An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad: Scandal in the Raj

by Benjamin B. Cohen

The dramatic story of Mehdi Hasan and Ellen Donnelly, whose marriage convulsed high society in nineteenth-century India and whose notorious trial and fall reverberated throughout the British Empire, setting the benchmark for Victorian scandals.

In April 1892, a damning pamphlet circulated in the south Indian city of Hyderabad, the capital of the largest and wealthiest princely state in the British Raj. An anonymous writer charged Mehdi Hasan, an aspiring Muslim lawyer from the north, and Ellen Donnelly, his Indian-born British wife, with gross sexual misconduct and deception. The scandal that ensued sent shock waves from Calcutta to London. Who wrote this pamphlet, and was it true?

Mehdi and Ellen had risen rapidly among Hyderabad’s elites. On a trip to London they even met Queen Victoria. Not long after, a scurrilous pamphlet addressed to “the ladies of Hyderabad” charged the couple with propagating a sham marriage for personal gain. Ellen, it was claimed, had been a prostitute, and Mehdi was accused of making his wife available to men who could advance his career. To avenge his wife and clear his name, Mehdi filed suit against the pamphlet’s printer, prompting a trial that would alter their lives.

Based on private letters, courtroom transcripts, secret government reports, and scathing newspaper accounts, Benjamin Cohen’s riveting reconstruction of the couple’s trial and tribulations lays bare the passions that ran across racial lines and the intimate betrayals that doomed the Hasans. Filled with accusations of midnight trysts and sexual taboos, An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad is a powerful reminder of the perils facing those who tried to rewrite society’s rules. In the struggle of one couple, it exposes the fault lines that would soon tear a world apart.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

368 pages, Hardcover

Published July 8, 2019

Reviews

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book tells a really quite interesting part of British colonial history shedding light on the relationship between British India and the Princely state of Hyderabad through the lens of a pamphlet alleging sexual impropriety of a mixed race couple who lived in British India and Princely State Hyderabad and the ensuing court case in the 1880s and 1890s

However, the work is primarily descriptive and would be much improved by a more explicit analysis of the dynamics between British India and the princely states as well as the gendered and racial dynamics at play in India during the 1880s and 1890s. It would also be of interest if the author had expressed whether he found the claims in the pamphlet to have any basis in fact and who was the author of the pamphlet.

[Muneeb U. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nice try.

The story could have been told in a much better way. I was disappointed. Source material like this needs much better story telling qualities, that this author unfortunately lacks.