Bahadur Shah Zafar

Bahadur Shah Zafar was the twentieth and last Mughal emperor, a distinguished Urdu poet, and a reluctant figurehead of the rebellion of 1857. He succeeded his father Akbar II in 1837, at sixty-two, and inherited a title without a state. Real power had passed to the East India Company decades earlier, and his authority ran no further than the walls of Delhi. The Company paid him a pension and had already decided that his line would end with him. He filled the years with poetry, calligraphy and the patronage of a remarkable literary circle that included Ghalib and Zauq. His own ghazals are still sung. In May 1857 mutinous sepoys from Meerut rode to Delhi and proclaimed him Emperor of India. He was eighty-two, had no army of his own, and accepted with visible reluctance. His name nevertheless gave the rising a legitimacy it could not otherwise have claimed, and turned a military mutiny into something closer to a war of restoration. The British retook Delhi in September after a brutal siege. Zafar surrendered at Humayun's tomb on a promise that his life would be spared. The officer who took him, William Hodson, shot three of his sons and a grandson the next day and had the bodies displayed. Zafar was tried for rebellion in his own audience hall and exiled to Rangoon in December 1858. He died there in 1862 and was buried in an unmarked grave, which the British concealed to prevent it becoming a shrine. It was rediscovered in 1991.

• Lived: 1775 CE – 1862 CE
• Nationality: Indian
• Roles: ruler, poet