September does stir the soul as it falls in the Autumnal Equinox with the promise of better days to come after the searing heat and dust of summer, made more miserable this year due to scanty rains and the ravages of dengue fever. However, one anniversary that went almost unnoticed was the retaking of Delhi by the British on Sept 19/20 1857 and the end of the dream of a Firangi-free nation (with the dal getting burnt in many homes because of the panic). Most Delhiwallahs gave the date a miss out of ignorance and some as they were not interested in commemorating this alien success as also the fateful Sept 10/11, 1803 Battle of Delhi. Yet to some others it was these two bloody episodes which re-inspired freedom-fighters led by Mahatma Gandhi (and his predecessors) to take the struggle to its successful culmination.
This year too a group of British tourists visited the Capital to make their annual pilgrimage to places and monuments where the worst fighting took place and where their ancestors fell dead or wounded. Lucy Wisden (not her real name) wiser than her 19 years, was emphatic in stressing that what their grandsires did was to uphold orders as part of duty. Moreover, like historian Dr. Rosie Lelleweyn-Jones explained on an earlier visit, the descendants visit Delhi and other places connected with the skirmishes of 1857 to perpetuate the memory of near and dear ones, including the controversial Nicholson and Hodson and the gentle John Colvin who died in the Agra Fort.
Many of them had no inimical feelings but just the task of putting down a perceived rebellion. It’s worth noting that even Ghalib sometimes felt for the Firangis. When William Fraser was murdered in 1835, he was very sad at the loss of a great friend and well-wisher who had helped him in his pension case when the poet visited Calcutta. Fraser was then attached to the Governor-General’s office and being a lover of Urdu and Persian naturally felt drawn close to Ghalib.
Urdu scholar Ralph Russell, the revised version of whose work “Famous Ghalib” has been edited by Marion Melteno and brought out by Roli Books, observed that it was partly through Ghalib’s help that Fraser’s assassin was traced. The poet lamented, “The men of Delhi all assailed me and lay at my door the seizure of the man of black ingratitude and killer of a just ruler. High and low they have spread abroad the slander that Shamsuddin (Nawab of Ferozepur who had turned against old guardian Fraser for allegedly sullying his sister’s honour) is innocent and that (his cousin sister) and I have, out of our abundant malice, caught the (British) authorities in a web of lies. At first my heart felt only the grief of William Fraser Sahib’s death, but now that the man who killed him is identified…I raise my voice each morning in prayer to God… to speed the day when that ruthless and overweening man shall pay the penalty”.
Incidentally, the execution of Shamsuddin Khan was also one of the reasons 22 years later for the Great Revolt in Delhi. Ghalib mourned not only his friends and kinsmen but also English acquaintances, among whom were “his pupils in poetry and bosom companions”. Ghalib’s fellow-feeling is worth appreciating without going into the merits of the rights and wrongs done then. This despite the fact that the British had stopped his pension as punishment for harbouring sympathy for “rebels”. The same charge in reverse was made by his Muslim detractors who cursed him with eternal damnation in hell.
In this connection Russell mentions a story about the Sufi rejection of the doctrine of reward and punishment after death. “A friar met an old (Sufi) woman in Damascus who was carrying burning coals in one hand and a flask of water in the other. When the friar asked what they were for, she replied that the coals were for burning paradise and the water to put out the fires of hell, so that people could live their lives no longer motivated by hope of paradise and fear of hell but solely for their love for God.”
Ghalib too highlighted this when he wrote, “God’s will be done, but not from greed of heaven’s wine and honey/Take hold of paradise someone and cast it into hell.”
That he is said to have written these lines during the September fighting in Delhi “between ghazi and infidel” (the Muslim and British) is noteworthy. No wonder one pondered over the happenings 158 years ago while talking to Lucy Wisden and her companions, who preferred to remain anonymous, at the Mutiny Memorial on the ridge, from where one could get a bird’s-eye view of Old Delhi and of the places that were in the thick of the revolt. Come September and such feelings surface, along with those of the film of that name. But Rock Hudson and Audrey Heburn’s fling was in romantic Rome and not in the hurly-burly of 1857!
The author is a veteran chronicler of Delhi
