Yangon, May 18: After he died in exile in British captivity, the last moghul emperor of India was buried and forgotten as a footnote in history.

Nearly 140 years later, Bahadur Shah Zafar is stirring new passions. Since the discovery of his grave in 1991 in a quiet, leafy part of Yangon, the foreign king has been worshipped as a ‘‘pir’’, or saint, by Myanmar’s Muslims as well as people of other faiths. To the caretakers of Zafar’s mausoleum, he is a saint, a poet-scholar and a symbol of communal harmony.

Zafar’s aura of holiness is due to his reputation as a scholar of Sufism, an ascetic movement within Islam.

During his time, Zafar was one of the foremost poets of the Urdu language and an accomplished calligrapher. His poems, or ghazals, are still popular in India and Pakistan.
The moghul empire, established in 1526, ended when Zafar was dethroned by the British in 1858.

He died four years later at age 87 after penning his own epitaph in the form of a ghazal: ‘‘Kitna hai badnaseeb Zafar, dafn ke liye do gaz zameen bhi na mili ku-e-yaar mein (How unlucky Zafar is! For his burial, he couldn’t get even two yards of earth, in my beloved country)’’ (AP)