view had no basis in the Koran of the Hadiths. However Shah Abdul Aziz had little faith in the intellectual abilities of the British and looked down on them for their abject failure to grasp the most elementary subtleties of Muslim theology. ‘They have a special aptitude for industry and technology. But their minds, with few exceptions, cannot grasp the finer points of logic, theology and philosophy.’
o Indeed many of the most brilliant Hindu thinkers of the time, like the Great reformer Ram Mohan Roy, were the products of madrasa education.
o At madrasas, students learn through the medium of Arabic and Persian, what men of Western colleges used to learn through those of Greek and Latin – that is grammar, rhetoric and logic. After his seven years of study, the young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with the things as the young man from Oxford – he will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato and Hippocrates, galen and Avicenna; and, what is much to his advantage in India, the languages in which he has learnt what he knows are those which he most requires through life.
o Instances were known of Englishmen coming to India early in life and becoming in the course of time so thoroughly Indianised, so identified with the natives (usually with the Mohamaddan natives) in habits and feeling so as to lose all relish for European society, to select their associates and connections from among the Muslims, to live in every respect in Mussalman fashion, and to either openly or tacitly adopt the Mussalman creed.
After the 1800s:
o The rise of the British Empire across the Globe (upon which the Sun never sets) made not just the British victors, but the glory of the Ascendant’s fortunes gave 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.
o The scale of devastation, defeat and the depths of humiliation heaped on the vanquished Mughals and the city of Delhi in 1857 meant that it was not just the city and Mughal rule that were uprooted and destroyed, but the self-confidence and authority of the wider Mughal political and cultural world throughout India. This also impacted the Hindu-Muslim, Indo-Islamic civilisation.
o The profound contempt that the British so openly expressed for Indian Muslim and Mughal culture proved contagious, particularly to the ascendant Hindus and also to many young Muslims, who now believed that their own ancient and much-cherished civilisation had been irretrievably discredited.
o Indeed India’s march for freedom too was led by the new Anglicised and educated Colonial Service class who emerged from English-medium schools and who by and large used modern Western democratic structures and methods – political parties, strikes and protest marches – to gain freedom.
After the 20th Century:
o Mughal miniature and architectural tradition, elaborate politeness of Mughal etiquette, the culture of Ghazal and Shero-shayiri are regarded as anachronistic
o For many Indians today (who are happy to eat the Mughal meal, or flock to the cinema to watch a Bollywood Mughal epic, or indeed to head to/watch the Red Fort for the annual Independence Day parade), 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 decadent, sensual, temple destroying invaders – something that was forcefully and depressingly demonstrated by the whole episode of the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992.
My own ponderings:
o With the ascendancy of India in various spheres and the acknowledgement of the world as evidenced of late in various forum (take the Obama visit/speech!): I feel the next cycle is about to begin! The next century will prove this out – but we should not lose sight of the important lessons from our own history to lead a virtuous and right path without losing our spirit and soul which is our culture and traditions!
