Bahadur Shah Zafar

• 1. Introduction

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  Bahadur Shah Zafar died at five in the morning on the 7th of November 1862, in a colonial outpost far from the city he had ruled. He was buried that same afternoon near the Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon, in a plot that had been measured out and prepared by the British Commissioner just days before. The man who had been declared Emperor of India by the forces of a continent-wide rebellion ended his days being spoon-fed broth in Burma, unable even to swallow. He was eighty-seven years old.

  He left behind an epitaph in Urdu verse that asked a haunting question: how unfortunate is Zafar, that not even two yards of land were to be had in the land of his beloved for his burial? The poem made his exile the final insult, the last proof that fate had decreed imprisonment even in the harvest of spring.

  This is the story of the twentieth and last Mughal Emperor, a man who was also a Sufi mystic, a patron of poets, and an aging, reluctant figurehead who found himself at the center of the greatest armed uprising against British rule in Indian history. What drew the rebel sepoys to his court? What happened during the twenty-one days of his trial at the Red Fort? And what became of the nearly five-hundred-year dynasty whose end his exile sealed?

• 2. A Throne With No Kingdom

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  By the early nineteenth century, the Mughal Empire had contracted to a single city. Bahadur Shah Zafar's authority ran only as far as the Walled City of Delhi and the surrounding territory out to Palam. The Maratha Empire had dismantled Mughal power in the Deccan during the previous century, and the regions that once paid tribute to the Mughals had either been absorbed by the Marathas or had broken away into smaller kingdoms. When the Marathas installed Shah Alam II on the throne in 1772, they did so under the protection of their general Mahadaji Shinde, effectively making the emperor a figure under their suzerainty.

  By the time Zafar inherited the throne after his father Akbar II died in 1837, the East India Company had become the dominant political and military force across India. The company collected taxes from Delhi and maintained a garrison there with the emperor's permission, and in return it paid him a pension. Zafar himself was described as having no interest in statecraft and no imperial ambition whatsoever.

  His path to the throne had not even been straightforward. He was his father's second son, and not the preferred heir. One of Akbar II's queens had pressed for her own son, Mirza Jahangir, to be named successor. Jahangir's candidacy collapsed when he attacked Archibald Seton, the East India Company's resident at the Red Fort, and the company promptly exiled him, leaving the way open for Zafar.

• 3. Poet, Mystic, Patron

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  Before a single sepoy arrived at his court in 1857, Zafar had spent decades building one of the most celebrated literary gatherings in Urdu letters. His court drew Mirza Ghalib, Daagh Dehlvi, Momin Khan Momin, and Mohammad Ibrahim Zauq, who was also Zafar's personal mentor. The assembled poets made Delhi a living centre of Urdu culture, and Zafar himself contributed a substantial body of Urdu ghazals to the tradition, later compiled into a collection called the Kulliyyat-i-Zafar.

  A decade before he took the throne, Major Archer described Zafar in 1828 as a man of spare figure, plainly dressed, with the appearance of an impoverished teacher of languages. That image matched his own self-understanding. Before his accession, he had lived like, in the words recorded about him, a poor scholar and dervish, setting himself apart from his three royal brothers. His devotion was not merely aesthetic. He was regarded as a Sufi Pir and accepted murids, or students, and the newspaper Delhi Urdu Akhbaar called him one of the leading saints of the age.

  His spiritual life was rich in both its heights and its particularities. He believed his dual status as pir and emperor gave him real powers, and when one of his followers was bitten by a snake, he treated the man with a seal of Bezoar stone and water over which he had breathed. He sacrificed buffaloes and camels on the advice of a coterie of pirs and Hindu astrologers, buried eggs, and wore a ring said to cure his indigestion. He donated cows to the poor, elephants to Sufi shrines, and horses to the clergy of Jama Masjid. One of his verses stated explicitly that Hinduism and Islam shared the same essence, a view his court made visible by celebrating Rakhi, Holi, and Diwali alongside Muslim observances.

• 4. The Rebellion Arrives

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  On the 12th of May 1857, Bahadur Shah Zafar held his first formal audience in several years. The men attending were sepoys who had marched to Delhi as the Indian Rebellion spread across the subcontinent. Contemporary accounts described them as treating the emperor familiarly, even disrespectfully. Zafar asked them directly why they had come, saying he had no means to maintain them.

  His conduct in those days was indecisive. The forces pressing him argued that the rebellion could not succeed without him. He yielded. Four days later, on the 16th of May, sepoys and palace servants killed fifty-two European prisoners who had been discovered hiding in the city. The executions took place under a peepul tree outside the palace, despite Zafar's protests. The executioners' intent was deliberately to implicate him. Once he had openly aligned himself with the rebellion, he accepted responsibility for everything the mutineers did, even as he was dismayed by the looting and disorder.

  The administration the rebellion created in Delhi was described as chaotic and troublesome, functioning haphazardly. Zafar nominated his eldest son, Mirza Mughal, as commander in chief, but Mirza Mughal had little military experience and the sepoys refused to accept him. Each regiment would only take orders from its own officers, so no unified command ever formed. Outside the city walls, Gujjar herders began levying their own tolls on traffic. Feeding the city grew steadily harder.

  As the Siege of Delhi tightened and British victory became certain, Zafar fled to Humayun's Tomb, then on the outskirts of Delhi. Company forces under Major William Hodson surrounded the tomb. Zafar surrendered on the 20th of September 1857. The following day, Hodson shot Zafar's sons Mirza Mughal and Mirza Khizr Sultan and his grandson Mirza Abu Bakht under his own authority at the Khooni Darwaza, near the Delhi Gate.

• 5. Twenty-One Days at the Red Fort

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  The trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar lasted twenty-one days, heard nineteen separate sessions, called twenty-one witnesses, and admitted over a hundred documents in Persian and Urdu along with their English translations. There had been a suggestion that the proceedings be held at Calcutta, where the Directors of the East India Company conducted their commercial business. Instead, the Red Fort in Delhi was chosen. It was the first case ever tried there.

  Zafar faced four charges: aiding and encouraging the mutiny, helping persons wage war against the British government, assuming the sovereignty of Hindustan, and being accessory to the killing of Christians. On the twentieth day, he defended himself. His argument was that he had been powerless before the sepoys, pointing out that they had affixed his seal to empty envelopes without his knowledge of their contents. The eighty-two-year-old was described as having been harassed by the mutineers and as being neither inclined to nor capable of providing real leadership.

  The most damaging blow came from Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, Zafar's most trusted confidant, a man who served simultaneously as his Prime Minister and personal physician. Ahsanullah Khan had insisted to others that Zafar had not involved himself in the rebellion and had surrendered of his own will. At the trial, he gave evidence against Zafar in exchange for a pardon for himself. Because Major Hodson had guaranteed Zafar's life on his surrender, the court did not sentence him to death. He was exiled to Rangoon.

• 6. The Road to Rangoon

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  At four in the morning on the 7th of October 1858, Bahadur Shah Zafar climbed into a bullock cart. His wife Zeenat Mahal, two surviving sons, and the remaining members of his household accompanied him. The escort was provided by the 9th Lancers under Lieutenant Ommaney. The procession moved through the night toward Rangoon, carrying the last of the Mughal line out of India and into British-controlled Burma.

  In Rangoon he lived confined, observed by British officials. The shrine of Bahadur Shah Zafar Dargah was eventually built at the site of his tomb after a restoration completed on the 16th of February 1991. In 1943, the Indian National Army paid tribute to that tomb. In 1975, the Indian government issued a postal stamp in his honour.

  His epitaph, the ghazal he wrote for himself, became his most enduring legacy. A scholarly dispute surrounds part of the text. William Dalrymple, in his book The Last Mughal, reports that according to the Lahore scholar Imran Khan, the opening line, umr-e-darāz māṅg ke, meaning "I asked for a long life," does not appear in any works published during Zafar's lifetime and was allegedly written by the poet Simab Akbarabadi. The rest of the ghazal, with its image of a nightingale whose fate was imprisonment in the very season of spring, belongs to a man who spent the last years of the nearly five-hundred-year Timurid dynasty sleeping, as his own verse put it, legs outstretched, in a tomb not two yards wide in the land of the beloved.