The Last Mughal: The fall of a dynasty, Delhi, 1857 by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury, 2006)Public and Private Tragedies:
Voices of the Indian Mutiny
William Dalrymple
Bahadur Shah Zafar II (1775–1862), the last Mughal emperor, presided over one of the greatest cultural renaissances of Indian history. But while his ancestors had controlled most of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the 82-year-old Zafar was king in name only.
However, when, in 1857, he gave his blessing to a rebellion among the East India Company’s own Indian troops, it transformed an army mutiny into the largest uprising the British empire had ever faced. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj’s Stalingrad: a fight to the death between two powers, neither of whom could retreat. For Zafar, it led to an anonymous grave in a prison and his beloved Delhi becoming a battered, empty ruin.
In this article, prize-winning historian William Dalrymple describes how, while researching Zafar’s life and the Indian Mutiny, he came across previously unknown papers containing eyewitness accounts by the individuals caught up in the crisis. And he draws startling parallels between Zafar’s world and our own.
