Best Historical Novels About Duleep Singh I

Duleep Singh I

1838–1893

Duleep Singh was the last maharaja of the Sikh Empire, a younger son of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and Maharani Jind Kaur. He was placed on the throne at Lahore in 1843 while still a child, during a period of factional violence and weakening central authority. After the First and Second Anglo-Sikh Wars, the East India Company annexed the Punjab in 1849, deposed Duleep Singh and required the surrender of the Koh-i-Noor diamond under the terms imposed on the defeated Sikh state.

Separated from his mother and placed under British guardianship, Duleep Singh converted to Christianity and was taken to Britain, where he became a conspicuous figure in Queen Victoria’s circle and established a country household at Elveden. In later life he became increasingly alienated from British rule, renewed contact with his Sikh heritage and attempted to return to India in 1886, but British authorities stopped him at Aden. He died in Paris in 1893 after years of frustrated efforts to recover status and property.

George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and the Mountain of Light places the child maharaja and the unstable Lahore court within the politics surrounding the First Anglo-Sikh War. Amarpal Singh’s The First Anglo-Sikh War and The Second Anglo-Sikh War provide the military and political history of the conflicts that progressively reduced Duleep Singh’s sovereignty and culminated in the British annexation of Punjab.

Historical novels and book series featuring Duleep Singh I (1 series)

The Flashman Papers in Order

by George MacDonald Fraser 12 books 4.2(80,547)

The Flashman Papers present the supposed memoirs of Sir Harry Paget Flashman, the bully expelled from Rugby School in Tom Brown’s School Days who becomes a decorated Victorian soldier despite being a coward, liar, opportunist and sexual predator. George MacDonald Fraser places this fictional witness inside documented nineteenth-century…