A stunning and bloody history of nineteenth-century India and the reign of the Last Mughal by the bestselling author of White Mughals
WINNER OF THE DUFF COOPER MEMORIAL PRIZE | LONGLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE
'Indispensable reading on both India and the Empire' Daily Telegraph
'Brims with life, colour and complexity . . . outstanding' Evening Standard
'A compulsively readable masterpiece' Brian Urquhart, The New York Review of Books
A stunning and bloody history of nineteenth-century India and the reign of the Last Mughal.
In May 1857 India's flourishing capital became the centre of the bloodiest rebellion the British Empire had ever faced. Once a city of cultural brilliance and learning, Delhi was reduced to a battered, empty ruin, and its ruler - Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last of the Great Mughals - was thrown into exile. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj's Stalingrad: a fight to the death between two powers, neither of whom could retreat.
The Last Mughal tells the story of the doomed Mughal capital, its tragic destruction, and the individuals caught up in one of the most terrible upheavals in history, as an army mutiny was transformed into the largest anti-colonial uprising to take place anywhere in the world in the entire course of the nineteenth century.
An
extraordinarily detailed and highly readable portrait of the last tragic months [of Mughal Delhi]. It is also a lament for a lost Islamic civilisation at its most tolerant and pluralistic . . . Dalrymple brings the Uprising alive from Indian and British perspectives . . . A
monumental work that breaks new ground in the study of one of the most important episodes in Indian history. Its lessons about the dangers of aggressive Western intrusion and interference in the East are as
pertinent today as they were 150 years ago
