It’s not an admiration, it should be said, shared by most modern Indians, who tend to dismiss their rule as just one more foreign incursion in a history of many millennia. Nor did British respect last a moment longer than the Mughal’s failure to support the British in the uprising of the Indian Mutiny. Tried, condemned and exposed to public gaze, the last Emperor, Bahadur Shah II, was sent to exile in Burma in 1858, where he died four years later. In the meantime, the British amassed a host of visual and literary treasures, not least from the imperial library itself, to be shipped back to England for study and display. Read more