Bahadur Shah Zafar

Bahadur Shah Zafar (1775-1862) was the last Mughal emperor, a serious poet who studied under Zauq and held Delhi’s greatest literary court. After the uprising of 1857 he was tried by the British, his sons were shot, and he was exiled to Rangoon, where he died and was buried in a grave deliberately left unmarked. The ghazals most associated with him are about exile and impermanence. One caution: the best-known of them is traditionally his but has been disputed by scholars, and the pages here say so.