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M M Kaye, who died on Thursday aged 95, was the author of The Far Pavilions (1978), a 1,000 page epic of war and romance set in 19th century India; the book sold in its millions and was adapted for television in 1984, when it was broadcast as a six-hour mini-series on Channel Four, starring Ben Cross and Amy Irving and featuring Omar Sharif, Christopher Lee and Sir John Gieldgud.
Mollie Kaye as brought up in pre-Independence India, and had published a number of books with little success when she produced The Far Pavilions. It had taken her 15 years to write. The book (described by one critic as "the Gone with the Wind of the North-West Frontier") is about a love affair between an Indian-born Englishman, Ashton Pelham-Martyn, and Anjuli, an Indian girl.
In many ways it was a page-turning blockbuster; treachery, intrigue and passion abounded as spoiled and wilful concubines assassinated their way to power, while the hero and heroine made dashing midnight escapes and sealed their love in a raging sandstorm.
But The Far Pavilions was also a detailed depiction of Mollie Kaye's own love affair with a country that she always referred to as "home". Every last detail, from the wildflowers that grew on the Himalayas to the complicated caste system, was informed by her own enchanted childhood, which she described as "living in paradise".
Mary Margaret Kaye was born at Simla, in the foothills of the Himalayas, on August 21, 1908. Her father, Sir Cecil Kaye, was in the Indian Civil Service. A cipher expert, whom the Indians reluctantly admitted was "unbribable", Cecil was on Kitchener's staff. Mollie's grandfather, brother and husband also served the Raj, while a cousin, Edward Kaye, commanded a battery during the siege of Delhi in the Mutiny. John Kaye, Edward's brother, wrote the official history of the Mutiny and the First Afghan War. As a child, Mollie lived in Curzon House and played in the garden among the very gun emplacements which her ancestors had commanded.
While Cecil, who spoke nine languages and twice as many dialects, travelled the country, his beautiful and vivacious wife Daisy was preoccupied with a never-ending round of parties. The children, meanwhile, spent much of their time with the Indian servants, and Mollie spoke Hindustani before she mastered English. Her early schooling, however, was haphazard. "My parents," she later recalled, "were of the generation who thought girls didn't need a proper education, so long as they read a lot."
Along with her brother and sister, she shared a governess with other families, "but there was little to do but feed the birds and squirrels in the luxuriant tropical gardens". Indeed, the children were unaware that they were not Indian themselves. "I never thought for a moment that I was not one of them," she explained. "I was merely a member of a different caste in a land full of castes."
When she was 10, Mollie was sent to England to be formally educated. "I found the place incredibly drear," she said, "so cold and colourless." Boarding school was "hell" and, bullied by the other girls, she and her sister would "say rude tings about the pupils" in Hindustani.
After leaving school, Mollie Kaye stayed on in England to attend art school, where she studied children's book illustration and supported herself by making Christmas cards. She also found work illustrating a novel which she thought so badly written that she decided to do better - and did, writing a thriller for which she received a cheque for £64 from the publishers. " I didn't mean to be a writer," she aid later. "If it had been sent back, I wouldn't' have tried again." The money was enough, however, to buy a return passage to Bombay.
Soon after her return to India she met her future husband, Goff Hamilton, an officer in Queen Victoria's Own Corps of Guides. The dashing soldier, who had been awarded the DSO at the age of 23 when he was serving on the North-West Frontier, swept her off her feet. He would later be the inspiration for Ash in The Far Pavilions.
Mollie Kaye married Goff Hamilton in India on Armistice Day, 1945. Years
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