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Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnon. And me, William Dalrymple. So this is so very much your territory, William, and I'm absolutely just absorbed by these amazing stories. We left the last podcast with the East India Company at the very height of its powers. These are the glory days of this corporation that has become a country eater, if you like.
1799, that's about the period. But then things start to change after the impeachment of Warren Hastings, which we talked about in the last podcast.
Something happens in Britain where they start allowing other companies in. So they start just slicing bits off East India Company interest and allowing others. Why do they do that? It's a very interesting story. And you've got to look at this today from the point of view of the great corporations of our time. We live with companies like Tesla and Facebook and ExxonMobil, Walmart, these vast multinational companies, Amazon,
And in some ways, they are more powerful, the States. A big company like Amazon or Walmart has a turnover greater than most countries in sub-Saharan Africa. A company like Amazon has a turnover greater than most countries in Europe. Only America can have a greater wealth than it.
And what you see with the company is that for much of its career, while it's most famous for bringing down governments in India and bringing down first Siraj-e-Daula, then Tipu Sultan, then the Marathas and so on. At the same time, it's also, in a sense, challenging the British state.
Because, first of all, as early as 1690, which is just 90 years into its existence, it's caught bribing parliamentarians. In the first ever case of corporate corruption in the world, a corporation realizes that it can use its wealth.
and give wads of cash to MPs. I mean, this is lobbying and corruption together, isn't it? I mean, this is so much earlier than we even know of this phrase. Exactly. I mean, this sort of goes on and there are shenanigans like this in every democracy in the world. And this is why people have to monitor this sort of thing. But the company invents it. So they are literally bribing
because of this vital issue that the company has got a monopoly on all trade to the east of the Cape of Good Hope. So let's say that I'm a big entrepreneur in London and I suddenly want to get into the textile trade and I fancy that I can take my ship to Calcutta and I can load up some cotton and sell it for a profit back in Liverpool or wherever I've come from. But I can't because the minute I write Doc at Calcutta, the East India Company can arrest me.
and can say, I've got the rights of a monopoly by the Royal Charter, therefore you are breaking the law and we can put you in prison. So this carries on. And what you find is that the company not only is playing Indian music
rulers against each other. There's a crucial moment very early on, which I think is very much, it reminds me of the way that Amazon behaves, for example. There's one moment when the company, soon after the founding of Madras, the Nawab of the Carnatic, who's the local boss of the area, turns up and says, you guys haven't paid a penny of tax for 10 years. He surrounds the city and looks like he's going to march in and kill everybody.
And the company doesn't send an army out. It sends one man called Manucci, who's a fluent Persian speaker. And he says to him, look, you can kill every one of us. That's fine. But the people that will suffer are your weavers and your traders.
They will have no business. They will have nothing to do. They will be unemployed and they will die of starvation. And the business will go just up the coast to Orissa or to Bengal. Exactly the language that the guys use today when someone tries to tax them, they'll just move their business to Dublin or wherever it is or to the Bahamas. And you see...
Throughout the 18th century, this battle between the power of the corporation and the power of the British state. And the company weakens for the first time because it looks for a long time as if the company is going to be more powerful. For example, not only can it, after it gives up trying to just blatantly bribe MPs, which is its initial strategy, it realizes that you can lobby people, that you can take them out to lunch, that you can offer them places on the board. You can do all sorts of things, just like modern corporations do.
And they also realized that retired company returnees who've come back to Great Britain can buy rotten boroughs and get themselves elected to Parliament. By the 1780s, you've got a quarter of Parliament of returned East India Company men who basically bought their seats with their Indian earnings.
And so there's a huge fear in Britain, the East India Company is not only going to take over Bengal. Democracy is subverted. Yeah, democracy is totally subverted. And then on top of that, there's some figures that show that at some points, as many as two thirds of the MPs have shares in the East India Company. So they're not going to pass any legislation which does in their savings. But in the end, the tide turns. It begins to turn in 1780 when
when the Regulating Act is passed and the company is bailed out in return for a 50% share by the Crown. And that increases in the years that follow. And the big cut is in the early 19th century when the monopoly is broken finally after years of lobbying by other interest groups. And this is greatly connected with the opium trade. There's all sorts of traders that want to get their hands on the narco business.
And it's their influence as much as anything else that eventually leads Parliament to passing an act which allows other traders to operate in India and to the East. Do they chip away sufficiently to really change what the East India Company is? Does it become something different to the big octopus trading company that it was? So it does. So a lot of the money goes to leaner, fitter operators like Jardine Matheson who end up making all the narco fortunes.
And just like that, they're like the Medellin cartel. They're like Pablo Escobar, but in 18th century Hong Kong rather than in early 19th century Hong Kong, rather than in 20th century Colombia. And so eventually the company has its right to trade removed altogether. It ceases to be involved in business, I think in the 1840s and becomes just a governing corporation.
And the final stage, which we'll see, is after the great uprising in 1857 when the companies abolished altogether. But we'll come to that. We'll come to that. I mean, perhaps we won't go into it in too much detail, but sort of aiding and abetting the...
limitation of the East India Company. You have a certain amount of local trouble in Afghanistan, don't you? Absolutely. Can we touch on it without going? Because I know we might do a whole podcast. So it's the first time that the company has a really major reverse and loses an entire army.
And in the 1839, having already now turned the Ganges into a sort of British motorway where steamships can sail up and down to particularly Al-Ahabad is the great port. And they make a fortune trading up and down right through the heartland of India, initially exporting Indian goods to England. But by the beginning of the 19th century, operating in reverse with importing British goods to India.
And the dream that they have, which is totally impractical, but they think they can do it, is to do the same with the Indus. In fact, the Indus is far more difficult to trade on because it's a far shallower river and you can't get steamships up the Indus in the same way you can the Ganges. But that doesn't stop them dreaming of doing this. And they have this idea that just like they've taken over the whole of the United Provinces, what is now Uttar Pradesh,
and taken over the heartland of India for British trade, they can now do the same in Central Asia. They can sail their steamships up the Indus
and bring all the goods that used to be the caravans coming from Tartary and from Central Asia and flood it all with, because now we have industrialization in England, and flood it with Manchester cottons. And the manufacturers of Manchester will suddenly pour into the Stans. I mean, that's the plan, but it doesn't work out. It doesn't work out because the company tries to take over Afghanistan on the cheap.
And the Afghans won't have it. So in 1842, there's the famous retreat from Kabul. There's a massive uprising.
and an entire army is lost. In legend, one man, Dr. Brydon, makes it through to Jalalabad. This is a subject for another day. It's a wonderful story in itself. I think it's really useful because when we talk about the Ganges becoming like a motorway or trying to turn the Indus Valley into another thoroughfare, this is not happening in a vacuum. There are people in India. There are people governing and living their lives in India. Can we focus in on one particular area? I know it's an area of great expertise for you.
Right.
But can we look at Delhi, which is now the capital, but it's also such an interesting crossroads in history. And why don't we start at that point where the East India Company now has kind of lost its monopoly. It is a governing body. And we're looking sort of around about 10th of the century. What is happening in Delhi? Sure. So this is 1803, the company defeats the Marathas and takes over the person of the Mughal emperor. Now, this is the descendant of Shah Jahan, Akshar.
Akbar, Aurangzeb, these rulers who had turned the whole of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan into their personal empire.
But now there's still a descendant of theirs on the throne in the Red Fort in Delhi, but he doesn't even rule the whole of Delhi. A British resident from 1803 becomes the real power in Delhi, governing the municipality. And so the Mughal emperor and the famous last Mughal emperor is called Zafar, which means victory, ironically. He never won any battle, but Bahadur Shah Zafar.
is sitting in the Red Fort, but he is a remarkable man. This is a man that has no money, has no resources. He can't send an army anywhere. He certainly can't build the Taj Mahal like Shah Jahan had done. But what he can do is inspire his people to the arts. And in this wonderful last moment, which the British call the golden calm, and which the
lovers of Urdu poetry regard as you know the great golden age of Urdu similar to what I suppose you know the English theatre was to the age of Shakespeare and Marlowe um
In Delhi at this period, you suddenly have these fantastic geniuses. So, I mean, we're talking about poets who are quoted even today. So, you know, the poet laureate is a guy called Zulk, isn't he? And then there's Ghalib, who everybody, anybody who has any connection with India knows something of Ghalib. Do you mind reading something of the poetry of the time so we get a flavour of what it's like? What I'm going to read is actually not a bit of Ghalib's poetry, but one of his letters, just to give you...
a flavor of who he is. Ghalib is this peacock who knows he's a genius and can't quite get over the fact that the slightly dull Zork has been given the job of poet laureate, not him. And I think this letter sums up who Ghalib is. This is written to a friend whose girlfriend has just died and the man is in mourning. And Ghalib says, cut it out. Mirza Saab, I don't like the way you're going on.
In the days of my lusty youth, the man of perfect wisdom counseled me. Abstinence I do not approve of. Dissoluteness I do not forbid. Eat, drink, and be merry. But remember that the wise fly settles on the sugar and not on the honey. Well, I've always acted on this counsel. You cannot mourn another's death unless you live yourself. Give thanks to God for your freedom and do not grieve.
When I think of paradise and consider how, if my sins are forgiven me, and I am installed in a palace with a huri to live forever in that worthy woman's company, I am filled with fear and dismay.
How wearisome to always find her there, a greater burden than a man could bear. The same old palace all of emerald made, the same old fruit tree to cast its shade, and God preserve her from all harm, the same old hoorie on my arm. Come to your senses, brother, and take another. Take a new woman with each returning spring, for last year's almanac is a useless thing.
Men. So Ghalib was definitely a man. Yeah. And lived in a very decadent age, but an age which is remembered in India as... Well, just so productive for beautiful things, beautiful words, beautiful music. Beautiful music, beautiful poetry. And the golden age of Urdu poetry. But also, and I think this is very interesting, a time of great learning. And today, you know, we don't associate...
madrasas with high scholarly achievement. But let me read you another short passage. So this is a man called Henry Sleeman. This is how he describes the madrasas of Delhi at this period. Perhaps there are few communities in the world, he writes, among whom education is more generally diffused than the Mohammedans of India. He who holds an office worth 20 rupees a month commonly gives his sons an education equal to one of our prime ministers.
They learn through the medium of Arabic and Persian languages what young men in our colleges learn through those of Greek and Latin, that is, grammar, rhetoric and logic. After seven years of study, the young Mohammedan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with things which appertain to those branches of knowledge as a young man raw from Oxford.
He will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato and Hippocrates, Gala and Avicenna, Aelius, Socrates, Aristoteles, Aflatoun, Bocrates, Jalinus and Buolacena. And what is much to his advantage in India is that the languages in which he has learnt and what he knows are those that he will require throughout his life. So what you have in this brief and gorgeous moment
is a world where the Mughals have lost power, but they have not lost their civilization. And the whole of India looks to Delhi as a center of culture, learning, and a school of manners. I mean, isn't this interesting? Because it is the decline of the Mughal Empire is almost on a parallel scale
track to the decline of the East India Company. I mean, those dates, the sun sets on both in a way. So what's really fascinating about this is, you know, as you say, it sort of challenges the straitjacket of what we assume we know of what madrasas were like. But also,
It challenges what we know of the British in India as well, don't we? Because there is not this superiority, there is not this separation that later becomes the byword for the Raj. It's different, isn't it? The white Mughals that you write about so well. It's completely different. And it's very surprising if you come to it having only thought of the Raj as being like Curzon and Kipling and East is East and West is West.
In the early days of the British in Delhi, but also at the same time in towns like Lucknow and Hyderabad,
The British officials are so taken with this poetic, artistic, prosperous, cultured life in Mughal India that many of them take local wives or girlfriends. Many of them have Anglo-Indian children, live in a world which is half Mughal. They will wear Mughal robes. They may eat talis on Mughal dishes. They may sit on the floor rather than on chairs.
They make commissioned mogul artists and have them in their house painting away while they're getting on with their official work. And in Delhi in particular, you have this. The first British resident is a man called Sir David Octorlone. He's a Scot, though he's born in Boston, a refugee from the American Revolution, which has kicked all the Brits out of America. And he comes to India and plans never to leave. And he has allegedly 13 Indian wives, each of whom has her own elephant.
And every day they do this loop around the Red Fort. I've heard about this. You know, the parade of love. Exactly. And his assistant is a man called William Fraser. William Fraser is a great Persian scholar. He's interested in Sufi and Islamic philosophy. Any relation to your wife? And he is a distant relation of my wife.
And he commissions the great Fraser album, which is the highlight of what's called Company School Painting, which is basically mogul painting, but commissioned by East India Company officials. And so you have this brief moment where it looks like the two worlds can join in a fruitful fashion, even though the power is with the East India Company. And even though the East India Company is still this militaristic and extractive force. Yeah.
But of course, it doesn't last. And by the 1830s, this world is dying off. The kind of white moguls who grow their beards and wear Indian robes become regarded as figures of fun rather than the norm. Is it simplistic to say that this honeymoon period is kind of ruined by God? That actually it is the arrival of missionaries who are seeking to save Indian souls? Several things are going on at once. First of all, this is just the fact of East India Company power.
alongside the extraction and the looting that the East India Company does, there has been from the 1780s an interest in Indian culture. We talked earlier about William Jones and Hastings and the Royal Asiatic Society. That, on a social basis, is matched by mass intermarriage. In the 1780s, one in three Brits are leaving in their wills money to either Indian women or to Anglo-Indian children. So far more than we
And we realize there is a whole mixed world developing with full of Anglo-Indian children and kids that speak both sets of languages and parents that are interested in each other's lives. And the Indian women sometimes sit in chairs and wear Western clothes and use knives and forks. The British men are sometimes sitting on the floor, eating with their hands, taking part in Mughal mushairas or poetry contests.
And, you know, it looks rather attractive world. And you think this is wonderful, but of course it doesn't last. And the reason is power. Once the Brits have got supreme power, they begin to
show their racism, they begin to look down on Indians, they begin to behave as if all Indians are inferior creatures. And this comes alongside a wave of evangelical Christianity, which teaches its adherents not to admire Hinduism as a source of ancient knowledge. Sir William Jones, you know, reads the Mahabharata with wonder and prefers it to the Iliad and the Odyssey. But
men 40 years later just see this as poor benighted heathens with their foolish fables. Oh, I mean, I've actually read tracks from early missionaries who say this is Satanism. This is Satan speaking through this strange alphabet. And this comes to Delhi, that kind of attitude with one man in particular, a man called the Reverend Jennings, who I think arrives in the 1840s. And he
has the gall to set himself up in the gateway of the Red Fort, where he puts a printing press that produces tracts exactly of that sort, calling Hinduism the religion of the devil and denouncing Islam as a form of Satanism, as you say, and converting not many, only a handful, but enough people
for there to be real anger and anxiety. Converting a few, but annoying a lot. Annoying a lot. Annoying a lot of people. And fatally, too, the company, having been initially rather suspicious of the missionaries, as this evangelical fervor grows in Britain and is exported with evangelicals running the company, you begin to find the company drawing close to the missionaries. So they're given official residences. They are allowed to travel and company horses and use company vehicles.
transport and so on. And in Indian eyes, the two become linked and people begin to think that we have a company that wants to convert us to Christianity. This doesn't sound like it's going to end well. Let's take a break. Join us after the break and we find out what happens next. Travel is all about choosing your own adventure. With your Chase Sapphire Reserve card, sometimes that means a ski trip at a luxury lodge in the Swiss Alps.
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So just before the break, things are starting after this beautiful golden age of poetry. And I love this idea of sort of poets, great poets, you know, embarking on what is the equivalent today of a rap battle to try and produce the most beautiful verse. They're given a meter in the morning and they have to come up with verses in that meter and they pass it backwards and forwards like a rap battle. And one poet at one side of the room says,
will give a couplet and then look at the guy and the other guy has to continue it. And they've given basically a morning to prepare rhyme schemes and so on. And it all sounds rather lovely but just before the break we were talking about the arrival of the missionaries and the behaviour of the missionaries and then suddenly there is after the time of Octolone who falls in love with many a brown woman there is now the othering of the brown people. They are less. They are in league with Satan. And we can actually see
see this decline statistically. It isn't just a feeling that historians kind of might have. I said earlier how so many of these company
who are sent out at 16 just die. And this leads to endless legal disputes with the company. And they're bored of having to fight off relatives who think they should have been left a fortune in India. So they pass a law that every company servant that goes out to India has to have a will made and he has to keep it in London and can update it. And all these wills survive. They're in the British Library today. You can get out a volume and they're by year. So there's 1780 to 1785 and so on.
And they're enormous volumes. They're as heavy as a crate of wine, big leather band volumes.
And if you look at the 1780s volumes, one in three company men is leaving everything to an Indian woman. It's down to about one in four by 1800, down to about one in five by 1820. And by 1840, it's kind of over. There are no mention of brown women at all. That doesn't mean, of course, that sex isn't going on. They're not taking wives in inverted commas. But it's now illicit. It's now hidden. It's now definitely not recorded in legal documents. And so you have a chilling and a separation.
And when I was writing The Last Mogul, which is the book I'd written about this, you get the impression very clearly that,
that there are two, not only two different worlds living side by side, but even different sort of time timelines on each day. So the Brits are getting up at sort of four in the morning and going riding and cantering round, and then they're going on parade, uh, and then they're doing their business. And that kind of day is, is kind of pretty well finished by lunchtime. This is when the moguls are getting up. I'm with the moguls, I have to say. I'm definitely with them too. And, uh, uh,
the moguls sort of, you know, have them begin, sort of make a venture out of bed and just reach for breakfast. Second breakfast in two hours time. And then you have the poetry competition about nine o'clock at night, just as the Brits are going to sleep. And they're just sort of leaving the coaties of the courtesans at six in the morning when the Brits are coming back from their morning ride. The two will meet briefly before
Heading in the opposite direction. And it is literally that. The two sides have lost the ability really to communicate with each other. There is now a complete separation. And this brief moment you had when they all joined in, these utilitarians, these evangelicals, dislike India. They regard it as an inferior, heathen, pagan culture. And...
And that is manifested daily when, for example, collectors will put up, that is what the officials are called by this stage, and their job is just to collect tax. And they put up the Ten Commandments in Hindi outside their collectorate. Or when evangelical colonels will start reading sermons to their Brahmin sepoys on parade.
And as you say, this is clearly not going to end well. Well, yes. I mean, is it fanciful to say? Because we are now approaching that date, that date that changes everything and officially and encodes that kind of racism that you're describing starting to bubble up, which is 1857. Is it possible that, you know, had they kept the same hours? Yeah.
All this might have been avoided. It's partly silly, but I wonder actually if you are having two people who understand each other and talk to each other more and can just explain to each other what is going on a bit better and don't live in deep suspicion of each other. There's a huge array of different issues growing. I mean, first of all, just the...
the Brits behaving more and more badly, more exclusively in the early days, you know, Indians were admitted to their houses and there was never, you know, we don't want to create this as a sort of garden of Eden situation. Cause it was always a, you know, a racist society and it was always a certain degree of mutual dislike. But you also had these men who clearly went over culturally and, and really did love the country and really did love Indian women and really loved their Anglo Indian children.
and really took an interest in poetry and theology and Sufism and admired the madrasas. And that just gives way to sort of loathing and disdain. Yeah, disgust almost, and white-only areas and, you know, the humiliation of anyone who dares to even, you know, their shadow to fall across these things. And the Indians feel it. And you find in the letters this time that they're aware of this growing disdain.
disdain, this growing dislike, and they hate it. And they bridle under this. And a few of them, there's a character called Azimullah Khan, who goes to London. He's an incredibly handsome young Muslim nobleman. He has an affair with various society ladies. But on his way back,
He goes to the Crimea and he sees the British being defeated by the Russians at this stage of the Crimean War. And he says, you know, we can do this too. And he comes back and begins to organize. And you get the beginnings of a really serious resistance growing across the country. But what sparks off the big uprising? And it has so many different, you know, there are so many ways you can resent what's happening in India. Yeah.
and the way that the British are dominating and being rude and vile and arrogant and racist. But what sparks it off is religion, and particularly the notion that the British are not just keen to convert you, but are about to convert you by force. So the cartoonish version of this is that bullets were handed out to Indian sepoys that were covered in pig fat.
And the phrase bite the bullet comes because you would have to bite into these things, pour the gunpowder into your gun and fire it. Now for Muslims, pig fat immediately is a no-no. Also for Hindus who, you know, it can drag you out of caste. And if you are out of caste, then you are out of the cycle of reincarnation. Your soul is forever cut loose. It cannot come back. It cannot be in the cycle of regeneration. So this is the worst thing that can happen.
Is it true? It's kind of true. Elements of it are true. So what happens is that we talked about the defeat of the East India Company armies by the Afghans in the first Afghan war. And one of the main reasons for that is the Afghans have these jazails which fire very long distances, while the British still have these old-fashioned brown vest muskets, the same gun that was used at the Battle of Culloden, for example, and they can't fire back.
So the company decides to replace the entire stock of East India Company army guns with the Enfield rifle. Now, the Enfield rifle has rifling in the barrel, which means that the bullet spins, the ball spins and goes further and more accurately.
But it's much more difficult to get down the barrel when you're muzzle loading, when you're pushing the stuff down from the front. And so you get around the rifling by greasing the cartridge. And the idea is you bite the top off, you pour it in the barrel and you ram it down. Now, I don't think these are ever actually issued to the sepoys, but they're issued to the white troops initially. And rumors begin to spread that they are covered with this fat. Now,
There seems to be actually some error at the dum-dum arsenal because not only was the fat offensive ritually to both Hindus and Muslims, it was also offensive to white troops who had to bite because it was coated thickly on like Vaseline. It's disgusting. And you don't want to bite this. It's horrible. It's horrible to taste because your mouth is full of Vaseline. You don't want it. And already the atmosphere is so fraught with stories of...
colonels trying to convert their troops and missionaries allied to the company going out into the bazaars and turning people into Christians. The two are put together and the effort to put Enfield rifles into the East India Company army is taken to be a signal that the British are about to convert all their troops and maybe the whole of India to Christianity.
And the flashpoint comes on the 11th of May, 1857, when the rifles issued to old Afghan veterans who fought and survived this Afghan war, loyal troops who've given their whole life to company service. And they're told to bite these bullets and use them. They refuse to do so. And they are arrested and sentenced to hard labor. And that night, their brethren free them from the lockup.
and turn on their troops, who at this point have gone to Evensong in the church in Mirut, where the mutiny breaks out. And at this point, it is just a mutiny. It's just the soldiers mutineering against their officers.
But they then ride down to Delhi the following morning and ride into the town, massacre all the Christians. And immediately it stops being a simple mutiny and becomes an uprising of the people of India. This is the signal that they're waiting for. And the...
But very significantly, it is the Indian Christians as well as the British Christians who were massacred on that first day. So it isn't a white thing. It is a conversion thing. It seems to be a religion thing. Can I just say, from the Indian perspective, the first bullet that is fired is fired. I mean, everybody knows his name. Mangal Pandey is the name of the first man who fires at his commanding officer saying, we will not do this. You will not make us do this. And he is in the hagiography of India, almost in a saint-like way.
Indians don't cope so well with the massacres that happen afterwards, but they do talk a lot about the reprisals that happen.
So the number of answers to that individually. So Mangalpande definitely was one of the first people to rise up, but there's no evidence I've seen in five years of research in the papers in Delhi that anyone in Delhi knew his name. He's made a pan-Indian hero in the 20th century by a writer called Vyasavarka, who's now the totemic sort of inspiration behind the RSS and the current BJP government.
And Veer Savarkar writes a book called The First War of Independence, which is a rewriting of this history, which puts him on front. But one of the things that Savarkar is sort of covering over is what is to Hindu nationalists an embarrassing fact that an army, which is 90% Hindu Brahmin and Rajput, goes actually to Delhi, 100,000 out of the 160,000 troops that mutiny go straight to Delhi and put the Mughal emperor back on the throne. Now today, that's obviously anathema to the RSS.
And what you have is in May 1857, these Rajput and Brahmin Hindu sepoys throwing off their allegiance to the East India Company and going to put the Mughal emperor back on the throne. And they turn up at the Red Fort on the 12th of May 1857, the day after they've mutinied in Mirut, and they said, lead us.
And this poet emperor who is a Sufi, he's 82 years old. In his youth, he was a great sportsman and may well have been up for dramatic military events at that period in his life. But he's now 82. He's a bit dotty. His whole life is poetry. You know, he's no Che Guevara. He's the wrong guy. And his sons aren't up to much. So the uprising instantly has a problem because there's no leadership. Yeah.
And the different regiments which have mutinied against their officers individually and come to Delhi are still under those individual officers. And none will sort of willingly obey another regiment. And so while you have an amazing take up of this uprising, initially in the Bengal army and then in the populace and in the Bengal army, I think the figures are that there are
169,000 soldiers in the Bengal army. There's also Madras army and there's also Bombay army, but it's the Bengal army which mutinies. Out of the 169,000 sepoys in the Bengal army, 139,000 mutiny and 100,000 march to Delhi. Hmm.
So suddenly, from all over northern India, these files of troops who have either shot dead their officers or just walked out of their barracks are heading for Delhi. And this enormous number of troops turn up. And initially, they come with ammunition and with food and with horses and with fodder and all the stuff that any normal functioning military unit would have.
But because the very racist policy of the Brits was always never to allow Indians to rise above subedar level, which is kind of sergeant level.
They haven't got any idea of greater strategy. And there's a few remarkable men among them like Bakh Khan, who do have a sense of strategy, an innate sense of strategy, but they're not trained to think strategically. They're trained to obey orders. And they don't have enough, after a couple of months, they don't have enough weaponry. They don't have enough ammunition. They try and turn the firework makers of Delhi into arms factories, but that doesn't work.
And famine soon breaks out in the city and the Brits come back. There's a small army on the ridge and though the mutiny is spread now right down the Gangetic plain through Kanpur and Lucknow, Delhi remains the focus. You've said the K word, Kanpur. So Kanpur is the scene of something that galvanises the British. They're panicking already because just the sheer movement of Indian troops converging on one place must be terrifying.
But then there are reports of what has happened in Kanpur, the slaughter of women and children, shoes of babies found in the mud. How much of that is propaganda and how much of it is real? So the massacre is real. The stories of rapes are fiction. And I've gone quite closely into this in Delhi, which was the area of my study. And the
there are some horrific murders children are pinned against the walls there are vile scenes of bloodletting at the beginning Are these by sepoys or are these sort of opportunistic thugs who sort of get swept up in the both very quickly which is why Indians object to the phrase mutiny because while it starts as a mutiny unequivocally it very quickly spreads into an uprising supported by many parts of the population
Interestingly, though, the sepoys who are from Bihar and are known by the people of Delhi as Telangas because they originally were recruited from Telangana.
People like Ghalib, who are these very sort of snotty aristocrats, regard these as barbarians. The poet, Ghalib, to remind people, yeah, yeah, yeah. What are these soldiers from far away doing in our civilized city? So it isn't like there's a universal take up, but there's a large take up. And it looks very, very shaky for the British.
But by the end of the 12th of May, 1857, the telegraph operators, the telegraph has just been sent and spread out the wires across India. And the telegraph operators managed to get the news out. And they tipped up on Morse code that Delhi has risen. The sepoys are here. They are killing everybody. And that message gets crucially to Lahore. So that by dawn the next day, all the sepoys there are disarmed.
by the very few white troops. They're put out on parade, they're made to pile up their arms, and then they have the guns turned on them and they're turned away. They have to leave their weapons behind them. From that moment, there is resistance by the very small number of white troops. And they manage to recruit whole new armies from the Sikhs, who remain loyal to the company, and from the Waziris and the Pashtuns of the frontier.
who are delighted for an opportunity to get another crack at looting Delhi, which they haven't done for a bit. And there's still legends among their people of all the riches of Delhi and the beauty of Delhi women and so on. So they sign up for this. I know there's a lot of anxiety and soul-searching over why the Sikhs join the British who have, at this point, two Anglo-Sikh wars later, and the deposition of a boy king, which has caused so much grief.
Is a possible explanation that those who fought in those Anglo-Sikh wars are the very Sepoys now who they're being asked to go and get their own back against? Could that be a possible explanation? That's often said to be the case. Yeah. I mean, I haven't studied the Punjab in detail, so I can't confirm that. But certainly you read in the literature that the Sikhs see it as an opportunity to get back at the East India Company Sepoys. So why they wouldn't want to get back at the East India Company officers is really left unexplained by this theory. Whatever happened...
Perfectly true. But whatever happens with, so with greater numbers, the telegraph has called people, there are native soldiers who are joining the British side and they push back and they push back very, very hard. And two or three things in a sense save the company at this point. Firstly, it doesn't really spread south of the Vindias. The whole of South India is more or less peaceful. There are odd outbreaks in some places where
And a whole variety of different groups rise up. Some tribal groups, for example, take the opportunity. You get the famous Rani of Jhansi rising up in Madhya Pradesh. Another one in the pantheon of nationalistic goddesses, yeah. And many of the British allied rulers, the people who will later be called the Maharajas, remain loyal to the company.
And they hold things together. So from what looks initially like a complete catastrophe, slowly the British fight back. The sepoys are uncoordinated. They haven't got the weapons. They haven't got the ammunition. They don't go on the strategic offensive.
And so by the midsummer, a lot of the sepoys are unpaid, unfed. They go home, there's the harvest, and they want to go back to their fields. So the numbers begin to drop. And from a peak of about 100,000 in Delhi, it sinks to about 50,000 by August. And the final act, which is very tragic, because now the city is being bombarded by a British force up on the ridge overlooking the city.
There is famine. There is disease. The city is not completely, but pretty well besieged. No food is coming in. And the people of Delhi have not asked for any of this. They have really not asked for any of this. Some are very enthusiastic supporters of this uprising. Some, like Zafar, feel that they're caught between two forces and that they can't win. They can't get out. And so finally in...
Early September 1857, the big guns are pulled by elephants down from the big arsenal at Ferozepol. And this line of enormous cannons, including, you know, what effect of the big super guns of their day, are lined up outside the gate of the city known as the Kashmiri Gate. And on the 12th of September 1857, they go in. And there is amazing resistance. One of the great heroic moments, these guys who've given up everything, have got nothing to lose, fight to the death.
And by the end of that day, the British have been held just about 100 yards into Kashmiri Gate. They've got through the gate, but they haven't got further. And for five days, those battle lines hold and it could go either way. The whole fate of India and the whole fate of the British in India hangs in the delance. And then by pure bad fluke, on the fifth day, there is an eclipse.
And this, even today, I've been in India today, people will hide inside to avoid the bad luck of the eclipse. It's considered to be the day of ultimate bad luck. If you're a high caste Hindu, you will draw the curtains and not go out. You won't go to your office, you won't do anything on the day of the eclipse. And by pure ill fortune, everyone's forgotten this is coming because it's the middle of a war. Suddenly at midday, the sun goes black. The next morning, when the British wake up, the trenches opposite them are deserted.
And they gingerly step forward, thinking there's maybe an ambush, there may be some trap. But the trenches are empty. The guys have fled. They think this is the sign of the end of the dynasty. They've escaped bad luck.
And they've allowed them in. And Zafar at this point realizes it's all over and he takes his family, most sacred relics, a hair of the prophet and various sacred texts. And he floats down the river, gives it to the great Sufi shrine at the Zamuddin and awaits his fate in Humayun's tomb.
But meanwhile, the Brits are going in and it's one of the most horrific moments in all British Indian history. Now, it's so, okay, so Indians make much of what happens next. And it is often referred to as the devil's wind that blows over India, which is just a scene of mass slaughter, men, women and children, no matter. And it's almost fueled into some...
fever dream of violence because of those stories that had been, perhaps as you were saying, inflated from Kanpur and so on. But it is bad. It is appalling. Oh, it's not just bad. And I think it's not remembered enough. I mean, it's far, far worse than, say, Jolien Wallenberg, which we'll talk about in a later podcast, which is remembered as the worst massacre the British did. It wasn't. This is on an infinitely greater scale. In Delhi, the gates are shut.
And every male above the age of 16 is regarded as an enemy combatant and is benefited. And this isn't sort of, you know, woke imaginings of some sort of hip historians or something. This is there in the British letters themselves. Here is Edward Weibar, age 19. The orders went out to shoot every soul. It was literally murder.
I have seen many bloody and awful sights lately, but one such as I witnessed yesterday, I pray I never see again. The women were all spared, but their screams on seeing their sons and husbands butchered were most painful. Heaven knows I feel no pity, but when some old grey-bearded man is brought before you and shot before your eyes, hard must be that man's heart, I think, who can look on with indifference.
There are also stories of, I mean, just cruel brutality. So in Kanpur reports that Indians are told to lick up the blood that has been spilt of British people killed by the sepoys. They have to lick it up. Humiliations. Also, old men strapped to cannons and cannons fired while they're strapped to them. This is the description of the British then leaving Delhi to follow the mutinous who fled to Lucknow.
The march out of the city was simply awful. This is a guy called Richard Barter. Our advance guard, consisting of cavalry and artillery, had burst and squashed the dead bodies, which lay swelled to an enormous size in the Channy Chowk, and the stench was fearful. Men and officers were sick all round, and I thought we'd never get through the city. It was a ride I don't care ever to take again, and the horse felt it as much as I did, for he snorted and shook the
as he slid rather than walked over the abominations with which the street was covered. Dead bodies were strewn in all directions, in every attitude that the death struggle had caused them to assume, in every stage of decomposition. In many cases the positions of the bodies were appallingly lifelike. Some lay with their arms uplifted as if beckoning, and indeed the whole scene was weird and terrible beyond description.
The atmosphere was unimaginably disgusting, laden as it was with the most noxious and sickening odours.
So this devil's wind continues to sweep across India, pursuing what's left of the mutineers. But it also blows a change through British government thinking, doesn't it? That if this can happen on company watch, something's got to change. This is the thing which ends not just the Mughal dynasty, but also the East India Company. From this moment, as reports reach, they realize you can't possibly have a corporation
Governing our greatest colony as they now see it. We've got to go in ourselves and govern it properly So for the first time you get talk about the actual what we would call I suppose the nationalization of the East India Company But before that happens they've got to do something with them with the mogul emperor and he's already patched up a deal on his surrender with a man called Hudson that he won't be shot but he is put on trial and
And by this stage, he's lost it. He's seen his sons slaughtered before him. He's seen his city half destroyed. And he sits crouching on a charpoy, winding and unwinding his turban, offering no defense when he's put on trial. And there's a description of him sitting in the cell, just writing. He's been forbidden pen and paper, but he's writing poetry with a burnt stick on the wall.
And years later, people start performing what they say are these last verses. This is translated by another Delhi exile called Amidali. When in silks you came and dazzled me with the beauty of your spring, you brought a flower to bloom, love within my being. You lived with me, breath of my breath, being in my being, nor left my side. But now the wheel of time has turned and you are gone.
no joys abide. You pressed your lips upon my lips, your heart upon my beating heart, and I have no wish to fall in love again. For they who sold love's remedy have shut shop, and I seek in vain. My life now gives no ray of light. I bring no solace to heart or eye. Out of dust to dust again, of no use to anyone am I.
Delhi was once a paradise where love held sway and reigned, but its charms lie ravished now and only ruins remain. No tears were shed when shroudless they were laid in common graves. No prayers were read for the noble dead. Unmarked remain their graves. The heart distressed, the wounded flesh, the mind ablaze, the rising sigh, the drop of blood, the broken heart.
tears on the lashes of the eye. But things cannot remain, O Zephathas, for who can tell? Through God's great mercy and the Prophet, all may yet be well.
The last Mughal emperor has fallen. The East India Company is on its way out. And the era of the British Raj is about to begin. You've been listening to Empire with me, Anita Anand. And me, William Dalrymple. Join us again.