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, the Nawab was seen as a threat by the British authorities, who forced him to abdicate in 1880 and permanently abolished his titles.\n\n 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 the defining moments of recent Indian, British and Australian history.
Lyn Innes is the great-granddaughter of His Royal Highness, the last Nawab Nizam of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Born and educated in Australia, she moved to North America and developed her interest in cultural nationalism, focusing on Irish, African, <br><br> 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 co-edited two volumes of African short stories with Achebe. Innes is currently Emeritus Professor of Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury.
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