Mughal memories

On 10 May 1857 Indian soldiers (sepoys) at the cantonment in Meerut mutinied and attacked their British officers. Fearing the punishment that would come when British officers at nearby cantonments heard of what had happened, many of the sepoys rushed to Delhi some 64 kilometres away and there sought the protection of the Mughal emperor, by then an old and feeble man.

His age did not deter them. When they reached Delhi and hurried to his palace in the Red Fort, he would not see them. They forced themselves into his quarters, and either coerced or persuaded him to lead them. The sepoys now had a leader, or a figurehead, and with him what had been a matter of military indiscipline became something more than a mutiny—a revolt against the foreign government. News of the uprising was spread elsewhere by soldiers who had fled out of Meerut in directions other than Delhi. A chain reaction was set off as cantonment after cantonment broke out in mutiny, and officers, other Europeans and Indian Christians were killed. Over the following months most of north and central India became involved in what the British called the Indian Mutiny and which Indians and others consider to be the First War of Indian Independence or the Mutiny and Civil Rebellion of 1857. Nothing like it had happened before, no extensive attack on British people and on the structure of domination they had established over the previous two centuries.

The story of 1857 has often been told and there is no need to repeat it here.²³ It is pertinent to note, however, that the uprising and the civil rebellion did not involve the rim cities, Bombay, Calcutta or Madras, to any significant extent and that the British quickly quelled such murmurings of discontent as did appear there. Nor did the Punjab rise, despite the fact that it was finally conquered less than a decade earlier by the British.

What is important in the present context is that the emperor and his Delhi became central to the uprising and to the battles waged between British and Indian armies. The mutineers’ initial and immediate resort to the emperor in Delhi showed that both institutions had managed to retain considerable hold over people’s minds, imaginations and loyalties. The memory of past glories had not been replaced by British domination over India. It still survived. The emperor and his capital thus became the symbolic centre for resistance, the rallying point and symbolic justification for Indian opposition.

The British understood the threat Delhi posed to their reconquering of the rebel north. They realised that Delhi was the key to reconquest; they needed to win Delhi back before they could succeed elsewhere. So the British returned to Delhi on 8 June but were not strong enough to retake control of it or re-enter it. Instead there was a stalemate between rival forces, with the British encamped on the ridge to the north of the city, facing Delhi. They neither besieged the city nor were themselves besieged. Both sides engaged in sorties and attacked and were counter-attacked. Not until September, and the arrival of British reinforcements, were they able with a series of bitterly contested battles to force a way into Delhi, capture the fort and take the emperor prisoner. That did not end the rebellion which continued into the following year elsewhere in the country, but it did finally end the rule of the line of Babur with the last emperor, Bahadur Shah II, captured and condemned to exile in Burma. He died there, sad and solitary, writing Urdu poetry of lament and melancholy.

Though the rebellion was put down, the Red Fort and the Mughals continued to have a hold in the popular imagination, a romance of resistance to foreign rule. For the British, Delhi had different symbolic values. It was the place where brave soldiers and civilians had been massacred. It was the story of pitched battles that joined the British mythology of military bravery.

The battlegrounds between the ridge and the walls of the city became a kind of sacral space familiar to English audiences back home through the reports of The Times correspondent and the photographs of Delhi battle sites taken by a pioneering photo-journalist, Felice Beato.²⁴ Delhi for the victors both commemorated those who had died and celebrated the place of British victory. Significantly the army after conquering the Red Fort continued in possession of much of it and was there until 1947 at the time of independence.

In 1877 the viceroy, Lord Lytton, held an imperial assemblage in Delhi to proclaim Queen Victoria empress of India.²⁵ The grand affair drew on the form of the durbar, a large ceremonial audience that the Mughal emperors had held at the height of their grandeur. In the traditional durbar, subordinate princes and nobles declared their loyalty to and exchanged gifts with the emperor. The 1877 British variant, held on flat ground outside Delhi, involved a long and ornate procession through the city and a proclamation ceremony in a specially built amphitheatre. Described by B. Cohn as an example of how the British creatively used tradition and even invented tradition, Lytton’s durbar bore little resemblance to a Mughal durbar despite the rajas and maharajas being required to dress in their finest, most ornate, elaborate and bejewelled costumes for the ceremony where they declared loyalty to the queen.²⁶ Cohn described the durbar as ‘hyperbolic historical fantasy’. Memories of 1857 haunted the proceedings and it was hoped the durbar would close the tensions that still lingered. Delhi had been chosen as the site precisely because it had been the seat of the Mughal Empire and had all the associations that went with that lineage. The durbar would legitimate the British as their rightful successors through the quasi-tradition of the event, and the manipulation of spatial associations with the Mughals, including the use of the Red Fort for receptions and special events.

It was expected that this would indicate a seamless image of the imperial, from the Mughal to the British Empire.

In 1903 Viceroy Curzon organised in the same location an even larger durbar to celebrate the coronation of Edward VII, and in 1911 the new king, George V, came to Delhi in person for another and grander durbar celebrating his coronation. It was the first and only time a reigning British monarch visited colonial India, the only time a British royal surveyed the imperium. Much was expected from this first visit of a British monarch, given that traditionally at durbars the monarch was expected to give his subjects a significant gift. The interchange of gifts between ruler and ruled at durbars was at the heart of the ceremony in the sense that the interchange created mutual obligations, an interlinking of interests. Unlike at the previous durbars, George did have a gift; he announced that the unpopular partition of Bengal dating back to 1905 would be rescinded and that the capital would move from Calcutta to Delhi. There was to be a new custom-built city nearby, New Delhi.

With New Delhi the seat of government returned to where it had been under the Mughals—on the plains and in the centre of north India. The new city would do its best to capitalise on some of that aura, but its location some kilometres from Shahjahanabad gave it a distinctiveness of its own and enabled it to retain the character of a separate space. New Delhi was to be a grand city in its own terms, one that represented the British sense of the grandeur of their own empire, regardless of its antecedents and its associations. It was a British city but with a presence and an imposing layout like no British city elsewhere. Again the British liking for pomp and display, the public assertion of position and status, that had been there from early in the British experience in India asserted itself in the grandeur of the city’s layout and the imposing quality of its building. However the modern-day emperors, the viceroys, were not to have the use of their new city for long—it was only formally finished and occupied in 1931 and sixteen years later the rulers went home leaving New Delhi to its new owners, the independent nation of India.

The day after the achievement of independence, the new prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, delivered a major speech from the ramparts of the Red Fort. Below him had gathered a seething enthusiastic audience said to number a quarter of a million.²⁷ He spoke of the way the fort and Delhi had been objectives in the freedom struggle, of how the rallying cry for Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army was ‘On to Delhi and the Red Fort’: Chalo Delhi Lal Kila. Nehru brought together different elements: Delhi’s symbolic importance in the freedom struggle; its place in 1857; and its siting as the centre of the Mughal Empire. He was reconceptualising Old Delhi and by framing the city between the Mughals and the nationalists he turned the time of British domination into an interlude, reducing it to one among the many empires that India had experienced. In doing so, Nehru gave an historical legitimacy to the new nation and an identity that did not derive from the British interregnum. Its legitimacy came from an extended lineage in which even the Mughals were only a part. Cities change and develop, as do the meanings and values ascribed to them, and it was through cities that not only was the country governed but its formative ethos framed, considered and restructured. The reinterpreting of Delhi over the years exemplifies the trend, and Nehru articulated the transitions and continuities better than most others. Those continuities applied equally to a wider population beyond the cities and towns, but they were expressed most pertinently in urban India and through the urban experience.

Notes

1 Kingsley Davis, The Population of India and Pakistan (Princeton, 1951), p. 127. Mughal cities, however, were among the world's largest. Bernier, a mid-seventeenth-century traveller, noted that Agra, for instance, equalled if not outrivalled Paris in the size of its population and the extent of its urban sprawl.

2 Figures sourced from Wendell Cox, ‘Urbanizing India: The 2011 Census Shows Slowing Growth',.New Geography, 21 November 2011, www.newgeography.com/content/002537-urbanizing- india-the-2011-census-shows-slowing-growth (accessed 22 July 2013).

3 John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge, 1996), p. 56.

4 Catherine Asher, ‘India: The Mughals 1526-1858', in Jim Masselos (ed.), The Great Empires of Asia (London, 2010), pp. 166-191.

5 Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656--1668 (Westminster, 1891), p. 381.

6 Gavin R.G. Hambly, ‘Towns and Cities, 1: Mughal India', in Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of India. Vol. I: c. 1200-c. 1750 (Hyderabad, 1982), pp. 434-451.

7 C.A. Bayly, ‘Small Towns in the Political Economy: The Qasbah Under Pressure', in Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770-1870 (Cambridge, 1983), chap. 9.

8 Gerson da Cunha, c. 1900, quoted in R.P. Karkaria (ed.), The Charm of Bombay (Bombay, 1915), p. 181.

9 Jim Masselos, ‘Changing Definitions of Bombay: City State to Capital City', in Indu Banga (ed.), Ports and Their Hinterlands in India (Delhi, 1992), p. 279.

10 W. Hodges, Travels in India during the Years 1780-83 (London, 1793), p.15, quoted in Pheroza Godrej and Pauline Rohatgi, Scenic Splendour: India through the Printed Image (London, 1989), p. 25.

11 Mark Bence-Jones, Palaces of the Raj: Magnificence and Misery of the Lord Sahibs (London, 1973), p. 43.

12 George Annesley, Viscount Valentia, Voyages and Travels to India... 1802-06, Vol. I (London, 1809), pp. 235-236, quoted in Godrej and Rohatgi, Scenic Splendour, p. 34.

13 Valentia, quoted in Philip Davies, Splendours of the Raj: British Architecture in India, 1660 to 1947 (London, 1985), p. 62.

14 This account of Simla draws extensively on Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley, 1996).

15 Ibid., p. 170.

16 Bence-Jones, Palaces of the Raj, p. 146.

17 Interviewed by Charles Allen (ed.), Plain Tales from the Raj (London, 1985), p. 131.

18 The collection first appeared in 1888, published by Thacker, Spink and Company in Calcutta and has had innumerable reprints since.

19 Davies, Splendours of the Raj, p. 77.

20 Masselos, ‘Changing Definitions of Bombay', p. 283, Table 1 and p. 293, Table 2.

21 Jim Masselos, ‘Bombay in the 1870s: A Study of Changing Patterns in Urban Politics', in The City in Action: Bombay Struggles for Power (Delhi, 2007), pp. 46-80.

22 See Jim Masselos, ‘Bombay Then', in Jim Masselos and Naresh Fernandes, Bombay Then and Mumbai Now (Delhi, 2012), pp. 11-23.

23 Jim Masselos, Indian Nationalism: A History (Delhi, 2010), chap. 2.

24 Jim Masselos and Narayani Gupta, Beato’s Delhi: 1857 and Beyond (Delhi, 2011).

25 Julie F. Codell (ed.), Power and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Durbars (Delhi, 2012).

26 Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India', in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 165-209.

27 Jim Masselos, ‘The Magic Touch of Being Free', in Masselos, City in Action, pp. 328-329.

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