Word: delhi
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...staff in Rhythmics, a DVD shop in an incense-filled underground market below Delhi's Connaught Place, were puzzled by my questions. The salesman scanned the walls of DVDs and then turned to me with a forlorn look on his face. "Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan fighting? No, we don't have that movie available. What's it called?" Next door, in a shop stacked high with the very latest movies, manager Kuldeep Singh dismissed the feud as "just newspaper attitude." "They make it up to sell more," he said with smile. "How can there be a fight when...
...bottom of this story - never let it be said that TIME's Delhi bureau is not at the forefront of investigative journalism's biggest stories - I sent a request to the Big B and SRK asking them for comment. Not having received a reply from either, I set out to take the pulse of India's movie lovers. Was there a fight? What was real and what was publicity-driven artifice? Given this is Bollywood, does it even matter...
...Although Zafar's life binds the narrative together, the real subject of The Last Mughal is Delhi itself. Dalrymple wants to prove that, far from being decadent and in terminal decline as is often thought, late Mughal Delhi was a thriving city, full of poets, artists and traders. Religiously eclectic, Delhi culture freely blended Hindu and Muslim influences. Although Indian nationalist memory glorifies cities along the Ganges like Kanpur as the centers of the revolt, Dalrymple suggests that Delhi was the true locus of the 1857 uprising. Drawing on contemporary accounts from the Indian and British sides, he paints...
...story ends badly for Zafar and Delhi. After a bitter siege, the British retake the capital, the citizens are massacred, and the old Emperor is exiled to Burma, where he dies, neglected and forgotten. Yet despite his flaws-Zafar was indecisive and easily manipulated by bad advisers-he still emerges as something of a hero in Dalrymple's narrative. Throughout the British siege, he obstinately refuses to alienate the Hindus by giving in to demands of Muslim fanatics among the rebels...
...Last Mughal argues that the destruction of Zafar's court and the religiously tolerant culture of Mughal Delhi exacerbated divisions between Hindus and Muslims and fueled the rise of Islamic fundamentalism on the subcontinent. Without Zafar, Dalrymple writes, "it would be almost impossible to imagine that Hindu sepoys could ever have rallied to the Red Fort and the standard of a Muslim leader, joining with their Muslim brothers in an attempt to revive the Mughal Empire." By invoking the memory of the last Emperor, Dalrymple reminds Indians of a time when such religious harmony was easy to come...