Mad dogs

I've always liked William Dalrymple's writing, especially From the Holy Mountain, but his latest book, The Last Mughal, is really unusually good. I bet bits of it are making their way into John Julius Norwich's commonplace books; nobody did eccentric like nineteenth-century colonial governor and army types. (The Flashman papers are great at bringing this out, by the way.) For example, John Nicholson, who hated all Indians and Afghanistanis, and had little if any sense of judicial procedure. According to Dalrymple, one note he wrote to the Chief Commissioner of the Punjab simply reads:
Sir, I have the honour to inform you that I have just shot a man who came to kill me. Your Obedient Servant, John Nicholson.
Somehow he inspired an Indian religious sect called the "Nikal Seyn", which apparently means "let the army come out" in Urdu. They saw him as an incarnation of Vishnu, and he had them flogged if they chanted in his presence. The Indian Mutiny of 1857 allowed him to give full rein to his grim impulses, entering a mess tent in Jalandhar where his fellow officers were awaiting their overdue meal with the words "I am sorry, gentlemen, to have kept you waiting for your dinner, but I have been hanging your cooks".

The Mughal court was similarly interesting -- exotic (at least to me), rather than eccentric. The early signs of the disintegration of Hindu–Muslim relations are sad. How much influence has eighteenth-century Medina had on the modern world? I don't know anything about it, but I'm guessing it's a lot.