Farzana Read online

  Ismael Beg, happy to join in any amount of plundering, had so far done little to protect the emperor from the strong-arm tactics of Ghulam Qadir. But this treatment of innocent girls and respectable women who had lived all their lives in modest seclusion was more than he could tolerate. He protested angrily and, when his remonstrations were ignored, withdrew his forces from the fort and retired to his camp outside the city by the Nizam-ud-din dargah. Even some of the Rohilla commanders were appalled by the public humiliation of the imperial princesses. Yet none dared challenge the vindictive ire of their commander. According to Jadunath Sarkar:

  [Ghulam Qadir] saw visions of his father and grandfather chiding him for not avenging the wrongs on their house of the effete Timurids [i.e., Mughals] of Delhi and believed himself to be the divinely appointed instrument for purging the royal house of Hindustan. With his manly Afghan clansmen at his back he claimed to be ‘the Scourge of God’ (Qahar-i-Khuda).10

  The Rohilla’s fanaticism and lust for wealth were running out of control. It was only a matter of time before they would drive him to methods of extortion still more ingenious and injurious. Never had the emperor had greater need of Scindia’s dilatory troops, never had he more missed Farzana’s devoted service.

  DESERT INTERLUDE

  In his three-volume History of the Mahrattas, published in 1826, James Grant Duff would rate Mahadji Scindia ‘a man of great political sagacity, and of considerable genius; [but] of deep artifice, of restless ambition, and of implacable revenge’.11 In the monsoon of 1788, while scenes of unparalleled horror were being enacted behind the walls of the Red Fort, it was the deep artifice that eclipsed both sagacity and genius to keep the Maratha in Mathura when he should have been speeding to the rescue of his sovereign.

  For not going to Delhi when news of its capture first reached him he had all manner of excuses. His troops had been fighting without a break since 1780; that was eight years ago and they were exhausted. He was determined not to move until he could advance in strength and was therefore waiting till reinforcements from the Peshwa in Pune could join him; or his army had refused to move at all without receiving their arrears of pay; or the intensity of the rains was making it impossible to travel. There were elements of truth in all these explanations, but in fact the wily Scindia was playing a waiting game. He had already lost too many men in battle with Ghulam Qadir and Ismael Beg to risk any more. Besides, he reasoned, an attack by a predominantly Hindu force would merely bind the Muslim conspirators closer together. On the other hand, if left to their own devices, they would almost certainly turn on each other, and in that event there was always the possibility of one of them joining the Marathas.

  There was also a more personal reason for Scindia’s reluctance to move out of Mathura. By now ‘he had gained power and fame beyond the dreams of ambition’, writes Jadunath Sarkar, ‘but Providence had denied him a son. A stranger would therefore enjoy all his life’s earnings after him.’12 His hopes had been ‘dashed to the ground’ in 1784 when his rani, in giving birth to their only child, had produced a daughter – she whose death had rendered Mahadji prostrate with grief on the battlefield of Lalsot. Now, in the holy city of Mathura, ‘Scindia began to woo the gods for the gift of a son. For this he made large gifts to the temples and the Brahmans and performed worship in person, composing hymns in praise of his deity.’ Immersed in his devotions and as yet uninformed of what was happening behind the walls of the Red Fort, he stayed on. But he did have the presence of mind to send a messenger to Farzana. By way of a stop-gap response, would the begum hasten to the emperor’s assistance on his behalf?

  Farzana and George Thomas were still in Tappal. Halfway between Mathura and Delhi, they were nearer the Red Fort but on the opposite bank of the swollen Jumna. They were also ignorant of events in Delhi, for if the emperor had despatched an appeal to Farzana when he did to Scindia, that letter too could never have left the fort. And they were very much preoccupied.

  Tappal was bandit country, ‘a district which had never previously acknowledged any master but the drawn sword’.13 It had so often been devastated by war and famine as to be scarcely populated; the fields lay fallow, wells were choked, and every hamlet was surrounded by a stout wall to protect the villagers from bands of robbers. Travelling from Agra to Delhi six years later, the eighteen-year-old Thomas Twining would describe the territory of ‘the celebrated princess, Begum Sumroo’ as an ‘extensive sandy plain, partially covered with bushes’. Its plentiful game delighted Twining but the villages were ‘miserable’.

  25th November 1794. Marched at daybreak over one continued barren waste, occasionally interrupted by spots of underwood and long jungle. There was some probability of our seeing Mewatties [bandits] today, but we met no-one, nor was any trace of population discernible as far as the eye could reach. Shot another peacock.

  26th. March at daybreak. Country again very barren though less so than the day before. At twelve reach Tappal and stop in the serai.14

  As well as a serai for the accommodation of passing travellers, Tappal had what Twining described as ‘a little fortress’ and, though hardly a comfortable love nest, it was here that Farzana and George Thomas had based themselves while they toured her new jagir. To Farzana the place could not have looked less promising. A huge investment would be required if it were ever to yield an income even a fraction the size of Sardhana’s. To the Irishman, who seems to have had an affinity with deserts and to whom the idea of bandit country was an added attraction, the district had potential. He urged Farzana to confirm him as its military governor.

  Yet she hesitated. Only since escaping from Sardhana and the brigade had she realized just how onerous and fatiguing her responsibilities had become. The trip to Tappal served as a reminder that there was more to life than power and conflict; she was in no hurry to end it. For the first time in years few were making demands on her. Others might issue the orders, worry about the brigade and manage the estate; she could relax, throw open the curtains of her palanquin, and revel in the company of her amused and complicit companion; she could stop being ‘the Begum’ and be just Farzana. Decisions about the future governance of Tappal could wait.

  And so, seemingly, could the wretched Shah Alam. The monsoon being the closed season for fighting, the Sardhana Brigade had already dispersed. The sepoys had been stood down so that they could return to their homes to sow their crops, while Major Baours remained on leave at Sardhana with his fellow officers and the rest of the headquarters staff. Only a small escort from Thomas’s battalion had accompanied Farzana and her lover to Tappal. And these were still the only troops they could call on when, at the end of July, Farzana received the request from Mahadji Scindia urging her to go to Delhi. She ignored it.

  Both Scindia and Farzana have been heavily criticized for their failure to rescue the emperor from his fate at the hands of Ghulam Qadir. In the light of her other heroics on his behalf, Farzana’s neglect of Shah Alam at this crucial moment seems particularly uncharacteristic. H.G. Keene would suppose it a calculated decision. ‘The prudent lady was not willing to undertake a task from which, with his vastly superior resources, she saw [Mahadji Scindia] shrink.’15 Given that she had only a skeleton force with her in Tappal, while Mahadji Scindia was simply hanging back in the hopes that Ismael Beg and Ghulam Qadir would ultimately turn on each other, her behaviour was certainly more reasonable than his. But to what extent it was also influenced by her desire to prolong the dalliance with George Thomas can only be conjectured.

  In their defence, it is argued that neither Scindia nor Farzana was aware of just how desperate the emperor’s situation was. They knew that Ghulam Qadir had taken over the Red Fort, and word had reached them that he was looting the palace of anything he could lay his hands on. But they knew nothing of the palace revolution whereby the Rohilla chief had deposed the emperor; they could scarcely even have imagined the torments to which Shah Alam and his womenfolk were being subjected; and by the time they did learn of these things,
the ultimate horror had already been inflicted on their luckless sovereign.

  THE LAST DAY OF THE MUGHALS

  Persistence – and brutality – was beginning to pay off for Ghulam Qadir. Still without any bars of gold, he had turned on his co-conspirator, the eunuch superintendent of the imperial household, Mansur Ali. ‘One almost feels a grim satisfaction,’ notes Jadunath Sarkar, ‘that divine justice did not sleep over the prime cause of these princely sufferings, the arch-traitor Mansur Ali.’ Ignoring the fact that it was only thanks to Mansur Ali that he had been able to gain entry to the city and fort in the first place, Ghulam Qadir now challenged the eunuch at knifepoint to reveal the whereabouts of the imperial treasure. Swearing he knew nothing, Mansur Ali begged his protégé to spare him, whereupon he was dragged to the palace latrines and told he would have his head pushed down the excrement-choked drain if he continued to dissimulate. This disgusting prospect had a wonderful effect on Mansur Ali’s memory. He produced no bars of gold, but he did reluctantly hand over seven lakh rupees, apparently from his own coffers. By promising Ismael Beg, the Mughal defector, a share in this suspiciously large fortune (approximately £70,000), Ghulam Qadir was able to lure him back to the Red Fort. The three principals in the treason were thus reconciled, though not for long.

  Having terrorized Shah Alam’s daughters into dishonour and suicide, Ghulam Qadir started on his sons. The nineteen princes were hustled back over the bridge from Salimgarh and ordered, like their sisters, to dance for the entertainment of the Rohilla and his drunken soldiery. The princes protested that dancing was not for men; it was of course for nautch girls. Ghulam Qadir retorted that he could easily remedy this; his men had knives and would begin their mutilations by first removing the nose of any prince who refused to dance. All then danced. But even the spectacle of the imperial princes cavorting clumsily round the palace’s parterres failed to satisfy the Rohilla. If not actually drunk, he seems to have been in the grip of a manic frenzy that was every bit as intoxicating.

  It was now three weeks since the conspirators had taken over the fort. Although other dates have been awarded a similar distinction, Keene would single out this Sunday, 10 August 1788, as ‘the last day of the legal existence of the famous Empire of the Mughals’. He was of course exaggerating. Already a mere shadow of its former self, the empire would continue to cast a faint and dwindling outline for another half century (the British would demote Shah Alam’s successor to ‘king of Delhi’ in 1835, and his successor would be deposed and banished in 1858.) But as of 10 August 1788 it was clear that there was no chance of the empire ever recovering any substance. Its territory would never again extend beyond the walls of Delhi and its emperor would never again be accounted more than a helpless cipher.

  On that Sunday Ghulam Qadir once again ordered Shah Alam to be brought to the Diwan-i-Khas. Half-starved and barely able to walk after his ten days’ incarceration in Salimgarh, the 60-year-old deposed emperor was dragged into the incongruously beautiful audience hall and forced to his knees in front of the ‘inhuman tyrant’. While the pride of Ghulam Qadir’s army lolled against the marble pillars, perhaps idly picking at the inlay with their knifepoints for any precious stones that had not already been removed, the now quaking princes were summoned to witness the fate of their father at the bloodstained hands of his Rohilla tormentor.

  Once again the question was asked, ‘Where is the treasure?’ Once again came the answer, ‘I know of no treasure,’ at which Ghulam Qadir raised his fist and sent the emperor sprawling to the ground. Then he called for red-hot needles and ordered two of his soldiers to drive them into his victim’s tear-shot eyes. Writhing in agony and with his eyesight fading fast, the old man was dragged away. He was brought back later in the day. By this time a court painter had been summoned and was under orders to depict the scene. As he sketched, Ghulam Qadir, in an act of ‘unimaginable brutality’, knelt on Shah Alam’s chest and with his dagger scooped out one of his seared eyeballs. He then handed the dagger to one of his lieutenants and ordered him to gouge out the other. Half-dead and with blood gushing from the empty sockets, Shah Alam was led back to his prison. No one was allowed near him. He was provided with nothing to eat or drink, and when three of his servants were discovered trying to smuggle him some water, they were summarily killed by Ghulam Qadir.

  Fakir Khair-ud-din Mohammed, who had been a spectator at the siege of Gokulgarh, claims also to have witnessed the atrocity perpetrated by Ghulam Qadir in the Diwan-i-Khas.

  ‘This wretch’ he wrote, ‘this accursed wretch, has, in one fatal moment, darkened the bright star of the august Timurid [i.e., Mughal] family, and buried in the whirlpool of destruction the stately vessel of imperial authority!16

  TOO LITTLE TOO LATE

  Sickened and disgusted by these goings on, Ismael Beg marched straight out of Red Fort. This time the former Mughal general left for good. As soon as he was back at his camp he wrote to Mahadji Scindia telling him of Ghulam Qadir’s horrific treatment of Shah Alam, apologizing profusely for his own role in the attack on Delhi and ‘declaring his readiness to join the Marathas in any measures toward the tyrant’s expulsion’.17 Then he set about rallying the citizens of Delhi to their own, and the emperor’s, defence. ‘The anxious citizens were not aware,’ asserts Keene, ‘of the particulars of the crimes and sufferings that had been going on …behind those stern and silent walls that were not again to shield similar atrocities for nearly seventy years’ (a standard British reference to the events of the Mutiny / Great Rebellion of 1857–58).

  But even when the citizens learned the particulars, Ismael Beg’s efforts to recruit their support did not prosper. Trusting neither the penitent general nor the unspeakable Rohilla, the civilian population closed their doors and concentrated on defending themselves. Ismael Beg was left to pace the courtyards of the Nizam-ud-din dargah while he waited for the arrival of the Marathas.

  On hearing the latest news from Delhi, Mahadji Scindia at last responded with alacrity, though not without difficulty. The intensity of the monsoon rains made movement every bit as slow and arduous as feared, and his troops were indeed reluctant to leave Mathura without receiving their arrears of pay. Scindia himself stayed on in Mathura, pleading ill health and promising he would follow as soon as he was able. But an advance guard, which included Benoit de Boigne’s well-drilled battalions, was instantly dispatched to the capital. They reached the outskirts of Delhi in mid-September and were there joined towards the end of the month by the sepia-suited sepoys of Farzana’s Sardhana Brigade.

  Farzana and George Thomas had left Tappal as soon as they heard of the atrocities in the Red Fort. But even their small escort was slowed by mud and surface water, while the distance to Sardhana and then back to Delhi was greater than that from Mathura. Luckily Tappal’s deserts were not prone to flooding, and thanks to the embankments and drainage constructed by Reinhardt and Farzana, Sardhana itself was seldom cut off even in the worst of the rains. But both places were east of the Jumna while Delhi was on the west bank. Once Farzana and Thomas had rejoined the hastily assembled brigade at Sardhana, they still had to get three thousand men and several hundred horses across the river. The artillery had been left behind; even Gujerati bulls could not be expected to haul gun carriages axle-deep in mud. More problematic was the absence of bridges. Permanent structures were unsuited to rivers that frequently changed course, and while in the dry season even the Jumna fell so low that it could be easily forded or crossed by pontoons, such arrangements were out of the question during the monsoon spate.

  By mid-September, although the rainfall was easing, the river still raged and the main ford near the Red Fort was impassable. But 25 miles to the north, near the ancient town of Baghpat, a bend in the Jumna offered a better chance of success. Here the water flowed wide and shallow over a river bed nearly a mile wide. By requisitioning every available boat, and at high risk to man and beast, the Sardhana Brigade had managed to gain the west bank, from where they made all possible spe
ed to Delhi.

  On 28 September the armies of Ismael Beg, Mahadji Scindia and Begum Sumru were drawn up before the several gates of Shahjahanabad (Old Delhi). To no one’s surprise, they were there joined by the slippery Himmat Bahadur, who had been lurking out of sight with his gosains until it became clear which side held the advantage. The combined force was under the overall command of a Maratha general called Rana Khan, a man well suited to the task of rescuing dignitaries. Twenty-seven years earlier, during the Maratha retreat from the disastrous battle of Panipat, he had saved Mahadji Scindia’s life when, crippled by an Afghan battle axe, Scindia had been left to bleed to death in a ditch. From the ditch Rana Khan, at the time a humble bhisti or water carrier, had rescued him, carried him home to his village on bullock-back and nursed him to health. Treating him ever after as a beloved brother, Scindia had rewarded the bhisti with a military appointment from which, on his own merits, he had risen to become one of the Maratha’s most successful generals and the ideal man for another mercy mission – the rescue of Shah Alam.

  On 29 September Rana Khan rode unopposed through the gates of Shahjahanabad at the head of a now considerable army. Its progress through the city was also unopposed; although Rana Khan had no idea how, without artillery – the guns were still being dragged through the mud from Mathura – he might gain entry to the nigh-impregnable Red Fort.