Author: Lucy Moore
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 351
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0670915890
Description
In Maharanis Lucy Moore brilliantly recreates the lives of four women: two grandmothers, a daughter and a granddaughter, all of them princesses of the royal courts of India.
Chimnabai, Maharani of Baroda, was a proud nationalist and one of the founders of the women’s movement India. Her husband famously snubbed the king of England during the Coronation Durbar of 1911.
Sunity came from a progressive Bengali family but was married as a teenage bride to the glamorous, anglophile Maharaja of Cooch Behar. She was the first maharani to visit Britain for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887.
Indira, Chimnabai’s daughter, dared to reject the marriage her parents had a arranged for her and eloped with Cooch Behar’s son, Jit, uniting the two dynasties. A renowned beauty, she combined here duties as Regent of Cooch Behar with a sensational social life in Europe. Later she became a matriarch almost as formidable as her mother.
And Ayesha, daughter of Indira and Jit, married the Maharaja of Jaipur, a dashing polo players, in 1940. After Independence she entered politics and made here name as an impassioned critic of the corrupt government of Indira Gandhi.
In a gripping narrative set in exotic places on the subcontinent as well as the drawing rooms of Europe, this powerful story spans 150 years. Full of spirit and courage, each maharani changed the world she lived in, shaping the way modern Indian women define themselves. Through their story Lucy Moore creates an intimate portrait of a nation during an era of great change-the rise and fall of the Raj and India’s long road to Independence and beyond.
REVIEWS
Erudite, poignant and compelling. With this exotic and flamboyant story Lucy Moore brings India to life in a way rarely achieved by English historians.
-Simon Sebag Montefiore
Lucy Moore has captured the richness and tragedy of the Indian princely favourites in the last days of the Raj and the new world of independence, focusing on the formidable personalities of four princesses as they emerge from purdah to stamp their personalities on their time. Exotic in detail yet clear in its historical treatment, this is a fascinating picture of a vanished world.
-Sarah Bradford
Contents
List of Illustrations
Maps
Family Trees
Maharanis
Glossary
Appendix: The Status of an Indian Princess A Tale of Woe
Bibliography
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index