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Saturday, June 20, 2009

The Jehad of 1857? - By William Dalrymple

 
----- Original Message -----
 
 
A British Indologist, William Dalrymple is creating a small wave of thought-provoking media blitz, to coincide with the publication of his new book: The Last Moghul.
 
He feels there are signs of history repeating itself. He  compares India's 1875 war against the British colonials, and the current war unleashed by Bush against the Muslims. A confrontation between extremist from the West and 'Fundamentalists' from the East. It is doubtful if India's 5% Brahmins ruling India in the name of total 85% Hindus, will ever see the broader world picture of the whole struggle between the East and the West; that is bound to have a major effect on India's future.  In 1857, all diversified forces that included Brahmins, Marathas and Sikhs rallied under the banner of a Muslim King-Emperor, the last Moghul, Bahadur Shah Zafar, however weak and nominal, but still a symbol of United India against the external British colonial powers. 
 
Since 1947, the Brahmins are fighting an ongoing civil war with the Muslims of the sub-continent and are ready to make common cause with the new super power and its policymakers, the Zionists, rather work for internal unity. They are oblivious to the divisions their strategies are making in this land of peace and promises that has always attracted foreign exploiters.
 
Only common cause with the Muslims of the sub-continent will save this nation in any meaningful way. The earliest the Brahmins realise the enormity of their self-centered betrayal of their mother land, the better India has chance to face the trickeries of the Western imperialists.
 
William Dalrymple is an insider from the West, but he has to be judged on his words at the moment, whatever may be the real motivation for him as a British writer appearing to be crossing swords with his own kind.
 
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
 
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The Jehad of 1857?

By William Dalrymple

At 4pm on a hazy, warm sticky winter's afternoon in Rangoon in November 1862, soon after the end of the monsoon, a shrouded corpse was escorted by a small group of British soldiers to an anonymous grave at the back of a walled prison enclosure.

This enclosure lay overlooking the muddy brown waters of the Rangoon river, a little downhill from the great gilt spire of the Shwe Dagon Pagoda. Around the enclosure lay the newly constructed cantonment area of the port a pilgrimage town that had been seized, burned, and occupied by the British only ten years earlier.

The bier of the State Prisoner as the deceased was referred to was accompanied by two of his sons and an elderly mullah. The ceremony was brief. The British authorities had made sure not only that the grave was already dug, but that quantities of lime were on hand to guarantee the rapid decay of both bier and body.

When the shortened funeral prayers had been recited, the earth was thrown in over the lime, and the turf carefully replaced so as to disguise the place of burial. A week later the British Commissioner, Captain H N Davies, wrote to London to report what had passed, adding:

"Have since visited the remaining State Prisoners the very scum of the reduced Asiatic harem; found all correct... The death of the ex-King may be said to have had no effect on the Mahomedan part of the populace of Rangoon, except perhaps for a few fanatics who watch and pray for the final triumph of Islam.

A bamboo fence surrounds the grave, and by the time the fence is worn out, the grass will again have properly covered the spot, and no vestige will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests."

The State Prisoner Davies referred to was more properly known as Bahadur Shah II, known from his penname as Zafar (meaning, ironically, 'Victory'). Zafar was the last Mughal Emperor, and the direct descendant of Genghis Khan and Timur, of Akbar and Shah Jahan.

He was born in 1775, when the British were still a modest coastal power in India, and in his lifetime he had seen his own dynasty reduced to humiliating insignificance, while the British transformed themselves from vulnerable traders into an aggressively expansionist military force.

Zafar came late to the throne, succeeding his father only in his mid-sixties when it was already impossible to reverse the political decline of the Mughals. But despite this he succeeded in creating around him in Delhi a court of great brilliance.

Personally, he was one of the most talented, tolerant and likeable of his dynasty: a skilled calligrapher, a profound writer on Sufism, and an inspired creator of gardens. More remarkably he was a serious mystical poet, and through his patronage there took place one of the greatest literary renaissance in Indian history.

Then, on a May morning in 1857, 300 mutinous sepoys from Meerut rode into Delhi, massacred every Christian man, woman and child they could find, and declared Zafar to be their Emperor. Zafar was no friend of the British; yet he was not a natural insurgent either.

It was with severe misgivings that he found himself made the nominal leader of an Uprising that he suspected from the start was doomed: a chaotic and officerless army of unpaid peasant soldiers set against the forces of what was then the world's greatest military power.

The great Mughal capital, caught in the middle of a remarkable cultural flowering, was turned overnight into a battleground. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj's Stalingrad: a fight to the death between two powers, neither of whom could retreat. Finally, on 14 September 1857, the British assaulted and took the city, sacking the Mughal capital and massacring great swathes of the population.

In one muhalla alone, Kucha Chelan, some 1,400 citizens of Delhi were cut down. "The orders went out to shoot every soul," recorded Edward Vibart, a 19-year-old British officer. "It was literally murder ...

The women were all spared but their screams, on seeing their husbands and sons butchered, were most painful... Heaven knows I feel no pity, but when some old grey bearded man is brought and shot before your very eyes, hard must be that man's heart I think who can look on with indifference..."

Those city dwellers who survived the killing were driven out into the countryside to fend for themselves. Delhi was left an empty ruin.

Though the royal family had surrendered peacefully, most of the Emperor's 16 sons were tried and hung, while three were shot in cold blood, having first freely given up their arms, then been told to strip naked: "In 24 hours I disposed of the principal members of the house of Timur the Tartar," Captain William Hodson wrote to his sister the following day.

"I am not cruel, but I confess I did enjoy the opportunity of ridding the earth of these wretches."

In 2002 I returned to my old home of Delhi, after nearly a decade in London, to write the story of Zafar and the last days of the Mughals. In the National Archives I found a remarkable archive of some 20,000 Urdu and Persian documents most of which have never been accessed since the Archives opened.

These documents the paperwork of the different sepoy camps across the city, the Red Fort chancery, the records of the courts of justice, the kotwal and the different police thanas are the rich raw material on which the book has been based, and which have allowed the daily life of the city before and during the siege to be resurrected in some detail.

Cumulatively the stories these 'Mutiny Papers' contained allowed the great Uprising of 1857 to be seen not in terms of nationalism, imperialism, orientalism or other such abstractions, but instead as a tragic human event, and to resurrect the ordinary individuals whose fate it was to be accidentally caught up in one of the great upheavals of history.

Public, political and national disasters, after all, consist of a multitude of private, domestic and individual tragedies. The Last Mughal, published this week, continues the story I had begun to write in White Mughals — the story of the fast changing relationship between the British and Indians especially Muslim Indians in the late 18th and the mid 19th century.

In White Mughals I had written about the often forgotten period in the 18th century when East and West most certainly did meet. During the 18th century it was almost as common for westerners to take on the customs, and even the religions, of India, as the reverse.

These White Mughals had responded to their travels in India by shedding their Britishness like an unwanted skin, and adopting Indian dress, studying Indian philosophy, taking harems and adopting the ways of the Mughal governing class they came to replace what Salman Rushdie, talking of modern multiculturalism, has called 'chutnification'.

Moreover, the White Mughals were far from an insignificant minority: by the end of the 18th century fully one-third of the British men in India were leaving their possessions to Indian wives.

In Delhi the period was symbolised by Sir David Ochterlony, the British Resident who arrived in the city in 1803: every evening, all 13 of his Indian wives went around Delhi in a procession behind their husband, each on the back of her own elephant.

For all the humour of this image, in such mixed households, Islamic customs and sensitivities were clearly understood and respected: in one letter, for example, it is recorded that 'Lady Ochterlony has applied for leave to make the Hadge to Mecca.'

Indeed Ochterlony strongly considered bringing up his children as Muslims, and when his children by his chief wife, Mubarak Begum, had grown up, he adopted a child from the family of the Nawabs of Loharu, one of the leading Delhi Muslim families. Brought up by Mubarak Begum, the girl eventually married her cousin, a nephew of India's greatest lyric poet, Mirza Ghalib.

This was not an era when notions of clashing civilisations would have made sense to anyone. The world inhabited by Ochterlony was far more hybrid, and had far less clearly defined ethnic, national and religious borders, than we have all been conditioned to expect.

It is certainly unfamiliar to anyone who accepts at face value the usual caricature of the Englishman in India, presented over and over again in films and television dramas, of the narrow-minded sahib in a sola topee, dressing for dinner in the jungle. 

At the centre of The Last Mughal lies the very contemporary question of how and why the relatively easy inter-racial and inter-religious relationships, so evident during the time of Ochterlony, gave way to the hatreds and racism of the high 19th century Raj: how a close clasp of two civilisations turned into a bitter clash.

Two things in particular seem to have put paid to this easy co-existence. One was the rise of British power: in a few years the British had defeated not only the French but also all their Indian rivals; and in a manner not unlike the Americans after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the changed balance of power quickly led to an attitude of undisguised imperial arrogance.

No longer was the West prepared to study and learn from the subcontinent; instead Macaulay came to speak for a whole generation of Englishmen when he declared his view that "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia."

The other factor was the ascendancy of Evangelical Christianity, and the profound change in social, sexual and racial attitudes that this brought about.

The wills written by dying East India Company servants show that the practice of cohabiting with Indian bibis quickly began to decline: from turning up in one-in-three wills between 1780 and 1785, they are present in only one-in-four between 1805 and 1810. By 1830, it is one-in-six; by the middle of the century, they have all but disappeared.

In half a century, a surprisingly multicultural world refracted back into its component parts, while the children of mixed race were corralled into what became effectively a new Indian caste the Anglo-Indians who were left to run the railways, posts and mines.

Like today, this process of pulling apart of failing to talk, listen or trust each other took place against the background of an increasingly aggressive and self-righteous West, facing ever stiffer resistance to western interference.

For, as anyone who has ever studied the story of the rise of the British in India will know well, there is nothing new about the NeoCons. The old game of regime change of installing puppet regimes, propped up by the West for its own political and economic ends is one that the British had well mastered by the late 18th century.

Sometimes the parallels are almost uncanny. By the end of the Nineties, the hardliners in London, who were calling for regime change, found that they now had a President who was not prepared to wait to be attacked: he was a new sort of conservative, aggressive in foreign policy, bitterly anti-French, and intent on turning his country into the unrivalled global power.

It was best, he believed, simply to remove a hostile Muslim regime that presumed to resist the West. The first to be targetted was a Muslim dictator who had usurped power in a military coup. According to British sources, this leader of state was a "furious fanatic," who had "perpetually on his tongue the projects of Jihad." He was also deemed to be "oppressive and unjust, [and a] perfidious negociator."

It was, in short, time to take out Tipu Sultan of Mysore, and the President of the Board of Control, Henry Dundas, sent Richard Wellesley, elder brother of the Iron Duke, to India in 1798 with instructions to replace Tipu with a western-backed puppet. First, however, Wellesley had to justify to the British public a policy whose outcome had already been long decided in private.

Wellesley, therefore, began a campaign of vilification against Tipu, portraying him as an aggressive Muslim a view strongly disputed by many modern historians who tend to see him instead as a modernising technocrat. Tipu was duly invaded and killed in the lucrative war of 1799.

By the 1850s the British had progressed from aggressively removing independent-minded Muslim rulers, such as Tipu Sultan who refused to bow before the will of the hyperpower, to destabilising, then annexing even the most pliant Muslim states.

In February 1856 the British unilaterally annexed the prosperous kingdom of Avadh (or Oudh) on the excuse that the Nawab, Wajd Ali Shah, an extremely unwar-like dancer and epicure, was "excessively debauched."

By this time, other British officials who believed in a 'forward' policy of preemptive action, were nursing plans finally to abolish Zafar's Mughal court in Delhi, and to impose not just British laws and technology on India, but also British values, in the form of Christianity.

If the missionaries reinforced Muslim fears, increasing opposition to British rule and creating a constituency for the rapidly multiplying jehadis, so the existence of "Wahhabi Conspiracies" strengthened the conviction of the Evangelicals that a "strong attack" was needed to take on such "Muslim fanatics."

Yet, while freelance Muslim jehadis the Ghazis and the Mujahedin as they describe themselves in the Mutiny Papers played a significant role in some theatres of the Uprising, notably Lucknow and Delhi, the huge majority of the combatants were the upper caste Hindus who had been recruited by the British into the Bengal army, and who were now sufficiently distrustful of the Company, and its new Evangelical Christian agenda, to turn the guns of their own officers, saying they were fighting for their faith.

More unexpectedly, they did so by riding to Delhi the destination of 100,000 out of 139,000 of the rebel sepoys and asking a Muslim Mughal emperor to lead them something which should give us pause for reflection on how Hindus and Muslims interacted and looked upon each other at that period.

The difference between Hindu attitudes to the Mughal Emperor in 1857, and the attitudes represented in the attack on that Mughal symbol, the Baburi Masjid, in 1992 are striking.

Though the Uprising had many causes and reflected many deeply held political and economic grievances, particularly the feeling that the heathen foreigners were interfering in the most intimate way with a part of the world to which they were entirely alien the Uprising was nevertheless articulated in the rebels' own proclamation as a war of religion, for din and dharma, and especially as a defensive action against the rapid inroads missionaries, Christian schools and Christian ideas were making in India, combined with a more generalised fight for freedom from occupation and western interference.

Although the great majority of the sepoys were Hindus, and although many of the recruits to the newly raised British army that eventually took Delhi in September 1857 were Muslim Pathans from the Frontier, nevertheless in Delhi a flag of jehad was raised on the domes of the Jama Masjid.

Indeed by the end of the siege, after a significant proportion of the sepoys had melted away, hungry and dispirited, the proportion of jehadis in Delhi grew to be about half of the total rebel force, and included a regiment of "suicide ghazis" from Gwalior who had vowed never to eat again and to fight until they met death at the hands of the kafirs "for those who have come to die have no need for food."

One of the causes of unrest, according to a Delhi source, was that "the British had closed the madrasas." These were words which had no resonance to the Marxist historians of the 1960s who looked for secular and economic grievances to explain the Uprising.

Now, sadly, in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7, they are phrases we understand all too well, and words like jehad scream out of the dusty pages of the Urdu source manuscripts, demanding attention. Moreover, there is a direct link between the jehadis of 1857 and those we face today.

For the reaction of the Delhi ulema after 1857 was to reject both the West and the gentle Sufi traditions of the late Mughal Emperors, who they tended to regard as semi-apostate puppets of the British; instead they attempted to return to what they regarded as pure Islamic roots.

With this in mind, disillusioned refugees from Delhi founded the Wahhabi-like madrasa at Deoband which went back to Koranic basics and rigorously stripped out anything European from the curriculum.

One hundred and forty years later, it was out of Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan that the Taliban emerged to create the most retrograde Islamic regime in modern history, a regime that in turn provided the crucible out from which emerged Al-Qaida, and the most radical fundamentalist Islamic counterattack the modern West has yet had to face.

Today, West and East again face each other uneasily across a divide that many see as religious war. Suicide jehadis fight what they see as a defensive action against their Christian enemies, and again innocent civilians are slaughtered.

As before, western Evangelical politicians are apt to cast their opponents and enemies in the role of "incarnate fiends" and simplistically conflate armed resistance to invasion and occupation with "pure evil." Again western countries, blind to the effect their foreign policies have on the wider world, feel aggrieved and surprised to be attacked as they see it by mindless fanatics.

As we have seen in our own time, the histories of Islamic fundamentalism and western imperialism have often been closely, and dangerously, intertwined. In a curious but concrete way, extremists and fundamentalists of both faiths have needed each other to reinforce each other's prejudices and hatreds.

The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the other. There are clear lessons here. For, in the celebrated words of Edmund Burke himself a fierce critic of British aggression in India those who fail to learn from history are always destined to repeat it.

Copyright © 2006Times Internet Limited. All rights reserved.

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