The Lionesses Of Punjab

Author Anita Anand through her books, sophia and the latest kohinoor: The world's most infamous diamond, offers insights about the inimitable women of the duleep singh family.

- Moeena Halim

Seated right at the centre of the stage at a literary festival in Mumbai, Anita Anand seems a bit shifty, shuffling through her cue cards. She cricks her neck to face the podium in the far corner, listening to William Dalrymple, with whom she is sharing the stage as well as the authorship for their latest Kohinoor: The World’s Most Infamous Diamond. The much-admired Dalrymple— the first of the “Laurel and Hardy duo” (in Anand’s words) to regale the packed audience with the history of the cursed Kohinoor diamond—would seem a tough act to follow for most.

But Anand, a broadcast and radio journalist with BBC who turned author with her 2015 book Sophia: Princess, Sufragette, Revolutionary, seems to have lost all hesitation by the time she takes the microphone. Pacing the length of the stage, she holds the audience in rapt attention, her eyes gleaming with excitement as she narrates gruesome tales of the torture that the cursed Kohinoor inspired. “There’s something quite compelling about people behaving in the most extraordinarily appalling ways; doing things you would never dream possible. I mean, there’s nobody I can think of, who would pour molten lead on someone’s head for committing any sort of crime,” she exclaims, when we meet for a chat in the author’s lounge later.