Delhi remembers the Last Mughal

New Delhi, Nov 1 (UNI) Hukahs, hukumnamas and ghazals recreated the famed Delhi Durbar of Bahadur Shah Zafar yesterday for the launch of a fascinating book on the last Mughal emperor.

British historian William Dalrymple took yet another peep into his adopted city with 'The Last Mughal:The Fall of Dynasty.Delhi 1857', a revealing account of the life and times of the city during the First War of Independence.

The British Council campus was lit with oil lamps and hukahs were kept on the stage as ghazal singers from the Old City enthralled a packed audience.

''Kitna hai badnaseeb Zafar dafan keliye/Do gaj zameen bhi na mili sou yaar main,'' sang Urdu scholar Mahmood Farooqui capturing the essence of the book in the emperor's own words before he died in exile in faraway Burma (now Myanmar)---How unfortunate is Zafar that for his burial he could not get two yards of land in his beloved's name.

Wearing a white salvar-kurta, Dalrymple, who shares his time between Delhi, Scotland (his birthplace) and London, read from his book between the ghazals, all about Zafar.

''At 4 p.m. on a hazy, humid winter's afternoon in Rangoon in November 1862, soon after the end of the monsoon, a shrouded corpse was escorted by a small group of British soldiers to an anonymous grave at the back of a walled prison enclosure,'' begins the book, the story of the last days of the great Mughal capital and its destruction in 1857.

Zafar, who found himself leading Hindus and Muslims in the 1857 revolt against the British, was buried in Rangoon (Myanmarese capital now called Yangoon) without lamentation or panegyrics.

Coming after the 'City of Djinns' and the 'White Mughals', the narration of the story of Zafar had been an arduous journey for Dalrymple into spaces of the national archives never ventured into before.

Told with the help of nearly a hundred pages (out of the total 579) of glossary, notes, bibliography and index, 'The Last Mughal' is claimed as the first account to present the Indian perspective on the 1857 war.

UNI FZ RL DB1345