Delhi’s Red Fort has hosted conquerors and commemorations, Independence speeches and light shows. On a warm May evening, as Saregama’s Carvaan Luxe presented The Last Mughal to a sold-out audience of 750 people, the fortress gave itself over to something else — genuine grief. Not performed grief, not the pleasant sadness that nostalgia brings, but the real, uncomfortable kind that arrives with understanding exactly what was lost and how.
The Last Mughal, based on William Dalrymple’s book, is a live storytelling experience featuring the author himself alongside vocalist Vidya Shah. Through narrative, poetry and music, the evening brings alive the world of Bahadur Shah Zafar and the cultural richness of 19th-century Delhi, its poets, politics, and passion. What made this particularly special was its setting, the Red Fort, placing the audience right at the heart of the story’s historical epicentre.
Historian and author Dalrymple has been telling the story of Bahadur Shah Zafar — poet-emperor, reluctant rebel, last of the Mughals — for the better part of two decades. Shah has been singing it alongside him almost as long. Together, they have performed The Last Mughal at literary festivals, at the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata, at the Asia Society in New York. But nothing, it turns out, prepared either of them for the Red Fort.
“I thought that was the best version we’ve ever done in 20 years,” Dalrymple says. “I’m not sure what was going on five minutes before,” he says with a laugh. “But it somehow all came together perfectly.”
Spoiler alert: It definitely did.
Concert, Theatre, Lecture
The format of The Last Mughal has always been, by its creators’ own admission, difficult to pin down. That evening at the Red Fort, it was also, for the first time, extravagantly produced. A sarangi player whom Dalrymple singles out as “spectacular,” a daf (frame drum) player, a three-piece percussion ensemble, and instrumentation the show simply never had access to before. “Normally, it’s just the two of us,” he says.
“We occasionally do it as a four or five piece, but we’ve never done it as well as that, and as grandly as that, on such a scale.”
One of the pleasures of the format, he adds, is precisely its restlessness. “I find that a concert can go on too long, and I find that a lecture can go on too long. What’s good about this is that it oscillates between one and the other — so you don’t get a chance to lose concentration. These things go together like kebab and roti. It’s a natural fit, and it’s odd that there aren’t more things like this.”
He is already entertaining ideas for future iterations — perhaps a version built around The Golden Road, his history of Buddhism’s journey from India to Asia. “I think it’s a rather clever innovation,” he says, without a trace of false modesty.
For Shah, the added scale was only part of what made the evening extraordinary. The Red Fort — the Diwan-i-Aam visible from the stage, the Meena Bazaar a short walk away — transformed the performance into something approaching lived experience. “We are sitting there and talking about the Meena Bazaar,” she says, “which is right there in the song.” The geography of grief, in other words, was not just evoked. It was underfoot.
Weight of the Words
Shah composed the majority of what she performed that evening — a fact that surprises until she explains why. The show draws not only on Zafar’s own celebrated ghazals and the familiar classical canon, but on what she calls “the smaller narratives which get lost otherwise in history”, folk songs and minor-key laments that she has spent years excavating from linguistic surveys and colonial-era records. “There’s no recorded documentation,” she says. “I just happened to find a whole bunch of things.” The result is music that feels simultaneously ancient and bespoke — composed for a performance but rooted in something much older.
Among the evening’s most indelible moments was the Flag Song, composed to capture the rallying cry of a people being called to arms, and the Dirge of the Begums, which Shah set in a particular raga to convey the fury and devastation of the women of the court following Zafar’s exile to Rangoon. “In my own musical way,” she says, “I tried to interpret the poetry to do justice to what the time was trying to say.”
The question of how music carries both aesthetic beauty and historical argument simultaneously draws a pause and then a characteristic candour. “You come into it with a sense of responsibility,” she says. “You want to make it interesting. You don’t want it to sound like a classroom situation; it’s a performance, after all.” The solution, she found, was to ask of each composition what it would have meant to the people who might have sung or heard it. To reason from the inside out.
For Dalrymple, the act of narration carries its own kind of evidentiary weight. He pushes back firmly on the suggestion that making history beautiful risks softening it. “These books have won all the major literary and historical prizes,” he says. What made The Last Mughal possible — as both a book and a performance — was archival density: 20,000 documents on 1857 in Delhi, sitting untouched in the National Archives.
“When the book came out, it was a major historical revolution — the first time we’d ever had 1857 told from the Indian records,” he says. His standard is exactitude. “If I say in The Last Mughal that the sun was shining on the first of August 1857, we have a record that the sun was shining.”
The Grandeur of Failure
Bahadur Shah Zafar — 82 years old during the uprising, exiled to Rangoon to die composing verses of longing and the absence of home — has been largely patronised by history, cast as the reluctant figurehead of a doomed rebellion. Dalrymple rejects that framing with force. “Against all the odds,” he says, “he produces this last great renaissance with almost no resources.” In 1856, he argues, Zafar might reasonably have been regarded as one of the great Mughal emperors; it was only the catastrophe of the following year, which he neither sought nor controlled, that reduced him to a footnote.
The comparison Dalrymple reaches for is illuminating. “If you’re talking about Shakespeare in England, nothing much happens to him during his life. Hamnet is fiction. Ghalib, Zauq, and Zafar lived through one of the most colossal upheavals in all colonial history.” The political, the personal, the poetic and the musical, converging in a single catastrophic moment — this is what makes 1857, for Dalrymple, uniquely resistant to simplification. And uniquely suited to this format. “You couldn’t ask for more,” he says. And then, with the glee of a born storyteller, he adds, “That’s just the first third of the story. Then all hell breaks loose.”
Myth Buster
Both Dalrymple and Shah are alert to the broader cultural context in which an event like this now operates. The growing Indian appetite for what might be called prestige cultural experiences — curated, premium, experience-led — has become increasingly visible; Saregama’s Carvaan Luxe platform, which chose The Last Mughal as its debut live showcase, is one of the more prominent expressions of that shift.
Shah, who has spent much of her career in the rarefied world of literary festivals and specialist audiences, is quietly electrified by the implications. “If a company with an outright commercial presence brings an event like this and receives the kind of response it did — I think in some ways it breaks a market myth,” she says. The myth in question is that classical and semi-classical music cannot, by itself, fill a premium venue and command a mainstream crowd. There may also, she suggests, be a broader tide turning. “There could be a certain kind of saturation in the other kinds of music that people are more and more exposed to,” she says. “Something like this comes like a breath of fresh air.”
What she hopes those 750 people carried home from the Red Fort is simple. “I think a lot of people would have left with goosebumps,” she says. “People who believe in the importance of history but also people who didn’t realise how powerful this time was.”
The show plans on moving to Mumbai and other Indian cities, hopefully in the second half of the year, with international dates — London is a particular aspiration for Shah — in discussion. Dalrymple, for his part, has a grander dream — to perform The Last Mughal in the Diwan-i-Aam itself, on the terrace of the Red Fort’s Mughal pavilions, rather than just in its precincts. Given what Carvaan Luxe managed to conjure this May, the idea feels less like fantasy and more like a matter of time.
Saregama is owned by RPSG Group which is also the licensed owner and operator of The Hollywood Reporter India.
The Anarchy: It’s Happening
The screen adaptation of William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy — The Relentless Rise of the East India Company, his 2019 account of the East India Company’s conquest of the Mughal Empire has long been the subject of speculation. Dalrymple confirms, “Yes, we’ve got Stephen Frears attached to it now.” The British director — whose credits include Dangerous Liaisons, The Queen and Philomena — is, Dalrymple says, “A dream to have.” He adds, “The script is still not quite there. We haven’t yet seen the thing finally move into fifth gear. But it is happening.”