Now this is one book that will pique your interest in history. Scottish travel writer and historian William Darlymple comes up with The Last Mughal, a groundbreaking work that poignantly portrays the events that occurred in and around Delhi during the Revolt of 1857. The Last Mughal is a refreshingly new perspective of the Revolt of 1857 and probably the first ever to present the viewpoints of ordinary people who lived during that tumultuous age.

The Last Mughal is not a biography of the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, though he is one of the major characters; instead, it is an account of the Indo-Islamic civilisation which he represented. It also deals with the fall of Delhi in the face of the uninvited arrival of the mutinous Indian soldiers of the British Army, and then its destruction at the hands of the British invaders. At the end of the Revolt, Bahadur Shah Zafar was put on trial for treason, his beautiful capital was ransacked and destroyed, his palace [an architectural marvel] was detonated and a British barracks was constructed within it, and the composite Hindu-Islamic culture he stood for had been eliminated.

Over the past four years, Darlymple tirelessly worked through many of the nearly 20,000 virtually unused Persian and Urdu documents relating to Delhi in 1857, known as the Mutiny Papers, found on the shelves of the National Archives of India. These documents allowed 1857 in Delhi to be seen for the first time from a properly Indian perspective and not just from the British sources it has been viewed through to date. Meanwhile, the Delhi Commissioner’s Office Archive contained the records of the reviled British administration, which describe the full scale of the viciousness and brutality they unleashed in the city after regaining it. Darlymple was also able to gain access to the Punjab Archive in Lahore, which contained the complete pre-Mutiny records of the British Residency in Delhi. And a visit to Rangoon yielded Bahadur Shah Zafar’s prison records.

Using all these disparate sources, Darlymple succeeds in creating a masterpiece that challenges the existing theories about the Revolt. Instead of the single coherent mutiny or patriotic national war of independence beloved of Victorian or Indian nationalist historians, Darlymple says that there was in reality a chain of very different uprisings and acts of resistance that were determined by local and regional factors.

Darlymple sets the stage by introducing the main characters and describing how people lived in Delhi in the 19th century. The city of Shahjahanabad becomes alive through his marvellous prose and we begin to get an idea of the problems that the people faced. Bahadur Shah Zafar was an emperor only in name when he succeeded his father, but he managed to create a court of great brilliance and fostered a literary renaissance. He was extremely talented — an expert in calligraphy, versatile poet, architect, Sufi mystic, patron of painting and much more; but he was not an able king and had a tendency to be indecisive, his greatest failing.