Thalassa Ali :: A Singular Hostage : Historical Note




	Buy A Singular Hostage		Historical Note for A Singular Hostage A Singular Hostage is set in northwestern India, now Pakistan, in 1838, the second year of Queen Victoria's reign. By that year, Britain already controlled most of the Indian sub-continent. To the north — in Afghanistan and beyond — the Great Game, the political battle between Britain and Russia for control of Central Asia, had already gathered speed. Afraid of a Russian attack on the Queen's Indian territories, Lord Auckland, the Governor General of India, made up his mind to outflank the Czar by gaining political mastery of Afghanistan. To do this, he embarked upon the first military adventure of the Victorian era: an invasion of Afghanistan, later known as the First Afghan War. Because the still independent Punjab lay between British India and Afghanistan, Lord Auckland needed the cooperation of its ruler, the wily old one-eyed Maharajah Ranjit Singh. Auckland therefore took the unusual step of traveling twelve hundred miles from Calcutta to personally enlist the Maharajah's help in his campaign. He was not alone on this journey. Accompanying Lord Auckland were his two spinster sisters, a ten thousand-strong army, his entire government and forty thousand camp followers. The treaty that Lord Auckland had come to sign was critical to his Afghan campaign. Knowing this, the old Maharajah made him wait a month before agreeing to it, forcing the British to send their armies across the mountains into Afghanistan in deep winter. A Singular Hostage takes place during that month.
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