How I came to write In Search of Amrit Kaur 

In Search of Amrit Kaur is the account of how I solved a mystery buried in the twilight of the Raj and the rubble of Paris in the Second World War.  

It all started in March 2007, a few days after my brother died, when I had no choice but to fly to Mumbai for a work engagement accepted long before. It was there that, on a sweltering afternoon, I stumbled upon a museum exhibition of portraits of maharajas and maharanis from the 1920s. Signed by the Lafayette studio, the photographs belonged to an archive that went missing after the Second World War and had only recently been rediscovered in a London attic. Forgotten for as long as sixty years, some of those pictures told equally forgotten stories. One of them was indeed very peculiar. It was a tale of loss, suffused with a melancholy that spoke to my state of mourning. But part of me was also seduced by the mystery it evoked. 

The picture was a full-length portrait of a slender, beautiful young woman. She was tall, her dark hair tied up. She wore a translucent sari edged with gold or silver embroidery – hard to say for sure, as the picture was in black and white. The caption identified her as Her Royal Highness Rani Amrit Kaur of Mandi, the only daughter of Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala. The photograph was dated 24 June 1924, the day Amrit and her husband, the Raja of Mandi, were received at Buckingham Palace by King George and Queen Mary. 

Amrit Kaur certainly stood out, diaphanous and graceful as she was, among the plump maharajas surrounding her, with sullen expressions and chests covered with pearls, rubies and diamonds. But what really ignited my curiosity was the last part of the caption that described her as a Sikh princess educated in England and France, who had lived in Paris throughout the 1930s, and was trapped there when the German army invaded. ‘A letter addressed to her father’s fifth wife, the former flamenco dancer Anita Delgado,’ I read, ‘reported that the Rani of Mandi had been arrested by the Gestapo in occupied Paris, with the accusation of having sold her jewels to help Jews leave the country. The letter stated that the Rani had survived Nazi imprisonment only less than a year.’ 

What an amazing story, I remember thinking. How was it possible that such an event had gone unnoticed?  

This is how my adventure – and the book – began: a flash of light during a moment in my life when intense grief obscured both the past and the future. I couldn’t have imagined how far I would travel in pursuit of the truth about Amrit Kaur. I certainly didn’t think that my quest would take me from Paris and London to Mumbai, Pune, Amritsar and even Chicago; and from the plains of Punjab to the foothills of the Himalayas – and California. Nor could I have imagined that the desire to solve the mystery of an Indian woman who may have been forgotten, or maybe deliberately erased from history, would accompany the new life that I was about to begin in Paris myself.  

What awaited me was a journey into a vanished world – a journey full of surprises, unexpected turns, betrayals and revelations – and a labyrinthine history in which I would meet extraordinary characters: visionary Jewish bankers, heroes of the French Resistance, secret agents, adventurous jewelers, and a host of unhappy princesses and ousted princes. I thought I was going to uncover a sort of Indian Schindler’s List. Instead, I found something much more universal: the powerful story of a woman’s liberation, set in the most glamorous, dramatic and sometimes lurid setting. Little did I know that I would also find another, most unexpected liberation: my own, from a very long-lasting spell.