In Search of Amrit Kaur: A Lost Princess and Her Vanished World, by Livia Manera Sambuy, translated by Todd Portnowitz

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In Search of Amrit Kaur

Amrit Kaur must have been a remarkable woman, even if Italian essayist Livia Manera Sambuy never quite finds her. Kaur was a maharani, wife of a maharajah who ruled one of the petty Indian principalities that flourished under British rule. She was no homebody but lived a free life in Paris. It was said that she was a feminist, helped Jews escape the Nazi occupation, was arrested by the Gestapo and died in a concentration camp. Sambuy discovered her photo in a Mumbai exhibition of India’s glittering former aristocracy. Beautiful and enigmatic as John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X, Kaur intrigued Sambuy. At loose ends in life and career, she set forth to find Kaur’s story.

In Search of Amit Kaur is a beautifully written account of that journey. Sambuy enjoyed the affluence of time, a bank balance of years allowing her to jet from Tuscany to Paris, from India to America, tracking leads as far flung as San Diego and the Himalayan foothills. She interviews the dwindling band of eyewitnesses—and witnesses to eyewitnesses—and discovers a truth she probably already knew: memory is a trickster. She sifts through the misinformation of memoirists and historians, finds holes in the archives and a trove of information through good fortune born of persistence.

Sambuy learns that some of the stories told about Amrit Kaur were clearly false. She did not die in a Nazi camp but in London, 1948. As for the rest of her life? Sambuy’s fascinating book traces Venn diagrams where Kaur and her princely family intersected with artists, mystics and financiers on three continents. She brings obscure corners of cultural history to life, even as the life she pursued remains elusive.