The Maharajah’s Box: An Imperial Intrigue - Hardcover

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 Hart

In July 1997 the Swiss Bankers' Association, under international pressure to atone for wartime compliance with Hitler's Germany, published a list of over 1,700 'dormant accounts', untouched for over fifty years. The names were supposedly those of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but among them was an Indian princess, 'last heard of in 1942 living in Penn, Bucks'.

Intrigued, Christy Campbell, a journalist on the Sunday Telegraph, started to search the records, and so uncovered the remarkable story of how Maharajah Duleep Singh, the last Emperor of the Sikhs, was made by the British – as a nine-year-old in 1849 – to sign away his kingdom of the Punjab and give Queen Victoria the Koh-i-Noor diamond (the most celebrated diamond in the world, and the jewel in Britain's Crown).

Duleep Singh, a virtual prisoner of Queen Victoria in England, began to dream of regaining his kingdom, and so embarked on a series of adventures (involving Russia and the 'Great Game' of Central Asia) before finally begging Victoria's forgiveness. He had six children and died in 1893. What he didn't know was that different factions in Russia were making use of him – and the British secret service were doing likewise.

Today the Sikhs still claim their inheritance, including the Koh-i-Noor and the now-divided Punjab. When the Maharajah's box is opened in summer 1999 it is likely to reveal further secrets.