Farzana Page 19

  Inside the fort, Ghulam Qadir had continued to indulge his ‘degraded barbarity’. The unfortunate Bidar Bakht had already been dethroned. Six weeks into his reign as ‘Jahan Shah’ he had announced that, as emperor, he could do what he liked and was therefore off to fly his kite in the bazaar. Instead, he was returned to his cell in Salimgarh. In his place Shah Alam’s favourite son Akbar Shah (who would indeed eventually succeed, albeit not for another eighteen years) was singled out by Ghulam Qadir and enthroned.

  Lounging in the emperor’s private apartments, the intoxicated Rohilla chief passed his time exploring the delights of the imperial harem, humiliating the princes of the blood, ‘acting indecently’ towards their traumatized sisters and gloating over the mutilated Shah Alam, who was still somehow alive though ‘pale, blind and bleeding’.18 Yet problems were starting to mount for the usurper. Food was running out, and those members of the imperial household who had not succumbed to their injuries were already dying of starvation. Fakir Khair-ud-din Mohammed reported that in two days twenty-one princes and princesses had expired and several others were ‘in a dying condition’.

  Since everything that could be plundered had already been plundered, the Rohilla troops were also becoming restless and demanding that the accumulated spoils be shared out between them. When, in addition to all these difficulties, Ghulam Qadir received word of the approaching Marathas, he ‘began to perceive with horror the shadow of an advancing vengeance’.19 ‘Awakened from his dream of riot and intemperance’, he pondered his chances of withstanding a long siege and decided that, given the temper of his men and the lack of provisions, they were not good.

  Events then took an unexpected course. On the evening of 10 October, exactly two months after the blinding of the emperor, a deafening explosion split the night air over the Red Fort. Terrified citizens ran for cover, as did the besieging armies encamped on the parade ground outside the fort’s gate. The fort’s supply of powder, or what remained of it, had apparently ignited. As Keene would have it, ‘… the high walls of the Red Castle blabbed part of their secret to those who had so long watched them … [as] the powder magazine rose into the air, and flames presently spread above the crenellated parapets.’ Nor was this all that was happening.

  The bystanders, running to the rampart of the town facing the river, saw, by the lurid light, boats being rowed across, while a solitary elephant was moving down at his best pace over the heavy sands bearing the rebel chief. ‘Ghulam Qadir had finally departed, leaving the Salimgarh by a sally-port, and sending before him the titular Emperor [Akbar Shah], the plundered controller of the household [Mansur Ali], and all the chief members of the royal family.’20

  Ghulam Qadir is thought to have spent the previous week preparing for his escape. Soldiers had been sent across the river under cover of darkness to test the depth of water over the ford and, if required, to collect more boats in which to carry away his ill-gotten gains. He had then had several loads of palace treasure ferried to the east bank with orders that it be sent to his fort in Saharanpur, although many of the larger pieces had proved too cumbersome to transport and had been reluctantly abandoned.

  The explosion in the powder magazine just as the Rohilla leader was making his getaway has been variously explained. One source insists that it was an accident and has Ghulam Qadir exclaiming as he trundled away on his elephant, ‘Now the fort itself has turned against me!’21 Another source credits the Rohilla with having fired the magazine himself, ‘so that his long crime might be consummated by the destruction of Shah Alam among the blazing ruins of his ancestral dwelling’.22 This might explain a feature of the escape that no source addresses directly: namely that although Ghulam Qadir took nearly all his other hostages with him, he left Shah Alam behind.

  The fort’s defences had been damaged by the explosion, allowing Himmat Bahadur to send a gosain over the battlements by means of a rope ladder to open the gate from the inside. Once the fire was extinguished, the clearing smoke revealed scenes of devastation that shocked even the most battle-hardened members of the relieving force. Ragged, skeletal and filthy, the surviving members of the emperor’s household emerged from their cellars and hiding places sobbing with relief and retching from the stench of the corpses that had been left unburied on the orders of Ghulam Qadir.

  The dethroned and mutilated emperor had somehow barricaded himself into his prison cell. Though unhurt by the explosion, he had to be coaxed out by Rana Khan, who showed the same concern as he had when tending the injured Mahadji Scindia after Panipat. Everything necessary for the convenience or comfort of the sightless old man was provided; then leaving de Boigne and one of his battalions to guard the citadel, Rana Khan set out in pursuit of the rebel chief.

  The Sardhana Brigade was ordered to accompany him, although Farzana herself stayed in Delhi. Ever since learning of the emperor’s plight she had been gripped by an overwhelming sense of remorse. Instead of dallying in Tappal with her lover she should have been in Delhi protecting the emperor. Her negligence and dereliction of duty could cost her the jagir of Sardhana. She might also have forfeited the imperial favour on which both she and the brigade depended. It was the worst mistake of her life. She had to stay and somehow redeem herself with Shah Alam.

  George Thomas departed with the rest of the Sardhana Brigade under Rana Khan, as did the second of de Boigne’s battalions under its French commander Lestineau, and the gosain army of Himmat Bahadur. Mahadji Scindia had yet to arrive from Mathura, but he had had the foresight to send every available boat upriver to Delhi so that his troops could cross into the Doab. If Ghulam Qadir had been thinking clearly, this would have been the moment to mount a counter-attack – when his pursuers were crossing the river. But Ghulam Qadir could think only of flight and securing his plunder. Descending from his elephant (which had just about managed to negotiate the ford) he had leaped onto a horse, stuffed his saddlebags with his choicest acquisitions, and bolted.

  Though progress was hampered by their hostages and booty, the fugitive Rohillas managed to stay ahead of Rana Khan until, three days later, they were forced to take refuge in the fort at Meerut. There, Ghulam Qadir was safe for the time being. Lacking any heavy artillery, the Maratha general was unable to bombard the ancient citadel and instead imposed a stringent blockade. Lestineau’s battalion, the Sardhana Brigade and Himmat Bahadur’s gosains were drawn up so as to encircle the fort, block off every supply route and thus starve the Rohillas into submission.

  Ghulam Qadir could expect no mercy and so refused to submit. Exhibiting ‘a gallantry and resolution that would have done honour to a better cause’,23 he held the Marathas at bay for nearly six weeks. Eventually, ‘utter want of food and close confinement wreaked havoc among the crowded multitude of the besieged’. As ‘men and beasts died in their hundreds and their corpses poisoned the air’, he offered to release his hostages in return for a full pardon and a guarantee of his own freedom.24 Rana Khan rejected this offer out of hand, whereupon it took the combined efforts of all the Rohilla commanders to stop their deranged leader from putting his royal prisoners to the sword. Instead, they agreed to stage a diversion that would give Ghulam Qadir a chance to slip away, the logic being that, if captured, they stood some chance of a pardon whereas he had none.

  Just after nightfall on 17 December, with an escort of fifty horsemen and with his saddlebags still crammed with coins and gems from the imperial palace, Ghulam Qadir made his break. But by midnight a patrol from Lestineau’s battalion had caught up with him. In the ensuing firefight more than twenty of his escort died and most of the others fled. Ghulam Qadir himself got away, plunging once more into darkness as he headed for the safety of Ghausghar. By dawn he was 40 miles from Meerut and completely alone. But just when he thought he had made a clean getaway, his horse stumbled. It had lost its footing in the lingering mists. Ghulam Qadir was thrown to the ground and concussed; the horse galloped away. Any hope of rescue was extinguished when the farmer who found him – ‘probably a suffe
rer from the Rohilla’s former raids’ suggests Khair-ud-din Mohammed – recognized his one-time oppressor and promptly alerted the Maratha commander. By nightfall Ghulam Qadir was a prisoner of the Marathas.

  ‘REFINED RETRIBUTION’

  After crimes so heinous, mercy was out of the question. The punishments meted out to the two main persecutors of Shah Alam would be as fiendish as contemporary minds could devise. At Meerut, the Rohillas in the fort had surrendered soon after the departure of Ghulam Qadir, the royal hostages had been rescued, and the traitorous Mansur Ali taken into custody. He was then hauled back to Delhi in chains and, before his verbal persuasion could do any more damage, was billed as a forthcoming attraction in the gladiatorial arena below the walls of the Red Fort. There, in a public spectacle, the zealous but treacherous superintendent of the imperial household was trampled to death by an enraged elephant. According to a contemporary notice by a ‘gentleman in the East Indies to his friend in Edinburgh’,25 Ghulam Qadir was not to be allowed to depart this world so quickly. ‘Disputes run high what mode of punishment is to be inflicted on him,’ the anonymous correspondent reported, ‘but the latest accounts from Delhi mention that it is now determined.’ With chains on his legs and an iron collar round his neck, Ghulam Qadir was hoisted into a specially constructed cage which was suspended in front of the assembled Maratha armies and pelted with ‘insults and indignities’. Having hung there for two days, the cage was put on a bullock cart and sent, with an escort of two regiments of infantry and 1,000 horses, to Mahadji Scindia in Mathura. Scindia briefly toyed with the idea of keeping Ghulam Qadir alive in the hopes that he could be persuaded to divulge the whereabouts of his plunder, but an indignant directive from Shah Alam in Delhi changed his mind and sealed the Rohilla’s fate.

  The details of this fate were so gruesome that James Grant Duff chose to report merely that ‘Ghulam Qadir suffered a dreadful mutilation which he did not survive’.26 Others were less squeamish. It was variously reported that ‘his tongue was torn out of his mouth’, ‘his ears were cut off and hung round his neck [and] his eyes were scooped from their sockets and sent to Shah Alam in a casket; when the casket reached the Delhi palace, the blind old man fumbled its grisly contents and felt that his wronger had been paid back in his own coin’.27

  There was then a pause to make sure the villain could still ‘feel those agonizing and unspeakable sufferings which he had occasioned to another’ before his nose, then his hands and feet, were cut off and his mangled trunk placed in a cart to follow his eyes to Delhi. But at this point ‘death mercifully released from his sufferings one who had never shown mercy to others’, wrote Herbert Compton. What remained of his corpse was finally suspended from a tree in whose vicinity a ghostly black dog was often seen to linger before both it and the body suddenly vanished, leaving nothing but a dark stain on the ground. As a final insult, Ghulam Qadir’s fortress of Ghausghar in Saharanpur was razed to the ground. ‘[Ghulam Qadir]’s offences,’ admitted the nameless scribe in his letter to Edinburgh, ‘have been monstrous; his punishment however, I am sorry to say, though seemingly accommodated to his actions, is a species of refined retribution which too strongly marks the sanguinary principles which still influence certain Eastern states.’

  Moving on with relief from such stomach-churning details, speculation quickly turned to the fate of Ghulam Qadir’s jewel-laden mount. Although nothing was ever proved, suspicion immediately fell on de Boigne’s shadowy officer Lestineau who, like the horse, vanished without a trace soon after the capture of Ghulam Qadir. Having come across the runaway beast and its precious burden by chance, Lestineau is supposed to have absconded not only with the jewels but also with his soldiers’ pay.

  ‘After all,’ writes a latter-day military historian, ‘he had come to India to look for the treasures of the Indies, or at least to make his fortune – what else was a mercenary’s aim? – and here it was.’ Heading for the safety of British territory, this ‘engaging scoundrel’ eventually made his way back to Europe where he reportedly lost his loot in the French Revolution and lost his mind soon afterwards. ‘Perhaps,’ mused H.G. Keene, ‘the crown jewels of the Great Mughal are now in France.’

  10

  ERRORS OF JUDGEMENT

  Farzana’s decision not to join in the pursuit of Ghulam Qadir had been dictated by the necessity of mending fences with the emperor. Without a prompt reconciliation she stood to lose Sardhana at the very least. Jagir holders had no security of tenure and could expect to be deprived of their estates for any dereliction of duty, especially if it had endangered the person of the emperor.

  A case in point was Najaf Kuli Khan’s loss of Gokulgarh. After the siege of that place, its opium-loving jagirdar had been reinstated in lifelong possession of his sandy acres and their battered mud ‘fort’, yet he was now being ordered to vacate them. As Farzana understood the matter, the jagir had been forfeited on the grounds that Najaf Kuli Khan had ‘beheld with indifference the late enormities at Delhi’. But the order to quit had come from Mahadji Scindia, who had another pressing reason: ostensibly on the emperor’s authority, Scindia had already promised Gokulgarh to Ismael Beg as a sweetener for forsaking the wretched Ghulam Qadir and joining the Marathas in the recapture of the Red Fort.

  In effect, the emperor’s authority was again being invoked to serve the purposes of his sponsors. Farzana was smart enough to realize this, and so far as she knew, her Sardhana jagir had as yet been promised to no one. But clearly, if she was not to lose it in a similar manner, she had to locate Shah Alam at the earliest opportunity and convince him that she had not been guilty of indifference to his plight, merely ignorance of it.

  In the aftermath of the explosion and Ghulam Qadir’s precipitate flight, she had swept through the outer courtyards of the Red Fort heading for the private apartments. A scene of devastation and chaos had greeted her. While de Boigne was clearing the city of any remaining Rohillas, the Maratha soldiers detailed to guard the fort had started fighting over such plunder as Ghulam Qadir had been forced to leave behind. The stables were empty, the armoury still smouldered and in the ornamental gardens shrubs had been uprooted for firewood. Surviving members of the imperial household appeared traumatized by their late experiences, while their retainers, a huddle of bent old men in coats begrimed by neglect, were barely able to look after their own needs. Farzana expected the worst. If Shah Alam was still there, he would surely be deranged by his blinding and very possibly dying from lack of medical care.

  Instead, she had come across him sitting serenely among the debris of the royal apartments, stroking his grey beard and reciting from memory long verses from the Quran. A contemporary chronicler, Sayyid Raza Khan, was full of admiration. ‘Under these accumulated misfortunes,’ he wrote, ‘the aged Emperor evinced a firmness and resignation highly honourable to his character.’1 But this testimony to the emperor’s reserves of strength would find no favour with sterner commentators. ‘There were probably not less than half-a-dozen points in Shah Alam’s life when a due vigour would have raised him to safety, if not to splendour; but his vigour was never ready at the right moment,’ says H.G. Keene. ‘It is pitiable to think how much fortitude may be thrown away for want of a little active enterprise.’2

  Not knowing whether he was even aware of her presence, Farzana had politely waited until Shah Alam roused himself from his prayers and then, with some trepidation, had made herself known to him. The emperor seemed distracted. He greeted his ‘beloved daughter’ affectionately and made no reference at all to her ‘indifference to the late enormities at Delhi’. This was reassuring, although the relief was short-lived.

  For Shah Alam then went on to tell her that he was too tired, too old and now too compromised to conduct the affairs of the empire. No longer fit for active participation in this life, he had decided to prepare himself for the next. ‘The resignation so highly honourable to his character’ was in fact twofold; personally he was resigned to his blindness and officially he accepted that
he must resign from the throne. In both Hindu and Muslim tradition, blinding disqualified a sovereign from power. There was a well-known example in the Mahabharata epic; and Mughal successions had often been determined by one claimant rendering all the others sightless.

  On both practical and symbolic grounds, vision was essential to legitimate authority. Thus Shah Alam, far from showing a lack of ‘due vigour…at the right moment’, was exhibiting a high sense of duty. He would, he announced, abdicate in favour of Akbar Shah, his oldest son – he whom Ghulam Qadir had already enthroned. Then he would follow the dictates of his faith, don the simple white robes of the hajji, dye his beard with carrot-coloured henna and withdraw from Delhi for a prolonged pilgrimage to Mecca.

  This was not at all what Farzana wanted to hear. Her jagir was in the emperor’s gift; if Shah Alam abdicated, there was every likelihood that his successor would revoke it. She would be a victim of the high politics and devious skills that had just dispossessed Najaf Kuli Khan. But there was not much she could do about it. Persuading Shah Alam to overlook her recent negligence was one thing, managing the succession quite another. Only the emperor’s keeper could provide the sort of assurance that might prevent the abdication, and he was stuck in Mathura. Though reportedly too ill to travel, Mahadji Scindia still pulled the strings of the Mughal puppet. Farzana could only stay close to Shah Alam, try to wean him from his stated intention by interesting him in the present instead of the hereafter, and await the return of the mighty Maratha.

  The next six weeks passed agonizingly slowly. Her anxieties were compounded by the stiff resistance being offered by Ghulam Qadir at Meerut, so near to Sardhana, and by the prolonged absence of George Thomas and his battalion as part of the besieging force. There was also a problem over where she should stay. Her former apartments in the fort had been so thoroughly ransacked as to be almost uninhabitable. Yet moving into Reinhardt’s old house in the city was an even less inviting prospect. It was not very convenient and it risked an encounter with the house’s present occupant, the insufferable Louis Balthazar, otherwise Zafaryab Khan or Aloysius Reinhardt.