Begums, Thugs and Englishmen

Author: Fanny Parkes Parlby
Publisher: Penguin Books India
ISBN: 9780143029885
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
Fanny Parkes, Who Lived In India Between 1822 And 1846, Was The Ideal Travel Writer Courageous, Indefatigably Curious And Determinedly Independent. Her Delightful Journal Traces Her Journey From Prim Memsahib, Married To A Minor Civil Servant Of The Raj, To Eccentric Sitar-Playing Indophile, Fluent In Urdu, Critical Of British Rule And Passionate In Her Appreciation Of Indian Culture. Fanny Is Fascinated By Everything, From The Trial Of The Thugs And The Efficacy Of Opium On Headaches To The Adorning Of A Hindu Bride. To Read Her Is To Get As Close As One Can To A True Picture Of Early Colonial India The Sacred And The Profane, The Violent And The Beautiful, The Straight-Laced Sahibs And The More Eccentric White Mughals Who Fell In Love With India And Did Their Best, Like Fanny, To Build Bridges Across Cultures.

The Last Mughal

Author: William Dalrymple
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408806886
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 819

Book Description
WINNER OF THE DUFF COOPER MEMORIAL PRIZE | LONGLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 'Indispensable reading on both India and the Empire' Daily Telegraph 'Brims with life, colour and complexity . . . outstanding' Evening Standard 'A compulsively readable masterpiece' Brian Urquhart, The New York Review of Books A stunning and bloody history of nineteenth-century India and the reign of the Last Mughal. In May 1857 India's flourishing capital became the centre of the bloodiest rebellion the British Empire had ever faced. Once a city of cultural brilliance and learning, Delhi was reduced to a battered, empty ruin, and its ruler – Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last of the Great Mughals – was thrown into exile. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj's Stalingrad: a fight to the death between two powers, neither of whom could retreat. The Last Mughal tells the story of the doomed Mughal capital, its tragic destruction, and the individuals caught up in one of the most terrible upheavals in history, as an army mutiny was transformed into the largest anti-colonial uprising to take place anywhere in the world in the entire course of the nineteenth century.

White Mughals

Author: William Dalrymple
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 9351184552
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 884

Book Description
James Achilles Kirkpatrick landed on the shores of eighteenth-century India as an ambitious soldier of the East India Company. Although eager to make his name in the subjection of a nation, it was he who was conquered—not by an army but by a Muslim Indian princess. Kirkpatrick was the British Resident at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad when in 1798 he glimpsed Khair un-Nissa—'Most Excellent among Women'—the great-niece of the Nizam's Prime Minister. He fell in love with Khair, and overcame many obstacles to marry her—not least of which was the fact that she was locked away in purdah and engaged to a local nobleman. Eventually, while remaining Resident, Kirkpatrick converted to Islam, and according to Indian sources even became a double-agent working for the Hyderabadis against the East India Company. Possessing all the sweep of a great nineteenth-century novel, White Mughals is a remarkable tale of harem politics, secret assignations, court intrigue, religious disputes and espionage.

Begums, Thugs and White Mughals

Author: Fanny Parkes Parlby
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Colonial administrators' spouses
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description

Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque

Author: Fanny Parkes Parlby
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719053504
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 458

Book Description
This edition of Fanny Parkes' account of her travels in India provides valuable insight into middle-class British women's views on Indian life. It includes descriptions of the Zenana and Indian domestic life--subjects that are often omitted from male-authored travel texts.

Nine Lives

Author: William Dalrymple
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408801248
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
A Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet - then spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the violence by hand printing the best prayer flags in India. A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her best friend ritually starve herself to death. Nine people, nine lives; each one taking a different religious path, each one an unforgettable story. William Dalrymple delves deep into the heart of a nation torn between the relentless onslaught of modernity and the ancient traditions that endure to this day. LONGLISTED FOR THE BBC SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE

Fanny

Author: Erica Jong
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393324358
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 548

Book Description
"Jong . . . filled a gap in the great tradition of the picaresque novel. . . . Linguistically, "Fanny" is a tower of strength. . . . Jong has gone farther than Joyce."--Anthony Burgess, "Saturday Review."

In Xanadu

Author: William Dalrymple
Publisher: Penguin Books India
ISBN: 9780143031079
Category : Asia
Languages : hi
Pages : 354

Book Description
In Xanadu is, without doubt, one of the best travel books produced in the last 20 years. It is witty and intelligent, brilliantly observed, deftly constructed and extremely entertaining& Dalrymple s gift for transforming ordinary humdrum experience into something extraordinary and timeless suggests that he will go from strength to strength Alexander Maitland, Scotland on Sunday

Nur Jahan

Author: Ellison Banks Findly
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195360605
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Book Description
Nur Jahan was one of the most powerful and influential women in Indian history. Born on a caravan traveling from Teheran to India, she became the last (eighteenth) wife of the Mughal emperor Jahangir and effectively took control of the government as he bowed to the effects of alcohol and opium. Her reign (1611-1627) marked the highpoint of the Mughal empire, in the course of which she made great contributions to the arts, religion, and the nascent trade with Europe. An intriguing, elegantly written account of Nur Jahan's life and times, this book not only revises the legends that portray her as a power-hungry and malicious woman, but also investigates the paths to power available to women in Islam and Hinduism providing a fascinating picture of life inside the mahal (harem).

Journey Into the Mind's Eye

Author: Lesley Blanch
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681371944
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
A stunning tale set in England, Paris, and Moscow, chronicling Blanch's love for an older Russian man and the passionate obsession that takes her to Siberia and beyond. “My book is not altogether autobiography, nor altogether travel or history either. You will just have to invent a new category,” Lesley Blanch wrote about Journey into the Mind’s Eye, a book that remains as singularly adventurous and intoxicating now as when it first came out in 1968. Russia seized Lesley Blanch when she was still a child. A mysterious traveler—swathed in Siberian furs, bearing Fabergé eggs and icons as gifts along with Russian fairy tales and fairy tales of Russia—came to visit her parents and left her starry-eyed. Years later the same man returned to sweep her off her feet. Her love affair with the Traveller, as she calls him, transformed her life and fueled an abiding fascination with Russia and Russian culture, one that would lead her to dingy apartments reeking of cabbage soup and piroshki on the outskirts of Paris in the 1960s, and to Siberia and beyond.