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- [00:01]
William Dalrymple
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- [00:19]
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- [00:34]
William Dalrymple
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- [00:59]
Anita Anand
Well, hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand.
- [01:03]
William Dalrymple
And me, William Durampal.
- [01:05]
Anita Anand
Now, in the last episode, we saw the army of retribution wreaking havoc on Delhi. The rebels, despite their vast numbers, suffer from a fatal lack of centralized command. Everyone's doing basically whatever they want. And while the British could coordinate movements via the telegraph, they still have those lines. Remember, in India they also have steamships and they have, you know, some kind of sense of coherence. Whereas the rebel centres in Delhi, Lucknow, Jhansi, they're all isolated, they're little islands unto themselves. And add to that, you've got the monsoon rains of 1857 that have drenched the plains. The British forces, they're reinforced by fresh troops and they've got a lot more weaponry and a lot more ordnance and loyal Punjabi columns joining them as well. And they are all ready, they are all hungry to strike the two symbolic hearts of this rebellion, the Mughal capitals of Delhi and Lucknow. So, Willi, I think what would be really good is to get into the preparations for this assault. You know, they've got what they need, they're tooled up, they're manned up. 7th September is the big date to push forward. Tell us how they begin.
- [02:17]
William Dalrymple
So the key thing is to get this ordinance, as you call it, this enormous siege train, these massive howitzers and mortars into position where they can really pulverize the walls. And they start on the 7th of September and there's this 10 day period when they just roll these cannon forward slowly but meticulously, using the COVID of various Mogul gardens. There's lots, there's a whole bed of orchards and all sorts of COVID for them. And over 10 days, they move these cannons ever closer to the wall till they're so close that they can just pulverize them. And it's an incredible rain of iron. It's not just the walls they're going for and the Mori, the Kashmiri and the Water bastions in particular, but they're also just lobbing in shells beyond to try and reduce the resistance. And the Moguls and their sepoys are busy working equally hard to repair the walls. Every night, as soon as the British rise at dawn, they find that the walls that were the tops of the walls, the parapets, have been replaced. And so this a real sense on both sides that they're now knuckling down for the final struggle. But on 13 September, the British strategists declare that the breaches are, in the military term, practicable. In other words, that they are sufficiently reduced that a storming party with ladders can get over it. And the final assault on Delhi is set for dawn on the 14th.
- [03:54]
Anita Anand
Right. And, you know, just in the run up to that, just looking at the sources from Delhi themselves, I mean, they just discuss and they talk about what it felt like to be in the city when this sort of rain of iron is coming down. They describe it being like the Day of Judgment. So you imagine that you've got a rattled population, not all fighters, a lot of civilians in there as well. They have been shaken and battered, and now it feels like the end is nigh. So you've got the British on their side, you know, feeling quite good about this, that they've managed to make practicable holes in the walls that they can get through. They're drinking their last rations of rum, they're sharpening their bayonets, they're writing their wills and they're writing their letters to their loved ones. There's even a church service on the ridge where a man called Padre Rotten, I mean, unfortunate name, Padre Rotten, is reading from the Old Testament and. And he's doing, you know, the. The doomiest bits, you know, the doom of the bloody city of Nineveh. He's talking about, you know, it's a city full lies and robbery. And. And he's, of course, likening, you know, his side to the angels, the side of the angels, and all the demons are below. And he says, you know, draw the waters for the siege. Fortify thy strongholds. And, you know, this fire and brimstone, Reverend Rotten says, you know, then shall the fire devour thee. The sword shall cut thee off. It shall eat thee up like the canker worm. There is a multitude of slain, a great number of carcasses. They shall sleep stumble upon their corpses. So, you know, it really is kind of absolutely hyped up, amped up and tooled up, British side. And in the other end, you know, in Delhi itself, you've got people carrying in Sellers. They too are praying to their God, and they are praying that he comes back, because it really does feel to everybody there through that long, long night that God is nowhere with them. And so you've got, you know, the sun rising and it rises over this final moment. And where does it actually all begin? Willi?
- [05:59]
William Dalrymple
Well, there's. What you say about people carrying. Sellers is absolutely right, but it's also true that, in a sense, the less committed sepoys have gone back to their villages, and those that remain are the real hardcore rebels. And they are there, and they know that they're likely to die, and they're all set to die in as costly a fashion as possible for the British. And one force we haven't mentioned, as well as the people of Delhi and as well as the court and as well as the sepoys, the East India Company's own army that had mutinied, there's all these jihadis, ghazis, as they call themselves. And it was very interesting writing this book that asked Mogul in the aftermath of 9 11, because these were words that didn't mean much to the Victorians. Jihadis and ghazis were not sort of buzzwords, but they were so present when I was writing this book. And these forces, which were very much there in the mutiny papers, had never really been written up. And they were basically ordinary Muslim. Some of them were peasantry, some of them were aristocrats from. From, you know, military households. And they had come to Delhi to die. Yeah, they come with axes, with swords. And they also were preparing to make a last stand in as costly a fashion for the British as possible. If they were gonna lose Delhi, they were gonna take as many Brits with them. So you get this sensation on the night before of these two sides getting ready for a final meltdown, a final confrontation.
- [07:28]
Anita Anand
So, William, I'm just really. Can we, before we go any further, just talk about the jihadi aspect of this? Because the wisdom that is passed down is that these were freedom fighters who really, you know, it wasn't religion was secondary, but it was. It was pride in one's country that made them want to push out the British, that they, you Know, had enough of being told what to do by people who didn't respect them. But you have found something else in this which changes the complexion and so. And it's going to be controversial. People aren't going to like it. But tell us what you found.
- [07:59]
William Dalrymple
Well, it's. Whether it's controversial or not, it's there in the Mutiny papers, which are the biggest seam that we have of the records of the mutineers people have. I mean, what you've definitely, where you're right, is that in the 50s and 60s, nationalist, often Marxist historians interpreted this uprising in nationalist, Marxist economic terms. And so it was about, you know, the British crushing the Indian economy and getting rid of the looms and sending.
- [08:25]
Anita Anand
Imports and cutting off the thumbs of weavers and all of that kind of stuff.
- [08:28]
William Dalrymple
All that sort of stuff was very much there in the historiography of the 50s and 60s. Writing this book after 9 11, when, you know, every newspaper was full of jihadis and the word jihad was on everyone's lips, it was very striking to see how much it was also on the lips of the Muslim fighters in 1857. And you had a similar sort of spin coming from the Hindus too, where they were talking about fighting for their dharma, Dharma and Dean, and fighting for their way of life in a wider sense, their religion and their way of life was very much the rhetoric certainly being used in the papers, in the publications. In the Delhi Urdu Akbar, the newspaper which went through under its editor, Mohammed Bakr, published edition every week with a full newspaper, all of which survive of these editorials. I mean, Bakar himself was an extremely religious man and from the beginning was talking about this in religious terms. But he. He's very interesting because, you know, we think of jihad as being such a sort of exclusively Muslim thing. He was saying this is something that all Indians should be, should be, should be fighting together. And he uses, well, whatever.
- [09:42]
Anita Anand
Whoever your God is.
- [09:43]
William Dalrymple
Whoever your God is. And he's using exemplars from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, saying you should fight as the Pandavas fought for dharma.
- [09:53]
Anita Anand
That's so interesting. Right.
- [09:55]
William Dalrymple
This is a very syncretic city in the 1850s. Hindus and Muslims are living very successfully side by side. And one of the British strategies in the course of the siege, we haven't really mentioned this, is to try and sow dissent between the Hindus and Muslims. The Hindus and Muslims. And there's one moment when they nearly succeed. And the reason they nearly succeed is that these bunch of ghazis, jihadis, living in The Jama Masjid. And these are the kind of really hardcore guys. And news comes that they want to sacrifice cows on Eid, right? And Zafar sends out a message saying there's nothing in the Quran saying you have to sacrifice cows, you can sacrifice goats perfectly well. And he then has this extraordinary thing when he, in order to prevent cows being killed, he sends out an order to arrest every cow in Delhi. And there are these wonderful succession of messages that, you know, you have these petitions which arrive and these orders which are sent out and he orders the police to arrest the cows in the streets. And then as now, you know, cows are wandering around the streets of Delhi, munching away at what they can find on the roadsides. And then there's these letters coming back from the police saying we filled all the jails with the cows and there's no more room, so they have to.
- [11:10]
Anita Anand
Find more places to put, to put the incarcerated moose. I mean, just to clarify this completely, what Zafar is very cleverly trying to do is keep them safe. So there is no report that, you know, would be like a flame to, you know, gunpowder that says a cow has been killed, which would alienate the Hindu population completely and break up this brotherhood. Okay?
- [11:32]
William Dalrymple
And there's the British intelligence chief who's a guy called William Hodson, who we'll hear about towards the end of this episode because he becomes very important in the aftermath of the assault. William Hodgson is waiting for a massive bust up between the Hindus and the Muslims at Ede over this issue. And Zafar effectively makes sure it doesn't happen. It's one of his principal contributions is to keep Hindu and Muslims together. So as far as he's concerned, they're both fighting for their faith against the Christian missionaries.
- [12:04]
Anita Anand
So what we've got then is we've got religious zealotry on this long night of Bible reading and fire and brimstone. And you've got the Die Hards if you want. You know, the people who are fighting for their gods, for their deen and their dharma. And you've also got the sepoys who were probably quite prominent in, you know, mutinying or rising up against the British, who know that they've got nowhere to go now because if they lose, they're going to die and everyone they love is going to die. So they are the Die Hards who are fighting. How does that dawn then play out? You know, the morning that they're all.
- [12:36]
William Dalrymple
In anticipation, the morning bugle goes up at 3am, they file down to Kutsjbag, which is the Mogul Garden on the edge of the city walls. And they use the COVID of the garden walls and the orchards within it to move safely up to where the artillery is now on the front line. And just as dawn comes up, I think there are three columns. The bugle goes and it is your absolute madness. The first party to go is a small party of sappers led by two young lieutenants, Sackeld and Hume. And they have to run across this broken bridge under a wall of fire and lay powder bags at the gate. That's the only way to do it. To blow the gates in, they have to put the powder sacks of gunpowder literally under the gate where everyone can shoot it.
- [13:25]
Anita Anand
I mean, that in itself is like a suicide mission. If you're under heavy barrage, it's, you know, it's just unthinkable, you know, that you'll get there.
- [13:32]
William Dalrymple
And one of them, Sackeld, is indeed shot through the arm and leg. But Hume manages to jump into the ditch, they put the gunpowder there, lay the fuse, and bam, they blow the gate and the bugle sounds. And the first obstacle is the ditch, which they've blown the walls down, but they haven't filled in the ditch, so they've got to go down first. 20ft deep by 25 foot broad. And the British have all been issued with scaling ladders. So the ladders are fetched, put into place, the troops go down the glacis and many of them are killed at this point because the ladders are slow to come up. There's various issues with getting them there. And it's 10 minutes before the first troops had succeeded in rising out the far side of the glacis and to climb into the breach where they've knocked the walls down.
- [14:22]
Anita Anand
You aren't joking when you said this is kind of a, you know, almost the precursor to trench warfare, because how many were lost trying to just get out of their trenches or the ditches and the number of lives they claimed, I think that's fascinating. Okay, so the ones 10 minutes in, you've got the first men who are finally making the run into the breach.
- [14:41]
William Dalrymple
And one of them is this 16 year old Fred Roberts, who later is a kind of greatest military hero. He's Lord Roberts of Kandahar at the, at the end of his reign. And we met him in the Rudyard Kipling episode as an old man talking about Kipling. But he, aged 16, is in this first scaling party and he writes up, went our men beautifully, like a pack of hounds. We gunners had done our work so well, that the breach was perfect and we gained the ramparts with comparatively slight loss.
- [15:13]
Anita Anand
Okay. So he makes it sound easy, but there are other accounts as well. So I'll just present to you Richard Barter, who's one of the first over the top. And he's running forward, and he remembers seeing, you know, the heads of. Of the defenders, the rebels, sort of popping up over the ramparts. And. And this is what he writes. He says, while along the walls they swarmed thick like bees. The sun shone full upon the white turbans and black faces sparkling brightly on their swords and their bayonets. And our men cheered madly as we reached the breach. So, you know, Roberts might have thought it was quite plain sailing. You've got those, you know, probably from a lower socioeconomic background, may I suggest, who are sort of being sent and pushed up front, who were saying, my God, you know, actually, we're getting mowed down. There are so many of them. They're thick like bees out there and firing at us. Okay, so what happens then? So they reach the breach. Do they go straight through? I mean, how quickly do they get in?
- [16:06]
William Dalrymple
Not quickly. He also writes, three times the ladder party was swept away, and three times the ladders were snatched from the dead and the wounded. It was hard work getting up the breach, which is like sloping bank of sea sand from the pounding of the shot. So they're stumbling down this thing, trying to get up this incredibly steep. You've got ladders, the men holding the ladders being shot, people that are replacing them.
- [16:29]
Anita Anand
Well, not just shot. I mean, it's medieval, isn't it? Because he also writes. And we think we have a lot to thank Barta for, just for writing, you know, his thoughts down afterwards. But, you know, it's medieval sieges. They're heaving huge blocks of masonry down at the ladder. So every time Barter and his friends are trying to get up, some of them are being brained by, you know, this rain of rocks that is coming down.
- [16:53]
William Dalrymple
And there's this very sweet final note. He says. He says once he gets up to the top, he and his friend Fitzgerald find themselves standing close up on the bastions. And he said, we shook hands and parted. He down the right of the breach, I along the parapet, to the left towards the Kashmiri gate. I never saw him again. He was killed by a discharge of grapeshot inside the walls immediately after I parted from him. So this is massive carnage.
- [17:20]
Anita Anand
Absolutely.
- [17:21]
William Dalrymple
These are very, very high casualties. The British have half thought that, as so often in war, they think that They've pelted the other side with artillery and the other side will now just sort of lie down and let.
- [17:31]
Anita Anand
Well, they'll run. They'll either lie down or run. That's what they'll do. But they don't. And that actually is the next chapter of this story, which is interesting because there's one thing to breach a city. You know, you can blow a hole in a wall, you can send men in through that hole, even if it is a costly thing to do. But then you have to keep the city and you have to keep pushing in to that city. And if it's a city that's filled with people who know that life or death depends upon keeping them out. And also, I mean, you know, this is a city that's like a labyrinth, isn't it? I mean, it's Old Delhi with all of its little gullies and alleyways, is. If you don't know it, how do you know where you're going and how do you know what's above you and how do you know what's coming round the corner? So it is. I mean, it could be a death trap for these people, couldn't it?
- [18:14]
William Dalrymple
So it is a death trap for the most famous of all the British in the attacking force. The party that's been told to sweep right from Kashmiri Gate towards the Mori bastion is led by none other than John Nicholson. This. This sort of the psychotic, brave madman, and he leads the charge and he gets in the Kashmiri Gate successfully and they head. Right, but it's just after that that Nicholson is shot down. And I've been to the place where he was shot. It's still there, the little plaque set up by the Victorians that no one's taken down yet. And you can see where he lied because, as so often again, you know, it's bad. Wounds don't necessarily kill you immediately.
- [19:00]
Anita Anand
No, it's almost a blessing if you do go. Because actually, the lingering and the agonising of a long, slow, drawn out death is just unbelievably painful. And that's nine days.
- [19:11]
William Dalrymple
Nine days dying.
- [19:12]
Anita Anand
Wow.
- [19:12]
William Dalrymple
And what he lives long enough to see is the hesitation by his nemesis, Archdale Wilson, this very hesitant British commander.
- [19:22]
Anita Anand
Oh, he hates Wilson.
- [19:24]
William Dalrymple
So Nicholson lies, lingering in a state of near death for nine agonizing days. What he sees is Archdale Wilson, the commander, who he hates and thinks is too timid, almost ordering the withdrawal, because the Brits get within the walls and they expect that once, normally with any siege, once you're within the walls. That's it. You know, the city's taken, you've won.
- [19:50]
Anita Anand
Yeah, that's it.
- [19:50]
William Dalrymple
But in this case, the sepoys who have anticipated the English coming in because they can see the effect of the siege, the siege battering, and they know that they can't save the walls which are just crumbling in front of them. So several days before that, these guys build a set of trenches just 100 yards within the city opposite St. James's Church. And you could still walk to this day, all these places.
- [20:18]
Anita Anand
Oh, I mean, that's really clever, clever warfaring there, Willy. Because what you're in effect saying is that, you know, the rebels, what they've done is that they said, okay, we lose the wall, but we'll make a wall within a wall. And then another one, like an onion that you can get through the out. You've got another, you know, another barrier you shall not pass. You've got to get through those others as well.
- [20:37]
William Dalrymple
And for nine whole days, that wall within the wall holds. The British may have got within Kashmiri gate, but they've only got 100 yards, right? And the whole thing is in the balance because there are no more reinforcements. If this assault fails, you know, it may be another two years before the British gather enough troops to. To fight this. And this is everything to the famous of India literally hangs in the balance. And at this point, either side could have broken and run. Both sides are in a very bad way. The British have had far more casualties than they expected. Nicholson is clearly dying, and Wilson is seriously pondering whether he should retreat to Simla. And Nicholson's very characteristic last contribution in this before he finally succumbs, is when he hears that Archdale Wilson is thinking of withdrawing. He whispers, thank God that I have yet the strength enough to shoot that man.
- [21:33]
Anita Anand
That's hilarious. I mean, if true, those are the best dying words I've heard. Okay, so he's a great character.
- [21:42]
William Dalrymple
I have to say. I love my villains. And Clive just provided endless material when I was doing the Anarchy and John Nicholson was the brilliant, a bloodthirsty monster.
- [21:52]
Anita Anand
But brave till the end. I mean, if you're sort of there on a stretcher in a agonizing pain without the kind of painkillers we have today. And the one thing you can think.
- [22:01]
William Dalrymple
Of shooting your commander.
- [22:03]
Anita Anand
I'm shooting Archdale Wilson. If it's the last thing I'd. Archdale. It's almost. Oh. And it's comedic and also gory. Okay, so does he do it? Because, you know, Nicholson is not going to shoot him and Nicholson is not much longer for this world. So, I mean, how does that play out, then?
- [22:18]
William Dalrymple
So there's one other story just before the turning point in this, and this is our old friend Theo Metcalfe, the junior magistrate who we've seen move from a sort of ne' er do well, sort of son of Theophilus Metcalfe, used to be the British resident. Too keen on dogs, too keen on horses, too keen on women.
- [22:42]
Anita Anand
Playboy about town, basically, doesn't do very much, makes up shit, you know, every time he's asked for any kind of intelligence report, he just goes and he's flashback.
- [22:51]
William Dalrymple
He's basically a Flashman character.
- [22:52]
Anita Anand
He's Flashman. I mean, he's hilarious. So what he does is he goes and he collects all the gossip and he says, behold, I have an intelligence report for you. But he has undergone something of a transformation because Theo Metcalf, and if you've listened to some of the previous ones in this series, has completely underestimated the feeling of the rebellion. And so, you know, when he finds himself having to beg at the doors of his former friends, please let me in. When he's fleeing for his life, and one after the other, they either turn him away or they betray him or they, you know, basically set him up to be killed. He is getting coarsened and hardened and, you know, this sort of like, quite happy, go lucky kind of, you know, charlatan of a man is turning into quite a wounded psyche and getting angrier and more callous at all at this point, Willie, he's almost unrecognisable from the young man that we know who made up shit in intelligence reports.
- [23:44]
William Dalrymple
That's right. And he is the one person in the attacking force that really knows Delhi. I mean, everyone else is from elsewhere. Theo had lived in the city. He knows the alleys. He'd gone wandering around to the courtesans and to the jewelers and all this stuff. And he knew the city which he grown up in backwards. So in the initial assault, he is sent to capture the Jama Masjid. And there's this fantastic scene when they find this area, which is not defended, and they get way ahead of any other British force down right to the street on the edge of the Java Masjid, almost within sight of the Red Fort. And it's complete silence and it's eerie. And he realizes something is wrong because there's no shooting, there's no sniping, there's just complete silence in the street. And he senses that something is happening. And eventually he gets up to the street immediately next to the north gate of the Jamma Masjid, which of course we know is where the jihadis and the ghazis with their axes, the real fanatics be waiting. And these guys gingerly move up the street looking left and right, trying to work out if there's an ambush, seeing where everything is complete silence. And it's only when they get to the steps of the Jaba Masjid that there's this eerie creaking noise and the gates swing open and these fanatical jihadis come racing down the steps with their axes. None of them for some reason seem to have firearms. The jihadis just got the kind of traditional swords, spears, arrows and particularly battle axes. And these guys go down and they drive Theo back, despite the fact they've got this antiquated weaponry. So Theo survives this jihadi break, if you like. This sort of extraordinary eruption of the Ghazis out of the Jama Masjid makes it back to the British front line at St James's Church. And for the next eight days there is this complete stalemate. The sepoys are in their trenches. The British can't go forwards, they don't want to go back. Archdale Wilson's considering retreat, but Nicholson's threatening to shoot him if he does. And what both sides have forgotten is the lunar cycle. So it's a total stalemate. The sepoys are in their trenches, the British are facing them. Archdale Wilson is thinking of retreating, but Nicholson's gonna shoot him if he does. And it looks like this could go on for months.
- [26:17]
Anita Anand
But, but, but William, look up, Just look up. Because something from the heavens is going to change everything. Let's take a break. Join us after the break.
- [26:35]
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- [27:06]
Dominic Sambrook
Hi everybody, it is Dominic Sambrook here from the Rest Is History. Now you have probably been watching the scenes on the streets of Iran. You may be wondering where all this comes from. So on the Rest is History. We have just recorded a four part series on recent Iranian history. So it kicks off with the Iranian revolution that brought down the Shah Mohammed reza Pahlavi in 1978, 1979. And it's actually his son who is now leading opposition to the Ayatollahs from exile in the United States. So in this series, we explore the history behind the Islamic revolution in Iran at the end of the 70s. Where did people like Ayatollah Khomeini come from? Where did their ideas come from? Why did they have so much support? Why was the Shah driven out of Iran in the first place? And what did it have to do with American intervention and indeed British intervention in the 1950s? And we look at the unfolding story of the revolution and then the amazing story of the SEIZURE of the US embassy in Tehran, the taking of initially 66 hostages by the Iranians. This is probably the story that I most enjoyed researching and writing. So please, if you're interested in Iranian history and what's going on, check it out. And if you want to taster, we have a clip for you at the end of this episode.
- [28:33]
Anita Anand
Welcome back. So just before the break, everyone's exhausted. Nobody knows how this is going to end. It looks like it's going to go on and on for months, but. But then it's almost as if the heavens speak. What do I mean by that, Willy? I haven't lost my mind. Cause the answer is writ large in the sky, isn't it?
- [28:51]
William Dalrymple
So exactly on the morning of the 18th of September, the sun is completely eclipsed for five whole minutes. Now, this is a surprise for everyone because no one'd be looking at their almanacs to see when there's gonna be an eclipse happening in the middle of all this fun and games. But it has a particular significance for the Hindus. Remember, the Hindus are the majority of the sepoys. Even today in India, an eclipse is considered to be a moment of incredibly bad luck. And I've got conservative friends in Rajasthan who will not go out on the day before or after an eclipse. They will stay inside and keep their curtains. Curtains even.
- [29:38]
Anita Anand
Today I will see your friends and I'll raise you members of family, shall I? Because there are members of family who've told me stories about cows shouldn't be milked on eclipse day because the milk will be poisonous. You can't look up at the sky directly to have a look at it. Also, you can only look at it in a bucket of water, only the reflection, otherwise the evil spirits will enter you. I mean, there is so much superstition that surrounds an eclipse that this is only going to be seen, particularly, as you say, by the Hindu as a portent of great evil that something wicked this way comes, that God is not on their side anymore.
- [30:13]
William Dalrymple
Exactly. So what happens is that the following morning the British wake up and you know, they've forgotten about the eclipse. It doesn't mean more than the list astronomical quirk to them. But for the Hindus it means the change of a dynasty, it means the end of everything and they flee. So when the following morning, on the morning of 19 September, the British wake up and they're suddenly aware that there's no shooting from the opposite trenches. And a few people pop their heads up and realize there's no shooting. And then they get up and they clamber out of their trenches and the sepoys have all gone just crazy. Unknown to the British, the sepoys have fled down the road and they're heading off to Lucknow to make their final stand. There they just take it that Delhi is doomed. And one of the people who was aware of all this happening was of course poor Zafar. All these sepoys who've been clogging the halls of his palace, even his special hall, the Duan I Khas, which should have been only access for the VIPs. These guys have been hanging around making nuisance of themselves. But on the night of the 18th of September, they just all disappear. So Zafar realizes that there's no one left to fight and that he will be picked up the following morning by the British. So again fatally taking this as a sign of divine judgment, he goes into his prayer chamber and he takes out the Mughals special relics of the Prophet. There's a hair from the Prophet's beard and there's various other. There's a footprint of the Prophet. Then he gets his boat party to let him out of the Watergate on the side of the Red Fort, which is the same gate that the sepoys came to on the morning of the outbreak and begged him to come down and lead the them. And he gets into the boat and he floats downstream in the darkness in the moonlight to Nizamuddin, to the Sufi shrine where he deposits the sacred relics and then goes across the road to Humayun's tomb to await the surrender. In the tombs of his forebears the great. It's like kind of the prototype of the Taj Mahal sitting on the edge of the river Jamna.
- [32:26]
Anita Anand
But it's like, it is like a fallen pharaoh going to the pyramids and waiting for his death. I mean that's the strength of that imagery. He's basically waiting to join the people who've died before him. And so it passes. I mean, it is a rout from there on in because there aren't any defenders. You know, people have left, they've gone. Whoever has left, I guess Willie is cut down without mercy because, you know, you've got an angry and tired and frightened, you know, formally out of their wits. They've watched their friends die. Like Barker watching his friend die in front of him. You know, the blood is up. So what happens then after those troops have left and the Brits then get in?
- [33:06]
William Dalrymple
So what happens is that the Brits surround the city and lock the gates and that then takes place, arguably the most terrible massacre to take place in the entire 250 years British rule in India. And it's odd that in the sense Jallianwulla Bagh, which you've written about so well, has taken the place of this as the sort of supreme British atrocity, because you could make a very strong case for saying that this is the worst thing the British ever did in India. Every male over the age of 16 is killed. There are one or two exceptions like Ghalib, who've got special letters and by virtue of their position do not get killed. But anyone in the city over the age of 16 is massacred. And the British, some of the British who see this are as horrified as anyone else. There's a character called Edward Vibart who has written some brilliant letters that I've used the whole way through this book. And Vibart had two sisters in the Bibigar at Cawnpor at the massacre that we dealt with two episodes ago. And he is all set on the night before the attack to wreak havoc and revenge. But what he sees now disgusts him. He says the orders went out to shoot every soul. It was literally murder. And I was perfectly horrified. I've 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 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.
- [35:04]
Anita Anand
I mean, that's just again so vividly, vividly portrayed and as you say, by a man who has every reason to have the blood up, you know, as they put it, you know, the blood is up and people do terrible things with their blades and their bullets. There is one person I want to come back to and that's Theo Metcalfe, you know who I said he'd undergone this transformation. You know, he'd been hiding in a cave. If you heard some of our previous submissions here in this series, this miniseries, you know, frightened for his life. He spent, you know, weeks before thinking he's gonna die at any moment. And he comes through and he gets to Delhi, and then he sees all this carnage. And when they win, when the Brits win and they've got access to Delhi, he turns into this monster. I think the way you put it is like a hanging judge. But he's there, and he's got sort of lines of people in front of him, and he will walk like, you know, some Gestapo villain going, that one. That one.
- [35:53]
William Dalrymple
Exactly that.
- [35:54]
Anita Anand
With absolutely no emotion, he condemns scores of people to death.
- [36:01]
William Dalrymple
And it's kind of worse than that because he's also making a personal fortune at the same time. He goes straight to the jeweler's quarter and he gets the jewellers hung and takes all the jewelry. He's a looter, and he uses his position to enrich himself as well as to take revenge. And the other thing he does is that his family house, Metcalfe House, it's still standing today. It's an Indian army defense building, his house, which his father had turned into a museum. His father's obsessed with Napoleon, and he had what he called the Napoleon Gallery, full of Napoleon memorabilia, including a statue of Napoleon by Canova.
- [36:41]
Anita Anand
Wow.
- [36:42]
William Dalrymple
That Napoleon himself had sent to William Fraser. William Fraser, who we met in other episodes of this podcast, was this white mogul who represented the opposite of this whole sort of Victorian horror show. Fraser loved Mughal Delhi. He commissioned paintings. He commissioned the Great Fraser Album, which is one of the great masterpieces. But he was also a man of great sort of humanity. When he heard that Napoleon was in St. Helena without any books, he sent his entire Library to St Helena to Napoleon, and it sank on the way, including, presumably, lots of lovely Mughal masterpieces.
- [37:14]
Anita Anand
Oh, wow.
- [37:16]
William Dalrymple
But Napoleon heard that this young man, this young officer, had sent all these books to him and said, I didn't receive the books because the ship sank, but here is my bust by Canova and my ring. And both of these were inherited by.
- [37:32]
Anita Anand
By Theo's father. And so Metcalfe. So all of that is in the house. So, yes. What happens to the house? What does he do? What does he do?
- [37:37]
William Dalrymple
And so the whole house is burnt down. So two things happen now. One is Theo tries to find the bust of Napoleon, which is incredibly valuable, and he Finds it in a Shiva temple being worshipped as Mahadev, as Shiva.
- [37:51]
Anita Anand
Napoleon's being worshipped as Shivji, the Lord of the Dance. That is so mad.
- [37:55]
William Dalrymple
But the house itself is a ruin. And he is convinced that the villagers. Well, I think he had good reason to think that the villagers around the house had looted it. And objects from the house were found in all the village houses. So he gets the whole village around Metcalfe House, which is just outside the walls, and he hangs the village from the rafters. It's horrific.
- [38:18]
Anita Anand
All of the villagers? All the villagers, everybody. Jesus. You know what, Willy? I have been fond of Theo for a long time. You know, you know, his early days, he was a buffoon, but he was likable. You know, he sort of learned the language, he went around sort of mucking around with, you know, the locals. All that, making his way with the least amount of work possible. I approved of that. I thought that was quite fun. But he turns into an absolute.
- [38:42]
William Dalrymple
He turns into a war criminal. Straightforward monster.
- [38:45]
Anita Anand
Monster.
- [38:46]
William Dalrymple
And what's interesting is that at this point, there are so many war criminals, obviously the blood is up, everyone is blessing. But Theo Metcalf, I think, is almost the only person in the East India Company's civil service to be dismissed for what he does after the fall of Delhi.
- [39:03]
Anita Anand
Right.
- [39:03]
William Dalrymple
It is considered to be so beyond the pale, even at the standards of the time.
- [39:07]
Anita Anand
Right. Gosh, then it must have been bad.
- [39:09]
William Dalrymple
Yeah. The fact that he personally enriched himself, I think, was the thing that people really minded.
- [39:12]
Anita Anand
So, I mean, let's stick a pin in Theo Metcalfe and just walk away quickly and avert our eyes. What about Zephyr? Because we last left him, he was waiting for his doom in Hamayu's tomb. Who comes for him in the end and what happens?
- [39:25]
William Dalrymple
So from the kind of end of July, it looks as if Zeenat Mahal, who is Zafar's much younger wife, who has got two kids of her own that she wants to inherit, she has traitorously, in the eyes of the mutineers, reached out to the British on the ridge. And Zeenat Mahal is in correspondence with William Hodgson, the British Intelligence chief. And at this point, she sends a message saying that if you grant our life, we will surrender to you in Humayun's tomb. And Hodson takes that. So on the 20th of September, he rides out with a party to Humayun's tomb, which is quite a brave thing to do, because in Humayun's tomb is not just Zafar and all his kids, but quite A lot of the armed court who are surrounding him. So there are two or three thousand people within the garden of Humayun's tomb. It's not a place you'd go in the middle of this uprising. But Hodson believes that he's got a deal and he walks in and he takes the surrender of Zeenat Mahal and Bahad Al Shazafa, who are promised their life in return for a peaceful surrender, and he marches them up to Delhi and places them not back in the hall of audience, which he'd left 10 days earlier, but in the stables he's lodged where the horses have been kept in a state of imprisonment. Meanwhile, his diwani kas. The center of the Mughal palace is a British officer's meth and they're serving pork and bacon and having a high old time on planters, chairs and that sort of thing now in the palace. And the famous atrocity takes place the next day when Hodson goes back and takes the surrender of the princes, of which there are about 10. So the princes have been left without their parents and the next day Hodgson comes back and arrests them. And they say, do we get our life promise to? And he doesn't give an answer. So the prince has got no particular option because Hudson's got troops with him this time. And so they, they go with him. And there are, I think, a party of six or seven of them in all their finery. And as they head towards the city, many of the troops and courtiers who'd be hanging around with them in Humayun's tomb follow them and then begin to get sort of more nervous about what's gonna happen and so crowd around the princes. At that point, Hodgson, in his own account, fears that there's gonna be a rescue operation. So he stops the carriage in which the princes are kept, he orders the princess out and he shoots them one by one with his Colt revolver in cold blood. He then takes all their jewelry and all their finery, puts it in his pocket, does not report it, and throws the naked bodies of the dead princes at the Kotwal. And the place where they were shot has been known ever since as Khunidarwaza, the Bloody Gate.
- [42:28]
Anita Anand
Do you know that doesn't actually. It's not Bloody Gate. Do you know what, Kuni? There was actually translates to the murderer's gate.
- [42:34]
William Dalrymple
The murderer's gate.
- [42:35]
Anita Anand
News of that surely must be rampaging through the country. What's the reaction? I mean, what happens?
- [42:41]
William Dalrymple
This is the terrible end of the uprising in Delhi. The rebels have fled and in the aftermath of this, of this massacre of the princes, the last princes of the Mogul line, the descendants of Babur, descendants of Timur, the senator of Genghis Khan, all these people, these, the blood, all converges in this group of young men that have just been massacred. It's at this point that the British order the troops out into pursuit of the rebels. And the last horror before we wrap this up for today and just present Ghalib's elegy on Delhi is the description of Richard Barter, the same guy who, if you remember, had been up on the walls whose friend had been killed.
- [43:30]
Anita Anand
But he had not said goodbye to his friend and never saw him again.
- [43:33]
William Dalrymple
He is at the front of the troops marching out towards Lucknow, and he describes the city just covered in corpses from the massacre of the week before. Every male in the city is dead and their bodies are lying up. This is his account. The march out of the city was simply awful. The advance guard, consisting of cavalry and artillery, had burst and squashed the dead bodies which lay swelled to an enormous size in the Chandni Chowk. And the stench was fearful. Men and officers were sick all round and I thought I'd never get out of 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. He snorted and shook as he slid rather than walked over the abominations with which the street were covered. Dead bodies were strewn about in all directions, in every attitude that the death struggle had caused them to assume. In every stage of decomposition. Many instances, 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.
- [44:56]
Anita Anand
So the glittering city of Delhi that we've described in previous episodes is now just ruins, ruins and corpses and gore. And one of your favourite people from this time period, Ghalib, the poetry, he is a survivor. And why don't we leave his words to sort of end what this all felt like?
- [45:16]
William Dalrymple
He is kind of the last survivor of the court. Everyone else is killed, hung, massacred. Of the old elite, he is last. And one of the great sort of wonders of the historiography of this is that we have Ghalib's account surviving of these horrors. So it's like having Shakespeare describe the Battle of Britain or something, you know, it's like you have the greatest writer in Urdu describing the greatest tragedy in the history of Delhi. And he survives because he's got a sense of humour. When he's interviewed by this sort of, you know, intelligence colonel, asking why he didn't come to the ridge and present himself and why he shouldn't be shot, the colonel says, are you a Muslim? And Caleb says, half. And the colonel says, what does that mean? And he says, I drink wine, but I don't eat pork. And the colonel laughs and Khalib gets off. He makes him laugh and manages to survive. And so we have his description. And in the months to come, the Muslims have moved out of the city. And a year later, when they're allowed back, he writes this letter. He says, the male descendants of the deposed king, such as survived the sword, draw an allowance of five rupees a month. The female descendants, if old, are bawds, if young, prostitutes. The city has become a desert. By God, Delhi is no more a city, but a camp, a contumement. No fort, no city, no bazaars, no watercourses. Four things kept Delhi, the fort, the crowds at the Jaba Masjid, the weekly walk at the Amna Bridge and the yearly fair of the flowermen. None of these survive. So how could Delhi survive? Yes, it is said that there was once a city of that name in the realm of India. We smashed the wine cup and the flask. What is it now to us if all the rain that falls from heaven should turn to rose red wine?
- [47:08]
Anita Anand
So with that, the final act of this drama, we're going to circle back to it, because I'm aware that we haven't told you what happens to Zephyr, who has been spared, although his children have not. We'll come back to that in the next episode. And we are also going to take you in the next episode to Lucknow, a place you now know fairly well. From our podcast till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita.
- [47:34]
William Dalrymple
Arnan, and goodbye from me, William Durham.
- [47:49]
Dominic Sambrook
Hi there, it's Dominic Sambrook again from the Rest Is History. Now, I mentioned during the break that we have a new series on recent Iranian history, so here is a short extract for you. If you want to hear the whole series, then search for revolution in Iran on the Rest Is History. Wherever you get your podcasts or search for us on YouTube, There are crowds in the streets every day. There are attacks on banks and restaurants every day. And already in some towns in Iran, power has been taken from the legitimate authorities and it's been taken over by Revolutionary Strike Committees. Now, if you're with the revolution, this is very exciting. If you're not with the revolution, it is terrifying. And in his memoirs, Ambassador William Sullivan describes standing at the US Embassy and looking out through an upstairs window and he sees in the distance troops holding back demonstrators. He sees cars burning in the middle of the road. He sees smoke rising from burning buildings and he thinks something has to change. You know, we have to do something. So on the 9th of November, he sends a secret cable to Washington with the title Thinking the Unthinkable. And he says the Shah is finished, it's over, and if we don't act now, Iran, which is so vital to us, will slip out of our hands forever. He says we should ditch the Shah right now and it may well be time to do a deal with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. If you enjoyed that clip, then please search for the Rest is History. Wherever you get your podcasts.