Empire Agonistes

Tempered by years of travel to increasingly obscure locations, Monu the Impassive waited by yet another dusty plaque as I both read and scanned the area, trying to piece together fractured history.

This visit was an aberration for we weren’t in rural India. Delhi’s Kashmiri Gate is a remnant of Indian history carefully sandwiched between the olfactory pleasantries of garbage bags filled to the brim and squashed into surrounding railings, and the ceaseless swirl of traffic around Delhi’s Inter State Bus Terminal.

Named for Kashmir—the destination it faces—this 17th century gate is reticent about its role in Indian history; it masks itself under a re-rendered set of arches—the smoothness little betraying its antecedents.

Once part of a series of 14 gates that encircled the city of Shahjahanabad, it was battered by British cannon from nearby Qudsia Bagh during the First War of Indian Independence in 1857. Today, it reluctantly reveals scars which have survived both rebels and a rebelliously modern makeover on one side of the monument.

As I read long-forgotten names at the Gate’s long-forgotten memorial, the name of another drifted into the peripheral—Thomas Macaulay , the first Law Member of the Governor-General's Council in India, between 1834 and 1838.

For such a short tenure on the subcontinent, Macaulay left an indelible mark on India, and Indian life; his were the recommendations for educational reform that relegated Sanskrit and Persian to second place in schools. In his 1835 publication, ‘A Minute on Indian Education’, he would give neither language more than just a minute of his time, arguing instead for education in English.

Minimally armed with the ability and willingness to understand the greatness of Sanskrit and Persian language, literature, and scientific knowledge, Macaulay observed that he, "certainly never met with any orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanskrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable."

Vae Victis.

Woe to the vanquished.

An empire’s noble struggle to educate the hitherto uneducated native had begun. Curricula in almost every Indian school would be—as a result of Macaulay’s recommendations—largely changed with the passage of the English Education Act of 1835 by Lord Bentinck, the Governor-General of the East India Company.

While vernacular schools would eventually receive funding, generations of Indian students would learn little of the richness of their own culture, language and literature—shoehorned instead into creating Macaulay’s bucolic vision of "a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect".

Perhaps surprisingly—despite an ill-versed approach to everything else—Macaulay was also a poet, one who began writing while in India; it is his lines from Horatius that I was reflecting on while standing at Kashmiri Gate.

"Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the Gate: "To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods?"

Published in 1842, the verse—though set in a different time and place—holds tragic meaning for those who would fight to the death at this gate, 15 years later.

Step through the arches at Kashmiri Gate and away from the modern rendering on one side, and you’ll notice what Lieutenant Philip Salkeld of the Bengal Engineers might have seen as fighting wound down at this heavily fortified—and bitterly fought over—area of the city during the Siege of Delhi on September 14th, 1857.

Some of the damage on display is a direct result of the placing of gunpowder charges at the gate by Salkeld, his fellow officer Duncan Charles Home, and their small team. Their actions at Kashmiri Gate were commemorated on the stone marker you see above, unveiled in 1867 by the then Commander-in-Chief of India, General Robert Napier. Salkeld wouldn’t live to see the unveiling and neither would Home; they died a few weeks after the Siege—bound, in life as in death, by the same battle and battle honors. Both were awarded the Victoria Cross for their efforts at the Gate.

Their stories, and those of the native (sic) sepoys who fought alongside, are hemmed in by the disinterest of modern day Delhi; the area is visited largely by swarms of bluebottle flies thriving on piles of discarded history.

Which is an interesting reflection on words the we leave behind. Words and poems etched in stone and on marble plaques, marking our time here on this earth. The iambic pentameter—unguents of our personal histories. Words that reflect the poignant frailty of our existence, and an all-too-human longing for some shard of immortality. The Empire excelled at overwrought prose, and never more so than in Victorian times.

Seven hundred meters from Kashmiri Gate and steps from Lothian Cemetery, lies another fragment of Empire—the British Magazine. Blown up by the English as rebels came ever closer on May 11th, 1857, it created an explosion that rocked the city.

Today, a remaining sliver of the Magazine—just one part of the fortification—glumly guards a traffic island and shelters the unaware: sleeping drunks and itinerant workers in need of a rest.

Embedded in the surviving arch is a plaque that pays tribute to the ‘nine resolute Englishmen’ who held the magazine for as long as they could while under attack. Lieutenant George Willoughby, the Commissary of Ordnance issued the order to light the fuse; the result magnified the explosion he once sketched in 1846. Hundreds of rebels were believed to have been trapped under the Magazine’s buckling walls. Eight of Willoughby’s team survived the blast, though he himself would die the next day—reportedly murdered by villagers as he made his escape from Delhi.

Along the same lines as Macaulay’s poetic sensibilities a few years earlier, the Hon W. Wallace would immortalize in verse the Delhi Nine and their battle against the ‘swarthy foe’ and ‘savage traitor mob’. His poem paints a vivid picture—its capital letters trumpeting a tale of British fortitude and courage on foreign shores.

They stood upon the ramparts, and knew that all was lost,

When they saw the dusty cloud above the approaching host,

Like a cornfield in the sunshine waved the flashing line of steel,

And the arid plain rang loudly with the chargers' steel-clad heel,

With murmur like the distant surge came on the swarthy foe;

Above the blood-stained banner waved, o'er craven hearts below,

Then turned they from the ramparts, to protect the magazine;

Stern were the looks, and firm the hearts of those brave men I ween,

Their pulses bounded boldly, and so boldly flashed each eye,

As those brave men of Delhi took the post where they should die,

Then out spoke gallant WILLOUGHBY unto the gallant eight,

"Let others fly, be ours’ to die, if need be, by this gate!

"Our dear ones may deplore us, but shall proudly mourn our fall,

"Our country shall remember us, and God be with us all"

No time lost they, but inwardly they prayed for aid Divine,

And with the gate shut out the world, that gallant band of nine.

Like bounding wave the traitors raved, and boomed against the wall;

Firm as a rock before the shock the nine defied them all.

But spake their guns, all thundered-tongued, and backwards reeled the foe,

As through them swept that storm of grape, and hundreds were laid low,

Loud yelled the savage traitor mob, alike with fear and hate,

As man by man the cowards ran, or fell before that gate,

Calmly the savage cry to yield our British brethren heard;

Calmly the gallant nine fired on, but answer'd not a word,

That band of heroes calmly stood, defending well that gate,

The swarthy foe around them closed, and well they met their fate.

One silent prayer to Heaven they breathed, for earth one tender sigh,

They grasp’d each other by the hand, and bravely turned to die,

Long as old England’s name is known, or spoken England’s tongue,

The gallant stand of that brave band shall by her men be sung.

Their cheek shall blanch, their eye shall flash, as o’er the sparkling wine.

They speak of that brave action of the gallant DELHI NINE!

WILLOUGHBY, RAYNOR, FORREST, SHAW, BUCKLEY, SCULLY, CROW, EDWARDS, and STEWART.

These words, and those men have now—despite Wallace’s convictions to the contrary—largely vanished into the haze of history, forgotten by both their country and the one where they served. What remains is a simple plaque on the magazine’s gate below the one raised to the ‘resolute’ nine.

Added by the Indian government after independence in 1947, it states the obvious: “The persons described as rebels and mutineers in the above inscription were Indian members of the Army in the service of the East Indian Company, trying to overthrow the foreign government.”

Perhaps this is the law of unintentional consequences come for Thomas Macaulay—a century after he penned his ‘Minute on Indian Education’. The people he sought to indoctrinate and make more English in their behavior—even if it meant accommodating their color—would one day use that very language to help gain their Independence from Britain.

And in a delicious repudiation, Sanskrit—one of the languages Macaulay abhorred—is being taught at schools and universities in modern-day Britain.

Vae Victis.

Woe to the vanquished.

Empire Agonistes

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