This is the review od the book by newspaper "THE TIMES" of UK. Maharanis by Lucy Moore REVIEWED BY MIRANDA SEYMOUR Viking �20 pp351 Lucy Moore's fascinating case study of the vivid and surprisingly emancipated lives of four fabulously wealthy Indian women opens at the extravagant and � with hindsight � ill-conceived Coronation Durbar (reception) of 1911 in Delhi, which marked the ceremonial crowning of a new emperor, George V. Inside the tasselled tents, rows brewed. Four of India's greatest princes had requested, and been denied, the chance to meet the emperor on equal terms, rather than as his subjects. Only one rebelled. The Maharajah of Baroda, the governor of one of the richest and most progressive states, chose not to comply with British expectations of how an eastern monarch ought to look. Dressed with ostentatious simplicity, the angry maharajah offered no more reverence to the new emperor than a brisk bow and a flourish of his cane, after which he turned and marched away. Calls for his deportation quickly subsided, but the British were slow to forgive the affront. One of the many virtues of Moore's engrossing study is the way that she shows how little hostility to British rule had to do with fear of western culture. Convincingly, she shows that both the Maharajah of Baroda and his strong-willed wife, Chimnabai, were Europhile to their fingertips. Baroda had been educated by an English tutor; his wife, a passionate sportswoman who shot tigers, played tennis and rollerskated in the palace corridors, went to Karlsbad with an English companion when she wanted to lose weight. To be European in taste was not, in British eyes, good enough. The empire's administrators liked their maharajahs to be foreign in attire and biddable in all things. Few, in this respect, pleased them so much as the gorgeously named Maharajah of Cooch Behar. Dazzlingly handsome, Nripendra had been given an English upbringing. Much of his spare time was spent shooting in Scotland and Ireland. When he married, he took British advice and chose Sunity Devi, a Bengali,whose father had famously declared that "the Lord in his mercy sent the British nation to rescue India". In 1887, Sunity became the first maharani to visit Britain. Back in Cooch Behar, the couple offered just the kind of hospitality that the British aristocracy appreciated. "Cooch Behar" himself beat out all the best big game for their guns, while his wife spoke gushingly of "our wonderful Empress". Eager to keep up with western ways, they nicknamed two favourite daughters "Pretty" and "Baby". It is in the next generation that Moore's story really comes into its own, with the maharanis, rather than their husbands, in the foreground. When the Barodas' elegant and wilful daughter Indira met Jit, the younger son of the Cooch Behars, her parents had already arranged for her to marry the plump Maharajah of Gwalior. Eton-educated, languid and unusually handsome, Jit won her heart and, after fierce family resistance, her hand. They married in England in 1913; the following year, Jit's brother (who had become maharajah after their father's death in 1911) died. Indira, while nowhere near as wealthy as her parents (Cooch Behar had left a trail of bills), was now a maharani with a doting husband who called her Babs and addressed his poems to "the cutest little thing that breathed on God's earth". Jit was never faithful, and he died in 1922 of alcohol poisoning. It was at this point, as the widowed Regent of Cooch Behar, that Indira began to show her mettle. Suttee, by which widows demonstrated their selfless devotion to their spouses by throwing themselves on the funeral pyre, was not to Indira's taste. Among the photographs that illustrate Moore's book, those from the 1920s portray a sophisticated woman at a hunting party in the Midlands, and on the beach at Le Touquet. A more striking one, taken when she was 40, suggests she was blessed with the unreal beauty of H Rider Haggard's heroine, Ayesha, or "She", after whom Indira named her daughter. Indira's friends included No�l Coward and Douglas Fairbanks Sr; her lovers were so numerous that she was nicknamed the Maharani of Couche Partout. High-living and a fanatical gambler, she retained the respect of her subjects, to whom she was known as "Ma", while scandalising society. It was said that the beautiful maharani sometimes danced on tables at bals masqu�s in Paris, dressed only in an emerald necklace. It seems quite likely. Indira is, in many ways, the most compelling of the maharanis; it is hard to resist Moore's stories of her. Asked in Europe for her name at airport immigration, for instance, she was fiercely disobliging. ("I have no surname. What do you call the Queen of England. I am her Highness Indira of Cooch Behar.") Life was harder for the last of Moore's four maharanis, Indira's daughter, Ayesha. Still alive today, Ayesha remains a forceful and elegant woman whose influence is strikingly apparent in Moore's account of her extraordinary life. As the young Maharani of Jaipur, Ayesha was fortunate to have a husband ("Jai") who supported her political career and shared her faith in the new and better India that would emerge from Independence. "Jai" willingly gave up his palaces, his rights and even the ancient name of his province for the sake of the country he loved. He believed that he and Ayesha would still have a political role to play, as advisors and administrators of a modernised kingdom. In this, as Moore movingly relates, he was mistaken. It is clear during this closing section that Moore is entirely on the side of Ayesha. It is hard not to share her view. Jai and Ayesha were tricked out of power by Indira Gandhi and her followers. They lost almost everything. As a widow, Ayesha continued to campaign and to speak out against the corrupt government of Indira Gandhi, her former schoolmate. In parliament, Mrs Gandhi denounced her aristocratic critic as "the glass doll" and "the bitch". In 1975, she went further. Tax inspectors were sent to raid Ayesha's home. The discovery of a few pounds and francs was enough to have her jailed for six months; when she was released, she was kept on a tight parole that effectively prolonged her imprisonment. Indira Gandhi was assassinated; Ayesha survived. Moore closes this absorbingly intelligent and thoughtful book with a meditation on what has been lost � the palaces, the great international houseparties and frolics, a life that maintained the splendours of Edwardian England in a foreign setting. But regret seems the wrong response to Ayesha, a lively, strong-willed octogenarian who, asked recently for her beauty tips, ascribed her handsome looks to boot-blacking on her hair and a bottle of whisky a day. The many signs of Ayesha's influence and vivid personality in Moore's study add to its unusually strong feeling of authenticity. ________________________________________________ This review is from "THE INDEPENDENT" Maharanis, by Lucy Moore Dying for a turn in front of the camera By Virginia Rounding 13 October 2004 This book has a huge cast list. The four Maharanis or "great queens" of Lucy Moore's title are Chimnabai, second wife of Sayajirao III, Maharaja of Baroda from1875 to 1938; Sunity, wife of Nripendra, Maharaja of Cooch Behar from 1863 to 1911; Indira, wife of Jitendra, Maharaja of Cooch Behar from 1913 to 1922 (daughter of Chimnabai, and daughter-in-law of Sunity); and Ayesha, Indira's daughter and third wife of Jai, Maharaja of Jaipur from 1923 to 1970. These women were redoubtable in their own right, but as their lives were so closely bound up with their overlapping families, Moore has had to include all their sons, daughters, husbands, in-laws, as well as the chief figures in the history of India from the last years of British rule to the present day. It is no easy task. The book inevitably feels as though the reader is being led through a maze. What is clear is the staggering percentage of the male relatives of the Maharanis who died relatively young of alcohol abuse. An incomplete list includes Raji, Jitendra's predecessor as Maharaja of Cooch Behar, who died at 31 in 1913; Shivaji, second son of Sayajirao and Chimnabai, who died of pneumonia in 1918 (or 1919, depending on which page you read); Jitendra, who died in 1922 on his 36th birthday; his son Indrajit, who died at 33 after setting fire to his bed in 1951; and in the most recent generation, Jagat, Ayesha's son, who died in 1997 aged 46. Whatever is going on here? To try to answer this question seriously could have made for a fascinating study. But, apart from a couple of pages of analysis, Moore doesn't seem any closer to understanding the problem than was Sayajirao, who "never drank because of the 'misery and suffering' it caused". To skate over this question is typical of the glossy approach Moore brings to her subject. Bewitched by richly caparisoned elephants, shimmering silk saris, thick strings of pearls, the spicy smell of incense, piles of silken cushions, delicately embroidered curtains and jewels tumbling out of gold boxes, she presents a picture of Indian princely life which could have come straight out of the pages of Vogue or Vanity Fair. She seems to operate from a number of unquestioned assumptions, along the lines of: British rule was entirely and always wrong; Mahatma Gandhi was entirely and always right (unlike Mrs Indira Gandhi, who wasn't); Lord Curzon was unspeakable; polygamy can be acceptable whereas male "infidelity" is heinous - and so on, but with an underlying sense that what really matters is to be glamorous. Ambiguity doesn't get much of a look-in although, despite the author's best didactic efforts, the book is full of it. Perhaps there are just too many people crowding its pages, all desperate for their turn in front of the camera. Pity so many of them drank themselves to death. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail