Review: William Dalrymple at the Writers & Readers Festival

William Dalrymple. Photo / Supplied

For the final session of the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival yesterday, British travel writer and historian William Dalrymple took the audience at the Aotea Centre back 153 years to the city of Delhi in May 1857, the epi-centre of the Indian mutiny against the rule of the English. It was the bloodiest revolution the British Empire ever encountered.

Dalrymple, a towering figure who spoke with the brio of a great orator, used imagery of paintings and photos to reinforce his compelling tale of the last Mughal.

Bahadur Shah Zafar II was an elderly, gentle mystic poet forced into the position of sheltering a massive army of rebelling sepoys, private Indian soldiers in the employ of the rapacious East India Company. He was completely unsuited to war.

Delhi-based Dalrymple, who spent years researching the events surrounding the rebellion for his book The Last Mughal, explained that in the earlier decades of the British presence in India, there existed an attitude of mutual respect and tolerance, with many inter-marriages between the British and Indian women.

That tolerance started to melt away with the arrival of rabid Christians, determined to convert the Hindus and Muslims to the church. The arrogance was breath-taking.

As the power of the East India Company grew, so did its army of sepoys but mutiny was growing.

The last straw came with the introduction of Lee Enfield rifles, with bullets - which the user had to bite down on - coated with fat from pigs or cows, anathema to the Indians. They killed their masters and fled to Delhi, demanding shelter in the Mughal¹s Red Fort.

He was caught in the middle and had no resources to support or guide the masses, who began to starve.

Eventually, after thousands had died on both sides, the British - led by psychopaths, as Dalrymple described them - regained power over Delhi and the Mughal. They set about destroying the city, killing every male, and dynamiting buildings of indescribable beauty and cultural importance.

They executed many of the emperor's sons and sentenced him to exile in Rangoon where he died. The last photo of the Mughal showed a lost, broken old man.

Dalrymple ended the evening by reading a poem written by the Mughal to his favourite wife during that time of exile.

It was moving, powerful and the full-house audience was spellbound throughout the evening. They had been in the hands of a master.

A magnificent treat, and a wonderful way to sign off the festival.