Who was the Last Mughal Emperor?

Last Mughal Emperor

The last Mughal Emperor is also referred to as Bahadur Shah II. He was the 20th and last Mughal emperor of India. He was coronated on 29 September 1837 at the Red Fort. In the early 19th century he ruled over a Mughal Empire. In the mid-nineteenth century, the East India Company became the dominant political and military power.

Bahadur Shah Zafar was involved in the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and hence he was sentenced to jail. He died at the age of 87 due to some illness. After his death, the family of the king was moved out of the Red Fort and given another place in Delhi.

• He had led a culturally sophisticated court in his earlier years as the last of a dynastic line that went back to the sixteenth century, but as the British East India Company expanded its control over more of India, it was obvious that his rule was coming to an end.
• Then, the sepoys’ uprising against their British officers triggered the siege of Delhi, the inauguration of direct British colonial rule, and the demise of Zafar’s claims to be the emperor.
• In order to capture the culture of Zafar’s court life—a culture of artists and intellectuals, Muslims and non-Muslims alike—Dalrymple mined the Persian and Urdu archives.

Although Dalrymple doesn’t say much about what led to the mutiny, he significantly adds to the common perception of the horrors of the fighting that left much of Delhi in ruins.

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