It is eight years ago. Writer Suzanne Falkiner has been chasing a chimera she believes had “political reverberations … throughout the Raj”. So far, the results have been disappointing: some gossip among cousins, of whom she is one, and official correspondence that is tedious rather than titillating. What she presumes to be complicity in India is mere indifference — princes “familiar with the salons in Europe” who required “sophisticated company” found it in the arms of their white companions. The survival rate of those who graduated to royal wives was often shorter than the scandals they caused in the zenanas.
Headstrong Ozzie heiress Joan Falkiner, second wife to Nawab Taley Muhammed Khan of Palanpur in the historically and strategically insignificant backwoods of Gujarat, earned the disapproval of the Raj for adding to its burden when, in 1939, she married the “50-year-old Muslim ruler of a Hindu state” at a time when it was caught up in the World War and its own imminent unshackling from India. In 1993, Suzanne Falkiner will finally meet Joan Palanpur, née Falkiner, in the south of France where she’s a recluse. She’s had a mildly interesting life as a Nawab’s wife but was less an observer of history than the victim of two cultures, both of which ostracised her. “He wore her like a flower, a trophy, an exotic flower,” one cousin remembers of her “cold and sensual” marriage with Taley; her own father disinherited her.
Joan Falkiner, though, was not the average European trash the maharajas dallied with — barmaids and chorus girls with naked ambition and an eye for jewels. She was less Anita Delgado, who married the maharaja of Kapurthala and was “retired” for having an indiscreet liaison with her stepson, than Molly Fink, who married the maharaja of Pudukkotai and remained his wife. Like Molly, Joan was Australian and from a wealthy family – not quite a Mayflower blueblood, which was the reason her mother Beatrice pushed the family up the social ladder with an eye on advancements, and titles.
When Beatrice – and her daughters – met Taley in Europe, she thought the dandy prince with the bad back was courting her. Joan carried out her affair clandestinely, booking a passage to flee to Bombay, for her father would never give his consent to his daughter marrying a coloured man, and certainly not as his second wife. Too soon Shameem, their daughter and only child, was born. Shameem is the most interesting person in the cast of characters in Suzanne Falkiner’s book, but remains unfortunately unexplored — she refuses to meet the author.
The British seemed to expedite inordinate amounts of energy on issues of lineage, frowning on mixed-race heirs among, especially, the princely order. If the minutiae of inheritance seems to absorb too many pages in the India files of the Raj, the Nawab’s letters asking the officials of Her Majesty’s Government to recognise Joan as Her Highness take up a good deal of his time. Eventually, Lord Mountbatten, an acquaintance if not a friend of the Palanpurs, in his last week as Viceroy, did sign the order.
The honour might have come too late to matter – in princely India, even lowly British officials would not fraternise with zenana concubines who had not been formally recognised as maharanis – but it at least strengthened her position among her own family. Certainly, the Falkiners seemed to have made their peace with their runaway daughter, whom they visited in India and Europe. It must also have been salve for Joan, who lived up to her end of the bargain in the marriage — decorating the palace in Palanpur, setting up homes in Bombay and in France, wearing pretty sarees and jewellery, and basking in the glow of adulation that surrounded her.
Alas, Taley died too soon and Joan’s adventure left her marooned – the chateau in France was sold off as were her baubles and heirlooms – since without the Nawab she was merely a woman of means but no position. Driven by loneliness and drink, not unlike other First and Second Your Highnesses, she was now increasingly forgetful, telling the author she’d met for lunch the previous day, that the leftovers the next day were on account of “a whole mob of people” she’d had to lunch for whom she’d ordered “the salads and pates and terrines to go with the chicken and the rabbit” from one store, then collected the same order from another store.
Suzanne Falkiner’s is a brave account, mixing romance with a potted history of princely India and a travelogue that shows she was as unprepared – she might prefer unbiased – before she set out chasing the shadow of Joan Palanpur and her royal beau. Alas, she never quite caught up with them, and Joan and Taley remain spectral figures — not because of Suzanne Falkiner’s lack of trying, but perhaps because there was no more substance to them.
JOAN IN INDIA
Suzanne Falkiner
Yodapress
315 pages; Rs 495