THE GRAND THRONE
On this, he must have sat and mulled the end of his dynasty. This was the throne of the final Mughal emperor.
At first, Bahadur Shah Zafar’s marble throne looks small, not quite a seat of power. It becomes statelier as one observes it closely. The armrests are supported by latticework in stone. The tip of each armrest curves into a swan.
A devotee of Sufism, Zafar had allotted himself a grave next to the dargah of a cherished Sufi saint in Mehrauli. But his plan didn’t work — following the failure of the 1857 war of independence, in which Indian fighters rejected British rule and chose Zafar as their nominal ruler, the emperor was sent into exile in Burma (now Myanmar), where he was eventually buried.
Now, at long last, Zafar finds some posthumous peace in the museum. His throne commands a part of the gallery that celebrates his beloved Sufi mystics. The saint of Mehrauli belongs to the same Sufi order as Hazrat Nizamuddin, the surrounding grounds of whose shrine eventually became the resting place of hundreds of Mughal royals. Called the “dormitory of the Mughals,” Humayun’s Tomb is home to 160 graves, most of them in groundlevel vaults.
A display case beside Zafar’s throne details all the Mughal monarchs who visited Nizamuddin’s dargah. Their veneration began in 1526, following Babar’s victory over Ibrahim Lodi. Among the first things that Babar did on entering Delhi was to pray at this dargah. Years later, his son Humayun built his capital of Dinpanah, known as Purana Qila, close to the dargah. Humayun also built a tomb for his mother, Maham Begum — it was even closer to the dargah (and now functions as a traffic island).
Then, Humayun’s successor, Akbar, built a mausoleum for his father close to Nizamuddin’s dargah — the Humayun’s Tomb. One of the two most significant early Mughal monuments, it served the model for the other, the Taj Mahal. The tomb was Zafar’s refuge after he lost to the British in 1857, and it was from here that he was arrested and deported to Rangoon.