The Last Mughal: A Story of Bahadur Shah Zafar

This is not a novel of crime fiction. Though it has plenty of intrigue, murder, mayhem, blood and gore, it is a work of serious scholarship of a horrendous episode in Indo-British relationships based on hitherto untapped archival material gathering dust in India, Pakistan, England and Burma. It shows the way history should be written: not as a catalogue of dry-as-dust kings, battles and treaties but to bring the past to the present, put life back in characters long dead and gone and make the reader feel he is living among them, sharing their joys, sorrows and apprehensions. Those who have read the City of Djinns and the White Mughals must have sensed that only William Dalrymple could have written The Last Mughal. Though a white Scotsman, he has no racial prejudices against browns or blacks: if anything, he is biased against his own people and in favour of those they wronged. It makes great reading.

The rebellion of 1857 lasted only a few months—from May to September 1857—but it shook the whole of India like a severe earthquake, taking a toll of thousands of lives.

Its epicentre was Delhi, the capital of the Mughal empire founded by Babar in 1526. By the time it struck, the empire had shrunk to a few square miles around the city. As the adage went: Sultanat Shah Alam az Dilli ta Palam—the kingdom of Shah Alam extends from Delhi to Palam. By the time the last of the emperors ascended the throne, it had shrunk further and was confined to Red Fort; his subjects comprised his vast harem of begums, concubines, their offspring, maidservants and manservants, most of them living in hovels without much to eat. The fort was guarded by an English officer; the so-called emperor received a living allowance from the British Resident and had little to do with governance. He spent his time composing poetry, practising calligraphy, watching his elephants being bathed in the Yamuna, and praying. Once in a while, he rode on his favourite elephant to the royal mosque, Jama Masjid, amid bursts of fireworks, or visited his wife's relations in the city. What he most looked forward to was holding poetic symposia (mushairas) in the Red Fort or in Delhi College outside Ajmeri Gate where his latest composition was read out first, followed by recitals of other poets, both Indian and European. The mushairas usually ended with recitals by masters like poet laureate Zauq and the greatest of them all, Mirza Asadullah Ghalib, in the early hours of the morning. As Ghalib put it, the candle burns brightest before it flickers and dies out.

A few decades before the outbreak, relations between Indians and Britons were reasonably amicable. Quite a few Britishers acquired Indian customs and styles of living, spoke Persian and Urdu; some married native women. Sir David Ochterlony had 13 bibis in his harem, James Skinner (Sikander Sahib) had 14. Besides building St James Church at Kashmere Gate, Colonel Skinner built a mosque for his Muslim wives and a temple for the Hindus. They wore Indian clothes, ate Indian food and smoked hookahs. It was one-way matrimonial traffic. Nubile English girls who came to India were not willing to share their nuptial beds with rival wives. But there was the Kashmiri dancing girl Farzana Zebunnissa who converted to Catholicism, cohabited with whites and carved out a principality of her own and became Begum Samru of Sardana near Meerut.

Relations between whites and natives began to sour with the aggressive evangelical zeal of clerics who attempted to convert Indians to Christianity. The Christian missionaries were confronted by jehadi elements from madrassas who looked down on both Christians and Hindus as infidels. However, the English topped the jehadis' hate list.

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