The Last Mughal

Probably most of those who committed this deed were themselves called to account to a Higher Power during their siege to answer for their sins.

We did not find a soul in the private apartments, and as to the plunder, the greatest part was the merest trash, and there was nothing whatever of any value.

“Alas my dear boy,” wrote Ghalib to a friend in January 1862. “This is not the Delhi in which you were born, not the Delhi in which you got your schooling, not the Delhi in which you used to come to your lessons with me, not the Delhi in which I have passed fifty-one years of my life.” It is a camp. The only Muslims here are artisans or servants of

They had created turbulence and chaos, but could not restore order. This was particularly fatal for them in the countryside around Delhi. Their failure to establish a well-governed “liberated area” or Mughal realm from which they could draw tax revenue, manpower and, most of all, food supplies ultimately proved the Delhi rebels’ single most disastr

Amid a rising sense of panic, only Mirza Mughal kept his head, saying that, as in a game of chess, as long as the king was next to the castle, “he was firmly seated beyond all fear of check mate.”

For the people of Delhi, the daily reality of what happened in 1857 was not so much liberation as violence, uncertainty and starvation. Indeed, reading through the Mutiny Papers there are times when it seems almost as if the siege of Delhi had become a three-cornered contest, with the sepoys and the British fighting it out, and with the people in D

Look at the lessons the Almighty has taught us: we used to be so fussy that we would reject the finest wheat and complain that our flour was too smelly and only good to be given to faqirs. Now we don’t hesitate to fight for the poorest left-overs from the bazaars.

One dies, and only intimate friends mourn—and how few they are.”

With the loss of the Mughal court went much of the city’s reputation as a centre of culture and learning. Its libraries had been looted, its precious manuscripts lost. The madrasas were almost all closed, and their buildings were again mostly bought up—and in time demolished—by Hindu moneylenders.