![]() ![]() The Siege of Delhi was the Raj's Stalingrad: a fight to the death between two powers, neither of whom could retreat. When Zafar gave his blessing to a rebellion among the Company's own Indian troops, it transformed an army mutiny into the largest uprising the British Empire ever had to face. ![]() Then, in 1857, Zafar's flourishing capital became the centre of an uprising that reduced his beloved Delhi to a battered, empty ruin. Deprived of real political power by the East India Company, Zafar nevertheless succeeded in creating a court of great brilliance, and presided over one of the great cultural renaissances of Indian history. ![]() But while Zafar's Mughal ancestors had controlled most of India, the aged Zafar was king in name only. As the British Commissioner in charge insisted, 'No vestige should remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests.' Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last Mughal Emperor, was a mystic, a talented poet, and a skilled calligrapher. 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. ![]()
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