New Year's Eve, 1856. As Captain Rodney Savage of the 13th Rifles, Bengal Native Infantry, celebrates the start of 1857 with his wife and friends in the isolated cantonment of Bhowani, news comes of a crisis that will have terrifying and widespread repercussions: the Rajah of the neighbouring native state of Kishanpur has been assassinated, and the Rani has had thirty-five of the culprits garrotted. With unrest...
mounting, the British have no option but to send troops to protect her and her young son. In the following months, as tension erupts into violence and the British begin to wonder whether even their closest servents are trustworthy, Rodney has good cause to remember the quiet comment of Caroline Langford, a visitor from England: 'India is your palace, but you live shut up in little rooms like the Bhowani Cantonment, and the next English room is always away at the other end of the palace somewhere.'
Combining the flare of a true story-teller with an intuitive sense of history born of his own deep knowledge and love of India, John Masters re-creates the horror of the Indian Mutiny that was to mark the end of British complacency in the huge sub-continent which they had thought their own. Never again would they feel so secure amid a native population that vastly outnumbered them.
The seeds of discontent had been sown, to bear fruit ninety years later in India's painfully won independence.
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