It featured a heroine named Winter de Ballasteros - described as half-English, half-Spanish and all Indian. One was 'Shadow of the Moon' (1956), about the 1857 Indian uprising against the British.

Kaye's earlier works about grand romance and adventure. 'The Far Pavilions' helped revive interest in Ms. As a child, she had spoken at length with elderly Indians about their lives, and their histories informed her work.īrigitte Weeks, then editor of The Washington Post Book World section, wrote: 'Shelves are haunted by the dusty ghosts of so many 'unforgettable' sagas, yet it would be churlish as well as thoroughly craven not to admit that this novel, with its unabashed vigor, has genuine power.' Kaye's knowledge of her homeland elevated the book above an epic bodice-ripper. The book, which some likened to an Indian 'Gone With the Wind,' sold millions of copies and was adapted into a six-hour miniseries starring Ben Cross and Amy Irving in 1984.Ĭritics noted that Ms. He returns to India, falls in love with an Indian princess and must struggle with competing cultural alliances. Its central character is an Indian-born Britisher named Ashton Pelham-Martyn who is orphaned as a boy during a bloody uprising, sheltered by his Indian nurse and then raised in England to be an officer and a gentleman. Kaye wrote the book during a 15-year span in which she struggled with cancer and made frequent moves around Africa and Asia for her husband's military career. She saw herself not as an outsider in India but 'merely a member of a different caste in a land full of castes.' Her fiction often was praised for providing a nuanced look at Indian life while intriguing readers with depictions of desire, intrigue and ethnic conflict.īy far her most successful volume was 'The Far Pavilions' (1978), a 960-page opus set in 19th-century India. Kaye, who sometimes wrote as Mollie Kaye or Mollie Hamilton, was born to British parents in pre-independence India. Kaye, 95, the author of lushly and lustily detailed books set in Africa and India, including the bestseller 'The Far Pavilions,' died Jan.

The Far Pavilions by M.M. Kaye