Maharanis

A rare, exotic portrait of the matriarchs of a brilliant Indian familyRanging from the final days of the Raj and the British Empire to the present, Lucy Moore vividly re-creates a splendid lost world and describes India's national growing pains through the sumptuous, audacious lives of four ravishing, influential women of the same family—Sunity Devi, friend to Queen Victoria; Chimnabai, fierce nationalist; Indira, her flamboyant daughter; and Ayesha, her equally fashionable daughter—who fought tirelessly and with incomparable grace to turn an ancient tradition of noblesse oblige into a…