by William Dalrymple
On the evening of Sunday 10 May 1857, 150 years ago next week, 300 mutinous
sepoys from Meerut rose up against their officers. They shot as many as they
could, then rode through the night to the old Mughal capital of Delhi, where
there they massacred every Christian man, woman and child, and declared the
82-year-old Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, to be their leader. . . .
The violent suppression of the Great Uprising of 1857 was a pivotal moment
in the history of British imperialism in India. It marked the end both of
the East India Company and of the Mughal dynasty, the two principal forces
that shaped Indian history over the previous 300 years, and replaced both
with undisguised imperial rule by the British government.
Shortly after Zafar's corpse had been tipped in its anonymous Burmese grave,
Queen Victoria accepted the title Empress of India from Disraeli, initiating
a very different period of direct imperial rule.
Yet in many ways the legacy of the period is still with us, and there is a
direct link between the jihadis of 1857 and those we face today. For the
reaction of the Delhi ulema after 1857 was to reject both the gentle Sufi
traditions of the late Mughal emperors, who they regarded as apostate, and
the West; instead they too attempted to return to what they regarded as pure
With this in mind, disillusioned refugees from Delhi founded a Wahhabi-like
madrasa at Deoband which went back to Koranic basics and rigorously stripped
out anything European from the curriculum.
One hundred and forty years later, it was out of Deobandi madrasas
in Pakistan that the Taliban emerged to create the most retrograde Islamic
regime in modern history, a regime that in turn provided the crucible out
from which emerged al- Qa'ida, and the most radical fundamentalist Islamic
counterattack the modern West has yet had to face.
Today, West and East again face each other uneasily across a divide that
many see as a religious war. Suicide jihadis fight what they see as a
defensive action against their Christian enemies, and again innocent
civilians are slaughtered.
As before, Western Evangelical politicians are apt to cast their opponents
and enemies in the role of "incarnate fiends" and simplistically conflate
armed resistance to invasion and occupation with "pure evil." Again, Western
countries, blind to the effect their foreign policies have on the wider
world, feel aggrieved and surprised to be attacked - as they see it - by
Yet as we have seen in our own time, nothing so easily radicalises a people
against us, or undermines the moderate aspect of Islam, as aggressive
Western intrusion in the East: the histories of Islamic fundamentalism and
Western imperialism have often been closely, and dangerously, intertwined.
There are clear lessons here. For, in the celebrated words of Edmund Burke -
himself a fierce critic of British aggression in India - those who fail to
learn from history are always destined to repeat it.
William Dalrymple's The
Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, which won the 2007 Duff
Cooper Prize for History and Biography, has just been published in paperback.
John Pilger, "The Warlords of
America," New Statesman, August 23, 2004
Robert Fisk, "Bush's New Strategy -
The March of Folly," Independent, January 11, 2007