Dastan-E-Ghadar

Zahir Dehlvi was a poet and a court official under Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor. He was living in Delhi when the Revolt of 1857 broke out, the upheaval that ended Mughal rule and brought in the British Raj. Dastan-e-Ghadar is his memoir of those years, dictated late in life as he lay dying.

The book opens with the twilight of the Mughal court and the author's own entry into a world that was already slipping away. Its heart, though, is the Revolt itself. Dehlvi takes the reader from the violent siege of Shahjahanabad through to the reprisals that followed. He describes the killing of the British Resident and the deaths of the European men, women and children who had taken shelter inside the Qila. He also records the emperor appealing to the rebels and then being unable to stop them as they took control of the fort.

Dehlvi does not stop at the slaughter. He also follows the people who got out alive and the hardships they faced as refugees once the city fell. The account is full of incident and sharp observation, and it reads as vividly as it does movingly.

This edition is the first English translation of the work. It serves as an important eyewitness record of the Revolt as it unfolded, and also as a personal story of a man watching the only world he knew change beyond recognition.