The Fall of Delhi and the End of the Mughals

In May 1857 a great rebellion broke out against the rule of the British East India Company in northern India, beginning with the Company's Indian soldiers, the sepoys, at Meerut and spreading rapidly across the Gangetic plain. The rebels marched on Delhi and rallied to the aged Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar (rahimahu Allah), the last of the line of Babur, a poet and Sufi who for decades had reigned only within the walls of his Red Fort while real power lay with the Company; proclaimed the symbolic head of the rising, he gave it the old Mughal name. Through the summer Delhi was the heart of the revolt, but in September 1857 a British and allied force stormed the city after a long siege, and the recapture was followed by a savage sack: much of the population was driven out or killed, quarters were demolished, and the emperor's sons and grandsons were shot after their surrender. Bahadur Shah Zafar himself was captured at the tomb of Humayun, put on trial, and exiled to Rangoon in Burma, where he died in 1862, the last Mughal emperor. The rebellion was crushed across the north over the following months with great bloodshed on all sides. Its political result was the formal abolition of the Mughal Empire and the end of Company rule: in 1858 the British Crown took direct control of India, beginning the period of the Raj. For the Muslims of India the fall of Delhi was a profound rupture, the end of the imperial order under which they had lived and the beginning of life as a community under colonial rule, a shock that shaped the reformist and educational movements of the decades that followed. This scene depicts the emptied marble throne-hall of the Red Fort after the fall, the vacated seat of a three-centuries-old empire.