Zahar: the Last Mughal Emperor

I'm very much enjoying William Darymple's "The Last Mughal" and today I read a passage that resonated with me. Zahar was the last Mughal emperor and he was fond of writing Sufi poetry:

Zafar’s poetry, however, existed on a higher plane than this. Like much verse of the period, it was deeply imbued with the Sufi ideals of love, which were regarded as much the surest route to a God who was seen to be located not in the heavens but deep within the human heart. For if the world of the heart lay at the centre of Sufism, it also formed the cornerstone of the principal literary form in late Mughal Delhi—the ghazal, which derived its name from the Arabic words “talking to a woman about love. The love of the ghazal poet was ambiguous—it was rarely made entirely clear whether it was sacred or worldly love to which the poet referred. This ambiguity was deliberate, for just as the longing of the soul for union with God was believed to be as compelling and as all-embracing as the longing of the lover for the beloved, both loves could be carried to the point of insanity or what Sufis called fana—self-annihilation and immersion in the beloved. In the eyes of the Sufi poets, this search for the God within liberated the seeker from the restrictions of narrowly orthodox Islam, encouraging the devotee to look beyond the letter of the law to its mystical essence.

Later Darymple writes that:

This was an attitude to Hinduism that Zafar—and many of his Mughal forebears—shared. It is clear that Zafar consciously saw his role as a protector of his Hindu subjects, and a moderator of extreme Muslim demands and the chilling Puritanism of many of the ‘ulama. One of Zafar’s verses says explicitly that Hinduism and Islam “share the same essence,” and his court lived out this syncretic philosophy, and both celebrated and embodied this composite Hindu-Muslim Indo-Islamic civilisation, at every level. The Hindu elite of Delhi went to the Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin, could quote Hafiz and were fond of Persian poetry. Their children—especially those of the administrative Khattri and Kayasth castes—studied under maulvis and attended the more liberal madrasas, bringing offerings of food for their teachers on Hindu festivals. For their part, Muslims followed the Emperor in showing honour to Hindu holy men, while many in the court, including Zafar himself, followed the old Mughal custom, borrowed from upper-caste Hindus, of drinking only Ganges water. Zafar’s extensive team of Hindu astrologers rarely left his side. 

It was very interesting to read of this tolerance at the time between the Hindus and Moslems as well as between the Shia and Sunni sects. The author has himself lived in Delhi for the past twenty years but holidays in England during the summer months. I'm looking forward to reading more about India in his other books.

Dalrymple's overview of the consequences of the sepoy rebellion is quite insightful:

There was nothing inevitable about the demise and extinction of the Mughals, as the sepoys’ dramatic surge towards the court of Delhi showed. But in the years to come, as Muslim prestige and learning sank, and Hindu confidence, wealth, education and power increased, Hindus and Muslims would grow gradually apart, as British policies of divide and rule found willing collaborators among the chauvinists of both faiths. The rip in the closely woven fabric of Delhi’s composite culture, opened in 1857, slowly widened into a great gash, and at Partition in 1947 finally broke in two. As the Indian Muslim elite emigrated en masse to Pakistan, the time would soon come when it would be almost impossible to imagine that Hindu sepoys could ever have rallied to the Red Fort and the standard of a Muslim emperor, joining with their Muslim brothers in an attempt to revive the Mughal Empire.

Of course, the events of 1857 also led to the formal dissolution of the British East India Company and its being taken over by the British Government.