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False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma
Author: Manu S Pillai
Publisher: Juggernaut
Price: Rs 899
Pages: 568
Manu Pillai is the deliverance that awaits generations of Indians bored to death by uninspiring history textbooks. His scholarly gifts sit beside an ability to tease out juicy, hilarious, even bizarre nuggets from the nooks and crannies of historical sources. He buries the reader in mounds of notes and references, then regales with a saucy sense of humour.
Can you identify the person that Pillai is describing in the following sentences? “The brown Victorian was swathed in bureaucratic blandness, not silk and colour; if he
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