Bahadur Shah Zafar — the last Mughal, deposed and exiled to die abroad

Bahadur Shah Zafar, the twentieth and last Mughal emperor, reigned in Delhi from 1837 until 1857, but he ruled almost nothing: by the time he inherited the throne the Mughal Empire had shrunk to a pension, a palace, and a title the British East India Company allowed him to keep. When the Indian Rebellion of 1857 erupted, mutinous sepoys marched on Delhi and proclaimed the elderly poet-emperor the figurehead of a revolt he had not started and could not control. After the British recaptured the city in September 1857, they took Zafar at Humayun’s Tomb, shot his sons and a grandson, tried him for treason, and exiled him to Rangoon in British Burma, where he died in 1862. With his deposition the house of Timur and Babur, which had ruled much of the Indian subcontinent for more than three centuries, came to an end.

Zafar was eighty-two when he died in a foreign country, buried in an unmarked grave so that no shrine could form. He had been a calligrapher, a Sufi devotee, and one of the finest Urdu poets of his age, presiding over a literary court that included Mirza Ghalib and Mohammad Ibrahim Zauq. He was not a soldier or a statesman, and the rebellion thrust on him a role he was unequipped to fill. His reign is remembered less for what he governed than for the manner of his fall and the violence of the suppression that ended his line.

The fall of the Mughals was not a single defeat but the closing act of a century of erosion. The empire had been hollowed out long before 1857 — by provincial breakaways, by Persian and Afghan invasions, and above all by the East India Company, which governed in the emperor’s name while reducing him to a client. The 1857 Rebellion did not topple a functioning monarchy; it gave the British the occasion and the pretext to abolish the shell that remained.

The suppression of the revolt was brutal and the reprisals indiscriminate. The recapture of Delhi was followed by mass killings of its inhabitants and the plunder and destruction of much of the old Mughal city; historians’ estimates of the wider rebellion’s death toll run into the hundreds of thousands of Indians, dead in the fighting and in the famines and epidemics that followed. The deposition of one frail emperor was the smallest of these losses, but it was the symbolic end of an empire and the prelude to direct Crown rule over India.