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Maharajas
From one of the palace towers the Guest peered hopefully
through his binoculars at the horizon, but there wasn’t a cow or a nomad in
sight. A tribe of picturesque wanderers were supposed to be there—standing
about waiting to be filmed and interviewed, with their herds of cattle and
with shiny gold ornaments in their ears. Only yesterday the Prince had said
they’d be there. The calendar on the wall said unambiguously that they were
due; while for her part the Maharani assured the Guest that they should
be there—although, as she hastened to explain, nomads were nomads, and she
really had no control over their movements herself.
It was going to be the usual romantic stuff: striking
profiles against the sky, turbans, jewellery, cute little jackets,
interviews poignantly relating the hardships of migratory life, a colorful
dance or two, herds of animals walking placidly across parched semi-desert
until late afternoon—a time of day when they would return to water. The
country was extremely flat, and it would be hard to get a high shot of the
herds in the arid landscape. But the Prince had a solution. He planned to
buy a motorised parachute that would soar aloft to shoot the needed scenes.
Which of them, the Guest or the Prince, was going to risk his life in this
dangerous contraption remained to be seen.
Anyway it was less and less likely to happen. Unless the
cattle people came back the whole project was at a standstill, and Mr
Kodak’s raw stock would remain in unopened cans. Poised on a turret of the
palace, the Guest scanned the horizon once more from east to west, and then
again from west to east; but the only sign of life was some men and women
gathering salt from evaporation ponds in the Rann of Kutch. Their distant
figures shimmered. But he hadn’t come to film that.
* * *
The palace itself was the sort of Indian princely pile
they don’t mention in guide books to Rajasthan—a big ugly contraption rushed
up in the 19th century on the backs of half a million unresisting
serfs, simply to earn an 11-gun salute for the Maharaja; a place whose
towers and balconies were now in varying states of disrepair, and with brown
stains running down the outside walls from broken cisterns and leaking loos…
To be fair, originally it would have been well maintained. But after
independence, with the power to tax his peasants taken away, the Maharaja’s
fortune evaporated, maintenance gradually ceased, and it was becoming a
ruin.
Peacocks screamed in empty courts, and hot winds stirred
the dust on the maidan. The broken glass of a thousand gin bottles was stuck
in concrete along the top of the palace walls; but there was little inside
worth thieving. Beyond the walls was an empty dam with a footpath around the
edge where the Guest walked daily for exercise—twice daily in fact, for
after examining the rooms of the untenanted wing where he was now immured
there wasn’t much else to do. Low shelves held the remains of a library
acquired by a long-dead ruler back in the 1920s: Macaulay’s essays; a well
preserved 11th Britannica.
And something else caught the eye. This part of the
palace had been where the unmarried sons of the royal household lived, and
on the walls of each room hung art of the playboy kind… Early Edwardian
playboy, that is, faded but fetching prints of nude women diaphanously
draped—all European, all demure, all irreproachably fair-skinned. Was this
the taste of the ancestor who read Macaulay?
The present Maharaja had lived abroad, and had gone to
Oxford in the 1950s. But in India he was best known for organizing the
Maharaja’s Union. After Nehru took away the power of the privy purse from
India’s princely rulers, destroying their income, he resolved to do
something. He knew that untouchables had things called unions to defend
their interests; why shouldn’t India’s oppressed Maharajas organize a union
too? The need was desperate; he applied himself to the task; and before long
he had a union of his own. Now, for much of the year, the Maharaja lived at
an alternative residence in Delhi, but the Guest learned that he would soon
be flying home to keep an eye on the royal estate.
* * *
Prince Number One spent his time looking at The Dukes
of Hazzard, marvelling at airborne cars. Prince Number Two employed
masons carving granite for the export trade. It was Prince Number Three who
had a weakness for anthropology, who found nomads and cows endearing, and
who was collaborating with the Guest to make a film. But as the days
lengthened into weeks, and the nomads remained invisible, both the Prince
and his visitor suffered greatly from ennui.
Sometimes, while his brother watched American videos,
Prince Number Three would take himself down through a wild and abandoned
garden to a pond where he gazed thoughtfully at the floating leaves. He was
by nature romantic. Grandly turbaned and moustached, posing in reverie
beside the pool, he resembled at times an exquisite Rajput miniature, and it
was easy to imagine him dreaming poetic dreams about Krishna and the
milkmaids in the forest. But this was nonsense. Like a surprising number of
his aristocratic chums on the subcontinent, the prince was an aviator
manqué. He dreamed of ultralights.
At other times he and his Guest played croquet on a worn
and tufted patch of grass. The rough surface made the ball hard to control,
and both men performed badly. This was mirthfully obvious to the Prince’s
daughters, aged three and five, and was silently noted by the palace staff.
Even the peacocks shrieked in mockery as the ball went this way and that,
and it was clear to the royal household that if the absent Maharaja were
playing he could show these amateurs a thing or two. His deftly wielded
mallet would knock them into oblivion.
That could well have been so, for by all accounts His
Highness had been a gifted sportsman. Photographs of a man in jodhpurs
filled several albums—sometimes on a horse playing polo, sometimes swinging
his bat on the cricket field, sometimes surrounded by men and guns in an
open tourer. Tomorrow night the Guest and the Maharaja would meet: the
feudal chieftain was arriving home for dinner.
* * *
Evening, around 9.00pm. A large room in the palace.
Seated there are Prince Number One, his Princess, the Guest, and the
Maharaja. The last is sprawled at leisure on a divan.
Clapping his hands, His Highness summons a servant to
bring drinks, and immediately a bent and cowering man appears and shuffles
forward. The manner in which His Highness addresses this abject creature is
surprising. In the world of servitude, which is the only world this
miserable fellow knows, he is barked at indifferently both by the dogs
outside the house and by his master within.
The Guest has a scotch, and then another, while the
Prince and Princess judiciously drink lemonade. They have been through this
sort of thing before and are taking precautions. As the night goes on His
Highness waxes jocular, but the jollier he becomes, and the more scotch he
imbibes, the more he gives the servants the rough edge of his tongue. His
tone, his casual contempt, the way he seems to enjoy bawling out the
servants waiting on him, lie quite outside the Guest’s previous experience
of mankind.
* * *
There are things the innocent citizens of modern
democracies will never understand about the past—even the past that persists
long into the present as it did in India’s princely states. Sentimental
conservatives, for example, are much given to rosy views of the feudal
world, in India and elsewhere. They like the idea of Maharajas. They like
the idea of dukes. They evidently think feudalism consisted of a Tennysonian
world of mists and enchantments, of noble acts and exalted piety, of
Lancelots and Guineveres—of everything an aggressive democratic ethos has
destroyed.
They probably admire the Sutherlands. I suppose they
would rather like to be formally received by the Duke and Duchess at
Dunrobin, another pretentious pile from the 19th century—in this
case fake-medieval, and built while fifteen thousand crofters were being
chased off the ducal estates and replaced by sheep. At times they may
wistfully feel that the world of princes and peasants is the sort of world
they would like to live in. This seems to me a mistake. That petty
potentates should feel free to behave like the Maharaja toward helpless
servants within their own walls is bad enough. That they should have
unrestrained authority over the lives of millions is unthinkable. Nehru did
well to take their power away.
All the Maharaja appeared to have learnt at Oxford was
that the English had a caste system too. This appeared to reinforce his
faith in his own. It must be said however that the Maharani was entirely
charming. And Prince Number Three and his Princess were models of civility,
discretion, good humor and good taste. She had attended the best schools in
India before going to Wellesley; he had gone to the distinguished Doon
School while in India, and later to Harvard. Their mixed British-Indian and
American backgrounds ensured that they grew into true members of the modern
world. But the Oxford-educated Maharaja was something else.
June 2005
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