SOURCE: Abel, Betty. “Quarterly Fiction Review.” Contemporary Review 255, no. 1485 (October 1989): 214.

In the following excerpt, Abel asserts that Raj eloquently illustrates the lives of Indians, particularly Indian women, and their interpersonal relationships with each other and with British colonists in the early to mid-twentieth century.

Raj by Gita Mehta, the new rival to Paul Scott, author of Jewel in the Crown, is a novel of stature. The plot is as sentimental and ordinary as many other tales of the Indian Continent under British rule: but Gita Mehta brings to this scenario a freshness and depth unusual in a romance of the Orient. Her plot concerns Jaya, a Princess raised in purdah who inevitably falls in love with a handsome young Englishman. Forced to marry a dissolute, unattractive Indian Prince, she later has an affair with a politically radical but heartless Casanova. Nonetheless, Jaya emerges a resolute, politically mature and...