Even Though Much Literature On Bahadur Shah Zafar And The 1857 Revolt Exists, Mahdi Husain S Book Continues To Be Of Considerable Relevance To The Historians Of Modern India. It Is Rich In Details, And Offers A Dispassionate Interpretation Of The 1857 Revolt. The Book Brings Alive, To The Present-Day Reader, The Trauma Of Living In 1857, A Trauma That People Like Syed Ahmad Khan And The Poet Mirza Ghalib Experienced.

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.

Bahadur Shah Zafar, the poet-king, was catapulted into the limelight when the mutineers from Meerut arrived in Delhi on 11 May 1857. After the mutiny , the last of the great Mughals went on trial on 27 January 1858 for aiding and abetting the mutineers of 1857. The 21-day trial in the Diwan-i-Khas, the Hall of Special Audience, in Zafar s own palace, saw the British produce dozens of witnesses and documents to demonstrate Zafar s complicity in the Mutiny . He was eventually found guilty and exiled to Burma, where he died years later. The proceedings of this historic trial was first published in 1858, but has remained largely absent from studies and histories of colonial India. The current edition reproduces the text, documents and witness accounts of the day-by-day account of the trial. The Introduction, beginning with a short but comprehensive history of the East India Company and the Mutiny , places the trial in the context of the colonial state and its ideological structures. It then moves on to a reading of the trial s key narrative and rhetorical features. The text of the trial constitutes a great historical drama. The vast archive of evidence captures the theatre, the violence, the betrayals and the British anger. The legal arguments and eye-witness accounts reveal the human, political and bureaucratic dimensions of the trial of the nineteenth century. The Trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar makes for fascinating reading for the history buff and anyone interested in India 1857.

Translated by Mahmood Farooqui, with notes on the Mutiny Papers and governance in Delhi 1857 by the translator When Delhi lay under siege for five harrowing months in the summer of 1857, the people of the city described the events as ghadar: a time of turbulence. Resources within the besieged city fell dangerously low and locals found the rebelling sepoys presence and the increased levies insufferable. Nonetheless, an extraordinary effort was launched by the government of Bahadur Shah Zafar to fight the British. Thousands of labourers and tonnes of materials were mobilized, funds were gathered, the police monitored food prices and a functioning bureaucracy was vigilantly maintained right until the walled city s fall. Then, as Delhi was transformed by the victorious British, these everyday sacrifices and the efforts of thousands of people to save their country were lost forever. In this groundbreaking work, Mahmood Farooqui presents the first extensive translations into English of the Mutiny Papers documents dating from Delhi s 1857 siege, originally written in Persian and Shikastah Urdu. The translations include such fascinating pieces as the constitution of the Court of Mutineers, letters from soldiers threatening to leave Delhi if they were not paid their salaries, complaints to the police about unruly soldiers, and reports of troublesome courtesans, spies, faqirs, doctors, volunteers and harassed policemen. Shifting focus away from the conventional understanding of the events of 1857, these translations return ordinary and anonymous men and women back into the history of 1857. Besieged offers a view of how the rebel government of Delhi organized the essential requirements of war food and labour, soldiers salaries, arms and ammunition but more than that, this deeply evocative book reveals the hopes, beliefs and failures of a people who lived through the tragic end of an era.

A forensic look into the Sepoy rebellion at Meerut in 1857 and the three-month siege and capture of Delhi which followed.

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