The Last Mughal Quotes

“The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and European imperialism have very often been closely, and dangerously, intertwined. In a curious but very concrete way, the fundamentalists of both faiths have needed each other to reinforce each other’s prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the other.”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857

“For the British after 1857, the Indian Muslim became an almost subhuman creature, to be classified in unembarrassedly racist imperial literature alongside such other despised and subject specimens, such as Irish Catholics or ‘the Wandering Jew’.”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857

“Given the somewhat dubious and sectarian reputation of madrasas today, it is worth remembering that many of the most brilliant Hindu thinkers, including, for example, the great reformer Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), were the products of madrasa educations.”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857

“The outbreak revealed the surprising degree to which the Mughal court was still regarded across northern India not as some sort of foreign Muslim imposition – as some, especially on the Hindu right wing, look upon the Mughals today – but instead as the principal source of political legitimacy, and therefore the natural centre of resistance against British colonial rule.”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857

“But in the years to come, as Muslim prestige and learning sank, and Hindu confidence, wealth, education and power increased, Hindus and Muslims would grow gradually apart, as British policies of divide and rule found willing collaborators among the chauvinists of both faiths. The rip in the closely woven fabric of Delhi’s composite culture, opened in 1857, slowly widened into a great gash, and at Partition in 1947 finally broke in two. As the Indian Muslim elite emigrated en masse to Pakistan, the time would soon come when it would be almost impossible to imagine that Hindu sepoys could ever have rallied to the Red Fort and the standard of a Muslim emperor, joining with their Muslim brothers in an attempt to revive the Mughal Empire.”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857

“So removed had the British now become from their Indian subjects, and so dismissive were they of Indian opinion, that they had lost all ability to read the omens around them or to analyse their own position with any degree of accuracy. Arrogance and imperial self-confidence had diminished the desire to seek accurate information or gain any real knowledge of the state of the country.”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857

“So prevalent was the belief among Delhiwallahs that Englishmen were the product of an illicit union between apes and the women of Sri Lanka (or alternatively between ‘apes and hogs’) that the city’s leading theologian, Shah Abdul Aziz, had to issue a fatwa expressing his opinion that such a view had no basis in the Koran or the Hadiths, and that however oddly the firangis might behave, they were none the less Christians and thus People of the Book.15 As long as wine and pork were not served, it was therefore perfectly permissible to mix with them (if one should for any strange reason wish to do so)”
― William Dalrymple, Last Mughal

“Love within my being. You lived with me, breath of my breath, Being in my being, nor left my side; But now the wheel of Time has turned And you are gone – no joys abide. You”
― William Dalrymple, Last Mughal

“Although a Bahadur Shah Zafar road still survives in Delhi, as indeed do roads named after all the other Great Mughals, for many Indians today, rightly or wrongly, the Mughals are still perceived as it suited the British to portray them in the imperial propaganda that they taught in Indian schools after 1857: as sensual, decadent, temple-destroying invaders – something that was forcefully and depressingly demonstrated by the whole episode of the demoliton of the Baburi Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992.”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857

“The depth to which Indian Muslims had sunk in British eyes is visible in an 1868 production called The People of India, which contains photographs of the different castes and tribes of South Asia ranging from Tibetans and Aboriginals (illustrated with a picture of a naked tribal) to the Doms of Bihar. The image of ‘the Mahomedan’ is illustrated by a picture of an Aligarh labourer who is given the following caption: ‘His features are peculiarly Mahomedan … [and] exemplify in a strong manner the obstinacy, sensuality, ignorance and bigotry of his class. It is hardly possible, perhaps, to conceive features more essentially repulsive.”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857

“but we did not come into India, as they did, at the head of great armies, with the avowed intention of subjugating the country. We crept in as humble barterers, whose existence depended on the bounty and favour of the lieutenants of the kings of Delhi; and the ‘generosity’ we have shown was but a small acknowledgement of the favours his ancestors had conferred to our race.”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857

“From this point of view, Zafar could certainly be tried as a defeated enemy king; but he had never been a subject, and so could not possibly be called a rebel guilty of treason. Instead, from a legal point of view, a good case could be made that it was the East India Company which was the real rebel, guilty of revolt against a feudal superior to whom it had sworn allegiance for nearly a century.”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857

“On another occasion, when a party of two hundred Muslims turned up at the Palace demanding to be allowed to slaughter cows – holy to Hindus – at ‘Id, Zafar told them in a ‘decided and angry tone that the religion of the Musalmen did not depend upon the sacrifice of cows’.”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857

“of the great cities of the world, only Rome, Istanbul and Cairo can even begin to rival Delhi for the sheer volume and density of historic remains.”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal

“The barracks should of course have been torn down years ago, but the Fort’s current proprietors, the Archaeological Survey of India, have lovingly continued the work of decay initiated by the British: white marble pavilions have been allowed to discolour; plasterwork has been left to collapse; the water channels have cracked and grassed over; the fountains are dry. Only the barracks look well maintained.”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal

“what young men in our colleges learn through those of Greek and Latin—that is grammar, rhetoric, and logic. After his seven years of study, the young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the young man raw from Oxford—he will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna; (alias Sokrat, Aristotalis, Alflatun, Bokrat, Jalinus and Bu Ali Sena); and,”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal

“Delhi was once a paradise, Where Love held sway and reigned; But its charm lies ravished now And only ruins remain. No”
― William Dalrymple, Last Mughal

“The other approach, taken by survivors of the old Madrasa i-Rahimiyya, was to reject the West in toto and to attempt to return to what they regarded as pure Islamic roots. For this reason, disillusioned pupils of the school of Shah Waliullah, such as Maulana Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi – who in 1857 had briefly established an independent Islamic state north of Meerut at Shamli in the Doab – founded an influential but depressingly narrow-minded Wahhabi-like madrasa at Deoband, 100 miles north of the former Mughal capital. With their backs to the wall, they reacted against what the founders saw as the degenerate and rotten ways of the old Mughal elite. The Deoband madrasa therefore went back to Koranic basics and rigorously stripped out anything Hindu or European from the curriculum.”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857

“According to Ommaney, prior to their departure Zinat Mahal had been squabbling loudly with Jawan Bakht after the latter had fallen in love with one of his father’s harem women. He also began using the family’s now scarce financial resources to bribe the guards to bring him bottles of porter: ‘What an instance of the state of morals and domestic economy of Ex-Royalty,’ wrote a disapproving Ommaney to Saunders. ‘Mother and son at enmity, the son trying to form a connection with his father’s concubine, and setting at nought the precepts of his religion, buying from, and drinking, the liquor of an infidel.”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857

“Harriott maintained that Zafar was the evil genius and linchpin behind an international Muslim conspiracy stretching from Constantinople, Mecca and Iran to the walls of the Red Fort. His intent, declared Harriott, was to subvert the British Empire and put the Mughals in its place. Contrary to all the evidence that the Uprising broke out first among the overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys, and that it was high-caste Hindu sepoys who all along formed the bulk of the fighting force; and ignoring all the evident distinctions between the sepoys, the jihadis, the Shia Muslims of Persia and the Sunni court of Delhi, Major Harriott argued that the Mutiny was the product of the convergence of all these conspiring forces around the fanatical Islamic dynastic ambitions of Zafar:”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857

“The Colonel looked at this strange fashion and asked in broken Urdu, ‘Well? You Muslim?’ ‘Half,’ said Ghalib. ‘What does that mean?’ asked the Colonel. ‘I drink wine,’ said Ghalib, ‘but I don’t eat pork.’ The Colonel laughed, and Ghalib then showed him the letter which he had received from the Minister for India [sic] in acknowledgement of the ode to Her Majesty the Queen which Ghalib has sent. The Colonel said, ‘After the victory of government forces why did you not present yourself at the Ridge?’ Ghalib replied, ‘My rank required that I should have four palanquin bearers, but all four of them ran away and left me, so I could not come.”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857

“Finally, on 14 September 1857, the British and their hastily assembled army of Sikh and Pathan levees assaulted and took the city, sacking and looting the Mughal capital, and massacring great swathes of the population. In one muhalla* alone, Kucha Chelan, some 1,400 citizens of Delhi were cut down. ‘The orders went out to shoot every soul,’ recorded Edward Vibart, a nineteen-year-old British officer. It was literally murder…I have seen many bloody and awful sights lately but such a one as I witnessed yesterday I pray I never see again. The women were all spared but their screams, on seeing their husbands and sons butchered, were most painful… Heaven knows I feel no pity, but when some old grey bearded man is brought and shot before your very eyes, hard must be that man’s heart I think who can look on with indifference …”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857

“emperor. Zafar was no friend of the British, who had shorn”
― William Dalrymple, Last Mughal

“Other than the targeting of Christians, there was surprisingly little patriotic or nationalistic spirit visible in the violence that rumbled on for weeks after the outbreak: the initial mutiny in the army had opened a vast Pandora’s box of differences and grievances – economic, sectarian, religious and political – and now that the violence and settling of scores had begun, it would not be easy to bring them to a halt. In the meantime, many of the sepoys simply took the opportunity presented by the breakdown of law and order to enrich themselves, as did many Delhiwallahs.57”
― William Dalrymple, Last Mughal

“One man said it was very wrong to kill the memsahib and the children, and how were they going to get rozgar [employment]? But another said that we were kafirs, and now the King of Delhi would provide for everyone.”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal

“Crossing the Black Water”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal

“I cannot account for this numbness of feeling that weighs me down and makes me helpless,” he wrote sadly to Edward. “I think without a relief from all work, without a long and perfect holiday, I will never rise.”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal

“Any singer who arrived in Shahajahanabad claiming distinction in the art would forget their sur and taal [note and beat] after hearing only one bar of his music and would accept the dust of his feet as the decoration of their eye…”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal

“Some of these figures were well known and even revered Delhi characters, such as the Majzub (holy madman) Din Ali Shah: “He is so careless about the affairs of this world,” wrote Sayyid”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal

“Yunani”
― William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal