| MANY UNHAPPY RETURNS There is little that is not known about the life and death of Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last of the Mughal Emperors. Born a princely heir to an empire founded by Babur, he was unceremoniously dethroned by the British following the insurrection of 1857, and after being tried and held responsible for encouraging it, even though it was clear that he had not instigated it, he was exiled from his crumbling kingdom and forced to spend the remaining years of his atrophied life in Rangoon, where he died on 7 November 1862, a forlorn footnote to history. |
| It was Bahadur Shah Zafar’s misfortune that he was born at the wrong time and died in the wrong place. In smaller men, possessing the sensitive temperament of a poet might have been an asset. In a Mughal Emperor descended from Taimur and expected therefore to rule like an autocrat, it was a debilitating weakness with fatal consequences. One of the more poignant lines of his poetic laments, written after his dethronement, expressed his distress at being denied even two measures of land, enough for a commoner’s grave, in his own homeland. [EXTRACT] |
| Published in THE NATION 4 Nov. 1993, and reprinted in THE BARK OF A PEN (2001). |
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