The Dancer and the Raja

by Javier Moro

  14

  The raja grew up with one foot in the deep India of his glorious ancestors and the other in Europe. One foot in a feudal world and the other in the twentieth century. Some teachers gave him classes in physics and chemistry, and others taught him the Kamasutra, a Sanskrit text from the fourth century written by a wise man who invented a sexual code to guide men in the art of love. While he was still a minor, the state was administered by a succession of brilliant English civil servants, some of whom became governors-general, as was the case of Sir James Lyall. Those superintendents were aided in their task by men in their confidence who made up the council of state civil servants, and together they gradually introduced reforms and perfected the administration in such a way that, when he was eighteen and took power, the young raja would find the house in order. For example, they reduced the number of ministries, merging Finance and Tax Collection into one, and they eliminated the Ministry of Miscellaneous Matters, which covered the administration of the stables, the elephants, and the zoo.

  The education Jagatjit received from carefully selected tutors was liberal. At the same time he learned good manners, the requirements of protocol, and the values of Western democracy, but without the obligation of having to apply them because he would rule absolutely over the three hundred thousand souls in Kapurthala. The influence of his tutors aroused great curiosity in him regarding England, its history, its values, its institutions, and its customs. England was the supreme power, and in his eyes it represented the source of modern civilization. The best cars, the fastest ships, the most solid buildings, the greatest empire, the most advanced medicine … England was all that.

  How does a combustion engine work? What is the sea? What difference is there between a sepia print, a lithograph, and a photograph? His tutors were the people who satisfied his childish curiosity and opened his eyes to the world because in his family environment no one had the slightest idea about life beyond the borders of India. The contacts that, because of his position, he maintained from an early age with British aristocrats familiarized him with the elite of that society that he so admired and that welcomed him as one more in the family. For that reason he applied himself to the study of English with special determination. He soon learned to speak it fluently and with an impeccable accent so British that it was strange to think he had never been to England. His fascination for that country widened to include the whole of Europe, the cradle of the great technological innovations of the end of the nineteenth century. Machines replaced the work of man, devices for talking over a distance, for reproducing pictures in movement, flying machines … the list of inventions able to seduce the imagination of a boy was interminable. And it was all happening in Europe. And so he set himself to learn French, and in a short time he was able to speak it and read it well too. He shared, like many of his countrymen, a great gift for learning languages. It is rare to find an Indian who does not know two or more languages, the minimum for making oneself understood in a country with fourteen official languages and more than five hundred dialects.

  At the age of ten, the raja spoke six languages. Apart from English and French, his mother tongue was Punjabi, similar to Hindustani, which he also knew, as well as Sanskrit, which he studied with an elderly Hindu holy man, and Urdu (ancient Persian), which was the official language of the court. This old custom inherited from the Moghul Empire, which lived on for a century after the empire disappeared, showed the long-lasting influence the Moghuls had on India.

  Jagatjit Singh came to embody the drastic change that had occurred in Indian monarchs due to Queen Victoria’s proclamation. In very few years, the rajas had found themselves forced to leap forward by centuries. And Jagatjit showed himself to be a real acrobat, able to leap from one world to another in a completely natural way. He was the first in his family to dress as a European, to play cricket and tennis, to eat Western dishes, and to practice a sport as English as pig-sticking—hunting wild boar with a lance. But he went to the council of ministers on the back of an elephant, wearing a diamond crown, a necklace of thirteen strings of pearls, and a plume of feathers fixed to his turban. He inherited a kingdom with all the exterior signs of the monarchy, with all the ceremonies and rituals of coronation, but which, in fact, was a leftover from the past and in which was missing the very substance that made sense of the monarchy. He had been taught that serving the people was the most important mission in his life, but deep down he knew, like all the other sovereigns, that his position was assured by the English, and that his job was for life. Therefore, the really important thing in order to enjoy a life of comfort and pleasure was to get on well with those in power. A good relationship with the British was thus placed above the concept of serving the people. It was a system with a fault in its foundations, but which at that time seemed as solid as it was eternal. The winds of history would take care to put things in their right place.

  The sudden change in the raja’s lifestyle would not be carried out without upsets or problems. It is not easy to reconcile cultures as different as that of the English and the Sikhs; it is not easy to be an Indian king and a British gentleman at the same time; ancient and modern, democrat and despot, Oriental prince and European vassal. Even more so when the absence of a father figure, together with the weakness of his mother, a traditional woman who belonged to another time, left him without the confidence necessary to face up to a changing world, to solve the conflict of having to be a king without really being one. Perhaps for that reason Jagatjit Singh began to externalize his psychological problems and took to eating. At first no one was alarmed; quite the opposite, the round-bellied heir to the throne was a decidedly fine-looking boy. But later, when at the age of ten he crossed the line of a hundred kilos, panic began to spread. Dr. Warburton, the official doctor of Kapurthala, put him on a strict diet, which brought no results. The boy continued to get fatter and fatter and slept too much. From that time came his habit of asking for help to tie or untie his churidar, very wide Indian-style pajama trousers held up with a silk rope round the waist. Later, when he got back into physical shape, he continued the custom and extended it to tying his turban. Inder Singh, the captain of his escort, would be the one in charge of dealing with that particular whim of his master’s for years.

  “Brought up an only child, fattened up since he was small, first by his wet-nurses and then by his ayas, the boy has acquired some dreadful eating habits,” stated Dr. Warburton in his report to James Lyall, the tutor of little Jagatjit, who was very concerned at the turn the progressive weight gains of the prince was taking. “For now, the only thing we can do is to try another diet,” suggested the doctor.

  “What if that doesn’t work? What is the outlook if he keeps getting fatter?”

  Dr. Warburton looked at him over the top of his glasses. He had just read an article in a medical journal and feared it could well be applied to the case of Jagatjit.

  “Let’s hope he does not suffer from a kind of morbid infantile obesity, a rare illness. The patients fall asleep standing up, and go on getting fatter and fatter until serious breathing difficulties appear …”

  There was a silence, interrupted by Lyall: “And …?”

  “Many of them die before they reach adulthood.”

  Lyall was speechless. After all the scandal caused by the other branch of the family, the fact of being left without a direct heir and with no chance of having another would present a very thorny problem to the Political Department of the Punjab.

  “We’ll see how he goes on,” continued Dr. Warburton. “I hope it’s only the expression of psychological problems showing themselves in an obsession with food!”

  Jagatjit stayed put at a hundred and thirty kilos. It was a lot for a boy of eleven, but at least his weight stabilized, which was a relief, even if only momentarily, for his tutors and the doctor. At that age, the members of the court decided to find him his first wife. The boy had nothing to say on the matter because there was
no possibility of a choice. This was demanded by tradition. Besides, he could consider himself lucky because, as a Sikh, the number of wives he could take was not limited, unlike Moslems, who have no right to more than four. Only when he had come of age and had taken over control of the government would he have greater freedom to choose his wives, although direct access to women from other families of the nobility would always be very difficult, because the families got them engaged when they were young girls.

  A large group of courtiers traveled to the Kangra valley, some two hundred kilometers from Kapurthala, in search of a girl of high caste of Rajput origin. They wanted a union that would be able to strengthen links with the great families of the Rajputana, the homeland of the Rajputs, where the ancestors of the raja originated, and with someone belonging to a very high caste to improve the “pedigree” of the line of Kapurthala. Originally Jagatjit’s family had belonged to the caste of the kalal, who in olden times were in charge of making alcoholic drinks for the royal houses—a mediocre caste. Jassa Singh, a brilliant forbear helped by the Sikhs who at that time formed part of a new religion, was able to bring together an army, rise up, and unify Kapurthala. But the stigma of the kalal still weighed heavily on some members of the court, who were very punctilious with anything to do with genealogy. Did a Punjabi proverb not say, “Crow, kalal, and dog, do not trust them even when they are asleep”? For that reason it was important to improve the bloodline.

  In every town, the arrival of the retinue charged with finding a bride was announced with the beating of drums. Girls of marriageable age were examined so meticulously that there were even complaints about the extreme zeal of the courtiers when it came to assessing the physical attributes of the candidates. The courtiers from Kapurthala came with the arrogance given them by the fact they represented a prince, however fat he was. They knew that the dearest wish of thousands of families was to marry one of their daughters to a raja. For that reason it was necessary to check that the papers of the girls were not mixed up, that the information was all true, and that no member of the retinue should accept bribes in order to include a young girl who was not appropriate among the candidates.

  Finally they decided to choose a beautiful girl the same age as the raja, called Harbans Kaur. She had big, dark eyes and her skin was as golden as wheat. She was Hindu and belonged to the cream of the high Brahmin castes. They negotiated the terms of her dowry with her parents, which would be made effective at the time of the marriage, set for April 16, 1886, when the young couple reached the worthy age of fourteen.

  The wedding was performed strictly according to the Sikh tradition. The raja did not see his bride’s face until that very day, and he did so by means of a little mirror placed between them. “I stood looking into her dark eyes, the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen. Then I smiled, and she returned my smile,” he wrote in his diary. What was not recorded in any diary was the reaction of Harbans Kaur when she discovered the swollen face of her beardless husband, his triple chin, his drooping eyes, and his enormous belly. No diary would tell in detail what must have been her first impression, and then her first night of lovemaking, she submissive and frightened, he inexpert and dangerously fat. What did get out was that the marriage was not consummated.

  To the concern that the court and the family felt for the raja’s health—which apart from his obesity showed no signs of narcolepsy or breathing difficulties—was now added a deep concern regarding his sexual life and thus for the future of the dynasty.

  15

  November 24, 1890, was no ordinary birthday. Jagatjit Singh was eighteen, which meant that he had come of age. His reputation for being quiet and good-natured fit in with his physical appearance—a potbellied young man weighing over a hundred kilos. Two servants were required to push the cycle-cart with large, narrow wheels that he used every day for his morning stroll. The invention had been an idea of J. S. Elmore, chief engineer of Kapurthala, who had set the wheels of a bicycle onto a chassis to which he added an extra wheel, a seat, and a sunshade to protect the royal head from the sun’s rays. Sitting there, pushed by the servants, the raja rode around the city and stopped to talk to people here and there because he was quite friendly, in his way. Other days he went out on horseback. His tutors had instilled a love of riding in him, but he tired quickly and was afraid of falling off. He felt better sitting on the back of an elephant.

  Four years had passed since the wedding, and the young couple had no children. But with the expectation aroused by the investiture, the dull anxiety that floated in the proximity of the palace was relegated to second place. The man who would court Anita Delgado with such determination eighteen years later came to power almost on the same date that she was born. The preparations lasted two weeks. Three hundred English and Indian guests came to participate in the three days of festivities, which included ceremonies, banquets, trips down the river, and hunts. In its edition of November 28, 1890, the Civil and Military Gazette, a newspaper published in Lahore and whose pride was that Rudyard Kipling wrote for it, reported on the “chaos during the inauguration of the new skating rink belonging to the Maharajah of Patiala because of the number of falls”; on the warning from the local government to young police officers in the Punjab not to use thong sandals at work instead of the regulation shoes; on the fine of ten rupees imposed on a drunken English soldier for shouting insults at a Moslem funeral cortege, and so on. But the front page and most of the editorial were dedicated to the investiture ceremony:

  “The scene at Durbar5 Hall was so full of life and so picturesque that it will remain forever in the memory of those present. The Hall is a splendid work of architecture, with an enormous covered interior courtyard lit by electric lights. Lined up outside were several regiments of State troops, one formed of distinguished soldiers in blue uniforms with huge scarlet turbans and tunics; another of cavalry for whose soldiers and horses it is impossible to find enough praise, and a long row of splendid elephants with their faces painted in filigree and their howdahs richly carpeted and furnished, perfectly still apart from the slow waving of their trunks. The courtyard of the Durbar Hall was full of people who wore a whole range of striking uniforms; while from the upper gallery, the shining eyes of the European visitors contemplated the scene that was going on below them.”

  In his investiture speech, Sir James Lyall, the ex-tutor of the raja and now governor-general of the Punjab, briefly covered the history of the excellent relations between the royal family of Kapurthala and the Crown back to the times of Randhir Singh, praising the dedication of the tutors and Dr. Warburton in their care of the child-prince, congratulating the raja on his educational achievements, especially in connection with English and Oriental languages, “owing to your efforts and your mental capacity,” he stated, and thanking the members of the government for their help while the raja was under age, which had permitted “good progress in all administrative departments without breaking with the tradition of the old Sikh government.” He ended by recognizing the worthiness, prudence, and good character of the raja, hoping that he would always be a fair and considerate sovereign to his subjects “and a liberal landowner in the great expanses in Oudh whence you gain such a splendid income.” He concluded with a quote from a poet, who two hundred years before had written some words to a king of England, which on that sunny morning, in the mouth of Sir James Lyall, seemed curiously premonitory:

  Sceptre and crown,

  Must tumble down

  And in the dust be equal made

  With the poor crooked scythe and spade

  …

  Only the actions of the just

  Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.

  A burst of applause greeted the speech. Then Sir James asked the raja to follow him. They both took a few steps toward some enormous carved wooden armchairs covered in gold leaf—the thrones—where they placed their august behinds. The investiture was thus formally carried out. Next, the raja stood
up and made his first great speech in public “in perfect English, with admirable dignity and great self-possession,” as the correspondent of the Gazette described it.

  He thanked his tutors, promised to go on with the same team of local administrators, mentioned the good offices of Dr. Warburton regarding the care of his health, and committed himself to following the advice of the governor-general: “I shall pray for my actions to merit the approval of Her Majesty the Queen and the satisfaction of my own people.” The order in which he had mentioned them left no room for doubt regarding his priorities.

  “The ceremony ended and the guests returned to their camp,” the Gazette went on. “Horse races occupied the rest of the afternoon and at nightfall a banquet was served, opening with a toast to the health of the Empress.”

  When the clamor of the festivities died down and calm returned to the little state of Kapurthala, the rumor that the raja was unable to beget a child circulated again more insidiously than before. No one doubted that he liked women. Several maids had told how, since he was small, he had set himself to seduce them; when they would not let him, he had tried to buy them. The echo of the good times that went on with the maharajas of Dholpur and Patiala had reached as far away as Delhi, and on more than one occasion their exploits with the young women from the hill tribes had brought them a serious reprimand. Also notorious was their taste for nautch girls, professional dancers who came from Lahore, considered to be the capital of vice and revelry. Hired to amuse sovereigns, they were also available for all kinds of sexual favors. They were not prostitutes in the strict sense of the word, but rather the equivalent of geishas. Experts in the art of satisfying a man, talking to him, making him feel comfortable and amusing him, they were given the task of initiating young men in the art of sex, as well as in the use of contraceptives. There were various methods: from coitus interruptus, which they called “the leap backwards,” to suppositories that contained wallflower broth and honey or willow leaves in woolen padding. Other techniques consisted of drinking an infusion of mint during intercourse or rubbing the penis with the juice of an onion or even with tar. These courtesan dancers also taught them the rules of court etiquette and to speak Urdu, the language of the kings. The old families, like the one in Kapurthala, rewarded them with plots of land and rooms in some palace or other so that they could perfect “their art.”