India's Last Mughal toast of a musical evening

India's last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II may have lamented about not getting two yards of land for his burial, but the launch of a book on Zafar resurrected the poet-king and his brilliant court in all its glory.

Nearly 150 years after his death in exile in Rangoon (now called Yangon), Zafar, the emperor who preferred writing sad mystical poems to the rigours of statecraft, was toasted with ghazals, sufi singing and spirited drinking at the launch of William Dalrymple's "The Last Mughal" (published by Penguin/Viking) Tuesday evening.

Ironically, the venue chosen to celebrate the ageing emperor who surprisingly became the leader of the failed 1857 "revolt" against British rule, called the first war of independence by many Indian historians, was the British Council.

Much like Zafar's court peopled by the intellectual and artistic elite of the time, the musical evening saw an eclectic collection of the glitterati, literati and 15-second celebrities listening in hush as Dalrymple read out the extracts from his book evoking many moods of the emperor who became literally a prisoner in the Red Fort.

Dalrymple's reading, which exuded a rare empathy and affection for a vanished age, was punctuated with soulful recitation of Zafar's hauntingly melancholic verses by Mahmood Farooqui, writer and theatre enthusiast who helped Dalrymple translate into English "The Mutiny Papers" - the archival material written mostly in Urdu and Persian on which the author based his book.

And, yes, there was melodious singing by Radhika Chopra and spiritually exalting sufiana music by the famous Nizami Bandhu, who perform at the dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya, the 17th century sufi saint, every Thursday night.

This heady cocktail of music, poetry and history had the audience intoxicated, with some of them found dancing and singing in unison with the performers on the stage.

A celebrant of Sufism and the syncretic way of life, Dalrymple's book tells the story of the last days of the Mughal empire through the eyes of a diverse cast of characters including poets, courtesans, eunuchs and shopkeepers.

Dalrymple's masterly narrative manages to arouse sympathy for the aesthete king who collected some of the most brilliant scholars, musicians and artists in his court, but died a broken man in exile in Rangoon. In a curious posthumous reversal of fortunes, Zafar is now revered as a saint in Myanmar.

The real hero of The Last Mughal is, however, Delhi, the city that has hosted a hundred cultures and mutinies over the centuries. Dalyrymple's deep love for all things Indian and Delhi - "a profoundly self-confident place, quite at ease with its own brilliance and the superiority of its tahzib" - comes through in this imaginative history of the sunset of the once-glorious empire.

-- Indo-Asian News Service

(IANS)

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