Zemindar

Zemindar is a historical romance by the writer Valerie Fitzgerald, published in 1981. It won the Georgette Heyer Historical Novel Prize and the Romantic Novel of the Year award.

Laura Hewitt goes to India as part of the household of a man she expects to marry, and the novel follows her arrival in a country that is far more complicated than the one she was told about. Oliver Erskine is a zemindar, a landholder who governs a territory of his own with the authority of a local ruler and with obligations to the British administration, and he is also the brother of the man Laura came out with. Fitzgerald sets the romance against the events leading to the uprising of 1857 and the siege and fighting that follow, so the private story and the public one are carried at the same time. The book is long, in the manner of the historical romances of the period, and its attention is divided between the relationship and the country it takes place in.

Fitzgerald wrote this as her first novel and it was awarded the Heyer prize in the year it appeared, which was given for historical fiction in the tradition of Georgette Heyer.