A 2,00,000-hectare outback station in Western Australia was purchased in 1972 by an unlikely person, an Indian prince from an extraordinary dynasty. This book chronicles the intriguing and dysfunctional life of the last Nizam of Hyderabad, Mukarram Jah, who abandoned the opulence and intrigues of his Hyderabad palace to drive bulldozers on a dusty sheep station in the estern Australian outback.

Mukarram was an offspring of the union of the two greatest Muslim dynasties of their time. Through his Indian grandmother, he was a descendant of Prophet Mohammed; through his Turkish mother, a descendant of the last Caliph of Turkey. The dynasty had been founded in bloodshed and intrigue in the 17th century under the Mughal emperors and in 1724 became an independent state. Since then the city and the state of Hyderabad had been synonymous with culture, opulence and intrigue.

No one understood the highly developed hierarchies of India better than the class-conscious British, who set about dividing the maharajas into tiers, measuring the rank of their state by the firing on all...