Doomed Indian Love Story Had Happy End for the Daughter

David Brown

 



It was the anguished plea of a desperate wife and mother as Eliza  Forbes wrote: “Our beloved Kitty and Alexander thank God they are in good health and often hope to see their beloved father.”

The letter was addressed to Theodore Forbes, a wealthy Scottish  merchant who had made his fortune in India in the early 19th century.

Eliza’s appeal was the culmination of their romantic yet tumultuous  love story, which was ultimately doomed by the social attitudes to  race and marriage in colonial India. Their descendant is now second in line to the British throne.

The Armenian Genocide and the Indians

                                                                                    Artsvi Bakhchinyan

                                                                                      Translated by Donald Abcarian

With the approach of the centenary of the Armenian genocide ever new incidents and details continue coming to light, these often touching on unexpected subjects and geographic settings. Last year, in a visit to Yerevan to take part in the "Strategies of (Un)Silencing" conference,(*) the famous contemporary Indian writer Amitav Ghosh presented a lecture from his work, "Shared Sorrows: Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-Ain, 1916-1918," and it came as a major revelation to all of us.(**)