The Last Prince of Bengal

A Family's Journey from an Indian Palace to the Australian Outback

The Last Prince of Bengal
Lyn Innes
RRP:
NZ$ 36.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 30.33
Paperback
h196 x 126mm - 256pg
5 Apr 2022 UK
International import eta 10-19 days
9781908906519
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
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 and his family 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; and from Bengal tiger hunts to sheep farming in the harsh Australian outback, Lyn Innes recounts her ancestors' extraordinary journey from royalty to relative anonymity. This compelling account visits the extremes of British rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, exposing complex prejudices regarding race, class and gender. It is the intimate story of one family and their place in defining moments of recent Indian, British and Australian history.
' I was captivated and surprised by this bitter-sweet history as it twists and turns down three generations, through many astonishing changes of fame and fortune, from a glittering Bengal palace to an Australian sheep farm. Lovingly researched and meticulously told, The Last Prince of Bengal is notable for its candid revelations of British colonial attitudes and hypocrisies across two centuries. A rich, delightful and unexpectedly thought-provoking saga. ' --Richard Holmes ' 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 The Irish Times. ' Lyn Innes explores her ancestors' history in moving detail, capturing the tragic story of the dethroned princes of Bengal who had to make their lives in foreign lands, marked forever by the harsh legacy of Empire. ' Shrabani Basu, author of Victoria and Abdul: The Extraordinary True Story of the Queen' s Closest Confidant. ' Lyn Innes tells her extraordinary and engrossing personal family history, revealing the ways in which the British Empire brought lives together, and scattered people apart. The Last Prince of Bengal tells us about the multitude histories we carry within, and the humiliations that race, class and faith perpetuate. ' --Salil Tripathi, author of The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy
Born and educated in Australia, Lyn Innes arned a PhD from Cornell University and taught at the University of Massachusetts,Amherst, where she became associate of OKIKE: An African Journal of New Writing, founded by Chinua Achebe, with whomshe co-edited two volumes of African short stories. Innes is currently Emeritus Professor of Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury.
Status: No local stock, title imported to order
ISBN-13: 9781908906519
Published: 5 Apr 2022
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: Westbourne Press
Publisher: Westbourne Press
Format: Paperback
Height: 196mm
Width: 126mm
Spine: 18mm
Pages: 256

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