The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi,

1857 by William Dalrymple

Free download audio book.

Original Title: The Last Mughal

ISBN: 1400043107
ISBN13: 9781400043101
Autor: William Dalrymple
Rating: 4.8 of 5 stars (4591) counts
Original Format: Hardcover, 560 pages
Download Format: PDF, TXT, ePub, iBook.
Published: March 27th 2007 / by Knopf / (first published 2006)
Language: English
Genre(s):
History- 280 users
Cultural >India- 140 users
Nonfiction- 118 users
Biography- 24 users

Description:

On a hazy November afternoon in Rangoon, 1862, a shrouded corpse was escorted by a small
group of British soldiers to an anonymous grave in a prison enclosure. As the British
Commissioner in charge insisted, No vestige will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great
Moghuls rests.

Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last Mughal Emperor, was a mystic, an accomplished poet and a
skilled calligrapher. But while his Mughal ancestors had controlled most of India, the aged Zafar
was king in name only. Deprived of real political power by the East India Company, he
nevertheless succeeded in creating a court of great brilliance, and presided over one of the great
cultural renaissances of Indian history.

Then, in 1857, Zafar gave his blessing to a rebellion among the Companys own Indian troops,
thereby transforming an army mutiny into the largest uprising any empire had to face in the entire
course of the nineteenth century. The Siege of Delhi was the Rajs Stalingrad: one of themost
horrific events in the history of Empire, in which thousands on both sides died. And when the
British took the citysecuring their hold on the subcontinent for the next ninety yearstens of
thousands more Indians were executed, including allbut twoof Zafars sixteen sons. By the end of
the four-month siege, Delhi was reduced to a battered, empty ruin, and Zafar was sentenced to
exile in Burma. There he died, the last Mughal ruler in a line that stretched back to the sixteenth
century.

Award-winning historian and travel writer William Dalrymple shapes his powerful retelling of this
fateful course of events from groundbreaking material: previously unexamined Urdu and Persian
manuscripts that include Indian eyewitness accounts and records of the Delhi courts, police and
administration during the siege. The Last Mughal is a revelatory workthe first to present the
Indian perspective on the fall of Delhiand has as its heart both the dazzling capital personified
by Zafar and the stories of the individuals tragically caught up in one of the bloodiest upheavals in
history.
About Author:

William Dalrymple was born in Scotland and brought up on the shores of the Firth of Forth. He
wrote the highly acclaimed bestseller In Xanadu when he was twenty-two. The book won the 1990
Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and a Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award; it was also
shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize.
In 1989 Dalrymple moved to Delhi where he lived for six years researching his second book, City
of Djinns, which won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young
British Writer of the Year Award. From the Holy Mountain, his acclaimed study of the demise of
Christianity in its Middle Eastern homeland, was awarded the Scottish Arts Council Autumn Book
Award for 1997; it was also shortlisted for the 1998 Thomas Cook Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys
Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. A collection of his writings about India, The Age of Kali, won the
French Prix DAstrolabe in 2005.
White Mughals was published in 2003, the book won the Wolfson Prize for History 2003, the
Scottish Book of the Year Prize, and was shortlisted for the PEN History Award, the Kiryama Prize
and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
William Dalrymple is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Asiatic Society,
and is the founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival.
In 2002 he was awarded the Mungo Park Medal by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for
his outstanding contribution to travel literature. He wrote and presented the television series
Stones of the Raj and Indian Journeys, which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary
Series at BAFTA in 2002. His Radio 4 series on the history of British spirituality and mysticism,
The Long Search, won the 2002 Sandford St Martin Prize for Religious Broadcasting and was
described by the judges as thrilling in its brilliance... near perfect radio. In December 2005 his
article on the madrasas of Pakistan was awarded the prize for Best Print Article of the Year at the
2005 FPA Media Awards. In June 2006 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters honoris
causa by the University of St Andrews for his services to literature and international relations, to
broadcasting and understanding. In 2007, The Last Moghal won the prestigous Duff Cooper Prize
for History and Biography. In November 2007, William received an Honourary Doctorate of Letters,
honoris causa, from the University of Lucknow University for his outstanding contribution in
literature and history, and in March 2008 won the James Todd Memorial Prize from the Maharana
of Udaipur.
William is married to the artist Olivia Fraser, and they have three children. They now live on a farm
outside Delhi.

Other Editions:

- The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 (Paperback)

- The Last Mughal : the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 (Paperback)

- The Last Mughal (ebook)

- The Last Mughal (Kindle Edition)

- The Last Mughal: The Fall Of A Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 (Paperback)

Books By Author:
- City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

- Nine Lives

- White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India

- In Xanadu: A Quest
 - The Age of Kali: Indian Travels & Encounters

Books In The Series:

Related Books On Our Site:

- Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India

- Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River

- India: A History
 - The Wonder That Was India: A Survey of the History and Culture of the Indian
Sub-Continent before the coming of the Muslims

- The Mughal Throne

- The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan

- Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire

 - Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres and The Indian Mutiny
Of 1857

- Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During
World War II

- Makers of Modern India

- His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle against
Empire
- India: A Million Mutinies Now

- The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity

- In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India

- The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to Ad 1300: Volume 1
 - Everybody Loves a Good Drought

- A Brief History of the Great Moghuls

- The Discovery of India

Rewiews:
Nov 06, 2015
Hana
Rated it: it was amazing
Recommended to Hana by:
Jibran
Shelves: history-and-bio, india-subcontinent, 2015-reads, library-has, 18th-19th-century
I have lived with this book for months. Even now I hesitate to write this review because it feels too
much like saying goodbye. I dont want to leave this world and these peopleI dont want to
remember that they are all dead and that a once glorious civilization is gone forever.

I had ordered a whole bunch of books on Near East and Islamic history and this one arrived at the
library first. My intention was to work forward from ancient times to the present day. But then I saw
from the cover that
I have lived with this book for months. Even now I hesitate to write this review because it feels too
much like saying goodbye. I dont want to leave this world and these peopleI dont want to
remember that they are all dead and that a once glorious civilization is gone forever.

I had ordered a whole bunch of books on Near East and Islamic history and this one arrived at the
library first. My intention was to work forward from ancient times to the present day. But then I saw
from the cover that most of the action in this happens in the fateful year of 1857--exactly the time
setting of novel I was reading Shadow of the Moon. The coincidence was clearly the Working of
Fate, so I surrendered to the tides of time and plunged into the waters of the River Jumna to relive
the last days of Zafar: mystic, poet, calligrapher--and doomed heir to the Mughal throne.
Dalrymple and his research team spent over four years in India uncovering and often translating
for the first time vast treasure troves of documentary material, much of which had not been
touched since it was gathered in 1857: The Mutiny Papers (100,000 Persian and Urdu documents
from the National Archives of India filled with detail about court and ordinary life in Dehli); Urdu
newspaper archives; the Dehli Commissioners Office Archive; previously untranslated first person
Mughal accounts (including a moving memoire from a court poet); the rarely accessed Punjab and
Rangoon Archives; pre-Mutiny records of the British Residency in Delhi (including spies reports
and correspondence between the British Resident and his superiors).

Yet nothing about this book is dry. This is history at its very best--vivid, immersive and
compulsively readable. Dalrymple makes Delhi so real that I, too, heard in the silence that
followed the end of the call to prayer, the songs of the first Delhi birds...the argumentative chuckle
of the babblers, the sharp chatter of the mynahs, the alternating clucking and squealing of the rosy
parakeets, the angry exclamation of the brain fever bird, and from deep inside the canopy of the
fruit trees in Zafar's gardens...the woody hot-weather echo of the koel.

Dalrymple's gift is both erudition--the deep knowledge of a scholar who immerses himself in every
possible resource--and empathy. Perhaps above all--empathy. I defy anyone who reads this with
an open mind and heart to leave the story of this world-changing moment in history without
thinking--
if only
....
33 likes
15 comments
Fionnuala
vivid, immersive and compulsively readable
That describes Dalrymple's style very well - but also your own in this review.
I see you're moving on to boo
vivid, immersive and compulsively readable
That describes Dalrymple's style very well - but also your own in this review.
I see you're moving on to books about the Persian empire. You might be interested in The Woman
Who Read Too Much set around 1857 coincidently, about a woman poet and scribe in the court of
the Shah.

Nov 06, 2015 12:28PM

Mike
Excellent review and fantastic pictures in your updates. Agree with "once glorious civilization is
gone forever." Especially that culture's "tolerance
Excellent review and fantastic pictures in your updates. Agree with "once glorious civilization is
gone forever." Especially that culture's "tolerance" for others, something we could use more of
now.

Mar 15, 2016 07:07PM