Ignorant armies clash by night

William Dalrymple

The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857

Knopf, 2007, xxiii + 534pp. $30

The Sepoy Mutiny is one of those historic disasters that gets worse with the passage of time. The story has been told over and over again, though never with the splendid fresh documentation Dalrymple has gathered here and seldom with as much color and verve. But the more we see its dreadful consequences swell, spread, and fuse with other troubles, the more ghastly it seems.

Everyone knows, more or less, how the introduction of the Enfield rifle, with cartridges (whose top had to be bitten off before loading) that contained both cow and pig fat, sparked a series of riots among both Hindu and Muslim troops that eventually led to the massacre of European Christians and the siege of Delhi, which was partly leveled by British bombs and finally captured after furious urban warfare.

As a matter of fact, the animal grease was quickly replaced by inoffensive lubricants, but the damage had already been done by the time eighty-five rebellious sepoys were court-martialed and condemned to ten years of penal servitude. In any case, Indian grievances ran much deeper than this fateful symbolic episode and included the continuing usurpations of the East India Company and the increasingly intolerant policies of the British Evangelicals who replaced the "white Mughals," the earlier generations of Brits who had often met the natives half-way, marrying Indian women (sometimes more than one) and even converting to Islam.

Then as now, a large majority of Indians were Hindus; but the Muslims of the Mughal Empire had ruled the north of India, and well beyond, into southern India and Afghanistan, since the 1530s. By the mid-19th century it had been in decay for 130 years, and its collapse was a done deal; but its actual extinction proved to be a true catastrophe. The last of the Mughals, vividly portrayed by Dalrymple, was the emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II (1775-1862), a religiously tolerant man (his mother was a Hindu) of exquisite refinement and a notable poet, cruelly but accurately dubbed "the chessboard king." More involved in harem intrigues than Realpolitik, Zafar first viewed the war with misgivings, which only multiplied when his splendid capital was overrun by the "Tilangas" (outsider sepoys), who enraged him and the city's inhabitants with their depredations. Still he let himself be pressured into backing the revolt, for which the British punished him with house-arrest until his death, at 87, in Rangoon.

Most of The Last Mughal is taken up with the brutal four-month war (May-September, 1857) and the furious reprisals that followed. Dalrymple (aided by his colleague Mahmood Farooqui) is the first writer to mine the archives of hitherto ignored Persian and Urdu sources, which supply all sorts of insights, especially into conditions in Delhi during the siege. War, as usual, brought out the worst in everyone. Most notable perhaps was the indiscriminate slaughter of British women and children, which in turn unleashed indiscriminate mass murder of civilians by the army under General Archdale Wilson (most of whose fighting men were Indians themselves--Pathans, Sikhs, or Punjabi Muslims).

Apart from marking the end of an empire that had begun with a foreign invasion, but had developed into a religious-cultural symbiosis far in advance of anything in Europe, the British triumph launched the marginalization and persecution of India's Muslims, which continues to this day. It fed the flames of Wahhabi fundamentalism, whose missionaries were hard at work in India a century and a half ago, and whose followers were driven to a still more fanatical pitch by their crushing defeat. Would the nightmare of Partition ever have happened, and would the miseries Pakistanis are now inflicting on themselves and the rest of the world ever have materialized, if the British hadn't treated the Muslims so badly? When the city fell and was ethnically cleansed, with many of its finest mosques razed, there were perhaps a thousand Muslims left in it. Thereafter, no Muslims were admitted unless they could prove their "loyalty" to the Raj. The British may have won their reverse edition of the Battle of Stalingrad, but if so, it was a very Pyrrhic victory. As Dalrymple summarizes it: "The profound contempt that the British so openly expressed for Indian Muslim and Mughal culture proved contagious, particularly to the ascendant Hindus, who quickly hardened their attitudes to all things Islamic, but also to many Muslims, who now believed that their own ancient and much-cherished civilization had been irretrievably discredited."

Not that any fair-minded observer must simply damn the British. Among the countless sources of Indian resentment were the foreigners' outlawing of suttee (still very occasionally practiced in India, by the way) and insistence on allowing Hindu widows to remarry. The Mughal empire, for all its charms, was an autocracy; it did imprison its women behind the purdah; and only ninety years after the Mughals were cashiered, the country finally won its independence. Nineteen years later, India elected a woman prime minister, a decade or so before Margaret Thatcher would attain that office and long before Hillary Clinton even aimed at it.