DELHI, THE CENTRE OF INDIAN NATIONALITY.
The course of this narrative now requires that attention—more particular
than will be required in relation to other cities in India—should be
bestowed on the world-renowned Delhi, the great focus of all that can be
called truly national in that vast country. Three regiments fled from
Meerut to Delhi, and there found other regiments ready to join them in
scenes of revolt and violence, of spoliation and murder; but it is
necessary, in order to appreciate what followed, to know why Delhi is
regarded in a peculiar light by the natives: why a successful resistance
to British rule was, and must long continue to be, more serious in that
locality than in any other part of the East. Not only ought the position
of the city, considered as the residence of a hundred and sixty thousand
Mohammedans and Hindoos, to be rendered familiar; but the reader should
know how it has happened that the sovereign of that city has, for eight
or nine hundred years, been regarded in a peculiar sense as the autocrat
of Hindostan, the one man before whom millions of natives have been wont
to bend the knee, or rather to lie prostrate in abject submission.
What India was before the arrival of the Mussulmans, need not be told
here at any length. We know, in truth, very little on that matter. It
was from the days of the first Moslem conqueror that the greatness of
Delhi began. Long before the Christian era, Arab merchants brought rich
spiceries from Sinde and Malabar, and sold them to Phœnician merchants,
who conveyed them on laden camels by way of Petra to the shores of the
Mediterranean. Other portions of Indian merchandise were carried up the
Persian Gulf and the Euphrates to a point whence they were transported
westward to Aleppo or Antioch—a route almost identical with that
advocated in the present day for a Euphrates railway and a Euphrates
telegraph. The Greeks derived all their knowledge of Indian commodities
through the Phœnicians: while their information concerning the country
itself was obtained from the Persians, who at one time held sway as far
as the Indus. The expedition of Alexander the Great into India, about
326 B.C., first gave the Greeks a personal knowledge of this wonderful
land; and many successors of the great Macedonian added to the then
existing amount of information concerning the tribes, the productions,
the customs of the region beyond the Indus. Consequent on those
discoveries, the merchants of the newly founded city of Alexandria
gradually obtained a command of the trade with India: bringing the rich
produce of the East by ship to Berenice on the Red Sea, and then
transporting it overland to Alexandria. The commodities thus imported
were chiefly precious stones, spices, perfumes, and silks; and during
some centuries the Roman Empire was drained of much specie to pay for
these imports. Alexandrians were the principal merchants who furnished
the nations of Europe with Indian articles till the discovery of the
passage round the Cape of Good Hope by Vasco de Gama in 1498. The
western nations of Asia, however, continued to be supplied principally
by the merchants of Basra or Bussorah, a very flourishing commercial
city near the point where the Euphrates empties itself into the Persian
Gulf; and there was also an extensive caravan-trade from Northern India
through Northern Persia to the Caspian and the Black Sea. The discovery
of the Cape of Good Hope route naturally attracted the attention of the
maritime nations of Europe towards India, followed by the settlement of
Portuguese and Dutch traders on the coast, and ultimately by the
wonderful rise of British power in those regions through the
instrumentality of the East India Company.
But although trading instincts thus laid India open to the commercial
dealings of merchants, and to the cupidity of European princes, it was
not until modern erudition had been applied to the subject that the true
history of the land of the Hindoos became at all known. Scholars found,
when they had mastered the Sanscrit or sacred language of that people,
that a wonderful mine of information was thrown open to them. They
ascertained that the nation, whatever it may have been called, from
which the genuine Hindoos are descended, must at some period have
inhabited the central plains of Asia, whence they migrated into the
northern parts of India; that for at least a thousand years before the
Christian era, great and powerful empires existed in Hindostan, which
made considerable progress in knowledge, civilisation, and literature;
that Southern India, or the Deccan, was conquered and peopled by the
Hindoos at a much later date than the rest; that Buddhism, the religion
of the earlier inhabitants, was overruled and driven out by Brahminism
or Hindooism in the fifth century of our era; and that for five
centuries longer, the Hindoos were the true rulers of this much-coveted
land.
It was, however, as has been already implied, only with the arrival of
the Mohammedans that the course of Indian history took that turn which
is now interesting to us, especially in connection with the city of
Delhi.
The year 1000 was marked by the invasion of India by Mahmoud of Ghiznee,
a Tatar sovereign who held sway among the chieftains of Afghanistan. He
defeated the rajah of Lahore at Peshawur; then penetrated beyond the
Sutlej; and returned laden with spoil. In a second expedition he
conquered Moultan; in a third, he reconquered the same city after a
revolt. A fourth expedition found Mahmoud opposed by a confederacy of
all the sovereigns of Northern India, who, seeing a common danger,
resolved to unite for a common cause; they were rapidly gaining an
advantage over him, when the sudden fright of an elephant induced a
panic in the Hindoo army, and left the victory to Mahmoud, who returned
to Ghiznee still more richly laden with booty than ever. For a time, the
Hindoo king who reigned over the region of which Delhi was the chief
city, managed to ward off the hostility of the great invader; but taking
offence at a departure from neutrality during one of the later
expeditions, Mahmoud captured that city, and returned to Ghiznee with
forty thousand prisoners. For thirty years did these raids and
spoliations continue. The most celebrated next to that which resulted in
the sack of Delhi, was the expedition intended for the destruction of
the Hindoo temple of Somnauth in Gujerat: a temple which, if native
annals are to be believed, had fifty thousand worshippers, and was
endowed with a revenue of two thousand villages; which had two thousand
Brahmins officiating as priests, five hundred daughters of noble Hindoos
as dancing-girls, three hundred musicians; and the sandal-wood gates of
which were the theme of magniloquence from the pen of an English
governor-general eight centuries afterwards.[7] Mahmoud broke all the
idols, and carried off countless treasures to Ghiznee.
From that time to the period of the rise of British power, the
Mohammedans never lost their hold upon India, however much it may have
been shaken by occasional success on the part of the Hindoos; nor did
they ever cease to regard Delhi as the chief Indian city. Although
Mahmoud made twelve expeditions across the Indus, the object was mainly
booty, rather than permanent settlement. His successors, however,
established a regular government in the Punjaub, and in the region
thence eastward to Delhi. The Ghiznee dynasty was put an end to in the
year 1184, when it was overcome by the Seljuks; and in 1193 Delhi was
formally appointed capital of the Moslem sovereigns of India. After a
succession of rebellions and murders, exhibiting all the hideous
features of Oriental politics, the Seljuk dynasty fell to pieces in the
year 1289. Then arose a third Mohammedan dynasty, that of the Afghans or
Patans, who came like all the other conquerors of India from the
northwest, and who like them coveted Delhi as their capital. For about a
century did these Patan emperors reign, continually struggling against
Hindoo rajahs on the one hand, and Mussulman adventurers on the other.
It was in the year 1398 that Tamerlane—familiar to all school-boys in
England by the famous name of Timour the Tatar—first set foot in India,
and laid the foundation of the Mogul dynasty. Properly speaking, he was
not a true Mogul, but belonged to the rival Tatar nation of Turcomans;
nevertheless the line of emperors to which he gave origin has always
been known as the Mogul dynasty. He was a ruthless conqueror, who,
having ravaged all Central Asia from the Black Sea to the Chinese
frontier, turned his attention towards India. He crossed the Indus at
Attock, went to Moultan, and extended his march to Delhi, wading through
Hindoo blood, which he shed without resistance and almost without cause.
The native annalists record how he put a hundred thousand beings to
death in the great city; how he caused himself to be proclaimed Emperor
or Great Mogul of India; how he departed suddenly to end his days on the
other side of the Indus; and how Delhi mourned for many a year over its
miseries. No pen can describe what India suffered during the next
century and a quarter, with a Mogul emperor at Delhi, constantly
fighting with the Mohammedan chieftains who resisted his authority.
The long but often broken line of wretched despots need not be
enumerated here: a few landmarks of great names—Baber, Akbar,
Jehanghire, Shahjehan, Aurungzebe, Nadir Shah—will furnish all that is
needful for our present purpose.
Baber—or, in more majestic form, Zahireddin Mohammed Baber—a descendant
of Tamerlane, was the first really great Mohammedan emperor of Delhi,
the first Mogul who regarded his subjects in any other light than as a
prey to be spoliated. Centering his power at Delhi, he extended it
eastward to the mouth of the Ganges; and although, in his short reign of
four years, from 1526 to 1530, constantly engaged in military
expeditions, he nevertheless found time to cultivate the arts of peace,
and to attend to whatever appeared calculated to promote the prosperity
of his empire. In blood-shedding, he was scarcely surpassed by his
predecessor Tamerlane: indeed this was a propensity among all the Tatar
chieftains of those times. When his warlike and angry passions were not
excited, Baber could, however, come forth in a very different light, as
a kind and forgiving man, one fond of friends and friendship, and not
without a tinge of poetry in his tastes. He was a man of business, who
attended personally to the affairs of government, and passed fewer hours
in sensual idleness than is customary with oriental princes. With the
Hindoos he had little trouble; their national character was by this time
much broken; the rapid succession of reigning families had inured them
to change; and they had imbibed a feeling of horror and dismay from the
atrocities to which the various Moslem conquerors had subjected them.
When opposition to his progress had once ceased in India, he became an
altered man. He made or improved roads; established serais or
resting-places for travellers at suitable distances; caused the land to
be measured, in order to fix taxation by equitable adjustment; planted
gardens, and introduced many trees and plants until then unknown in
India; established a regular post from Agra, through Delhi, Lahore, and
Peshawur, to Cabool; and wrought many improvements in the city of Delhi.
Akbar, unquestionably the wisest and greatest prince who ever ruled
India—a prince who was really a benefactor to his people—was the
grandson of Baber. Becoming emperor of Delhi in 1556, he established the
Mogul dynasty on a firmer basis than it had before occupied. The native
Hindoos enjoyed, under him, greater prosperity than they had ever
experienced since the first invasion of the Mohammedans. He was
distinguished by a spirit of toleration and a love of justice; and the
memory of his virtues is to this day treasured up by the Hindoos as well
as the Mussulmans of India. As the worshippers of Islam had, by the time
of Akbar, fallen out much among themselves, in various parts of Asia,
the Mogul Moslems of India gradually became weaned from sympathy with
the rest, and prepared for more thorough amalgamation with the Hindoos
than had ever before been possible. If not an amalgamation by family
ties, it was at least an incorporation by civil and social usages; and
thus it is that from the time of Akbar may be dated the remarkable
mixture of Mohammedans and Hindoos in so many towns of India. Ambitious
chieftains might continue to struggle for supremacy; but the populace of
the two religions began to wish rather to trade together than to
exterminate each other. Akbar had the genius to see the full force of
this tendency, and the honesty to encourage it. He never crushed those
whom he conquered; but invited all alike, Hindoos as well as
Mohammedans, to settle down as peaceful citizens, assured that they
would receive equal justice from him regardless of their religious
differences. He placed natives of both races in offices of trust; he
abolished the capitation-tax on infidels; he forbade the degradation of
war-prisoners to the position of slaves; he abrogated such of the Hindoo
laws as were most repulsive to reason or humanity, without being vital
parts of their religion; he discouraged fanaticism among those of his
own faith; he encouraged trade and commerce; he reduced taxation; and he
kept a strict watch over the conduct of the officers of his government.
The mildness of his character, his strict impartiality to the different
classes of his subjects the magnanimity which he shewed to his enemies,
and his great personal courage are mentioned with praise even by the
Jesuits, who visited India during his reign. Well did this eminent man,
during his long reign of forty-nine years, deserve the title of Akbar
the Great; and natural was it that his subjects should look up with
reverence to Delhi, the centre and seat of his empire. His reign, both
in its beginning and its end, was almost exactly contemporaneous with
that of Queen Elizabeth in England.
Jehanghire, a far inferior prince to Akbar, succeeded him in 1605, and
soon became involved in troubles. The Uzbeks obtained possession of his
dominions in Cabool; the King of Persia took Candahar from him; the
Afghans revolted from his rule; the Hindoo Rajpoots commenced their
struggles for independence; and, at a later date, his son Shahjehan
rebelled against him. Nevertheless, Jehanghire, judged by an oriental
standard, was not a bad ruler of Hindostan. The country enjoyed
considerable prosperity under him; literature was extensively
cultivated; many new cities were built; the Hindoo religion experienced
even greater toleration than in the reign of Akbar; and he gave a
courteous reception to Sir Thomas Roe, sent on an embassy from England
to the Great Mogul. He was, however, a strange being. In a fit of anger
against certain rebels, he caused several hundreds of them to be
impaled, and placed in a row leading out of the Lahore gate at Delhi;
and he himself rode past them on an elephant, ‘to receive the obeisance
of his friends.’ His native ferocity also shone out, in his causing one
of his principal councillors to be sewed up in the hide of a newly
flayed ox, and thrown into the street; the hide, shrinking in the heat
of the sun, compressed him to death; but as the compression came too
soon to satisfy the savage feelings of the monarch, he caused the next
victim, when similarly incased, to be sprinkled with water occasionally,
to prolong the torture. One of the most remarkable circumstances in the
career of Jehanghire was the influence gradually acquired over him by
his Sultaness Nurmahal, the ‘light of the palace,’ whose name became
changed to Nurjehan, the ‘light of the world;’ her exquisite beauty,
wit, and accomplishments, won the love of the monarch; and as she was in
mind and heart far his superior, her power over him was often exerted
for good purposes.
Shahjehan, an ungrateful son to Jehanghire, was destined to be, in turn,
the victim of his own son Aurungzebe. He was an emperor from 1627 to
1659, and then a miserable uncrowned captive for seven years longer. He
attacked all the neighbouring princes whose dominions or wealth he
coveted; and blinded or murdered all his relations whose ambition he
dreaded. And yet, amid his atrocities, he was a man of much ability.
Delhi, Agra, and other cities, benefited by his rule. The internal
government of his kingdom was very complete. The great mosque at Delhi,
and the Taj Mahal at Agra, which rose at his command, are, to this day,
objects of admiration to the natives of India. Though it may, to English
minds, have been a waste of public money to spend six millions sterling
on the far-famed peacock’s throne; yet, as all his establishments were
formed on a scale of great magnificence, and as numerous other cities
and towns throughout the Empire vied with the splendour of Delhi and
Agra—there is evidence that the Mogul and his dominions must have owned
vast wealth. He possessed both taste and financial tact; and thus, with
all his atrocities, Shahjehan left behind him a full treasury and a
splendid and prosperous empire.
Aurungzebe, the last Mogul who maintained the real greatness of the
native court of Delhi, became emperor in 1659, by an act of violence
against his royal parent. He captured the cities of Hyderabad, Bejapore,
and Golconda, and extended his dominions nearly to the limits of the
Carnatic. There were, however, the germs of mischief perceptible in his
reign: the warlike Hindoo tribe of Mahrattas rose into note; and though
they were frequently defeated in the plains by the troops of Aurungzebe,
he was unable to subdue the country inhabited by these mountaineers.
Sevajee, the founder of the Mahratta empire, gradually conquered the
greater part of the Deccan; he died in 1682, and his son, Sambajee, was
put to a cruel death by Aurungzebe in 1689; but the Mogul emperors of
the north could never afterwards wholly subdue the Mahratta rajah of the
south. Aurungzebe was illiberal towards his Hindoo subjects; and this
circumstance threw them into closer sympathy than would otherwise have
been produced with the rude Mahratta mountaineers. He was not without
ability; but he had neither the wisdom nor the justice to maintain his
wide-spreading empire in a state of greatness; and when he died in 1707,
he left the Mogul power at Delhi much weaker than he found it at the
period of his seizure of the crown.
Nadir Shah, although never emperor of Delhi, must be named here as one
who contributed to the crumbling of the Mogul dynasty. This man, one of
the grand barbarians whom Central Asia has so often sent forth, was the
son of a sheep-skin cap-maker. He became a soldier of fortune; then the
leader of a band of robbers; then governor of Khorassan; then Shah of
Persia; then a formidable opponent of the Turks and the Afghans; and
then a scourge to India. While devastating Afghanistan in 1738, he
required of the Emperor of Delhi that none of the Afghans should find
shelter in his (the Mogul’s) dominions; but as no attention was paid to
his demands, he marched into Hindostan in the following year, and
entered Delhi with an enormous army on the 8th of March. He seized the
whole of the vast treasures which had been amassed in the course of
nearly two centuries by the Mogul monarchs. The citizens not being so
submissive as he wished, he ordered a general massacre. His commands
were only too well obeyed; for, from sunrise till noon, the inhabitants
were slaughtered by his soldiers without distinction of sex or age. At
the earnest intercession of the emperor, Nadir ordered the butchery to
be stopped. Where the estimates of human beings murdered varies from
8000 to 150,000, it is clear that no trustworthy data are obtainable;
but it is unquestionable that Delhi suffered immensely, both in its
population and its wealth. The ruthless despoiler not only refrained
from claiming the crown of Hindostan, but he did not make any conquests
whatever: he came simply as a Shah of Persia on an errand of vengeance;
he remained two months at Delhi; and then departed westward, carrying
with him treasures that have been variously estimated at from thirty to
seventy millions sterling.
The Delhi monarchs no longer need or deserve our attention; they had
fallen from their high estate, and were forced to struggle constantly
for the maintenance of their authority. A number of obscure names meet
our view after the time of Aurungzebe—Shah Alum, Moez-Eddin, Furrucksir,
Mohammed Shah, Ahmed Shah, Alumghir, and Shah Alum II.: each more
powerless than the preceding. Now they were attacked by the warlike
Mahrattas; now by the Rajpoots, a military Hindoo tribe which had never
been wholly subdued by the Moslems; now by the Sikhs, a kind of Hindoo
dissenters, brave and independent in their bearing; now by the Rohillas,
an Afghan race, who effected a settlement in the very neighbourhood of
Delhi; now by many of the Mohammedan nawabs or viceroys, who, like other
Asiatic viceroys in parallel circumstances, were willing to rise on the
fall of their masters; now by the competing sons and nephews who
surrounded every emperor; and now—more striking in its consequences than
all the rest—by the ever-encroaching British.
Nevertheless, amid all this decadence of Mogul power, the natives of
Hindostan never ceased to look up to the emperor as the centre of power,
to Delhi as the centre of nationality. Their traditions told them of
Mahmoud, of Tamerlane, of Baber, of the great Akbar, of Jehanghire, of
Shahjehan, of Aurungzebe; and although ruthless barbarities were
connected with the names of many of these rulers, there was still a
grandeur that impressed the imagination. The Hindoos, it is true, had
their sacred associations connected with Benares rather than with Delhi;
but their distinct nationality had been almost stamped out of them
during eight centuries of Mohammedan supremacy; and they, like the rest,
held in reverence the city where the peacock’s throne had glittered on
the world.
By what strange steps the descendants of the Great Mogul became
pensioners of the East India Company, will be explained presently; but
it will be well first to describe Delhi itself.
This far-famed city is situated on the river Jumna, about five hundred
miles by road above Allahabad, where the Jumna flows into the Ganges,
and nine hundred by road from Calcutta. In the opposite direction, Delhi
is nearly four hundred miles from Lahore, and six or seven hundred from
Peshawur—so great are the distances between the chief towns in India:
distances that terribly hamper the operations of a British army during
any sudden emergency. Striking as Delhi may be, it presents but a faint
approach in splendour to the city of past days, the home of the grand
old Moguls. Of the original Delhi, the natives give the most extravagant
account; they even run back to a period three thousand years before the
Christian era for its foundation. All that is certain, however, is, that
Inderput or Indraprestha, the name of the old city, was the capital of a
Hindoo kingdom under a rajah, long before its conquest by the
Mohammedans. When or how the original city went to ruin, is not exactly
known; but modern Delhi owes its chief adornments to Shahjehan. A
traveller from the south or Agra direction is struck with the evidences
of ruined Inderput before he sees anything of modern Delhi. ‘Everywhere
throughout the plain rise shapeless half-ruined obelisks, the relics of
massive Patan architecture, their bases buried under heaps of ruins
bearing a dismal growth of thorny shrubs. Everywhere we tread on
overthrown walls. Brick mosaics mark the ground-plan of the humbler
dwellings of the poorer classes. Among the relics of a remote age, are
occasionally to be seen monuments of light and elegant style of
architecture, embellished with brilliant colours, gilt domes, and
minarets incased in enamelled tiles.’ Some travellers have asserted that
they have traced these ruins thirty miles along the Jumna; but these
cannot all have been the ruins of one city. Approaching the present
Delhi, it is seen that the ruins are spread over a plain, in the midst
of which the city is situated; and they give place, after a time, to the
tasteful villas of the Europeans who exercise civil or military control
within Delhi. Most of these villas are on the site of the once famous
garden of Shalimar. On the northern side of the city, close under a
ridge of sandstone rocks called the Mijnoon Pahar, are the
cantonments—an alternation of bungalows, huts, and groups of trees.
So much for the environs. Although not entitled to take rank among the
great cities of the earth, Delhi is nevertheless a considerable place,
for it is seven miles in circumference. The Jumna bounds it on the east,
while a lofty crenellated wall, of horseshoe shape, completes the
boundary on the other sides. This wall has been an object of much
attention at different times. As built by Shahjehan, it possessed little
strength. When the British obtained ascendency over the city in 1803,
the wall was found to be in a ruinous state, without other flanking
defences than small circular bastions placed at intervals; the ditch was
imperfect; there was scarcely any vestige of a glacis or exterior slope;
and the crumbling ruins of dilapidated buildings had been allowed to
accumulate all round the wall. Captains Hutchinson and Smith, of the
Bengal engineers, were thereupon deputed to restore and strengthen the
fortifications. It was determined to establish a series of bastions,
with faces and flanks to defend the curtain or plain wall, and to mount
them with heavy artillery. The walls were repaired; and to shield them
from escalade, they were protected, especially on the river-front, with
beams of timber, the sharpened ends of which were pointed at an acute
angle downward into the ditch. The ditch was cleared out and deepened;
the glacis was made to cover, in some degree, the scarp of the wall; the
ground outside was cleared to some distance of ruins and houses; and the
ravines were filled up to check the approach of marauding horsemen. To
prepare for a rising within the city as well as an attack from without,
detached martello towers were constructed, entirely separate from the
walls, and accessible from them only by drawbridges; each tower had a
gun mounted on a pivot, so that in the event of a tumult in the city,
the towers might be occupied by artillerymen, the drawbridges drawn up,
and the guns swiveled round to pour a fire upon the insurgents. The
gateways of the city were strengthened; outworks were provided in front
of some of them, while others were provided with guard-houses and
_places-d’armes_. At a much later date—in 1838—Lord Auckland caused the
walls and towers to be strengthened, and one of the new defences, called
the Wellesley Bastion, to be reconstructed.
In what relation these defences stood to a British besieging force in
1857, will remain to be told in a future chapter: we proceed here with
the description of the city.
[Illustration:
BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF DELHI.—From a Coloured Lithograph by A. Maclure:
taken from original native Drawings.
]
Delhi has seven gates on the land-side, named, respectively, the Lahore,
Ajmeer, Turcoman, Cabool, Mohur or Moree, Cashmere, and Agra Gates;
while along the river-front are four others, the Rajghat, Negumbod,
Lall, and Kaila Gates. Some little diversity is shewn by travellers in
giving these names; and some make the number of gates twelve instead of
eleven. The Cashmere Gate is provided with casemated or shot-proof
chambers, for the accommodation of a city-guard. A bridge of boats over
the Jumna connects Delhi with the road leading northeastward to Meerut,
and the chief magazine is, or was, between the centre of the city and
this bridge. Eight of the defences on the walls are called the Shah
Bastion, Burn Bastion, Gurstin Bastion, College Bastion, Ochterlony
Bastion, Lake Bastion, Wellesley Bastion, and Nawab Bastion—names
obviously derived, in most instances, from military officers engaged in
the Company’s service. Strictly speaking, the wall does not quite
surround the city; for on one side it abuts on a small branch of the
river, where there is a short bridge across to the old fort of
Selimgurh, built in a very heavy style by one of the early emperors.
Entirely outside the wall, north of the city, is a custom-house, which
affords a curious commentary on the relations existing between the civil
and military officers of the Company. It was first built by a medical
officer, then sold to the Company for a treasury, and then adapted as a
custom-house. The engineers wanted to get rid of this building, as an
obstruction to their plan of defences, in the same way as they had swept
away numerous outhouses, bazaars, and ruins; but the civilians prevented
this; and so the custom-house remained till 1857, when the building and
its garden became a ready prey to the rebels.
The city, considered without relation to its defences, presents many of
those features so familiar in oriental towns. As seen by the approaching
traveller, few of the dwelling-houses peep above the ramparts; but the
Jumma Musjid or principal mosque, the turreted and battlemented palace,
the minarets, and other public buildings, combine to form a majestic
picture; while the graceful acacias and lofty date-trees bending over
the ramparts, and the grouping of tombs with sombre foliage on the
glacis, add new features to the scene. Arrived within the city, it is
seen that the streets are mostly narrow. The chief exception is that of
a handsome street running south from the palace to the Agra Gate: three
quarters of a mile long by a hundred and fifty feet wide. This street
has, therefore, length and breadth enough to afford space for much
splendour; but the Delhians have not fully availed themselves of this
opportunity, for they have built blocks of small houses in the midst of
this street, analogous in some degree to the ‘Middle Rows’ known to the
inhabitants of London. Another large street, similarly shorn of its due
dignity, runs from the palace westward to the Lahore Gate. Both streets
are, however, enlivened by raised water-courses flowing in channels of
red stone—part of a great work begun and finished by the Company, for
supplying Delhi with water.
The glories of Delhi are the great mosque and the still greater palace.
The Jumma Musjid, situated in the centre of the city, is one of those
buildings to which Mohammedans point with pride: famous not only in
Hindostan, but all over Southern and Central Asia. It presents to the
eye an open court on an elevated platform, nearly five hundred feet
square; in the middle of which is a marble fountain for the ablutions
necessary in the ceremonials of Islamism. On three sides of this court
are open arcades and octagonal pavilions; while on the fourth side is
the mosque, a structure of great splendour approached by a magnificent
flight of marble steps. White marble cornices inlaid in black marble
with inscriptions from the Koran; walls, ceilings, and pavements of the
same delicate materials; beautiful domes and lofty minarets—all combine
to render the Jumma Musjid a truly gorgeous structure. The Emperor
Shahjehan built it more than two centuries ago; and the British
government gave orders in 1851 that it should be kept in repair.
But, splendid as is the Jumma Musjid, the imperial palace is still more
striking—partly for what it is, but principally for what it has been.
The palace stands between the two principal streets and the bridge. Some
travellers have compared it with Windsor Castle, some with the Kremlin
at Moscow, in size and majesty; while others insist that it has no
compeer. Bishop Heber was quite enthusiastic in its praise. In the first
place, the palatial buildings are surrounded by a wall to which there is
certainly no parallel either at Windsor or at Moscow; it is of red
granite, three quarters of a mile in circuit, nearly forty feet high,
flanked with turrets and domes, and entered by two noble gates with
barbicans. This wall is a grand work in itself, irrespective of the
structures it encloses. Strictly speaking, the wall is only on three
sides, the fourth abutting on a small branch of the Jumna, where occurs
the short bridge crossing to the old fort of Selimgurh. The palace
itself is entered by a series of beautiful gateways, all of red granite,
and all sculptured with flowers and inscriptions from the Koran. The
vaulted aisles and the open octagonal courts are spoken of by Heber with
great admiration. The Dewani Khas, or private council-chamber, although
allowed to become filthy by the visits of crows and kites, is an
exquisite structure; it is a pavilion of white marble, supporting four
cupolas of the same delicate material, with pillars and arches
elaborately inlaid with gilt arabesques, flowers, and inscriptions. The
garden around it has numerous white marble fountains of elegant form,
and a small octagonal pavilion with bath-rooms, but all dirty and
neglected. The Moti Musjid or private mosque for the court, and the
Dewani-aum or public hall of audience, are, like the rest of the palace,
ornate in marble and in carving, in sculpture and in inscriptions, in
gilding and in inlaying; and, also like the rest, disfigured with
filth—a combination truly oriental. In the hall of audience is, or was
before the Revolt, the dais on which once stood the world-renowned
peacock’s throne, formed entirely of gold and jewels; and it was in this
same chamber that the victorious Nadir Shah, by exchanging turbans with
the defeated Mogul Mohammed Shah, obtained possession of a treasure
almost as renowned as the peacock’s throne itself—the _koh-i-noor_, the
‘mountain of light,’ the glorious diamond which, after various
vicissitudes, now occupies a place in the regalia of Queen Victoria.
Passing from a scene of decayed splendour to one of living interest, we
find Delhi to be inhabited by almost an exactly equal number of Hindoos
and Mohammedans, eighty thousand of each; but it is essentially a
Mohammedan city, the centre of their prestige and influence in India;
and all the dwellings and public buildings of the Hindoos are indicative
of a race locally less powerful. Besides the imperial palace just
described, there is, about nine miles from Delhi, near an extraordinary
pillar called the Kootub Minar, the country residence of the emperor,
or, as it has been more customary in recent years to call him, the King.
It is a large but paltry building, in an inferior style of Italian
architecture, with a public road running through the very court-yard.
Within the city a palace was built for the British resident a few years
ago; and around this building a number of elegant houses have since been
erected, by the natives as well as by the Europeans. Since the once
great Mogul has been a king without a kingdom, a pensioned puppet of the
Company, a potentate having nothing to employ his thoughts and his
pension but political intrigue and sensual indulgence—the representative
of England has been a sort of envoy or resident, ostensibly rendering
honour to the Mogul, but really watching that he does no mischief,
really insuring that he shall be a king only in name. But more on this
point presently. The British civil staff in the city comprises—or did
comprise before the Revolt—a resident or commissioner, a revenue
collector, a magistrate, and other officials. There have usually been
three regiments barracked or stationed in the cantonment; but the
military importance of the place has been rather due to the fact that
Delhi has been made a depôt for a large park of artillery—valuable
enough when in the hands of the British, but a source of dismay and
disaster when seized by mutineers.
Although this narrative has little to do with the merits or demerits of
Delhi as a place of residence; yet, knowing something of what Englishmen
and Englishwomen have had to bear when cooped up within a town or fort
menaced by ruthless natives, every compatriot at home would like further
to know in what way those trials are likely to have been aggravated by
the incidents of climate. A lady-traveller furnishes a vivid picture of
Delhi in a _hot-wind_, such as frequently visits towns in India during
certain seasons of the year. ‘Every article of furniture is burning to
the touch; the hardest wood, if not well covered with blankets, will
split with a report like that of a pistol; and linen taken from the
drawers appears as if just removed from a kitchen-fire. The nights are
terrible, every apartment being heated to excess. Gentlemen usually have
their beds placed in the verandahs, or on the chubootiar or terrace on
the top of the house: as they incur little risk in sleeping in the open
air, at a season in which no dew falls, and when there is scarcely any
variation in the thermometer. Tornadoes are frequent during these hot
winds; while they last, the skies, though cloudless, are darkened with
dust, the sun is obscured, and a London fog cannot more effectually
exclude the prospect. The birds are dreadful sufferers at this season;
their wings droop, and their bills are open as if gasping for breath;
all animals are more or less affected.’ Then, when this frightful heat
is about to depart, ensues a storm, more terrible to look at, though
easier to bear. ‘The approaching strife is made known by a cloud, or
rather a wall of dust, which appears at the extremity of the horizon,
becoming more lofty as it advances. The air is sultry and still; for the
wind, which is tearing up the sand as it rushes along, is not felt in
front of the billowy masses, whose mighty ramparts gather strength as
they spread. At length the plain is surrounded, and the sky becomes as
murky as midnight. Then the thunder breaks forth, but its most awful
peals are scarcely heard in the deep roar of the tempest; burst succeeds
to burst, each more wild and furious than the former; the forked
lightnings flash in vain, for the dust, which is as thick as snow,
flings an impenetrable veil around them. The wind having spent itself in
a final effort, suddenly subsides, and the dust is as speedily dispersed
by torrents of rain, which in a very short time flood the whole
country.’ This is the last agony of the storm; after which the
temperature lowers and nature becomes more tranquil.
Such is Delhi—such the city which, amid all its changes of fortune, has
for so many centuries been an object of reverential affection to the
natives of Hindostan. When the disorganised regiments from Meerut
entered the imperial gates, they found an aged mogul or king, with sons
and grandsons, courtiers and retainers, willing to make him a
stepping-stone to their own advancement. Who this king was, and how he
had come into that position, may soon be told.
Precisely a century ago, when Clive was preparing to revenge the
atrocities connected with the Black Hole at Calcutta, the Delhi empire
was rapidly losing all its power; the northern and northwestern
provinces were seized upon by the Afghans and the Sikhs; the Rajpoots
extended their dominions as far as Ajmeer; and the Emperor Alumghir was
too weak to protect his capital from the monstrous barbarities of the
Afghan insurgents. The next emperor, Shah Alum II., unable either to
repel invaders or to control his rebellious nawabs, virtually yielded to
the rapidly rising power of the East India Company. He signed a treaty
with Clive in 1765, involving mutual obligations; he was to yield to the
British certain provinces, and to award to a resident appointed from
Calcutta considerable power at the court of Delhi; while the British
were to protect him from his numerous assailants, and to secure him a
pension of £260,000 per annum, which, with other sources of wealth,
brought the degenerate descendant of the Moguls nearly half a million
annually. Troubled by the Mahrattas on one side, by the Rohillas on a
second, and by the Nawab of Oude on a third, the paralysed emperor
became so bewildered that he knew not which way to turn. About 1788 a
Rohilla chieftain suddenly entered Delhi, and put out the eyes of the
unfortunate emperor with a poniard; then the Mahrattas defeated this
chieftain, seized the capital, and reduced Shah Alum himself to a mere
puppet. During this anarchy the British in India were so fully occupied
in other quarters, that they could not make a resolute demonstration in
the centre of the once great Mogul empire; but in the year 1803 all was
prepared by Lord Lake for a resolute attempt to break down the Mahratta
and Rohilla power in the north, and to insure that the emperor should
have no other master than the Company—a kindness, the motives for which
will not bear very close scrutiny. The battle of Delhi, fought on the
11th of September 1803, opened the gates of the city to the British, and
relieved the emperor from his thraldom. A reverse had very nearly
occurred, however. While Lake was reposing after his victory, Holkar,
the great Mahratta chief, leaving his cavalry to attract the notice of
the British at Muttra, suddenly appeared before Delhi with a force of
20,000 infantry and 100 guns. The garrison comprised only two battalions
and four companies of native troops, with a few irregular horse; and as
some of these deserted at the first affright, there were left only 800
men and 11 guns to defend a city seven miles in circuit. By unwearied
patience and daring intrepidity, however, Colonel Burn, who was military
commandant in the city at the time, and who was ably assisted by Colonel
Ochterlony and Lieutenant Rose, succeeded in repelling all the attacks
of the Mahrattas; and Holkar retired discomfited.
From that day—from the 16th of October 1803, until the 11th of May
1857—an enemy was never seen before the gates of Delhi; a day had never
passed during which the city had been other than the capital of a state
governed nominally by a Mogul king, but really by a British resident.
Shah Alum, after thirty years of a troubled life, was vouchsafed three
years of peace, and died in 1806—a pensioner of that great abstraction,
that inscrutable mystery to the millions of Hindostan, the ‘Coompanee
Bahadoor,’ the Most Honourable Company.
The behaviour of the Company’s servants towards the feeble descendant of
the Great Moguls was, until about thirty years ago, the most absurd
mockery. They took away all his real power, and then offered him a
privilege, the least exercise of which, if he had ventured on such a
thing, they would at once have resented. Shah Akbar, who succeeded his
old, blind, feeble father, Shah Alum, in 1806, became at once a
pensioner. He was really king, not over a kingdom, but only over the
twelve thousand inmates of the imperial palace at Delhi, his relations
and retainers—the whole of whom he supported on a pension of about a
hundred thousand pounds per annum, paid by the Company. Hindoo and
Mussulman, notwithstanding his fallen state, alike looked up to him as
the only representative of the ancient glories of India; numerous
princes received their solemn and legal investiture from him; and until
1827, the Company acquired no new province _without applying for his
nominal sanction and official firman_. He was permitted to bestow
dresses of honour on native princes at their accession to the musnud, as
a token of suzerainty; and the same ceremony was attempted by him
occasionally towards the governor-general. At length, under the rule of
Earl Amherst in 1827, it was determined to put an end to a system which
was either a mockery, or an incentive to disaffection on the part of the
Delhians. The pension to the king was increased to a hundred and fifty
thousand pounds, but the supposed or implied vassalage of the East India
Company to the nominal Padishah or Mohammedan ruler of India was brought
to an end; Shah Akbar being, from that date, powerless beyond the walls
of his palace—except as the representative, the symbol, of something
great, still venerated by the natives.
Palace intrigues have not been wanting at Delhi during the twenty years
that preceded the Revolt; and these intrigues have borne some relation
to the state of disaffection that accompanied that outbreak. Shah Akbar
reigned, if reigning it can be called, from 1806 until 1837. He wished
to be succeeded by his second son, Shahzadah Jehanghire; but the British
authorities insisted that the succession should go, as before, to the
eldest son; and consequently Meerza Abu Zuffur became emperor on Shah
Akbar’s death in 1837, under the title of Mahomed Suraj-u-deen Shah
Ghazee. This monarch, again, exhibited the same distrust of the next
heir that is so often displayed in Oriental countries; the British
authorities were solicited to set aside the proper heir to the peacock’s
throne, in favour of a younger prince who possessed much influence in
the zenana. Again was the request refused; and the palace at Delhi was
known to have been a focus of discontent and intrigue for some time
previous to the Revolt. The mode in which the Marquis of Dalhousie
treated these matters, in his minute of 1856, has already been adverted
to; but it may be well to repeat his words here, to shew the exact state
of Delhi palace-politics at that time. ‘Seven years ago [that is, in
1849], the heir-apparent to the King of Delhi died. He was the last of
the race who had been born in the purple. The Court of Directors was
accordingly advised to decline to recognise any other heir-apparent, and
to permit the kingly title to fall into abeyance upon the death of the
present king, who even then was a very aged man. The Honourable Court
accordingly conveyed to the government of India authority to terminate
the dynasty of Timour, whenever the reigning king should die. But as it
was found that, although the Honourable Court had consented to the
measure, it had given its consent with great reluctance, I abstained
from making use of the authority which had been given to me. The
grandson of the king was recognised as heir-apparent; but only on
condition that he should quit the palace in Delhi, in order to reside in
the palace at the Kootub; and that he should, as king, receive the
governor-general of India at all times on terms of perfect equality.’ It
was therefore simply a suspension of the absolute extinction of the
kingly title at Delhi: a suspension dictated, apparently, by the
existence of a little more hesitation in the court of directors, than in
the bold governor-general.
The king who occupied the nominal throne of Delhi at the time of the
Revolt was neither better nor worse than the average of his
predecessors. A pensioned prince with no responsibilities, he was a true
Oriental sensualist, and had become an almost imbecile old man between
eighty and ninety years of age. Nevertheless, for the reasons already
more than once stated, he was invested with a certain greatness in the
eyes of the natives of Hindostan; and Delhi was still their great city.
Hindoos, Afghans, Patans, Seljuks, Rajpoots, Tatars, Moguls, Persians,
Rohillas, Mahrattas, Sikhs—all had left their impress upon the capital;
and with one or other of these, the millions of India had sympathies
either of race or of creed. Even to the hour of the outbreak, the king
was approached with the reverence due to royalty. In the ruined paradise
of Oriental sensualism, the great palace of Delhi, ‘the house of
Tamerlane still revelled in unchecked vileness. The royal family,
consisting of many hundreds—idle, dissolute, shameless, too proud or too
effeminate for military service—lived in entire dependence on the king’s
allowance. For their amusement were congregated from all India the most
marvellous jugglers, the most cunning bird-tamers and snake-charmers,
the most fascinating dancing-girls, the most skilled Persian musicians.
Though the population was exactly balanced between Mohammedans and
Hindoos, it was the Moslem who here reigned supreme.’[8]
[Illustration:
HOWDAH OF AN INDIAN PRINCE.
]
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Footnote 7:
When General Nott returned to India after his victorious campaign in
Afghanistan in 1842, he brought away with him the gates of Somnauth,
which, according to the tradition, had remained at Ghiznee since the
days of Mahmoud. This and other trophies gave occasion to an address
from Lord Ellenborough to the native princes of India, conceived in
somewhat bombastic language, in which the recapture of the gates was
characterised as an achievement ‘avenging the insult of eight hundred
years.’ The chiefs and princes of Sirhind, Rajwarra, Malwah, and
Gujarat, were enjoined to transmit, ‘with all honour,’ the gates to
Somnauth. The address was much ridiculed in England; but those on the
spot believed it to be calculated to make an impression on the
natives. The home government, however, would not permit the gates—even
if the genuine sandal-wood originals, which is not free from doubt—to
be sent to the still-existing temple of Somnauth; they considered such
an act would identify the Company injuriously with one of the two
great parties of religionists in India, and deeply offend the other.
[Illustration:
King of Delhi.
]