Farhatullah Baig imagines a mushaira as it might have been in the last glory days of Delhi, during the mid-nineteenth century, lit by the glowing embers of the dying Mughal empire. The Last Light of Delhi is the story of a last grand mushaira held in the city of Delhi circa 1845. Though the mushaira is fictional, the book is a cultural document of the age, taking the reader on a journey in time to a past when poetry flowed through the streets of the city. It paints a portrait of a lost world, of the life and living styles of the upper classes of Delhi in the decade before the fateful year of 1857. Baig takes the reader into the sitting rooms of some of the most iconic people of the time, from Mirza Ghalib to Bahadur Shah Zafar, giving us a glimpse into their private lives, describing their homes, their manners, their ways of dressing and talking, filling his portraits with colour and detail so that the poets appear vividly before us-and when they begin to recite their poems in the mushaira, it seems as if each poet is speaking out from the pages of the book.
