The Last Mughal

The Last Mughal

William Dalrymple

Pages: 496, Category: History

Publisher: Penguin-Viking

Dalrymple’s well known historical narrative describes events in and around Delhi on the aftermath of the 1857 riots and the overthrow of the Mughal dynasty. Bahadur Shah Zafar II was the last of the Timurid line, but he was long a chess-board King at Delhi with all the real power vested with the East India company. When the mutineers stormed into Delhi and made an unwilling Zafar their emperor, he had no option but to move along the tide. The battle was eventually lost and one of the worst genocide of the populace took place by the British. Three of his sons shot in cold blood by the British, Zafar was convicted, exiled to Burma and died there in 1862 at the age of 87.

Dalrymple concentrates on Delhi and Zafar alone and has gone through a large number of first-hand accounts he collected at the National Archives, which he claims was unread for a long time. He manages to strike a neutral pose throughout, and explains the intrigues in court, harassment and plundering by the mutineering sepoys, blood thirsty revenge by the winning British and the life in exile of Zafar. An altogether excellent book.

Some quotes.

The reasons of the mutiny

1. The new Enfield gun was, unlike its predecessor, the smooth-barrelled Brown Bess muskets, had grooved(rifled) barrels. While this made them much more accurate and gave them a longer range, it did mean they were more difficult to load, and in order to get the ball down the barrel, quantities of grease were needed, as well as a great deal of pushing with the ramrod. This involved biting off the top of the cartridge, pouring the powder into the rifle, then stuffing the ball and the rest of the fatty cartridge down after it with the rod.

This was new technology, however, and the company had decided, unwisely, to have the cartridges manufactured at the Dumdum arsenal in Calcutta, which had no previous experience of manufacturing this type of ammunition. As a result, there were inevitably teething problems, in particular with the first few batches of Dumdum manufactured cartridges, which seemed to have been coated with far too much grease. It meant that the barrels quickly fouled up with the excess fat and needed frequent cleaning. The second problem was that the greasy cartridge was deeply unpleasant to put in the mouth, and biting became thoroughly repellant to any rifleman. It was into this fertile soil that a rumour quickly took root; that the quantities of grease used were not only unpleasant, they were actually defiling, and made from a mixture of cow fat and pig fat. The rumours do seem to have been based on truth: initially the unpleasant grease had indeed been made from these defiling ingredients, as Lord Canning later admitted. The ingredients were quickly changed, and in many cases, the sepoys were allowed to make up their own lubricant of beeswax and ghee, but the damage was done.

2. Many sons of established sepoy families in Hindustan found themselves refused jobs in the army as the Company was busy filling its ranks with Gurkhas and Sikhs, whose fighting skills had come to impress the British. And for those who could get positions, there was little chance of promotion: even after years of gallant and faithful service, no Indian could rise above the ranks of subahdar or subahdar-major; real authority rested with the British.

3. The acts of the aggressive missionaries and collusion of army officers with them

4. The Company passed the hugely unpopular General Service Enlistment Act, which required that all sepoys should be prepared to serve abroad. Since ‘crossing the black water’ was forbidden to high-caste Hindus, this only went further to confirm the fears that the Company was actively conspiring to take away their status and their religion.

5. There were also great worries that the military profession was losing its status and respectability as the Company was now actively recruiting and promoting men of lower castes. The Company high command now came to regard such men as less troublesome and ritually oversensitive.

The outbreak was mainly against Christians.

Other than the targeting of Christians, there was surprisingly little patriotic or nationalistic spirit visible in the violence that rumbled on for weeks after the outbreak. The mutiny turned into a Jihad as more and more Jihadis joined the struggle and the Hindu proportions dwindled.

Overall rating: 4/5