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Lot Essay
Bahadur Shah II was known from his penname as Zafar (meaning 'Victory'). Zafar was the last Mughal Emperor, and the direct descendant of Genghis Khan and Timur, of Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan. He was born in 1775, when the British were still a relatively modest and mainly coastal power in India, looking inwards from three enclaves on the Indian shore.
Zafar came late to the throne, succeeding his father only in his mid-sixties, when it was already impossible to reverse the political decline of the Mughals. But despite this he succeeded in creating around him in Delhi a court of great brilliance. Personally, he was one of the most talented, tolerant and likeable of his dynasty: a skilled calligrapher, a profound writer on Sufism, a discriminating patron of miniature painters, an inspired creator of gardens and an amateur architect. Most importantly he was a very serious mystical poet, who wrote not only in Urdu and Persian but Braj Basha and Punjabi, and partly through his patronage there took place arguably the greatest literary renaissance in modern Indian history. Himself a ghazal writer of great charm and accomplishment, Zafar also provided, through his court, a showcase for the talents of India's greatest lyric poet, Ghalib, and his rival Zauq- the Mughal poet laureate, and the Salieri to Ghalib's Mozart.
Then, on a May morning in 1857, three hundred mutinous sepoys from Meerut rode into Delhi, massacred every Christian man, woman and child they could find in the city, and declared Zafar to be their leader and Emperor. The great Mughal capital, caught in the middle of a remarkable cultural flowering, was turned overnight into a battleground. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj's Stalingrad: a fight to the death between two powers, neither of whom could retreat. There were unimaginable casualties, and on both sides the combatants were driven to the limits of physical and mental endurance. Finally, on the 14th September 1857, the British and their hastily assembled army of Sikh and Pathan levees assaulted and took the city, sacking and looting the Mughal capital, and massacring great swathes of the population.
Nevertheless, the following month Zafar was put on trial in the ruins of his old palace, and sentenced to transportation. He left his beloved Delhi on a bullock cart. Separated from everything he loved, broken hearted, the last of the Great Mughals died in exile in Rangoon on Friday 7th November 1862, aged 87.
- William Dalrymple, author of The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857, London, 2006.
Zafar came late to the throne, succeeding his father only in his mid-sixties, when it was already impossible to reverse the political decline of the Mughals. But despite this he succeeded in creating around him in Delhi a court of great brilliance. Personally, he was one of the most talented, tolerant and likeable of his dynasty: a skilled calligrapher, a profound writer on Sufism, a discriminating patron of miniature painters, an inspired creator of gardens and an amateur architect. Most importantly he was a very serious mystical poet, who wrote not only in Urdu and Persian but Braj Basha and Punjabi, and partly through his patronage there took place arguably the greatest literary renaissance in modern Indian history. Himself a ghazal writer of great charm and accomplishment, Zafar also provided, through his court, a showcase for the talents of India's greatest lyric poet, Ghalib, and his rival Zauq- the Mughal poet laureate, and the Salieri to Ghalib's Mozart.
Then, on a May morning in 1857, three hundred mutinous sepoys from Meerut rode into Delhi, massacred every Christian man, woman and child they could find in the city, and declared Zafar to be their leader and Emperor. The great Mughal capital, caught in the middle of a remarkable cultural flowering, was turned overnight into a battleground. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj's Stalingrad: a fight to the death between two powers, neither of whom could retreat. There were unimaginable casualties, and on both sides the combatants were driven to the limits of physical and mental endurance. Finally, on the 14th September 1857, the British and their hastily assembled army of Sikh and Pathan levees assaulted and took the city, sacking and looting the Mughal capital, and massacring great swathes of the population.
Nevertheless, the following month Zafar was put on trial in the ruins of his old palace, and sentenced to transportation. He left his beloved Delhi on a bullock cart. Separated from everything he loved, broken hearted, the last of the Great Mughals died in exile in Rangoon on Friday 7th November 1862, aged 87.
- William Dalrymple, author of The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857, London, 2006.