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The Last Mughal

The Fall of Delhi, 1857

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The Last Mughal

By: William Dalrymple
Narrated by: Sagar Arya
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Bloomsbury presents this Unabridged recording of The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple, read by Sagar Arya

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.

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.©2006 William Dalrymple (P)2024 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Asia Europe Great Britain India Law South Asia World Imperialism Middle East British Empire
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Critic reviews

Dalrymple is an outstandingly gifted travel writer and historian who excels himself in his latest work
Vivid . . . unmatched . . . revolutionary . . . humane . . . No previous book has delved so deeply into the history of Delhi in those days, nor painted such a vivid portrait of the late Mughal court
Brims with life, colour and complexity . . . outstanding . . . one of the best history books of the year
Magnificent . . . shames the simplistic efforts of previous writers
Indispensable reading on both India and the Empire
A compulsively readable masterpiece (Brian Urquhart)
Dalrymple brilliantly evokes the tense equilibrium on the eve of the Indian Mutiny and, with pace and panache, leads us to the explosion . . . A towering achievement
A book as important as it is impressive (Diana Athill)
A moving and totally engrossing account
Dalrymple writes with a brio rare among academic historians. Here is history almost novelistic in its vividness, wonderfully embodying both our closeness to, and radical distance from, the past. Alone among his peers, Dalrymple is producing the kind of work that, in scale, ambition and style, is like an oriental version of Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
A natural-born storyteller, Dalrymple recounts the dramatic history of Mughal Delhi before, during and after the 1857 Indian mutiny with such brio and passion that it is impossible not to be won over
Informed throughout with poignant awareness of contemporary events. His final words are a bleak warning, and one can only hope that The Last Mughal finds its way onto the bedtime tables of current world leaders (Lucy Moore)
Easily Dalrymple's most ambitious, compelling and unusual book. Here are the stories of real people who populated those tumultuous times - heroes and villains, saints and debauches . . . The Last Mughal is Dalrymple's saddest and loveliest work to date
An exhaustive, deeply informed and compelling new book, bulging with scholarship. The strength of this book lies in the breadth of its quotations from unpublished primary sources. In deploying his material, Dalrymple shows he has the two essential gifts of the historian: a grasp of detail and an ability to see the big picture (Sara Wheeler)
A magnificent, multi-dimensional book which shames the simplistic efforts of previous writers (David Gilmour)
A riveting account . . . The animating spirit of the book is Delhi itself
All stars
Most relevant
Well written and interesting. Develops the situation prior to the mutiny well although the impact of differing members of the royal family could have been clearer.
Overall very enjoyable and informative.

Gentle prose

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The account of the events, written by William Dalrymple, is good, but the reader sounds a bit like Peter Sellers doing an Indian impression which really spoiled the book for me. To understand what I mean, listen to the reader of the abridged version of this book; I enjoyed that so much it led me buying the longer version, but unfortunately the reader wasn't the same and delivered his performance in a way that was pretty offputting.

It's a pretty interesting story, somewhat spoiled by the performance.

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