The Maharajah's Box: An Imperial Intrigue Book

In 1997, Christy Campbell, then a journalist on the London Sunday Telegraph, was following the story of Jewish victims of the Holocaust who were announced as having had "dormant accounts" in Swiss banks, and whose descendants were therefore entitled to compensation. However, among these names was one that rather stood out: one Princess Catherine Duleep Singh, last heard of residing in Penn, Buckinghamshire, in 1942. Like all good journos, Campbell immediately scented a scoop, and began to investigate. "I started out on a treasure hunt and found a love story". What he discovered was quite astounding: Princess Catherine was none other than the descendant of Maharajah Duleep Singh, the last Emperor of the Sikhs, and his story was every bit as glamorous and tragic as that of the last Emperor of China.In 1849, at the age of 10, the Maharajah, his armies defeated in the field by the British, was brought to London. Oh, and with him came a certain rather famous diamond: the Koh-i-Noor, "acquired" by the East India Company and presented to Queen Victoria. The Maharajah settled down for a while as an English country gentleman, at Elveden Hall in Suffolk, and married an English chambermaid. But later in life he grew more and more obsessed with his lost inheritance, and the exchange of the majesties of the Punjab for a few acres of rural Suffolk did not seem to him quite fair... This is very much the territory of what Rudyard Kipling christened "The Great Game". Kipling himself wrote about it in his own masterpiece, Kim, as did Patrick French more recently in his prize-winning biography, Younghusband. Christy Campbell now joins this select band of chroniclers of the wilder margins of the British Empire, in a story that, one imagines, would make a brilliant film. Merchant-Ivory, where are you? --Christopher HartRead More