He draws a series of very heavy-handed analogies between the events of the 1850s and those of today. So: good job!īut one problem: Dalrymple is a relentlessly present-minded writer. Reviewers who know much more about Indian history than I do agree that Dalrymple has cast light on many previously obscure events and solved some important outstanding mysteries. Dalrymple deserves enormous credit for the painstaking archival work he has done to bring new insight into a till now poorly understood story, and to bring to immediate life characters most of us had glimpsed only in outline. How Zafar made this choice - what precisely happened - has never been well understood. The aged Mughal emperor (Dalrymple usually refers to him as Zafar, the name under which he wrote poetry of still-controverted merit) hesitated - and then threw in his lot with the mutineers.

The British population was massacred, the latest in a series of atrocities up and down the North Indian plain. The revolting sepoys - the mercenary soldiers of the British East India Company - besieged and captured Delhi in May 1857. Progressively hemmed in by the British, deprived first of all remnants of power, then even of his title of emperor (the British called him “the King of Delhi”), and then ultimately even of control of his personal jewels, this indecisive old man found himself at the center of a terrible civil war. Few can be as well written as The Last Mughal, which focuses closely on the pathetic story of the last of the emperors of the dynasty of Babur and Akbar, Bahadur Shah II. There is no shortage of books on the Indian Mutiny, although I have to confess that I have not read very many of them. It’s a marvelous sensory experience, marred only by the one sound that we never do seem to hear: the ring of truth.

We hear the plash of fountains in courtyards, the chant of Urdu poetry, the calls of street sellers we see the gaudy colors and smell the spices of the east. Dalrymple’s depiction of the city is unabashedly nostalgic.

In The Last Mughal, William Dalrymple evokes a lost world: old Delhi before the Indian Mutiny and the ensuing destruction of much of the venerable capital of the Mughals.

The last mughal