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with the history of the time will recognize countless details in this novel of actual events taken from the mass of diaries, letters and memoirs written by eyewitnesses, in some cases with the words of the witness only slightly modified; certain of my characters also had their beginnings in this material. Among the writers whom I have cannibalized in this way are Maria Germon and the Rev. H. S. Polehampton of Lucknow, F. C. Scherer, and the admirable Mark Thornhill who was the Collector at Muttra at the time of the Mutiny. The verses admired by Mr Hopkins at the meeting of the Krishnapur Poetry Society are taken from an epic poem by Samuel Warren Esq celebrating the Great Exhibition, a work which had a great success in its day, though dismissed by one reviewer as “the ravings of a madman in the Crystal Palace”.

Lastly, I am most grateful to Mrs Anthony Storr for letting me see family letters relating to the Mutiny. I wish also to acknowledge my debt to Professor Owen Chadwick’s work on the Victorian Church and to M. A. Crowther’s Religious Controversy of the Mid-Nineteenth Century, and to the historians, too numerous to mention individually, on whom I have relied for the facts of Victorian life to support my fiction.

This is a New York Review Book

Published by The New York Review of Books

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1973 by J. G. Farrell

Introduction copyright © 2004 by Pankaj Mishra

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Farrell, J.G. (James Gordon), 1935–

The siege of Krishnapur / J.G. Farrell; introduction by Pankaj Mishra.

p. cm.—(New York Review Books classics)

ISBN 1-59017-092-X (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. India—History—Sepoy Rebellion, 1857–1858—Fiction. 2. Sieges—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.

PR6056.A75S57 2004

823'.914—dc22

2004011934

eISBN 978-1-59017-373-2

v1.0

Cover photograph: Felice Beato, “Interior of Secundra Baug after the slaughter of 2,000 rebels by the 93rd Highlanders. The Punjab Regt.,” 1858.

Cover design: Katy Homans

For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series

visit www.nyrb.com

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Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

Table of Contents

Cover

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Contents

Introduction

THE SIEGE OF KRISHNAPUR

Dedication

Part One

1

2

3

4

6

7

8

9

Part Two

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

Part Three

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

Part Four

28

29

30

31

32

Afterword

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