India, 1914: a Sikh officer, a princess named Yasmini, a German agent, and the question of whether the frontier tribes will rise when the war starts. Mundy was born William Gribbon, spent his twenties in India and East Africa as an ivory poacher and confidence man, and was jailed for it before reinventing himself in America; the intrigue here is a working knowledge of how the frontier actually operated. Fifty-nine plates from 1842 to 1922, among them street markets, merchants and court life by Edwin Lord Weeks and Abanindranath Tagore, carry the Indian world of the story in paint.