The Last Mughal

The courage of the sepoys invariably impressed their old officers; their tactics did not. The massed bodies of troops certainly looked magnificent when seen from the city walls—Zahir Dehlavi thought the contest was “a strange and fascinating war which one had never heard of or seen before, for both the armies belonged to the British government, and

You do not realize that in public life a man must use his reason rather than give way to his emotions. If we try to dissuade the rebels now they will kill us before they kill the English, and then they will kill the King.”

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

“Never fear Mister Barter sir, we ain’t agoing to turn.” And on they went quietly closing up the gap made by their fallen comrades.

They have gone far ahead of our Oriental forebears. Wind and wave they have rendered useless. They are sailing their ships under fire and steam.

It was not just that most of the sepoys totally refused to touch the new rifles. More dangerously still, the idea quickly gained acceptance that the mistake was far from accidental and was part of a wider Company conspiracy to break the sepoys’ caste and ritual purity before embarking on a project of mass conversion.

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.

civilisation championed by Akbar, Dara Shukoh or the later Mughal Emperors has only a limited resonance for the urban middle class in modern India. Many of these are now deeply ambivalent about the achievements of the Mughals, even if they will still happily eat a Mughal meal, or flock to the cinema to watch a Bollywood Mughal epic, or indeed head

What Ghalib was describing was in fact a very reduced version of the plan, originally mooted by the Lahore Chronicle, to completely level Delhi as a punishment for being the centre of the defeated rebellion.