Since post-colonialism came into vogue in the study of South Asia in the early 1980s, scholars have been writing about the tensions between fluid South Asian identities and the essentializing categories imposed by Europeans during the colonial era. But rarely have these tensions been so well illustrated as they are in Michael Fisher's eminently readable biography of David Ochterloney Dyce Sombre, a man whose multifaceted identity the book's subtitle only partly describes.

A better description is the well-chosen adverb Fisher uses to describe his subject's life. More than simply strange, Dyce Sombre's life was “inordinately“ so, and in almost every sense of the word. Writing at times with an affection for Dyce Sombre that the reader cannot help sharing, Fisher shows us a man whose life was inordinate in that his behavior was often intemperate and excessive, habitually overindulging in food, sex, and gambling and spending prodigally. It was inordinate in that the powers that be could not successfully regulate or control it, try as they did in lengthy court battles over his money, his sanity, and even his corpse. Dyce Sombre's life was inordinate in that his social standing was neither subordinate to nor coordinate with the Anglo-Indian gentry, British aristocracy, or Indian subalterns. Finally, it was inordinate in that in could not be plotted using coordinates on a map—he was constantly in motion, socially, geographically, and politically, intersecting the lives of figures like Benjamin Disraeli, The Duke of Wellington, Sir Charles Metcalfe, and Bahadur Shah II.

After being born to an Anglo-Indian family and made heir of the wealthy principality of Sardhana by his Indian Catholic grandmother, Dyce Sombre was raised surrounded by opulence and privilege. But when his grandmother died and the British unexpectedly annexed Sardhana, Dyce Sombre found himself wealthy but stateless and spent the rest of his life traveling through Asia, Europe, and Britain trying to buy a place in society. He successfully secured an advantageous marriage to an aristocrat's daughter and bribed his way into Parliament. But soon after, his marriage came to ruin and he was expelled from Parliament, declared insane by the British courts and exiled once again from his home.

Like Rudyard Kipling's Kim or Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, Dyce Sombre's biography reads like a picaresque novel of the 19^th century. To keep track of the twists and turns of his life and the wide variety of actors that come into play, Fisher provides a genealogy and a cast of characters near the front of the book.

In his introduction, Fisher sums up the ways in which Dyce Sombre's life serves as a focal point for the power struggles of class and ethnicity that defined the 19^th century colonial project: “In the inordinate life of David Dyce Sombre, we encounter someone who, by his very existence and often unprecedented words and deeds, and by his cascade of violations of cultural norms wherever he went, highlights the constructed and contingent nature of all these categories which are so deeply embedded in both Asian and European societies” (p. 2).

But it is not just the confusion of categories and intersections of power that played out in Dyce Sombre's life that make his story such a fascinating read. Frequently giving him a voice through excerpts from his personal journals, Fisher paints his subject as a flesh and blood human being. Indeed, Dyce Sombre's fleshly nature is a recurring theme throughout the book. It plays out in his own descriptions of his corpulence, frequent bouts of venereal disease, and unfashionably dark complexion, all filtered through the intricacies of Victorian social conventions. Without even mentioning Pierre Bordieu, Fisher has given us a compelling illustration of the French sociologist's work on the political implications of taste and other esthetic judgments with his accounts of Dyce Sombre's struggles with what to wear, how much to tip a butler, and how to get a chambermaid to sleep with him.

Along with Bordieu, the other theorists hiding just out of view in Fisher's argument are Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose analysis of the case of the 19^th century delusional German judge Daniel Paul Schreber in A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) resonates with Dyce Sombre's story. The “madness” and sexual paranoia that came on Dyce Sombre after his marriage to the aristocratic Mary Ann Jervis, Fisher demonstrates, was a result of the vertiginous complex of expectations forced on him according to contemporary views of gender, class, race, religion, politics and nationality, along with, one could argue, his ceaseless Kafka-esque legal battles with the British East India Company. The Inordinately Strange Life of Dyce Sombre, inordinately strange though it may be, turns out to be the best guide we have seen so far to the complexities of South Asian identities in the 19^th century.