Indian Mutiny And The Calamity That Descended Upon The Women of Delhi
An account provided by Mirza Asadullah Ghalib in his many letters to his friends and students about the misfortunes that descended upon the women after the Indian Rebellion of 1857
Women are usually vulnerable in wars. The siege of Delhi, after the Indian mutiny, was not different from others. We mentioned an account from different sources in our previous posts, how misfortunes descended upon the women of Shahjahanabad (Delhi), which they suffered from the British East India Company army. Here we are mentioning the most authentic source; an account provided by the most popular poet of Delhi of that time, Mirza Asadullah Ghalib in his many letters to his friends and students.
‘Alas my dear boy’ wrote Ghalib to a friend in January 1862. ‘This is not the Delhi in which you were born, not the Delhi in which you got your schooling, not the Delhi in which you used to come to your lesion with me, not the Delhi in which I passed 51 years of my life. It is a camp. The only Muslims here are artisans or servants of the British authorities. All the rest are Hindus. The male descendents of the deposed King-such as survived the sword-draw allowances of five rupees a month. The female descendants, if old, are bawds; if young, are prostitutes.’
Ghalib’s Account
What Ghalib did not say was that many of the Delhi begums were set on the path to prostitution by the mass rapes that followed the fall of the city. Believing that the British women in Delhi had been sexually assaulted at the outbreak, the British officers did little to stop their men from raping the women of Delhi. Saunders commissioned a full inquiry, which subsequently proved the rumor false.
The fate of the women of the royal family after the Indian mutiny was clearly something that deeply shocked Ghalib, and he returns to it again and again in his letters: ‘Had you been here,’ he told his friend Mirza Tafta, ‘you would have seen the ladies of the Fort moving about the city, their faces as fair as the moon and their clothes dirty, their paijama legs torn, and their slippers falling to pieces. This is no exaggeration.’
The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple. Pages 462-463.
‘The flight from Lucknow, 1858′. This painting shows the suffering of the English women during The Indian Mutiny
The painting, ‘The flight from Lucknow, 1858′, by British painter Abraham Solomon. From Journal, The British Empire series 23, The Indian Mutiny Shock revolt, Savage reprisals.
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