Thus Maharani Sunity Devi of Cooch Behar recollected meeting her husband's British advisor for the first time in a Calcutta sitting room. This favourable interview would serve as the prelude to her initial meeting, eventual engagement and later marriage to the Maharaja in 1878. The encounter, however brief, reveals the growing presence of colonial officials in arranging the political marriages of courtly Indian families during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as part of a larger expansionist project of ‘civilizing’, reforming and ‘anglicizing’ Indian princes. In such a manner, late Victorian, imperial attitudes redefined ideals of conjugality, love and sexuality within the colonial zenana. Sunity Devi's marriage was heralded as a novel alliance between two dynastic elites connected for the first time under the unifying chatri (umbrella) of the Crown Raj: an eastern Hindu prince of the indirectly-governed ‘native states’ and a leading family of the Calcutta intelligentsia situated within the culturally cosmopolitan and politically ascendant British India. Theirs was certainly a marriage which would not have taken place earlier without the intervention of the British.