In June 1997 the Swis Bankers' Asociation published a list of over 1700 dormant account", untouched for over fifty years. Among the names supposedly those of Jewish victims of the Holocaust was an Indian princess, last heard of in 1942 living in Penn, Bucks, Intrigued, Christy Campbell began a search which took him to India, France and Russia and was to uncover a remarkable tale of conspiracy, deceit and imperial malpolitik.

In 1849, following the second Sikh war, the Punjab was annexed by the British and the ten-year-old Maharajah Duleep Singh, last Emperor of the Sikhs, deposed and brought to London. (At the same time the world-famous Koh-i-Noor diamond was acquired by the East India Company and presented to Queen Victoria.) Duleep Singh became a Christian, received a generous pension from the British government and settled down as a country gentleman on a large estate at Elveden Hall in Suffolk.

As the years passed, Duleep Singh's sense of injustice grew, and in the 1880s he persuaded himself that the way to recover his kingdom was by allying himself with Czarist Russia. He also had a new lover an English chambermaid - which necessitated abandoning his existing family. In Paris he fell in with Irish revolutionaries, Russian nationalists, Islamic visionaries and a Jewish-born doctor, who sent him and his teenage mistress on a journey to Moscow.

The British foreign secret service was watching his every move; and now, for the first time, the author can reveal from extensive research in the archives - both the identity of the spy and exactly who was manipulating the Maharajah and for what purpose. The result is a marvellously rich and enthralling real-life historical thriller, with the tragic figure of the last King of Lahore at its centre.

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PARTMENT OF POUTICAN SONG 量 e

maharajas-sudia Biography Biography

HarperCollins Pubinbers

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www.fireandwater.com

Published by HarperCollins Publishers 2000

135798642

Copyright Christy Campbell 2000

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 000 157008 4

ISBN 000 157217 6 (GDV)

Set in PostScript Linotype Janson by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Caledonian International Book Manufacturing Ltd, Glasgow

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