The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 (abridged) - William Dalrymple Audiobook

Written by William Dalrymple
Read by Robert Bathurst
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Abridged

Length: 4 hrs and 27 mins
Abridged Audiobook
Release date: 10-30-07
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

At 4 PM on a dark, wet, winter’s evening in November 1862, a cheap coffin was buried in eerie silence - no lamentations, no panegyrics, for as the British commissioner in charge of the funeral insisted, “No vesting will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests”. This Mughal was Bahadur Shah Zafar II, one of the most talented, tolerant, and likeable of his remarkable dynasty, a man who found himself leader of a violent uprising he knew from the start would lead to irreparable carnage.

Zafar’s frantic efforts to unite his forces proved tragically futile. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj’s Stalingrad, and Mughal Delhi was left an empty ruin. The Last Mughal charts the desecration and demise of a man, his dynasty, his city, and civilizations mercilessly ravished by fractured forces and vengeful British troops.

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 emperor, Zafar, came to the throne when the political power of the Mughals was already in steep decline.

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. All the while, the British were progressively taking over the Emperor’s power. 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. Four months later, the British took Delhi, the capital, with catastrophic results. With an unsurpassed understanding of British and Indian history, Dalrymple crafts a provocative, revelatory account of one the bloodiest upheavals in history.

February 19, 2007
In time for the 150th anniversary of the Great Mutiny, the uprising that came close to toppling British rule in India, Dalrymple presented a brilliant, evocative exploration of a doomed world and its final emperor, Bahadur Shah II, descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane.

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. British besiegers took the capital in September 1857, followed by massacre, purges and destruction. Zafar died five years later in penury and exile.

Dalrymple, 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. 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. That the rebels fatefully raised the flag of jihad and dubbed themselves “mujahedin” only adds to the mutiny’s contemporary relevance.
…History Book Club

Although the book is abridged I have kept each part divided as close to the original chapters as I can. If you wish a full text of this bloody and dark piece of history in epub or mobi, go here.

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