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Heart Like a Fakir: General Sir James Abbott and the Fall of the East India Company

By (author) Chris Mason

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normal price: R 3 862.95

Price: R 3 476.95

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Heart Like a Fakir is a history of the final forty years of British East India Company rule in India as witnessed by General Sir James Abbott (1807â€“1896), the man for whom the Pakistani town of Abbottabad is named. Based on extensive research into primary source documents, the book uses the life of General Sir James Abbott as a narrative thread to explore the troubled period between William Dalrympleâ€™s White Moghuls and the Indian Rebellion of 1857. General Sir James Abbott was one of the most remarkable characters in British colonial history, becoming Great Britainâ€™s first guerilla leader, the first Briton to reach the fabled Central Asian city of Khiva, and a British Deputy Commissioner who became the King of Hazara. He may have also been the inspiration for Rudyard Kiplingâ€™s The Man Who Would Be King and the character of Mr. Kurtz in Joseph Conradâ€™s novel Heart of Darkness. This book chronicles the remarkable collapse of the social contract between Britons and the peoples of India in the first half of the nineteenth century, taking a fresh look at British perceptions of race, gender, and the nature of social and sexual relationships between them, leading up to the Great Rebellion of 1857â€” the cataclysm that ended British East India Company rule.