Author: Rosie Llewelyn-Jones
Series Editor: Sqn Ldr Rana Chhina (Retd.)
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Have you heard about the Battle of Chinhat in 1857?
The city of Lucknow was the epicentre of the uprising of 1857. In
Lucknow, 1857 - part of a new series of books on India's historic battles -
historian Rosie Llewellyn-Jones examines the conflict in detail, from the
British annexation of Awadh to the Indian response nad the subsequent revolt by
sepoys. The defeat of a unit of the East India Company's army at Chinhat led
immediately to the siege of the extensive British Residency in the heart of the
city. Here, nearly 3,000 people - British, Indian and Anglo-Indian - held out
for four and a half months. The winter saw huge defensive barricades being
built around Lucknow, but with their superior firepower, the British recapture
was the inevitable outcome. This richly illustrated field guide draws on
Llewellyn-Jones's intimate knowledge of the city to paint a vivid picture of
the events that unfolded in this historic urban battlefield.
Throughout the fight for independence, there have been uprisings across
the country and there are some stories that only a handful of people know. This
series explores all those stories and bring them to the forefront. Lucknow
1857 explores the series of events that took place from the Battle of
Chinhat in June of 1857 to the recapture of Lucknow on March 1858. What I loved
about the book is that it is a non-fiction history book, but it reads like a novel.
The book is structured in a wonderful manner with the background, the
commanders who were involved, the chronology of the events, and how everything
unfolded during that period. The text is wonderfully supported with maps and photographs,
both past and present which help you realise how things changed and places lost
their essence as the fight went on. The research in the book is wonderfully
done and I loved the small snippets of facts that make their way into the text
which make the read even more intriguing.
If you like to read history and something that is told in an interesting
manner, you can pick up this book. This one gets a 4.69/5 for me.
I got my copy at Faqirchand & Sons Bookstore in Delhi. The book is also available on Amazon India.
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