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 Dalrymples 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 Britains 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 Kiplings The Man Who Would Be King and the character of Mr. Kurtz in Joseph Conrads 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.
Chris Mason is professor of national security affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College.
In Heart Like a Fakir, Chris Mason uses the voluminous papers of General Sir James Abbott--an explorer, soldier, and district officer who lived as a native among the peoples of the Hazara district--to explore how relations, social and sexual, between Britons and Indians broke down in the last decades of British East India Company rule. This breakdown--which contributed to the mutiny uprising--is usually attributed to the arrival of Christian missionaries and British women in significant numbers in the early years of the nineteenth century. Masons work suggests that historians need to look much more closely at the twenty-five years before the mutiny uprising. This is essential reading for all those interested in the last years of East India Company rule.--Francis Robinson, Royal Holloway, University of London
Chris Masons richly textured and elegant reconstruction of James Abbotts varied career over the final decades of the East India Companys rule in India persuasively and entertainingly illuminates the complex and frequently contradictory impulses and impressions shaping British interactions with India in the years before the cataclysmic rebellions of 1857-58. Drawing on Abbotts remarkable legacy of more than ten thousand pages documenting his forty years in India, Heart Like a Fakir introduces us to a British officer--similar in so many ways to Kurtz in Heart of Darkness--whose deep knowledge and romantic idealization of India--but often willful blindness to the changes happening around him--personifies the increasingly brittle and unstable relationship between colonizer and colonized.--Douglas M. Peers, University of Waterloo
Chris Mason has rescued from obscurity one of the most remarkable agents of British imperial rule in nineteenth-century India. James Abbott was an army officer, district commissioner, Central Asian explorer, and irrepressible romantic. This engaging and insightful study is at once an intimate portrait of the man himself and an illuminating examination of the social and cultural changes that led to the erosion of East India Company rule in India and the outbreak of the 1857 Indian Rebellion/Mutiny.--Dane Kennedy, author of The Imperial History Wars: Debating the British Empire
