Lapis Magazine

Book Review: The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple

The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple

Knopf, 536 pages

Review by Ralph White

For anyone interested in the world of mid-Nineteenth-Century India, this is a wonderful book. William Dalrymple has established himself as one of the most original and compelling authors writing today about the Indian sub-continent and the Middle East. His capacity to paint graphic word pictures of lost worlds, his masterly storytelling abilities and scholarship, and his clear sympathy for the Sufi culture of the late Mughal Dynasty all make his work compulsively readable.

This book tells the poignant tale of the last Mughal emperor of India in the days leading up to the Indian Mutiny (or First War of Independence, as the Indians call it). Today we often think of Delhi as an overcrowded, impoverished city weighed down by the stresses of modern life. But in the mid-Nineteenth Century it was a beautiful and elegant city whose heart was the Red Fort where many nights the Emperor would host salons of Sufi poetry in a court perfumed by rose water, illuminated by Chinese lanterns, and filled with the finest poets in the land. The most accomplished among them were exponents of the ghazal, the poetic form popularized recently in America by Robert Bly, which requires the disciplined expression of mystical insight in a few short lines. This court of love, as it has been described, was also populated by courtesans in whom the tantric and Sufi worlds met in poetic and erotic ecstasy. But these were not ordinary courtesans — some were accomplished and published poets and one even married the Emperor.

Dalrymple’s writing beautifully evokes the spiritual and artistic life of the city on the eve of the Mutiny in 1857. He portrays a happily syncretic culture where yogis, sadhus and ascetics met each evening with Sufis on the banks of the river to share their meditative practices. Yet looming over this inspiring scene is the prospect of war and terror. The British had grown increasingly aggressive militarily, and this had been accompanied by the rise of an evangelizing, self-righteous Victorian Christianity that lacked the love of Indian culture and dress that had characterized many Eighteenth Century British expatriates, many of whom married Indian women, smoked hookahs and dressed like Indian nabobs.

This growing insensitivity to the local culture made possible the introduction of cartridges greased with pork or beef fat among the sepoys of the East India Company’s armies. Of course, this inflamed both Muslim and Hindu soldiers and set the stage for the largest revolt of the Nineteenth Century against an imperial power — one that ended in catastrophe and horror. British military power allied with missionary zeal unwittingly ignited the powers of religious fundamentalism and extremism and ultimately wound up seeding the narrow, Deobandi form of wahhabi-like Islam in India. Dalrymple is acute in his perception of parallels between those times and ours.” One hundred and forty years later it was out of Deoband madrassas that the Taliban emerged to create the most retrograde Islamic regime in modern history,” he notes. In fact, one concludes this book with a powerful sense of the tragic loss of a marvelous time and culture, and with a sense of warning that unless we can muster a profound respect for Islamic and Asian civilizations today we may be doomed to repeat the mistakes of the Victorian imperialists. This is a gripping book that tells a rich, largely unknown story — one with a moral that we would do well to heed. It is highly recommended.

The Last Mughal can be ordered at:
www.randomhouse.com/knopf