The Taste With Vir: India’s princely tradition works best as a fairytale

By some co-incidence I ended up staying at Jaipur’s Rambagh Palace simply after I had completed studying John Zubrzycki’s The House of Jaipur, an exhaustive account of the historical past of the royal household of Jaipur, which doesn’t shrink back from detailing the household’s many present authorized and monetary disputes. And once I returned to Delhi, I reread Quentin Crewe’s The Last Maharaja, a biography of Sawai Man Singh II which got here out in 1985, apparently with the blessings of a minimum of a part of the Jaipur royal household.

The promoting level of the Rambagh as a luxurious lodge is that it provides you a glimpse of what life in princely India will need to have been like. The fluctuating fortunes of that lodge remind us how a lot it prices to maintain that type of present on the highway. The Rambagh is now a Taj Hotel, run to distinctive requirements, but it surely solely retains its attract as a result of the Taj spends tens of millions on workers and common refurbishment. 

 

Unlike many different palaces, the Rambagh has no historical historical past — a trait it shares with Jodhpur’s Umaid Bhawan. There has been a construction on that web site for ages but it surely by no means amounted to rather more than a searching lodge. The palace, as we now realize it, is a 1920s phenomenon designed primarily by Brits. It was constructed by Sawai Man Singh, who was famously Westernised, to function a form of Rajput Downton Abbey. The eating room (lovingly renovated by the Taj and nonetheless in use) is straight out of a European chateau or palazzo and even, an English nation home. When Sawai Man Singh lived there, you needed to put on white tie and tails for dinner.

In these extra egalitarian instances, most individuals have in all probability forgotten how glamorous the Jaipur royal household was when Sawai Man Singh (Jai to his pals) and his third spouse Gayatri Davi (Ayesha to her pals) had been alive. Unlike most Indian royals, Jai was on first title phrases with the British royal household. When Prince Philip visited Jaipur for Holi, he mingled simply with others on the palace and had his face rubbed with gulal by everybody who attended the festivities. In his introduction to Quentin Crewe’s guide, Philip wrote, “I have met many people who could be described as charming but few, if any, had Jai’s special brand of kindly charm and gentleness of character.”

Jai and Ayesha spent practically half the 12 months overseas (each earlier than and after independence) and in 1970, simply earlier than Indira Gandhi stripped the princes of their titles, he died on a polo subject in England when he was nonetheless in his fifties.

The glamour of the Jaipur household survived his dying largely as a result of Gayatri Devi (Ayesha) remained a well known determine in world jet set circles and maintained a residence in England. Till her dying in 2009 her’s was a reputation to drop in British aristocratic circles.

I do not know if the Jaipurs did actually handle to switch huge parts of their appreciable fortune overseas as critics of the household alleged throughout the Emergency (when Gayatri Devi was unjustly arrested) however there’s little doubt that, with out entry to the substantial wealth of ruling princes, they might by no means have been capable of keep the Rambagh in an acceptable type.

Recognising that instances had modified, Jai turned the Rambagh right into a lodge. According to Zubrzycki, the primary that Ayesha heard of it was at a celebration hosted by the Oberois in 1956. Jai knew the Oberois and the unique plan was that they might run the lodge. That didn’t work out and the Jaipurs ran it themselves — very badly. They spent no cash on the property and maybe, as a consequence, it by no means turned a revenue. Just earlier than he died, Jai requested the Taj (then only a single lodge in Mumbai, not the chain it’s right now) to take it over and it has been a Taj lodge ever since (the Jaipur household is represented within the administration by two of Jai’s sons).

Even then, the Taj ran it like a circuit home. I stayed there as a teen within the mid Seventies and was not impressed. Things improved considerably within the Eighties however the lodge solely returned to glory in 2003/four when crores had been spent on an enormous refurbishment programme. Today, it has the flicker and glamour that the Rambagh will need to have had earlier than 1947 within the heyday of Princely India.

I by no means met Jai however I typically ran into Gayatri Devi. In 1977, when A Princess Remembers, her autobiography, got here out, I interviewed her in a small suite on the Mumbai Taj the place, slightly than promote the guide, she complained in regards to the many errors that Santha Rama Rau who really wrote the textual content, had made. In 1987, once I met her on the Rambagh after which at Lilly Pool, her residence, she instructed me to induce all my readers to not purchase the guide. (Some drawback with the royalties, I feel.)

She might be imperious. During the 1989 election, two members of the Sunday journal group (I used to be then the editor) went as much as her on the Rambagh and mentioned “Mrs Singh, we are from Sunday and we wondered if you would like to comment on the election….” She regarded proper by them as if they had been invisible. (My guess is that she was not thrilled at being addressed as Mrs. Singh.)

But she additionally had impeccable manners. I used to be as soon as on a flight from Mumbai to Delhi. When we landed, everybody received into their very own vehicles and drove away. Except for one aged girl who stored wanting impatiently on the highway, ready for her automobile to drive up — this was earlier than cellphones caught on. I used to be going to supply the girl a trip anyway however once I received nearer, I noticed to my shock, that it was Gayatri Devi.

I re-introduced myself and gave her a trip. She was charming and afterwards wrote me a letter of thanks including, on the finish, “and please tell everyone not to buy A Princess Remembers.”

Her step-son Col. Bhawani Singh, who turned the brand new maharaja was a a lot easier individual, a conflict hero with a bluff, straight ahead method. He was fairly comfortable to be known as Col. Singh. His spouse Padmini who’s now the Rajmata might be the nicest member of the Jaipur household in centuries: heat and approachable, however sensible and witty on the similar time.

Bhawani Singh and his household didn’t have a lot to do with the Rambagh which his step-brothers managed and Gayatri Devi who lived in Lilly Pool, a small home on the grounds of the Rambagh had a tense relationship with a few of her relations. As Zubrzycki factors out, the gate between Lilly Pool and the Rambagh was locked after a dispute and after Gayatri Devi died, possession of the property was contested.

In each sense that issues, the age of the maharajas is over. Even within the West, they’re now seen as anachronisms from a bygone period (like Yugoslav royalty, maybe) slightly than critical glamour figures. Some maharajas have renewed their maintain on their outdated states by becoming a member of politics however with every passing technology the bond between former ruler and former topics weakens additional.

And whereas I consider that Mrs. Gandhi handled the maharajas very unfairly, going again on ensures supplied by the Indian state solely in order that she may make a populist level, I don’t consider (as some maharajas now declare) that almost all of princely India was ever well-administered and conscious of the wants of the individuals.

In truth, India’s princely custom works greatest as a fantasy, a fairy story. That is how A Princess Remembers is written and that’s the reason regardless of Gayatri Devi’s fulminations, it continues to promote a long time after it was first printed.

I stayed within the Gayatri Devi suite on the Rambagh this time. This is designed as a tribute to her legend (she in all probability lived in what’s now the Maharani suite) and it was simple, staying there, to fall beneath the spell of the fairy story. I’m not positive the service or the meals had been nearly as good when the Rambagh was a royal palace however, as of late they’re faultless.

And who is aware of what issues had been actually like in that period? What was the truth behind these fairy tales? In his biography, Quentin Crewe admits about Jai, “his taste was a shade chromium perhaps but by no means as vulgar as that of the majority of his fellow Princes”. Adds Crewe, “everyone who knew Jai, always mentions his stinginess.” And Sawai Man Singh’s romance with Gayatri Devi started when she was simply 13 and he was a a lot older man with two wives tucked away and a rumoured friendship together with her mom. As an apologetic Crewe provides:“to European readers it may seem strange that a man who would never lack female companionship should take an interest in a thirteen-year-old-girl. It must be remembered that in India, over the centuries, it was perfectly normal.”

Well, no. Actually it wasn’t. But why let the info get in the best way of a fairy story? Today’s Rambagh is a monument to that fairy story. And a really pretty monument it’s too.

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