The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857

The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857
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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, â€œNo vestige will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests.â€

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 Companyâ€™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 Rajâ€™s Stalingrad: one of theÂ most horrific events in the history of Empire, in which thousands on both sides died. And when the British took the cityâ€”securing their hold on the subcontinent for the next ninety yearsâ€”tens of thousands more Indians were executed, including allÂ but twoÂ of Zafarâ€™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 workâ€”the first to present the Indian perspective on the fall of Delhiâ€”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.
Country USA
Brand Knopf
Manufacturer Knopf
Binding Hardcover
ReleaseDate 2007-03-27
UnitCount 1
Format Deckle Edge
EANs 9781400043101

Country	USA
Brand	Knopf
Manufacturer	Knopf
Binding	Hardcover
ReleaseDate	2007-03-27
UnitCount	1
Format	Deckle Edge
EANs	9781400043101

The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857

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