The History of the Indian Revolt and of the Expeditions to Persia, China and Japan 1856-7-8

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.

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.