Books:The Last Mughal
THE LAST MUGHAL: THE FALL OF A DYNASTY
by William Dalrymple. Alfred Knopf, March 2007.
Hardcover, 560 pages. $19.80.
William Dalrymple's latest book, The
Last Mughal, awarded the prestigious
2007 Duff Cooper Prize for History
and Biography, is a significant contribution
to understanding the roots of the current
war in Iraq, and the clash between Western
countries, particularly the United States, and
al Qaeda and the Taliban. Dalrymple says that
the histories of Islamic fundamentalism and
Western imperialism have often been closely,
and dangerously intertwined. The quick narrative
pace of this well-researched book of
nearly 500 pages makes it less dry history and
more of a vivid human story.
Dalrymple portrays a narrow slice of
Indian history, the 1857 Indian uprising
against the British. By 1857, the British had
conquered almost the entire subcontinent,
not with armies but by annexing territories
and legal chicanery. Bahadur Shah Zafar, the
last Mughal, was left with nothing but his palace
in Delhi and the hollow title of Badshah
(emperor).
He was a king who felt weighed down by
the trappings of his office. Like his illustrious
ancestor Akbar, Zafar was more interested in
encouraging the arts and building gardens,
but he lacked the political acumen of dealing
with the political reality of a dynasty in
decline. Ghalib and Zauq, celebrated poets,
adorned Zafar's court. Zafar himself was a
mystic, poet, writer on Sufism, calligrapher,
and architect. He was also a very tolerant
king. It was during this surreal coexistence
of Zafar's life of aesthetic pleasure and the
expansion and consolidation of the British
empire, that 300 armed Indian sepoys and
cavalrymen (sawars) employed by the British
army suddenly rode into Delhi after killing
their British superiors in Meerut where an
uprising had broken out on May 10, 1857.
The soldiers repudiated British authority and
declared Zafar to be their leader, a position he
reluctantly accepted.
The Indian soldiers' grievance was that
they had been forced to bite the cartridges
of the newly introduced Enfield rifles. The
cartridges were smeared with cow and pig fat,
which offended their religious sensibilities.
But the uprising had deeper causes. May
10, 1857 is recorded in history books as the
day of the infamous Sepoy Mutiny, a British
view of the incident. Dalrymple, however,
gives us another perspective. After researching
20,000 virtually unused Persian and Urdu documents
relating to Delhi, known as the "Mutiny
Papers," Dalrymple and his colleagues, Mahmood
Farooqui and Bruce Wannelly, found for
the first time, what Dalrymple calls seeing the
events of 1857 in Delhi "from a properly Indian
perspective, and not just from the British
sources through which to date it has
usually been viewed."
Dalrymple also found
in these documents
descriptions of life in
Delhi in those troubled
times seen through
the eyes of ordinary
people. What Dalrymple
discovered
were "two parallel
streams of historiography
"which used
completely different
sources." He found
in the Punjab Archive,
hidden in the
tomb of Anarkali,
emperor Jehangir's
favorite dancer,
c o r re s p o n d e n c e
between the British
Resident and
his superiors in
Calcutta plotting
the total extinction of the Mughal
court, an ominous prelude to gradually gaining
total control over Delhi.
When the British came to India as officers
of the East India Company, their initial interest
was trade, and for this they adopted amicable
relations with local rulers. They even mingled
with Indians, some of them marrying Indian
women and having children by them. They
became interested in the native cultures of India
and studied Persian and Arabic diligently.
Some of them were attracted to the courtly
Muslim culture of Delhi, giving rise to "a sort
of Anglo-Mughal Islamo-Christian culture"
which served as a buffer between the Mughal
world and the British Company's Residency.
While this fusion of civilizations was going
on, there was also an intense movement by
Evangelical missionaries like Rev. Midgeley
Jennings to convert Muslims and Hindus, and
worse, to demolish mosques to construct
roads and churches.
The East India Company was morphing
into an empire: Siraj ud-Daula had been defeated
in Bengal in 1757, the French in 1761,
Tipu Sultan of Mysore in 1799, the Marathas
in 1803 and 1819, and the Sikhs in 1849.
This expansion bred what Dalrymple calls
"an imperial arrogance." Thomas Babington
Macaulay famously articulated this superiority
complex by declaring that "a single shelf of a
good European library was worth the whole
native literature of India and Arabia." Macaulay's
brother-in-law, Charles Trevelyan, spearheaded
a movement to remodel
native madarasas,
once centers of Islamic
learning, open also to
Hindus, into the Delhi
College, to impart English
education. By 1852,
British imperialism was
becoming patently manifest,
and the rift grew
between Indians and the
British. Evangelical proselytization
also gave rise
to radical Islamism led by
Shah Waliullah who advocated
strict adherence
to Koranic law and vowed
to wage jihad against
Christians. The jihadists
also admonished the less
strict, pleasure-loving Sufis,
among who were Zafar
and Ghalib.
The British policy, born
of technological, economic,
and political superiority, displaced an entire
culture and disrupted the Hindu as well as
Muslim way of life. The insurgency by the
sepoys spread beyond the ranks of the army,
and was widely supported by the people. With
the breakdown of law and order, criminals
took over Delhi. Zafar was horrified by the
violence on both sides, but was helpless to
prevent it. After much carnage on both sides,
the British gained the upper hand and the
Indian sepoys either fled from Delhi or died
of starvation. Though legally the Company
was still a vassal of Zafar, the emperor was
tried in a kangaroo court, found "guilty" of an
international Muslim conspiracy to overthrow
the British Empire, and was sentenced to live
in exile in Rangoon. He died in 1862 and was
buried in an anonymous grave behind a prison
enclosure there.
Moderate Muslim voices were muted. Dalrymple
traces the roots of the al-Qaeda and
Taliban to the radical Islamism that emerged
from the 1857 Uprising from an orthodox madarasa founded in Deoband, in the Doab.
Quoting Edmund Burke, Dalrymple issues a
closing warning to those who fail to learn
from history. The "aggressive Western intrusion
and interference in the East," says Dalrymple,
radicalizes the ordinary Muslim, "and
feeds the power of extremists."
By LAKSHMI MANI
Lakshmi Mani taught at the Rochester Institute of
Technology for 20 years. She writes on American
and Indian-American literature, and is a National
Endowment for the Humanities fellow.
Wondering About India:
Palimpsest or Pentimento?
IN SPITE OF THE GODS: THE STRANGE RISE OF
MODERN INDIA by Edward Luce. Doubleday, January,
2007. 383 pages. $26.00.
Decades ago A.L. Basham wrote an
academic tome titled The Wonder That
Was India. I happened across a pristine
copy in a second-hand bookshop near the
University of Chicago, where Indologists were
doing first-class scholarship about the Indian
subcontinent. My way of belonging to that
community was to acquire the books that
those scholars wrote and read. While I have
read most of the books that I've purchased,
Basham's book has remained pristinely unread
on my bookshelf. In part, I was intimidated
by its size (568 pages). And then there was
the weighty title written in the past tense.
Every time that I have lifted the book off of
its shelf, I've groaned at its heft and silently
complained, "But my India is a wonder."
Edward Luce's In Spite of the Gods: The
Strange Rise of Modern India is an antidote
to books that suggest that the vitality of Indian
civilization expired sometime between
the Mughal Period and British Imperialism.
Luce shares the following anecdotal gem to
support his case that Indian culture has an
unparalleled thread of continuity: "When A.L.
Basham, the British classical historian, wrote
his still widely admired book The Wonder That
Was India in 1954, he tried to persuade his
American publishers to make a minor alteration
in the title ?. Professor Basham said that
in India's case the ‘was' should be changed to
‘is,' since the country's civilizational story was
unbroken." The publishers were unmoved by
the professor's argument.
Happily, Luce's readers will be moved by
the lively writing and provocative arguments
in In Spite of the Gods. Page after page is filled
with quote-worthy insight. The careful reader
is rewarded by questions that these insights
raise. For example, Luce notes that "in India
the modern lifestyle is just another layer on
the country's ancient palimpsest ? Most
Europeans tend to think of modernity as
the triumph of a secular way of life: church
attendance gradually dwindles and religion
becomes a minority pastime confined to worshipers'
private lives ? In Europe the past is
the past. But in India, the past is in many ways
also the future."
But is India a palimpsest, a layering of
old, religious ways onto the new? Do tradition
and modernity coexist like a grandparent
and grandchild in an extended family? How
far below the hip-hop-happening surface of
agnostic call centers does one need to scratch
to discover Aryans galloping on horseback to
their Hindu homeland? Or witness Ashoka's
conversion to Buddhism? Or experience
Akbar's ecumenical Islam?
If the metaphor of palimpsest hides more
than it illuminates, is India instead a pentimento?
Is it like those layered canvases where
earlier images show through as the top layer
of the painting becomes transparent with
age? Simply put, is India's post-Independence
democracy vanishing into some imagined Hindutva
past? Isn't this what the Hindu fundamentalists
rally around when they wave their
saffron flags and their Shiva-inspired tridents?
India as pentimento has Bal Thackeray, the
Shiv Sena supremo, menacing minorities with
dreams of a "Hindustan of Hindus" that would
bring "Islam in this country
down to its knees."
Luce rejects Thackeray's
sectarian vision. A scan of
his chapter titles suggests
that modern India is an aggregation
of its diverse,
multi-layered past: "Global
and Medieval," "The Burra
Sahibs," "Battles of the
Righteous," "Long Live the
Sycophants," "Many Crescents,"
and "A Triangular
Dance." The most forceful
argument for the past living
in the present is made
in the penultimate chapter
—"New India, Old
India: The Many-Layered
Character of Indian Modernity."
This is the only
chapter where the now
commonplace observations of call
centers and software sectors are discussed.
However, they are presented in the context
of the book's overall premise that India is a
wonder because of her many religions, her
dozen-plus languages, her thousands of dialects
which merge as a kind of dialectic within
and between cities and villages. Echoing V.S.
Naipaul's prescient observation that India has
a "million mutinies now," Luce forcefully raises
the palimpsest argument for pluralism.
But as hinted at in the book's title and
discussed in detail in a chapter titled "The
Imaginary Horse: The Continuing Threat of
Hindu Nationalism," Luce is anxious that the
pentimento theory is gaining currency. He
takes issue with powerful Hindu politicians
who seek to maintain the centuries-old status
quo and remain in control by manipulating the
illiterate masses (quite often low-caste Hindus
or Muslims). Luce supports his arguments
with a mix of meticulous journalistic reporting,
personal anecdote, and reference to wellaccepted
(at least in the West) scholarship.
The closing chapter illustrates how this
book of advocacy journalism works. Luce,
who is a reporter for the Financial Times, is
unabashedly a future-oriented Indophile; he
makes clear that he would like to see India's
trajectory toward superpower status continue.
He asserts that if India is to achieve this
desired state, the following four constraints
must be overcome: (1) 300 million impoverished
citizens, (2) environmental degradation,
(3) HIV-AIDS epidemic, and (4) challenges to
liberal democracy.
Luce's recommendations to overcome
these problems are specific and helpful, if at
times a bit overbearing. He does not mince
words. At first the prescriptive approach is
refreshingly candid and concrete. But page
after page of statistically supported prescription
begins to take on the feel of a hectoring
doctor who doesn't appreciate that the patient
is in control of her own destiny. Those
in the Indian government (and especially
those members
of the BJP party out of
government) might consider
In Spite of the Gods
a harangue. Indeed, Luce
repeatedly compares India
unfavorably to China,
repeating the following
mantra: "The problem is
neither money nor technology.
It is about the inefficiency
of government
?. Corruption is the only
possible explanation ?"
The harangue is spiced
with pithy quotes: "In Africa
poverty is a tragedy,
in India it is a scandal;" "It
is time for India's VIPs to
follow the people who get
no pay for no work;" "India
never misses an opportunity
to miss an opportunity;" "The 21st century is
India's to lose."
But just as the reader tires of the smart
statistics and the smart-aleck quotes, Luce
delivers a brilliantly personal closing story. He
relates a night journey in the first-class cabin
of an Indian train. One of his fellow passengers
is a 10-year-old Sikh boy who cheerfully
and sleeplessly implores Luce, "Tell me some
interesting things." This is a good frame of
mind for all of Luce's readers-cum-companions
on his journey through modern India. He
does tell us some interesting things. In Spite of
the Gods stirs the reader out of sleepy indifference
about the dreams and nightmares of the
palimpsest that is India—living at once in the
past, present, and future. —Rajesh C. Oza
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