Author: Lucy Moore
Publisher: Viking Penguin
In Maharanis, Lucy Moore brilliantly recreates the lives of four queens, and captures the grandeur of Royal India with sparkling descriptions.
Through the chapters of the book, the reader is introduced to Maharani Chimnabai, the formidable queen of Baroda, who was a proud nationalist and one of the founders of the women’s movement in India.
Sunity Devi came from a progressive and educated Brahmo Samaj family, and was married as a teenage bride to Maharaja Nripendra Narayan, the glamorous and Anglophile king of Cooch Behar.
Indira, Chimnabai’s stylish and fiesty daughter, dared to reject the marriage her parents had arranged for her and eloped with Cooch Behar’s son, Jit, uniting two dynasties. A renowned beauty, she combined her duties as Regent of Cooch Behar with a sensational social life in Europe.
And Indira’s daughter Ayesha (Maharani Gayatri Devi), who married Jai, the handsome, polo-playing Maharaja of Jaipur, to become his third wife.
This extraordinary story that spans 150 years and three generations of formidable women, gives the reader a glimpse of the jeweled world of the Indian Royalty; of tiger hunts, beautiful palaces and lavish ceremonies; of the British Raj and what it did to Royal India. Exotic in detail and clear in its historical treatment, ‘Maharanis’ brings forth a fascinating picture of a vanished era.
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