The Last Mughal

On 11 September, the British began co-ordinating the firing of all their guns, so that the shot struck the walls simultaneously in great deafening salvoes. By midday, the city walls were finally beginning to crumble, “sending up clouds of dust, and bringing the masonry down into the ditch.”

Thanks to the Maharaja’s guards, Ghalib was one of the only citizens of Delhi to remain unmolested in his house, and almost the only member of the courtly elite to survive the fall of Delhi with his property, such as it was, intact.

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.

For the British after 1857, the Indian Muslim became an almost subhuman creature, to be classified in unembarrassedly racist imperial literature alongside such other despised and subject specimens, such as Irish Catholics or “the Wandering Jew.”

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.

But while Zafar was certainly never cut out to be a heroic or revolutionary leader, he remains, like his ancestor the Emperor Akbar, an attractive symbol of Islamic civilisation at its most tolerant and pluralistic. He was himself a notable poet and calligrapher; his court contained some of the most talented artistic and literary figures in modern

Throughout the autumn and the early part of the winter of 1857, while the battle for Lucknow still raged in the eastern half of Hindustan, much of the effort of British administration in Delhi went into preparing for the historic trial of the man who was now clearly going to be the last of the Mughals.

Almost alone of his class, Ghalib had, without leaving the city, survived the cataclysm that destroyed Delhi. But now he had to face the intense loneliness of the sole survivor—a

Following the crushing of the Uprising, and the uprooting and slaughter of the Delhi court, the Indian Muslims themselves also divided down two opposing paths: one, championed by the great Anglophile Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, looked to the West, and believed that Indian Muslims could revive their fortunes only by embracing Western learning.