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A daughter of the Raj, born in Simla in the years before the First World War, M M Kaye put her childhood experience and voluminous reading of history to good use in her epic romance of British India in the 19th century, The Far Pavilions, which was published in 1978. The story of a boy, orphaned in childhood, brought up as a Hindu and growing to maturity in the sub-continent before the Indian Mutiny, it became a runaway bestseller and an immensely popular television drama.
It was by no means her first novel. She had been writing children's fiction (as Mollie Kaye) from 1937 onwards, and published several novels with Indian themes in the 1950s and 1960s. She also wrote as Mollie Hamilton, the surname of the army officer whom she married during the war. She had researched the Indian Mutiny meticulously, and detailed of its causes - and the savagery with which it was conducted and then repressed - are the subject matter of several of her books. But it was The Far Pavilions, that defined her as a writer about Indian, and which made her a household name.
Before taking up writing, Kaye had been a painter, taking her easel wherever she went on her rambles in India, and making a small income from selling them. She continued to paint throughout her life. In the 1950s, she illustrated a number of children's books and, much later, did the watercolour for the jacket of the first part of her autobiography.
Mary Margaret (Mollie) Kaye was born in India in 1908, the daughter of Sir Cecil Kaye, an Indian civil servant. Her early childhood was one steeped in the ambience of the Raj, something that never really left her. The Delhi of her youth was still the old walled city of the Moguls, and she and her sister, Bets, explored the secret hideaways of its gardens and fished for whitebait under its ramparts. When out with their ayahs she and Bets became adept at persuading these guardians to shop in the bazaar, while they slipped away and chatted to stallholders or listened to story-tellers.
But this idyll was soon to come to an end. As their brother had before them, at ten they were to be shipped off to boarding school in England. After a three-day journey by train from Delhi they embarked in a steamer at Bombay for the lengthy passage to London.
Mollie was educated at The Lawn School, Clevedon, Somerset. By the time she left, it appeared that her Indian experience was to be closed to her. Her father retired from his Indian service in 1935 and returned home to England to settle with his family.
But the India Office had further work for him. In 1926, he was invited back to the sub-continent to help with the revision of the Aitchison treaties, concluded the previous century by the Under Secretary to the Government of India, Sir Charles Aitchison, between the Raj authorities and sundry princely states, Kaye decided to take his family with him and to her delight his daughter was reunited with the sights and sounds of her childhood. As she recorded on landing at Calcutta; "… jasmine garlands and everything - the temples, the fruit bats, the smells, the noise - was all Indian. I looked around me and thought: 'I'm home, I'm home… I'm home!'
For the 18-year-old Mollie Kaye life now became a whirl of parties, romances and marriage proposals, with a concerned mother perpetually anxious that she ally herself in marriage to some suitable young - or not so young - officer. (An eminently eligible aristocrat had to be turned down on account of his drinking.)
But this could not go on for ever. In 1935 her father died and his daughter, by then 27 but still unmarried, found she could not live on the pittance of a pension allotted to an Indian civil servant's daughter. She returned to England and from a tiny flat off King's Road, Chelsea, tried to make an income from selling her pictures of Indian scenes.
This scarcely brought her in a realistic income so she tried her hand at writing for children. Fro 1937, as Mollie Kaye, she produced a number of books in the
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