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.
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