Overview

The Nawab Nazim was born into one of India's most powerful royal families. Three times the size of Great Britain, his kingdom ranged from the soaring Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal. However, in 1880, he was forced to abdicate by the British authorities, who saw him as a threat and permanently abolished his titles. The Nawab's change in fortune marked the end of an era in India and left his secret English family abandoned. The Last Prince of Bengal tells the true story of the Nawab Nazim, his wife and their descendants, as they sought by turns to befriend, settle in and eventually escape Britain. From glamourous receptions with Queen Victoria to a scandalous Muslim marriage with an English chambermaid; from Bengal tiger hunts to sheep farming in the harsh Australian outback, Lyn Innes recounts her ancestors' extraordinary journey from royalty to relative anonymity. Exposing complex prejudices regarding race, class and gender, this riveting account visits the extremes of British rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is also the intimate story of one family and their place in defining moments of recent Indian, British and Australian history.

Full Product Details

9781908906465

Table of Contents

Reviews

'The book is a rich tapestry of family narrative in the course of which various intolerances of nation, ethnicity, class and gender are woven into a story that is deft, alive to irony, and alert to many human foibles - it is a work in which intellectual audacity is matched by sound research and textual scruple. The result is a masterpiece of patient, lucid analysis ... a spellbinding family history.'-- Declan Kiberd, (i> The Irish Times

Author Information

Lyn Innes is Emeritus Professor of Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Born and educated in Australia, she moved to North America and developed her interest in cultural nationalism, focusing on Irish, African, African American and Caribbean literatures. She earned a PhD from Cornell University and taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she became associate editor of OKIKE: An African Journal of New Writing, founded by Chinua Achebe. Innes has co-edited two volumes of African short stories with Achebe.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available