Late in Akbar Shah II’s reign, an Englishwoman with the unusual name of Mrs Meer Hassan Ali happened to make a visit to the Qila-i-Mualla. The wife of a Muslim scholar and teacher from Lucknow, Mrs Ali was one of many British visitors to the court, ordinary men and women who were curious about the fort and the padishah within it. By this time, most of the palaces Shah Jahan had carefully built long ago were rundown; a visitor in 1824 reported seeing dirty floors, blocked water channels, broken furniture covered in pigeon droppings, and a garden in the sort of disorder that would have brought Babur to tears.
Yet when Mrs Ali arrived in the emperor’s presence, she took care to observe the expected courtesies. She solicitously took off her shoes before entering the king’s presence, bowed low, and offered both Akbar Shah and his queen gifts before taking a seat beside the queen.
The emperor, she would later write, possessed a fine and intelligent face, and his manner of speech was gentle and refined. Both he and the queen asked Mrs Ali many questions and seemed curious about everything, from her family life to the customs of English royalty, to how well she liked the weather in India. Mrs Ali reportedly impressed them with her ability to speak in their own language. When she rose to depart, Mrs Ali was pressed to accept two gifts by the queen: an embroidered scarf and a small ring to remind her of this visit. It was an awkward moment: Mrs Ali did not wish to refuse them because that would cause offence, but she felt embarrassed at having to take valuable things away from a couple who had so little left.
Once, the padishah of Hindustan had been the richest man in the world. But by 1837, he was just an old man whose wretched circumstances elicited the pity of a passing traveller.
When Akbar Shah II took the throne in 1806, he had no army to lead, no territory to conquer and no city, let alone an empire, to rule. His authority extended only as far as the walls of his fort – even Delhi was administered not by him but by the Company. Yet, when the new emperor was crowned, letters and offerings came to Delhi from many Indian rulers, including some who had been independent for decades. To them – as to many others across India – it mattered that there was still a padishah in Delhi. And so, the British made an effort to show that they were merely ruling in Akbar’s name.
The Company’s Resident, their main man in charge in Delhi, paid the padishah regular visits, small gifts such as flowers and food were exchanged often between the palace and the Residency, and a British doctor tended to the royal family. British officials continued to adhere to some of the Timurid court’s many rituals when they visited the padishah’s palaces. Just like the nobles of years past, they dismounted and walked when approaching the Diwan-i-Am, offered the emperor gifts several times a year, and accompanied him on his grand processions around the city. Curious British visitors delighted in attending the emperor’s durbars and accepting lofty-sounding titles from him.
But beneath the public performance of courtesy and respect, the Company was already plotting in private to slowly strip the new emperor of his last remaining symbols of power. This was because Akbar Shah II had the unhappy fate of becoming padishah just when the British were coming to dominate all of India. The emperor might demand, request, or plead for things to be as they had always been, but the British were determined to show him that he was the past, and that they were the future. Letters flew back and forth between Delhi, Calcutta, and London, generating furious discussion around issues of protocol and precedence: should the padishah be allowed to reconfirm the titles of new nawabs, nizams, and rajas who succeeded their fathers? Should he be allowed to apply the tika to new Rajput kings, as emperors had done for centuries? Should the padishah be allowed to send traditional robes of honour to the highest British official in India, the governor-general? Should the governor-general offer gifts to the emperor several times a year? These were just some of the hundreds of ways in which past emperors had displayed their supremacy over everyone else. Encouraged by some of his female relatives, the emperor tried to force the British into performing these actions and publicly accepting him as their superior. But the British steadfastly declined to participate in any ceremonies that made them seem like the emperor’s subjects.
Akbar Shah had two big reasons to be dissatisfied with the British. The first was money. The British had not entirely lived up to the terms of the agreement they’d originally made with Shah Alam. Akbar pointed to the fact that he had not only his own large family to support, but also the hundreds of other imperial relatives who lived in the fort, the widows, children, and grandchildren of long-dead padishahs. He needed a larger allowance if he was to support them all.
The second was Akbar’s right to choose which of his sons would succeed him. Timurid princes had always chosen their successors, as Akbar had with Jahangir, or let the throne go to whichever son successfully won the fight for it, like Aurangzeb. So when Akbar Shah wished to declare his favourite son, seventeen-year-old Jahangir, his successor, he was astonished to find that the Company had an opinion on the matter. To the British, who believed that a king’s eldest son naturally succeeded him, it seemed obvious that Akbar Shah’s eldest son, Abu Zafar, would take the throne after him.
The conflict between the imperial household and the Resident got so heated that Jahangir resorted to intimidation: he took a shot at the Resident with his gun. The bullet merely made a hole in a soldier’s cap, but the alarmed Company acted swiftly. The prince was imprisoned and carted off to Allahabad. But even with his son in exile, Akbar continued to make repeated demands, requests, and finally, pleas, to the Resident, the Governor-General, and even the King of England for more money and the right to choose his own successor.
In 1829, Akbar Shah made one last, frustrated last attempt to assert himself. He chose a young Bengali man named Ram Mohan Roy, gave him the title of “Raja”, and sent him off to England to plead his case directly to the king. But Roy would die in England in 1833, leaving Akbar just as powerless against the Company as he’d always been. It was all for nothing anyway: Jahangir died in Allahabad in 1821, aged just thirty-one. The Company would get what it wanted after all – Abu Zafar would succeed his father.
Excerpted with permission from The Book of Emperors: An Illustrated History of the Mughals, Ashwitha Jayakumar, illustrated by Nikhil Gulati, Puffin.
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