The legendary sun has finally set on the British Empire and the India of the Raj has passed into history. In the inevitable sea-change that follows, its strengths are being remembered, its weaknesses softened by time.

Riding the crest of this revisionist wave, this Cecil B. DeMille production of a novel [The Far Pavilions]—15 years in the writing—brings those times close as only the most stirring fiction can. M. M. Kaye's formidable imagination, steeped in history, war and romance, conjures up sights and sounds of India, from palaces in the Himalayas to the docks of Bombay.

Ashton Pelham-Martyn, a hero worthy of the name, is the son of an eccentric British anthropologist working in India. Orphaned in a cholera epidemic at the time of the 1857 Indian Mutiny, Ash is saved by his nurse Sita, who then passes him off as her own son for his own protection...