The last days of Mughal Delhi

The Broken Script: Delhi under the East India Company and the Fall of the Mughal Dynasty, 1803-1857

Author: Swapna Liddle

Publisher: Speaking Tiger

Pages: 456

Price: Rs 899
 

Percival Spear’s book with the evocative title Twilight of the Mughals was among the first books to be written about the period when Mughal Empire symbolically was in existence but in terms of power and authority non-existent. It was a strange and bizarre period of transition that the British rulers rather enjoyed because it enabled them to exercise power without responsibility.
 

The words “British rulers” in the previous sentence is used deliberately. Since the passing of Pitt’s India Act in 1784 for all practical purposes the East India Company had ceased to be the rulers of those territories in India that the British had conquered. The East India Company reported directly to the Board of Control appointed by the House of Commons; the Governor-General of India was appointed by the British government in London. And the royal charter that allowed the East India Company to operate in India (and Asia) came up for review every 20 years — and every successive Charter Act (1813, 1833, and 1853) clipped the wings of the Company to the point of making it irrelevant. What is equally important is that British officials in India, including the Resident in Delhi, thought of themselves as representatives of the British government. Swapna Liddle has enough quotes in this book to establish this perception. In this context it might be worth reconsidering the phrase “under the East India Company” in the subtitle that Dr Liddle gives to her book. Once the British conquered Delhi in 1803, the British government, not the East India Company, ruled Delhi, as it did the other territories the British had conquered since 1757.

The issue raised above concerns the external/outer life of Delhi or Shahajanabad. Dr Liddle’s book evokes the inner life of the city — and she moves effortlessly from the inner chambers and courtyards of Lal Qila to the streets and lanes of Chandni Chowk, Daryaganj and the environs of Jama Masjid. Her narrative covers the lives of Mughal Emperors trying desperately, if pathetically, to cling to the vestiges of authority and dignity, of British residents ensconced in Delhi to control and undermine the position of the Emperors, of poets lamenting the passing of an era, of merchants and bankers seeking to preserve and enhance their fortunes by wagering on the winning side and, importantly, the common people of Delhi, the mute witnesses of history who, much to the surprise of the British, decided in the summer of 1857 to take arms against the firangi. Dr Liddle’s book in its sweep and in its details captures all these layers. The title of her book — borrowed from a poem by Qadir Baksh — is apt but her narrative is hardly ever broken.
 

The best sections in the book are those that deal with the revolt of 1857 in Delhi. After William Dalrymple’s reconstruction of the last days of Bahadur Shah Zafar in Delhi, this is the most detailed account we have of the revolt in the city. There are at least three aspects of the rebellion to which the readers’ attention is drawn by Dr Liddle. One, the activities of the common people which was at the heart of the uprising. Here, Dr Liddle is prone to emphasise the disorder spread by the actions of the common people who engaged in loot and plunder. In this she is probably too close to her sources, which were mostly accounts penned by the elites of the city or by scribes who enjoyed the patronage of the elites. Loot, plunder and destruction are the characteristic modalities of popular insurgency. Two, because she underestimates the significance of the insurgency, her attention is in the most part focused on how the Mughal Emperor tried, against all odds, to restore order in the city. The Emperor himself could exercise power because a popular insurrection had restored the authority he had lost with the arrival of firangi  rule. Third, Dr Liddle points out how the revolt by turning the world upside down drew into its fold marginalised sections of the population, especially women.

In many ways, this is a very good book studded with unknown gems of information. My only grouse against it is that the author is so concerned with fashioning a coherent narrative from a broken script that she often ignores the crucial point of causality. How things unfolded is presented by Dr Liddle in rich detail. But why things happened the way they did does not receive sufficient attention, in many places no attention at all. Through the broken script, Dr Liddle presents a chronicle of Mughal Delhi in its twilight but like all chronicles, it does not rise to the level of history. This book leaves the reader asking for a little more.

The reviewer is chancellor and professor of History, Ashoka University