The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty : Delhi, 1857Alfred A. Knopf, 2007 - 534 էջ 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 groundbreaking material: 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. |
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Archives army arrived August Bahadur Shah Bakhsh Bakht Khan Baqar Begum British Library Calcutta camp cavalry Chandni Chowk Christian Collection court Dastan i-Ghadr death Delhi College Delhi Gazette diary Edward Emperor English entry father Fraser Ghalib Greathed Gujars guns Hakim Ahsanullah Khan Hindu Hodson horse Ibid India Islamic Jama Masjid Jennings jihadis Kashmiri Gate killed King Lahore letter London looted madrasas Mahbub Ali Khan Maulvi Meerut Mehrauli Metcalfe Mirza Fakhru Mirza Jawan Bakht Mirza Mughal Mobarak Shah Mubarak Muhammad Muslim Mutiny Papers Native Narratives Nawab Nicholson night Ochterlony officers OIOC Ommaney outbreak Palace Intelligence poet Precis of Palace princes prisoners Punjab rebel Red Fort regiment Ridge Sahib Saunders sawars sent sepoys September 1857 shot Siege of Delhi Sir Thomas soldiers Sufi Theo Tilangas troops Uprising Urdu Akbhar Vibart Wagentrieber walls White Mughals wife wrote Zafar Zahir Dehlavi Zauq Zinat Mahal