Book Review: Return of a King
The king whose year had begun so auspiciously, and who had put on such a dazzling and theatrical display of absolute power only a few weeks earlier, was once again, as in his youth, a lone fugitive, cantering blindly through the darker provinces of the Afghan night.In the spring of 1839, the British invaded Afghanistan for the first time. Led by lancers in scarlet cloaks and plumed shakos, nearly twenty thousand British and East India Company troops poured through the passes and re-established on the throne Shah Shuja ul-Mulk. On the way in, the British faced little resistance. But after two years of occupation, the Afghan people rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into violent rebellion. The First Anglo-Afghan War ended in Britain's greatest military humiliation of the nineteenth century: an entire army of what was then the most powerful nation in the world ambushed in retreat through high mountain snow drifts, and there utterly routed by Afghan tribesman.
Uncovering wide ranges of recently discovered sources - including materials in Russian, Urdu and Persian from archives in South Asia and previously not translated full-length contemporary Afghan accounts of the conflict, including the autobiography of Shah Shuja himself - William Dalrymple in his book Return of a King retraces these passages from history, bringing into life sets of several unforgettable characters. In Return of a King, Dalrymple once again blurs the distinction between history and historical fiction. In spite of the gigantic size of the book, the reader is never allowed to get distracted, and the book is compelling read and uniquely valuable both because of its scholarly appeal and warmth of human characters.
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Return of a King: The Dalrymple tradition continues. I had received the review copy from the shoppingwish.in. Thank you Anshul for giving me this opportunity. You can buy this book at amazon or at Flipkart in case you live in India. You can find the lowest price of this book in India at shoppingwish.in
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