[Reader-list] Gyan Prakash on Dalrymple's 'The Last Mughal'

[Anuj Bhuwania]

The Nation
 review | posted April 12, 2007 (April 30, 2007 issue)

INEVITABLE REVOLUTIONS

Gyan Prakash

E.M. Forster's A Passage to India ends with a
poignant exchange between Aziz, a young Muslim
doctor, and Fielding, a Briton sympathetic to
Indians. Though Aziz is acquitted of the false
charge of molesting a British woman, he is deeply
wounded by the experience and wants nothing to do
with the colonial race. Fielding, an old friend,
seeks him out and asks why they cannot be friends
again.

But the horses didn't want it--they swerved
apart; the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks
through which riders must pass single file; the
temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the
birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came
into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau
beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their
hundred voices. "No, not yet," and the sky said,
"No, not there."

This is how the novel ended, written in 1924
against the backdrop of the first mass
nationalist upsurge against British rule. Gandhi,
who led the movement, was a product of the Indian
encounter with Western culture. He trained as a
barrister in London and spent more than two
decades in South Africa, developing his doctrine
of nonviolent struggle in campaigning for Indian
rights. Western ideas deeply influenced his
political philosophy, and he maintained lifelong
friendships with a number of Europeans. But
anticolonialism formed the bedrock of his
relationship with the West. Despite good
intentions, there could be no friendship in the
abstract. You could not simply wish away empire
when it formed the setting in which the members
of colonizing and colonized cultures met.

Historians of empire have always understood this
chasm in human relationships created by the fact
of one culture ruling over another. But a
reappraisal of this truth has been under way for
some time now at the hands of revisionist
historians of the British Empire. These
historians dislike Edward Said and the
postcolonial critics who cite French theory and
argue that the British Empire established lasting
Orient/Occident and East/West oppositions in
politics and knowledge. Uncomfortable with the
political passion and theoretical language of
these critics, the revisionists counsel us (in
mainly British accents, with some American
intonations) to lower the anti-imperial
temperature and write old-fashioned narrative
history. They contend that empire is the oldest
and one of the most widely practiced forms of
governance.

The Romans did it, the Spaniards did it, the
Russians did it, the Chinese did it, even the
newly independent nations have done it. Everybody
oppressed everyone else. Pax Britannica may have
ruled over one-fifth of humanity, but the
conquerors, soldiers, administrators and scholars
were also human. Why bring in such abstractions
as Orientalism and colonialism? Underneath it
all, the story of the British Empire is a
narrative of individuals caught up in human
encounters between cultures.

True, the revisionist argument continues, Britons
went to distant lands to profit and conquer. But
vastly outnumbered by the local population and
pitted against powerful adversaries, they were
deeply conscious of their vulnerability. This was
particularly true in the eighteenth century, when
the British were all too aware of the power and
grandeur of the Ottomans and the Mughals. The
Barbary corsairs and Algerian slave owners
harassed them in the Mediterranean, the Indian
tribes challenged them in North America and the
French engaged them in imperial wars. Then, their
American territories fell. On the Indian
subcontinent, the Mughal Empire was reduced to a
shell, but successor states posed a serious
challenge to the East India Company's military
position. Embattled, the British were forced to
depend on indigenous allies and could not afford
to treat native populations and cultures as
inferior. Forcibly or willingly, many crossed
cultural borders. They shed European trousers for
native pajamas, grew Hindu mustaches and Muslim
beards, married local women and kept concubines,
and collected indigenous texts and artifacts. A
human story of interest and immersion in other
cultures, languages and artifacts--not
mastery--underpinned British imperial expansion.

Stroke by stroke, this revisionist historiography
seeks to redraw the portrait of the British
Empire. This picture has received prominent
attention in British publications, including
leftist ones, eager to mark distance from their
imperial past while trying to rescue some
cultural value from it for the present. In this
version of the story, set against the current
spectacle of an arrogant and dangerous American
imperialism, we are told the British Empire
developed willy-nilly as a collection of
territories and cultures; it was never the
project that nineteenth-century imperialists
claimed and that present-day postcolonial critics
allege. The conquerors, particularly in the
eighteenth century, are seen not as agents of
colonial oppression and exploitation but as
hapless imperialists caught in a hostile
environment; weak and embattled, they eagerly
embraced indigenous allies and cultures.

This revisionist view of the British Empire
underpins William Dalrymple's deeply researched
and beautifully written The Last Mughal. The
subject of his study is the 1857 Uprising against
British rule in India. It was an event that,
according to Dalrymple, marked the end of the
eighteenth century's "relatively easy
relationship of Indian and Briton" and the onset
of "hatreds and racism" that became so
characteristic of the nineteenth-century Raj.
"The Uprising, it is clear, was the result of
that change, not its cause."

When the Uprising broke out, Company rule in
India was already a century old. During this
time, the Company had acquired effective military
and political control over nearly the entire
subcontinent. The imperial Mughals, a dynasty
that traced its lineage back to Timur (Tamerlane)
and had ruled India since 1526, still enjoyed
nominal authority. The aging Mughal emperor,
Bahadur Shah Zafar, lived in Delhi. Clutching
hollow emblems of authority, Zafar presided over
the royal household and harem. Real power lay
with the Company, which used it to build a modern
empire. The Company annexed territories,
established courts, laid telegraph and railway
lines, collected taxes and instituted land
settlements that caused widespread discontent.
The developing ideology of liberal imperialism,
buttressed by evangelical Christianity, left
little room for existing cultures and traditions.
The old nobility and landholders were summarily
cast aside, and Thomas Macaulay declared that all
the accumulated products of Oriental knowledge
were worth a single shelf of a Western library.

The simmering discontent against British rule
boiled over with the "greased cartridge"
controversy. At the end of 1856, the Company
army, which consisted of both Hindu and Muslim
sepoys (recruits) commanded by British officers,
introduced the new Enfield rifle. Loading the
rifle required biting open the cartridge, which
was greased to ease pushing the ball down the
barrel. Initially, the grease was made of cow and
pig fat, defiling to both Hindus and Muslims.
This was quickly changed to beeswax and linseed
oil, but the damage was done. A rumor spread that
the British were deliberately using pig and cow
fat to violate the sepoys' religions.

The Uprising began on May 10, 1857, with a mutiny
of Indian soldiers in the military barracks of
Meerut. The mutineers killed their British
officers and marched thirty miles south to Delhi,
where they were joined by the sepoys in the
regiments stationed in the city. Together, they
"restored" Zafar as their emperor. The spirit of
rebellion spread to other garrisons in North
India and turned from a limited mutiny into a
widespread revolt of peasants, artisans,
laborers, religious leaders and the old gentry.
For more than a year, the fire of the Uprising
raged. European officers, women and children were
massacred. British authority crumbled in large
parts of North India until it was restored with
brute force in the summer of 1858. Zafar's glory
ended even earlier. Within a few months, the
rebel position in Delhi fell. The emperor was
tried and convicted for hatching an international
Muslim conspiracy against his English
benefactors, and exiled to Burma. The charge was
legally and factually absurd. Since Zafar had
never renounced sovereignty over the Company, he
could not possibly be guilty of treason. In fact,
Dalrymple explains, "from a legal point of view,
a good case could be made that it was the East
India Company which was the real rebel, guilty of
revolt against a feudal superior to whom it had
sworn allegiance for nearly a century." Equally
groundless was the allegation that Zafar was
behind an international Muslim conspiracy
stretching from Constantinople to Delhi. "The
Uprising in fact showed every sign of being
initiated by upper-caste Hindu sepoys reacting
against specifically military grievances
perceived as a threat to their faith and dharma;
it then spread rapidly through the country,
attracting a fractured and diffuse collection of
other groups alienated by aggressively
insensitive and brutal British policies." The
British "bigoted and Islamophobic argument"
reduced the complexity of the rebellion to an
oversimplified and fictional picture of a "global
Muslim conspiracy with an appealingly visible and
captive hate figure at its centre." Back in
England, the Uprising and the aftermath of
British bloodlust shocked the Parliament into
assuming direct rule over India. Company rule was
abolished, and Queen Victoria became the Empress
of India.

Understandably, the Uprising aroused heated
emotions. The British officials and civilians
caught up in it captured the experience in their
writings. Several fictional and historical
accounts were published, including Flora Annie
Steel's novel On the Face of Waters (1896) and
John Kaye's three-volume History of the Sepoy War
in India (1877). In the British imperial
imagination the Mutiny was remembered as the
moment when Indians bared their barbarian souls.
In Indian nationalist mythology, it was the first
war of independence. Outside these stock images
and myths, there exists a substantial body of
sophisticated and complex historical work on the
Uprising, notably the writings of Rudrangshu
Mukherjee, Gautam Bhadra and Eric Stokes. But
historians have largely ignored Delhi's
experience of the cataclysm, preferring to focus
on areas where the revolt was more protracted.

Dalrymple, a British travel writer and historian
who divides his time between London and Delhi,
sets out to correct this neglect. Writing with
obvious affection for Delhi and appreciation for
Mughal culture, he shows that the experience of
the rebellion in the city was quite distinct. It
was the seat of the imperial Mughals and the
center of high Indo-Muslim culture. Even if Zafar
no longer exercised real power, the emperor, as
the rebel proclamation demonstrated, still
exercised tremendous symbolic significance. From
his palace in Delhi's Red Fort, Zafar wrote
accomplished poetry and presided over a refined
court milieu. Living under his patronage was
Ghalib, possibly the greatest poet ever in the
Urdu language, and one who went on to record his
experiences of the Uprising. Using sources in
Persian and Urdu along with voluminous British
papers, Dalrymple has written a riveting and
poignant account of the events of 1857 in Delhi.

When the mutineers descended on Delhi, the city
initially welcomed them. Dalrymple shows that
Zafar was gratified by the "restoration" of his
imperial sovereignty but chafed at the lack of
proper deference the rebels showed. He complained
bitterly about the violation of imperial
protocols and the country manners of the largely
Hindu sepoys and was alarmed by the jihadi rebels
who arrived from the North Indian town of
Bareilly to add religious zeal to the Uprising.
Trapped between the imperious British and the
rude sepoys and zealous jihadis, Zafar
reluctantly assumed the mantle of rebellion.
However, he was too weak, too indecisive and
utterly incapable of assuming the role assigned
to him. The Uprising floundered and the elite
opinion in the city turned against the violence
and the unsophisticated culture of the lowly
sepoys. Bandits and roving rebels ruled the roost
on highways, making escape from the city
hazardous.

Europeans found their houses ransacked, their
property looted and their lives endangered. Upon
victory, the British celebrated their triumph by
letting loose a reign of terror on the fleeing
insurgents and Delhi's inhabitants. The princes
who had participated in the Uprising surrendered
unconditionally to a British officer, William
Hodson, with the hope that their lives would be
spared. Hodson stripped them naked and shot them
in cold blood. Then he promptly proceeded to
strip the corpses of their rings and amulets,
which he pocketed. Satisfied with the killing and
the loot, Hodson wrote to his sister: "I am not
cruel, but I must confess I did enjoy the
opportunity of ridding the earth of these
wretches." Edward Vibart, who participated in
what he called the "murder" of defenseless
civilians, wrote about the horror of hearing
women scream after witnessing their husbands and
sons being butchered. "Heaven knows I feel no
pity--but when some old grey bearded man is
brought and shot before your eyes--hard must be
that man's heart I think who can look on with
indifference," he wrote. But horror quickly
shifted to bravado and justification: "And yet it
must be so for these black wretches shall atone
with their blood for our murdered countrymen--my
own father and mother--sister and brother all cry
aloud for vengeance, and their son will avenge
them." Slaughter followed slaughter. In the Kucha
Chelan neighborhood, Dalrymple writes, about
1,400 residents were cut down: "After the British
and their allies had tired of bayoneting the
inhabitants, they marched forty survivors out to
the Yamuna, lined them up before the walls of the
Fort, and shot them." Among them were some of the
most distinguished poets and artists of Delhi.

The victors made little distinction between
insurgents and civilians. George Wagentrieber
wrote with satisfaction in the Delhi Gazette
Extra: "Hanging is, I am happy to say, the order
of the day here." Believing that the rebels had
sexually assaulted their women (a charge proved
false by a subsequent inquiry commission), "the
British officers did little to stop the raping of
the women of Delhi." To escape the victors'
wrath, most of Delhi's residents fled to the
surrounding countryside, finding shelters in
tombs and ruins and scavenging for food. Looters
went house to house, seizing whatever they could.
"To all of us [soldiers]," wrote one officer,
"the loot of the city was to be a fitting
recompense for the toils and privations we had
undergone." Prize Agents stalked the city,
confiscating native property and delivering it to
Europeans. To punish the residents for having
supported the Uprising, the British considered
leveling the entire city. Fortunately, cooler
heads prevailed. "Even so, great swathes of the
city--especially around the Red Fort--were still
cleared away." Many fine mosques, Sufi shrines,
palaces and the houses of notables were
demolished. Ghalib grieved that, under wanton
destruction, "the whole city has become a
desert." Dalrymple relates this story in all its
horror, quoting extensively from the melancholy
descriptions written by Delhi's literary elite
and from accounts by the victors, who gleefully
recorded the terrible vengeance they wreaked on
the vanquished in what became known as the City
of the Dead.

Dalrymple mourns the passing of an age, the end
of Delhi's urbane milieu in which the Europeans
had taken a deep interest. Now that the "beating
heart of Indo-Islamic civilization had been
ripped out," the British-Indian racial divide
ripped open the body politic. Contrary to
received opinion, Dalrymple argues that the
Uprising did not cause this divide; rather, the
blame should be placed on "the Victorian
Evangelicals whose insensitivity, arrogance and
blindness did much to bring the Uprising of 1857
down upon both their own heads and those of the
people and court of Delhi, engulfing all of
northern India in a religious war of terrible
violence." The rebel violence and the British
retribution merely widened the gap between the
rulers and the ruled that had already opened
before 1857. He tells this story with an eye on
the current phenomenon of an evangelically
inspired American imperial power locked in battle
with jihadi Islam. He sees ghosts of the past in
the present good-versus-evil war: "Today, West
and East again face each other uneasily across a
divide that many see as religious war. Jihadis
again fight what they regard as a defensive
action against their Christian enemies, and again
innocent women, children and civilians are
slaughtered." The contemporary passion for
absolutes, he argues, inflicts irreparable damage
on ordinary interactions and exchanges between
cultures and religions.

As critical as Dalrymple is of the current
ideological war of opposites, he is equally
impatient with Edward Said and postcolonial
critics. Writing with the traditional British
suspicion of theory, he sees them as purveying
the abstract concepts of Orientalism and
colonialism. These abstractions, according to
him, do injustice to the human interactions
across identities that were common in the
eighteenth century. Before nineteenth-century
racism and colonial arrogance took over, the
British and Indians bridged the distance of
language and religion.

Dalrymple is on familiar ground here. He has
published two acclaimed books that celebrated
Europeans who crossed racial and religious
boundaries. In City of Djinns, a book about his
year in Delhi, he uncovers the ghosts of the
city's turbulent and varied past. Among them was
William Fraser, a Scotsman sent by the Company to
Delhi in 1805 to pacify the brigand-infested
countryside around Delhi. Cut off from his
compatriots, Fraser gathered a private force of
Indians and set about his business. Always ready
to abandon the routine of the office desk for the
excitement of the battleground in the Company's
wars, he surrounded himself with a community of
Indian followers whom his contemporaries likened
to Scottish Highlanders. He adopted native dress
and customs, and he fathered "as many children as
the King of Persia" from his harem of Indian
wives. Dalrymple compares him to Mr. Kurtz in
Conrad's Heart of Darkness; like Kurtz, "he saw
himself as a European potentate ruling in a pagan
wilderness." The Company officialdom did not
trust him, but Fraser was no power-hungry brute.
He was a philosopher who took a deep interest in
Sanskrit, composed Persian couplets and
befriended the poet Ghalib. His younger brother
found him unrecognizable; he had turned "half
Hindoostanee." In a curious twist, Dalrymple's
research uncovered that Fraser was a distant
cousin of his wife.

This mixture of the personal and the intellectual
also animates Dalrymple's White Mughals. While
researching the book, he discovered that his
great-great grandmother was born to a Hindu
Bengali woman who had married a Frenchman. This
discovery awakened his interest in the unwritten
history of interracial unions under empire. In
White Mughals, he tells the fascinating story of
James Kirkpatrick, the British Resident in the
court of Hyderabad between 1797 and 1805.
Kirkpatrick fell in love with 14-year-old Khair,
the grandniece of a powerful Muslim noble, and
married her despite official disapproval. Khair
bore him two children, who were promptly packed
off to England. After Kirkpatrick died, she had
an affair with his assistant, who eventually
deserted her. Khair was exiled from Hyderabad,
lost her house and money and never got to see her
children again. In telling this story of love and
betrayal, Dalrymple weaves in accounts of other
"White Mughals," men like Sir David Ochterlony,
the British Resident in Delhi, who lived the life
of a Mughal nobleman. He dressed in Indian
clothes, had a fondness for hookahs and dance
girls and strolled Delhi every evening with his
thirteen wives, each mounted on an elephant.

The Last Mughal returns to this territory of
Frasers and Ochterlonys. Dalrymple writes that
there were a number of landed families in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
who walked the fault lines between Islam and
Christianity, the Mughals and the British.
Several of these families descended from European
mercenaries who had married into the Mughal elite
and practiced a hybrid lifestyle. They were
Christians but had adopted Mughal customs and
manners. All this cultural borrowing came under
increasing scrutiny and critique with the
consolidation of Company power and the arrival of
the evangelicals by the 1830s. An intolerant
spirit was in the air. The winds of change were
blowing on the Muslim side as well. Zafar himself
was born of a Hindu mother, not untypical of the
Mughals. He promoted a form of mystical Sufi
Islam and was revered by many as a saint. Delhi's
literary culture was also open and tolerant,
suspicious of orthodox theologians. But the
orthodox opinion began gaining strength, setting
the stage for the clash of fundamentalisms.

This is a neat formulation, but it is also false.
The clash of religious fundamentalisms did not
cause the Uprising. A great majority of the
sepoys who mutinied and assembled in Delhi to
"restore" the Mughal emperor were Hindus. Despite
the presence of jihadi rebels, the rebellion was
a remarkable display of Hindu-Muslim unity in
Delhi and elsewhere. If it was a religious war,
it was one only insofar as the rebels opposed
what they thought was the British plot to impose
Christianity. The growing evangelical influence
was a factor in fomenting this opposition, but
the causes of the Uprising lay in colonialism
itself. Coercion, conflict and violence were
built into colonial rule, even when it was
imposed with the help of indigenous allies and
soldiers. As the Company government violently
displaced existing structures of power and
authority, it encountered endemic opposition. The
1857 Mutiny in the army over greased cartridges
served only to unify and escalate specific
grievances at different places and among
different groups into a widespread violent
opposition to the Company.

To argue, as Dalrymple does, that it was only
imperial arrogance and evangelical influence that
forced the rebels to engage in a life-or-death
struggle is to underestimate the depth of their
determination. Revolt and resistance against
colonialism were inherent in alien rule. Since
the beginning of the Company conquest in the
mid-eighteenth century, rebellions were endemic;
the Uprising was only the most widespread and
fierce expression of the built-in conflict
between the colonizers and the colonized.
Dalrymple overlooks this history and assumes that
but for the nineteenth-century imperial
foolhardiness, the imagined eighteenth-century
empire might have remained intact. This would be
like supposing that prior to present wars of
fundamentalisms, the West's history of domination
over the rest of the world was free of sharp
oppositions and discords. In drawing a parallel
between 1857 and the current "clash of
civilizations," Dalrymple makes precisely such a
suspect assumption. Whatever the role of the
"clash of civilizations" ideology in the current
conflict, the opposition to Western domination
did not begin with it, just as the insurgency
against Company rule in India did not start with
the arrival of Victorian evangelicalism but was
endemic to British rule. Empire has always
produced challenge and resistance. If Dalrymple
and like-minded writers were not so dismissive of
the "abstractions" of Edward Said and
postcolonial critics, they would not need the
reminder that colonialism was always a
fundamentally violent system.

Joseph Conrad wrote that the conquest of earth
was never a pretty thing if you looked into it
too closely, for it meant taking lands away from
people of a different color and appearance. Even
if racial superiority and the "civilizing
mission" were not marshaled to justify the
eighteenth-century empire, this does not mean
that it was a pretty thing. As Nicholas Dirks's
superb recent book The Scandal of Empire shows,
greed, duplicity, corruption, exploitation and
violence were present at the birth of Company
rule in India. With perceptive readings of the
British record in eighteenth-century India, Dirks
shows that the scandal of colonial violence and
oppression was systemic, and not just the product
of a few bloodthirsty and corrupt officials.
Edmund Burke's eloquent rage against the
Company's arbitrary power during Warren
Hastings's impeachment trial, for example, was
underpinned by his scorn for Indian customs and
traditions. He expressed sympathy for the plight
of native rulers deposed by Hastings, but what
really troubled him about the Company's conduct
was that it was being corrupted by India. One
day, he feared, this corruption would spread to
Britain. The scandal of Company rule had to be
expunged so that the record of the British Empire
would remain untarnished. Such an assertion on
behalf of the empire and its legitimacy is
unthinkable without a belief in Britain's right
to conquer and rule and a complete disdain for
Indians.

Consider the fabrication of European deaths in
the Calcutta Fort in 1757 into the mythical
"Black Hole" incident. Dirks points out that
combat rather than imprisonment caused most of
the deaths, and that there were far fewer
fatalities than initially claimed. But Europeans
were so quick to believe the lurid tale of
Oriental barbarism that the Black Hole soon
acquired a mythical status. When the Company
carried out sustained wars against indigenous
rulers in the last quarter of the eighteenth
century, the desire to punish native perfidy
encouraged the brutal campaigns.

As globalization compresses space and time, those
privileged and educated enough to travel between
cultures find themselves increasingly impatient
with the legacies of imperial racism and
nationalist myths. This is understandable. But to
retail the eighteenth century as a time when
Europeans and non-Europeans overcame racial and
religious boundaries is to fly in the face of
historical evidence. To see the crossing of
imperial borders in the lives of "White Mughals"
is to misrepresent both the nature of interracial
liaisons and imperial conquest.

Empire made the Frasers and the Ochterlonys
possible. It was because of empire, not despite
it, that Europeans took an interest in
non-European cultures. Colonial power enabled the
Europeans to enter into interracial unions, keep
concubines and father children, and learn native
languages and customs. This was largely a one-way
street on which mostly European men traveled to
"collect" Indian women, territory, texts and
artifacts. Astonishingly, Dalrymple fails to see
the sense of imperial entitlement that permitted
Company men to penetrate indigenous culture and
become White Mughals. He identifies William
Fraser with Kurtz but still insists that the
eighteenth-century conquerors could act without a
sense of racial privilege. This is to claim that
empire can permit "easy relationships" between
cultures, that human exchanges can occur outside
history. Not now, not then.