Abstract
Amar Farooqui’s work covers that period of Indian history about which few people have much information, let alone understanding, notwithstanding works on ‘Delhi Renaissance’ and ‘Ghadar 1857’. The theatre of existence, the compulsions and responses that drove the Badshah 5 and other inmates of Red Fort in Delhi, with their burden of past glory and might, and the bureaucrats of English East India Company (EEIC), with their baggage of being most powerful in the current political firmament, has hardly exacted much work from historians so far. It is commendable that Farooqui has chosen to fill this vacuum, though his earlier exertions kept him confined to the study of the politics of opium and its impact. However, since the publication of his book Sindias and the Raj, one could have expected this as a natural corollary.
Studies of transitional periods in history began to interest scholars some decades ago when they came to value these phases as being part of historical processual experiences. Farooqui has, since the past decade, made himself a diligent pursuer and an authority of this genre (transition from pre-colonial to colonial or Early Modern period in Indian history). We are all the better for it for such an amazing wealth of history lies within the folds of these transitional phases.
Farooqui’s latest work, Zafar and the Raj—Anglo-Mughal Delhi c. 1800–1850, is yet another work in this genre. The book is mainly divided into three parts related to pre-Zafar, Zafar and 1857 phases, interestingly and broadly titled, ‘The New Mughal Dispensation’, ‘Constraints and Possibilities 1837–1857’ and ‘Ghadar 1857’. Each part contains several chapters. There are two appendices. It is a linear narrative which starts with Shah Alam’s settlement with the EEIC after the battle of Baksar and culminates by branching off in different ways following as it does the (mis)fortunes of principal players, viz., Zafar and his family, the EEIC, Ghalib, etc.
Farooqui must be congratulated for swimming against the tide of scholarly constructions, currently popular in academics. He begins by taking two interesting positions and being unnecessarily touché about another.
The first when he writes
The pre-1858 colonial state was hegemonic only to the extent that it was successful in incorporating traditional ideological and cultural devices to suit its purposes, though of course its power ultimately rested on brute and superior force’ (p. 6, italics mine).
Later, ‘it would be ahistorical to term early nineteenth century religious conflicts as communal’ (p. 47). I was, hence, unable to fathom Farooqui’s use of the term ‘collaborators’ (p. 89, 167) in the most unselfconscious manner.
His second position postulates a break in the continuum of the Mughal regime by suggesting that Zafar was not the ‘last’ of the ‘Mughals’, ‘Timurids fallen on bad days’, but rather the last of the modest new dispensation ushered in by Shah Alam when he established his position after the Battle of Baksar (p. 7, italics mine) ‘maintaining the pretence that the Saltanat was still intact, but at the same time claiming no more than de jure authority’ (p. 39). However, in spite of the ‘modest new dispensation’ and the fact that he was in all practical terms a ‘cultured aristocrat’ (p. 7) rather than a ruler, people’s expectations and mentalities changed little. They continued to hold him in high esteem, sought patronage in the form of blessings, titles, robes of honour, stipends, intervention and direction from the Badshah. The Company was rattled that his aura remained intact and sipahis were willing to fly their flag in his name.
Perhaps, it is because of his training as a Marxist historian that has made Farooqui weave meta-narratives and eschew what he terms the ‘local’. We are grateful he was persuaded to delve into the ‘local’ but he is touché enough to suggest, ‘It serves little purpose to be contemptuous of this responsibility’ (p. 7). Nobody is! It is also a great relief that the author evokes the local without verbal jugglery. This enables the reader to read the book and not beat through a verdurous forest of verbiage.
The period under consideration in Farooqui’s work is one of the most poignant phases of Indian history. Within it is the saga of a human being, theoretically without an equal across the length and width of Hindustan, where his ancestors had ruled over massive territories and large populations. They had vacationed wherever their fancy took them within their Empire, in the salubrious climes of Kashmir, Mandu and other places. Now, the Badshah’s authority was confined to the several million square yards of the Red Fort and he lived in the hearts of the Dilliwalas. For his vacations he probably never left the environs of Delhi. When Zafar indulged himself in such leisure, he could only move to the undulating terrain of Mehrauli, perhaps resigning himself to the pan-Indian philosophical concept of the cosmos in the microcosm.
This spatial restriction was in direct contrast to the increasing perfidy of the EEIC from the time they began to renege on the tribute they had promised Shah Alam to the shooting of royal princes in cold blood, the denuding of the city of most of its inhabitants, destruction of buildings and localities in the fort and outside and of an entire way of life. The 82-year-old Badshah, who had reserved a small plot for himself at Bakhtiyar Kaki’s Dargah in Mehrauli as his final resting place, was to be finally peripatetic as befitting a Mughal Badshah even though it was a journey to his exile at Rangoon.
Farooqui’s work, located as it is between the Battle of Baksar and Zafar in exile at Rangoon, uncovers the nuanced development of relations between the central figures, the events, the subtexts. He culls these from archival sources, plethora of works in Urdu, including literary works and other secondary material. The book really scores in bringing out the fact that although the EEIC reconciled itself to the presence of the Badshah, their relationship was constantly negotiated. Further, even though the EEIC found it expedient to leave the de jure position of the Badshah-turned cultured aristocrat intact, the continued presence of the ruler was beginning to be uncomfortable for them. This was less evident in the decent to petulant behaviour of the bureaucrats of the Company in Delhi but more than indicated in the Company’s correspondence.
While all the chapters are well researched, interesting and absorbing, I have a few favourites. Chapter 4, ‘Akbar Shah’, deals with the constant tussle over the peshkash due to the Badshah from the Company with both sides representing their cases with a great degree of self-righteousness. My own work led me to a ubiquitous feature of this period and that was the litany of grievances of people (located in National and State Archival Records) to whom the Company owed pension, stipend, etc., in the form of revenue from assigned land. Either the revenue fell short of the decided amount or the same land was further alienated in favour of others. Almost in every case, representation led to no redressal because the Company was itself the final arbitrator. If the Company was less than honest in its dealings with the Badshah, what chance did the others have?
However, Bahadur Shah sought the services of Rammohun Roy to represent his case to a superior authority than the Company. While the mission yielded precious little, its nature was completely misunderstood by the heir-apparent, Abu Zafar, who thought that the game was afoot to dislodge him as the waliahd. This was an interesting dimension of the poetical and philosophical Zafar. To his credit, he knew he was not the cynosure of the Badshah’s eyes and even though the ruler played an incredibly truncated role, the Fort was still a hotbed of intrigue.
This chapter holds delightful vignettes of cultural expressions both misunderstood and disdained: refusal to allow the Governor General to be seated in the presence of the Badshah (pp. 73–74); transgression of etiquette in the Harem, including Bishop Heber’s responses later (pp. 111–12); the issue of Nazr; rejection of blessed flowers of Dargah Nizamuddin sent by the Badshah for the Resident; members of the Resident’s retinue entering the enclosure of Diwan-i-Khas on horse-back.
While the Fort was a hotbed of intrigue and the Badshah and his family were slighted and disdained in the northern quarter of the city, the officials at the Residency were indulging in competing loyalties towards the Company and were in competition with one another. Farooqui has brought this out succinctly in Chapter 5, ‘The Delhi Agency’, where he discusses Coolbrooke, Hawkins, Martin, Trevelyan, Metcalfe brothers, William Fraser, etc.
The longest chapter in the book, ‘The Palace and the City’, is based on the premise that the palace was closely integrated with the social and cultural life of the city. According to Farooqui, the Emperor’s authority was supreme in the palace, while the city was administered by the Company. Still, however, there was a near total connect between the ruler and the residents of Delhi, manifested in different ways.
The intellectual life of Delhi in the period under consideration is being scrutinized with great interest by historians across specializations and universities. Farooqui is also mindful of that and discusses the poets and intellectuals of the city and teachers associated with Delhi College. While he writes quite appropriately about Ghalib that, ‘There was no place for his towering genius in the colonial scheme of things’, I wonder, given the title of the book and the dynamics of this period, if it is possible to state so definitively that, ‘Colonial absence rather than presence determined the historical processes of this island....’ (p. 127).
Historians of ‘Modern Indian History’ look at Ghadar 1857 from top-below and draw certain conclusions from it as does the author when he writes in ‘Under the Sipahi Regime’ that, ‘In the absence of a nationalist vocabulary, the ideologues of the revolt clothed their programme of anti-colonial resistance in religious rhetoric’ (p. 152). Further, ‘the post-1857 colonial state would emphasize continuity, which in turn tended to make it socially reactionary’ (p. 188).
The debate is related to discourses on nationalist and anti-colonial resistance, and as a medievalist I find it difficult to handle or comment on it.
The last chapter, ‘Oblivion, Remembrance’, is amongst other things about the trial of Zafar, which in the words of Farooqui, ‘served the purpose of publicly demonstrating that the Company possessed sovereign power, against which he had committed high treason’, even though he further adds, ‘The Company’s government had no independent constitutional basis. It derived its authority from the various farmans issued by the emperor’ (p. 184) and of course from brute and superior military power.
For some strange reason, I was reminded of the story of Alexander and Puru. But of course! There was no merchant factor in it!
The first appendix is a congratulatory letter by the Governor General on the accession of Bahadur Shah Zafar in which Auckland, the governor-general, addresses Zafar as ‘My Royal and Illustrious Friend’ (p. 199, italics mine).
A summary of Ghalib’s Dastambu forms the second appendix. It is a sort of a diary which he kept for fifteen months during the course of Ghadar and after, recording all that he saw, heard, thought, felt, suffered and lost.
Two small issues continue to irk me. I have not been able to locate the Aurangabadi mosque (p. 125) within the space of Shahjahanabad, and when the author takes up ‘Ghadar 1857’ so substantively why does the title of his work say 1850?
Let me conclude this with a small laundry list of add-ons, which would have been hugely attractive to lesser mortals like me. A map of Delhi to highlight the spatial proximity of the Red Fort and the Residency on the common north–south axis in contrast to the wide road of cultural differences and mentalities people here traversed to cover that little physical space. A few pictures and some peppering of the text with anecdotal references would have increased the sense of belonging with the material and added to the poignancy of the subject or drawn a few chuckles in spite of it.
Such works should break the confines of those formally engaged with history to interest younger generations for whom Bahadur Shah Zafar is only a road in New Delhi. Farooqui’s work demystifies this period of history and elicits in me the same response that the reading of an excellent primary work does. That is, ‘Why didn’t he write more?’