Vellaloor (Paperback)

Paperback. January 1, 1767. A village that refused to kneel. An empire that refused to forgive. In the scorching heartland of southern India, the village of Vellaloor has stood for centuries - home to the Piramalai Kallar, a warrior clan that guards its land, its honour, and its ancient right to bow before no man. When the British East India Company and its puppet, the Nawab of the Carnatic, demand crippling taxes, the village headman Sevvakkodi Thevar faces an impossible choice: submit and watch his people die slowly - or resist and watch them die all at once. He chooses to stand. Captain Rumley rides south with five battalions and fifteen hundred cavalry. His orders are simple: collect the revenue, or make an example. Behind him marches Subedar Muthu Velan - a Kallar man in a Company uniform, walking toward the village where his mother still cooks rice over a wood fire. Beside him rides Lieutenant Hargrove, a young Englishman who carries Locke's Two Treatises in his saddlebag and believes in the civilising mission - until the night the sky turns orange and five thousand men, women, and children burn. VELLALOOR is a savage, unflinching historical novel based on the real Vellaloor Massacre - a forgotten atrocity that the British Empire erased from its records but the Kallar community preserved in song. Spanning from the fall of the legendary rebel Puli Thevar to the passage of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, it is a story of defiance, betrayal, and the terrible arithmetic of colonial power. "We do not kneel." Contains graphic depictions of violence. Recommended for readers 18+. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…