To them it was vital that Zafar should be put down, precisely because, having a Hindu mother, he appealed to both sides of India's own great religious division.ĭelhi, however, was a profoundly Muslim city at this time, unlike Lucknow, Calcutta and other centres that had found certain western habits attractive and were beginning to evolve into multicultural cities. He had been banished not so much for what he did during the mutiny as for what he represented to the mutineers - Hindus as well as Muslims - who regarded him as the touchstone of an old and deeply rooted way of life which the Victorian Evangelicals, who dominated the making and execution of British policy, were determined to replace with the prejudices and habits of muscular Christianity. For he died five years after the mutiny, in faraway Burma, a frail 87-year-old who was spoon-fed on broth by the handful of family and retainers he had been allowed to take with him into exile. The last emperor was also known to his familiars as Zafar - the pen name he used when writing poetry - a word which means 'victory' and which could scarcely have been less appropriate, given that it was attached to one of history's great losers. But now William Dalrymple has magnificently rescued him from near anonymity, and in doing so has greatly increased our understanding of what went on in the old Mughal capital at the time of the Indian mutiny. He has rarely rated more than a paragraph or two, sometimes only one sentence, and as often as not has been referred to merely as the King of Delhi - which is rather like describing the Pope as the Bishop of Rome in order to diminish him. History written by Britons has not been kind to Bahadur Shah II, even though he was the last of the Mughal emperors of India, a descendant of both Genghis Khan and Timur the Great (Marlowe's Tamburlaine), among others who are much better remembered.

The last mughal by william dalrymple