Reviewed by: An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad: Scandal in the Raj by Benjamin B. Cohen Arvind Elangovan (bio) An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad: Scandal in the Raj, by Benjamin B. Cohen; pp. xii + 347. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2019, $28.95. Benjamin B. Cohen's An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad: Scandal in the Raj is an intricate, detailed, and delicately crafted historical narrative of a now largely forgotten scandal that rocked the princely state of Hyderabad and, in its time, reverberated in other parts of British India, occupying the intense attention of at least one British Parliamentarian, John Seymour Keay. It is a story of Mehdi Hasan Khan and his wife, Ellen Donnelly (who went by the name of Mrs. Mehdi Hasan), who had quickly risen up the elite political and social ranks of the administrative rungs in Hyderabad but, somewhat equally quickly, declined as well. The cause of the decline was the publication of a pamphlet in 1892 that alleged, among other things, that a proper marriage had not taken place between the Hasans. Even more scandalously, it charged that Ellen and her sister were prostitutes back in Lucknow prior to Ellen's move to Hyderabad. Determined to contest the claims of the pamphlet, Hasan pursued a court case against S. M. Mitra, the supposed author of the pamphlet (even though Hasan knew that he was not the author), which only led to a greater deliberation of the many claims of the pamphlet and the counterclaims that were put forward. The trial ended with Mitra being acquitted, but the wafting insinuations of the contents of the pamphlet remained in the air, eventually leading to Hasan's resignation from the prestigious position he held in the Nizam's administration. Both he and his wife had to return to Lucknow, where they eventually died under considerable financial strain. Narrating with great acumen, Cohen sifts through the historical material to tell a careful story that does not jump to immediate conclusions or push the story in any particular direction. The book has the effect of vividly transporting the reader to the courtroom; we are provided glimpses of the socio-political-sexual milieu that dotted the elite landscape of Hyderabad and Lucknow. In this sense, Cohen accomplishes the primary task of documenting this scandal, the trial, and its aftermath, which will be a useful addition to the historiography of princely states in India, particularly Hyderabad. Questions naturally arise, however, regarding the methodology followed. A natural critique, of course, would be that the book does not tell us much more than the story. Indeed, Cohen's account does not seek to recover the cosmos of the time when the drama enfolding the Hasan family played out in public; instead, it is confined to recovering only the relevant details relating to the trial itself, in addition to documenting the main events leading up to and succeeding the trial. Cohen, in fact, deliberately avoids embroiling the account in any larger academic debate. He explains as much in a brief paragraph in his acknowledgment (this reviewer wishes that the explanation appeared in the introduction of the text, rather than the acknowledgment section). He notes that while some reviewers of the manuscript wanted "heavy academic interventions," he had a different idea: "My intention has been to tell a story that appeals to many while gesturing to some of the academic possibilities in the endnotes. My hope has always been to let the voices from the past sound clearly in their own words and without distraction" (334). So, contextualizing the broader contours of the unfolding of the scandal was never the intent of the book. But the pursuit of this intent does have unfortunate methodological implications, which must be noted here. [End Page 151] The risk in not contextualizing the "voices from the past" or sufficiently engaging in "distraction" (by which we mean academic debates on the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, and the pursuit of political power, the culture of public opinion, and so on) is that the reader is left adrift about the many interesting details that Cohen brings up in the story. Let us begin with the very title...
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