Breaking out of purdah

Reading Maharanis has something of the poignant pleasure of rummaging in the attic of a great house fallen into desuetude: here are reminders of another age. Princesses stroll in their gardens in the Indian moonlight, fireflies flickering like stars, or roller-skate gaily through their marble palaces, saris billowing, with a staff of 400 to keep the place in order. We share the sense of loss Browning discerned in a Venice deprived of splendour ‘when the kissing had to stop’. Think of them dressing for dinner on a tiger hunt in the jungle (white tie and tails, evening gowns and emeralds) while a 35-piece band played in the dining tent. Back at the palace, guests chose their preferred mode of transport for the following day: ‘horse, elephant or Rolls-Royce’.

Lucy Moore’s vivid and richly detailed book opens at the Coronation Durbar for George V held outside Delhi in 1911: British administrators, suspicious, often mean-minded, were leaning on the Indian princes, determined to keep them suitably subservient.