Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography (24 page)

By 1857, the glory days of Shahjahanabad
were a fading memory. The eighty-two-year-old Bahadur Shah Zafar was an emperor in
name alone and his writ barely ran in Delhi. The royal family lived off a pension
provided by the British and many of the junior branches of the family had been
reduced to extreme poverty. William Sleeman, an official who visited the Red Fort a
few years before the revolt, tells us of how 1200 members of the family lived in the
palace off the meagre pension but were too proud to work.
⁸
Instead, there are amusing stories of how some of these princes would try to
use their family name to swindle money. Even the palace inside the Red Fort was in a
state of severe disrepair. In 1824, Bishop Herber described the palace gardens as
‘dirty, lonely and wretched; the bath and fountain dry; the inlaid
pavement hid with lumber and gardener’s sweepings, and the walls stained
with the dung of birds and bats.’
⁹
Things would have been worse by the 1850s.

There has been a tendency in recent
years by writers like William Dalrymple to present the court of Bahadur Shah Zafar
as a ‘court of great brilliance’ that was in the
‘middle of remarkable cultural flowering’ and the
‘greatest literary
renaissance in modern Indian
history’.
¹⁰
This is inaccurate. While it is true that the court did include some excellent
poets like Ghalib and Zauq, by the 1850s Delhi would have felt distinctly provincial
and archaic compared to Calcutta. A ‘renaissance’ is about new
ideas, innovation and vigour. Ghalib’s poetry may be very good from a
literary perspective but it is mostly a lament for a world that was collapsing
around him. It contains no vision of the future.

In May 1857, several hundred mutinous
sepoys and cavalrymen rode into Delhi from Meerut and instigated the local troops.
Together they massacred every British resident that they could find. Indian converts
to Christianity were not spared either. As more and more rebels arrived, the
soldiers turned to the ageing emperor for leadership. Bahadur Shah was personally
ambivalent about the offer. On one hand, he was scared that the British would return
and exact retribution. On the other hand, he was faced with a large and growing
number of rebels who would probably break into a riot if he refused. He opted to
play along with the rebels, but would remain indecisive throughout the episode.

Meanwhile, a small British force had
arrived and set up a defensible position on the ancient Aravalli ridge overlooking
the walled city. From here they proceeded to pound Shahjahanabad with artillery.
Their numbers were small but the disorganized rebels were unable to make a concerted
attempt to capture the position. A contingent of Gurkha soldiers held off waves of
rebel attacks near Burra Hindu Rao’s house on top of the ridge;
it’s now a hospital. One of the princes, Mirza Mughal, did try to organize
the mutineers, but was constantly undermined by the indecisive emperor and by
the internal jealousies of his own family. It is amazing how
the British had a constant flow of information from collaborators within the walled
city throughout the siege.
¹¹

From mid-August, the British were being
reinforced by fresh troops and supplies from Punjab. The artillery pounding was
ramped up. A month later, Shahjehanabad had been captured and sacked. The game was
over. Bahadur Shah and members of his family, proud descendants of Taimur the Lame
and Ghengis Khan, fled down the Yamuna to take shelter in Humayun’s grand
tomb. It is not clear why they bothered since it is barely a few miles south of the
city. The British soon caught up with them. Many Mughal princes were executed. Three
of them, including Mirza Mughal, were stripped naked and shot dead with a Colt
revolver near the archway still called Khuni Darwaza (Gate of Blood). The emperor
himself was exiled to Rangoon.

The city of Delhi, shorn of its last
link to Mughal grandeur, became even more of a backwater. Within the Red Fort, many
of the Mughal structures were torn down to make way for the barracks that one sees
today. A few years later, a large part of the old city would be cleared to make way
for the railways. Only a handful of structures remain to remind one of Shah
Jehan’s dream. This completes the third cycle of India’s
urbanization. It had begun with the sacking of Prithviraj Chauhan’s Delhi
and ended six and a half centuries later with the sacking of Mughal Delhi. The next
cycle, however, was well under way in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay.

After the fall of Delhi, the British
proceeded to systematically put down the other centres of rebellion. Tens of
thousands were executed as punishment. This is not the place to analyse
the many reasons for the failure of the revolt. Despite the
extraordinary courage shown by individuals such as Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi, the
rebellion was probably too uncoordinated to succeed. The British were able to pick
off each group one by one. For all its fame, the fort at Jhansi is a modest affair.
It still contains two of Rani Laxmibai’s cannons, of a design that would
have been considered antiquated by the mid-nineteenth century and stood no chance
against modern British cannonry. Standing on the ramparts of Jhansi fort, I could
still feel the spirit of the twenty-two-year-old queen—her isolation, her
audacity in defying the most powerful empire of that time, and the complete
hopelessness of her cause.

It may hurt our nationalist pride to
admit this today but many Indians either remained indifferent or were loyal to the
British. Perhaps they feared a return to the chaos of the eighteenth century.
Perhaps, they simply did not think that their future lay in going back to the old
feudal order. The year 1857 saw another revolution that would have a much more
lasting impact. Three federal examining universities on the pattern of London
University were established in the cities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. By the
time India became independent in 1947, twenty-five such institutions would have been
set up. The universities would create an educated middle class that would be at the
forefront of the next round of resistance to British rule.

The rebellion of 1857 also spelled the
end of the East India Company. Its territories in India were put directly under
government control. The Governor-General was replaced with a Viceroy, a
representative of the Crown. The ratio of
Europeans to Indians
in the army was pushed up to 1:3 from 1:9. The British also gave up their policy of
annexing Indian kingdoms, and the existing network of kingdoms and principalities
was given a permanent standing under the Imperial umbrella. This framework would
broadly survive till 1947. Most importantly, the Queen’s Proclamation of
1858 stated that the British would no longer ‘impose Our convictions on
any of Our subjects.’

The Queen’s Proclamation was
read out by Lord Canning on 1 November 1858. The choice of place is interesting
since it was not read out in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras or even Delhi. Instead, it was
done in Allahabad. It is here that the Yamuna meets the Ganga and is said to be
joined by the invisible Saraswati flowing underground. The place is called Triveni
Sangam, literally meaning the confluence of three rivers. It is here that Ram is
said to have crossed the river and visited the sage Bharadhwaj before proceeding on
his exile to the forests of central India. The association with the Ramayana is
remembered in a famous Hanuman temple close to Triveni Sangam and an
‘
eternal
tree’ under which Ram is said to have
rested. It is also here that Xuan Zang (or Hieun Tsang) witnessed the great
gathering of the Kumbha Mela in the seventh century
AD
.
Overlooking the temple and the merging rivers is the fort built by Emperor Akbar
which houses the Mauryan column that bears the inscriptions of three
emperors—Ashoka, Samudragupta and Jehangir. In short, this is no ordinary
place, but the heart of Indian civilization. The British had finally understood the
nature of Indian nationhood.

In order to understand the essence of
this, visit the Saraswati Ghat
¹²
in Allahabad at dawn in January during the annual
Magh Mela
(or, if you are lucky, the Kumbha Mela). As the sun rises through the mist, one can
see tens of thousands of people irrespective of age, gender, class, sect or caste
take a dip at the confluence of the rivers. They chant Vedic hymns composed
thousands of years ago on the banks of the ancient Saraswati, still alive in the
collective memory of millions. Boatloads of villagers row across from villages far
and near, their women softly singing traditional songs passed down through
generations. It is a moment of eternity. The sun reflects off the ramparts built by
a Muslim emperor who grew to understand this. A short walk away is the spot, marked
by a column, where a global power was forced to acknowledge this ancient
civilization in order to legitimize its rule.

The column commemorating the
Queen’s Proclamation is a short walk from Saraswati Ghat and stands
neglected in an overgrown park. None of the locals seemed to know the significance
of the place. This is unfortunate because the modern Indian State is the direct
outcome of this Proclamation. After independence, the government capped the column
with a replica of the national emblem, the Mauryan lions and the wheel. Usually I
disapprove of meddling with the artifacts of history, but somehow it seemed
appropriate that the dreams of Sudasa and the Mauryas are remembered at that
place.

Although colonial expansion became less
overt after 1858, a large gap remained between the Indians and their British rulers.
The separation is visible even in urban planning. British towns were clearly
segregated into the spacious ‘white-towns’ and crowded
‘black-towns’. It is not unusual for rulers to live separately
from the ruled. We see this in both the citadel of Dholavira as well as the Red Fort
of Shahjehanabad. However,
the elites still lived within the
same cultural context as the wider population. In contrast, there was a large
cultural gap between the spacious bungalows of the Civil Lines and the bazaars of
the indigenous population.

Nowhere was this more visible than in
the Civil Lines of Allahabad itself. The fifty years following the Revolt would be
the heyday of Empire. The British considered themselves superior to the rest of
humanity and were grudgingly acknowledged as such. It would be many decades before a
trickle of Indians, armed with a Western education, would be reluctantly allowed
into this world. Till as recently as 2005, vestiges of this era were clearly visible
in the large, crumbling bungalows of Allahabad’s Civil Lines. However,
when I revisited it in April 2012, I found that the neighborhood had turned into a
jumble of malls, shops and apartment blocks. The few remaining bungalows now hide
fearfully amidst the new buildings.

By 1820, India’s population
stood at 111 million, but its share in world GDP had fallen to 16 per cent compared
to China’s 33 per cent.
¹³
Together they still accounted for half of the global economy, but China was
doing most of the heavy lifting. Driven by the Industrial Revolution, Britain
already enjoyed a per capita income that was three times higher than that of the
Asian giants. As the nineteenth century wore on, the gap between the Europeans and
the Asians grew wider. By the time India became independent in 1947, its share would
fall to a mere 4 per cent of world GDP.

Despite this relative decline, the
second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a radical transformation of the
country’s economic and geographic landscape. The introduction of the
railways was arguably the single most important factor that drove this change. Both
commercial and military considerations lay behind the idea of building a railway
network. Through the 1830s and 1840s, there were a number of discussions and
proposals. The government did not have internal resources to build it but it was
initially thought that private operators would easily raise the capital. However, it
was soon clear that the money could not be raised in India. Investors in England
also appeared lukewarm.

The discussions drifted for several
years till the arrival of F.W. Simms, a railway engineer of ‘tried and
proved ability’. A number of routes were surveyed under his supervision.
He argued that a Delhi–Calcutta line would allow the military
establishment alone to make a saving of at least 50,000 pounds a year, a very large
sum in those days.
¹⁴
Given these encouraging studies, the government decided to give generous
guarantees to persuade investors to pump capital into the railways. These included a
guaranteed return of 4.5 per cent as well as an exchange rate guarantee. These would
later prove expensive and attract a lot of criticism, but at that moment they got
the projects going. The very first railway line in the subcontinent ran 21 miles (34
km) from Bombay to Thane. The formal inauguration was performed at Bori Bandar on 16
April 1854 when 14 carriages with 400 guests left the station ‘amidst the
loud applause of a vast multitude and the salute of 21 guns’. A year
later, a train left Howrah (a town across the river from Calcutta) and steamed up to
Hooghly
thereby establishing the first line in the east. Two
years later, the first line in the south was established by the Madras Railway
Company. By 1859, there was even a line between Allahabad and Kanpur.

An Indian railways map of March 1868
shows that by this time Howrah (i.e. Calcutta) had been connected to Delhi and the
line was being extended to Lahore. The Lahore–Multan line had also been
built, some of it with the use of four-thousand-year-old Harappan bricks. From
Multan one could use the Indus Steam Flotilla to sail down to Karachi. In the west,
Bombay had been connected to Ahmedabad and Nagpur but the link to the
Delhi–Calcutta line was still not complete. Similarly, the link between
Madras and Bombay was still
being built near Sholapur. There
were a number of side lines already in operation or being built.