A Place Within (14 page)

It seems to me that perhaps the rubble should have been preserved as a monument, not to the man but to his neglect. Is this all there is? I ask a man in a skullcap who now sits at the street entrance. He tilts his head to indicate, Just so.

I walk outside, sit down at a stall next door for tea. It is Sunday morning. Three boys evidently dressed up and recently bathed walk in, grinning, and take their seats. Confidently they order paya and parantha for their breakfast. Paya is a curry made of goat trotters; fatty but tasty, and a breakfast delicacy even in Toronto. I am reminded of childhood.

On March 29, 1857, an Indian sepoy called Mangal Pandey shot his English adjutant in the parade ground at Barrackpore army camp, near Calcutta, with his musket and then slashed him with his sword. Lieutenant Baugh was not killed, but when the colonel ordered the guard to arrest Pandey, they refused. Pandey, however, at the point of finally being overpowered, shot himself, but was not killed, and within ten days was convicted and hanged in a hurry. This event is often regarded as the flashpoint of a widespread insurrection that followed, called the Indian Mutiny by the British. Indian nationalists prefer to call it the First War of
Independence. Whatever one calls it, it was provoked by a general sense of suspicion and resentment against the rule of the British East India Company that was already prevalent in much of the country, and especially within the army, where it was believed that the cartridges for the new Enfield rifles which had recently been brought into use came coated with beef or pork fat. This fuelled the rumour that the British were out to defile the religious purity of the Indian soldiers serving in their army, with the object ultimately of converting them to Christianity. Whether Mangal Pandey was a revolutionary hero, or a sepoy high on bhang at the time of his deed, is a question still debated. But while on his rampage he gave voice to the suspicion and hatred that many inside the army and outside it harboured towards the ruling race, and he became a symbol of Indian resistance to British rule. A few weeks after the incident at Barrackpore there was a mutiny at the army camp in Meerut, near Delhi, and in the violence, which spread to the bazaars, fifty-two European men, women, and children were killed. Some of the mutineers then headed for Delhi to enlist the Mughal emperor to lead their cause, and mutiny and violence erupted in other places as well.

The emperor was Bahadur Shah, a frail eighty-two-year-old resident of the Red Fort, a puppet whom the Company kept on the throne with a pension, but still beloved to his subjects. His father was a Sufi and his mother a Hindu Rajput. He is said to have likened his Muslim and Hindu subjects to his right and left eye, did not eat beef, and visited Hindu temples wearing a mark on his forehead. He liked animals and the arts, and was devoted to Urdu poetry. His own compositions are recited to this day by the aficionados. A weak, broken ruler at the sunset of Mughal rule in India, or a philosopher poet who knew his time and that of his ancestors was at last over?

But when a contingent of the rebels of Meerut arrived in Delhi and pleaded with Bahadur Shah to lead them in their war against
the British, perhaps sensing a glimmer of hope for him and his dynasty, after saying first, “I did not call for you,” he relented. He sat down on his throne and accepted their tribute. He appointed several princes to positions of command in the new army and wrote to neighbouring rajas to join forces with him.

“On May 11, 1857,” Ghalib wrote memorably of that day in Delhi, “the disorders began here. On that same day I shut the doors and gave up going out. One cannot pass the days without something to do, and I began to write my experiences, appending also such news as I heard from time to time.”

Ghalib had English friends, drew an English pension, and with his station in life did not have much sympathy for the rebels, who were not of his class and had only disrupted his life. He relates how they overran the city, and describes with remarkable empathy for the foreign, white victims how the rebels began killing men, women, and children, and burning down their houses:

There were humble, quiet men, who passed their days drawing some modest sum from British bounty and eating their crust of bread…. No man among them knew an arrow from an axe…. In truth such men are made to people the lanes and by-lanes, not to gird up their loins and go out to battle. These men, when they saw that a dam of dust and straw cannot stem the fast-flowing flood, took to their only remedy, and every man of them went to his home and resigned himself to grief. I too am one of these grief-stricken men. I was in my home…but in the twinkling of an eye…every street and every lane was full of galloping horsemen, and the sound of marching men, coming wave upon wave, rose in the air. Then there was not so much as a handful of dust that was not red with the blood of men.

In contrast to this sympathy, which would have been shared by many upper-class Delhiites, many others embraced the incoming
sepoys as liberators, the local Urdu paper going so far as to gloat over the murders of the English. Once the foreigners had been expelled or killed, the sepoys increasingly came to be seen as unruly and undisciplined, peasant warriors who seemed to have lost their zeal and spent their time creating disturbances at the tea houses and brothels. Still, with the imprimatur of the Mughal emperor, the insurgency continued to spread widely in the cities of the north, to become, as the historian William Dalrymple puts it in his detailed account of the events, “the single most serious armed challenge any Western empire would face, anywhere in the world, in the entire course of the nineteenth century.”

The majority of the rebels were Hindus. Among many Muslims the revolt took on the tone of a jihad against kafirs (infidels), an attitude of hostility against Western dominance that in one form or another has lasted to this day.

Four months after the attack on Delhi, in September 1857 the British forces, with the help of Sikh soldiers, retook the city and quelled the uprising everywhere else, and the retribution that followed was savage.

History, as is so often the case, and not unlike reports of “rebellions” in other colonies or occupied countries, has given us a skewed, victors’ look at the events. Indians did not record details as the British did. The British were few, each of them accounted for and written about, and their fates appear to us as personal tragedies or acts of heroism, illustrated sometimes by photographs; the Indians in the aftermath simply died or were hanged in their multitudes. Whereas the English showed themselves as arrogant, incompetent, brave, or pathetic, their descriptions making them live as individuals with faces, the sepoys were merely low-class fanatics and murderers.

Of the aftermath of the Mutiny in Delhi, its poet Ghalib would write:

Now every English soldier that bears arms

Is sovereign, and free to work his will.

Men dare not venture out into the street

And terror chills their hearts within them still.

Their homes enclose them as in prison walls

And in the Chauk [Chandni Chowk] the victors hang and kill.

The city is athirst with Muslim blood

And every grain of dust must drink its fill.

The emperor tried to escape but was captured at Humayun’s tomb in the Nizamuddin area. His two sons and a grandson surrendered, after which they were stripped and shot dead by the officer in command outside the walls of Delhi, in the presence of a few thousand of their men who had been convinced to lay down their arms. Their corpses were taken by the Sikhs and displayed in front of the gurudwara, their temple, where 182 years before their Guru Tegh Bahadur had been executed by another Mughal, Aurangzeb. The officer, William Hodson, wrote that night, “I cannot help being pleased with the warm congratulations I received on all sides for my success in destroying the enemies of our race.”

Bahadur Shah, the last Mughal emperor, after a trial whose outcome was no surprise, was exiled to Rangoon, Burma, with his wife and other family members, where he died three years later and is buried. He wrote an epitaph for himself, often quoted as a celebrated lament of exile. The last verse reads, “How unlucky is Zafar! For burial / Even two yards of land were not to be had, in the land of the beloved.” A portrait of Bahadur Shah shows a wasted man with a long, quite handsome face and a white beard, in royal tunic and turban; a photograph in an English account of
the Mutiny depicts a sickly old man in bed. We see what we want to see.

A film has been made, called
Mangal Pandey
, about the events that apparently triggered the Mutiny. It bears little resemblance to documented history, and with typical Bollywood illogic (Pandey forms a close friendship with his British commanding officer, who in turn rescues a widow from her husband’s funeral pyre and falls in love with her) is an attempt to create a new legend for the gullible or patriotically romantic. The film ends with footage about Gandhi, thus grafting this new romance onto the real-life struggles for independence.
Mangal Pandey
is one of a spate of recent political films, including
Lagaan
and 1942:
A Love Story
, all extremely popular, in which the English are portrayed mostly as boors and thugs. A remake of the classic
Umrao Jaan
, which is based on a novel set in the same period, about a young girl who is kidnapped and becomes a celebrated courtesan, has a lengthy scene depicting mounted British soldiers (no Sikhs) attacking Lucknow’s citizens. A blood-soaked rapist is forgiven by his victim because he has taken up arms against the British. It is not the films so much as their provenance that is interesting, telling us that memories of British dominance go deep and continue to smart.

This was demonstrated in a remarkable fashion when a group of British historians and descendants of the fallen came to India recently to retrace the events of the insurrection on its hundred and fiftieth anniversary and commemorate the dead. In Meerut the group was barred from entering the cemetery by protestors bearing black flags, consisting of Indian nationalists and Muslim clerics according to reports, who saw the purpose of the visit as “an insult to Indian freedom fighters.” In Lucknow the tourists were pelted with stones, cow shit, and other objects. The tour was aborted. “What sort of world is this?” said one of the visitors later. “People throwing muck at an eighty-two-year-old who can’t even walk without help.”

Old Delhi, fetid Delhi

alleys and little squares and mosques

like a stabbed body

like a buried garden

OCTAVIO PAZ

There is an organic quality to this old city of the Mughals, Shahjahanabad, a thrilling wholeness consisting of a multitude of people and occupations jostling in a close space rich with history, and a pace of life you will find nowhere else in Delhi. Here, as in Manhattan—though the two places could not be more different—you do not tarry, are simply swept up by its life and pace and carried along.

On our way, busy meat shops; sweetmeats, salty namkeens frying; fresh-baked breads and cakes on display; a sidewalk book vendor eating meat curry with chappati opposite the Jama mosque; a
perfume seller calling out, rubbing samples on people’s backs; boys playing alley cricket; cycle rickshaws, horses, mules, cows; burqa-covered women walking stiffly, proudly on the street; busy shopkeepers, idle shopkeepers, a bevy of women gathered around outside a shop to inspect a heap of material. I’ve never seen so many veiled women in India before.