In another age, certainly in the years preceding independence, but perhaps even if the Privy Purse had not been withdrawn, it is possible that I might have had to shear off my (admittedly scant) locks as a mark of respect to the deceased titular head of the Kachchawa clan. “Maharaja” Bhawani Singh of Jaipur – referred to as Bubbles by those who knew him even in passing, though rarely to his face – was the head of a dynasty that had prospered greatly under pacts with the Mughals and the British. This brought the house a certain disrepute among peer clans who fought rather than befriended the enemy – prompting my wife these many centuries later to label me, somewhat unfairly, a “sycophant”, even though our branch considered itself renegades – and the legitimacy of the marriage of a princess of the royal house to Emperor Akbar is still hotly debated, contested, and flung in the face as a suggestion of cowardice.
Cowards or not, the Jaipurs were the most glamorous among the Indian royals who had turned negotiating into an art. At a time when Jodhpur fielded India’s best polo team, Bhawani Singh’s father Man Singh agreed to a matrimonial alliance with the Rathores provided he got their polo team as his dowry. He was married off simultaneously to an aunt and niece, the polo players shifted base from Jodhpur to Jaipur, Man Singh led the team to some memorable matches in imperial capital Calcutta, where he met Gayatri Devi, and she was soon his third wife, living outside purdah, the public face of Indian royalty around the world. For her palace, the London-based designers used every luxury brand then known to the jet-set of Europe, though Gayatri Devi herself became unpopular for a while for serving scant teas in a schoolgirlish nod to rationing on account of the war.
The family survived several scandals in the last decades, among them the alleged passing away of family elders in the zenana due to loneliness and a fondness for drink, a marriage within the same gotra, which prompted Rajput outrage, rumours of estrangement between members of the family, and Bhawani Singh’s adoption of his daughter’s son as his heir in contradiction to the strict observance of primogeniture. But any skirmishes within the royal palaces remained publicly unreported, a grace that might serve our politicians better than the smear campaigns they routinely mount against each other.
Certainly, Bhawani Singh and his stepmother, Gayatri Devi, were reported not to get along, a point I asked the maharaja about when I went to interview him at his amazingly appointed office in the City Palace. In part, he admitted, he had felt distanced from his father — though perhaps ignored might have been the term he was looking for while his father bought expensive cars for his trophy third-wife and whisked her off for exotic holidays away from India. “It was a formal relationship,” he conceded, one that obliterated any intimacy between father and son — which, as heir, might have been denied to him to toughen him up for the gaddi that he inherited just a year before the Privy Purse was revoked.
It was Gayatri Devi’s incarceration in Tihar Jail during the Emergency (her crime: a handful of “undeclared” pound notes found on her dressing table) that set the tongues wagging among the chatterati — why did Bhawani Singh do nothing to help her? “It has been Jaipur’s policy,” Bhawani Singh recalled its history for me, “to always support Delhi.” As elegant as his answer was, I’m at least glad for the raucous democracy that has saved me from offering my fading grey hair in homage to our clan’s late headman.
