Maharajah of Bikaner

After the success of ‘The Prime Ministers of the Twentieth Century’, Haus commissioned ‘Makers of the Modern World’, the lives of all those who signed the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Fascinated to find out why an Indian soldier should have signed the peace treaty that shaped Europe, I chose to write about the majestic Maharaja of Bikaner, who appears at the very heart of the famous painting of the Signing of the Peace executed by Sir William Orpen.

'A beautifully produced series...all volumes capture and convey the essential tragedies of their subjects... long overdue' Literary Review

'The story of the Indian soldiery in the Great War needs a new telling and one important chapter of it will be about the Maharaja of Bikaner: Dashing, autocratic and a formidable public speaker, commander his own camel corps, he fought on the Western Front and in Egypt, became the first Indian general in the British Indian army.' The Guardian