[In the following review, Alibhai criticizes Raj as a meager and bland novel, deficient in characterization and inventiveness.]

There is a thin novel somewhere in this fat one [Raj]. Thin as a gruel that hardly satisfies the appetite it raises, in spite of being served up in an aureate bowl on a table heavy with exquisite silver. The story is the personal odyssey of Jaya, a Rajput princess who moves from a life of seclusion and exclusion in a sumptuous palace, first as a daughter and then the wife of a Maharajah, during the days of British rule, to a life of political commitment and power as she applies to be a candidate in the first free elections in her country. Jaya's story is obviously also meant to symbolize the history of India itself as it moved turbulently from the end of the 19th century to independence in 1949 and the liberation of Indian women as these historical convulsions rocked the social structures of the society.

It doesn't work and the problem may well be the aureate bowl. There is far too much meaningless detail, far too much cloying fascination with the exotic. In an article in the Observer a few years ago, Salman Rushdie attacked the kind of Raj Revival Enterprise that had started to flourish in Britain in the eighties. It represented, he said, the recrudescence of an imperial ideology, because the revival was only really interested in creating “a false orient of cruel-lipped princes, dusky slim-hipped maidens, ungodliness of fire and the sword … where the natives are surrounded by the branding of human flesh, snakery and widow burning”. So why has Gita Mehta, an Indian writer, joined in this exploitative enterprise?

It can, of course, be argued that she is only being historically accurate, that these things did happen. It is clear from the various acknowledgments and references that much research has gone into the book. Gandhi, Nehru, Curzon, Naidu, Jinnah, Dyer all get a mention, and many others besides. But this is supposed to be a novel and not a boil-in-the-bag history/social anthropology lesson and the imaginative leap that is needed to transform historical realities into fictional realities is rarely made. Unlike the British writers and film makers who have an addiction to the subject, Mehta does try to show how the colonials used their power to manipulate people and destroy systems which had evolved through the centuries, but the impact of this is reduced by the overwhelming presence of opulent decadence.

There is hardly any development of character. Jaya ponders in the same idiom, and with the same awareness, as child and adult. At the age of ten, we are required to believe that she “realized with an aching sense of loss that she had ceased to be a child”. She never does anything solid or memorable. Her power comes to her simply because all those who would have had it conveniently die, one by one. First her father, then her brother, then her despicable husband and finally her son. This may be how the outside world treated Indian women, but does Jaya's internal life have to respond with such lassitude? Writers like Ila Mehta and Mrinal Pande also deal with the powerlessness of Indian women, but their heroines seethe and plot and joust, at least within the safe confines of their brains.

Mehta occasionally gives us a glimpse of what she is capable of writing, a peep behind the purdah. And these are moments when she shows her real feelings. She is angry when she describes how the British reduced the Maharajahs to impotent puppets—“Your empire absorbed our armies, castrated our nobles, confused our scholars, diminished our priests …”—and appalled at the humiliation of Jaya at the hands of her husband when he finally rips into her body “until her glass bangles smashed into the jasmine garlands and blood stained the crushed petals”. She is afraid when she writes, “Fear opened like a trapdoor beneath the Maharani.”

Mehta is also very good when she describes the pain of the west exerting its influence over the east, when Indian sons lose themselves in the arms of French whores and despise their own people. “Are white women more beautiful than we are?” asks Jaya, and is then persuaded to make herself into a woman who is desirable to white men so that her husband will want her. The shadowy figures who come and go also work because they remain ambiguous and escape the verbal overloading that the main characters are burdened with.

But these brief moments do not rescue the book from its superficiality and cliched obsessions. As Rushdie says: “The jewel in the crown is made these days of paste.”