The Fall of the House of Timur

The siege of great cities in modern history has made for some harrowing though memorable non-fiction narratives: Cornelius Ryan’s ‘The Last Battle’ on the battle for Berlin and the death throes of Hitler’s Reich; Alistair Horne’s ‘Fall of Paris’ on the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune; Harrison Salisbury 900-day siege of Leningrad and Antony Beevor’s ‘Stalingrad’ come immediately to mind.

Today marks the 167th anniversary of Delhi’s capture by the British and the end of the harrowing three-month siege of Delhi during the Great Rebellion of 1857. The siege, and the savagery of the British reprisal, found its passionate chronicler in William Dalrymple’s extraordinary and polyphonic The Last Mughal (2006).

Dalrymple’s opus used to splendid effect nearly 20,000 Persian and Urdu documents (in the National Archives) known as the ‘Mutiny Papers’ to provide a fully-rounded perspective of the Indian side. Whereas that book was an elegy to a lost Indo-Islamic civilization, Amarpal Singh’s book is a different beast.

A UK-based military historian whose previous books include definitive studies of the two Anglo-Sikh Wars, Singh’s account of the siege, based on a careful reading of primary sources, is a model of focused, detached history. While the events of 1857 - with the violence of the rebels exceeded by the horrific British reprisals - make it hard not fall prey to passions, Singh marshals his narrative with admirable control and tells his tale with marmoreal calm.

The relative peace between the capture of Delhi by the East India Company in 1803 to the revolt in 1857, and the EIC’s efforts to pursue a policy of strict neutrality in social and religious matters was ended by the advance of aggressive evangelical Christianity into the country.

The Enfield Pattern 1853 Musket and the introduction of a cartridge greased with cow and pig fat united Hindus and Muslims and led to almost the entire Bengal Army rising against the EIC. When the revolt erupted, the odds were heavily stacked against the British government with only three European regiments stationed between Calcutta and Delhi 1,000 miles apart.

While Singh’s narrative treads over well-worn ground, it is his interweaving of military strategy and high politics with gut-wrenching personal details of grandees, generals, soldiers and civilians which makes his book stand out. The twilight calm of Bahadur Shah Zafar’s court – the last of the Timurid line – was shattered by the arriving sepoys from Meerut, and their indiscriminate plundering of Delhi. In Delhi, the rebels seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of ammunition guns thanks to the Delhi magazine. They had “more guns than gunners,” as Singh wryly observes.

In stark contrast, the EIC’s hastily assembled Delhi Field Force, dogged by a paucity of ammunition had to be hauled 300 miles from the magazines in Ferozepore and Phillaur in the Punjab and depended on the goodwill of the maharajas of the Cis-Sutlej states of Patiala, Nabha and Jhind which allowed the British passage of supplies, ammunition and siege guns. The ‘Siege of Delhi’ was never a siege in the conventional sense as for large periods the small British force on the Ridge found itself more besieged.

Throughout June to September 1857, the issue of whether the EIC could retain its Indian empire largely hinged on the ownership of the Delhi ridge - a strategic position cheaply thrown away by the revolting sepoys.

The sepoys also benefited from scant local goodwill as they looted Delhi’s populace while the lack of support of revolt in the Punjab was critical in tilting the scales for the British. Singh shows how the population of the Punjab had developed a special hatred for the sepoys of the Bengal Army, pejoratively called purbiahs (‘easterners’) after the end of the Second-Anglo Sikh war in 1849. Singh’s rousing set-pieces like the Battles of the Hindun River, Badli-ki-Serai, Najafgarh and the sack of Delhi recall the excitement and striking clarity of the best works of Antony Beevor and Max Hastings. A compulsively readable account, ‘The Siege of Delhi’ belongs to the small shelf of truly accessible books on 1857.