March 15th
7pm
As she builds her own life anew, an Italian writer embarks on an all-consuming search for the true story of the mysterious princess H. H. Amrit Kaur of Mandi.
On a sweltering day in 2007, having just lost her brother to illness, Livia Manera Sambuy finds herself at a museum in Mumbai, enthralled by a 1924 photograph of a stunningly elegant Indian princess. What she reads in the picture’s caption will change her life forever. This alluring Punjabi royal had supposedly sold her jewels in occupied wartime Paris to save Jewish lives, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp, where she died within a year.
Could it be true? And if so, how could such a sensational story have gone unreported? Almost against her will, Manera becomes drawn into the mystery of Amrit Kaur. Delving into the history of the British Raj, its durbars and society balls and jubilees, she shows us the precipitous decline of India’s royal caste through the lives of extraordinary figures such as Amrit’s father, the larger-than-life Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala; the Jewish banker Albert Kahn; and the Russian explorer Nicholas Roerich—all while pursuing the elusive Amrit Kaur’s story.
When she meets with the princess’s eighty-year-old daughter, Manera’s search takes on a new dimension, as she strives to reintroduce an orphan to a mother who disappeared in 1933, leaving behind two children, her raja husband, and a legacy of activism in India’s nascent women’s civil rights movement.
In Search of Amrit Kaur is an engrossing detective story, a kaleidoscopic history lesson, and a moving portrait of a woman seeking personal freedom against the backdrop of a world in upheaval.
Livia Manera Sambuy is an Italian writer whose book of profiles of American writers, Don't Write About Me, was published in 2015. She is also the author and co-director of two documentary films on Philip Roth. She has been a staff writer at the literary pages of the Italian national daily Corriere della Sera for over twenty years. She lives in Paris.
Judith Thurman is the author of, most recently, A Left-Handed Woman: Essays; as well as Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire; Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, winner of the National Book Award for Autobiography/Biography; and Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette. A staff writer at The New Yorker, she lives in New York City.
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