topics: |  biography | history | british-india | mutiny

Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last Mughal Emperor, was a mystic, a talented
poet, and a skilled calligrapher, who, though deprived of real political
power by the East India Company, succeeded in creating a court of great
brilliance, and presided over one of the great cultural renaissances of
Indian history. In 1857 it was Zafar’s blessing to a rebellion among the
Company’s own Indian troops that transformed an army mutiny into the largest
uprising the British Empire ever had to face.

The Last Mughal is a portrait of the dazzling Delhi Zafar personified, and
the story of the last days of the great Mughal capital and its final
destruction in the catastrophe of 1857. Shaped from groundbreaking material,
William Dalrymple’s powerful retelling of this fateful course of events is an
extraordinary revisionist work with clear contemporary echoes. It is the
first account to present the Indian perspective on the siege, and has at its
heart the stories of the forgotten individuals tragically caught up in one of
the bloodiest upheavals in history.

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize for History 2007

1. A chessboard king  27
2. Believers and infidels
3. An uneasy equilibrium
4. The near approach of the storm
5. The sword of the lord of fury
6. This day of ruin and riot
7. A precarious position
8. Blood for blood
9. The turn of the tide
10. To shoot every soul
11. The city of the dead
12. The last of the great Mughals

Tobin Harshaw, NYT rev 07 apr 22

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. In his last
book, the excellent “White Mughals,” a doomed love affair between a British
civil servant and an Indian noblewoman served as an allegory for broader
social unraveling. Here he tackles the most obvious example, the Great
Mutiny of 1857, in which hundreds of thousands of mostly Hindu soldiers
turned murderously on their British officers and inexplicably made their
feeble Muslim monarch the figurehead of Asia’s first great anticolonial
uprising.

His coup in researching “The Last Mughal” was his uncovering, deep in the
National Archives of India, some 20,000 personal Persian and Urdu papers
written by Delhi residents who survived the uprising.

Why had historians not used these papers before? As Dalrymple explains, what
really happened doesn’t fit any fashionable academic dogmas: “The stories
that the collection contains allow the uprising to be seen not in terms of
nationalism, imperialism, orientalism or other such abstractions, but instead
as a human event of extraordinary, tragic and often capricious outcomes.”

As for the British, Dalrymple focuses on a few whose emotional
transformations are the most idiosyncratic: the gregarious son of a poisoned
British official is driven to homicidal rage in the battle to retake Delhi;
the editor of the city’s English-language daily becomes the leading voice in
the movement to raze the capital; the wife of a senior British officer gives
birth during her harrowing escape yet, almost alone among the participants,
retains her sanity and humanity.

Sanity, alas, is not Zafar’s strong suit, at least not by the time he flees
the city, only to dither on its outskirts and take refuge in the tomb of an
ancestor, Humayun. This is fitting, as Humayun, the second Mughal emperor,
was also more suited to poetry than politics and also lost his throne,
regaining it just in time to pass it along to his remarkable son Akbar in
1556.

No such fortune awaited Zafar: he was arrested, given a kangaroo trial and
exiled to Burma. What blame does he deserve for the bloody fiasco? Dalrymple
feels it is “difficult to see what more Zafar could have done,” but the
details he has so painstakingly assembled tend to undermine such sympathies.

Consider two events in the mutiny’s first week. On May 14, upset that some
Indian soldiers were defiling a beloved garden, he began “refusing audience
to all.” This was a threat to withdraw his imprimatur from their rebellion,
and the mutineers moved on. Two days later, when the rebels discovered 52
Europeans Zafar had hidden in the palace, the emperor “wept and besought the
mutineers not to take the lives of helpless women and children,” but stepped
aside as the executioners went to work.

At the pivotal moment of his doomed reign, Zafar concentrated not on his role
as a leader of men or on the sparing of innocent lives, but rather on his
flowers. Deep in their tombs, one suspects, Humayun sympathized, Aurangzeb
scoffed and Genghis Khan wept silent tears.

http://www.waterbridgereview.org/062007/rvw_last.php

How did the British defuse the situation and restore order? They ultimately
proved to be the more capable commanders, resisting a long attack outside of
Delhi with a few soldiers (mostly men of the same ethnic descent as the
rebels) until reinforcements arrived. Significantly, their intelligence
services trumped those of the mutineers, who seem oblivious to the importance
of having people inside the firengi (foreigners') organizations. They also
displayed military experience and prowess that enabled eventual victory in
spite of the significant advantages that the rebels squandered because of
poor leadership and lack of conviction.

The situation degrades sickeningly as the British start to regain
control. Within the city, the rebels sink to any depth in a last-ditch
attempt to repulse the infidels, pillaging, torturing, and extorting whatever
might be useful from those most likely in possession. The British
successfully assault the city in a chapter Dalrymple titles "To Shoot Every
Soul." The same roving gangs who decimated the British refugees a few months
earlier cut down fleeing inhabitants, and in the midst of it all, a solar
eclipse petrifies and paralyzes the rebels, as if in some Biblical
account. Meanwhile, the British calmly assign their "Prize Agents" to
allocate the spoils of war to those who remained loyal to the Crown.

Other reviews

The tale of two empires
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/oct/22/biography.features2

William Dalrymple's penchant for bashing the West mars an otherwise
impeccable biography of the last Mughal, says Rachel Aspden

For the last 17 years, William Dalrymple's travel and history books have
celebrated syncretism. Nothing pleases him more than the 'fluidity' and
'tolerance' displayed by such champion integrators as Sir David Ochterlony,
who processed around 19th-century Delhi each evening with his 13 Indian
wives, each on the back of her own lavishly caparisoned elephant.

The real villains of The Last Mughal are the brutal, narrow-minded British
military and civil administrators. When they insist the elderly emperor is
'the evil genius and linchpin behind an international Muslim conspiracy', the
parallels Dalrymple draws between the sack of Delhi and recent Western
misadventures in the Middle East suddenly come alive. Like their counterparts
in the Green Zone, the victors are ostentatiously righteous (celebrating the
fact that Zafar's throne room, which 'once echoed to the mandates of a
despotic emperor ... now echoed the peaceful prayers of a Christian people')
and legally bankrupt. Show trials of the imperial family, which invariably
resulted in the death sentence, were a legal nonsense, as the company still
owed Zafar the allegiance it had sworn his family in the 18th century.