Novelist, intrepid traveller, barrister-at-law, newspaper editor and uninhibited gossip, John Lang lived for a number of years in pre- and post-Mutiny British India, and his writings constitute some of the most vivid records of the time. Lang describes his meeting with the Ranee of Jhansi-soon to become the focal point of the rebellion-as well as his counsel to her; he also chronicles the wondrous and tragic life of ‘Black and Blue’, a boy of mixed British and Indian parentage, and his claims to a peerage in England. And, narrating a march in the Upper Provinces, Lang provides an eyewitness account of eight thousand monkeys, gathered in Deobund for a clan meeting. Written with a historian’s sense of detail, a raconteur’s delight in the unexpected, and a keen sense of the absurd, John Lang’s travel diary is a riveting read.