Imperiously dismissive of the whispers of a new democratic India, the royal family of Sirikot continues its centuries-old exploitation of its people with the casual cruelty and extravagance that blue blood decrees is their birthright. But the high-handed arrogance of the rulers of Sirikot is curiously at odds with its own tenuous hold on a monarchy threatened by the coming of Independence and India’s emergence as a democracy. A hold that is weakened further when, in another fine tradition of royal families, the king is murdered. The Raja Is Dead splendidly re-creates the sheer extravagance and opulence of a Rajput court and is resplendent with the kind of exquisite detail about Indian royal life that only an insider is privy to. Narrated in the part imperious, part vulnerable voice of a thirteen-year-old princess, daughter of the First Daughter of the king, who takes it upon herself to solve the murder of her grandfather, it brilliantly describes both the whimsical ways of its emasculated elite and the suppressed hatred of those condemned by birth and caste to serve it.
