On September 14, 1857, British Troops launched an attack on the besieged city of Delhi, bringing a bloody end to the sepoy mutiny by massacring not only the rebels, but also the ordinary citizens of the Mughal capital.
159 years later to the day, on a pleasant autumn evening in the capital city, memories of the faded grandeur of imperial Delhi hung heavy in the air as William Dalrymple sat down for a discussion on his most famous work, “The Last Mughal”.
The event which celebrated the Hindustani edition of Dalrymple’s magnum opus was also attended by its translator Zakia Zaheer and singer Vidya Shah.
The session at the Oxford Bookstore was marked by readings and music, and brought alive historical references for the audience, as the panel took them through the vivid descriptions of life from the Mughal era.
Dalrymple described how Bahadur Shah ‘Zafar’, the last of the Mughals, was someone who was “quite magnificiently unsuited to lead a revolution” of the scale of the 1857 mutiny.
“The face off was between two different worlds,” Dalrymple said.
A doomed romantic figure like Zafar on one side of the ring against the East India Company -- a force that was four times the size of the British Army in the year of the mutiny.
The East India Company was, as Dalrymple put it, like an an evil multinational corporation, with the difference that it had an army.
“For the last 100 years, we have been taught to think about colonialsim as the british coming here. But it is much worse than that -- it is a multinational corporation, like Union Carbide with armies, Google with weapons, Rio Tinto with infantry regiments,” he said.
The scale of killings on that fateful day was on a level that was infinitely greater than the massacre at Jalianwala Bagh, Dalrymple said.
English troops proceeded to systematically murder every able citizen at gunpoint, leaving the city of half a million people an empty ruin.
Zakia Zaheer who spent a year translating the book into Hindustani, meanwhile read out captivating excerpts from the translated version of the book, describing the majestic sheen of the Mughal court at a time when it still held some semblance of power.
The readings were intersperesed with soulful vocals by singer Vidya Shah, who has also worked with Dalrymple earlier in a concert based on the book.
