ABSTRACT
When the controversies were suddenly resumed in 1852, the arena had moved from Agra and Lucknow to the Mughal capital of Delhi. Why had Delhi remained so long impervious to Pfander's influence, in spite of the earlier response in Lucknow and the excitement in Agra in the mid 1840s, and why did the situation so suddenly change? It was argued in chapter two that the style of government favoured by the first few British Residents, notably David Ochterlony and Charles Metcalfe, was conducive to securing the acquiescence, if not the active collaboration, of the ashraf service classes of the old Mughal capital. Spear's dictum, 'Metcalfe's system was to have no system; its essential principle was to preserve the old intact', is no doubt an exaggeration, and more recent studies have favoured a more cynical interpretation of the Company's preservation of the facade of Mughal sovereignty.' Whatever the mixture of British motives, the administrative backwater surrounding the city of Delhi was certainly unique in the first three decades of Company rule in remaining a favoured enclave, sheltered from the new 'regulations' imposed in the rest of the Bengal Presidency, where its poets, artists and men of religious learning, were able to continue their traditional pursuits, aided in some cases, by the interest or financial patronage of particular British officers.? The late 1830s, marked by the accession in 1837 of the last Mughal king, Bahadur Shah Zafar, seems the appropriate point to re-examine the atmosphere in Delhi, allowing as it does, parallels to be drawn with the nearby city of Agra, recently re-elevated under British rule to the administrative importance which had once been Delhi's. This is the beginning of the era too, for which the term 'Delhi Renaissance' has been coined as descriptive of a specialized form of interaction occurring in one of the city's colleges, between its own scholars and Western scientific learning.'
