拍品专文
Colonel James Skinner, C.B., or Sikander Sahib, retains an unchallenged place in Indian military history. An Anglo-Indian son of a Scotsman and an Indian woman of the Rajput (warrior) Caste, Skinner was debarred from military service following a prohibitory decree by the East India Company in 1792. Eventually he founded and brought to perfection his own regiment of irregular, light, remarkably versatile cavalry called 'Skinner's Horse'. But it was not so much the number of his amazing exploits that created the legend but the man himself; a man who strove to prove himself and to overcome the prejudice that had grown up against the mixed race. He was a generous, much-loved man, whose name was never sullied by a base or dishonourable act. Skinner wrote memoirs in Persian which, though fragmentary and historically inaccurate, are vivid and remain an important source of information on some of the fantastic battles in which he fought. For further information see D. Holman, Sikander Sahib; The Life of Col. James Skinner, 1778-1841, Heinemann, London, 1961 and A.M. Daniels, The History of Skinner's Horse, London, 1925.