Maharanis by Lucy Moore

One of the many virtues of Moore's engrossing study is the way that she shows how little hostility to British rule had to do with fear of western culture. Convincingly, she shows that both the Maharajah of Baroda and his strong-willed wife, Chimnabai, were Europhile to their fingertips. Baroda had been educated by an English tutor; his wife, a passionate sportswoman who shot tigers, played tennis and rollerskated in the palace corridors, went to Karlsbad with an English companion when she wanted to lose weight.

To be European in taste was not, in British eyes, good enough. The empire's administrators liked their maharajahs to be foreign in attire and biddable in all things. Few, in this respect, pleased them so much as the gorgeously named Maharajah of Cooch Behar. Dazzlingly handsome, Nripendra had been given an English upbringing. Much of his spare time was spent shooting in Scotland and Ireland. When he married, he took British advice and chose Sunity Devi, a Bengali,whose father had famously declared that "the Lord in his mercy sent the British nation to rescue India". In 1887, Sunity became the first maharani to visit Britain. Back in Cooch Behar, the couple offered just the kind of hospitality that the British aristocracy appreciated. "Cooch Behar" himself beat out all the best big game for their guns, while his wife spoke gushingly of "our wonderful Empress". Eager to keep up with western ways, they nicknamed two favourite daughters "Pretty" and "Baby".

It is in the next generation that Moore's story really comes into its own, with the maharanis, rather than their husbands, in the foreground. When the Barodas' elegant and wilful daughter Indira met Jit, the younger son of the Cooch Behars, her parents had already arranged for her to marry the plump Maharajah of Gwalior. Eton-educated, languid and unusually handsome, Jit won her heart and, after fierce family resistance, her hand. They married in England in 1913; the following year, Jit's brother (who had become maharajah after their father's death in 1911) died. Indira, while nowhere near as wealthy as her parents (Cooch Behar had left a trail of bills), was now a maharani with a doting husband who called her Babs and addressed his poems to "the cutest little thing that breathed on God's earth". Jit was never faithful, and he died in 1922 of alcohol poisoning. It was at this point, as the widowed Regent of Cooch Behar, that Indira began to show her mettle.

Suttee, by which widows demonstrated their selfless devotion to their spouses by throwing themselves on the funeral pyre, was not to Indira's taste. Among the photographs that illustrate Moore's book, those from the 1920s portray a sophisticated woman at a hunting party in the Midlands, and on the beach at Le Touquet. A more striking one, taken when she was 40, suggests she was blessed with the unreal beauty of H Rider Haggard's heroine, Ayesha, or "She", after whom Indira named her daughter. Indira's friends included Noël Coward and Douglas Fairbanks Sr; her lovers were so numerous that she was nicknamed the Maharani of Couche Partout. High-living and a fanatical gambler, she retained the respect of her subjects, to whom she was known as "Ma", while scandalising society. It was said that the beautiful maharani sometimes danced on tables at bals masqués in Paris, dressed only in an emerald necklace. It seems quite likely.

Indira is, in many ways, the most compelling of the maharanis; it is hard to resist Moore's stories of her. Asked in Europe for her name at airport immigration, for instance, she was fiercely disobliging. ("I have no surname. What do you call the Queen of England. I am her Highness Indira of Cooch Behar.")

Life was harder for the last of Moore's four maharanis, Indira's daughter, Ayesha. Still alive today, Ayesha remains a forceful and elegant woman whose influence is strikingly apparent in Moore's account of her extraordinary life. As the young Maharani of Jaipur, Ayesha was fortunate to have a husband ("Jai") who supported her political career and shared her faith in the new and better India that would emerge from Independence. "Jai" willingly gave up his palaces, his rights and even the ancient name of his province for the sake of the country he loved. He believed that he and Ayesha would still have a political role to play, as advisors and administrators of a modernised kingdom. In this, as Moore movingly relates, he was mistaken.

It is clear during this closing section that Moore is entirely on the side of Ayesha. It is hard not to share her view. Jai and Ayesha were tricked out of power by Indira Gandhi and her followers. They lost almost everything. As a widow, Ayesha continued to campaign and to speak out against the corrupt government of Indira Gandhi, her former schoolmate. In parliament, Mrs Gandhi denounced her aristocratic critic as "the glass doll" and "the bitch". In 1975, she went further. Tax inspectors were sent to raid Ayesha's home. The discovery of a few pounds and francs was enough to have her jailed for six months; when she was released, she was kept on a tight parole that effectively prolonged her imprisonment.

Indira Gandhi was assassinated; Ayesha survived. Moore closes this absorbingly intelligent and thoughtful book with a meditation on what has been lost — the palaces, the great international houseparties and frolics, a life that maintained the splendours of Edwardian England in a foreign setting. But regret seems the wrong response to Ayesha, a lively, strong-willed octogenarian who, asked recently for her beauty tips, ascribed her handsome looks to boot-blacking on her hair and a bottle of whisky a day. The many signs of Ayesha's influence and vivid personality in Moore's study add to its unusually strong feeling of authenticity.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £16 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585