Some Thoughts about The Last Mughal

After many months I finally finished William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal. The book is an impressively detailed history of the events leading up to, during and after the 1857 mutiny which saw the overthrow of the eponymous last Mughal ruler of India, Bhahadur Shah II. What follows is not a review or scholarly appraisal of any kind. I am neither qualified nor equipped after one reading to attempt anything like that. Rather it is a series of loosely connected thoughts about what the immersive picture that Dalrymple paints of that time can tell us about Indian society today, the nature of religion, and the place of history in our deliberations about what to do in the present.

Dalrymple ends the book with the old adage from Edmund Burke that he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat it. For Dalrymple, the tolerant and multi-religious civilisation that was defeated by the British in Delhi in 1857 is instructive for the sorts of tolerant relations we can develop now between east and west and between different religious communities. Ignoring this lesson would be, for Dalrymple, to risk repeating the sorry events of 1857 and the British Raj. But, as I read this final moral coda of sorts I was struck by how, to my eyes, Dalrymple’s history of the 1857 mutiny in Delhi actually undermines his concluding point. Moreover, so far as India and Indian society is concerned, I actually think the lesson of the events Dalymple relates is that there are no viable lessons for India’s present or future in its history.

Dalrymple is not alone in his view of the potential instructiveness of history for Indian society. Amartya Sen argues in the first four chapters of The Argumentative Indian that Indians need not see a pluralistic and diverse society as alien to them or that the management of such a society should be something to learn by looking to European societies. Rather, Sen argues there is a long and rich tradition in the Indian subcontinent of a pluralistic culture of debate and tolerance of heterodox thought. The ancient Indian materialist philosopher Carvaka, Buddha, Ashoka, Aryabhata, Akbar Shah Jahan, Dara Shikoh, Tagore, and Gandhi are examples of a tradition of thought and action that embraces pluralism and reasoning from the public point of view. By this Sen means that these figures are not historical flukes but part of a tradition of scepticism about orthodoxy, and reasoned discourse that takes a diverse society into account. For Sen, this tradition in its finer moments enabled a multi-religious and multicultural society to live in relative harmony and therefore provides a guide or at least an inspiration to India’s present and future. It shows a genuinely pluralistic society can wrought from modern India’s penchant for communal violence.

I don’t know if Dalrymple agrees with the entirety of Sen’s view, although going by his emphasis on Bahadur Shah II’s multi-religious court and attempts to keep religious peace during the events of 1857, it is probably safe to say he believes some close version of it. The irony then is that I think the general picture of the sepoy mutiny in 1857 Dalrymple recounts undermines Sen’s view. Rather than showing any great streak of tolerance or reception to reasoned argument, the mutiny shows how skin deep religious enmity was. Sepoys were actively justifying their indiscriminate killing and looting on the basis that the English were taking away their religion. To be sure, as Dalrymple relates the attitudes of many of the British in India had turned by the time of the mutiny from a desire to integrate into Indian society, to a desire to rule as racial and religious superiors. However, how weak does one have to think of one’s religion, Islamic or Hindu, to believe the only recourse to evangelical proselytising involves the savage indiscriminate killing of defenceless men, women and children, and the lawless looting of a city.

Even in unity against the British, Dalrymple documents the religious tensions that arose between the Muslim and Hindu muntineers inside Delhi. The killing of cows and beef eating, which seem like modern melodramas, inflame communal tensions between the Hindu and Muslim mutineers. So much so it requires the King and the city’s police to ban beef eating and the butchery of cows to calm the situation. For me all this shows that religious tension and the hysterical fear of being robbed of one’s culture and tradition has always been in Indian society. It is an undercurrent in social relations that has a long history shaped before, during and after the colonial period.

None of this is to say that the mutiny shows up the British as some sharp moral relief to the mutineers. The vengeful lynchings and murders as the British retook Delhi are a testament to that. But, ultimately, the savage nature of British violence is only a reflection of the violence of the mutineers they trained. As a whole the mutineers and the forces under the command of the British came from the same institutional stock. They were a private military force that by the time of the mutiny were meant for the conquest of India.

Another thought I had as I read Dalrymple’s account of the the religiously charged violence during the mutiny was that it shows the normative powerlessness of religions like Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. In the same breath, religions claim to make people better because they provide a guide on individual virtue. But, when those same people act wrongly it is conveniently hand waved away as merely a weakness of individual will. Well which is it? Does organised religion have the normative purchase on people’s minds to make them better individuals, or is it, like so much ideal moral theory, at the mercy of individual interests and material conditions? At least in the mutiny, ignorance is no excuse as the mutineering sepoys and British officers were not wholly some uneducated or socially oppressed rabble. They were some of the elite of their respective communities. The British Officers came out of some of the best public schools in Britain from the exalted Victorian era. On the other side many mutineers were high caste Hindus. Religion and upbringing, when it mattered, did nothing to stay their hands from lawless revenge.

Another thought I had was that the British conduct after the defeat of the mutiny stands out, not because of its mere brutality (eg. lawless looting, murders, executions, rapes, the razing of Delhi, and the betrayal of their supports in Delhi), which is predictable enough by the racialised sentiment Dalrymple recounts within the British camp during the fighting. Rather it stands out because it is clear that the defeat of the mutineers and the lawless deposition of the Mughal Emperor (to whom the British East India company at the time were legal vassals) is the actual final battle that establishes the effective conquest of the Indian sub-continent. It shows how the British Raj was not some accident or convenient settlement produced by rivals to the Mughal thrones. It establishes quite clearly how colonialism is not merely a procedural wrong that involves subverting some rules or conventions. It is substantively wrong because it undermines the goods of legitimate political authority like order and prosperity and furthers the evils of private gain at the expense of public benefits, disorder, and social instability.

This brings me to my final thought which is about Dalrymple’s description of the actual armed forces fighting each other in the mutiny. The overwhelming majority of the men fighting one either side of the mutiny were all Indian sepoys in the employ of the British East India company or forces provided by the princely states of north west India happy to see the downfall of the Mughals. This means that tragically the colonisation of India is something that some Indians played a large part in enabling. This is not some crass victim blaming, but to simply acknowledge the identity of most of the armed forces that made the fall of the Mughal dynasty possible. The British Raj formalised after the mutiny was only possible because it could rely on the thousands of Indian soldiers in their direct employment and the support of the princely states. That those princes were not hanged for treason or driven into exile in 1947 is a small wonder. That they weren’t perhaps further undermines Dalrymple’s moral coda at the end of the book about learning from history. History isn’t some clear record of moral transactions that can be systematically corrected to unravel the present. It is a murky lake where complex creatures from a different world roam. Those in the present can only deal with what is in front of them. Here I think, ironically, Sen sums the situation up best towards the end of The Argumentative Indian where in discussing the folly of trying to find an Indian identity in history as the basis for secularism, he concludes that, “while we cannot live without history, we need not live within it either”. That is I think the real lesson for India from the events Dalrymple eloquently details in The Last Mughal.