Is The Abyss Gazing Back At Pakistan?
D. Suba Chandran
PAKISTAN: COURTING THE ABYSS by Tilak Devasher HarperCollins Publishers, New Delhi, 2018, 480 pp., 559
January 2018, volume 42, No 1

Given the extra emphasis that Pakistan receives in India (some would even call it an obsession), books authored by Indian scholars, especialy those who have spent time in Pakistan in some official capacity have been few. Given the harsh fact that some of the best books on Balochistan and NWFP (now KP) were written by former British bureaucrats and military officials, and those who accompanied them, this becomes even more important.

Not only did the civilian and military officials give their account; even others, for example, Theodore  Leighton Pennel’s book on Among The Wild Rribes Of The Afghan Frontier published in 1908 and Lady Sale’s A Journal of the Disasters in Afghanistan, 1841-2 published in 1843 provide glimpses of the then KP-FATA-Afghan relations! Pennel was a missionary who founded the Hospital in Bannu; and Lady Sale was the wife of Sir Robert Henry Sale, who got kidnapped by the Afghans during the first Anglo-Afghan War in 1841-42.

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