Delhi, 1857: a thriving, cosmopolitan Mughal capital where an 82-year-old poet-emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, lives out his days on verse and kites—until mutinous sepoys storm the city and thrust leadership of history's largest revolt against British rule upon him.
An old ruler with no army and no taste for war can still turn a local mutiny into a mass uprising just by lending it his name. His approval gives scattered rebels a shared center and a claim to rightful authority. What matters is the symbol he stands for, not his fitness to lead troops.
A court that has lost almost all its money and real power can still produce a golden age of art. Here, poetry, calligraphy and painting reached a last great peak precisely as the empire's political strength drained away. Cultural brilliance and political strength need not rise and fall together.
When neither side in a siege can afford to back down, the fight stops being about terms and becomes a struggle to the death. Each side's inability to withdraw drives the other to fight harder. In this book, the result was a great city reduced to an empty ruin.
A period when rulers and ruled mixed freely, marrying across religions and adopting each other's ways, can give way to bitter separation. As newcomers grow more rigid and contemptuous, the earlier mixing gives way to suspicion. The author calls one book a marriage of cultures and this one its divorce.