#AhilyabaiHolkar

“While the Company swallowed India state by state, one kingdom stayed off the menu for forty years because its ruler was too strong, too canny and too well-armed to be worth the risk — and within ten years of his death, everything he built, down to the diamond on his arm, belonged to Queen Victoria.”

“A one-eyed, unlettered teenage chieftain welded the quarrelling Sikh misls into an empire running from the edge of Tibet to the Khyber Pass, hired Napoleon's unemployed officers to build a European-drilled army, filled his cabinet with Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Frenchmen — and was the one Indian ruler the East India Company chose never to fight.”