Sublime

Yet for all this rhetoric, behind the facade the royal family reacted by splitting into competing and deeply divided factions.

when Nizam Ali Khan acceded to the throne thirty-two years earlier in 1762, few would have guessed that, almost alone of the contending forces of the Deccan, it would be Hyderabad that would survive the vicissitudes of the next seventy-five years.

Adams was now behaving like a naturalized Hollander.

This new Imperial approach was one that Lord Wellesley was determined not only to make his own, but to embody. His Imperial policies would effectively bring into being the main superstructure of the Raj as it survived up to 1947; he also brought with him the arrogant and disdainful British racial attitudes that buttressed and sustained it.

“You may crush down the populace and keep them in awe with your arms, but until you conquer and win the hearts of the people, the peace and affection will be more an outward word of talk” than reality.50

The Mughal House of Timur ruled most of South Asia for more than two hundred years and became arguably the greatest dynasty in Indian history. For many, the Mughals symbolise Islamic civilisation at its most refined and aesthetically pleasing—think of the great white dome of the Taj Mahal that Akbar’s grandson, Shah Jahan, raised in Agra in memory

In return for the promise of ‘a faire Portugal maiden’ Ala-uddin Shah connived at this move to the extent of detaining a Portuguese emissary who might have alerted his fellow countrymen.

For the people of Delhi, the daily reality of what happened in 1857 was not so much liberation as violence, uncertainty and starvation. Indeed, reading through the Mutiny Papers there are times when it seems almost as if the siege of Delhi had become a three-cornered contest, with the sepoys and the British fighting it out, and with the people in D

As before, Western Evangelical politicians are apt to cast their opponents and enemies in the role of “incarnate fiends” and conflate armed resistance to invasion and occupation with “pure evil.” Again Western countries, blind to the effect their foreign policies have on the wider world, feel aggrieved to be attacked—as they interpret it—by mindles