322. India’s Greatest Rebellion: The 1857 Mutiny (Part 1)

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0:28Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durumpal. And today we are going to tell you about the eruption of the greatest anti-colonial uprising of the 19th century. It is the story of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, who is ripped away from a life of poetry and palaces and plunged into a crisis, a rebellion that will almost shatter the British Empire. Delhi is on the brink. Rumours are spreading, the sepoys are furious and British blunders are piling up. A single grease cartridge will light the spark. This is the story of how the 1857 War of Independence or the Great Uprising or the Sepoy Mutiny began.

1:16I think it'd be really helpful if we can paint a picture of 1850s Delhi, because you sort of suggest in that opening that it was a tumult of rumours and gossip and insecurity. I mean, just what was it like to be in Delhi in the 1850s? Well, it starts off at the beginning of this period as a rather wonderful place because Delhi, which has been sacked by successive armies of Afghans marching through and Marathas coming up from the south, everyone's wanted to plunder this incredibly rich city. Once the British capture it in 1803, you have this extraordinary period when there's a revival of the city.

1:57And for a brief period, the British and the Mughals are living in extraordinary harmony. So, I mean, this is the period of Ochtoloni and those wonderful characters who not only are dazzled by the place, but the people as well. And they don't see them as inferior this time. Indeed, they fall in love. They do. And not just Oktoloni, who famously has 14 Indian wives, each of whom has her own elephant. And they do this wonderful procession around the Red Fort every time they go and visit the Begums in the Red Fort. But there's this whole world in the residency. One of Oktoloni's assistants is this guy, William Fraser, who commissions the greatest late Mughal paintings, who learns perfect Urdu and Hindustani, who is beloved of the Sufis of the city.

2:39And there's this sort of moment of 20 or 30 years, which is sometimes called the golden calm, when they're all, you know, the Brits are going to Urdu poetry readings, they're writing Urdu poetry, collecting Mughal miniatures and commissioning the great artists of the city. And then there's this slow chill, because this is the period of the rise of the evangelicals. And it's also just growing British arrogance. The British, up to this point, have always been aware of the fragility of their space in India. They're aware that there were Tipu Sultan, the Marathas, provincial Mughal governors, all of whom could potentially have defeated them, the great armies of the Sikhs.

3:17But after 1820, after 1830, they are, you know, the sole big dog around and they begin to restrict the freedoms and they begin to restrict the lives of the Indians who they rule. And by, you know, the 1830s, by the time that Zafar comes to the throne in 1837, the Mughal's power is literally restricted to the court itself. The whole town of Delhi is under British rule, as is the rest of India. I was always interested in that transition, that sort of tipping point. And I often wondered whether it's because the people in London didn't feel they could control those who had gone native in India, who had more sympathy than, you know, sort of this voracious predation that London wanted from the territories that it had now, you know, sort of taken.

4:09Was there a bit of that, that actually, you know, we've got the wrong people in there because they're just not giving us as much as we think we can get? There is a bit of that, but I think it's also just the arrogance of the British at this time. That period of Octolonean Fraser when these guys fall in love with this dazzling court is replaced by a group of people. Charles Trevelyan, do you remember him? The guy that created the potato famine and caused a million Irishmen to die. Charles Trevelyan is in the British residency at the beginning of his career and just looks down on Indians. He thinks they're savages.

4:40He thinks they're inferior. This is very different from the attitude of Octolonean Fraser, who'd love to turn up to a Red Fort Mushira and recite poetry into the early mornings and had Indian wives and half Indian children. And that early appearance to us seems very attractive. And it's replaced by these evangelicals who are all reading Macaulay, believing that a single shelf of a good English library is worth more than the entire native literature of India and Arabia. Those sort of attitudes are now prevalent. And it's in the middle of this that this wonderful final emperor comes to power. He's already a late middle-aged man by the time he gets to the throne.

5:20And this is Bahadur Shah Zafar, who you refer to. And Zafar is to Urdu poetry and Indian literature what I suppose the age of Elizabeth is to the English stage in Shakespeare. Because Zafar hasn't got the money to do what his ancestors had, which is build the Taj Mahal or create these wonderful caravanserais or road systems spanning India, the great marble palaces of the Mughals, which dazzled all the ambassadors that came. Writers are cheap, and he has around him the greatest writers of the day. There is Zork, who is this rather pious and well-behaved poet who produces beautiful poetry. He's from a very ordinary background and produces this dazzling verse despite his lack of education.

6:05And then there's his great rival, who's Ghalib, who is the aristocrat's aristocrat. He's one of my favorite characters. He's a fantastic character. Yeah, I mean, the relationship is actually quite funny. I mean, it is sort of that Mozart-Salieri thing. Why is he getting all the attention, this young sort of brute, and I'm so much more refined than him, and jealousy and intrigue in the court? I wanted to ask though, why has he not got money, the money and the wealth and the dazzling riches of his forebears? Is it because the Mughal Empire has just over time overextended itself? Or is it because they are profligate with that?

6:41I mean, what has happened to reduce him to keeping the company of cheap poets? Well, this is the subject of the book we wrote together, first of all, when we were kicking off our partnership called Kohino, and that told the story of how this Persian adventurer, Nader Shah, turns up. Nader Shah, again, from quite a humble background, his father made hats. He was a furrier. But Nader Shah is this military genius, and he invents something called the swivel gun, which is like a sort of, you know, small tank sort of artillery cannon that you can strap onto a camel or a horse. And he invades India. And there's this massive battle, Battle of Karnal.

7:19And on one hand, you've got nearly a million moguls in the field with their dazzling armor shining in the sun, their jeweled helmets, their shining spears. And then the other, you've got this very small army of crack Persian troops who aren't flashy to look at, but have got this amazing new weapon that's armor-piercing. And so the Persians pretend to flee, the old sort of fake retreat routine. And then the light cavalry parts just as the Mughals are advancing. And there lined up are these swivel guns. But it's the bullet that does it. And it's sort of technology and warfare. And it's also, I guess, the arrogance, the bloated arrogance of a family that's been in charge and just doesn't even question the fact that they're always going to be in charge.

8:06I mean, the man at the time, the time we wrote that book, Mohammed Shah Ranghila, is just useless. I mean, he sort of brings parties and jugglers and acrobats and girlfriends to the battle. I'm a great fan of Mohammed Shah Ranghila and his cross-dressing ways and his pearly shoes. I think he's an idiot. He's an idiot. Anyway, certainly you wouldn't want to be led into battle by Mohammed Shah Ranghila. And that's what happens. And at the end of this, as you know well, Anita, the Nadi Shah comes into Delhi and he leaves six weeks later, having extracted, is it 380 wagons of jewels, including the peacock throne and the Kohenor.

8:45Everything basically the Mughals have plundered from around India for 150 years is just put into a series of wagons and driven off to Persia. One of the lovely aspects of that story is that some of the wagons are so heavy, they tip into a river and no one bothers to fetch the stuff out because they've already got so much stuff. I mean, it's a ludicrous amount of looting. Coming to Zafra's time, so that explains why Zafra is doing things that don't cost much money. But as a man himself, I mean, he likes the company of cultured people, but he is a cultured man himself. I mean, he's a calligrapher, he's an architect, he designs beautiful gardens.

9:18I mean, he has qualities all by himself, doesn't he? Yeah, I mean, what he could have done if only he had a bit of cash. But sadly, Nadir Shah has run off with literally the crown jewels, and there's not much left. So Zafar, he's remembered for what he did to poetry. And he succeeds his father in his mid 60s, when it's already impossible to do anything to reverse the decline of this dynasty. But he creates around him a court of great, great brilliance. You know, personally, I've always thought he's one of the most likable, tolerant and talented of his dynasty. He's a skilled calligrapher, as you said.

9:52He's a profound writer on Sufism, a discriminating patron of miniatures. And he's a serious mystical poet. You know, if you're into Udu poetry, he's one of the great writers in his own right. We have here in Delhi this festival called Rekta, which is all about Udu poetry. And still to this day in 2025, vast crowds have a stadium now to come and listen to the people reciting Zafar and Galib and Zork. And there is this sort of wonderful backstory, which everyone here in Delhi knows. It's not well known, obviously, in Britain or beyond. But with Galib and Zork being the kind of Mozart and Salieri of Mughal India.

10:33And there's this obsessive search for the perfect couplet. They have these musharas, which are sort of like word game. You're given the rhythm of the poetry that you have to, you're given a morning's notice to prepare your rhymes and verses and rhythms. And you're told what the rhythm is going to be, the tal. And then you pass a couplet onto your rival, and he has to answer the couplet in the perfect rhythm. So, it's like a cross between a sort of crossword puzzle and a duel. It's a duel in words. It is. A duel in verse is exactly what it is. Just on Zuffer, again, himself, I'm kind of interested because he has those old courtly manners that the Mughals were really famous for, you know, being more polite than anyone.

11:22The British are fairly rude to him from the get-go, aren't they? I mean, they don't treat him well. Yeah, by the 1830s, you know, the deference which the British initially paid when they first sort of entered as his protector, and the British have on their coins that they are the Fidvi Shah Alam, that they are the devoted vassal of his grandfather, Shah Alam. But this is abolished by 1830. By the time he comes to the throne, the British are plain rude. And they're already sort of conspiring to get the Mughals out of the Red Fort, to shove them into a smaller fort near where I live here in Meroli.

11:59And Zaffer is this very attractive character. We have a court diary, which I found in the National Archives, which is just full of daily details. And he's this sort of benign old man, as you say, with impeccable manners, even when he's treated with rudeness. And he has olive oil rubbed into his feet to soothe his aches. Occasionally, he goes and visits a garden or goes on a hunting expedition. where I live here in Southern Maraudi is his old hunting grounds. And his evenings are spent, according to the court diary, enjoying the moonlight, listening to singers or eating fresh mangoes. And he has this sort of running battle with all his young concubines because he's now quite an elderly man, and they're always getting pregnant by other men, by the kind of guards at the gates and by the court musicians and so on.

12:44And this is a kind of running saga in the palace. And the Delhi school of music survives the cataclysm, which is to come because we're about to enter into this great war, which will be the next eight episodes of our podcast about this sort of apocalyptic end to the dynasty. And just to look ahead, the music of Delhi survives because one of the most famous musicians gets one of his concubines pregnant and is exiled to Hyderabad. So doesn't suffer the complete wipeout that takes place in Delhi. Sliding doors moment. Had he stayed, we would have lost so much culture in the process. And the other great character who we're going to be hearing, who's going to weave his way in and out of the episodes which are to come, is this aristocratic poet, Ghalib, who is kind of raffish.

13:32He never has enough money, although he's very high birth. He's a great drinker. He's a great ladies' man. And he holds as a badge of honour the fact that he's been put into prison for gambling. Yes. And when he hears that the very pious Sabai has been made the poet laureate, Galib replies, how can Sabai be a poet? He has never tasted wine, nor has he ever gambled. He has not been beaten with slippers by lovers, nor has he once seen the inside of a jail, which is a wonderful definition of how the moguls sort of poets should behave. You know, she'll constantly be sort of, you know, running out of their lovers' apartments and letting themselves down on ropes and being in prison.

14:15Sort of a little bit like a carry-on movie. Carry-on movie with better clothes. The picture is one of, you know, opulence and manners. But also naughtiness. I mean, I'd love to just read you my favourite letter by Galib. Go for it. So, Galib is a great but an extremely complex poet. And if you're a student of Urdu poetry, Ghalib is the most complex of, he's like, I suppose, John Donne would be the English equivalent. You know, you really have to sit and puzzle through his lines and work out what he's actually trying to say. It all sounds wonderful, but it's complex and dense. But in contrast to that, Zaffer's letters to his friends are funny, light and witty.

14:58And I'll just read this to give an example of the kind of man he was. One of Ghanem's best friends had a very beautiful mistress who died. And the friend goes into deep depression, missing this girl, who he thinks is irreplaceable. And Ghanem is prepared for this guy to sort of, you know, spend a couple of months mourning. But by six months, he says enough. And he writes this letter. Mirza Sab, Prince, I do not like the way you're going on. In the days of my lusty youth, a 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 never on the honey.

15:37I have always acted on his counsel. You cannot mourn another's death unless you live yourself. Give yourself to God for your freedom and do not grieve. When I think of paradise and consider how, if my sins have forgiven me and I'm installed in a palace with a hurry 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 hurry on my arm. Come to your senses, brother, and take another.

16:12Take a new woman with each returning spring for last year's albanax a useless thing. So that's Garlib. You get him now firmly in your sights, Anita. I'm sure you disapprove very strongly of him. No, no, I think he sounds like a fun guy to be with. But the thing is, you know, all of this is not preparing for, you know, the storm clouds that are gathering. So, I mean, you've got the East India Company and you've just described how there is an impatience with the kind of indulgence that perhaps, you know, their forebears like Octolone and Fraser had, you know, indulging these sort of the carry on of the palace.

16:45You've got sort of increasing control. You've got the missionaries who are also setting their sights on civilizing this part of the world because, of course, their gods are not civilized gods. But you also have, and I think sometimes we forget this, the rise of the Wahhabis as well, who themselves would have despised what Ghalib was standing for, drinking and honey and sugar. I mean, they would have had their tea bitter is how they would have done it. And so, all of this that has gone before, and the Wahhabis are very strict, hardline Puritans from Saudi Arabia. They still follow the Wahhabist Islam, which doesn't have idols, which doesn't have the kind of ornate art that the Mughal court is famous for.

17:32So, there are all these pressures building around. And it's almost as if the guys in the middle just aren't aware of the walls closing in on them, you know, if they're still sort of, you know, tinkering around with poetry. I mean, they may not be aware of it in the palace, but is there a change of atmosphere in Delhi itself? Very, very strongly. You have on the British side, the old world of Fraser and Octoloni, who dressed up in turbans and gowns with, you know, jewels and turned up at the poetry evenings. They're replaced with a family called the Metcalfs. And the Metcalfs wear these sort of black suits.

18:08I mean, they come up in our Kohenor story. Yeah, they do very much. Some members of the family slightly make up bullshit, but we'll come to Theo in a minute. That's Theo, yeah. But yes, tell us more about… Yes, Theo. Theo's going to weave his way right through this next eight episodes. He comes to Delhi as the kind of very naughty son of this incredibly straight-laced father. The father, when he wants to punish one of the servants, puts on a white gloves and tweaks his year. This is the kind of way he behaves. And he goes to bed at sort of eight in the evening and never goes out to party. Theo is out with his dogs and his women and his fancy evenings.

18:44Hunting and drinking. Yeah, exactly. And what you have, what's fascinating is the way that both sides sort of go more puritanical. On one hand, on the Brits, you've got, you know, the old world of Fraser and Octolini giving way to Metcalf. On the Indian side, as you say, there's been the wise of the Wahhabis. So the Sufis who are tolerant and allow a little bit of, you know, alcohol can possibly help you reach God, they think. The Puritanical Wahhabis will not touch drink, they won't allow images. They specifically try and weed out anything Hindu in Muslim practice in India. And over the centuries, you know, Indian Muslim women wear nose rings, they eat on bananas, leaves.

19:26They behave like the Hindus, and many of them are indeed Hindu converts. The Wahhabis try and end that. They want to look to Arabia to root out anything that is not pure Islamic as they see it. And so the evangelicals and the Wahhabis are sort of perfectly matched to have an enormous fight. They're both of them uninterested in becoming friends with the other. And at the same time, you get the beginnings of Indian nationalism beginning to make itself felt. Previously, people had often identified with the city. So, you know, you have people describing themselves as Delavi from Delhi or somebody, Shah Jahanabadi from Shah Jahanabad.

20:04Your immediate horizon is your kind of number one loyalty. But you have people beginning to leave India and come back and have a sense of India as a nation. And one of these characters is one of a character called Azimullah Khan. And Azimola Khan goes to London, has an affair with Lucy Duff Gordon, who's a kind of very prominent British socialite and traveler in the East. And so feels, you know, very much that he's the, you know, the equal of anyone from the Brits. And then he goes on the way home to the Crimean War, where he sees the Brits struggling against the Russians and this terrible stalemate and slaughter, which we dealt with in our Crimean War episodes.

20:42And when he arrives back in India, he has a strong sense of Hindustan, of India, being this country ready to free itself. But also that, you know, the Brits are vulnerable. They can be defeated. You know, he sees sort of, you know, the given wisdom was that they are, you know, Shensha, Bhatsha, Bhatsha. You know, they are the kings of the world. But then he sees, you know, sort of in those blood-soaked fields of the Crimean, that actually they bleed too. And that gives Asimullah Khan an enormous amount of sort of rocket fuel to take back saying, you know what, we can take him. I've seen it done.

21:18We can definitely push them out. And Asimullah Khan is one of a whole generation that's now beginning to think that it's time to unite. Hindu and Muslim must come together. Maratha and Mughal must come together. We must push out these foreigners. And in 1857 in March, a piece of paper is posted to the wall of the Jama Masjid in Delhi, saying that the Persian army is on its way to come and liberate India. It's not true, but it causes a great sensation. And there are all these other rumors beginning to spread that liberation is near. But ultimately, it's not going to be the nobles or the aristocrats or even the populace of Delhi, which has got the military hardware to actually resist the might of the East Indy Company, which now is this enormous multinational company with 200 ,000 mercenary troops.

22:14The people who actually try for freedom and take up arms against the British are the East Indy Company troops themselves, the sepoys. And as we'll see in the next half, they have got ample reason to really hate the British now. And they are all set to turn their guns on their officers and fight for freedom. We'll see that in the next half.

22:49Welcome back. We were talking about almost Luther-like nailing of a proclamation of defiance on the wall of the Jamma Masjid. But there is also sort of growing paranoia, if you like, about this rumbling of discontent and how maybe there's a challenge to British rule coming. And there were reports, which I think were fascinating in the Urdu-speaking newspapers at the time of these mysterious chapatis, which are sort of rotis or some Delhi newspaper said it was like fried puris, which are this bread, this unleavened bread that is eaten in India. They're being passed from night watchmen from village to village across Hindustan.

23:29And there's one report in a publication called Nuri Maghrebi in February that says they're passing between villages and by early March, they've reached Mathura and they're on the main road to Agra. So, these Puri's are travelling. Coming towards Delhi, yeah. So, you know, these unleavened breads are sort of like, you know, edging their way towards Delhi. And the Delhi newspapers are starting to get all crumpled up about this as well. You know, what is the significance of these Rortis and these Puri's coming towards? The Puri's are getting closer. We know that they're just on the outskirts. You know, they start getting all sort of nervous about this, but not as worried as they are about outright declarations of war against the British, you know, that there is sort of instigation and in the shape of actual fatwas.

24:15So, I mean, one of them that's posted in Madras is, and I'll quote from it, calling on all believers to rise against the infidels. He who fell in such a war would be a martyr, it says. And that's truly worrying because that is a call to arms. And there are all sorts of rumours swirling around that either the Russians are coming to help, and we've seen what they can do in the Crimea or the Persian army is coming to help, or maybe they're both coming to help and there'll be a pincer movement and that they'll one day just pop up in Delhi. And most prominent of all the reports that are swirling around at this time, they start coming into the newspapers, coming to the press in late March and they talk of unrest within the army in Bengal.

25:00Now, that is a nightmare because the Brits are so outnumbered. They rely on these armed forces, particularly in places like Berampur and Barakpur. Theo Metcalf, who if you've read our Koh-I-Noor book or listened to our Koh-I-Noor episodes, because he's man about town, bit of a playboy, sort of hangs around the bazaars picking up gossip, he sort of is the main source of intel a lot of the time. He's picking up all these murmurings that there is something big coming. And I think it's him, it's Theo Metcalf, I'm writing, who says in the spring of 1857, that the people of Delhi were perfectly aware of the want of fidelity in the Sepoy army, and the subject is being frequently discussed.

25:47So, he's basically issuing a warning, there's something coming, and it's like a disease, and it's spreading around Delhi now. I found a great stash of his papers in Cambridge, and they are fantastic because They're day-by-day reports of how things are getting more and more tense in Delhi. And what's really kicked it off, what happened a couple of years previously or a year previously, is what happened in Lucknow. Now, Lucknow was another court, very like Delhi. It was originally the Mughal governors of Avard, which is the area that's now Uttar Pradesh, UP. And they had had, again, a court, a mogul court that was famous for its music and its dancing and its cooking and its parties.

26:28And it was a cross between sort of Monte Carlo and Tehran in the 70s and Glyndebourne, I suppose, with all those sort of things put together. And what you get in February 1856 is suddenly the British abolish the court. They exile the Nawab, Wajid Ali Shah. Wadi Jani Shah is, by 1856, an enormously fat man. But in Windsor, in the Queen's own collection, they have his Ishknama, his book of girlfriends. And it's just like a sort of Tinder manual or a Tinder log, rather, where he has just picture after picture of these beautiful courtesans and girlfriends that have been through his parlours. And in his youth, he was a great dancer and so on.