M.M. Kaye, 95; Writer Best Known for ‘The Far Pavilions,’ Set in Colonial India

M.M. Kaye, the author of lushly and lustily detailed books set in Africa and India, including the best-seller “The Far Pavilions,” has died. She was 95.

Kaye died Thursday, it was reported in England. The exact location and cause of death were not announced.

The author, who also wrote as Mollie Kaye or Mollie Hamilton, was born to British parents in pre-independence India. She saw herself, not as an outsider there, but as “merely a member of a different caste in a land full of castes.” Her fiction was often praised for offering a nuanced look at Indian life while intriguing readers with depictions of desire, intrigue and ethnic conflict.

By far her most successful work was 1978’s “The Far Pavilions,” a 960-page opus set in 19th century India. Kaye wrote the book over 15 years in which she struggled with cancer and made frequent moves around Africa and Asia for her husband’s military career.

The central character is an Indian-born Briton 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. He returns to India, falls in love with an Indian princess and must struggle with competing cultural alliances.

The book, which some saw as 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.

“The Far Pavilions” helped revive interest in Kaye’s earlier works about grand romance and adventure. One was “Shadow of the Moon” (1956), about the 1857 Indian uprising against the British.

Mary Margaret Kaye, the daughter of a British intelligence official, was born in Simla, a town near the Himalayas to which the government moved at the peak of summer. She said she was so close to her family’s Indian servants that she spoke Hindustani, a dialect of Hindi, before English. Her nurse often took her to the local market to hear storytellers.

The writer once told the Post that she had been grief-stricken when her family sent her to England for a formal education. On the train that spirited her away, she said, she and her sister made an oath always to return and then swore the oath in Hindustani.

In England, she became an illustrator of children’s books, then switched to writing thrillers with such titles as “Death in Cyprus,” “Death in Kenya” and “Death in Zanzibar.”

Her reputation on the rise and her husband’s military career waning, she returned to England in 1962 to work on “The Far Pavilions.”

In recent years, she had written three autobiographies, “The Sun in the Morning,” “Golden Afternoon” and “Enchanted Evening.”

Her husband, Goff Hamilton, whom she married in 1942, died in 1985.

Survivors include two daughters.