The Mughal House of Timur ruled most of South Asia for more than two hundred years and became arguably the greatest dynasty in Indian history.Zafar was the last Mughal Emperor, and the descendant of the great world-conquerors Genghis Khan and Timur.That the rebels fatefully raised the flag of jihad and dubbed themselves 'mujahedin' only adds to the mutiny's contemporary relevance. Thanks to them Dalrymple can vividly recreate, virtually at street level, the life and death of one of the most glorious and progressive empires ever seen. Dalrymple (White Mughals), however, is primarily concerned with compiling 'a portrait of the Delhi he personified, a narrative of the last days of the Mughal capital and its final destruction.' In this task, he has been immeasurably aided by his discovery of a colossal trove of documents in Indian national archives in Delhi and elsewhere. Zafar died five years later in penury and exile. British besiegers took the capital in September 1857, followed by massacre, purges and destruction. Bahadur, more familiarly known as Zafar, was a reluctant revolutionary: the mutinous sepoys who had murdered every Christian in Delhi proclaimed him their commander, an honor he hadn't sought. In time for the 150th anniversary of the Great Mutiny, the uprising that came close to toppling British rule in India, Dalrymple presents a brilliant, evocative exploration of a doomed world and its final emperor, Bahadur Shah II, descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane.

With an unsurpassed understanding of British and Indian history, Dalrymple crafts a provocative, revelatory account of one the bloodiest upheavals in history. Four months later, the British took Delhi, the capital, with catastrophic results. When, in May 1857, Zafar was declared the leader of an uprising against the British, he was powerless to resist though he strongly suspected that the action was doomed.

All the while, the British were progressively taking over the Emperor's power.

Nonetheless, Zafar-a mystic, poet, and calligrapher of great accomplishment-created a court of unparalleled brilliance, and gave rise to perhaps the greatest literary renaissance in modern Indian history.

The last Mughal emperor, Zafar, came to the throne when the political power of the Mughals was already in steep decline. In this evocative study of the fall of the Mughal Empire and the beginning of the Raj, award-winning historian William Dalrymple uses previously undiscovered sources to investigate a pivotal moment in history.

The last mughal book