No longer powerful or super-rich, former princes haven’t let go of their past.
The thirteenth day pagh or turban ceremony in Rajasthan is a solemn occasion, one on which the mourning of a loved one’s death is marked by a continuity of life, the baton of responsibility passed on to younger shoulders, the symbolic drinking of wine indicating that the pleasures of the living now await them. A few weeks back, therefore, when 12-year-old Padmanabh Singh replaced his adopted “father” — actually his own grandfather — as the head of his clan, it erupted into an ugly controversy with members of civil society labelling it regressive and feudal, commenting on what was, for the kinfolk, at least, simply a family affair.
What had their knickers in a twist was that the rites ended with a raj tilak or coronation which resulted in the young boy adding what is, in effect, a banned title before his name — “Maharaja”. With the death of “Maharaja” Brigadier Bhawani — “Bubbles” — Singh, the gaddi of the glamorous house of Jaipur had fallen vacant and the Kacchawaha clan of Jaipur had become “headless”, even though that office is merely a notional, or even an emotional, one. The maharajas were consigned to the dustbin of history decades ago, but their aura has since grown because, though India has created its millionaires and billionaires with their business jets and penthouses, their Gucci bags and Burberry shoes, you can’t buy into a royal legacy that stretches back not just over generations and centuries but, according to those privileged to be to those palaces born, all the way to a hoary past when the gods were warrior kings like Ram whose sons Luv and Kush spawned the dynasties that wore their halos like crowns — the Kacchawahas trace their “recorded” lineage all the way back to Kush.
No wonder the princes are regarded among their tribes not as mere mortals but as custodians of the courts of the gods themselves, reminiscent of a mythical Ram rajya, keepers of the faith. Therefore, when young Padmanabh became “maharaja”, he assumed the pomp and grandeur of an office that is not merely terrestrial but equal parts celestial, so what if a few protestors seemed distressed that several social — even royal — norms seemed to have been broken to assure him his place in that office.
Bubbles — so nicknamed because his birth had been celebrated with fountains of champagne — bore no son who, by primogeniture, would have inherited his gaddi. His only daughter, “Princess” Diya Kumari brought ignominy to many in the family when she married for love instead of doing what princesses are brought up to do: agree to an alliance between equals in an arranged match, such as that recently conducted in Udaipur when “Princess” Padmaja Mewar married her microbiologist “Prince” of Santrampur, Gujarat, exchanging her palatial home in Udaipur for a modest apartment in Boston. It was made worse because Diya Kumari’s “commoner” husband was of the same gotra, setting off a scandal that had the tongues wagging and insiders following the ups and downs of their relationship with all the vicariousness of tabloids, only it was whispered over pink champagne at the races rather than aired grossly in the media, for the tribe closes ranks against outsiders. Sharing gossip with the public? Not done, old girl!
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Padmanabh’s adoption by his grandfather as his heir and successor created a tsunami of gossip too with everyone taking sides. Jaipur had a history of adoptions, claimed the family. Yes, said the detractors, but they followed a tradition of adoptions from the fraternal side of the family that did not include your daughter’s eldest-born male. How would it look if all the princesses started claiming their inheritances when even the younger brothers weren’t allowed such claims? What would happen if you started to carve up all those magnificent forts and sprawling palaces and divided them up like — shudder — chawls?
Arguably, it is, of course, one reason why their legacies have survived. It is true they had appeared effete and petty, more worried about their ceremonial robes and polo teams, their baubles that Christie’s and Van Cleef and Arpels set into distinctive suites (“sets” are so downmarket), their rivalries against each other that they traced back to history over generations almost as though a siege, or an alliance (or lack of it) had happened not in 1689, or 1754, but last week.
Which is why the slander never stopped, at least not within the perfumed palaces and gilded lifestyles they surrounded themselves with. And there was plenty where that came from, especially in the last century when the maharajas doubled up as playboys and spent their privy purses on privileges that seemed to include bevies of foreign barmaids and chorus girls as mistresses who soon tired of being caged in their zenanas instead of being allowed to go spend their fortunes in London and Paris as they might have imagined, and so engaged in shocking affairs that might, on occasion, have included their step-children. They embarked on grand building projects, bought fleets of Rolls-Royces not merely for the love of the car but because a salesman might have unknowingly insulted a maharaja by not being attentive, or subservient, enough. They arranged grand shikars for visiting British royals in which their own hunters added to the imperial bag, softening them sufficiently to ask for further concessions.
If notoriety was never far behind, some turned out to be “model’ maharajas — Baroda, Bikaner, Mysore, Gwalior, even Jaipur among them, while the errant lot included Udaipur, which was never gracious about accepting the suzerainty of a foreign power and mocked the other kingdoms for capitulating so easily, or even Hyderabad, which had the habit of hiring mercenaries with the vast wealth it controlled and never quite let the British get its hands on, or Kapurthala, where a “Spanish maharani” left the kingdom on a salacious note that, recently, had Hollywood star Penelope Cruz attempt to turn into a film.
But royal gossip is so yesterday. The fights and court cases between Udaipur’s warring “maharanas” — the senior but disinherited Mahendra Singh and the younger inheritor Arvind Singh — is about heritage. About money too, but that’s too déclassé to talk about. Jodhpur’s stoicness about the Bollywood film Zubeida was simply stiff upper-lip no-comment on a matter it considered its personal business — so few knew that the maharani who was widowed in the air crash that claimed her husband and his amour also brought up the son born from that union in the palace. That boy, Titu-Bana, might later have been beheaded in a mysterious murder in Jaisalmer — but his own family is still beholden to the current maharaja of Jodhpur who, coronated at the age of four as a result of that air accident, found himself being sent off by his determined mother to study in cold, inhospitable England to escape zenana politics and, some claim, possibly more lethal intrigues. Or claimants of Jaipur’s — or rather Gayatri Devi’s — inheritance since her dissolute son Jagat pre-deceased her, leaving it to her to do the square thing by his estranged Thai princess wife and their children, which also attracted bounty hunters pretending a claim to the estate that the family graciously snubbed sans publicity or theatrics.
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What then do these maharajas do when they are at home? Their kingdoms now reduced to a few properties, almost their first reaction to the abolition of the privy purse in 1971 was to sell off the family silver — those that held on have since converted their palaces into businesses, their treasures into museums. Their titles, unrecognised by the government, bring in tourist dollars. They might still be seen as symbols of the glamourati — the token polo pictures, the dressing-up for lifestyle magazines, the private airplanes they fly themselves — but they have also been forced to work for their living. Scions of those families set up booths at international travel marts to squabble over room rates and room nights. The interviews and the posturing are no longer about a life of privilege and dissipation as much as about visibility.
Some have taken to politics, others have dabbled in it only to abandon the shrill rhetoric for working in areas they can make a difference without the attendant noise. “Bapji” Gaj Singh of Jodhpur, last seen at the wedding of his son, the eminently eligible polo-playing Shivraj Singh who was injured in a near-death fall from his horse, and in whose support the line-up of “maharajas” in his baraat turned it into a close clone of the 1911 Delhi Durbar, spends considerable time on non-glamorous irrigation and water schemes in the desert. “Shriji” Arvind Singh of Udaipur’s pet project is solar energy — he even has solar motorboats in “his” lake in the city. “Maharaja” Padmanabh Singh’s mother, “Princess” Diya Kumari has taken on restoration projects as well as providing a contemporary fillip to traditional crafts. The former princes’ trusts support medical causes and award scholarships, while they themselves turn up for clan weddings and births and other important ceremonies…
…and then, a few times a year, they air their old costumes, trot out the ancestral jewels, air their swords, dress up and play the part of maharajas on their birthdays, and on warrior festivals such as Dussehra. At these spectacles, so difficult to explain to those offended by the very notion of titles and privileges of birth, they are surrounded by their clansmen in similar ceremonial robes in a show of fealty that the 21st century with its notions of loyalty bred on HR-led training programmes is unable to comprehend. Every once in a while they sheath those swords in jewelled scabbards and slip into brocade tunics to revive old scandals, lending words to family grudges with all the attendant joys and hurts that come with being part of a bloodline that claims a lived history and probably deserves the same endangered World Heritage status as an architectural site, or natural wonder.
It’s why coronations still happen and why a cherubic kid on the cusp of his teenage years finds himself wearing the mantle of “Maharaja” — living up to that office is not a matter of election, or choice, neither does he have the luxury of renunciation, or failure.
