'By God Delhi is not a city now, it is a desert ... Sometimes I wonder if it was only in my dreams that there was once a city by this name in the dominions of India.'
At 4pm on a dark, wet winter's evening in November 1862, a cheap plywood coffin was buried to the eerie sound of silence: no lamentations, no panegyrics, for as the British Commissioner in charge of the funeral insisted, 'No vesting will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests.' The last of the Great Mughals was Bahadur Shah Zafar II: one of the most talented, tolerant and likeable of his remarkable dynasty, he found himself in the position of leader of a violent uprising he knew from the start would lead to irreparable carnage. Zafar's frantic efforts to unite his disparate and mutually suspicious forces proved tragically futile: the Siege of Delhi was the Raj's Stalingrad, and Mughal Delhi was left an empty ruin, haunted by battered remnants of a past that was being rapidly and brutally overwritten. 'The Last Mughal' charts the desecration and demise of a man, his dynasty, his city and civilizations mercilessly ravished by fractured forces and vengeful British troops. William Dalrymple unearths groundbreaking new material to create the first English account of the life of the last Emperor, and the first narrative of the Mutiny to contain large quantities of material from the Indian perspective. 'The Last Mughal' rapidly changes our understanding of a pivotal moment in Indian and Imperial history.
