Person · last Mughal emperor · India
Bahādur Shāh Zafar
A poet and calligrapher of eighty-two, pensioner of the East India Company with authority over little beyond the Red Fort, whom the Meerut sepoys declared emperor of Hindustan in May 1857 — making a rebellion into a restoration, and himself into a defendant.
- Date
- 1775–1862
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 28.656, 77.241
Worth knowing
He was tried in his own Diwan-i-Khas for waging war against a Company whose subject he had never legally been, exiled to Rangoon and buried in an unmarked grave that was lost until 1991. His Urdu ghazals are still sung; the line about not getting two yards of earth in the beloved's lane is the most quoted of them.
About the place
Placed at the Red Fort, where he held his nominal court, was proclaimed emperor by the sepoys in 1857 and was tried the following year. He died in exile at Rangoon and is buried there.
Connections (5)
- Life routeRangoon / Yangon
Zafar was tried in his own Diwan-i-Khas in 1858 for waging war against a Company whose subject he had never legally been, and deported to Rangoon with his wife Zinat Mahal and two sons. He died there in 1862 and was buried at night in a grave left unmarked so that it could not become a shrine; it was rediscovered in 1991 during digging. Two of his sons had already been shot at Delhi by Hodson.
- Imperial administration ofRed Fort, Delhi
Zafar held a nominal court in the Red Fort on a Company pension, with authority over its walls and a household of several thousand, and it was there that the Meerut sepoys came on 11 May 1857 to demand he lead them. He was tried in the fort's own Diwan-i-Khas the following year. The building in which the Mughal dynasty ended is the one on whose ramparts the Indian flag has been raised every August since 1947.
- Teaching lineageAmīr Khusrau
Zafar was the last patron of the Delhi Persian and Urdu tradition that runs back through Amir Khusrau, with Ghalib and Zauq at his court and his own ghazals still sung — the line about not getting two yards of earth in the beloved's lane is the most quoted of them. The 1857 reprisals scattered that literary world: Ghalib's letters describe a city emptied, and Urdu's centre of gravity moved to Lucknow and then to Hyderabad.
- CampaignJames Broun-Ramsay, Marquess of Dalhousie
Dalhousie decided that the Mughal title would lapse with Zafar, that his heir would leave the Red Fort, and that the pension would be reduced — the same doctrine he used on Satara, Jhansi and Nagpur. Three years after he sailed home, the Meerut sepoys rode to the fort he had planned to empty and proclaimed its occupant emperor of Hindustan.
- AnalogueThibaw Palace, Ratnagiri
Thibaw of Burma was deported to Ratnagiri in 1885 and Bahadur Shah Zafar to Rangoon in 1858, so each empire's last monarch spent his final years on the other's coast under the same administration. Both were buried where they died, both graves were neglected, and both are now maintained as memorials by governments that did not exist when they were dug.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Bahadur Shah Zafar”. The trial of Bahadur Shah, Proceedings on the Trial of Muhammad Bahadur Shah (1859); William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal (2006); Zafar’s dīwān.
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