An Inside View of the Crumbling World Within Bahadur Shah Zafar’s Red Fort

SEVEN YEARS PRIOR to the first war of Indian Independence, Bahadur Shah Zafar was eking out a living with the pension that the British supplied him. The phrase “eking out a living” can be interpreted in two ways in his context. The first: here was a Mughal who had inverted the relationship between monarch and supplicant. His ancestor Jahangir had made Thomas Roe and other Europeans bow before him as supplicants while his status was slightly higher than that of a pauper shamelessly feeding off British crumbs. The second: the pauperised status did not deter the deluded Bahadur Shah Zafar from basking in the illusion that his Mughal House still commanded the same prestige as before. And he fed the delusion with the selfsame British pension, lavishing it on jewellery, gardens, festivities, parties and extravagant decadence. When the money ran out ahead of the next deposit of pension, he borrowed and borrowed copiously.

Bahadur Shah Zafar’s self-created chimera of Mughal prestige was so incredibly pathetic that he once refused entry to the Nawab of Bahawalpur unless he took off his Kulge. This supplicant also had the temerity to refuse a chair to the British Resident and disallowed the Commander-in-Chief to enter the Diwan-i-Aam on horseback. The same officials who supplied him his regular dole.

And the grand Red Fort was both the grand structural symbolism and reality of this delusion of grandeur. Literally.

An intriguing document titled Precis of Palace Intelligence running into 800 pages furnishes first-hand details of life inside Bahadur Shah’s Red Fort. It is actually a compilation of weekly diaries beginning on January 6, 1851 and ending on January 1, 1854. Every week’s diary bears the signature of the British Resident of Delhi. Its purpose was clearly political: to collect and report intelligence of the activities of Bahadur Shah Zafar to the Governor General. One great value of the document is the sheer wealth of details that it offers about the personal life of Zafar, his begums, his vast harem, his princes and the social and cultural life inside the Red Fort, which housed two thousand people.