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Heart Like a Fakir

General Sir James Abbott and the Fall of the East India Company
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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 witnessedby General Sir James Abbott (1807-1896), the man for whom the Pakistani town of Abbottabad is named. Based on extensive research intoprimary source documents, the book uses the life of General Sir James Abbott as a narrative thread to explore the troubled period between William Dalrymple'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 Britain'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 Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King and the character of Mr. Kurtz in Joseph Conrad'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 1857- the cataclysmthat ended British East India Companyrule.
Chris Mason is professor of national security affairs and the director of the Study of Internal Conflict (SOIC) at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he researches, writes, and teaches on civil wars, insurgencies, and modern and historical India. He has published extensively on South Asia, focusing on Afghanistan, India, and the nineteenth and twentieth century borderlands between them. Dr. Mason is a retired Foreign Service Officer with a PhD in imperial and colonial history from the George Washington University in Washington, DC.
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