Akbar Shah II: A Mughal Emperor Without an Empire

Mu'in al-Din Akbar II, the son of Shah Alam II, reigned at Delhi from 1806 to 1837. He was the penultimate emperor of the Mughal house, and he ruled, in any practical sense, nothing. The territory that had once answered to the Red Fort had passed to the East India Company, to the Marathas and to the Sikhs; the emperor's writ ran over his palace and its immediate surroundings, and his income was a pension paid by a trading company that had become the paramount power in India.

What survived was the court — its ceremonial, its titles, its patronage, and above all its poetry. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, surveying Urdu literature, describes a final flowering of the Delhi court under the titular last Mughal sovereigns, Akbar II and his son Bahadur Shah II, with systematic royal patronage encouraging a remarkable development of narrative verse. The court that could not command a province could still make a poet's reputation, and the title it conferred still carried weight among those who sought it.

Akbar Shah II's reign is therefore a study in a particular kind of authority: one that had lost its substance but kept its forms, and whose holder spent much of his energy defending those forms against a Company that was methodically dismantling them. His longest personal struggle was over the succession: for three decades he tried to displace his eldest son in favour of a younger one, and the British refusal to allow it determined who the last Mughal emperor would be.

The Delhi He Was Born Into

The Mughal collapse of the eighteenth century had been both financial and physical. Nadir Shah sacked Delhi in 1151–52 AH, 1739, and carried off the imperial thrones; the Encyclopaedia of Islam cites the eyewitness account in Tihrani's Nadir-nama, which records that the Persian conqueror took seventeen thrones among his spoils, Shah Jahan's Peacock Throne among them.

Worse followed within Akbar's own lifetime. In 1203 AH, 1788, Ghulam Qadir Rohilla captured Delhi and blinded the reigning emperor, Shah Alam II — Akbar Shah's father. The episode is recorded in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, and a near-contemporary account of Ghulam Qadir's rise survives in the Waqi'at-i Azfari, the memoir of a Mughal prince begun at Murshidabad in 1211 AH, 1797, and completed at Madras in 1221 AH, 1806. William Dalrymple's history of the dynasty's last years records that during the occupation of the palace Ghulam Qadir made the future Akbar Shah II dance for his entertainment.

The reduction of the empire to its capital was proverbial by then. Dalrymple quotes the doggerel that circulated in Delhi: The Kingdom of Shah Alam / Runs from Delhi to Palam — Palam being a village a few miles outside the city.

Akbar Shah succeeded his father in 1221 AH, 1806. The Encyclopaedia of Islam gives his regnal dates in three separate entries as 1221–53 AH, 1806–37.

The Contest Over the Succession

The defining struggle of the reign began in its second year and was never resolved in Akbar Shah's favour.

He wished to be succeeded not by his eldest son, Abu Zafar — the future Bahadur Shah Zafar — but by a younger son, Mirza Jahangir. On 21 March 1807 he wrote to Archibald Seton, then British Resident at Delhi, stating that his eldest son was wholly devoid of every qualification for occupying the throne. Dalrymple records that the letter carried a further accusation against the prince which the emperor advanced without evidence or particulars, and which is not repeated here for that reason.

Seton did not accept it. He wrote to Calcutta that he thought the charge very unlikely, that the young Abu Zafar was a respectable character, and that the prince, not being his father's favourite, was much neglected by him. The Resident's own reading was that Akbar Shah lavished his attention on Mirza Jahangir, of whom he was, in Seton's word, devotedly fond.

Mirza Jahangir settled the question himself. Irritated by Seton's support for his elder brother, he fired at the Resident from the battlements of the Red Fort and succeeded in knocking off his hat. He was exiled to Allahabad in 1809 and died there in 1821, at the age of thirty-one. The Encyclopaedia of Islam's survey of the monuments of Delhi lists his grave among those in the enclosure at the shrine of Nizamuddin Auliya, alongside those of Jahanara, the daughter of Shah Jahan, and the emperor Muhammad Shah.

The British adhered to primogeniture, and Abu Zafar duly succeeded in 1837. Whatever Akbar Shah had written of him in 1807, the Resident's view twenty years later was different again: Charles Metcalfe, Resident of Delhi, described the prince in 1827 as the most respectable and the most accomplished of the princes. Dalrymple observes that the father's treatment of his heir left its mark, and notes the irony that Bahadur Shah Zafar, who owed his own throne to British insistence on primogeniture, later tried to set that principle aside in favour of a younger son of his own.

The Company and the Emperor's Standing

The Reduction of Privileges

The Company's policy towards the Delhi court hardened across the reign. Lord Wellesley had promised one kind of relationship at the start of the century; what followed was different. Dalrymple sets out the sequence: a British official concluded that the best policy in future was to let the emperor sink into insignificance rather than uphold his dignity; the following year the emperor's name was removed from East India Company rupees; and when Lord Auckland visited Delhi he did not pay a courtesy call on Akbar Shah II at all. By 1850, under Akbar Shah's successor, Lord Dalhousie was forbidding any British subject to accept titles from the Mughal, dismissing the practice of covering the English with the Mughal ceremonial mantle as a solemn farce. Dalrymple characterises the policy as an attempt to demote a feudal superior to the standing of a subject nobleman.

The removal of the imperial name from the coinage touched a point of principle, because the right of coinage in a ruler's name was one of the two classical marks of sovereignty in Islamic practice, the other being mention in the Friday sermon.

Ceremony as the Last Resort

With little else to assert, the court asserted precedence. Dalrymple records an episode from 1830, during Akbar Shah's annual holiday at Mehrauli, when the Resident Francis Hawkins approached the Diwan-i Khas without removing his shoes. It had been unheard of for anyone to pass the Red Curtain on horseback or to approach that hall shod. The emperor complained to Calcutta of the offensive and disrespectful act and asked that steps be taken, in the formula his chancery used, to wipe off the dust of grief and affliction from the polished mirror of his enlightened and resplendent mind. Hawkins was promptly dismissed.

That the complaint succeeded is as notable as that it had to be made. The court could still enforce a point of etiquette on an individual officer while losing every substantive question to his government.

The View from the Residency

The British officials at Delhi in the early part of the reign were not uniformly hostile, and several were deeply attached to the city's culture. Dalrymple records that William Fraser, assistant to the Resident Sir David Ochterlony, came twice a week to the scholar Shah Abdul Aziz to improve his Persian and Arabic, and received from him advice on shrines to visit and on points of sharia; and that the Mughal court was sufficiently pleased to receive an Arabic version of the New Testament in 1807, soon after the British arrival at Delhi, that it returned thanks and asked that the supply be continued.

Ochterlony himself objected to the direction policy took. In old age he wrote to Fraser that the House of Timur, far from being thought worthy to command the least consideration, was apparently sinking into the very lowest state of contempt.

The Embassy of Ram Mohan Roy

In 1827 Akbar Shah II sent an envoy to London. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, in its survey of envoys sent to and from Muslim courts, records that one of the last Mughal emperors, Akbar Shah II, sent Raja Ram Mohan Roy to London in 1827 to plead his case for an increase in his pishkash or pension. Dalrymple adds that the mission was also to protest at the way the Company was consistently reducing the emperor's status.

The embassy indicates the position the Mughal emperor had reached. The successor of Akbar and Aurangzeb was obliged to send a representative four thousand miles to argue, before the directors of a trading company and the British government, for a larger allowance and for the retention of his dignities.

It also produced a characteristic episode within the family. Dalrymple records that Abu Zafar, assuming the mission was directed at disinheriting him, wrote angrily both to the Governor General and to Ram Mohan Roy himself; Roy replied, refuting the accusations.

The Court and Its Poets

Zauq

The career of Shaikh Muhammad Ibrahim Zauq is bound up with Akbar Shah II's court, and the Encyclopaedia of Islam's entry on him supplies the detail. Zauq came from a modest background — Dalrymple notes that his father had been a common footsoldier — and his reputation grew quickly. An old class-fellow, Mir Kazim Husayn, introduced him to Abu Zafar, the heir apparent, and Zauq was in due course appointed to correct the prince's poetical compositions, a post he held from roughly 1816. On presenting a qasida to Akbar Shah himself he received the title Khaqani-i Hind, the Khaqani of India — a comparison with the twelfth-century Persian panegyrist.

The terms in which Zauq addressed his patron are recorded in the same encyclopaedia's survey of the Urdu qasida, which notes that he called Akbar Shah II the shadow of God and the deputy of the Prophet of God, and treats the description as exaggeration of the kind the genre invited. The poet's biographer, the entry adds, defended such language on the ground that the person praised figures in the verse not as an individual but as a symbol of his time.

The gap between the title and the reality is the plainest measure of the reign. An emperor whose name had been struck off the Company's rupees was being addressed in his own court in the language of universal Islamic sovereignty.

The Delhi Flowering

Zauq was not an isolated figure. The Encyclopaedia of Islam describes the late Delhi court as hosting a final flowering of the classical period, with royal patronage encouraging a notable development of the masnavi on historical and romantic subjects. Zauq, who died in 1854 and is chiefly remembered for his qasidas, was the laureate; his contemporary Mu'min (1800–51) worked alongside him; and Ghalib, whose standing eventually eclipsed both, attended the court of Akbar Shah's successor. The court's literary life outlasted its political life by a generation.

Religious Patronage

Akbar Shah II's one documented act of architectural patronage is at the shrine of Nizam al-Din Awliya, the Chishti shaykh of fourteenth-century Delhi. The Encyclopaedia of Islam's survey of the city's monuments records that the shaykh's tomb dates from the time of Akbar, replacing an earlier structure built by Firuz Shah Tughluq, that it has been much restored since, and that the dome is an addition of Akbar Shah II in 1823.

The act fits the pattern of the reign. Patronage of a Chishti shrine cost little, asserted the emperor's standing as a Muslim sovereign in the one register still open to him, and placed his name on a building that the city's population actually visited. It was also at this shrine that his son Mirza Jahangir was buried two years before.

Ceremony, the Throne and the Summer Court

The Encyclopaedia of Islam records a detail that captures the court's circumstances exactly: later Mughal emperors, the penultimate one among them, are said to have had less costly replicas made of the Peacock Throne, the original having been carried off by Nadir Shah nearly seventy years before Akbar Shah's accession. The throne was reproduced because the ceremony required a throne; it was reproduced cheaply because the treasury could not do otherwise.

The court kept its annual rhythm. Mehrauli, some miles south of Shahjahanabad, held the Mughal summer palace and, beside it, the dargah of the Chishti shaykh Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki, known as Qutb Sahib; the emperor went there yearly. Processions remained the court's principal public statement, as they had been for two centuries, and under Akbar Shah's successor the routine continued: visits to Sufi shrines, the summer move to Mehrauli, the Id prayers at the old Id Gah, and the Phulwalon ki Sair, the flower-sellers' fair.

Death and Succession

Akbar Shah II died in 1837, in the thirty-first year of his reign. He was buried at Mehrauli, in the marble royal enclosure beside the Moti Masjid within the dargah complex of Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki, where the graves of Bahadur Shah I and of his own father Shah Alam II also lie. Abu Zafar succeeded him as Bahadur Shah II, taking the poetic name Zafar by which he is generally known, and reigned until 1858, when the British deposed and tried him after the uprising of 1857 and exiled him to Rangoon. He was the last of the dynasty.

Historiographical Note

The sources for this reign are thin, and the article reflects that. Akbar Shah II has no dedicated entry in either the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi or the Encyclopaedia of Islam. What the latter carries about him is scattered across entries written about other subjects — the poet Zauq, the monuments of Delhi, the Urdu qasida, the history of envoys, the Peacock Throne, Urdu literature — and amounts to half a dozen facts. The fullest continuous treatment in the approved sources is in William Dalrymple's history of his son's reign, where Akbar Shah appears chiefly as the father who tried to disinherit his heir. A sweep of the project's whole source base found no biography of him and no chronicle of his reign. Section 3 of this project's standards prefers a short article resting on established evidence to a longer one filled out with material that cannot be traced, and this article is short for that reason.

His birth year is not given here. No approved source consulted supplies it, so none is stated, and the date range in this article's metadata records his reign rather than his life. The regnal dates themselves are secure, appearing in three separate places in the Encyclopaedia of Islam as 1221–53 AH, 1806–37.

The year of Ghulam Qadir's capture of Delhi. Dalrymple's book gives this inconsistently: one passage places it in the summer of 1788, when Bahadur Shah Zafar was a boy of thirteen, and another in 1783, when Zafar was eight. Since Zafar was born in 1775, the two statements cannot both be right. The Encyclopaedia of Islam settles the point independently, dating Ghulam Qadir's capture of Delhi and the blinding of Shah Alam II to 1203 AH, 1788. That is the date used here.

Zauq's birth year. The Encyclopaedia of Islam gives it as 1789 in one entry and 1790 in another. This article gives only his death year, 1854, on which the two agree.

A name that invites a false identification. The Encyclopaedia of Islam's entry on Delhi lists, among the graves at the Nizam al-Din Awliya shrine, that of "Jahangir, son of Akbar II". This is Mirza Jahangir, who died in 1821, and not the emperor Jahangir, who reigned from 1605 to 1627. The two are separated by two centuries, and the coincidence of name is a trap for anyone compiling from the entry alone.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• Waqi'at-i Azfari, the memoir of the Mughal prince Azfari, begun at Murshidabad in 1211 AH, 1797, and completed at Madras in 1221 AH, 1806, which the Encyclopaedia of Islam describes as a valuable historical sketch of the rise of Ghulam Qadir Rohilla.
• Akbar Shah II's letter to Archibald Seton, British Resident at Delhi, 21 March 1807, on the succession, quoted in Dalrymple.
• Akbar Shah II's complaint to Calcutta of 1830 concerning the conduct of the Resident Francis Hawkins, quoted in Dalrymple.
• The qasidas of Zauq addressed to Akbar Shah II, discussed in The Encyclopaedia of Islam's entries on the poet and on the Urdu qasida.

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• 'Dihlī', The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 2 — the monuments of Delhi, including the dome added over the tomb of Nizam al-Din Awliya in 1823.
• 'Dhawk', The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 2 — Zauq's career and the title Khaqani-i Hind.
• 'Bahādur Shāh II', The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 1.
• 'Āzfarī', The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 1.
• 'Kasīda' (Urdu section), The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 5.
• 'Mustashār', The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 8 — the embassy of Ram Mohan Roy.
• 'Urdū' (literature), The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 10 — the late Delhi literary court.
• The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 10, on the Peacock Throne and its later replicas.
• William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857. London: Bloomsbury, 2006.

Further Reading

• Tanwir Ahmad Alawi's biography of Zauq, cited in The Encyclopaedia of Islam's entry on the Urdu qasida for its defence of the poet's panegyric language.
• Parliamentary Return No. 162 of 1859, East India (King of Delhi), cited in The Encyclopaedia of Islam's bibliography on the last Mughal, for the Company's own record of the Delhi court's finances and status.
• Percival Spear's studies of British Delhi, for the Residency's relations with the Mughal court.

Note: the works in this Further Reading list are offered to the reader for further study. Nothing in the body of this article rests on them.