Amrit Kaur: the Indian princess who defied the Nazis

Rupert Christiansen
Sat, January 7, 2023 

Book review of In Search of Amrit Kaur: An Indian Princess in Wartime Paris, a new book by Livia Manera Sambuy - Victoria and Albert Museum

Ranking highest in the murky annals of the fabulously wealthy, alongside Roman emperors, American tycoons and Russian oligarchs, are the Indian maharajahs, whose riches – licensed by the British empire in return for their fealty – manifested themselves above all in the diamonds and pearls they ostentatiously displayed on their embroidered persons. In the popular imagination they tend to cut absurdly pretentious rather than tragically magnificent figures, their assets ultimately stripped by the levelling taxations of Partition and Indira Gandhi. But as Kipling tartly put it, “Providence created the maharajahs to offer mankind a spectacle”, and their romantic fascination casts a spell over the Italian journalist Livia Manera Sambuy.

While in Mumbai on a professional assignment, she visits an exhibition of portrait photographs of the Raj loaned from the V&A. Her eye is caught by an image, dating from 1924, of the elegant Amrit Kaur, daughter of the Maharajah of Kapurthala, a region in the Punjab. The caption announces that she died in Nazi imprisonment after her arrest in Paris on the charge of selling her jewellery to assist Jews attempting to escape France.

Manera Sambuy immediately becomes obsessed with this tantalising claim, which proves to be only half true. Pursuing wild hunches and blessed with the lightning flashes of serendipity and coincidence that all researchers pray for, she starts to excavate Amrit’s peripatetic life. Quite how she finances this expensive project, including several trips to India, is never made clear, but she makes an exemplary sleuth, both astute and open-minded.

Amrit's father was a westernised but polygamous Sikh commuting between a palace in India modelled on Versailles and a hôtel in the Jewish bankers’ compound of the Bois de Boulogne. Moving in Proustian circles, he was a figure of extravagant glamour, surrounded by the beau monde – his daughter-in-law, for instance, was Sita Devi, one of the great beauties of her day, a muse to Man Ray, photographed by Beaton and dressed by Mainbocher.

But Amrit, born in 1904, appears to have had a more serious bent. Educated at the progressive Clovelly-Kepplestone school in Eastbourne, she became a fervent champion of women’s rights. In 1927 she was interviewed by the New York Herald Tribune in the wake of a furore surrounding the publication of an incendiary book called Mother India which excoriated a native society that its American author Katherine Mayo depicted as corrupt and brutal. In response Amrit speaks out against child marriage and the patriarchal culture of purdah. “The men won’t really do much to help,” she complains. “It is for the women to try and get education for themselves and bring themselves to the level of men.” This was brave talk at the time, not least as Gandhi was insisting that women stay at home, subservient and spinning.

In 1923 Amrit had married a rajah and embarked on a very grand tour during which they were received in London by George V. Back in India, her husband soon took another woman and married again, by which time Amrit had given birth to a son and a daughter. Manera Sambuy tracks the latter down in Poona, but she is frustratingly unable to provide any clues, as it emerges that Amrit apparently abandoned her children in 1933 to live in Paris, never to return. To take the story any further here would spoil the unraveling of the mystery.

As far as one can gather from Todd Portnowitz’s fluent translation from the Italian, Manera Sambuy writes with impassioned style and insight, attributing the motivation for her long and dogged hunt for Amrit to crises in her own life and lost relationships: self-analysis provides a running counterpoint to her investigation into Amrit’s story.

But the result is one of those books where the casual reader may struggle to keep pace with the author’s enthusiasm for his or her subject and the trail that is being followed. The chronology ricochets, minor characters come and go without ever quite coming into focus, and since many of the intriguing twists and turns lead to dead ends, the big reveal in the puzzle of Amrit’s behaviour comes as a faint disappointment, not least because the evidence that surfaces leaves her a shadowy enigma whose voice is only faintly heard.

In Search of Amrit Kaur is published by Chatto & Windus at £25. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books