Through the ruins of Zafar Mahal

By William Dalrymple - Telegraph.co.uk - United Kingdom
Monday, October 2, 2006

India in the 18th century was a land of peaceful integration, with many English gentlemen 'going native'. But by the great mutiny of 1857 racism was rife and the British were loathed. William Dalrymple, whose new book tells how the Mughal empire was destroyed, explains what went wrong

Not far from my farm outside Delhi lies Zafar Mahal, the ruined summer palace of the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar II. It is a deeply melancholy place. The cusped arches of the chambers where Zafar held his mushairas, or poetic symposia, are collapsing; only pigeons declaim here today. Next to the domes of an old Sufi shrine lies the empty plot in which Zafar wished to be buried; a wish that was never fulfilled. At 4 am on October 7, 1858 – 332 years after the first Mughal Babur conquered Delhi –the last Emperor left the imperial city on a bullock cart, escorted by a troup of British Lancers to exile in Rangoon.

Zafar – the direct descendant of Genghis Khan and Timur – succeeded his father only in his mid-sixties, when it was too late for him to reverse the political decline of the Mughals. But he succeeded in creating a court of great brilliance. He was a skilled calligrapher, a profound writer on Sufism, a discriminating patron of miniature painters and an inspired creator of gardens. More remarkably, he was a serious mystical poet, and through his patronage there took place one of the greatest literary renaissances in Indian history. While the British took over more and more of the Mughal Emperor's power, the court busied itself in pursuit of the perfect Urdu couplet.

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Often, on winter afternoon walks while putting the book together last year, I would find myself wandering through the ruins of Zafar Mahal. As I looked out from its great gateway, I wondered what Zafar would have made of what happened to Delhi. I suspect he would somehow have managed to make his peace with the new cyber-India of call centres, software parks and back-office processing units that are now overpowering the last remnants of his world.

After all, realism and acceptance were always qualities Zafar excelled in. For all the tragedy of his life, he was able to see that the world continued to turn, and that, however much the dogs might bark, the great caravan of life moves on. As he wrote in a poem shortly after his imprisonment, and as Mughal Delhi lay in ruins around him:

Delhi was once a paradise,
Where Love held sway and reigned;
But its charm lies ravished now
And only ruins remain.

But things cannot remain, O Zafar,
Thus for who can tell?
Through God's great mercy and the Prophet
All may yet be well.

'The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857', by William Dalrymple, published by Bloomsbury, is available for £20 (rrp £25) plus £1.25 p&p, from Telegraph Books, 0870 428 4115