Queen Mary’s book of India is an anthology of short essays published in aid of the Indian Comforts Fund, a charity that sent parcels of clothing and comforts to Indian servicemen throughout the Second World War.

The book’s compiler and editor was Cornelia Sorabji, an Indian lawyer who retired in Britain in the 1930s and who was, by then, almost blind. She encouraged authors including T.S. Elliot and Dorothy L. Sayers to contribute essays on the Indian war effort, and India more generally, for the fundraising publication.

The book opens with a reproduced typed message from Queen Mary written at Marlborough House addressed to ‘the mothers of India’s fighting men.’ It begins “You are constantly in my thoughts and I know that many of you are anxious, and some are sorrowful, but all are proud of your brave sons.” The foreword is by Leo Amery, then Secretary of State for India and Burma and Patron of the Indian Comforts Fund, who praised Sorabji’s ‘glowing patriotism, for India and for the Empire, and indefatigable energy’. Correspondence, contributions, proofs and reviews of the book are found in Cornelia Sorabji’s papers in the British Library: Mss Eur F165/202.

This presentation copy was bound in red leather with Queen Mary’s signature tooled in gold on the front cover by Leighton-Straker. Cornelia Sorabji presented it to the queen in July 1943, and wrote a dedicatory inscription to her on the opening flyleaf.