River of memory

Amit Sengupta

“The morning of 12 May saw Delhi almost completely emptied of the British, who had dominated it since the British defeated the Marathas in 1803… As Theo woke in ill-fitting Hindustani clothes, hidden in a backroom in the house of a stranger; as the Tytlers in Karnal and the Wagentriebers in  Panipat wolfed down their breakfasts; as James Morley, swaying on his bullock cart, pondered life without his wife and family; as Edward Vibart and his party hid in a bunch of tall grass in the fields towards Meerut, avoiding the sepoy search  parties out looking for British refugees; as Ghalib peered disapprovingly through his lattices at the sepoys swaggering through his muhalla of Ballimaran; as Maulvi Muhammad Baqar began writing up for the Dihli Urdu Akbhar all the strange sights and portents that he had seen the day before; as the young Muhammad Husain Azad composed his poem on the uprising; as Zahir Dehlavi and Hakim Ahsanullah Khan began trying to remove the sepoys from the most crucial ceremonial parts of the Palace; as all this was happening (Bahadurshah) Zafar too was anxiously trying to envisage his future… The night before he had sheltered the forty-odd British prisoners brought in by Muin ud Din…”

If William Dalrymple is not a historian, then what is he? The wordsmith of magic fiction historical realism? Or simply, an elegant storyteller with a beginning and an end?

It’s just that there is no end to this story, even after the British attacked the Kashmere Gate and massacred the rebels and citizens alike, that is, painted the walled city red. Read the above paragraph, quoted for the belief that this review is not an acidic rendition from a high moral ground, and you realise that the magic of history lies in the literary cobwebs of time-past and time-future, running like a river with memories of the dead and alive, the human and inhuman, in present continuous. The unfinished story of a turbulent morning of stillness during the chaotic waves of the great sepoy mutiny of 1857, which Karl Marx called the first war of independence in India, and which we must celebrate on its 150th anniversary next year. Perhaps, even in a fleeting flashback, that morning might come back, the morning of 12 May, like a symphony, sometimes jarring and broken, sometimes tragic, sometimes nothing but pure humanity, as the incredible dilemma of Zafar, the poet, mystic, calligrapher, emperor, the last Mughal.

That is why Dalrymple’s meticulously researched and empirically documented narrative of that impossible, chaotic, restless, bloody rebellion is many things at one time, weaving a singular thread but moving into unpredictable layers of unfinished circles: fiction, literature, documentary, history, short film, long film, biography, essay, anecdote, oral tradition, art, craft, draft. For instance, the account of the massacre of the British prisoners by the rebels, despite pleas by the emperor not to kill innocent people, “their murder can’t be allowed”, the sepoys were in mood to heed.  “Then the King ordered the sepoys to separate into parties, Mahommedans and Hindus, and he appealed to each to consult their religious advisers to see if there was any authority for the slaughter of helpless men and women and children.”

But the Sepoys wanted to make Zafar an accomplice, to send a signal to the British. It is recorded that “the king wept and besought the mutineers not to take the lives of helpless women and children, saying to them, ‘take care – for if you commit such a deed the vengeance and angel of God will fall on us all. Why slay the innocent?’”