DELHI BETWEEN

TWO EMPIRES
1803-1931
Society, Government and
Urban Growth

NARAYANI GUPTA

DELHI
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS
 I

THE BRITISH PEACE AND

THE BRITISH TERROR

‘Shah-Jehan conceived the design of immortalizing his name by

the erection of a city near the site of the ancient Delhi. This new
capital he called after his own name, Shah-Jehan-Abad; that is to
say, the colony of Shah-Jehan. Here he resolved to fix his court,
alleging as the reason for its removal from Agra, that the excessive
heat to which that city is exposed during summer rendered it
unfit for the residence of a monarch.’1
Thus Shahjahanabad came to be built. This incarnation of Delhi
survives today in a splendid fort, the Jama Masjid and many other
mosques and temples, some broken walls and in the names of some
kuchas and mohullas. It also survives as a culture and a way of
life. Its ethos has been dimmed since the 1930s by the urban
sprawl of New Delhi, and it will become increasingly difficult to
recapture it. Three political episodes—in 1857-8, 1911-12 and
1947—affected Shahjahanabad as seriously as, and in many ways
far more deeply than, earlier Afghan and Maratha invasions. This
work is an attempt to illuminate some aspects of the town’s history
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The site chosen was protected from the north-west by the
Ridge, and was linked to the east by a bridge across the Jamuna,
a glorified moat at the back of the Palace. The city was doubly
fortified by the Palace and the city wall. Architectural and
engineering skills designed the town with an eye to aesthetic
appeal as well as to provide, for a limited population, military
security, efficient tax-collection, an adequate supply of water and
a functional drainage-system. Plots of land were allotted to noble¬
men, merchants and people of other professions. Bernier, who
lived in the city soon after it had been built in 1638, was struck
by the extent to which the economic and social as well as the
2 Delhi Between Two Empires
political life hinged on the monarch, the court and the umara.2
There were numerous karkhanas for craftsmen under the patron¬
age of the aristocracy, but Bernier commented on the absence of
men of ‘the middle state’. He saw great opulence and an abun¬
dance of provisions, but also great squalor. The city had some stone
and some brick palaces, ringed by mud-and-thatch houses. The
merchants worked in and often lived in second storeys of the
buildings and arcades along the two boulevards radiating from the
palace—Faiz Bazaar and Chandni Chowk. The other roads were
asymmetrical. Bernier explained this by their probably having been
built at different times by different individuals, but the more likely
reason was that this had been done deliberately to make ingress
more difficult for invading troops. Katras developed around
nuclei deriving their names from provincial groups or commodi¬
ties (Kashmeri Katra, Katra Nil), and mohullas and knchas were
named after commodities sold there or prominent men who lived
there (Mohulla Imli, Kucha Nawab Wazir). ‘The city was aesthe¬
tically pleasing. The streets of Delhi are not mere streets. They
are like the album of a painter,’ Mir, one of Delhi’s great poets,
said affectionately.3
Some umara built houses outside the city wall, on estates gifted
or sold to them by the king, but there were no suburbs in the
sense of people moving out of a crowded city to more open spaces
beyond. This was to hold true till the nineteenth century. Bernier
used the word ‘suburbs’ not in the modern sense but to describe
the ruins of old cities near Shahjahanabad, and the pockets of
habitation around wholesale markets. These were akin to the
jaubourgs of Paris and were separated by large royal or aristo¬
cratic preserves, gardens or hunting lodges, particularly Jahan-
numa in the north-west and Shalimar in the north. There were
palaces and hunting grounds also on the left of the river, which
were reached by crossing the river on elephants,4 until they came
to be linked to the city by the bridge of boats beside the Fort
and Salimgarh. Delhi was fed from the Doab and from the grain
emporia east of the river in Shahdara, Ghaziabad and Patparganj.
These were linked to the intramural market near the Fatehpuri
mosque; vegetables and fruit came from the north-west and were
sold in the wholesale market of Sabzi Mandi in Mughalpura, out¬
side the city wall, on the Grand Trunk road to Lahore.5
In the decades between Bernier’s visit and the British conquest
 The British Peace and the British Terror 3

in 1803, Shahjahanabad withstood the ravages of civil war and

invasion. The basic map of the city remained unchanged, though
there was some building activity as well as cases of some areas
becoming gradually or suddenly deserted. Masjids, temples, houses,
markets, streets and gardens were laid out by individuals at differ¬
ent times. Maliwara and Chhipiwara, and suburban Teliwara
originated in the period of Maratha control, as indicated by the
Marathi suffix ‘wara’. During the vicissitudes of struggle for power
at the imperial level, troops, merchants, artisans and intellectuals
often withdrew to the provinces. Even as late as the 1780s, how¬
ever, there were sixty bazaars in the city and abundant supplies
of food. The wall of the city, which was not proof against Nadir
Shah or the Marathas, did protect the inhabitants to a consider¬
able degree from the Mewatis and Gujars of the hinterland. When
imperial authority declined, that of the Kotwal increased propor¬
tionately. From his office in Chandni Chowk, he and his twelve
thanadars policed the town, collected duties, regulated trade and
industries, and kept a count of the population and of immigrants,
through the agency of the mohulla news-sheets. The extent and
incidence of tax-collection appears to have varied depending on
whether Mughal or Maratha was in power, as well as on the
efficiency of individuals.6

This city, battered but not ruined, uncertain of its fate but with
enough sense of kinship and a cultural and social tradition to
check its morale from flagging, was taken over from the Marathas
by the British in 1803. It was a city that Bernier would have
recognized, and in the following half-century it changed only to
a limited extent. Bernier had carried away an impression of a city
consisting largely of ‘wretched mud-and-thatch houses’ which
appeared less a town than ‘a collection of many villages’. A
century and a half later, Forbes was disparaging about one of the
boulevards, Faiz Bazaar, which he saw as ‘a long street of very
miserable appearance’, of a piece with many houses which were
‘low and mean’.7 The disparity of status noticed by Bernier was
also apparent to Forbes, who said that the houses of the nmara
and the rajas were on a larger scale than those of nobles in Europe,
‘on account of their immense establishments’. This was also the
impression of Heber in the 1840s, who said the houses at Delhi
‘far exceed in grandeur anything seen in Moscow’.8 Bernier’s dis-
4 Delhi Between Two Empires

appointment at the absence of window-display (indicating lack

of familiarity with Indian styles of salesmanship) is echoed by the
Englishman of 1815 who commented that the bazaars were poorly
furnished.9
The Gazetteer of 1815 claimed that the value of land in the
city had doubled in the first ten years of the ‘British Peace’. There
was building activity in these years, one of the most spectacular
constructions being the haveli built by Bhawani Shankar, a shrewd
Indian who had backed the Marathas and later the British, and
was locally nick-named Namak-Haraam.10 In a census of houses
in 1843, over 23,000 were counted, of which over 17,000 were
listed as being made of brick and stone.11 ‘The largest city in
India’ was the phrase of a European soldier who saw Delhi in
1844, after travelling up-country from Calcutta12—a far cry from
Bernier’s ‘collection of many villages’. The Palace buildings and
the houses of the rajas in Daryaganj did not acquire additional
storeys, for the traveller approaching by river or across the bridge
of boats saw the domes and minarets as a distinctive skyline, with
date-palms and acacias showing over the wall.
After the British conquest, there was an impression that the
population of the city was increasing. Available estimates for the
size of the population in the previous centuries are unreliable, and
specific enumerations are available only from 1843. Lord Lake in
1806, and other officials in 1808, were convinced that there was an
increase, which they attributed with complacency to the novelty
of a regime of ‘security, comfort and impartial justice’.13 In 1833,
a detailed census indicated that there were 119,860 people in the
city, excluding the Palace.14 The censuses of 1843, 1845 and 1853
show the population rising from 131,000 to 137,000 and then to
151,000; in 1854, half the population of Delhi District (306,550)
was said to be concentrated in the city.15 By 1850, the pressure
of population led to a row of houses being built down the length
of the two main streets of Chandni Chowk and Faiz Bazaar16
along the centre of which flowed the two major canals of the
city.17 Pockets of settlements developed outside the wall. Many
extramural markets had been closed or shifted into the walled
city in the course of the previous century. Some of these appear
to have shifted out again in the early nineteenth century. The
settlements west of the city wall, described inaccurately as thirteen
villages, had a largely non-agricultural population. Sabzi Mandi,
 The British Peace and the British Terror 5

‘consisting of houses . .. high walls, gardens etc.’,18 was located

in Mughalpura, the property of a Mughal 7naafidar. South of this
were Dargah Nabi Karim (around the shrine of Qadam Sharif),
Teliwara and Shidipura (granted to Meher Ali Shidi in 1773).
These were all in the revenue estate of Jahan-numa village.19 But
these settlements were not formalized by being made into extra¬
mural wards, as in nineteenth-century Pune, where the increasing
population was settled in new wards adjacent to the city.20
The increasing population of these settlements was explained
as being caused by ‘the annual increase ... by births, the influx of
strangers and travellers and other causes incidental to large and
thriving suburbs’.21 The ‘strangers’ were chiefly from the Punjab,
whence a dispersal of khatris occurred early in the nineteenth
century. In the north, Rajpura Cantonment was separated from
the city by large royal gardens rich with fruit trees.22 The army’s
bazaar was located at ‘Khyber Pass’ on the Alipur Road. Though
Mughal power declined, this did not lead to any exodus of Muslim
families from Delhi, for the numbers of Muslims and Hindus
remain fairly consistently equal in these years; the immigration
rate of both communities was fairly equal.23
An Indian chronicler, writing in the early nineteenth century,
who remarked on the extent of Calcutta, the buildings of Jaipur,
the abundance of goods in Lucknow, thought that Delhi was
chiefly remarkable for its aadmiyat, its polished urbanity.24 And
the culture of Delhi was contained within its walls. ‘The culture
of the time was obstinately, narrow-mindedly urban, seeking pro¬
tection within the city walls against a surrounding barbarism. The
desire to be closer to nature would not take a man outside the
city, because it was believed that nature fulfilled itself in the
gardens ... and the breezes of the city.’25
There was in those years a camaraderie between Hindus and
Muslims, at the Court and at Delhi College, at the gatherings in
Chandni Chowk and Sa’dullah Chowk, around the dastan-gos, at
festivals, especially Basant (when the whole city was ‘dressed
like a bride’) and the Phulzvalon Ki Sair, during weddings and
7nusha,aras.26 Weekly mushd’aras were held at Ghaziuddin
Madarsa (where Delhi College classes were held) and on those
nights Ajmeri Gate was kept open late into the night. The spirit
of the age has been described as having been characterized by
three addictions—to mysticism in Islam, to a frenetic gaiety, and
6 Delhi Between Two Empires

to the salons of the courtesans—all explained as being a form of

escape from the political insecurity of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century.27
In Delhi, this half-century saw the establishment of the first
Indian press for Persian and Urdu lithography, and the publica¬
tion of some of India’s first newspapers.28 By 1852 the mushroom¬
ing of private presses in Delhi led to a sharp fall in the price of
books. The most exciting thing that happened was a literary and
scientific efflorescence which C. F. Andrews called ‘the Delhi
Renaissance’. The focus of this was Delhi College.
Rs 7,000 out of the funds collected by a short-lived Town
Duties Committee in 1824 were spent on repairing Ghaziuddin
Madarsa.29 This housed a school which had been set up in 1792,
to which the newly-formed Committee of Public Instruction gave
a grant in 1824 equivalent to that allocated from waqf funds.30
Three years later, English classes were added to it under the
encouragement of Charles Trevelyan. The local inhabitants were
not too happy at this, suspecting it to be the thin end of the
wedge of Christian proselytization.31 In 1829 Nawab Itmad-ud-
daula of Lucknow (a native of Delhi) gave a generous endow¬
ment for the College, to be managed by British officials. (This
was variously described as the Itmaduddaula Fund and the Fazl
Ali Bequest.) This helped the school to win back local allegiance.
From that time on the English and ‘Oriental’ sections were sepa¬
rate. The school attracted boys from all over north India, and the
Committee of Public Instruction gave many scholarships. The
English courses were initially wider in scope than the ‘Oriental’,
but by 1848 the two sections were on a par. This was because of
the remarkable enthusiasm of both teachers and students, which
made the College a dynamic instrument of change.
Delhi College (and later those in Agra and Benares) achieved
something which was qualitatively very different from the con¬
temporary Calcutta ‘Renaissance’.32 Delhi had a well-defined and
broad-based school curriculum and a native language. On to this
were grafted European philosophy and science. The students
showed a decided predilection for a scientific rather than a literary
education. It is remarkable that this should have been the prefer¬
ence of a people renowned for their love of literary Urdu. It was
not a question of making a choice. The students and teachers
found it possible to be enthusiastic about mathematics and astro-
 The British Peace and the British Terror 7

nomv and to compose Urdu verse at the same time. The joint
efforts of Indians and Europeans led to Urdu transforming itself
from a language of poetry to the transmitter of western know¬
ledge. The college set up a Vernacular Society, which translated
as many as a hundred and twenty-five books, chiefly Greek
classics, Persian works and scientific treatises, into Urdu, all in
the space of about twenty years.33 There were inevitable, but not
insurmountable, hurdles such as Syed Ahmad Khan’s reluctance
to give up his Ptolemaic vision of the world and accept the
Copernican view. C. F. Andrews has given a vivid account of
young Zakaullah running all the way home from College; a more
sedate pace was impossible because of his sense of excitement at
the wonders of mathematics he had just imbibed. The work of
the Vernacular Society was supplemented by that of the Society
for the Promotion of Knowledge in India through the vernacular,
the executive committee of which consisted of Thomas Metcalfe
of Delhi, Boutros, the Principal of Delhi College from 1840 to
1845, Charles Grant and Dwarkanath Tagore.
The European teachers who were remembered for their sense
of involvement were Boutros, a Frenchman, and Sprenger, a
German. This was perhaps the reason why learning English was
not, as in Bengal, regarded as vitally important. ‘We regarded the
English section as a means of getting a job, not an education,’
commented Altaf Husain Hali, one of the most renowned alumni
of the College. Nazir Ahmad, who became a well-known novelist
in Urdu, recounted how ‘my father ... told me ... he would rather
see me die than learn English.’34 This would explain why visitors
such as Bishop Heber, Jacquemment and Shah Abdul Aziz felt
that the educated classes of Upper India had been touched very
little in feeling and life-style by the British presence.35
The teachers at the College included Mamluk Ali and Mufti
Sadruddin ‘Azurda’ of the Court. Among the students were
‘Master’ Ram Chandra, whose work on differential calculus was
published and noticed in Europe, Dr Mukand Lai, one of the first
allopathic practitioners in north India, Maulvi Ziauddin, an emi¬
nent scholar of Arabic, Mohammed Husain Azad, author of
Khumkhan-e-Javed, a work of literary criticism, Maulvi Zakaullah,
historian, Pyare Lai ‘Ashoob’, and Master Nand Kishore, well-
known educationists, and Syed Ahmad Khan, a versatile person
who moved from mathematics to theology to archaeology, and
 8 Delhi Between Two Empires

later was to found the Muslim Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh

in 1877, the year that Delhi College was forced to close down.36
Even as late as the nineteen-thirties, the Delhi College ethos could
be seen in the kayasths of Delhi who studied Persian not because
it was useful but because of the family tradition.
In the years before 1857, in sharp contrast to the subsequent
period, relations between the prominent Indians of the town and
the British officials were characterized by an easy conviviality,
because Englishmen as well as Muslim umara and Elindu kayasths
and khatris all subscribed to the vibrant Urdu culture and eti¬
quette. Apart from the literary and academic meeting-grounds,
there were many other points of contact, formal and informal.
Magistrate Gubbins’ Relief Society had Indian and European
members, and the amount of subscriptions from the Indians was
soon larger than that from the Europeans.37 The Delhi Bank,
pioneered by Lala Chunna Mai, had Hindu, Aluslim and European
shareholders.38 An Archaeological Society was formed to study
the monuments and ruins near Delhi. Its members included British
officials, and Master Ram Chandra, Syed Ahmad Khan, Maulvi
Ziauddin, and other scholars of Delhi College. Syed Ahmad Khan
was curious enough and agile enough to scale the sides of the
Qutb in a basket manipulated from the top storey, in order to
decipher the inscriptions at the higher levels. He presented a
paper to the Society on his findings, and tried to make them
accept his belief that part of the Qutb was built by a Hindu
ruler.39 From these discussions and papers resulted his massive
book Aasar-us-Sanaadid (The Ruins of the Cities of Delhi), pub¬
lished in 1846, and considerably revised again in 1862. This was
well before the Archaeological Department started focussing
attention on these ‘ruins’. On the strength of this book, he was
made a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, but there was no
attempt to translate this remarkably comprehensive work into
English.40 It was, however, translated into French by Garcin de
Tassy, a scholar of Urdu.

Religious zeal often bubbled to the surface, but did not destroy
the harmony. Excited debates were held in the Jama Masjid in
the 1850s between local maulvis and Dr Pfander of the Church
Missionary Society (similar debates were held in Agra). These
were not prohibited by the Resident, as were the lectures of the
 The British Peace and the British Terror 9

Waha’bi leader Shah Mohammad Ismael.41 The officials became

uneasy because Shah Abdul Aziz, the son of Wali’allah, declared
that ‘in this city [sc. Delhi] the lmam-al-Muslimin wields no
authority, while the decrees of the Christian leaders are obeyed
without fear [sc. of consequences]’.42 From the British side, the
Baptist Missionary Society (from 1818) and the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel (from 1852) alienated conservative
sections of people in Delhi by their proselytizing activities. They
had their moment of triumph when they won two prestigious
converts—Master Ram Chandra and Doctor Chiman Lai. Their
baptism in 1852 generated a lot of interest, and the officials feared
that there might even be a riot. But though ‘the whole Hindu
population turned out and surrounded and filled the Church’, the
‘greatest order and decency prevailed’, commented the Reverend
Mr Jennings. ‘We had near at hand, though not visible, a body
of Muslim chokadars and chaprasses whose services, however,
were not required.’43 Adopting Christianity did not make Ram
Chandra break with Urdu and the cosmopolitan culture of Delhi.
He edited two of Delhi’s earliest Urdu newspapers—the Farwaid-
ul-Nazarin (aimed at the general reader) and the Kiran-us-Sadai
(which published articles on scientific subjects). In July 1847, he
published a translation of Macaulay’s Minute on Education, and
commented sadly ‘Dekhiye Hindustan ke dinen kah phirengeT
(‘When will the great days of India return?’).44
The British and Indians met over leisurely soirees at the houses
of Colonel Skinner (who was the son of an English father and an
Indian mother), Raja Hindu Rao, Lala Chunna Mai, the nawabs
of Jhajjar and Ballabgarh, or Court umara. Ghalib, like others,
realized that the British had come to stay, and shrewdly thought
that a qasida to the Queen would be a useful investment. But he
went that far and no further. When Thomson, the provincial
Secretary, treated him boorishly, Ghalib sacrificed the offer of an
appointment at Delhi College, though he desperately needed a
steady income to cushion him against his extravagances and his
gambling debts.45

The British administrators in Delhi often thought it their duty

to act so as to keep the balance between the communities. This
was to be done, depending on the occasion, by arbitration or by
the show of force. In 1807 there was tension in the city because
10 Delhi Between Two Empires

of demonstrations against a Jain banker who sponsored a Rath-

jatra procession with great fanfare. Charles Metcalfe, on whom
we are dependent for an account of the incident, claimed that a
riot would have ensued had the civil authorities not acted in time
and called out the army.46 Tension between the Jains and Hindus
occurred in 1816 and 1834, after which such processions were
banned. In 1837, Magistrate Lindsay altered the traditional pro¬
clamation about tazias in favour of the Shias. The Sunnis, twice
as numerous as the Shias, petitioned against this order to Thomas
Metcalfe, who had it repealed.47 In 1853 and 1855 the Resident
called out troops to prevent possible clashes during the celebration
of Id and Ram Lila.48 The Mughals had a simple device for
minimizing clashes. They reserved Chandni Chowk for their own
cavalcades. The Ram Lila procession traditionally passed from
Mori Gate to Nigambodh Ghat, skirting the Palace along its
northern face. This was modified when Bahadur Shah ordered
that it should pass in front of the Palace so that he could also
have the pleasure of viewing it.49
By prohibiting cow-slaughter the Mughal rulers had scrupul¬
ously avoided offending the Hindus.50 At the Id of 1852 Bahadur
Shah sacrificed camels and his subjects goats. In 1853 Thomas
Metcalfe issued a decree permitting cow-slaughter on festive occa¬
sions. Bahadur Shah as well as Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, the court
physician, were unhappy at this decision. The Magistrate, who
was a Hindu, ordered that meat should be screened before sale.
The butchers went on strike, confident they would win. An
abortive attempt was made to replace them with butchers im¬
ported from Meerut, but ultimately the officials had to yield to
the butchers.51 Shortly before the Revolt, Egerton permitted
Muslim butchers to kill cows in a locality which was largely
Hindu. The shops owned by Hindus observed a hartal for three
days, till the decision was rescinded.52 These acts of the rulers
were not so much an attempt at creating tension as an extension
to Indian towns of the practice of the slaughter of cows for
consumption by British officials and soldiers.
When the British captured the city, they found that it had
been divided into spheres of control by neighbouring Gujar tribes
for purposes of plunder. Ochterlony (the Indianized Englishman,
who had thirteen Indian wives and whom the local people called
‘Loony Akhtar’) organized a force of volunteers to check them.53
 The British Peace and the British Terror 11

Later, the Assistant who had charge of the criminal court was
made superintendent of the city police, which was directly under
the Kotwal and his twelve thanadars, as in Mughal times. Under
him were 148 infantry and 230 guards, all paid by the Govern¬
ment. They were supplemented by 400 chowkidars on night-duty,
paid by the inhabitants.54 In both cases there was one guard or
chowkidar to every four hundred of the population. The judicial
powers of the Resident, fortified by the contingents of the army
in and near the city, gave security from external aggression and
from raids by the Gujars and Mewatis.
By the Act of 1837, applied to Delhi in 1841, the charge of the
chowkidari tax was given to the Bakshi, in place of the citizens’
panchayats. This was so strongly resented by the inhabitants that
the traditional system was restored.55 The British image of them¬
selves as the bulwark of impartiality led the editor of the Delhi
Gazette to suggest that a European be appointed Kotwal, or at
least that Hindus be appointed alternately with Muslims, and the
local police force be recruited from Europeans and from Hindus
of the North-Western Provinces rather than from local men.56
This fetish of maintaining an artificial communal balance was
endorsed by the officials, for Magistrate Lindsay in 1837 was said
to have ‘broken through the very unjust rule of giving preference
in nomination to Muslims only’.57 The last Kotwal before the
Revolt was young Gangadhar Nehru, the father of Motilal
Nehru.58
Whatever tension flared up occasionally seems to have been
caused often by sections of the inhabitants playing off different
authorities against each other—Kotwal against Magistrate, or
Commissioner against Resident. Charles Metcalfe expressed this
clearly in 1807: ‘Two authorities exist in the town, which circum¬
stance gives rise to much trouble and confusion.’59 An episode of
1837 illustrates how the inhabitants sought to divide the civil
authorities to their own advantage. A grain riot occurred be¬
cause some banias cornered the supplies. This was aggravated by
the Commissioner fining those who asked that prices be fixed.
The protesters asked Thomas Metcalfe to intervene.60 Subse¬
quently the export of grain from the city was regulated by the
Magistrate and the police, to reduce the power of the Kotwal,
who had been helpless in 1837.61 We have no evidence as to how
many people took part in these ‘riots .
 The British Peace and the British Terror 13

description within the precincts of the palace, at least not within

the distance of cannonshot of the citadel.’65 Fortunately for the
inhabitants of Delhi, these remarkable instructions were not put
into effect. The main arsenal was shifted from the city to the
bank of the river in 1851, in response to a petition from the local
inhabitants, who, like Napier, feared an accidental explosion.66
Only a small magazine was retained between Kashmeri Gate and
the Palace.
The Treaty of 1803* restricted the Mughal Emperor’s domain
and jurisdiction to his Palace, and his revenue to the income from
territories north-west of the town of Kabulpur, which was farmed
out and was under the management of the Resident. The Emperor
and his family received regular but frugal pocket money, and
nazars on the occasion of festivals.67 The British succeeded in
making the Emperor politically functionless, but the mystique of
the court kept Delhi essentially a Mughal town. ‘In heart we are
united, though in appearance there is disunion. And this circum¬
stance is perceptible to the whole world,’ wrote the gentle Baha¬
dur Shah to the Governor-General’s Agent in 1843, with the
fortunate ability to sublimate his discomfiture by verse.68 Elis
consolation lay in versification and flying kites. Debendranath
Tagore, who visited Delhi shortly before the Revolt, wrote that
the first thing he saw as he approached the city by boat was a
large crowd gathered to watch the Emperor’s prowess at flying
kites.69 The mushd’aras held at the court were relayed to the
people outside, and the rivalry of the poet laureate, Zauq, and
Ghalib were discussed animatedly in the town.
The Emperors and Residents co-existed on fairly amicable terms.
There were some stray incidents of cold war, when the Emperors
complained about tributes or honours. Once the British magis-

* Shahjahanabad was the chief city of Delhi Territory, which was acquired
by the East India Company from the Marathas by the Treaty of Surji
Arjungaon in 1803. It comprised Delhi and Hissar Divisions, which were
sub-divided in 1819 into the districts of Haryana, Rohtak, Panipat, Gurgaon
and Delhi; in 1848 and 1853, 193 square miles from Meerut and Bulandshahar
(the ‘Eastern Parganah’) was added to the Territory east of the river.
Lying on the route from Calcutta to the yet unconquered Punjab, Shah¬
jahanabad had, for the British, the strategic importance of a frontier town.
It also linked the North-Western Provinces with the principalities of
Rajasthan, and the British conducted their diplomatic relations with these
from Delhi.
14 Delhi Between Two Empires

trate empowered the banker Lala Chunna Mai to seize the pro¬
perty of the heir-apparent, to which the latter retorted by moving
his worldly goods to the immunity of the Palace precincts.'0 The
empress Mumtaz Mahal offered to adopt Resident Seton as her
son. If this had been accepted, it would have had bizarre conse¬
quences for the issue of sovereignty!11 When Simon Fraser ac¬
cepted a title from the Emperor, Governor-General Bentinck
was annoyed and made it clear that this should not be allowed
to' form a precedent.72 The Resident was a powerful official, the
representative of the sovereign power. But the British officials
never ceased to covet the less tangible aura attached to the court of
the powerless Mughals. The British officials repeatedly suggested
that they should occupy the Palace. Thomas Metcalfe, in a
detailed Minute in 1848, proposed to move the Emperor to the
Qutb. Charles Napier suggested Fatehpur Sikri.73 Metcalfe was
enthusiastically supported by Dalhousie. If the accident of the
Revolt had not occurred, this plan would have been put into
effect when the long-lived Bahadur Shah died.74
‘The British Resident [sc. at Delhi] was very important in
those days,’ wrote a newspaper in 1868, referring to the years
before the Revolt. It was ‘the most coveted job in India’75 because
Residents elsewhere in India were only concerned with diplomatic
relations. The Delhi Resident ‘ostensibly [sc. represented] the
British Government at Court but, in fact,... his business is rather
to watch the straw sovereign, pay him his pension and regulate
his intercourse with strangers’.76 These powers were sometimes
felt to be too much of a responsibility for one man. In 1816
Charles Metcalfe complained to the Court of Directors that the
Resident’s work was more that ‘of a subordinate Government than
of a political Resident’.77 So, when Ochterlony replaced Metcalfe
in 1819, the Resident was asked to share his responsibilities with
a Civil Commissioner. But Metcalfe, who returned to Delhi in
1825, did not find his own earlier recommendation palatable, and
the post of Civil Commissioner was scrapped. In 1830 he wrote a
Minute to justify ‘the completeness of control and unity of
authority’ of what came to be known as his Delhi System.78
Bentinck, after his tour of the Territory in 1831, decided that the
offices of Collector, Judge and Magistrate should not be vested in
the same person. The Residency was abolished, and the Territory
thereafter administered by a Commissioner, with increased power
 The British Peace and the British Terror 15

given to the Board of Revenue and the Agra High Court. The
junior Officers were English, Bengali and Delhi men. One of the
most promising of them was Syed Ahmad Khan.
‘Delhi is a very suggestive and moralizing place,’ wrote the
inimitable Emily Eden in 1838. ‘Such stupendous remains of
power and wealth passed and passing away-—and somehow I feel
that we horrid English have just “gone and done it”, merchandised
it, revenued it and spoiled it all.’79 ‘Merchandising’ and ‘Revenu-
ing’ were the functions of any imperialist goverment. What
appeared to be a new concept was one spelt out by Governor-
General Amherst in 1823, that town duties be earmarked for local
‘improvements’, and that even direct taxes might be levied for
this purpose. The follow-up action on this in Delhi was that a
Committee was set up to administer town duties. Its work was
made easy by the very comprehensive report prepared by Fortes-
cue in 1820, cataloguing the customs and town duties prevalent
in Delhi.80 But before the experiment had got under way, the
Committee was disbanded by the masterful Charles Metcalfe, and
the nascent Municipality crushed under the weight of his cen¬
tralizing policy. Charles Trevelyan, in his Report of 1833, criti¬
cized town duties, which, he held, had made Delhi decline as a
trade-centre, just as their absence had helped Bhiwani, Rewari and
Shahdara to flourish.81 Town duties were, accordingly, abolished
first in Bengal and then in the North-Western Provinces.

To people in Delhi the civil administration at this time con¬

noted not a place or an office—as it did after the 1860s—but
individual officials. This was because the British accepted the
walled city, and did not segregate themselves in a ‘Civil Lines’.
Land beyond Kashmeri Gate was handed out by the Mughals
very generously. Ochterlony laid out Mubarik Bagh, four miles
north of the city.82 In 1839, one of his begums, Mubarik-un-nissa,
claimed 180 bighas, and was allowed 42 as her due.83 A more
complicated and bizarre issue of succession rights was about a
Jorus (?) Bagh beyond Qudsia Gardens. This had been given to
Begum Samru and then to her heir David Ochterlony Dyce
Sombre. In 1883 compensation for this property (which was
requisitioned by the Canal Department) was claimed by seven
members of an Italian family called Solaroli—their claim being
based on the marriage of Baron Solaroli to Georgiana, sister of
16 Delhi Between Two E?npires

Dyce Sombre (another sister had married an Englishman). The

original 25 bigkas ‘had increased’ mysteriously to 40, for which
‘full compensation’ was given. The sum paid—Rs 5019—was
converted into Italian currency and helped support the family of
an indigent Italian nobleman!84 There were some Englishmen
who had such an attachment to the city that they built private
palaces and pleasure-domes near it. Ludlow built his ‘Castle’ (the
area retains the name though there is no trace of Ludlow Castle).85
This was on a site beyond the Qudsia, purchased in 1820. Thomas
Metcalfe built his ‘House’ (it is still standing) on the river front
in 1830. He and his brother Charles patronized the Mughal
gardens at Shalimar and the Qutb, where Thomas built a country
house in 1844.86 William Fraser owned the large stone house
spectacularly located on the Ridge and described by Jacquemment
as ‘an immense Gothic fortress’. This became popularly known
as Bara Hindu Rao, after that nobleman bought it in 183587
(this, too, is perpetuated in the name of the hospital built on the
site).
‘The works of the Europeans at Delhi’, commented a visitor
in 1845, ‘are confined to a magnificent canal, an arsenal... a
church, a college and a printing press.’88 Some of the palaces
were requisitioned for offices. These were scattered south of
Kashmeri Gate. The Kotwali continued to function from the
traditional building in Chandni Chowk. In 1849 the Joint Magis¬
trate’s office and residence were moved from outside to inside
the city, a move commended as evincing ‘consideration for the
people and for the safety of Delhi’.89 Safdarjang’s house was used
as a guest-house for British travellers. The post-office and the
arsenal were located south of St James’ Church. The area thus
acquired the appearance of a Christian enclave, adding another
dimension to a cosmopolitan city. The Swedish author of a work
on European architecture in India has described the church as
‘a very unusual building in Indian territory’.90 It was this fact—
that the British lived and built in ‘Indian territory’—that made
Delhi before 1857 different from the Presidency towns, where
there was racial segregation. British officials lived in rented houses
in Daryaganj and inside Kashmeri Gate. When in 1847 Begum
Samru’s palace in Chandni Chowk fell vacant, it was suggested
that the kachahri move there, so as to be near the Kotwali. The
 The British Peace and the British Terror 17

Delhi Bank was, however, quicker in getting together the neces¬

sary funds to buy the house.91

In such a situation, where British officials and Indian citizens

lived and worked side by side in a confined area, the civilian
officials could not afford to be indifferent to questions concerning
the maintenance of the city, road repair and traffic regulations.
In the early years, before town duties came to be earmarked for
local improvement, Seton undertook to replant trees along the
Chandni Chowk at his own expense.92 In 1830 Trevelyan spent
his own money to establish a small suburb outside Lahore Gate.
A classic Whig amalgam of altruism and financial hardheadedness,
he wrote enthusiastically about his experiment. ‘The population
of Delhi is crowded within the walls, around which immense
fields of ruins extend ... A portion of them I have purchased off
the Government to lay out in streets and squares, giving to each
person as much as he will undertake to build good houses upon,
thereby raising up new towns and converting into valuable pro¬
perty what was before a mere sightless [ffc] nuisance. Even now
the example has had great effect, and the people are applying...
to buy up these rubbish lands, with a view to their improvement.
My new suburb will soon become a handsome city, without my
laying out a Rupee on it except the original purchase money of
the ground.’93
The city wall was kept in good repair and well fortified with
bastions and glacis. A contemporary noted that ‘the shopkeepers
have encroached on to the roads in the bazaar’, and their shops
were demolished by the British and returned to the state in which
they were under Shahjahan. His judicious comment was ‘Durushti
aur narmi bahamdar bahasf (a mixture of the firm and gentle is
good).94 The shortlived town committee used the duties to repair
drains and bridges and the Canal which had been reopened two
years earlier. In 1822 the taiul, waqf, zabt and nazid properties
held in trust by the British Government for the Emperor were
removed from the control of the city Kotwal and put under a
special daroga?5 Middleton reported with pride that the subse¬
quent cleaning of mosques and their environs was appreciated by
the local Muslims.96 Bishop Heber noticed in 1828 that the Jama
Masjid was repaired by a special grant from Government (he was

2
18 Delhi Between Two Empires

in error, for the grant was from waqf funds); it was a measure
which was very popular in Delhi’.9' It was decidedly not popular
with the squatters who had long lived undisturbed in the smaller
mosques and who were now unceremoniously ejected.
The Delhi Gazette frequently complained that the city roads
were neglected; this referred not only to cantonment roads but
also to areas of the ‘native city’. It was insinuated that only the
‘exhibit’ roads were kept in repair, and that the lanes and back
slums [sc. were] worse than Edinburgh." The Local Road Com¬
mittee (a Provincial Department) was advised to borrow money
from the Delhi Bank to expedite road repair. The sharp tongue
of the Delhi Gazette was equally unsparing on the local inhabi¬
tants. It criticized the Hindu residents of the road from Shahbula-
ka-Bad to the Chidiyakhana, who would spend thousands on a
wedding but would balk at giving forty rupees to repair their
road. In 1837 the local authorities tried to induce prominent local
men to subscribe towards improving roads. The response was
poor, being limited to Raja Hindu Rao and Ahmad Ali Khan.
The Rajas of Pataudi and Ballabgarh are known to have made
generous grants.100 Diwan Kishan Lai, who had been in the service
of the Raja of Jhajjar and later was made Deputy Collector by
Thomas Metcalfe, founded the ganj in the western suburbs which
came to be named after him.101 Near it were the eleven acres
which were gifted to the grain merchants of the city in 1853
when trade with Punjab had started to pick up after its conquest
by the British. This area was to serve as ‘a grain ganj’, so that
the procession of carts carrying grain did not need to enter102
the city. The local merchants and bankers agreed in 1856 to raise
a loan for building a permanent bridge over the Jamuna which
would enable the railway line from Calcutta to be extended to
Delhi.103 They were also enthusiastic about a project to introduce
steam navigation between Delhi and Mathura at their own ex¬
pense, provided the government met the initial cost of the steam
engine.104

Questions of public health were discussed frequently because

of Delhi’s importance as a military encampment and because of
the possibility that it might be made the capital of the North-
Western Provinces. In the early nineteenth century the British
only imperfectly understood Indian diseases and problems of
 The British Peace and the British Terror 19

public health, but attempts were made to pinpoint causes and find
solutions. The diseases prevalent in Delhi—cholera, malaria, and
the ‘Delhi Sore’, were thought to be caused entirely by water¬
borne contagion, transmitted through running water, brackish
well water and water-logged pools. A proposal was made to
drain the Najafgarh Jheel in 1817, but this was not done, probably
because of the expense involved.105
The sanitary arrangements within the city had from its incep¬
tion been linked to the water supply in the hinterland. The Ali
Mardan Canal had dried up. Soon after the British conquest, Mr
Mercer offered to reopen it at his own expense, if he were given
the canal revenues for the next twenty years. Accordingly a
survey was made in 1810, and work begun in 1817. Charles Met¬
calfe formally opened it four years later. It was to provide
healthy drinking water for the city-dwellers, who greeted the
flowing water with offerings of ghee and flowers. But the farmers
in Delhi Territory used up so much of it that the quantity
flowing into the city decreased and the Canal finally dried up
again.106 During the eighteen-twenties and eighteen-thirties, when
the canal did provide potable water, the wells were neglected.
This was possibly why in 1843 as many as 555 of the 607 wells
in the city were pronounced to be brackish. In 1846 at the sugges¬
tion of Lord Ellenborough, the Provincial Ways and Means
Committee constructed a large tank (popularly known as ‘Lai
Diggi’) between the Palace and Khas Bazaar to be linked to the
canal and to serve as a reservoir. The officials somewhat ineptly
tinkered with the Shahjahani drains; this led to flooding in the
city, with the drainwater flowing back. This, and the canal,
rather than the Najafgarh Jheel, were now blamed for the city’s
ill-health.107 In 1852 the question was thought sufficiently serious
to merit a very comprehensive report on the city’s drainage.108
The barren Ridge, with its extremes of temperature, was con¬
sidered such a health hazard for the soldiers that regiments were
stationed at Delhi only for two years at a time.109 Napier was
puzzled. ‘If Delhi be unhealthy, what made it such a grand city?’,
he wanted to know. ‘A rigid police to keep the town clean, sound
sanitary rules about irrigation from the canal, which runs much
too rapidly to produce malaria if the banks are kept clean, would
perhaps make Delhi as healthy as any part of India,’ he said.110
Generous contributions were made by men of the Court,
20 Delhi Between Two Empires

bankers and merchants towards a projected dispensary, to be

built ‘in a manner worthy of the Imperial City’. As against
nearly Rs 10,000 from local subscriptions, the Government grant
amounted to only Rs 2,500.111 An Act of 1850 sanctioned for
British India the establishment of Committees in towns to levy
taxes for public health. Apart from the Presidency towns, this
was followed up in Ahmedabad where a ‘wall-tax’ was levied for
conservancy expenses.112 There was nothing similar in Delhi but
in 1849 an appeal in Urdu was circulated in the city, urging the
inhabitants to accept taxation for the purpose of a conservancy
scheme. The example of Ahmedabad was cited as worth follow¬
ing.113 Thomas Metcalfe, Commissioner of Delhi, was sceptical
as to ‘whether among the most influential members of the native
community there exists that degree of public spirit which would
induce them to originate a system of conservancy which will not
only entail upon them their personal exertion and responsibility
but a taxation to which they are most sensitively opposed’.114

The exigencies of the Rising of 1857 jeopardized good relations,

not as between Muslims and Hindus but as between those who
supported the rebels, for reasons of conviction or of self-interest,
and those who either sat on the fence or helped the British troops.
Nawab Hamid Ali Khan supported the Mughal ruler, Nawab
Amiruddin the British. Mufti Sadruddin ‘Azurda’ was opposed to
the Rising, though he stood by the Emperor. Of the merchants
and bankers, Ramji Das, Saligram, Qutbuddin and Husain Baksh
helped Bahadur Shah, though many others stayed neutral or
secretly aided the British. These names are examples to indicate
that the cleavage cannot be simplistically stated as being between
a declining Muslim aristocracy and a nascent Hindu bourgeoisie,
but between those who sided with the Emperor and those who
were far-sighted enough to back the British and thus set up a
store of security and rewards for the future.
During the siege the British on the Ridge waited anxiously for
Id, on 3 August 1857, hoping that the Purbias and Muslims would
clash, for then ‘Delhi will fall to the British’. They misunder¬
stood Bahadur Shah and said: ‘It is a great satire on Muslims
fighting for their faith that at Id no one was permitted to sacrifice
a cow.’115 Mughal Beg’s last words on the gallows in Chandni
Chowk were to be ‘Hindu Musulman mere shurreek ho/meri