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SURENDRA RAO

Amar Farooqui
Zafar and the Raj: Anglo-Mughal Delhi, c.1800-1850
Primus Books, New Delhi, 2013
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The subject of this book is not new. Scholars like Syed Mahdi
Husain, G.D. Khosla, Percival Spear, William Dalrymple and others have
told the story of the Last Mughal. Sometimes it has been told as a melancholy epilogue of a great empire, as a relic of wretchedness to which it
had reduced itself, and occasionally to condole the life of an unlikely
national hero of the first national war of independence. To most British
historians the sign of this wretched denouement of the Mughal Empire
could be seen even as the nineteenth century dawned. As Lane-Poole
wrote, When Lord Lake entered Delhi in 1803, he was shown a miserable blind old imbecile, sitting under a tattered canopy. It was Shah-Alam,
King of the World, but a captive of the Marathas, a wretched travesty of
the Emperor of India. The British General gravely saluted the shadow of
the Great Mogul.... The ludibrium rerum humanarum was never more
pathetically played. No curtain ever dropped on a more woeful tragedy.
The story of the Mughals in the next fifty years or so is shown in the
colonial writings as petty tales of whimpering shadows, sordid palace intrigues and the occasion for the British sweep away the wretched irrelevance of the doddering old fool Bahadur Shah Zafar and his dynasty in
1858. This picture has been critically interrogated by Amar Farooqui in
Zafar and the Raj and a new portrait of the Anglo-Mughal Delhi has been
superbly drawn, not so much to vindicate Zafar or arrange for him a new
coronation in history but to re-locate him within the framework of colonial rule. The book is much more than a biography of Bahadur Zafar; it is a
sensitive retrieval of a world in which the swaggering colonial rulers were yet contending against the reality of the Mughal imperial name, which
still seemed to have by its side its own apparition of reputation and power
which the British found curiously hard to exorcise.
The book is particularly significant in the context of the need to
understand the anomalous nature of the colonial state which the merchant
entrepreneurs of the East India Company were creating in India. For all
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its successful subterfuges and military conquests the Company was aware
of its foreignness and the illegitimacy of its governance. It was also
aware of the halo of legitimacy which the Mughal rule enjoyed even after
its imperial presence in India had been reduced to a fiction or caricature
by the events of 1759-1761. The Treaty of Allahabad had affirmed it.
Amar Farooqui shows how, contrary to the derisive prose in which the
British sought to describe them, the reigns of Shah Alam II (1759-1806)
and Akbar II (1806-1837) marked a break from some of the unsavoury
features of the reigns of their immediate predecessors from Jahandar
Shah to Alamgir II. In fact, though their empire had shrunk ludicrously to
a tenuous control and nominal management of the locality of Delhi, and
the rulers continued to appeal for the restoration of the peshkash which
the Company reneged on, they could yet effectively draw upon the name
of the Mughal as social and cultural capital. Shah Alam, for example, had
meticulously paid attention to ceremonial and court ritual to gain respect
due to royalty, his disability of blindness notwithstanding. Akbar II and
his son, Bahadur Shah, scrupulously adhered to the ways of Shah Alam
to retain the useful halo of Mughal dignity. Some of them even declined
to receive the Governors-General at their Court, as it would have risked
transgressions to court protocol and ceremonies. Akbar Shah did it to
Lord Hastings in 1814, to William Bentinck in 1831 and Bahadur Shah to
Lord Auckland in 1838. In fact, when the Resident, Francis Hawkins,
made some trivial departures from court etiquette the Mughal Court was
able to secure his dismissal in 1830. For all the pecuniary difficulties and
insults that the Mughal rulers faced or their dependence on the Company
to decide on matters of inheritance and succession, the name of the
Mughal yet carried a halo, which Amar Farooqui rightly points out, beckoned the mutinous sepoys to Delhi in May 1857.
Though the empire of the Mughals had eerily vanished into the
pages of history, the imperial palace in the Delhi Red Fort had retained
the sanctity which the British too, ostensibly, respected. Amar Farooqui
shows how in this city within city the Emperor still mattered, his writ still
ran and he was still the hub around which things seemed to move. The
palace was closely integrated with the social and cultural life of Delhi,
and the Emperors presence extended beyond his palace, to his retreat at
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the Qutb, the Jama Masjid and the villages around the city. The inhabitants of Delhi turned to him spontaneously for redressal of grievances
and at least as someone who could intercede with the British. It was as if
the de jure, as distinct from the de facto, authority of the Mughal emperoremperor sans empire yet mattered. Personally too, Bahadur Shah
Zafar presided over a vibrant literary world and the coming of age of
Urdu as a literary language, which produced such luminaries as Mirza
Ghalib, Momin Khan Momin and Sheik Ibrahim Zauq. Zafar was first
mentored by Shah Nasir and later by Zauq who oversaw the publication
of the Emperors verse. Muhammad Husain Azad, in his influential history of Urdu poetry, Abe-e Hayat (1880), observed that Zafars half-baked
compositions were perfected by Zauq, which is no flattering commentary
on Zafars poetic skill. But that seems to be a travesty of truth. Azad was
himself a disciple of Zauq, and he was apparently too eager to enhance
the stature of his ustad by attributing the authorship of Zafars poems to
him. After Zauqs death in 1854, Zafar became particularly close to Ghalib. Interestingly, perhaps the greatest-ever Urdu poet was commissioned
to write the history of the Timurids in Persian prose. He was supplied
with summaries or selections of histories available in the royal library,
prepared under the supervision of Ahsanullah Khan. Ghalib made it very
clear that he was practising the craft of the litterateur and not that of the
historian.... That Bahadur Shah should have commissioned such a work
reveals his anxiety about his place in history.... [I]t was insufficient that
he should be known to posterity just as a poet. The reality of colonial rule
precluded his being projected as an illustrious monarch. What the proposed history could do was to record that he belonged to a great lineage
whose traditions...he had done his best to preserve. (p. 120) Though
Ghalib lost interest in the history project, he retained connection with the
court. He hated the drudgery of routine attendance in the court, but was
persuaded to persist because of the assurance of some regular income to
the otherwise impecunious state which the literary celebrity was always
in. Besides, Zafar and Ghalib seemed to genuinely enjoy each others
company. Bahadur Shahs reign had also seen the experiment, at Delhi
College, of imparting knowledge of modern science and mathematics
through the medium of Urdu. It had such eminent scholars like Master
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Ram Chandra, Sadiqur Rahman Kidwai and Sadruddin Khan Azurda,

though this alternative path to modernity was historically doomed due to
colonial rule. But around people like Azurda gravitated the best of
intellectuals and scholars like Ghalib and Syed Ahmed Khan.
The Revolt of 1857 turned out to be both a tempting opportunity
and a grim tragedy for the Last Mughal. Amar Farooqui rejects the view
that the Meerut sepoys were nave and acting impulsively when they rushed to Delhi to make a leader out of a pathetic ghost of Mughal royalty.
He argues that this decision of the sepoys affirms that the illegitimacy of
the colonial state had to be projected before it was overthrown and that it
could be done only be acknowledging the legitimacy of the Mughal rule.
In fact, the Revolt of 1857 acquired a definitive political ideology when
the sepoys declared their allegiance to the Mughal rule. Zafar had no idea
of the events at Meerut or the plans of the sepoys, but he had to make his
choice when they did arrive in Delhi. That he chose to reprimand the
sepoys and yet accepted the leadership offered to him while the British
still controlled Delhi shows that he was making a statement about where
he stood in history (p. 145). Amar Farooqui points out that the court of
administration of the brief sepoy regime in Delhi, with its definite
framework and procedures, throws a hint at the new state in its embryonic form; it also did contain seeds of modern democracy. He also
suggests that the roots of the court of administration experiment lay in the
informal soldiers councils within units of the Companys army which in
the pre-revolt period had been forums for deliberating upon various
issues concerning the sepoys. (p. 148) But in the absence of a nationalist
vocabulary, the ideologues of the revolt clothed their programme of anticolonial resistance in religious rhetoric. (p. 152)
But the colonial rulers seemed to know better. If Bahadur Shah
Zafar was keen to preserve and harness the name of the Mughal, the first
thing the British did after recovering Delhi was to erase the name of the
Mughal. Imprisoning of Bahadur Shah, Hodson shooting down some
Mughal princes at Humayuns tomb and the sham trial before the Last
Mughal and his family were sent to their wretched exile in Burma were
all testimonies to the British anxieties and their manifest desperation to
do away with what was left of the Mughal. That the trial of the Mughal
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emperor was held in his own palace was particularly significant both for
its wicked cynicism and political message it was meant to convey. The
physical removal of the emperor from the mainland India was of a piece
with the British policy of delegitimizing the Mughals. Even the presence
of the exiled royal family in Rangoon was hidden from the gaze of the
local inhabitants. Even after the Last Mughal died in 1862, the colonial
state was keen to place a thick veil of cynical de-recognition over members of his family till their melancholy death, Jawan Bakht in 1884, Zinat
Mahal in 1886 and Shah Zamani Begam in 1899. Even the lesser princes
suffered a hostile neglect.
Zafar and the Raj shows that contrary to the imagesstrongly
tattooed on colonial historiographyof the British saying the extreme
unction to an effete and dying Mughal royalty, the Mughal name and
heritage carried a precious and peculiarly powerful source of legitimacy
the British had to contend with. Though without an empire, the Last
Mughal was yet a Mughal. The British could say with an unconcealed
sneer, What is in the name? but they knew that the name indeed mattered. It seemed to mock at their illegitimacy. Zafar too was too aware of
it, however nervously; and he did everything to preserve his name and the
legitimacy it conferred. The British response to it during the climacteric
days of the Great Revolt bears testimony to the uneasy claims of the
colonial state over legitimacy it did not possess and which it could grab
only if they could do away with the name and vestiges of the Mughal
rule. Decency and scruples should not come in the way. The book makes
compelling reading and goads us to take a fresh look at the Last Mughal.

(The reviewer was formerly Professor, Department of History, Mangalore University, Mangalagangothri.)
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