Empire: World History - 329. Indian Uprising 1857: The British Raj is Born (Part 8)

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

How did Lucknow become the final battleground of the 1857 Uprising? Who was Begum Hazrat Mahal, and how did she hold together a rebellion against overwhelming odds? How did the 1857 Uprising lead to the fall of the East India Company, and the rise of the harsher British Raj? In the final episode of the series, Anita and William explain how northern India’s organised rebellion came to an end, ushering in a new era of British rule in India.  Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Editors: Bruno Di Castri and Lorcan Moullier Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. In the finale of our series on the Great Uprising of 1857, we leave Delhi a smoking ruin. turn our eyes to the final battlefield of Latina. And this is once a centre of luxury, of poetry, of beauty, of art. And now it is a city of corpses, blood and despair, under siege from the rebels. But the Scottish general, the brutal Scottish general, Lord Clyde, is marching up to the city to stamp out the final fire of rebellion.

And you know, this is a red line in Indian history where the East India Company falls, the British Raj, takes over. And this is an entirely different grip on the Indian subcontinent. India will change forever. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Drupal. Now, this is our series finale of our Empire special on the 1857 uprising. So we are going to turn our attention back to a place where we started, the glittering domed capital of Lucknow, the city of poets, of courtesans, of music, of art. It is now, though, a city of corpses. And if Delhi was the political heart of the rebellion, Anita Lucknow,

you could say, really, is it so? In Delhi, the sepoys were fighting for an old king, but in Lucknow, the entire population of Avod, from the great Tullukdar landlords to the peasants, rise up in what one of our guests for a future bonus, were drunk through Mukagi, the great expert on the rebellion in Latnow, has famously called a peasant war.

So let me just remind you, we last looked at Lucknow when the British were trapped in the residency. So the date was September 1857. You had the generals Havelok and Uttram who have finally fought their way in. It is celebrated in Victorian law as the first relief of Lucknow. But, I mean, relief isn't really the word that comes to mind, is it, Willie? Far from it. It wasn't at all. It was a bit of a cock up because they fought their way in through these narrow streets,

losing hundreds of men, only to realise that they didn't have enough force to evacuate the women and children at all. And so all they'd done was add extra mouths to the defenders while the rebels closed the ring around them. So inside this six-acre site of the residency of Latina, which is still sort of preserved as a memorial, for the Brits, a sacred site that every visitor tender used to visit. But today, now rather a neglected landmark just outside the main thoroughfare. of luck now. Inside that six acre ruin, the situation is now incredibly desperate. There's 2,000 soldiers, a thousand civilians, surrounded by an entire province in arms, and everyone is with the rebels. No one wants the British to survive. Everyone wants to see the British driven

out and expelled forever. It is as if they are in a pressure cooker and someone just turned up the heat basically around them. And if you do read Rudrangshu Mukaji's work, I just point you towards his other than revolt. Because what he argues, Willie, and I'd love to know your take on this, is that Lucknow was fundamentally different from anywhere else in India. We talked about Delhi in the last episode. But this place, this place was the one that the British would struggle with the most. And why was that?

Why was it so different? That was absolutely correct assessment. And what's interesting by 1857 when you study is that it's different to different places. Lucknow is one thing where you get the entire population up in arms. Delhi is much more fractured because these are not really. local boys. They've come in from outside. Everyone in Delhi regards them as sort of uncouth provincials. It's like sort of mud-booted Yorkshire farmers walking into Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury or something. These guys are definitely outsiders. And Garib thinks them as sort of a peasant

rabble. But you get other rebellions too. You get, you know, for example, there's a Santal rebellion. You get these sort of tribal rebellions in remote areas. You get various rural uprisings in the countryside. So the old exam question that every historian of India has had to answer at some point, you know, is it an uprising, is it a mutiny, is it that, it's both and more. It's also a tribal rebellion. It's also a class rebellion. It's a revolution.

It's all sorts of different things put together. But Lucknow is unique. It's a mass movement. It's everybody's in it. Everyone is for it, exactly. And that's not necessarily the case elsewhere. That is fascinating. I mean, I'll quote Mukaji again.

I know we are going to talk to him in a bonus episode. But, you know, he says the seapoys weren't just soldiers. They were peasants in uniform. And their grievances were personal, you know, from their home villages. So somebody could be fighting because their taxes were too high. Another person could be fighting because they were, you know, insulted. Another could be fighting for their glory of other. These reasons were complicated, but they were united as a people.

And so, you know, you've got the British huddled in that residency with a sea of rebellion, lapping at the walls and holding the rebellion together with all of these disparate groups which is not an easy thing to do as we found out in Delhi with all of these groups that aren't listening to each other and aren't talking to each other

they hold together a bit better here because of one woman you know I like a powerful woman you certainly do this is one of your one of your key girls this one. Begham Hazerat Mahal was her name and tell me I mean you know jokingly you say she's my kind of girl

but she kind of is because She is. She rises above her sex, the expectation of her sex, her position, everything. Now tell everybody why she's so special. Well, she's an intriguing character. And we've mentioned already twice in this, and we will mention him again, Rudrengshu Mukaji. Rudrengshu is the guy who's really dug deep into the uprising in Latinau. And he has excavated her story. As we heard last time in the first round of the Latinau story, she was a rather sort of junior member of the house. Harim. She came from a black African background. Her father was a black African. She got left behind when Wajad Ali Shah was exiled to Calcutta. But that turned out to be a reason for promotion,

in a sense when the city rises up in 857, because she's got the only male child, Birgis Khadr's only son in the city. So she rises up now and becomes really the soul of the resistance. I love the fact that you call her the soul of the resistance. And the reason she is soul of the resistance is because she is clever. I mean, she's clever than a lot of the men around her. And actually, it's really interesting in this mutiny series, we've come across quite a few powerful, as I like to call them, kick-ass women, Rani of Jansi being another. She is one big kick-ass woman, sort of riding into battle. But if we talk about Hazraith Mahal, she does good proclamation. Let me tell you, let me commend unto you her proclamation. So this is the kind of thing

that she is gut-stirring stuff. And so she says unto her people, the British will try to destroy your religion. They will take your land. They have already broken their treaties. And it's that kind of tub-thumper that gets men to follow her and to say, you know what, we are one, we are together and we are behind you.

I'm sure if you'd be around 85 to 7-liter, you'd have been very much on the same proclamation front. I like to think I'm doing that right now in London, I think, you know, in my own little way. Yeah, yeah, give me a revolution. I'm all there. The Hazrat Mahal of Gull Hagar podcast. Yes, okay, I'll take it. I'll take it. So, I mean, she manages, Willie, to keep the Daluk Dai,

the great landlords, the ones who never hear the word no, frankly, on side. I mean, she gets them to fight with her. Tell me more about that because it's great. So she creates a coalition. I mean, what's interesting is that this woman who is almost invisible in the records before 8057 becomes the symbol. of resistance against the British in Lucknow during the uprising. And it's the fate of Lucknow to be the last stand of this rebellion. As we've seen, Poro Raniv Janji has been hunted down and

killed and her body cremated. As we saw in the last episode, Delhi has fallen and the moguls are now in prison. We'll have yet to see the trial of Zuffer, but we'll come to that before too long. and Lucknow is the last centre of resistance. And what you've seen in the autumn of 1857 is the arrival first of the rebels of Delhi, driven out of Delhi by the assault on Kashmirigate that we dealt with in the last episode. Are they the ones driven out, Willie,

or are they the ones who just took off and left during the eclipse? I often wonder what they tell their children, the ones who took off. Well, I think it's probably a bit of everyone. Everyone that wasn't killed that hadn't got anywhere else to go. And so luck now is the last place. There's a strong party that think that the walls of Delhi had been breached, but Lucknow is still standing. Right, right. So let's go there.

We'll be safe there. We can fight from there. You know, it's a two-week journey on horseback to go from Delhi to Lucknow. It's not impossible. And so you have these guys trudging down the roads, rather like COVID times when all these migrant labour from UP had to walk back from Delhi where they were working. There's a similar sort of scene, all these guys filling the roads, wounded, rough. offshod, thirsty in this heat.

And they start coming back. And they've got nowhere else to retreat to. So, you know, this is the last stand of the last rebels. And there's another thing, isn't there, with this? Because, you know, what's making them able to put one exhausted foot in front of the other is the news from Delhi. Of what the hell the British have done to the people who they did get their hands on. You know, the devil's so-called devil's wind and Nicholson's terrible treatment of civilians, and sometimes you had nothing to do with anything in Delhi.

So, you know, if you're not going to go to luck now, where the hell are you going to go? Because if they get you, we know what they do to you. The attitude of the British were there was no innocent people in Delhi. They took the view that everyone there was guilty. And so every male, I mean, it's a hell of a thing. Every male above the age of 16 is benefited. The streets are literally filled, jam clogged with corpses, one over each other. So anyone that's gone out is making.

it till like now. And they don't have long to relax there because a month and a half later, Sir Colin Campbell, who is this fascinating character, a Glasgow carpenter's son who has risen through the ranks due to his military talent. He's now 65, a veteran of the Peninsula War, the two opium wars we've dealt with in our Opium War series, the Crimea. And he is both a military genius, but also someone who's incredibly cautious. He's a kind of cross between Nicholson and Archdeacon. Dale Wilson, if you like. He's the sort of two and one. Can I tell them all his nickname? I love his nickname. Can I tell them those nicknames? Because we have this thing. So every mother tells her child when they don't want the child to do anything. Kabardar, which is don't you dare.

You better take care. And he gets that nickname, old Kabardar, because, you know, they say he never takes a risk that you didn't have to. You know, just don't even risk it. So that's his nickname, Colin Campbell. And he has a very different army with him as well. I mean, it's not the East India Company Army anymore. These are crack squads like the Queen's regiments. They're 93rd Highlanders, otherwise known as the thin red line. And this is the very cream of the British fighting force, which has now come. Yeah. The Victorian books make a great deal of this because the British always looked down on East India Company armies and regarded them as slightly second division, almost like a sort of G4S security force rather than the actual troops.

Other security forces exist. Don't sue us G4S. Anyway, as you were, carry on. Well, yeah, anyway, the Victorians regarded the British army proper as a cut above every other force in the world. And from memory, I think these guys were on their way to China. They were on their way to the China coast. Yeah. When the ships get turned around back to Calcutta and they get then sent up the country with Campbell to relieve Kahnpour. And we last saw these Highlanders in their kiltz marching on.

Kampur ready to revenge the dead of the Bibi Gar. They've done that. They've created havoc and butchery in Kampur and now they're making their way for a final bout of revenge killing in Lucknow. But Campbell is clever. He's Kani. He's a Kani, Scott. And he's knew how in the previous attempt to relieve Latinau, they just marched through the middle and lost half their force because This is, you know, not now with narrow lanes is a perfect guerrilla fighting territory. Snipers and windows can just take out any of these guys as they stroll in their kilts through the streets. So Campbell avoids the narrowest streets and he goes a long way around. He goes through the parks and palaces.

He reconnoiters very successfully. And he uses a very clever method of blasting his way through the outer defenses like Shanajaf and Sikandabar, through the gardens. and he makes it, if you like, three quarters of the way around the city and comes into the residency from the rear. And one of the great slaughters of the entire mutiny, we saw the great slaughter in Delhi in the last episode once Nicholson and the other troops have burst into Kashmiri Gate. The equivalent in the fall of Lucknow is what happens in Secunderbagh. Now, this is a high wall garden and it's closed off on four sides. And what Campbell does is he just blows a hole in one tiny bit of the wall. It's not a big hole.

It's a really small, it's a small breach. Exactly. It's not huge at all. What, three feet square? Exactly. And these guys in their kilts have to clamber through it. Yeah. But there's no way out because of this for the rebels inside.

And so once the Highlanders have clambered in to Secunderbark, they just get their Benets out. And they kill every single one of the. troops in this enclosed space. I remember reading about this and the rocket fuel that these troops were on. I mean, apart from the fact they've got through a tiny little entrance that there's no way out for them either, is that they have, you know, they're screaming at the top of their voice, remember Karnpur, remember Delhi. And that is, you know, the thing that is pushing them forward to this no quarter fight,

that they will kill or be killed. It's as simple as that. So they are a terrifying force that break upon this place. Well, they're literally bare-knitting men trapped against these walls. And the story is that the piles of bodies are so high that the soldiers actually have to climb over them to find more people to kill. I mean, it's an horrific, horrific scene. Dead bodies blocking the gateways.

Anyway, after this, Campbell, by this odd route, which avoids his troops coming into much direct danger themselves, reaches the residency. and unlike the previous attempt by Neil, he evacuates the civilians and the garrisons. And then without pausing, immediately he withdraws them all from the city, leaving only a tiny force in the Alambagh on the outskirts. So the rebels reclaim Lucknow, but this sense of victory is illusionary. It's not going to last very long, is it? Because they're not going to leave it now that they know they can take it.

So it's just, you know, a tick, tick, tick of time. And at this point, I want to introduce somebody we've talked about before on this podcast who we, you know, respect hugely a man called William Howard Russell. Probably, I would say, the first war correspondent. He wrote for the Times. He was a man who had a conscience. He was a man who could admit when he got something wrong. You know, he'd come with one state of mind.

And it could be changed because of the evidence of his eyes. So Russell is there on the scene. And this is one of those moments where you'd come with. see him doing a 180 degrees and changing his mind about what the hell is going on here under the flag that he worships. What does he see? So Russell is disgusted by what he sees the Brits up to. And what's fascinating is that the British have been fed in their news up to now, particularly in the Illustrated London News, which is the most read magazine and which has been covering this in a very jingoistic fashion. And the British had just been told that

The Indians are these savages who go around raping Indian women and the genocide is too good for them. It's really the message. And this is heard in London. And even someone like Dickens, Dickens is always the person that sticks in my way. Because he's someone who's usually on the side of the oppressed, the minorities, the underdogs. He's vile about this. Yeah. He's vile.

He says delete deli. So what's the great victory of Russell's moral stature is that he dares to report the truth. and in a world that is being fed propaganda and fake news, he is the only source of truth. The way he counters it is just by saying what he sees. So he describes, you know, British troops as being drunk with blood. He sees them doing things which are unconscionably inhumane, breaking every rule of, you know, not gentlemanly conduct, but warfare,

the conduct of warfare. And at one point he asks, and this is a very famous quote from Russell, Is this a war or is it a series of executions? And all of this is sort of, you know, starting to filter out. But the final act for luck now is yet to come. You remember we just said a little while ago, the rebels managed to take back the city because the British withdraw, but it's not for very long.

Because in the spring of 1858, Campbell, of course, comes back. And he comes back with 31,000 men this time. 31,000 men and I think something in the order of 160 plus heavy guns. It is the largest army ever assembled by the British in India. Extraordinary that. And just mad. And the rebels, remember, are led by Begham Hazrath Mahal, you know, this extraordinary woman. And she has somebody else by her side who we've not really mentioned.

And he is a holy man. Tell us who's right at her shoulder at this point. So the Morvi of Fisabad is in many ways the Begum's rival at the early part of the uprising before the Begham had really established herself as the sole voice of the rebels in Lat now, the Mawvi had rather fancied himself for that position too. And he's one of these sort of jihadi Maldives that we talked about in the last episode. There is, the language of jihad is very much on the lips of many of the rebels at this time. And reading it today, obviously, you know, we read it after we're used to hearing it on the lips of al-Qaeda and ISIS and so on.

the words jihad and Ghazi leap out of the pages of the primary sources in a way, perhaps they didn't to someone writing this in the 50s or the 60s or the 40s. Anyway, the Mulvey is very much of that persuasion. And now working alongside his former rival, the Begham Hazraat Mahal, they know that they are the last stand of the uprising. They know the British are going to come back. And they have built three massive lines of defence. Tell me about that, Anita.

Well, I mean, the lines of defence are really considerable. They're great, except they haven't reckoned that Campbell's going to come with so many people and that he is going to have the ability to outflank these three massive lines of defence. So it happens on March 14th, the British Storm, Kaisabar. It's a huge palace complex that is the pride of the kings of others. You see photographs of it, and there's one tiny fragment of it surviving today. And I've stayed in that fragment. It was now the property of the Rajah of Mahmudabad.

And I was lucky enough to spend a night there with the old Suleiman Mahmoudabad is now dead. But in 1857, it's 10 or even 20 times the size of the enormous building that's there today. And in the photographs, it looks like, you know, one of those palaces in St. Petersburg or one of those endless Zaris palaces that go on for miles and miles into the distance. And this is where the rebels are based and this is where Campbell comes to them. And he smashes through. I mean, he does this quite brilliant.

And credit where it's due, just as a strategist, this is just brilliant. He gets around, outflanks, crashes through, takes the Kaiser Barg. And now what happens next is actually, you know, you've seen the best of British soldiery in doing that. And then you see the worst because they end up in this, as you call it. I think it's brilliantly compared to, you know, St. Petersburg luxury, you see the soldiers go nuts. The British soldiers, once they are unleashed with all of this, you know, having seen, and, you know, cut them some slack as well. You know, they've probably seen some horrible things and done some horrible things and suffered some horrible things.

But they get into this place of immense beauty and they smash everything up. You know, just like a rampage of hooligans. The chandeliers are pulled down and smashed with musket butts. You've got sort of cashmere shawls ripped up. used as saddlecloths, you know, ivory treasures are just put into campfires and burned, and pockets are filled to bursting points. So, I mean, the looting that goes on here, Willie, just tell us it's nuts. Well, all over Britain to this day in private houses are items of loot from this palace. I have come across two houses that I know personally, where there are

sort of cups of the King of Ovid or jewels of the King of Ovid that are still lying around on shelves in people's houses. There are a lot of British troops that are doing. a lot of looting. But in the next half, we will talk about the terrible fate of Lucknow after British capture Kaisemakir. Welcome back. So the fate of Lucknow hangs in the balance now. And if you think about what they did to the palace, it's not looking good, is it? And if you read Rundrungshu Mukherjee, who we keep quoting because he's done sort of, you know, the most amount of work on this. He describes what happens next as herbicide. So not genocide, but herbicide, the killing of a city, its people, its spirit, basically wiping it off the map. And that's

what they do. Yeah, I mean, they plan to do the same in Delhi. And the fact that the Red Fort survives, more or less intact. About half the internal buildings of the Red Fort were destroyed. And there were plans to destroy all of it, plus to level the Jabba Masjid and build a Gothic cathedral. Now, that didn't happen in Delhi because John Lawrence turns up to the Punjab. And we have to thank Lawrence for the survival of the Red Fort and the survival of the Jamalian. Otherwise, we'd have some hideous Victorian cathedral where that beautiful Vogel mosque remains today. But no one intervened in Lucknow.

And about four-fifths of the city is just wiped out. Today, there's a little bit of Kaiser Barg. There's a couple of pavilions. There's lots of tombs. But you have to go to the old photographs. That was very well photographed before and during this destruction. And there's a great photographer called Biato, who was of Italian extraction, who photographs Lucknow just before this herbicide, just before they completely destroy.

Imagine St. Petersburg. That's the kind of landscape you have to think. Or Paris. You know something beautiful like Paris? And then suddenly you say, right, Paris will be no more. and you sort of crash through the boulevards and you recreate them. You know, you're going to wipe off every semblance of its past, its history. Can you remember that quote we had when we started the, we first talked about Latinau in an earlier episode?

He says, you know, not Paris, not Rome, not Constantinople, Luck now is the most magnificent. And no one has told me this. He's irritated because he's been told these people are savages. And he turns up and finds this unbelievable magnificence. And then he sees it destroyed in front of his eyes. It's just, it's one of the great bits of British imperial vandalism up there with the summer palace in Peking and the stripping of the path and then and all these other things that, you know, that we keep hearing about. But Lucknow is not so famous today because very few people know, I think, what was lost in Lucknow.

I mean, it's not just an act of vandalism, though, this herbicide, this destruction of a city in its culture. You know, one terribly hard-fought lesson that they've learned is that, you know, those winding streets of the Mughal city, you know, those beautiful little surprises that you can. come across in an old mogul city of a narrow lane opening up into this beautiful kind of haveli in a courtyard, they killed lots of Brits, you know, because they were jumped on, they were ambush. So what they want to do now is create these sort of clear lines, streets that are straight, that you can drag a cannon through, that you can march your men through, you can race your horses through without fear of being jumped upon. So that kind of, you know, is one of the reasons behind this, if you like, I think it might even be your phrase, spatial cleansing, and

and turning it into like an entirely different looking city that has no past, that has no roots in this very rich, beautiful culture. And you say it goes even further than that, Willie, because, you know, the poets are silenced and there's no more music. And it's like everything that ever made Lucknow, what it was, has gone, completely gone after the British do what they need to do. Now, at the same time that they are dynamiting the Kaiser Barg and destroying one of the great urban landscapes of the 19th century and 18th century. The British are putting on trial the last

Mughal emperor. Bahad Shah Zaffa, who we met at the beginning of this series as this multilingual poet who had created this extraordinary renaissance of Udu poetry and turned Delhi into one of the most cultured cities of his time, despite having almost no budget. He has surrendered to the British. And at the same time that now is being destroyed in revenge. for what Lucknow did to the British, the British are putting Zaffa on trial, blaming him. This is an 82-year-old man. He's basically seen that. He's seen all his sons shot in front of him or hung or dragged away and their naked bodies thrown in the Cotwell. And there is a show trial when Zaffer is accused of being personally the spider at the centre of the web, of being at the

center of what is made out by the prosecutor to be an international Muslim conspiracy stretching to Mecca and Iran. And this is complete historical nonsense. As we know, the uprising started largely in the East India Company's own army when it's largely Brahmin and upper caste troops refused to touch this cartridge. And he can't be killed because Hudson has promised him his life when he's surrendered. And so the worst that the British can do is to exile. him. But that is exactly what they do. They plan to move him off to Burma and to send him to exile in Burma and Rangoon, just as they had sent the last King of Mandalay to Bombay. So they kind of, you know, move exiled heads of state around their chessboard. And the night before he is due

to be exiled, Russell gets in to see him. He's still in the stables where he's been dumped. All he has is a charpooy. And Russell, like everybody else, who, you know, has read the transcripts of the trial. I think he was in luck now during the trial, so he wasn't present, but he knows the charges against him. And the child makes out that Zuffer is like, you know, like some sort of villain from a James Bond movie with a white cat controlling all this sort of spectre-like activity across a vast area.

What he finds, and it takes the genius of William Howard Russell, who is not someone to have the wool pulled over his eyes, what Russell sees. is something plainly and evidently completely different. He was, wrote Russell, a dim, wandering-eyed, dreamy old man with a feeble hanging nether lip and toothless gums. Was he really? One who had conceived that vast plan of restoring a great empire, who had fermented the most gigantic mutiny in the history of the world.

We called him ungrateful for rising against his benefactors. he was no doubt a weak old man, but to talk of ingratitude on the part of one who saw all the dominions of his ancestors gradually taken from him until he was left with an empty title and the more empty exchequer and a palace full of penniless princes is perfectly preposterous. And this is an important point incidentally. I just break in here to say that until 1832, the British had actually had Fidvi Shah Alam, the vassal of Shah Alam on their own coin. They were the vassals of the moguls.

That was their official position. So now to charge him with treachery against them is to just invert it. You know, they are the vassal. Zaffa cannot be disloyal to them. They are the ones who are disloyal to him. Anyway, just to complete Russell's extraordinary moment of perception. Not a word came from his lips. In silence he sat day and night with his eyes cast on the ground,

as though utterly oblivious of the conditions in which he was placed. His eyes had the dull, filmy look of very old age. Some heard him quoting verses of his own composition, writing poetry on a wall with a burnt stick. Oh, this is again, I mean, thank God for Russell, because it also, that with the other little piece of evidence that we presented in our last episode, of a man who knew that his city was about to fall and is composing these just bonkers verses. of next stop London will be there soon. He's lost his mind. I mean, there's some kind of dementia or just madness, mania that has set in.

But even in the throes of that, he is still able, Willie, to produce some pretty heartbreaking poetry. And there's one, you know, you've read it before on this podcast. I have read it before. I think our second episode or something. Yeah, I'm not ashamed of asking you to do it again because the last time you did do it in our second episode. People were in tears.

And I think you were in tears. And, yeah, I wasn't in tears. I'm a hard-hearted cow, but it is really deeply moving. And I might cry this time. So, look, read it again because it is beautiful. Go on. So this is said to be the poem which Zuffer was putting on the wall with the burnt stick when Russell walked in. Whether that is the case, no one knows.

In fact, no one even knows whether it is Zuffer's poem, because the legend is that this was being recited by the bards who used to perform outside the German Aslude. And when the people of Delhi allowed back in again, which they're not a lot. loud for two years. They're just like the Gazans shoved into a corner of Gaza. They're shoved over the Amina, but they're allowed back after two years. And the story goes that this is what the poem that was recited as Zaffa's last poem dedicated to Zenat Mahal, his wife, who went with him into exile in Burman. When in silks, you came and dazzled me with the beauty of your spring, You brought a flower to bloom Love within my being

You lived with me Breath of my breath Being in my being Nor left my side But now the wheel of time has turned And you are gone No joys abide You pressed your lips upon my lips

Your heart upon my beating heart And I have no wish to fall in love again for they who sold love's remedy have shut shop and I seek in vain. My life now gives no ray of light. I bring no solace to heart or I. Out of dust to dust again, of no use to anyone, am I? Delhi was once a paradise where love held sway and rained. But its charms lie ravish now, and only ruins remain.

No tears were shed when shroudless they were laid in common graves. No prayers were read for the noble dead. Unmarked remain their graves. The heart distressed, the wounded flesh. The mind ablaze, the rising sigh. The drop of blood, the broken heart. Tears on the lashes of the eye. But things cannot remain ozaphethas, for who can tell through God's great mercy and the prophet.

All may yet be well. Oh, poor Zafo wasn't well, there was it. All was not well. All was never well again. Not for him, not for his family. So look, I mean, 1858, the British won. But they did lose as well because there used to be. I mean, you know, the era of the white moguls where, you know,

there was reciprocity and there was love. and there was, you know, affairs and there were, you know, mixed children. That's all over. But now this is another era over where there is any thought that Indians are worth anything, that, you know, they start now looking at them just wholeheartedly as savages. And by doing that, Willie, they lose the hearts of Indians forever. If anything, they've kind of lit the spark that will eventually lead to Gandhi and Nairu and Jinnah and the like saying, you know what, get out.

And it's a strange coincidence that the year Galib dies is the same year that Gandhi is born. Oh, really? But it's interesting because what, you know, when India wins its freedom, it's not the Talukdas, it's not the Mughals, it's not the Marathas, it's none of the old princely order. It's the British train lawyers. Yes. Who, in a sense, use the weapons of the British against the British. They learn how to fight them. And they know that the resistance like this, just picking up arms, is not going to destroy this massive British army.

But there's another effect, too, the British blame the Muslims for this. Because the moguls are the figurehead, because everyone goes to the mogul court, because Zhafer is the heart of this, even though he is unwillingly heart of this. The British blame the Muslims and they destroy Mughal and Mughal and Mugh. Muslim power in India. And the Indian Muslim elite never recover from this. It's not only the end of the East India Company and not only the end of the Mughal dynasty, but it's also the end of the Indian Muslim elite. They are destroyed at this point and they will sink from being the elite of India, which they've been really since the 12th century in North India, to this position of inferiority. In Delhi, it is the Hindu banking classes that buy up.

the city that take over the ruins which are left gutted by the city. And the Muslims don't quite know what to do. There's two different approaches. You find on one hand, a figure like Saeedah and Khan looking to the West and believing that Indian Muslims can only revive their fortunes by embracing Western learning. And he starts the university in Alighar, which still survives, and trying to encourage westernization of Indian Muslims. But the other approach, and this is the one in the sense that we are more familiar with is that the Muslim elite rejects the West and turns against it. And the old madrasa Irahmae, which was the main madrasa in the centre of Delhi, destroyed at this point, reforms in a place called Daobund in the years after this. And it's out of

the Deobundi madrasas as recently as the 1980s that the Taliban emerge. And the Taliban provide the shelter for al-Qaeda, and it is al-Qaeda out of this world that comes in 9-11 and attacks the West. So you can see not just, in a sense, the divide between hindered and Muslim in partition, not just the difference between the old feudal order and the new order which arrives part of Gandhi and Nauru, but you also see the despair of the Muslim world, which leads to the growth of Islamism and ISIS in our own day. You know, it's funny you should say that, because it is our next two-parter. It's the Iranian Revolution, a theocracy based on Islam and the rejection of the West that's coming up next.

And we have a brilliant guest to do that. It's Scott Anderson, he's a veteran war correspondent, author of a brilliant book on the Iranian Revolution. So, look, join us for that mini-series too. Willie, thank you. I mean, you write beautifully. You recite poetry beautifully. I didn't cry again. But that's my failing, not yours. I'm going to think about what I've done. I had such fun rereading that you don't normally get to read, reread your books for 20 years ago. And the last Bougall, which was a book I enjoyed writing more than I think any other book I've ever written. Very much enjoyed it. Listen, until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Drupal.