What Happened to the Mughal Royal Family After the Mughal Empire Fell?

The Mughal royal family's crown has been catalogued at Windsor since 1861. Bahadur Shah Zafar's own grave stayed lost for 129 years. Bahadur Shah Zafar came to the throne in 1837 with a court, a calendar of ceremonies and a pension paid to him by the East India Company. Twenty years later the empire was gone. This video follows what happened to the Mughal royal family after 1857 by following one object: the jewelled skull-cap that Major Robert Tytler bought at the Delhi prize auctions and sold to Queen Victoria in 1861 for five hundred pounds, along with two throne chairs. Along the way: the surrender at Humayun's Tomb on 20 September 1857, and the shooting of three princes at the gate now called Khooni Darwaza two days later. A trial held in the emperor's own Hall of Private Audience, in a room whose ceiling declares it a paradise on earth. The prize agents who invoked a European law of maritime salvage to sell the contents of Delhi, and the 4,700 manuscripts sold six days before Zafar himself left the city. Four rooms behind a ten-foot palisade in Rangoon, where pen, ink and paper were forbidden. And a grave designed to leave no trace, found in February 1991 by a drainage crew with a digger. It ends in a Kolkata slum and in the Supreme Court of India, where on 5 May 2025 a bench headed by Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna dismissed a Mughal descendant's claim to the Red Fort.