This volume discusses the lives of five significant and influential figures of nineteenth-century Delhi - Mohammad Zakaullah, Nazir Ahmad, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Mizra Asadullah Khan Ghalib, and Khwaja Altaf Husain Hali. It studies their attitudes and behaviour towards one another, their responses to the onset of colonial rule, their experience of living through the 1857 Rebellion, their reappraisal of their culture and identity, and above all, the impact of their thinking and activism on their contemporaries.