Narrative of a residence at the Court of Meer Ali Moorad;
with wild sports in the Valley of the Indus.
London, Hurst and Blackett, 1860
'Langley was a political agent in Khairpur and had the rank of a major. Mir Ali Murad Khan Talpur was the second ruler of the Khairpur state (1842-1894). The East India Company had accused Talpur of deception and fraud and stripped him of most of his land in upper Sindh in 1852. He was left with little more than his original emirate, including Khairpur and surrounding lands.
The first chapter of the first volume gives intriguing details of how Mir Ali Murad was stuck in Italy without much money and with servants none of whom spoke Italian. Langley was sent from England to Italy to disentangle the Mir from his problems so that he could come back to Sindh. This shows how the British took care of the local lords as long as they remained faithful. While the first volume delineates the journey from England, to Italy, to India, via the Red Sea and Aden, ending with Langley's observations of Hyderabad, Shikarpoor (now Shikarpur), and Khyrpoor (Khairpur), the second volume is more concerned with the socioeconomics of Sindh' (Dr Naazir Mahmood, The Times International, February 17, 2018).
First edition, 2 vols, 8vo, viii, 306; vi, 300 pp., 2 wood-engraved frontispieces, titles with pictorial vignettes, original pebble-grained purple cloth gilt, neat repairs to extremities, a very good set.
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