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A forensic look into the Sepoy rebellion at Meerut in 1857 and the three-month siege and capture of Delhi which followed.
WINNER OF THE DUFF COOPER MEMORIAL PRIZE | LONGLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 'Indispensable reading on both India and the Empire' Daily Telegraph 'Brims with life, colour and complexity . . . outstanding' Evening Standard 'A compulsively readable masterpiece' Brian Urquhart, The New York Review of Books A stunning and bloody history of nineteenth-century India and the reign of the Last Mughal. In May 1857 India's flourishing capital became the centre of the bloodiest rebellion the British Empire had ever faced. Once a city of cultural brilliance and learning, Delhi was reduced to a battered, empty ruin, and its ruler – Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last of the Great Mughals – was thrown into exile. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj's Stalingrad: a fight to the death between two powers, neither of whom could retreat. The Last Mughal tells the story of the doomed Mughal capital, its tragic destruction, and the individuals caught up in one of the most terrible upheavals in history, as an army mutiny was transformed into the largest anti-colonial uprising to take place anywhere in the world in the entire course of the nineteenth century.
Translated by Mahmood Farooqui, with notes on the Mutiny Papers and governance in Delhi 1857 by the translator When Delhi lay under siege for five harrowing months in the summer of 1857, the people of the city described the events as ghadar: a time of turbulence. Resources within the besieged city fell dangerously low and locals found the rebelling sepoys presence and the increased levies insufferable. Nonetheless, an extraordinary effort was launched by the government of Bahadur Shah Zafar to fight the British. Thousands of labourers and tonnes of materials were mobilized, funds were gathered, the police monitored food prices and a functioning bureaucracy was vigilantly maintained right until the walled city s fall. Then, as Delhi was transformed by the victorious British, these everyday sacrifices and the efforts of thousands of people to save their country were lost forever. In this groundbreaking work, Mahmood Farooqui presents the first extensive translations into English of the Mutiny Papers documents dating from Delhi s 1857 siege, originally written in Persian and Shikastah Urdu. The translations include such fascinating pieces as the constitution of the Court of Mutineers, letters from soldiers threatening to leave Delhi if they were not paid their salaries, complaints to the police about unruly soldiers, and reports of troublesome courtesans, spies, faqirs, doctors, volunteers and harassed policemen. Shifting focus away from the conventional understanding of the events of 1857, these translations return ordinary and anonymous men and women back into the history of 1857. Besieged offers a view of how the rebel government of Delhi organized the essential requirements of war food and labour, soldiers salaries, arms and ammunition but more than that, this deeply evocative book reveals the hopes, beliefs and failures of a people who lived through the tragic end of an era.
It is an old trick in the intelligence setup of major states to create their own stringent but controlled opposition. This has a twofold objective. First, it attracts and centralizes opposition resources and honest grassroots members, inciting them to put on a great show of force. Second, it ensures that this "resistance" remains only a pretense and prevents them from achieving anything of real value because the duplicitous leadership don't want any true change to come of it.It has always been a challenge to maintain the purity of any movement or organization. Infiltrating to sabotage from within and give a bad name, thus justifying the unleashing of oppression, has often been the basic framework in which the intelligence agencies have worked in India in the context of suppressing minorities. But this is very difficult to document.The author of this short but incisive book has done a wonderful job of exposing a fraudulent scheme which seems to have no other purpose than to stifle our Sikh community's political voice in the United States of America. In this particular case of the Sikh Caucus, the deception has been named and nailed. This kind of documentation is perhaps the most effective way of leading the community to the straight path.Treading that path is necessary to avoid being bogged down in the quicksand of extreme slogans made without any preparation or consideration of the consequences - something which accomplishes nothing more than to attract a disproportionate reaction that decimates the true struggle. Perhaps in the future, the community will take greater care to avoid emotionally pledging unquestioning loyalty to the people who display the most influence and power, only to finally find themselves betrayed. Rather, those who alone deserve our cautious and conditional support are the brave souls who speak the truth consistently and live a straight, simple, and honest life.- Rajvinder Singh Bains, Advocate, Punjab & Haryana High Court
The Indian Mutiny of 1857 was the bloodiest insurrection in the history of the British Empire. It began with a large-scale uprising by native troops against their colonial masters, and soon developed into general rebellion as thousands of discontented civilians joined in. It is a tale of brutal murder and heroic resistance from which innocents on both sides could not escape. This work covers the story of the Mutiny. It challenges the accepted wisdom that a British victory was inevitable, showing just how close the mutineers came to dealing a fatal blow to the British Raj.