About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the complete Urdu text and a new English translation of *Bazm-e-Akhir* ("The Last Assembly"), Munshi Faizuddin Dehlavi's account of daily life, ceremony and festival in the Red Fort of Delhi under the last two Mughal emperors, Akbar Shah II and Bahadur Shah Zafar.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the page بزم آخر and its section pages, downloaded in October 2026. The book was first printed in 1885 at the Armaghan-e-Dehli press at the Turkman Gate, Delhi; the commendation printed at its end is dated the fifteenth of February 1885.

What is left out and what was changed: every section of the author's text is given, in his order, from the opening verse to the commendation. Three things in the Wikisource edition are modern editorial matter and are not given here: the short summary at the head of the book, a long foreword by the twentieth-century writer Ashraf Saboohi Dehlavi, and thirty-four footnotes that gloss single words. Two footnotes marked as the author's own are kept, in brackets, where they belong. The book's thirty-one short sections have been grouped into ten chapters by subject, with Faizuddin's own section titles kept as headings. Lists of dishes, dress, jewels and colours are given in full; most of their names are transliterated, and the glossary explains the commonest.

Copyright: Faizuddin was brought up in the Fort before 1857 and the book appeared in 1885, so the author's text is in the public domain in Pakistan, India and the United States. The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …].

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Akbar Shah, Bahadur Shah, the Malika-e-Zamani and the Queen of the Age (the chief queen), the Crown Prince (Wali Ahd), the Salatin (the royal kinsmen), the Red Fort, the Diwan-e-Am, the Diwan-e-Khas, the Rang Mahal, the Moti Mahal, the Hayat Bakhsh garden, the Jama Masjid, Mehrauli (Khwaja Sahib, Qutb Sahib), Humayun's Tomb, Delhi.

Introduction

Munshi Faizuddin grew up inside the Red Fort and spent his youth in the service of a prince of the royal house, as the commendation at the end of this book records. After the uprising of 1857 the Mughal court came to an end: Bahadur Shah was exiled to Rangoon, and the world of the Fort was scattered. Nearly thirty years later, at the request of a Delhi publisher, Faizuddin set down what he remembered of it, and a grandson of the old court, Prince Mirza Muhammad Sulaiman Shah Gurgani, certified that his account was true.

*Bazm-e-Akhir* is not a history of battles or politics. It follows the King through one day, from the morning gun to the midnight drums, and then through one year: the anniversary of the accession, Nauroz, Muharram, the two Eids, Shab-e-Barat, the *urs* of the saints, the Hindu festivals of Salono, Dasehra, Diwali and Holi, the women's parties in the palace gardens, the Flower-Sellers' Fair at Mehrauli, and the rites that followed a death. Faizuddin writes in the present tense, as a guide showing a visitor round ("Look!", "There now!"), and he catches the talk of the palace women, with its teasing, its curses and its proverbs, as no other book does.

The book is valued for this reason by historians of Delhi and by students of Urdu, both as a record of the last Mughal court and as one of the best examples of the *begamati zuban*, the idiom of the women's quarters. Its long lists of dishes, fabrics, jewels and colours are themselves documents of a vanished material culture. Readers will notice that the old court mixed Muslim and Hindu customs freely, and that its ceremony, though the empire had shrunk to the walls of the Fort, was kept up to the last with great care.