[In the following review, Curtis praises Mehta's eye for detail in Raj but argues that the plot is uninspired and poorly narrated.]

In Raj, Gita Mehta, who was born in India and educated at Bombay and Cambridge Universities, chronicles the last years of the Rajput realms of India, from the turn of the century until 1950 when under the new Indian constitution the rulers of the kingdoms surrendered their powers. She does so through the eyes of Jaya, Princess of Balmer, whose fort and palaces on the edge of the desert have touches of Jaipur, Jaisalmer, Patiala and the other real States mentioned in the book as allies and neighbours. The idea of scanning the disintegration of the Rajputs through the lattice chinks of the zanana from which Mehta's heroine has to emerge is an ambitious and attractive one. The device of a hero born at a historic hour was used by Salman Rushdie in Midnight's Children, but there the parallels cease. Unfortunately, Mehta shows neither his narrative skill nor his imaginative gift.

Jaya is caught between conflicting traditions. Her father, the Maharajah Jai Singh, has taught her the traditional four arms of kingship: Saam—a king must serve his people's needs; Daan—he must provide for their welfare; Dand—he must punish injustice; and Bhed, he must protect the kingdom with treaties and alliances. He is himself much troubled by Bhed, for which he has to appease the rapacious, arrogant British, who tax the loyal princes out of existence and ignore the ancient wisdoms of their land. He sends his heir to England in order to be educated, then killed fighting in the First World War; and yet he hires as his daughter's tutor Mrs Roy, whose brother is a leader of the independence movement.

As disaster after disaster befalls her house, Jaya is contracted in a marriage of convenience to Pratrap, the playboy Prince of ancient Sirpur, more interested in his mistresses than his responsibilities. She responds with a loyalty bred of her upbringing, plays a waiting game and suffers humiliation after humiliation, not least when being shaped into a more sophisticated consort by the strange Lady Modi, a character out of Waugh who is given the odd perceptive line: “You represent”, Lady Modi tells her charge, “everything the British Empire has taught Pratrap to despise.”

Perhaps Jaya's passivity symbolizes that of mother India; but it has the effect of exposing the mechanics of the plot. The duplicity of the British, the incapacity of the princes to combine to protect their traditions, and the divisions between India's religions, are exhaustively reported. Sometimes a historical character such as Annie Besant or Rabindranath Tagore is inserted into an episode, sometimes there are pages of exposition covering the conferences and events of the year. Like the detail of religious ritual, life in the harem, festival and ceremony, all this is fascinating in its own right but never satisfactorily integrated. Even the satirical accounts of the ludicrous excesses of princely decadence lose their edge because they are set-pieces.

The most interesting character in the book is Jaya's mother, changing from a widow who would have liked to have committed suttee on her husband's funeral pyre to a follower of Gandhi on his salt march. But she does this off-page, and we only hear about it briefly; she is really only a vehicle to represent an aspect of the Indian scene Gita Mehta wanted to project. The English officer of the Raj, with whom Jaya has been half in love since they were both children, serves a similar dual function, as romantic interest and as a symbol of the more acceptable aspects of the British. In the modern Indian tradition, sexuality pervades the book, but we are spared most of the detail.

The trouble is that like most of her characters, Mehta has been over whelmed by conflicting aims. Her serious attention to her theme saves the book from being a mere blockbuster yarn or historical romance; but she shows how difficult it is to combine epic sweep with an exploration of one individual's dharma.