Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

Just as the amateurish Mughal-led armies had proved unable to compete with British generals and British Enfields, and just as Mirza Mughal’s stumbling commissariat proved no match for the Company’s bureaucracy, so in the years that followed the still-living and even thriving Mughal miniature and architectural tradition would soon come to a grinding halt in the face of Tropical Gothic colonial architecture and other Victorian art forms. The elaborate politeness of Mughal etiquette and Indo-Islamic manners came to be regarded merely as anachronistic. The poetic world represented by Zafar’s mushairas would find it increasingly hard to attract young Indian intellectuals seduced by the siren call of Tennyson or the Wordsworthian naturalism now taught in English-medium schools.66 As Maulvi Muhammad Baqar’s son, the poet and critic Azad, wrote: ‘The important thing is that the glory of the winners’ ascendant fortune gives everything of theirs – even their dress, their gait, their conversation – a radiance that makes them desirable. And people do not merely adopt them, but they are proud to adopt them.’