000			02459nam a2200229 4500
008			200908b2019 ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9780674247581
082			_a306.8450 COH-B
100			_aB. Cohen, Benjamin
245			_aAppeal to the ladies of Hyderabad : _bscandal in the Raj / _cBenjamin B. Cohen
260			_aIndia _bHarvad University Press _c2019
300			_a347 p.
365			_aINR _b599.00.
500			_aThe dramatic story of Mehdi Hasan and Ellen Donnelly, whose marriage convulsed high society in nineteenth-century India and whose notorious trial and fall reverberated throughout the British Empire, setting the benchmark for Victorian scandals. In April 1892, a damning pamphlet circulated in the south Indian city of Hyderabad, the capital of the largest and wealthiest princely state in the British Raj. An anonymous writer charged Mehdi Hasan, an aspiring Muslim lawyer from the north, and Ellen Donnelly, his Indian-born British wife, with gross sexual misconduct and deception. The scandal that ensued sent shock waves from Calcutta to London. Who wrote this pamphlet, and was it true? Mehdi and Ellen had risen rapidly among Hyderabad’s elites. On a trip to London they even met Queen Victoria. Not long after, a scurrilous pamphlet addressed to “the ladies of Hyderabad” charged the couple with propagating a sham marriage for personal gain. Ellen, it was claimed, had been a prostitute, and Mehdi was accused of making his wife available to men who could advance his career. To avenge his wife and clear his name, Mehdi filed suit against the pamphlet’s printer, prompting a trial that would alter their lives. Based on private letters, courtroom transcripts, secret government reports, and scathing newspaper accounts, Benjamin Cohen’s riveting reconstruction of the couple’s trial and tribulations lays bare the passions that ran across racial lines and the intimate betrayals that doomed the Hasans. Filled with accusations of midnight trysts and sexual taboos, An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad is a powerful reminder of the perils facing those who tried to rewrite society’s rules. In the struggle of one couple, it exposes the fault lines that would soon tear a world apart.
650			_aMiscegenation
650			_aRace relations
650			_aScandals
650			_aIndia
650			_aIndia--Hyderabad (State)
650			_aEmployees
650			_aJang, Fathah Nawaz, 1852-1904
999			_c65853 _d65853