CHAPTER TWO:
B E Y O N D A S E A
O F B L O O D
The story of 1857 has been told and retold, from numerous points of view. It indeed began as a mutiny, and the "Mutiny" it has remained in the British historical imagination. It soon spread beyond the army, however, and thus became much more than a mutiny; South Asian historians often describe it as the "First War of National Independence." For our present purposes we can call it the Rebellion.[1] By whatever name, it had profound effects on the lives of virtually all urban North Indians.
Bahadur Shah `Zafar,' poet-emperor and English pensioner, was utterly undone by the events of 1857. On the one hand, it has been argued that he was an ardent participant in the Rebellion--that he had been secretly informed about it in advance, that he tried energetically to take charge of it and give it an inclusive, nationalistic character.[2] It has also been argued that although the Rebellion took him by surprise, at the crucial moment the "Imperial yearnings in his heart" suddenly awoke, and he "entered into the full spirit" of the rebels, for "rather than continue in slavery, it would be preferable even to die."[3] On the other hand, he has also been blamed for the collapse of the Rebellion: he failed to rise to this "great occasion" and uphold the kingship, so that although the common people participated in the Rebellion, "the elite remained prey to vacillation," and "the English had the chance to destroy Delhi."[4]
No doubt the prospect of wielding in practice the power he had always claimed in theory was alluring. But Bahadur Shah was eighty-two years old, and was never able to control the rebels--or even to restrain his own headstrong sons from atrocities like the killing of captured English women and children. He was almost certainly taken by surprise on May 11th, when the first rebel soldiers arrived from Meerut and appeared beneath his balcony; he clearly disapproved of their ill-bred, unmannerly behavior. Once they seized the city and claimed him as their emperor, however, he displayed considerable activity on behalf of their cause. He became, in Spear's words, "a contingently willing accessory after the fact."[5]
For he tried to restore order in the city, maintain communal harmony, raise and allocate revenues, and inspire the troops to fight the English instead of despoiling the citizens.[6] His power was far from absolute, but it was also far from nonexistent. May 17th: "The King summoned many of the Sepoys to his presence and spoke to them very severely." June 17th: "The King sent for the chief of the mutineers, and threatened to take poison unless greater discipline were enforced and the oppressions discontinued. The chief promised immediate compliance." July 2nd: "The King said it was no use his giving orders, as they were never obeyed, and he had no one to enforce them, but his decree was that the English should be caused not to exist." August 4th: "'We have here 60,000 men in the city, but they have not been able to win a clod of dirt from the English.'" August 22nd: "'If the Sepoys would only leave the city, and employ themselves in collecting the revenue, I should be in a position to pay them, and to protect the lives and property of the citizens.'"[7] His exasperated tone is not that of an absolute ruler, but neither is it that of a helpless, fearful victim.
The emperor's leverage lay in the fact that the rebels could not afford to lose his services as their symbolic source of authority. Thus his frequent threats to withdraw his cooperation: to hold no more public audiences, to renounce the throne, to retire to some holy place, to "swallow a diamond" and die.[8] Such threats were noted with pathos and hope in the Dihli Urdu Akhbar:
His Majesty has issued a proclamation wherein he has drawn attention to the fact that the majority of the powerful and influential people cause misery to the loyal subjects of the Emperor....If the prevailing state of affairs continues, His Majesty wrote, then he would be obliged, since he had little love for worldly goods, to retire to Ajmer, to the shrine of the Khwaja....It is heard that the above-mentioned had a great effect on the audience when it was read out.[9]At other times, however, Bahadur Shah made strongly anti-British remarks, and even composed martial verses that he sent to his commanding general: "May all the enemies of the Faith be killed today; / The Firinghis be destroyed, root and branch!"[10] When the British recaptured Delhi on September 18th, Bahadur Shah hesitated, then ultimately refused to accompany the rebels in their flight from the city.
The unfortunate emperor had been placed from the start in an almost impossible position. The British, however, perceived (or chose to perceive) his court as the heart and soul of the Rebellion--and avenged themselves accordingly. They summarily executed a number of Bahadur Shah's sons and grandsons and other princes of the blood; still others were sentenced to life imprisonment. The Red Fort, which housed the Mughal court, had always been called the Auspicious Fort; so many of its inhabitants met dire fates that Ghalib later renamed it the Inauspicious Fort.[11] As for the emperor himself, he was held for a time in a humiliating kind of captivity, available to be stared at by chance British visitors. Finally he was placed on trial, on ill-conceived charges of sedition. Later historians would recognize that in fact he had never formally renounced his sovereignty: while he might be a defeated enemy king, therefore, he could not properly be considered a rebel.[12] He was also charged with the death of the British women and children who had been murdered in the Red Fort.
At the trial, the prosecutor argued that "to Mussulman intrigue and Mahommedan conspiracy we may mainly attribute the dreadful calamities of the year 1857"; he sought to show "how intimately the prisoner, as the head of the Mahommedan faith in India, has been connected with the organisation of that conspiracy either as its leader or its unscrupulous accomplice." Bahadur Shah's defense rested on the plea of helplessness: "All that has been done, was done by that rebellious army. I was in their power, what could I do?....I was helpless, and constrained by my fears, I did whatever they required, otherwise they would immediately have killed me....I found myself in such a predicament that I was weary of my life."[13] The emperor was judged guilty on all counts, exiled to Rangoon, and kept under discreet house arrest; he was by this time in a condition of vagueness and partial senility. When he died a few years later, the British buried him secretly in an unmarked grave, in a wide field which was then sown all over with grass.[14] The last surviving members of the Mughal dynasty were left in conspicuous and humiliating poverty; as Ghalib later wrote to a friend, "The male descendants of the deposed King--such as survived the sword--draw allowances of five rupees a month. The female descendants, if old, are bawds, and if young, prostitutes."[15]
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In 1857 Ghalib was fifty-nine years old, partially deaf, and in uncertain health. He took no significant part in the Rebellion, though it appears that he prudently "continued to maintain relations" with Bahadur Shah by composing celebratory verse and perhaps appearing once or twice at court.[16] But he suffered much anxiety and grief, and endured financial hardship when his British pension ceased to arrive. For the most part he shut himself up in his house and began to write an elaborate history of what was happening--in ancient Persian, avoiding all Arabic words. In his history Ghalib wrote of the disastrous effects of the revolt: one must, he said, "shed tears for the destruction of Hindustan," which was a ruined land. "City after city lies open, without protectors....House after house lies desolate, and the abodes of grieving men invite despoliation."[17] Delhi College, where Azad had studied, suffered the total loss of its library. The rebels looted the Persian and Urdu books, and tore the English books into fragments that "carpeted all the college gardens to a depth of two inches."[18] The prisons had been emptied, and the streets were in a state of anarchy; the city was full of the kind of lower-class ruffians with whom the aristocratic Ghalib could never feel empathy. Perhaps most painful of all, the postal service had entirely broken down, so that Ghalib--an indefatigable correspondent, writer of the most irresistible letters in Urdu literature--could no longer get news of his friends in other cities.
When the British recaptured the city in the autumn, however, things suddenly grew much worse. For several days after the assault, British troops ran wild, not only looting and plundering but also killing every able-bodied man they found. Then there followed "a more systematic reign of terror"--indiscriminate shootings, drum-head court martials and summary hangings--which lasted for several weeks.[19] During this period Ghalib and his family led "a prisoner's life," barricaded inside their house, so deprived of all news that "our ears were deaf and our eyes were blind." When Ghalib's brother died after many years of insanity, the curfew was so strict that it was difficult even to bury him. "And in this trouble and perplexity, a dearth of bread and water!"[20]
Even so, Ghalib was one of the luckier ones: his street contained some houses owned by courtiers of the loyalist Maharaja of Patiala, who had arranged for special guards. He and some neighbors were eventually interrogated by a British officer. Ghalib, ever the aristocrat, reported that the officer had "asked me my name and the others their occupation." Ghalib claimed that he had established his credentials by producing the letter that acknowledged his ode to Queen Victoria. When asked why he hadn't come over to the British camp, he replied, according to Hali's account, "My rank required that I should have four palanquin-bearers, but all four of them ran away." According to his own account, he described himself as "old and crippled and deaf," unable to do anything but pray for English success. In any case, he was sent home again without harassment.[21]
Apart from a few such privileged, barricaded, and guarded neighborhoods, however, almost all the people of Delhi, and especially the Muslims, were driven out of the city. Ghalib said there were hardly a thousand Muslims left in the whole city, while many were living "in ditches and mud huts" outside its boundaries.[22] They were still outside in December, shelterless in the cold and the winter rains. Not until early 1858 did the Hindus begin to return; the city regained something like a quarter of its former population. Mosques were occupied by troops; many beautiful old buildings had been damaged or destroyed in the fighting, or were systematically razed by the British. It was not until July 1858 that the civil courts reopened, and only late in 1858 did Muslims gradually begin to reenter the city.[23] It was in 1858 that Ghalib wrote, in a private letter to a friend, an unusual verse-sequence (qitah) full of bitterly direct description:
Every armed English soldier / can do whatever he wants.Even by the end of 1858 a general permission to return had still not been granted, as Ghalib noted; it was not given until November 1859, more than two years after the Muslims of Delhi had been expelled from their city--and the city to which they returned was irrevocably transformed.[25]
Just going from home to market / makes one's heart turn to water.
The Chauk is a slaughter ground / and homes are prisons.
Every grain of dust in Delhi / thirsts for Muslims' blood.
Even if we were together / we could only weep over our lives.[24]
A number of the changes made in the city were pointedly symbolic. After 1857 the densely built-up urban areas within three hundred yards of the Red Fort were razed to the ground. The fort itself was "almost entirely cleared of buildings, only a few relics of the old Mughal Palaces being allowed to stand," with the resulting space occupied by "barracks for European troops." The majestic Lahore Gate became a bazaar "for the benefit of the European soldiers of the Fort"; the famous Divan-e Am (Hall of Public Audience) was "used as a canteen." The general effect of the many kinds of punitive measures taken after the Rebellion was that people "had been taught to know their masters"; the Delhi area "received a lesson which will never be forgotten."[26] Sikh troops were quartered in the Jama Masjid until 1862; several other mosques were not restored until the 1870's, and the Sunahri Masjid, outside the Red Fort's Delhi Gate, not until 1913.[27] The well-known Madrasah of Husain Bakhsh, where Hali had studied, stayed closed for eighteen years.[28] And Delhi College, its library destroyed by the rebels, was kept closed by the British until 1864, when it reopened; but despite its steadily increasing emphasis on English at the expense of Urdu, it was closed again in 1877.[29]
In the immediate aftermath of the Rebellion, moreover, the invasions, occupations, looting, slaughter, and expulsion of population were followed by further disasters. As Hali put it, after the British reconquest the city became a "howling wilderness."[30] In 1860 Ghalib summed up the sufferings of Delhi:
Five invading armies have fallen upon this city one after another: the first was that of the rebel soldiers, which robbed the city of its good name. The second was that of the British, when life and property and honour and dwellings and those who dwelt in them and heaven and earth and all the visible signs of existence were stripped from it. The third was that of famine, when thousands of people died of hunger. The fourth was that of cholera, in which many whose bellies were full lost their lives. The fifth was the fever, which took general plunder of men's strength and powers of resistance.Normalcy was very slow in returning. Ghalib continued to mourn the death of a great number of his friends--on both sides. Among the British dead, "some were the focus of my hopes, some my well-wishers, some my friends, some my bosom companions, and some my pupils in poetry." And among the Indians, "some were my kinsmen, some my friends, some my pupils and some men whom I loved." Now "all of them are laid low in the dust."[31]
The destruction of the neighborhoods, landmarks, and customs of the city was such that, to Ghalib, Delhi itself had died: Delhi was "a city of the dead." Did someone ask about Delhi? "Yes, there was once a city of that name in the realm of India." Whenever his friends inquired about some notable Delhi person or occasion, he replied that Delhi was finished: "All these things lasted only so long as the king reigned."[32] In a pessimistic letter to a friend, Ghalib quoted one of his own shirs (two-line verses): "A sea of blood rolls its waves--if only this were all! / Wait and see what else now lies before me."[33] The image obviously rang true for him: two years later he described his life since the Rebellion as that of "a swimmer in a sea of blood in this city."[34]
But life had to continue somehow. From 1858 onwards Ghalib sought to get his pension restored; this proved to be difficult, for he was suspected of collaboration with the rebels, a charge he vehemently denied. He needed the support of the chief commissioner, Sir John Lawrence: "I therefore wrote in the praise of this man of high splendour a ghazal on the theme of spring, congratulating him on his victories and singing of the freshness of the breezes of the unfolding season, and sent it off by post." He received instructions to resubmit his petition through the commissioner; when he did so, he was told that "there was no call whatever for a letter comprising nothing but praise and congratulation."[35]
Ghalib had literary sufferings to endure as well. He himself had never kept copies of his own verse, and the two great private libraries in which his friends had carefully collected his works had been sacked and wantonly destroyed by British troops--as had the library at the Red Fort, too. He feared the loss of the poetry that was his life's great achievement. "A few days ago a faqir (faqir) who has a good voice and sings well discovered a ghazal of mine somewhere and got it written down. When he showed me it, I tell you truly, the tears came to my eyes."[36]
Finally, in May 1860, after so much uncertainty and so many rebuffs that Ghalib had almost given up hope, the pension was restored and the arrears paid in full. Ghalib received from Sir John Lawrence a formal letter in Persian, duly written on paper sprinkled with gold dust, thanking him for his laudatory ghazal. This, together with a regular pension he had been receiving for some time from the Navab of Rampur, eased his financial situation somewhat. In February of 1863, his courtly rights--to attend at government durbars and to have the traditional robe of honor bestowed on him--were finally restored. He attended his last durbar in December 1866, where for the first time since the Rebellion these ceremonial robes and gifts were actually presented to him.[37] Although Ghalib's health was failing, and his finances were never what he wished, the flow of letters to and from his many friends and shagirds continued to sustain him. He died in 1869.
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In 1857 Azad, twenty-seven years old, had been working with his father at the Dihli Urdu Akhbar Press. The rebels arrived so suddenly, and seized the city so rapidly, that people were left stupefied. This abrupt downfall of the British was, as the Dihli Urdu Akhbar editorialized, a reminder of the Day of Judgement, and was thus "meant to scourge us into obedience to the Divine Will." It was an event so amazing as to be scarcely credible: "Did what we saw really take place in fact, or did it pertain to the realm of dreams?"[38]
After the initial shock, Maulvi Muhammad Baqir successfully readjusted his loyalties. He apparently tried to save the life of his friend and former colleague, Francis Taylor, the principal of Delhi College, by hiding him from the mob that sacked the college and destroyed its library. The next day the presence of the fugitive was discovered; Francis Taylor, forced to flee in disguise, was caught and beaten to death in the street.[39] But when Maulvi Muhammad Baqir published an article about the killings of various Englishmen, he went out of his way to blacken Francis Taylor's character. With his years of experience in the collector's office, Maulvi Muhammad Baqir then did what many others were doing: he reported to the new center of authority, the court. The emperor presented him with a robe of honor, and he became a regular advisor, performing a variety of administrative duties.[40] It seems that on one occasion, he even took to the field in command of "two companies of infantry and one of cavalry," to rescue a revenue train that was being attacked by bandits on its way to Delhi.[41]
The Dihli Urdu Akhbar took note of the widespread looting, violence, oppression, and economic hardship, expressing the hope "that the Divine Dispenser might so will things that the present anarchy comes to an end and the cause of His Majesty's worry is totally removed."[42] As the weeks wore on, Maulvi Muhammad Baqir's editorials grew more hortatory and anti-British. He changed the name of the paper to Akhbar-e Zafar--doubly appropriate since "zafar" means "victory"--and pointedly issued it on Sundays, "in defiance of the Christian sabbath."[43] He wrote at least one pamphlet arguing that the fight against the English was a religious struggle (jihad), which it was the sacred duty of Muslims to support.[44]
Azad himself reacted to the shock of the Rebellion by publishing, as we have seen, his first known poem, "A History of Instructive Reversals." This nineteen-verse "continuous ghazal" appeared on May 24, 1857, about two weeks after the arrival of the rebels. The poem begins with a series of rhetorical evocations of famous dead kings ("Where is the realm of Solomon, and where the sovereignty of Alexander?") but soon becomes altogether direct and immediate:
Right now it is said that the Christian community of yesterdayLiterarily speaking, this poem can only be called uninspired; but it has a unique historical interest. It is Azad's only known reflection on the Rebellion, and it emerges from the very midst of the turmoil, from those few months in Delhi when the revolving--the "revolution"--of the wheel of fortune had indeed turned the world upside down.
was the possessor of ascendant fortune (iqbal), world-bestowing, world-upholding,
was the possessor of learning and skill and wisdom and cleverness,
was the possessor of splendor and glory and a powerful army.
There was no help! When there emerged
in the world the sword of wrath of the Lord of Fury,
all their jewels of wisdom could not be employed,
all the fingernails[45] of devising and wisdom became useless,
wisdom and craft and knowledge and cleverness availed nothing--
the Telingas from the East [sic] killed them all right here.
This is an event that no one has ever seen or heard of--
the revolving of the heavens is a strange revolving!
Indeed, just open the eye of instruction a little, oh heedless one--
here, the lips of speech of the people of language are closed.
If you have eyes, the whole reality of the world has been revealed:
beware, oh heart--never place any trust in it!
For instruction, this event is enough for the people,
if God should give a steady wisdom and an alert heart.
What can I say--there's not enough scope for a breath!
All are gaping like mirrors, with their backs to the wall,
that despite the Christian rulers' wisdom and vision
they should be erased like this, all at once, withont a trace in the world!
When Azad wanted a chronogram (tarikh) of this event,
his heart said, "Say, `Oh you of sight, you should derive a lesson from it.'"[46]
In the poem the British are referred to only in religious terms, as "Christians," and the Rebellion too is depicted entirely as a religious lesson arranged by God: it is a stern rebuke to the vanity of kings, and indeed to all human illusions of power. The fate of the Christians reveals "the whole reality of the world," and "the people" are to take warning: "beware, oh heart--never place any trust in it!" God may give you sovereignty one day, and the next day He may, without warning, utterly cast you down. The pages of history are full of famous cautionary examples, and now a new one has been added to the series. Azad's view is typical of contemporary newspaper commentary on the Rebellion.[47] Although nationalist, anticolonial, politically modernizing responses to the Rebellion no doubt existed, they do not seem to have been widespread within the Muslim elite of Delhi. Azad's poem shows us how Maulvi Muhammad Baqir could change allegiances almost literally overnight: since God had chosen to overthrow one set of rulers and raise up another, what else should one do but accept His manifest verdict? Similarly, when a few months later God chose to restore the British to power, that too had to be accepted--and indeed, by then people must have been somewhat inured to such shocking but "instructive" reversals.
Azad himself apparently seconded his father's journalistic efforts on behalf of the Rebellion; and after the British retook Delhi, Azad too became, as Farrukhi writes, "a swimmer in this ocean of blood." Maulvi Muhammad Baqir was arrested, and Azad was summarily expelled from his house at bayonet-point, together with his whole joint family including old women and young children.[48] As Azad later described the scene:
The soldiers of the victorious army suddenly entered the house. They flourished their rifles: "Leave here at once!" The world turned black before my eyes. A whole houseful of goods was before me, and I stood petrified: "What shall I take with me?" My eye fell on the packet of his [Zauq's] ghazals. I thought, "Muhammad Husain, if God is gracious, and you live, then all this can be restored. But where will another ustad come from, who can compose these ghazals again?....While these exist, he lives even after his death; if these are lost, his name cannot survive either." I picked up the packet and tucked it under my arm. Abandoning a well-furnished home, with twenty-two half-dead souls I left the house--or rather, the city. And the words fell from my lips, "Hazrat (hazrat) Adam left Heaven; Delhi is a heaven too. I'm his descendant--why shouldn't I leave Delhi?" [450].As they made their halting way out of the city, a stray bullet struck Azad's year-old baby daughter; after some days in a coma, she died. Having wandered on foot for several days, half-starving, under conditions of the greatest hardship and danger, the travelers made contact with reliable friends. Azad sent the rest his family off to safety, but despite their tears and entreaties, he refused to go with them. Instead he went back to Delhi, to learn his father's fate.[49]
There he sought out a Sikh general who was an old friend of his father's, and who now took pity on his plight. Disguised as the general's groom, Azad followed him as he rode his horse past the field where Maulvi Muhammad Baqir and other prisoners were awaiting execution. Under these painful conditions, father and son exchanged a last long look. Two weeks afterwards, Maulvi Muhammad Baqir was shot. Azad was hidden by his friend the general and then smuggled out of the city. Although details of this account may be uncertain--Azad's father was probably not shot but hanged, and probably rather sooner than later--the main outline is at least plausible, and this is the account Azad passed down in his own family.[50]
Then began a lost time in Azad's life. There was rumored to be a British arrest warrant out for him; in fact, it was a remarkable piece of luck that he hadn't been arrested along with his father. While his family stayed with relatives in a town near Delhi, he himself kept moving from city to city, fearing arrest, unable to find a secure niche. For two years or so he wandered, spending time in Lucknow, in Madras, in the Nilgiri hills, in Bombay, in Malwa, and elsewhere; then he spent longer periods in the Panjab, first in Jind, then in Jagraon, where he worked as a calligrapher in a newspaper office.[51]
Finally, in early 1861 he reached Lahore, where a relative helped him get a low-level job in the postmaster general's office. Azad was now working directly for the "Christian rulers" who had, only four years earlier, killed his father and destroyed his world. He held the postal job until the end of 1862. It is not clear what he did in 1863--except that during this whole period he was actively seeking a job in the Department of Public Instruction. In pursuit of this goal he composed his first book, a small textbook (now lost) for schoolgirls, and showed it to the appropriate officers. In February 1864, Azad was finally appointed to a clerical position in the Department of Public Instruction.[52]
During this year he wrote another textbook, The Earring of Good Advice, also for schoolgirls. In this textbook he found occasion to speak elegiacally of "the renowned city, the ancient royal capital of India," Delhi. "Although it's been entirely devastated and destroyed, and the inhabitants have been slain and exiled and laid low in the dust, even in their ruined, poverty-stricken condition its people showed an elegance and sophistication that I haven't seen anywhere else."[53] Azad struggled to get on with his life, but it was clear that he bore deep scars. Within a single month he had lost his father, his baby daughter, his work, his friends--and his city. The "terrible sufferings" of the Rebellion "had a crushing effect on his mind," quenching his youthful high spirits, making him seem older than his age. Even years later, when he used to reminisce with an old friend about 1857, "all these talks ended in tears."[54]
= = = = = = =
Hali suffered less bitterly during the Rebellion. He was in Hissar, it will be remembered, working in the deputy collector's office. Suddenly Hissar, like many other North Indian cities, was in turmoil. As Hali put it, the "mischief caused by rebellious soldiers broke out in India, and even in Hissar dire events manifested themselves, and government authority disappeared."[55] As was so often the case, the rebels in Hissar acted independently: word was brought to the emperor after the fact that five companies of soldiers, who had been joined by three hundred bandits (Mevati), had murdered the collector and plundered the treasury, and were on their way from Hissar to Delhi.[56]
Hali, "taking his life in his hands," set out for Panipat. The roads were now very dangerous; during his journey he was set upon by bandits, and the horse on which he was riding was seized. By the time he at length reached Panipat, traveling on foot, enduring much hardship and danger, the fatigue and bad food had given him a case of dysentery so acute that he was sick for more than a year. Even after a famous physician (hakim) finally cured him, his stomach, chest, and lungs stayed weak all his life, so that he had to live with much more caution and restraint.[57]
Although Panipat itself remained quiet during 1857, it rapidly filled with refugees who had been expelled from Delhi without money or possessions. Though only twenty years old, Hali worked so devotedly, compassionately, and soberly among the refugees that he seemed, it is said, like a much older man. Some of the refugees who had taken shelter in his own household stayed on and on. One of these was a ten-year-old girl whose whole family had been killed, and who lived for the rest of her long life with Hali's family. Writing forty years later, Hali referred to the events of 1857 as "extremely tragic," such that "even to describe them again as they happened is like rubbing salt into a wound."[58]
After the Rebellion itself was over, for a long time "the condition of the country was such that people were afraid to leave their houses. Factories, offices, schools, colleges were all closed....They say that there was not a neighborhood in Delhi without its gallows," writes Salihah Abid Husain, Hali's granddaughter and biographer. Hali stayed in Panipat for four years; as his health improved and most of the refugees left, he began studying in an impromptu but persistent way with the most eminent local scholars. But more children were born to him. With extra mouths to feed, the family's finances grew even more straitened. It was time once more for Hali to look for work.[59]
In 1861 Hali once again went to Delhi. There he led a hand-to-mouth existence of uncertainty and unemployment. In 1863, however, he fortunately encountered Navab Mustafa Khan `Sheftah' (1806-1869), who invited Hali to his city of Jahangirabad, near Meerut, to tutor his children. Sheftah was an important poet and biographer in his own right; his ustad had been the major Delhi poet Momin Khan `Momin' (1800-1852). Since then, Sheftah had been a shagird of Ghalib's. Hali and Sheftah formed a warm friendship, and Hali stayed at Jahangirabad for the remaining years of Sheftah's life. Hali treated Sheftah as an ustad, and later claimed that Sheftah's correction (islah) of his poetry was even more useful than Ghalib's. Both Sheftah and Hali, however, shared a great respect and love for Ghalib, and occasionally visited him in Delhi. Hali's life in Jahangirabad was a quiet, retired, congenial one.[60]
It came to an abrupt end in 1869. In February, Ghalib died; Hali wrote an elegy (marsiyah) full of grief at the loss of such an ustad: "With his death, Delhi has died"; "There was one light in the city, and it is gone."[61] Late in the same year Sheftah too died, so that Hali lost both his ustads almost at once. During this same crucial period, Hali met Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who was to play a large role in his future. And having no choice, Hali began to look for another job.[62]
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The Rebellion of 1857, together with its brutal, destructive, and long-lasting aftermath, marked the real end of aristocratic Muslim culture in North India. The effects of this deep slash through the fabric of nineteenth-century Indian history have been so profound that it is impossible to enumerate, or even envision, all of them. Metcalf concludes that the "most pervasive legacy" of the Rebellion was perhaps to be found in the "intangible sphere of human relations," for "a year of bitter racial warfare left an abiding mark on all concerned."[63]
There was enormous physical destruction, especially in Delhi. The ruin wrought on lives and property in Delhi was in fact much greater than in any other rebellious city. People were haphazardly killed, systematically executed, imprisoned, expelled from the city, subjected to terrible hardships, arbitrarily stripped of all their property. Many of Delhi's old Muslim families were almost entirely rooted out. Survivors were scattered and reduced to grief, helplessness, and silence. Libraries were looted, precious manuscripts lost, buildings razed, the city's old culture devastated.[64] After the initial "reign of terror" when British troops first retook the city, most of the continuing reprisals were selective and were directed against upper-class Muslims who were thought, with or without reason, to have had ties to the court.
Above all, after more than three hundred years the Mughal court itself was now gone--hopelessly gone, gone forever. Bahadur Shah had left an equivocal legacy. He certainly joined with the rebels to at least some extent, as indeed his own imperial claims would have almost required him to do. But then he surrendered to the English, and during his "trial" he emphatically repudiated the Rebellion. Nostalgic sympathy for him was widespread: he was a romantic symbol of imperial grandeur and tragic loss. But his legacy could not provide a cultural rallying point for his demoralized people. Not until 1903 was any real effort made to locate his grave and build him a tomb. Even then it was a small effort, and the British created obstacles; only in 1934 was a modest tomb actually built.[65] It was not for nothing that the Auspicious Fort had been renamed by Ghalib the Inauspicious Fort.
The Mughal idea of the king as divinely ordained focus and center of the society, axis of the culture in time and space, was still very much alive in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India. Even new would-be dynastic founders often aspired to such a vision of kingship. When Tipu Sultan assumed royal power (with Mughal approval) in Mysore in 1786, he felt empowered to "reconstitute the universe around himself." By his command, "measures of distances and weights, names of towns, administrative departments and official titles, units of coinage, and the entire calendar including the days of the week, months, and years, were all transformed."[66]
Even as late as 1819, when Ghazi ud-Din Haidar, Navab of Avadh, assumed (theoretically) independent kingship--thus setting himself up with British encouragement as a rival to the Mughal dynasty--most of his implicitly universal claims, including a throne and royal canopy apparently based on the Peacock Throne, were drawn directly from Mughal precedent. He created new coins and a new dating system for them, a new royal coat of arms, a new and much more elaborate code of court etiquette based on the sacredness of his person, and a set of newly exalted titles for all and sundry including "Lord of the Age" for himself and "Lord of the World" and "Lord of the Era" for certain of his nobles.[67] As we have seen, the British, too, had been drawn into this system, holding durbars and bestowing robes of honor, writing formal Persian letters on paper sprinkled with gold-dust. These tendencies reached their height in Lucknow: the resident was attended wherever he went by no fewer than forty ceremonial mace-bearers, and "the Residency buildings themselves became ever more like a palace complex."[68]
Whatever the actual political facts, the medieval Mughal vision of kingship as absolute universal sovereignty was still widespread and powerful. When such a symbolically awesome king, the center and embodiment of a whole cultural world, falls in some irrevocable way, a great deal may fall with him. His people may well fear for their culture. Thus Ghalib could write of the lost glories of Delhi, "All these things lasted only so long as the king reigned." Since the king Bahadur Shah was also the poet Zafar, and preeminently the patron of Urdu and Persian poets, it is not surprising that his fall tended to drag the classical poetry down with him. Azad later expressed surprise that even the Urdu language itself had survived the debacle: "Urdu emerged from Delhi--and its lamp ought to have been extinguished with the kingship of Delhi" [61]. But survival meant living through a time of devastation and disaster. So many poems in various genres lamented the ruin of the city that a number of them were ultimately gathered into a melancholy anthology, The Sigh of Delhi (1863).[69]
The loss and the mourning were painful enough. But the vengeful English often went out of their way, in those first months and years, to rub in the humiliation, to show their contempt for the whole culture that had presumed to give them such a horrible moral and practical shock as the "Mutiny" had been. In the immediate aftermath of 1857 many Englishmen wished "to raze Delhi to the ground, or at least to destroy the Jama Masjid," and the "most bitter and widespread hostility was reserved for the Muslim community."[70] Many Muslims grieved for the rest of their lives: their ancient, much-cherished culture seemed to have been hopelessly discredited, even in their own eyes, by its ignominious collapse.
The British, "at the climax of their power," confronted a Muslim community that was "at its lowest ebb"; even a Westernizer like Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan feared that the Muslims could never again prosper or "receive esteem," and considered emigrating to Egypt.[71] "I could not even bear to contemplate the miserable state of my people," he wrote. "For some time I wrestled with my grief and, believe me, it made an old man of me." In any case, he planned to leave Delhi after his retirement from government service, for "everyone knew," as Hali put it, that "he did not want to be constantly reminded of the awful conditions in which the Muslims of Delhi were living after the Mutiny."[72] Another survivor of this period, Maulvi Zakaullah, showed a more typical reaction: he refused, even years later, to talk about his memories of what he had seen and experienced. To him "the shock of those last Mutiny days" had been "beyond all bearing," so that he succumbed for a time to "a melancholy that bordered on blank despair."[73]
Decades later, Nazir Ahmad's markedly pro-British son Bashir ud-Din
Ahmad wrote of the period, "Delhi was very much suppressed, and so beaten
down that--God forbid! There are still some people alive who saw the Rebellion;
when I hear from them about its devastation and sufferings, my blood runs
cold." The Rebellion had "shaken the foundation of Delhi, and so destroyed
it that even today it hasn't been able to flourish."[74] As Sadiq put it
very simply, "the whole system went down with a crash after the Mutiny."[75]
FOOTNOTES
[1]:This is a de facto term of convenience; I do not mean to imply that sovereignty was legally vested in the British East India Company at the time.
[2]:Agha Mahdi Husain, in Bahadur Shah II and the War of 1857, makes this case strongly.
[3]:V. D. Savarkar, The Indian War of Independence (National Rising of 1857) (London: Mayuresh, n.d.; 4th ed., orig. 1909), pp. 101-102.
[4]:Kalb-e Ali Khan `Faiq,' in his introduction to Qurban Ali Beg `Salik,' Kulliyat-e Salik (Lahore: Majlis Taraqqi-e Adab, 1966), p. 11.
[5]:Spear, Twilight of the Mughuls, p. 224.
[6]:Spear, Twilight of the Mughuls, pp. 200-217.
[7]:Charles T. Metcalfe, trans., Two Native Narratives of the Mutiny in Delhi (Delhi: Seema Publications, 1974), pp. 95, 123, 134, 181, 203.
[8]:K. C. Yadav, ed., Delhi in 1857: Volume 1, The Trial of Bahadur Shah (Gurgaon: The Academic Press, 1980), pp. 52, 59, 333-335; Metcalfe, Two Native Narratives, pp. 114, 122-123, 193.
[9]:Khan, A History of Urdu Journalism, pp. 95-96.
[10]:Metcalfe, Two Native Narratives, p. 177.
[11]:Ghalib, Khut?ut?, vol. 2, p. 621.
[12]:Spear, Twilight of the Mughuls, pp. 222-226.
[13]:Yadav, Delhi in 1857, vol. 1, pp. 400, 345.
[14]:Parvez, Bahadur Shah °afar, pp. 139-150.
[15]:Russell and Islam, Ghalib, p. 269.
[16]:For a look at the somewhat confusing evidence, see Gopi Chand Narang, "Ghalib and the Rebellion of 1857," in his Urdu Language and Literature: Critical Perspectives (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1991), p. 10.
[17]:Russell and Islam, Ghalib, p. 137.
[18]:Abd ul-Haq, Marhum Dihli Kalij, p. 72.
[19]:Spear, Twilight of the Mughuls, 218.
[20]:Russell and Islam, Ghalib, p. 142.
[21]:Russell and Islam, Ghalib, pp. 145, 149-150. According to yet a third account, he was released when a friend vouched for him; see Narang, "Ghalib and the Rebellion of 1857," p. 15.
[22]:Ghalib, Dastanbuy, p. 60.
[23]:Spear, Twilight of the Mughuls, pp. 220-222.
[24]:Ghalib, Khut?ut?, vol. 1, p. 239.
[25]:Russell and Islam, Ghalib, pp. 190-191.
[26]:Gazetteer of the Delhi District, 1883-4 (Delhi: Punjab Government, 1884), pp. 182, 184, 30. Lucknow too, after its recapture, was rebuilt with a view to preventing any future rebellions; for an account of the process, see Veena Talwar Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856-1877 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
[27]:Sangat Singh, Freedom Movement in Delhi, 1858-1919 (New Delhi: Associated Publishing House, 1972), pp. 11-12.
[28]:Leitner, History of Indigenous Education, part 2, p. 2.
[29]:°afar Hasan, Sir Sayyid aur Hali, pp. 41-42.
[30]:He used the evocative word "sannata." Hali, Yadgar-e Ghalib, p. 187.
[31]:Russell and Islam, Ghalib, pp. 243, 153.
[32]:Russell and Islam, Ghalib, pp. 261, 224, 291.
[33]:Ghalib, Divan, p. 333, verse 10.
[34]:Ghalib, Khut?ut?, vol. 1, p. 336; vol. 2, p. 556.
[35]:Russell and Islam, Ghalib, p. 162.
[36]:Russell and Islam, Ghalib, p. 182.
[37]:Russell and Islam, Ghalib, pp. 233-234, 282-283, 347.
[38]:Khan, A History of Urdu Journalism, pp. 86-87.
[39]:Abd ul-Haq, Marhum Dihli Kalij, p. 71.
[40]:Khan, A History of Urdu Journalism, pp. 92, 87-88.
[41]:Metcalfe, Two Native Narratives, p. 114.
[42]:Khan, A History of Urdu Journalism, p. 96; see also pp. 95, 99-100.
[43]:Khan, A History of Urdu Journalism, p. 101; see also pp. 97-98, 102, 105, 109.
[44]:Sadiq, Azad, pp. 14-16.
[45]:"Fingernails" had a well-established role in loosening the "knots" of difficult problems.
[46]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, p. 98. The Arabic phrase in the last line yields the date of 1273 A.H. [1856-57].
[47]:Khan, A History of Urdu Journalism, pp. 128-130.
[48]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, p. 104.
[49]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 105-107.
[50]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 76-77, 108-109.
[51]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 113-124.
[52]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 124-129.
[53]:Muhammad Husain Azad, Nasihat ka karn phul (Delhi: Azad Book Depot, 1945), p. 32. While this little book is indeed nostalgic at times (p. 22), it also shows a lively appreciation for the improved, secure roads (pp. 27, 31) and efficient trains (p. 37) provided by the English government.
[54]:Sadiq, Azad, p. 18.
[55]:Hali, Kulliyat-e nasr, vol. 1, p. 336.
[56]:Metcalfe, Two Native Narratives, p. 113.
[57]:Salihah Abid Husain, Yadgar-e Hali, p. 29.
[58]:Hali, Hayat-i-javed, p. 46.
[59]:Salihah Abid Husain, Yadgar-e Hali, pp. 30-31.
[60]:Shujaat Ali Sandilvi, Hali, pp. 30-34; Hali, Kulliyat-e nasr, vol. 1, pp. 337-339.
[61]:Hali, Divan-e Hali, p. 158; the whole marsiyah runs from pp. 156-163.
[62]:Shujaat Ali Sandilvi, Hali, pp. 34-35.
[63]:Thomas Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt: India, 1857-1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), p. 289.
[64]:For a fuller account of this cultural devastation, see Syed, Muslim Response to the West, pp. 18-20, and Narang, "Ghalib and the Rebellion of 1857," pp. 2-3.
[65]:Husain, Bahadur Shah, pp. 429-434.
[66]:Fisher, A Clash of Cultures, p. 156.
[67]:Fisher, A Clash of Cultures, pp. 130-147. In 1857, however, the rebel troops insisted on taking orders directly from Delhi; the young Birjis Qadir, whom they placed on the throne, became merely a vazir in Bahadur Shah's service. See Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt 1857-1858: A Study of Popular Resistance (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 135-137.
[68]:Fisher, A Clash of Cultures, p. 180.
[69]:Tafazzal Husain Khan `Kaukab,' Fughan-e dihli (Lahore: Akadami-e Panjab, 1954).
[70]:Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt, pp. 295, 298.
[71]:Syed, Muslim Response to the West, pp. 22, 40.
[72]:Hali, Hayat-i-Javed, pp. 56, 132.
[73]:Andrews, Zaka Ullah of Delhi, pp. 67, 75.
[74]:Bashir ud-Din Ahmad, Vaqiat-e dar-ul hukumat-e dihli (Agra: Shamsi Mashin Pres, 1919, 3 vols.), vol. 1, p. 702.
[75]:Sadiq, Azad, p. 11.