The summative discussion opens with the dethronement of major music impresario and last King of Lucknow, Wajid ‘Ali Shah, and the canonical treatises his chief rabab player Basit Khan took with him into exile in 1856. I then synthesise the findings of the previous chapters to explore the reasons why both colonial and Indian/mixed-race figures wrote about music during this transitional period. For the coloniser, I argue, the reasons were a hunger to collect the auditory picturesque and, later, to control musical communities. Mughal writers, in contrast, were grappling with significant change as well as trying to mitigate the loss those changes threatened to their beloved musical culture. I conclude with the aftermath of the devastating 1857 Uprising as the reason we have forgotten these musicians and their writings, and point to the lingering echoes of the late Mughal in the classical music of today.

This chapter provides an overview of the shahr āshob genre and analyses one collection of 1857 poems: The Lament for Delhi (Fuġhān-e Dehlī, 1863). Reassessing this body of texts through an analysis of its emotional language, it highlights its originality from previous Urdu shahr āshobs. The resort to elegiac literary devices and the association with the secular elegy (marṡiyah) paved the way for a particular expression of collective grief (ġham), in which it was associated with physical suffering and trauma. The contrast between pre-1857 paradise and post-1857 doomsday materialised in the image of the garden, which was deployed to describe the city as symbol of an ideal vision of Mughal political order.