From
the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the
Christians of the < Middle East
White Mughals
Return of the King - narrative of the last
king of Afghanistan, which also contrasts the British, Russian and
American invasions of Afghanistan
Much os based on recently discovered non-English texts:
a
second-hand book dealer who occupied an unpromising-looking stall at Jowy Sheer
in the old city. The dealer, it turned out, had bought up many of the private
libraries of Afghan noble families as they emigrated during the 1970s and 1980s,
and in less than an hour I managed to acquire eight previously unused
contemporary Persian-language sources for the First Afghan War, all of them
written in Afghanistan during or in the aftermath of the British defeat, but in
several cases printed on Persian presses in India for domestic Indian
consumption in the run-up to the great uprising of 1857. The sources consist of
two remarkable heroic epic poems—the Akbarnama, or The History of Wazir Akbar
Khan, of Maulana Hamid Kashmiri, and the Jangnama, or History of the War, by
Mohammad Ghulam Kohistani Ghulami, both of which read like Afghan versions of
The Song of Roland, and were written in the 1840s
The Last Mughal:
The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857
The last Mughal emperor, Bahadur
Shah II, also known as Zafar, died in a British prison in Burma in
1862. As the last of the dynastic line that extended back to the
sixteenth century, he had in his earlier years presided over a
culturally sophisticated court, but as the British East India
Company extended its control over more of India, his rule was
clearly coming to an end. Then the mutiny of the sepoys against
their British officers led to the siege of Delhi, the establishment
of direct British colonial rule, and the end of any pretensions of
Zafar as emperor. Dalrymple has mined the Persian and Urdu archives
to capture the culture of Zafar's court life -- a culture of artists
and intellectuals, of Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Dalrymple
adds greatly to the standard picture of the horrors of the fighting
that destroyed a great deal of the city of Delhi.Ages of Kali
Djinns of Delhi
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