The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 » (Reprint)

William Dalrymple is the author of five acclaimed works of history and travel, including City of Djinns, which won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; the best-selling From the Holy Mountain; and White Mughals, which won Britain’s most prestigious history prize, the Wolfson. He divides his time between New Delhi and London, and is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The Guardian.

On a hazy November afternoon in Rangoon, 1862, a shrouded corpse was escorted by a small group of British soldiers to an anonymous grave in a prison enclosure. As the British Commissioner in charge insisted, “No vestige will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests.”

Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last Mughal Emperor, was a mystic, an accomplished poet and a skilled calligrapher. But while his Mughal ancestors had controlled most of India, the aged Zafar was king in name only. Deprived of real political power by the East India Company, he nevertheless succeeded in creating a court of great brilliance, and presided over one of the great cultural renaissances of Indian history.

Then, in 1857, Zafar gave his blessing to a rebellion among the Company’s own Indian troops, thereby transforming an army mutiny into the largest uprising any empire had to face in the entire course of the nineteenth century. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj’s Stalingrad: one of the most horrific events in the history of Empire, in which thousands on both sides died. And when the British took the city—securing their hold on the subcontinent for the next ninety years—tens of thousands more Indians were executed, including all but two of Zafar’s sixteen sons. By the end of the four-month siege, Delhi was reduced to a battered, empty ruin, and Zafar was sentenced to exile in Burma. There he died, the last Mughal ruler in a line that stretched back to the sixteenth century.

Award-winning historian and travel writer William Dalrymple shapes his powerful retelling of this fateful course of events from groundbreakingmaterial: previously unexamined Urdu and Persian manuscripts that include Indian eyewitness accounts and records of the Delhi courts, police and administration during the siege. The Last Mughal is a revelatory work—the first to present the Indian perspective on the fall of Delhi—and has as its heart both the dazzling capital personified by Zafar and the stories of the individuals tragically caught up in one of the bloodiest upheavals in history.

The New York Times - Tobin Harshaw

While Zafar is the title character of The Last Mughal, his life is just the thread along which William Dalrymple continues to explore a theme that has fascinated him for two decades: the utter collapse of relations between the British and the inhabitants of their Indian dominions…Dalrymple excels at bringing grand historical events within contemporary understanding by documenting the way people went about their lives amid the maelstrom.

Maps     viii
Dramatis Personae     xi
Acknowledgements     xxi
Introduction     3
A Chessboard King     29
Believers and Infidels     57
An Uneasy Equilibrium     81
The Near Approach of the Storm     107
The Sword of the Lord of Fury     134
This Day of Ruin and Riot     180
A Precarious Position     213
Blood for Blood     238
The Turn of the Tide     282
To Shoot Every Soul     320
The City of the Dead     363
The Last of the Great Mughals     412
Glossary     449
Notes     457
Bibliography     503
Index     513
Illustrations     533