Heart Like a Fakir

Book excerpt: Heart Like a Fakir is a history of the final forty years of British East India Company rule in India as witnessed by General Sir James Abbott (1807–1896), the man for whom the Pakistani town of Abbottabad is named. Based on extensive research into primary 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 cataclysm that ended British East India Company rule.