First, disclosure. This book was not read, but listened to in the form of an audio book. The four CD set took four and a half hours and was thus (nearly) perfect for a drive back from Strasbourg this week. Obviously, that means it was abridged, so this can't be a 100% review. (By the way, a good audio book and cruise control on the car help the time of a journey go by extremely well, as well as disinclining you to stressful competitive driving.)
But back to the book. Dalrymple describes the Indian Mutiny of 1857. He focuses his attention on how it played out in Delhi, and in particular how it destroyed once and for all the Mughal dynasty and, more generally, the rich cultural world which surrounded it. The last Mughal himself, Bahadur Shah Zafar II, was already at the time of the Mutiny an aged and indecisive man, who had essentially come to terms with the fact that any real power his lineage had possessed was gone. He was in fact, notwithstanding the insensitivities of the British, and the casual humiliations they inflicted, relatively content with the life of his court, which lay at the heart of a vibrant and sophisticated cultural scene.
In the early part of the book, Dalrymple powerfully evokes pre-Mutiny Delhi, it's court and poets, its artists and courtesans, it smells and flavours, its bustle and rhythms, its politics and intrigues. The worlds of the Indians and the British (at that time, the East India Company) run almost entirely in parallel, rarely intersecting on a day-to-day basis. The British "Resident", who wields the real power in Delhi, does so on the whole in a fairly benign manner, allowing the Mughal and his court to do what they do, though meddling in dynastic matters to a painful extent. Still, it all rubs along reasonably well, even if rising potential for religious conflict is detectable, not least provoked by increasingly evangelical British incomers, replacing an earlier generation of more integrated colonists, more in sympathy with the local way of life and indeed frequently adopting it. (Polygamy especially seems to have held an appeal for many of them.)
Neither of these two worlds either foresaw or at all welcomed the swiftly spiraling Mutiny, famously ignited by the belief among Indian sepoys that their new ammunition cartridges, which they were required to bite in order to load their new Enfield rifles, were greased with the fat of both cows and pigs, thus offending the religion of both Hindus and Muslims. This belief, which is probably at least partly justified, gave the Mutiny and incendiary religious dimension from the very outset.
For the Europeans who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, i.e. Delhi when the troops - or at least most troops - turned on their colonial masters, the disaster was unmitigated. Most were massacred brutally and indiscriminately, men, women and children alike. The only ones spared were known converts to either Hinduism or Islam, and a meagre few managed to escape, mostly owing their lives somewhere along the line to Indian friends or protectors, who included indeed, for one group, the Mughal himself.
Dalrymple's is a detailed narrative history of the events that follow. Politically, the key event in the early phase of the Mutiny comes when the mutineers go to the old Mughal and ask for his blessing for their rebellion. The normally indecisive man takes the decision to do so, and thereby transforms the rebellion from "just" an army mutiny to a full blown uprising against British rule. One could say the Mughal had no choice, certainly he seems to have shown little enthusiasm for the Mutiny and tried, mostly vainly, to rein in the excesses of the sepoys, but there is perhaps also at the back of his mind the idea that the glory and power of his dynasty might be restored. If so, he will be swiftly disabused and retreats from any active involvement in proceedings as his world, and all the art and culture for which he lives, is utterly destroyed.
And how… If one sympathizes with the British for their terrible suffering as the Mutiny erupts, the re-establishment of British rule moves from being a desperate defensive action, to a risky and courageous military campaign, to an exercise in ruthless, even psychopathic, vengeance every bit as bad as what was originally inflicted on the Europeans in Delhi, but far vaster in scale. The treatment of the Indian innocent by the ultimately victorious East India Company is appalling and, as far as Delhi is concerned, leaves little more than a ghost town to slowly recover, though never to recapture its cultural glory and pre-eminence. (In any case, most of the artists and poets are dead, caught in the British "clearance" of entire quarters of Delhi.
The Mughal himself, indecisive to the last, commits a second fatal error near the end of the Mutiny, opting out of leading the rebels against the British, who could perhaps still have been beaten back in the course of their highly precarious taking of Delhi. It is too late to decide he "wants no part" of the rebellion, but that is the course he tries to take, fatally undermining the sepoys and in effect bringing down the final curtain on his dynasty, his own family (almost all of whom die in the fighting or are later hanged by the British). Himself, his last minute attempt to flee fails, as he is caught by an opportunistic British glory-hunter, who, however, guarantees him his life to ease the capture process, a promise which, though contested by others, leads to him ending his life a few years later in British captivity in Rangoon.
As for British rule, calmer heads ultimately deplore the viciousness of the reprisals against the Indian population and curb the excesses. The government back in London finally decides that India cannot reasonably be administered as a commercial operation with a private army by the East India Company, and brings it under Crown administration. But these are the codas to Dalrymple's history, which has recounted, with balance and objectivity, an episode of terrible destruction driven by a potent mix of religious fundamentalism, racism, vengeance and raw power.
Recommendation: great narrative history about events we know too little about. Yes, read it.
Magnificence, high culture, indecision: the Last Mughal
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