The Magnificent Diwan: The Life and Times of Sir Salar Jung I is the definitive biography of arguably India's most influential and powerful statesman of the nineteenth century. Drawing on extensive archival material, this is a compelling account of the life and times of a remarkable Indian who as Diwan or prime minister decisively shaped Hyderabad's political and economic history for nearly three decades in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was Salar Jung who, by his reforms of the medieval oligarchy that was Hyderabad, ushered the state into the modern era.