Delhi in 1857: Through the Eyes of Poets

There have been various attempts to study and understand the nature and extent of the uprising of 1857. It has been variously described as a 'mutiny',1 a 'revolt',2 a 'peasant revolt' 3and a 'war of independence'.4 However, more recent studies focus on regional variations and present a view that it was not one unified movement but many, with widely different causes, motives and natures. Such regional studies show how different were the situations in Muzaffarnagar and the Doab,5 Awadh,6 Bundelkhand 7and Delhi.8

Similarly, the uprising of 1857 had different meanings for each individual who were living in those times. Mutinous sepoys, kings and rulers, peasants, noblemen, merchants and traders, all of them had different expectations and socio-economic aspirations from those circumstances. Somewhere amidst this, poets were also trying to find their own meanings. Poetry, in particular, was an obsession in Delhi. The court of Bahadur Shah Zafar boasted of 'poetic luminaries like Mirza Ghalib, Sheikh Ibrahim Zauq and Momin Khan Momin in one gathering.' 9 Zafar was himself a talented poet and calligrapher.       

From Taimur to Zafar

Before three hundred mutinous sepoys and cavalrymen rode from Meerut on the morning of May 11, the court of Bahadur Shah Zafar was that of 'great brilliance', presiding over 'one of the great cultural renaissances of Indian history.'10But Zafar was already deprived of any political power by the East India Company and he knew this very well. Zahir Dehelvi, who was a shagird (disciple) of Zauq in poetry and Darogha-e-Mahi Maratib (the in charge of the empire's fish emblem) at Zafar's court, talks about it in his eyewitness account of the rebellion, Taraz-e-Zahiri (became famous as Dastan-e-Ghadar):

He [Zafar] often heard expressing his views through his poetry and poetic utterances. One of his apt repeated phrase was:

Meri aulad na-haq aarzu sultanat ki rakhti hai

Yeh karkhana aage ko chalne wala nahin hai

Mujhi par khatma hai

Az Taimur taa Zafar

(My children have unjust dreams of kingship

This order can't stay for long

It will end with me 

From Taimur to Zafar)

 It happened exactly as he predicted.11

Photograph of the damaged St. James's Church in Delhi taken by Dr John Murray in 1858 after the Uprising of 1857
(Source: British Library)

The sepoys from the Meerut cantonment demanded the restoration of Zafar as the Emperor of Hindustan and proclaimed him as their leader. The reluctant Badashah eventually gave legitimacy to the rebels by lending his name to the cause. The stage for a prolonged conflict in Delhi was now set. In the following months, the city witnessed mass murders and looting.

An Ocean of Blood

A poet who was particularly excited by these turn of events was Muhammad Hussain 'Azad', twenty-seven-year-old son of Maulvi Muhammad Baqar, the editor of Dihli Urdu Akhbar. The second edition of the paper after the arrival of sepoys from Meerut, that of 24 May, contained Azad's poem entitled 'History of Instructive Reversals'. The ghazals saw these events as an end to the Christian empire in India:

O Azad, learn this lesson:

For all  their wisdom and vision,

The Christian rulers have been erased,

Without leaving a trace in this world.12
 

However, for Mirza Ghalib, the greatest Urdu poet, this was the time of subsequent destruction of the culture of Delhi. Ghalib called this time 'rustakhez-e-beja', or an unwarranted rebellion.13 He remained in Delhi throughout the uprising and recorded the events of this period, particularly a period of fifteen months (from 11 May 1857 to 31 July 1858),14 in his Persian diary, Dastanbuy (literally nosegay). But it seems that Ghalib wrote this diary in order to get amnesty from the British after the revolt. It is evident from a letter he wrote to Har Gopal Tafta who was supervising the publication of Dastanbuy:

When you see this manuscript you will understand...I shall present one copy to the Governor General of India and through him one copy to her Royal Highness the Queen of England. Now you can guess what the style of writing is going to be.15    

 

A portrait of Asadullah Khan Ghalib (dated 1856) from Bahadur Shah Zafar's collection (now in the Red Fort Museum)

Therefore, his epistolary correspondence is a more relevant source as it is written with comparatively greater freedom and boldness. In a letter to Abdul Ghafur Surur, he scribbled about the bloodbath in the city:

Here in this city with my wife and sons, I am swimming in an ocean of blood.¹⁶ 

In fact, Ghalib's mentally-ill brother, Mirza Yusuf had run out of his house and was shot dead by the blood-thirsty British soldiers and his house looted.17

Worst was the slaughter of innocent people in Kucha Chelan when British and their allies entered the city in September 1857. Among the dead were Miyan Amir Panja-kash, a great calligrapher and Maulvi Imam Bakhsh Sahbai, one of the most celebrated Urdu poet. Zahir Dehelvi wrote:

I have heard that 1400 men from this mohalla were arrested and taken to the river from the Rajghat Darwaza. There, they were slaughtered by guns and the corpses were thrown in the river.

The women ran out of their houses with their children and jumped into wells. The wells of Kucha Chelan were full of dead bodies.18

How Can Dilli Live

On September 20, the British captured the Red Fort. Bahadur Shah Zafar had already escaped to Humayun's Tomb on 17 September. Zafar probably wrote these verses then or sometime after that:

Ai vaaye inquilaab zamaane ke jaur se

Dilli  Zafar ke haath se pal mein nikal gayi 

(Alas! What a revolution, due to the cruelty of age

Dilli slipped out of Zafar's hands in a moment)19

Stereoscopic photograph of the Kashmir Gate at Delhi (battered by shots and shell), with carriages and pedestrians on the roadway, taken by James Ricalton in c. 1903

There were excessive looting and massacre in the streets of Delhi by individual soldiers and officers after the fall. Later on, the formal looting was started by the British 'Prize Agents'. Zahir Dehelvi mourned the situation:

Har ek shahr ka peer wa jawaan qatl huwa

Har ek qabeela wa har khaandaan qatl huwa

Har ek ahl-e-zabaan khush-bayaan qatl huwa

Garz khulasa yeh hai ke ek jahaan qatl huwa

(All the young and old of the city were martyred

Every tribe, every family was martyred 

Every eloquent, sweet-tongued was martyred

In short, an entire world war martyred)20

These circumstances forced poets like Dagh Dehelvi, Mohammad Hussain 'Azad' and Zahir Dehelvi to flee from the city leaving their house and belongings. But Ghalib remained in Delhi. Saddened, he wrote to Majruh:

The life of Dilli depended upon the Fort, the Chandani Chawk, the daily gatherings at Jami Masjid, the weekly walks to the Jamana Bridge and annual Phoolwalon ki Sair. When all these five things are not there, how can Dilli live? Yes, there was once a city by this name in the dominions of India.21

And in a later letter, he comments:

Dilli is not a city now, it is a camp, it is a cantonment. No fort, no city, no bazar, no canals.²² 

In the same letter, he also laments for the fate of female members of the royal house:

The male descendants of the deposed king - such as survived the sword - draw all allowances of five rupees a month. The female descendants, if old, are bawds; if young, are prostitutes.23

The damaged building of Delhi Bank (Part of a portfolio of photographs taken in 1858 by Major Robert Tytler and his wife, Harriet)

With the loss of the Mughal court went much of the city's reputation as a centre of culture and learning. Its libraries had been looted, its precious manuscripts were lost. It seems like it was Zafar who was binding it all together. He was now kept in a dark dingy cell in Red Fort where he lived all his life. He had nothing at his disposal, not even a pen or paper. Yet, he was doing there something that he loved all his life, composing poetry. As Times correspondent W.H. Russell described:

His eyes had the dull, filmy look of very old age...which seems as if it were to guide us to the great darkness...Some heard him quoting verses of his own composition, writing poetry on a wall with a burned stick.24

Zafar finally breathed his last on 7 November 1862 in Rangoon where he was exiled. He was buried secretly and no one knew the exact spot of his grave until 1991. On 16 February 1991, workmen digging a drain stumbled upon a brick-lined grave of the Last Mughal Emperor. It looks like one more of his prediction was right. As one of his verses goes:

Kitna hai badnaseeb Zafar dafn ke liye

Do gaz zameen bhi na mili ku-e-yaar mein

(How unfortunate is Zafar, that even for his burial

He couldn't get two yards of land in the beloved's lane)²⁵ 

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Notes

1. J.W. Kaye, History of the Sepoy War in India, 3 vols. (London 1867).

2. S.N.Sen, Eighteen Fifty-Seven (New Delhi 1957); R.C.Majumdar, The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857 (Calcutta 1957); S.B.Chaudhuri, Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies (Calcutta 1957).

3. Eric Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj, Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India (Cambridge 1978); Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi 1983); Eric Stokes, Peasants Armed: The Indian Revolt of 1857, ed. C.A.Bayly (Oxford 1986).

4. V.D.Savarkar, The Indian War of Independence of 1857 (London 1909).

5. Eric Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj (Cambridge 1978).

6. Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt 1857-1858, A Study in Popular Resistance (Delhi 1984).

7. Tapti Roy, The Politics of a Popular Uprising, Bundelkhand in 1857 (Delhi 1994). 

8. William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal (Penguin India 2006).

9. Rana Safvi, Shahjahanabad, Shahr Ashob Poetry and the Revolt of 1857 (Sahapedia, 2018).

10. William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal (Penguin India 2006) pp. 2-3.

11. Zahir Dehelvi, Dastan-e-Ghadar, trans. Rana Safvi (Penguin India 2017) pp. 25.

12. William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal (Penguin India 2006) pp. 161-162.

13. Mirza Ghalib, Dastanbuy, trans. Khwaja Ahmad Faruqi (Asia Publishing House 1970) pp. 34.

14. Gopi Chand Narang, Ghalib and the Rebellion of 1857.    

15. Mirza Ghalib, Urdu-i-Mu'alla (1869) pp. 41.

16. Ibid., pp. 104.

17. V.N. Datta, Ghalib's Delhi.

18. Zahir Dehelvi, Dastan-e-Ghadar, trans. Rana Safvi (Penguin India 2017) pp. 142-143.

19. Rana Safvi, Shahjahanabad, Shahr Ashob Poetry and the Revolt of 1857 (Sahapedia, 2018).

20. Zahir Dehelvi, Dastan-e-Ghadar, trans. Rana Safvi (Penguin India 2017) pp. 301.

21. Mirza Ghalib, Khutut-e-Ghalib pp. 285.

22. Ibid., pp. 293.

23. Ibid., pp. 293-294.

24. Quoted in William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal (Penguin India 2006) pp. 434.

25. Rana Safvi, Shahjahanabad, Shahr Ashob Poetry and the Revolt of 1857 (Sahapedia, 2018).