And with that the steam just went out of the trial. The defence lawyer had not just changed the goal-posts. He had contrived to make them vanish. He had killed the prosecution’s case not by resorting to legal arguments but by presenting a fact of life. Logic itself, it seemed, was on his side — his secret weapon.

Perceptions of what constitutes feminine beauty have been different not only in different countries, but from time to time. Nudes in famous classical paintings are today thought to be grossly overfed. Today’s highest paid models look more and more like the slender slave-girls of Tutankhamen’s tomb. Platinum blondes with pencil-line eyebrows and colourless eyes may set young men in Hordic lands panting with desire, but in Asia and Africa they would not be even considered beautiful. Thick rubbery lips, long necks and hair like a wig of peppercorn ringlets, are the attributes of beauty in parts of Africa. Would a low-paid government servant of the Raj go to the trouble and expense of organising an elaborate and well-publicised picnic just to create an opportunity to be able to molest a white woman? — a woman whom he did not find sexually attractive? The fictional case brought out in the open issues that the Raj’s keepers found distasteful. The Empire was a bastion of Victorian orthodoxy, and its sahibs were the guardians of public morals. Things such as a woman’s sex appeal to a man were not to be talked about. And here was an Englishman who had raised them in a novel! The cad!

Forster had been, as it were, under the observation of the Empire’s Secret Service, whose head had made sure that he should be prevented from taking a job in India because he was a homosexual. Forster, for his part, had never cared for what he called the Anglo-Indians, or the Empire’s guardians. He was a partimes of the natives.

But Empires come and go. The passions of men and women remain and shape events. Beautiful women, seductive women figure prominently in the history of nations which, but for them, would be a dreary record of wars powered by religious frenzy or greed. Who would believe it now, in the climate of hysteria over Kashmir, that there was a time when wars were fought to avenge the abductions of beautiful women? Or that a voluptuous queen could win over an avenging warlord by granting him sexual favours — as Egypt’s Cleopatra did. Herodotus, reputedly the world’s first historian, begins his account with the story of a war sparked off by the abduction of a woman. The legendary Trojan war, too, was set off by the abduction of Helen of Troy. And as every Indian knows, the invasion of Lanka by Lord Rama was mounted with sole aim of rescuing Rama’s wife Sita, who had been abducted by Ravana.

But these wars of ancient times have no physical reality today. They’re just stories. Not so the story of the great johar of Chittor-garh, which, so they say, actually happened in the year 1290. When I visited Chittor, a professional guide showed me where it was all supposed to have happened. This is where Allauddin stood, I was told, and there, in that mirror, he could see Padmini’s face. That glimpse could only have inflamed his desire to possess her because instead of lifting his siege and going away, he pressed home his attack with renewed resolution. With no hope of saving Chittor, the menfolk, punch-drunk with bhang fought with the desperation of today’s human bombs — determined to die, and the women in the fort, committed johar, in as James Tod tells us: "a funeral pyre that had been lighted within the great subterranean retreat." "It was just under the ground where we are standing," my guide told me dramatically, and I remember how surreptitiously I touched the ground to see if it still retained the heat of that fire.

Common sense tells us that his lust to possess Padmini could hardly have been Allauddin’s real purpose for invading Mewar. But then the handful of last defenders of the fort making that opium-crazed ritualistic charge at the enemy, the johar of Padmini and the other women in the fort, and the terrible savagery of the sack of Chittor are facts of history.

That age when men of spirit went to war over beautiful women like Helen of Troy or Padmini of Chittor is long gone. Later wars were caused by religious frenzy or by the urge for territorial conquests. They don’t seem to have a role for implausibly beautiful women. So perhaps we should be thankful for the plain women who figure in some of its obscure footnotes. At least they bring out the point that ideas of beauty differ from country to country: the same point made by E.M. Forster’s fictional Adela Quested.

Early in the 19th century, the East India Company had still to conquer large parts of the subcontinent. That was when, a Commander-in-Chief of the Company’s army, General Ramsay, paid an official visit to the Nawab of Oudh. Ignoring local custom, General Ramsay then proceeded to introduce his wife to the king. This was so unusual that, as Sir Charles Napier tells us:"The King did not understand it at all, and fancied that the General wanted to sell her. After a while, His Majesty said to his attendants: ‘Take her away’."

That contretemps, Napier believes, had more to do with the British finishing off the Kingdom of Oudh than any other grievance. More than 20 years later, the lady’s son became the Governor General of the Company’s domain. He was Lord Dalhousie. He just annexed Oudh on some trumped-up charges, one of them being that the Company would be guilty in the eyes of God if they did not take over Oudh.

One wonders what it was that the king had done that had been thought to be insulting: that he thought that Lady Ramsay was being offered for sale — or because he had made it so obvious that he did not think she was attractive enough.

It was one of Dalhousie’s successors in office, Lord Curzon, who, let it be emphasised, prided himself on being a connoisseur of beauty, has put on record how concepts of feminine beauty differ. After a visit to the King of Persia, Curzon wrote in a newspaper article: "The Queen of Persia is a woman who looks like a melon."

"But how can you say such things about a country’s Queen?" Lord Salisbury, Britain’s Prime Minister, objected. Curzon’s answer was: "By Oriental standards it’s no insult to call a woman melon-shaped."