‘Thuggee Sleeman’ was later Resident at Gwalior, and then at Lucknow until just before the Mutiny. In 1856, aged sixty-eight, a major-general and knighted, he died at sea on passage home. He had served continuously in India for forty-seven years. The village of Sleemanabad in what is now Madhya Pradesh is named after him. Today, when many colonial-era place-names have been and are being changed – most notably, in the case of Hervey’s story, Chennai for Madras – the fact that Sleemanabad remains must say something for the respect in which some at least of ‘The Men Who Ruled India’ are still held.

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Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Bantam Press an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © Allan Mallinson 2020

Endpapers: St Mary’s Church, Fort St George, Madras. Drawn and engraved by J. W. Gantz, Vepery, 1841. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover illustration by Robert Papp

ISBN: 978-1-473-57430-4

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