This article examines the parallel fates of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, and Thibaw, the last king of Burma in the late nineteenth century. British expansion displaced both rulers and turned them into state prisoners far from their capitals. It outlines the decline of the Mughal court and Thibaw’s short reign, the 1857 revolt, and the decisions to send Zafar to Rangoon and Thibaw to Ratnagiri. The piece describes their constrained lives in exile, restrictions on their income and movement, and the circumstances of their deaths and burials.
By the time Bahadur Shah Zafar became emperor in 1837, the Mughal state was a legal fiction, wrapped around an aging man who knew more of poetic metre than military logistics. He was a serious Urdu poetry lover who had Mirza Ghalib as a court poet. His Delhi court functioned as a cultural hub even as its borders shrank to a few neighbourhoods. One biographical account notes that he had “no interest in statecraft or imperial ambition", effectively outsourcing power to the East India Company in return for a pension.
Bahadur Shah wasn't unique. Poet kings seem to have been the norm at the time. In Satyajit Ray’s 'Shatranj Ke Khiladi', the Nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, appears as an enthusiastic patron of music, dance, and theatre while colonial officials quietly prepare to annex his kingdom. Historians have shown how Awadh’s court became a byword for “culture” and spectacle even as the Company took over revenue, tax extraction, and coercive power in the countryside. The intellectual and artistic richness of these courts sat uneasily on top of feudal land relations that left them vulnerable to a tightly organised, profit‑driven colonial bureaucracy.
When British troops marched into Mandalay in 1885, they faced a kingdom weakened by earlier wars and internal factionalism, coupled with an economy under pressure from global trade. King Thibaw, crowned in 1878, ruled for only seven years before being pushed into a carriage and shipped out across the Bay of Bengal. British administrators selected Ratnagiri, a small port off coastal Maharashtra, without a railway connection, specifically to keep sympathisers away and keep the king under control.
In Ratnagiri, the exiled family lived in what became known as Thibaw’s Palace, more a mansion than palace. On a controlled pension, Thibaw slipped into debt, reportedly pawning Burmese rubies to local moneylenders while complaining of “snakes and scorpions” and an “unpleasant place to live in.” When he died in 1916, he was buried in a relatively humble tomb nearby, which can still be visited today.
The 1857 Indian Rebellion had Bahadur Shah declared as Emperor of Hindustan, and its symbolic leader. Later, the British staged a military court in Delhi, charged him with treason, and then shipped him to Rangoon (now Yangon) as a state prisoner. In Burma, he was kept under close watch in a wooden house where he was placed under house arrest.
Historian William Dalrymple mentions that he was allowed no pen and paper. “It now seems as if the famous verses attributed to him in exile, expressing his sadness and bitterness, are not the product of his own hand”. However, William Howard Russell describes him writing verses on the walls of his prison with a burned stick, and it is not improbable that these could have been recorded and preserved.
When he died in 1862, officials buried him in an unmarked grave so that no shrine could form around his body. Over a century later, in 1991, Zafar’s burial site was rediscovered and developed into a dargah, where Indian prime ministers now usually pay tribute when they visit Myanmar.
Zafar and Thibaw were figures standing at a crossroads, between older feudal orders and the modern colonial state. Their courts produced extraordinary music, poetry, and theatre, but rested on hierarchies that placed the burdens of both local landlords and foreign companies on peasants, artisans, and soldiers.
Nationalist historiography saw these monarchs as a symbol of the last stand of an older South Asia. Their limited administrative capacity and deep investments in courtly pleasure, could not counter new forms of violence tied to railways, steamships, and joint‑stock companies which channelled wealth and labour from working people into large‑scale commodity production under global imperialism. Today, Ratnagiri and Yangon both live with the remnants of these exiles: a humble 'palace' whose resident could not go home and a shrine built over a grave that was meant to be forgotten.
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