Ivory Throne

by Manu S. Pillai

  Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s family portrait was now complete.56

  When Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840, her counsellors and friends all issued dire warnings to her. He was a man, they said, and no man would remain peacefully for long under the authority of a woman, whoever she might be. Staunch royalists insisted that he should have nothing at all to do with government and that he ought to be purposefully kept away. Some others, like Stockmar, felt the queen could devolve power in degrees to him over a substantial space of time. Albert himself was uneasy at first. ‘In my whole life I am happy and contented,’ he wrote, ‘but the difficulty in filling my place with proper dignity is that I am only the husband and not the master of the house.’57 As a man who owed everything to his wife, he was naturally quite powerless before her. Yet, by the time of his death, scholars concurred that Albert had influenced the policy of the queen discreetly but very successfully.

  In Travancore, the Valiya Koil Tampuran was in very similar circumstances. As one contemporary remarked, ‘His position no doubt is not an easy one for he appears in the conflicting roles of husband and subject of Her Highness at the same time.’ He had to be ‘ever conscious of the line of demarcation between his privileges as royal partner and his duties as loyal citizen. This perplexing situation,’ it was felt, ‘will tax any man’s mental alertness.’58 But Rama Varma was not all that perplexed. For right from the onset, he appears to have desired to play more than a peripheral or merely advisory role in the Maharani’s administration. Owing to her caution about public appearances, it is not certain what the entire reality of their relationship during this period was when it came to his political involvement. But insofar as all the evidence goes, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi usually stood by her husband and his actions. One can assume that she did not object to his interest.

  At the commencement of her reign, interestingly, she had handed over the management of the Sripadam to him, which was ‘generally regarded as a hint that she does not want him to interfere in affairs of State’.59 But this was really done in order to reduce the burden on her shoulders and not to sidetrack him. Mr Cotton knew this, which is why he was so concerned at first that the Valiya Koil Tampuran might hijack his wife’s authority. That did not turn out to be the case, yet he remained nervous. He imagined that the amount of power Sethu Lakshmi Bayi had inherited could turn the man’s head, and informed Delhi that he was ‘watching him carefully’. His feelings about Rama Varma were mixed at this time. On the one hand he felt he was ‘not a bad man’ and that there was ‘much that I like in him’, but on the other, he was also ‘strong willed, somewhat mulish and like most Malayalis [!] avaricious and mean’.60 But if there was any tendency to interfere in appointments, as Sankaran Tampi used to do in return for lucrative amounts, or to provoke quarrels with his old enemy, the Junior Maharani, the Resident promised to ‘carpet him in and in the last resort threaten to report his misconduct’.61

  In the initial phase of Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s administration, the Valiya Koil Tampuran did give some legitimate cause for concern to Mr Cotton. In November 1924, for example, when Chithira Tirunal celebrated his twelfth birthday, the entire royal family was supposed to meet for a feast. But nobody from Satelmond Palace attended, mainly because the Junior Maharani had, justifiably, written to say that since Rama Varma had not once called on her son since his installation as minor Maharajah, she would not receive him.62 Sethu Lakshmi Bayi too therefore decided against going, seeing how her husband was unwelcome. It took a year for some rapprochement to be effected when during Lord Goschen’s visit in October 1925, Rama Varma met and engaged in friendly banter with the Junior Maharani’s husband at a garden party. The Kochu Koil Tampuran then took the initiative and called at Satelmond Palace, following which his counterpart paid his first ever visit in years at Kowdiar Palace.63 But then another quarrel broke out and everyone was back at starting point. ‘Nothing will,’ Mr Cotton bemoaned, ‘terminate the feud between the Junior Maharani and the Valiya Koil Tampuran but the death of one of them.’64 And so long as they did not see eye to eye, chances of the two cousins reconciling were also slim.

  Similarly, two months after the Maharani’s rule was inaugurated, it turned out that the Valiya Koil Tampuran was covertly financing an editorial series in the Hindustan Times that warned against Mr Cotton’s interference in the administration.65 When the editor of the Princely India visited Trivandrum, Rama Varma also had him put up as a state guest and reportedly paid him a large amount of money when threatened that he would ‘expose’ his clash with the Junior Maharani. The Resident’s information was that while Sethu Lakshmi Bayi was unaware of these transactions, Mr Raghavaiah, who was pandering to her husband at the time for his retention as Dewan, was privy to it.66 Since Mr Raghavaiah was sacked anyway, it appears that the Maharani did not heed her husband’s advice and went her own way, which contributed to Mr Cotton’s confidence in her. Additionally, she also summoned the editor of the Hindustan Times, none other than the future diplomat K.M. Panikkar, and gave him ‘a good dressing down’ for the misleading articles being published.67 Thereafter, when in January 1925 the paper was still printing false reports of altercations between her and Mr Cotton, she personally issued a firm press note denying the rumours, without consulting anyone on the matter.68 Rama Varma, consequently, had to give in to his wife’s resolve and in a conversation with Mr Cotton he admitted to having mistrusted him in the past and sought to now become friends.69 This inconsistent behaviour combined with his mischievous conduct continued to render the Valiya Koil Tampuran suspect in the eyes of the Government of India. If there were a dark figure in Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s administration, people mumbled, it looked very much like her husband.

  The concerns continued and by February 1926 a grievance arose from Mr Watts regarding undue interference by the Maharani’s husband in state matters. The Dewan was said to be ‘fed up’ with Rama Varma over his intrusions in ‘administrative questions and particularly in the matter of patronage’. It appeared that there was a vacancy in the Law College and Mr Watts selected a Nair to fill it, while the Valiya Koil Tampuran recommended a Christian candidate. The Resident’s information was that the Dewan had threatened to resign (although from private correspondence with the Maharani it does not seem to have gone that far) before Rama Varma backed off. He was, in Mr Cotton’s opinion, ‘not venal’ but had a ‘passion to play King, and withal so short a time for its indulgence’.70 Again, it appears that the Maharani made her final decision independently and went with the Dewan. Moreover, in spite of the dispute between her husband and Mr Watts, she was happy to consider the latter’s application for a raise solely in recognition of his excellent service to her.71 Power might momentarily have gone to the Valiya Koil Tampuran’s head, but common sense had not abandoned Sethu Lakshmi Bayi.

  Then again, in April that year the Land Revenue Commissioner also registered a protest against Rama Varma. This time he had involved himself in the business of transferring certain officials, and one A.R. Subramania Iyer, ‘one of the laziest and most corrupt’ tahsildars, who happened to be an acquaintance from Harippad, was shown special favour. In addition to all this, the Valiya Koil Tampuran spent most of his mornings in ‘giving audiences to subordinate officials seeking to avoid unwelcome transfers or obtain undeserved promotions’. Hitherto, the Resident warned, people only accused the Maharani’s husband of being greedy for power. But if he continued to hold court for so many petty government servants, it would only be a matter of time before he was charged as Sankaran Tampi’s heir in the business of corruption too, whatever the truth might be.72 And predictably, it did take one unnerving experience for the Valiya Koil Tampuran to learn the tact and discretion requisite for a man in his position, and to rein in his ambitions.

  It all started when late in 1925 the Jenmabhoomi, a prominent vernacular newspaper with considerable circulation, published a vehement attack on Rama Varma. Calling him corrupt and unscrupulous, this article even shocked the hawk-eyed Resident with
its colourful variety of insinuations. He recorded, to the Valiya Koil Tampuran’s credit, that the article was ‘not only scurrilous but without a shadow of justification’, adding that for all his other flaws, the Maharani’s husband was ‘certainly not a rake’ and could not be accused of corruption.73 The gravity of the false allegations was severe enough for Mr Cotton to write to Rama Varma personally, ‘as your friend’, about how ‘disgusted’ he was by the piece, assuring him that that such ‘recklessly made charges of venality and incontinence’ cut no ice with anybody of intelligence.74 And to Sethu Lakshmi Bayi he sent his sincere sympathies against ‘the most disgraceful, false aspersions’ cast upon her husband by ‘this mischievous rag’ of a newspaper. ‘The editor probably hopes,’ he added indignantly, ‘that if he only throws enough mud some of it will stick.’ 75

  The Maharani, however, no matter what her disagreements with her husband, was not willing to take this attack on him lying down. This one article would set into motion a series of events that would bring down the iron hand of the government not just on the Jenmabhoomi but on the entire Travancore press. It helped that for some time now a need was being increasingly felt to regulate newspapers in order to restrain the communal tensions they blatantly promoted. The fact was that even the press in Travancore was divided along communal lines. As a commentator in the Madras Mail noted in 1905, ‘we have the Brahmin interest, the Nair interest, the Syrian interest, the Ezhava interest etc., and … there are journals to support each one’s cause’ in what was a ‘social civil war’.76 In the legislature on two occasions, therefore, non-official members had already called upon the government to control the ‘systematic propagation of misrepresented and ill-represented reports’.77 The Maharani too had been ‘anxiously observing’ a ‘reprehensible laxity’ in the quality of the press.78 The fact that a newspaper had without fear, openly launched itself against none other than the monarch’s consort became the last straw, regardless of the substance of its allegations. The Resident, reflecting the attitude of the colonial state on the matter, informed the Maharani of his fullest support to ‘stay the pens of the ink slingers’ and called for the ‘very early introduction of a Press Regulation’.79 Sethu Lakshmi Bayi decided, therefore, to take up the matter and issue yet another reform that her predecessor’s government had not felt the courage to pass. It was, however, a perilous move, one that would scorch her husband seriously and bring about the first concerted effort to topple her from power as well.

  The business of printing is very old in Kerala. It arrived with foreign missionaries at the end of the sixteenth century and about two hundred years later, in 1772, the first printed Malayalam book was published from Rome. Newspapers and journals took some more time to make their appearance and in 1847 the Rajya Samacharam was published in Malabar, with the distinguished linguist and scholar, Hermann Gundert, as its editor. In 1876, the Satyanadam Weekly commenced circulation and in 1881 the Kerala Mitram followed. The Deepika was set up in 1887 and then, perhaps the most celebrated of all, the Malayala Manorama was born in 1888.80 Very many more journals and newspapers established themselves in Travancore and in the early 1920s there was an unusual surge in numbers. On an average there were three newspapers and six magazines per taluka, a considerable statistic compared to other parts of India.81 By the end of the decade there were seven prominent dailies with large-scale circulation of 16,000, and twenty-two weeklies with a circulation of 20,000 in the state, not to speak of smaller, more local players and papers from Cochin and Malabar.82 In addition to this, for every 1,000 of the population, 289 were literate, according to the coming 1931 census of the state, and as education continued to reach out to more and more, the attendant appetite for news only swelled the business’s market.

  It was in 1903 that the government first imposed a very moderate regulation under which all newspapers were ordered to register with local authorities. This was followed by another step in 1917 binding them to deposit copies of their publications immediately after printing, with default inviting a fine of Rs 50.83 Thereafter, during the Dewanship of Mr Raghavaiah, thought was given to a more serious, qualitative regulation of the press in the interests of communal harmony.84 For it was a time when ‘different communities began to struggle tooth and claw for scraps of offices’, and the press started to manifest these rivalries. Officers from one community could have their reputations maligned by the newspapers of a competing group, and ‘scurrility, obscenity, vilification, and vituperation’ were rampant in the press.85 As a European professor in the Women’s College would write, the papers in Travancore ‘live by collecting exciting rumours and then denying them—else how would they fill their columns and the Editors’ pockets’?86 The government definitely had an interest, thus, in controlling the free rein of the Fourth Estate.87 Nothing was done about this during Mulam Tirunal’s time, however, as it was bound to cause enormous uproar as an illiberal clamp on the freedom of expression.

  Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, nevertheless, decided to go ahead with the idea in spite of the potentially fiery opposition and foreseeable unpopularity. For one, in her determined effort to weed out communalism, the elimination of such a powerful political weapon from her opponents’ armoury had its obvious strategic advantages. In fact, communalism became the declared moral justification for the regulation. ‘Every schoolmaster in our three thousand and odd schools,’ the Dewan argued, ‘is the centre of a political group and as every Nair and most Ezhavas and Syrian Christians are prone to politics and evince a keen interest in affairs generally, you can well imagine that the demand for newspapers is great.’88 And if the press were communal and denigrating in nature, it was dangerous to allow it to seep through to villages, where communalism was not yet entrenched, or to schools, where young minds were moulded. The Maharani was determined, therefore, to impose restrictions on the contents of newspapers in order to arrest any further divisive drifts in Travancore’s society. Or so the official line earnestly proclaimed.

  That said the royal family had always had an awkward relationship with the concept of the freedom of expression. The Maharani’s guardian, Kerala Varma, for example, had all the subscriptions in the state to the Keralapatrika cancelled when it carried unflattering critiques of his Sanskrit works. Earlier in the 1870s when Ayilyam Tirunal ruled Travancore, the Santishtavadi was shut down for being ‘outspoken in its criticism’ of the government. So too during Mulam Tirunal’s reign the Malayali was forced to move base to a British enclave fearing royal wrath, not to speak of the infamous expulsion of the editor of the Swadeshabhimani in 1911. There was, thus, a history of the government and the royal family not tolerating the press beyond a certain point; that point normally being the preservation of the halo around the royal family.89 In 1926 too what finally triggered the Maharani’s decision to impose a comprehensive blanket regulation was (notwithstanding her avowed position against communalism) the jolt she received from ‘the most atrocious calumnies published about my husband’.90 This was the latest in an exasperating series that included attacks even against Mr Watts, whom one newspaper sourly called ‘The Mussolini of Travancore’.91 Sethu Lakshmi Bayi perceived these as personal attacks on her, and it is quite likely they were. She believed that this ‘pronounced tendency to attack highly placed persons’ began to be ‘noticed only from the commencement of the Regency’, indicating that some politicians had an axe to grind against her authority exclusive of their long-standing communal battles.92 For while they could not directly vilify her owing to her standing with the masses, what they could do was traduce her adherents and diminish the credibility of her regime. It was time, the Maharani therefore felt, to use her sovereign power and make a point, both moral and political.

  But forcing any kind of control on the press has always been universally resented. And Sethu Lakshmi Bayi was severely criticized for her draconian policy on this count by most in the business. A peculiar circumstance that opened her up to direct liability was that she personally and independently took the final decisi
on. For, by the middle of May 1926, when it became clear the new law would be promulgated, both Mr Watts and Mr Cotton had to go away to England for private reasons. Some suspected, therefore, that the Maharani was taking advantage of their absence to issue a directive they did not really support. And to add to it, she intended to do so by royal decree and not through the legislature. This prompted the loudest protests in the press, for they were confident that politicians would never allow the regulation to pass if they were allowed to have a say in it. A delegation of journalists desperately called at Satelmond Palace to appeal against the decision but they were told the Maharani would not receive them. Members of civil society also expressed that while ‘some restrictions on the Press were necessary, they should not [take] the form of “judgment without trial”.’93 Nevertheless, unwavering and resolute, and in a rare admission that despite constitutional concessions, Travancore was, ultimately, the inherited fief of a single family, on 22 May Sethu Lakshmi Bayi affixed the sign manual to the Newspaper Regulation, imposing upon the press a series of qualitative standards and a number of stringent political restrictions as well.

  No newspaper could henceforward publish without a licence available from the government at a price of Rs 500. This was intended to ensure that no Tom, Dick or Harry could at a whim start up a newspaper solely to defame someone, and shut it down once that objective was achieved, as was apparently being done. Only those with the necessary capital could hereafter invest in the business, and it was hoped that at least out of the fear of forfeiting the expensive licence, they would toe the government line. Similarly, the press was prohibited from publishing anything that would ‘excite disaffection or bring into hatred Us or Our Government or His Majesty the King Emperor of India or the Government established by law in British India’. Criticism of the royal family was strictly banned as was anything that would ‘promote feelings of enmity or hatred between the several classes of people’ in the country. In case newspapers erred, the government was authorised to revoke licences forthwith. The former were permitted, however, to approach the High Court and appeal against the authorities for a reversal if they so desired.94