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February 17, 2008
Once glorious Delhi
Daastaan-i-Ghadar
By Zahir Dehlavi
Sang-e-Meel Publications, Lahore
ISBN 969-35-2038-6
176pp. Rs300
Khawaja Hassan Nizami: Khakay aur khaka-nigari
Compiled by Dr Abu-Sulman Shahjahanpuri
Poorab Academy, Islamabad
ISBN 969-8917-36-5
232pp. Rs225
Reviewed by
Brigadier A.R. Siddiqi
Among the host of writings in commemoration
of the 150th anniversary of the Mutiny of 1857, Zahir Dehlavi’s Dastan-i-Ghadar
stands out as perhaps the most comprehensive eye-witness account of the event
which had its epicentre in Delhi, the seat of the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur
Shah Zafar. Barring the inevitable limitations of a purely personal record in
terms of the author’s own verbiage, observations and the conclusions, the
authenticity of Zahir’s reportage would be hard to question. His account is
overwhelmingly substantiated by such contemporaneous accounts as Ghalib’s
Dastanmbou (bouquet of flowers). Sayyed Ahmad Khan’s Asbab-i-Baghawat-i-Hind,
yet another contemporaneous work, was a serious treatise for the British masters
to understand the real causes of the Sepoy Mutiny and assuage their rage against
the
Muslim soldiers who spearheaded it. Sayyed Ahmad himself happened to be posted
as a district official in Bijnor, at a safe distance from the hell that was
Delhi from May to September 1857.
Amongst the later works about the mutiny in Urdu, Khawaja Hassan Nizami’s
collection of stories along with a detailed reportage of the court-martial of
the old king Bahadur Shah stands out, both for his chaste Urdu diction and
painstakingly accurate translation of the court proceedings.
Zahir wrote up his account as a sick man in Hyderabad (Deccan) and completed it
on his ‘deathbed’. In the words of the author William Dalrymple, Zahir felt no
compunction about recording what he believed to be the truth about what really
happened. He wrote with equal candour about the failings of the Mughal court,
the sepoys and the British.
Zahir draws an impressive picture of Bahadur Shah Zafar as a man broken in body not in spirit who is tenaciously hanging on to his royal dignity. Zafar might have been reduced to penury like a fakir but stands tall as a king without a crown.
About the prevailing pathetic state of decadence and lethargic indolence, Zahir’s description of his own sword bears the most agonising testimony. His sword had ‘lain unused for years’. The spectral Mughal Empire, like Zahir’s sword, had been rusting away in the scabbard without being engaged in battle for ever so long.
The sepoys stormed the city like a ‘leaderless’ rabble. As Ghalib has described it in Dastanmbou, the sepoys rapidly gathering in the city were ‘a thousand armies marshalled without marshals, unnumbered hands led by no commander and yet ready for war.’ War, to the minds of the beleaguered Delhiwallas, was more like looting and plundering the city than an organised effort on the part of the mutineers against their firangi masters.
According to chroniclers, the mutinous rabble consisted ‘largely’ of Pathans and Punjabi irregulars. Ghalib peered disapprovingly through his lattice window at the sepoys swaggering through his mohalla of Bahimaran (which is also this scribe’s native mohalla in old Delhi)
Maulvi Mohammad Baqar of the Dilli Urdu Akhbar wrote about all the ‘strange things and portents’ taking place before his eyes. Muhammad Husain Azad composed a poem on the weird happenings.
Zahir Dehlavi and Hakim Ahsanullah, the royal physician, for their part, tried in vain to remove the sepoys from the royal quarters of the Palace. A number of them had thronged there to wait on Bahadur Shah.
The king himself appeared to be ‘anxiously’ envisaging his own fate and the future of the empire. The frail, old king resisted the pressure the mutineers’ brought to bear upon him to assume the command of the ‘uprising’. ‘Zafar’s increasing openness to the uprising’, writes Dalrymple, ‘though never entirely wholehearted and always ambivalent, nevertheless changed the whole nature of the rebellion’. It lent it the dignity of a liberation war (jang-i-azadi). Besides the sheer force of the situation, what had forced or persuaded the King to yield to the pressure was news of similar violent eruptions in Bombay and the Deccan.
Fifty-one years ago, in July 1806, sepoys in the southern garrison of Vellore had rebelled more or less for similar reasons involving outrage to their religious sentiment and social norms. Forty-seven years before Vellore — that is after the Battle of Plassy — in 1757 soothsayers had predicted the fall of British rule after a 100 years.
Zahir has drawn a darkly moving picture of his once proud city in the aftermath of the violent sepoy influx. While passing by the deserted Urdu Bazaar next to the Jamia Masjid he writes: ‘there was a strange silence over the whole town as if the city had turned suddenly into wilderness. Shops were lying looted, the doors of all the houses and havelis were closed and there was not a glimmer of light. Even the glass of the street lanterns lay broken’ A prolific poet, Zahir composed many poems lamenting the plight of the city which had been reduced to a howling wilderness. The following couplets speak loudly of his deep anguish over the lot of the ill-starred city and of its unfortunate people.
(We dare not leave the city even if wish. A thousand moves we make in vain)
(The kind of torture is no less than the one on Doomsday. Pray that God spares us the sight of this revolution)}
Zahir draws an impressive picture of Bahadur Shah Zafar as a man broken in body not in spirit who is tenaciously hanging on to his royal dignity. Zafar might have been reduced to penury like a fakir but stands tall as a king without a crown.
Khawaja Hassan Nizami’s is an excellent compendium of sketches and essays along with an informative introduction to his life and times. Excerpts from his writings have been selected and reproduced with much care and sensitivity. I saw Khawaja Sahib as a child and was struck by his uniquely costumed appearance and charismatic personality. He was a man of many parts — a man of the world in the grab of a man of God drawing his saintly status by virtue of his custodial status as the keeper of the shrine of Hazrat Niazmuddin Auliya.
From an ordinary book vendor hawking his wares through the city streets he rose to the status of the grand old man of Delhi, enjoying equal and free access to the highest and the lowest of the land.
The pan-chewing saintly figure, his piercing eyes gleaming from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, with richly-oiled, dyed black long tresses hanging loose around his shoulders and a conical green velvet cap could be recognised from a mile away. He was the only one of his kind in the city and beyond.
Nizami was a prodigious writer known for his chaste and typical Delhi Urdu. Not many of our younger generation would however, be able to read and enjoy his works remains a matter of much shame.
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