In Courtly Indian Women in Late Imperial India, Angma Dey Jhala takes up Barbara Ramusack's challenge that “The agency of elite and non-elite women in princely states during the colonial era begs for further analysis”, The Indian Princes and their States, (Cambridge, 2004) (p. 182). ‘Courtly women’ are the wives, concubines, and maidservants who lived in the zananas (women's quarters) of Indian monarchs, and Jhala is uniquely qualified to study them: an assistant professor of history at Bentley University in Massachusetts, with an Oxford doctorate; and a princess, with one grandmother the maharani of Dhrangadhra in Gujarat, and the other the rani of the Chakma tribe in Bangladesh. This background informs Jhala's study of royal women in colonial and independent India, as they struggled with agents of British imperial power, with the men of their families, and in parliamentary politics. In the end, she leaves no room to doubt that, in or out of parda (seclusion), “the courtly Indian woman [was] a principal actor and potent symbol in Indian society and history during a crucial century of transformation, from 1890 to 2000” (p. 3).

Jhala's first substantive chapter examines the power of royal mothers: promoting a son's claim to the throne, adopting an heir to a husband who had died sonless, or acting as regent on behalf of a minor son. It shows how queens could transform the seeming liability of living in parda into an asset, as it allowed them to act “without the public knowledge of the crown officials stationed in their own states or the men of the royal family” (p. 44). Jhala next turns to debates over succession. One debate concerned children whose mothers belonged to castes, religions, or nationalities that had not traditionally intermarried with royal families. British officialdom and princely subjects agreed that these children must be excluded from the throne, although, as Jhala notes, even foreign wives could have “significant influence over . . . the king, and . . ., ultimately, the kingdom's relationship with the paramount power” (p. 67). A second debate centred on the rare phenomenon of a woman who ruled in her own name, not just as a regent for a male child or the hidden partner of a devoted husband. Jhala examines the Hindu maharani Prafulla Kumari Devi of Bastar and the challenges that a queen regnant posed to her husband's sense of sex roles; and the Muslim Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal's successful campaign to set aside the rules of primogeniture to secure the succession of her youngest son.

The next three chapters explore royal marriage. First come the effects of colonial rule on the selection of spouses. By banning war between princely states, the Pax Britannica ended the need for marriages to cement alliances. Sometimes, the goal was now preserving bloodlines by choosing partners of the same caste and rank. Increasingly, however, royal marriages reflected the newfound unity of India, as they tied together royal families that had not previously been in contact with one another. Connected with this was a habit, launched under British auspices, of princes taking brides who combined impeccable ancestry and western education. One of the first instances of this occurred in 1878, when colonial officials played matchmaker between the maharaja of Cooch Behar and the daughter of Jhala's great-great-grandfather, the religious reformer Keshub Chunder Sen. Royal families themselves soon began to seek educated wives for their sons, however, as a “desire for modern, yet connected brides reflected the ambition of various lineages . . . to display, on the one hand, the public face of modern change through the institution of marriage and the person of their new daughter-in-law, while at the same time cementing bonds with established, old families, which would heighten their prestige according to pre-colonial definitions of status-building” (p. 95).

Then, particularly in the twentieth century, western conceptions of love influenced the choice of spouse.

Jhala now steps back to the efforts of early twentieth-century widowed queens of Rajkot and Palitana to find husbands for their daughters. Both episodes centred around Jhala's great-grandfather Ghanshyamsinhji of Dhrangadhra: the Rajkot dowager broke off her daughter's betrothal to a collateral member of another royal family in favour of alliance with Ghanshyamsinhji, while her Palitana counterpart ended her daughter's engagement to Ghanshyamsinhji so that she could marry a raja from Madhya Pradesh. In both cases, the mothers succeeded by securing the support of British officials against the male relatives of the spurned princes. They did this by couching their appeals in terms that westerners could understand, downplaying the political and economic advantages that would flow from the alliances they wanted, and instead arguing in terms of their daughters' marital happiness.

The focus now shifts from queens who were seeking husbands for their daughters, to two maharajas of Indore, Tukoji Rao and Yeshwant Rao, whose stories show how “women attained power both because of the weaknesses of male rulers who pursued impolitic sexual or romantic relationships, and by the introduction of colonial legislation, which enabled women to challenge prevailing customary practices” (p. 159). In 1926, Tukoji Rao abdicated rather than face an enquiry into his involvement in the murder of a Bombay businessman who had taken up with his former concubine. He subsequently wedded an American woman, and his son Yeshwant Rao took two American wives in succession. Jhala uses these marriages to illustrate the contradiction in the notion that an Indian prince could retain a traditional outlook after receiving a thoroughly western education (although she is exaggerating when she claims, p. 158, that “The rulers' rejection of British meddling in their choice of sexual partners hints at the development of a social confidence which is at the same time manifesting itself in the nationalist cause for ‘self rule’ and foreshadows the future Independence of the nation from the colonial yoke”).

Courtly Indian Women's final substantive chapter discusses the post-Independence parliamentary careers of two queen-mothers, Gayatri Devi of Jaipur and Vijayaraje Scindia of Gwalior. Jhala notes of them and other royal women who went into politics, that “Unlike their male counterparts, . . . Zenana women participated not only in one but two twentieth-century revolutions: peaceful transition from princely state to the republic, and emergence from pardah into the political arena” (p. 166). Unfortunately, this chapter seems to have been written hastily, and mainly on the basis of published sources. Jhala's figures (pp. 162, 164) on royal participation in politics are drawn from William Richter's 1978 paper, and an update would strengthen her argument. Her treatment of Gayatri Devi and Vijayaraje relies heavily on the widely-read memoirs of these two most prominent royal female politicians in modern India, rather than on new sources on lesser-known figures.

In an epilogue, Jhala shows that the royal massacre in Nepal in 2001 supports her contention that courtly women can exercise power in the public sphere of a Hindu kingdom, as Crown Prince Dipendra slaughtered his family after his mother had rejected his choice of bride. In other words, the prince was caught between two women, each of whom wanted him to acquiesce in her goals.

Jhala is particularly strong when she explains the motivations of Indian royals, which often combined family or personal interest with sincere beliefs about a monarch's duty of serving his or her subjects (or, after the end of monarchy in India, former subjects). Her treatment of the British is less satisfactory. She sees them as a monolithic bunch, who even in the 1920s lived by “an imperial design to recreate Indian society according to Victorian definitions of sexual propriety, good governance and transparency” (p. 133). The truth is that there was never one “imperial design”; “Victorian definitions of sexual propriety” were not even a peripheral consideration in policymaking; not merely the word, but the very concept of “transparency” did not exist in the English-speaking world before the late twentieth century; and from 1909 to 1939, the paramount power explicitly renounced any attempt to enforce “good governance” in princely India.

Actually, British policy with regard to the wives, daughters, and concubines of Indian kings was part and parcel of the whole relationship between the paramount power on the one hand, and the Indian princely and chiefly states on the other, but Jhala seems oblivious to the scholarship on the evolution of that relationship. The result is that she often misunderstands the reasons behind official criticism of princes' private lives, which as far as I can tell was invariably either intended to gild the lily in the case of a ruler who was already in trouble for threatening imperial interests, or more often because an apparent moral quibble had political implications. Thus, when Sir Kenneth Fitze expressed concern over the marriage of Yeshwant Rao of Indore to the American Marguerite Branyon, it was not, as Jhala says (p. 152), because Mrs Branyon was divorced, but because there was evidence that she was not. If she were still married to her first husband, a host of problems would arise, from the illegitimacy of any children she might have with the maharaja, to blackmail, all of which might prevent Yeshwant Rao from fulfilling his assigned role in the imperial structure.

Annoyingly, Jhala supports her depiction of the British by liberally misusing inverted commas. For example, she tells us that “certain women were ‘dangerous’” in the eyes of the British (p. 61), or Tukoji Rao of Indore “appeared a ‘barbarous,’ ‘degenerate’ Oriental patriarch” (p. 143). The reader will assume that “dangerous,” “barbarous,” and “degenerate” are from some official document, and thus prove the censoriousness of India's foreign overlords. In fact, the adjectives are all Jhala's own. Similarly, she speaks of “the larger colonial project of the ‘civilizing mission’, which sought to purge the princely state of odious, backward and degenerate influences in a larger process of ‘enlightened’ reform” (p. 57). This too sounds as if it comes from a statement of policy, but it does not. The ‘civilising mission’ was a principle of French imperialism, not British, and after the revolt of 1857 the British renounced any interference in Indian domestic life.

Courtly Indian Women also includes lesser errors. For example, the Chamber of Princes was established by the British, not the princes (pp. 6, 138). Molly Fink, the wife of raja Martanda Bhairava Tondaiman of Pudukkottai, was the socialite daughter of a Melbourne barrister, not a “working class Caucasian” (p. 64). From the nineteenth century, Indian princes were immune from criminal prosecution in the legal system of British India (the part of the subcontinent not ruled by princes and chiefs), so there was never any possibility that Tukoji Rao of Indore might be tried in a British Indian court (pp. 137–141); the only question was whether he would abdicate rather than face an investigation by a Commission of Enquiry.

When all is said and done, though, Courtly Women is a groundbreaking work of history, as Jhala makes a persuasive case that Indian royal women “were integral actors in the relationships between indigenous courts and the British as well as traditional leadership and nationalist elites” (p. 190).