Book: The Last Mughal
The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple
Though it includes many Indian narrative of the the great war of 1857 but still this book is dominated by English narrative to this important piece of Indian history.
One is surprised that how close Indian forces were to routing British forces but due to weakness on the strategic front, their bravery could not make up for it, all of India was lost to the British for 90 more years.
Mughals had no choice but to support what started out as a mutiny but soon became a war against the British. British were going to end the recognition of the Mughals as emperor of India and Mughal family was supposed to move out of the Red Fort. This situation gave the dying Mughal empire last hope of revival and they did gave a good fight but palace intrigues also had a hand in them losing this important battle.
British forces were helped by a number of spies and if it was not for them the fall of Delhi would not have taken place. Though the book focuses only incidents in and around Delhi there were many battles against British through out India- before and after the fall of Delhi.
The question that has not been answered is would India be any different if Mughals did win 1857 war? I think it would have been only slightly different- may be we had different sets of institutions and the progressive thoughts that went into the writing of constitution would not have been there. But feudalism, communal tension, poverty, corruption, etc. all would have been still with us. Though a lesser number of Indian would have been in awe of anything white or Western.
Some excerpts from the book:
Roads over mosques
… in the British land settlement that had followed the conquest of Hindustan, many hundreds of temples, mosques, madrasas and Sufi shrines had their endowments “resumed” – effectively confiscated- on a variety of pretexts, and wherever documents proving the grantees’ rights could not be produced; among the land grants resumed were the revenues bequeathed to no fewer than nine mosques in Delhi. There were other cases where the Company casually demolished revered temples and mosques to make roads- something that especially upset the influential theologian Shah Abdul Aziz. [p.67]
Madrasa education in Mughal India
Even Colonel William Sleeman, famous for his suppression of the Thugs and a leading critic of the administration of the Indian courts, had to admit that the madrasa education given in Delhi was something quite remarkable: “Perhaps there are few communities in the world among whom education is more generally diffused than among Muhammadans in India, “ he wrote on a visit to the Mughal capital.
“He who holds and office worth twenty rupees a month commonly gives his sons an education equal to that of a prime minister. They learn, through the medium of Arabic and Persian languages, what young men in our colleges 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 which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the young man raw 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.” [p.90]
Religious killings:
The religious nature of the Uprising was becoming immediately apparent. British men and women who had converted to Islam were invariably spared, yet all Indian coverts to Christianity- Hindu or Muslim- were sough out and hunted down. [p.143]
Women jihadis:
The jihadis may have alarmed the Hindus, but in the weeks to come their suicidal bravery often put the sepoys to shame- especially when some of the most prominent jihadis turned out to be women. [p.249]
Masjid occupation:
Most of the confiscated Muslim properties put up for auction by the British were bought en masse by the Hindu khatri (clerical caste) and Jain bankers of the city, such as Chhunna Mal and Ramji Das. … Hindu traders and bankers even bought up two of the city’s most famous mosques: Chhunna Mal bought the Fatehpuri Masjid, while a Hindu baker bought the beautiful Zinat ul-Masajid, one of the main jihadi centres throughout the Uprising. [ footnote: Neither was returned to the Delhi Musims until many years later- the Fatehpuri Masjid in 1875 and the Zinat ul-Masajid by Lord Curzon in the early years of the twentieth century. Sikh troops remained occupying the Jama Masjid until it was returned in 1862.] [p.426]
Hating Indian Muslims:
For the British after 1857, the Indian Muslims became an almost subhuman creature, to be classified in unembarrassedly racist imperial literature alongside such other despised and subject specimens, such as Irish Catholics or the “the Wandering Jew.” The depth to which Indian Muslims had sunk the British eyes is visible in an 1868 production called The People of India, which contains photographs of the different castes and tribes of South Asia ranging from Tibetans and Aboriginals (illustrated with a picture of a naked tribal) to the Doms of Bihar. The image of “the Mahomedan” is illustrated by a picture of an Aligarh
The profound contempt that the British so openly expressed for Indian Muslims and Mughal culture proved contagious, particularly to the ascendant Hindu, who quickly hardened their attitudes to all thing Islamic, but also to many young Muslims, who now believed that their own ancient and much-cherished civilization had been irretrievably discredited. Some even shared Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s initial conviction that Indian Muslims could never again prosper or “receive esteem.” “For some time,” he wrote, “I could not even bear to contemplate the miserable state of my people. I wrestled with my grief, and believe me it made an old man of me.”
…
Even after independence, the arts that were cultivated by the Mughals- the miniature- painting tradition, the ghazal, the delicate forms of Mughal architecture- never really regained their full vitality or artistic prestige, and remained- at least in some quarters- as discredited as the emperors who patronized them.
Today, if you visit the old Mughal city of Agra, perhaps to see the Taj Mahal, the supreme architectural achievement of Mughal rule, note how the roundabouts are full of statues of the Rani of Jhansi, Sivaji and even Subhas Chandra Bose; but not one image of any Mughal Emperor has been erected anywhere in the city since independence. [p. 440-442]
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