Ivory Throne

by Manu S. Pillai

  On her return to the palace she walked into the study where her parents were poring over photographs of eligible suitors, and declared to them that she had found her consort. ‘To say the least,’ her daughter now laughs, ‘grandparents were both stunned at first and then aghast at the prospect of their child selecting a stranger off the city streets!’8 ‘No, no! We don’t do things like this!’ a predictably outraged Rama Varma vented, while the Maharani tried to convince her daughter that at her age, she couldn’t possibly take a serious decision that could affect her whole life.9 ‘He could have been a Christian or a Muslim or someone below caste who didn’t come from the aristocracy. He could have been anybody really!’10 Princess Lalitha stuck to her position adamantly, though, even as her parents would have none of it. Eventually one day a photograph was brought to her. ‘Grandmother said, “Now look, we have a very nice proposal here, and this is the person we think you should marry.” Mother wouldn’t entertain them but they insisted she at least look at the picture. And that is when she got the biggest surprise of her life when she realised that it was exactly the man she had seen during the procession!’11 What happened was that Princess Lalitha saw the boy near the townhouse of the Kilimanoor clan, to which the Maharani’s own father and illustrious grandfather had belonged. And by a happy coincidence he was a member of the same family, which had a historic tradition of marrying into the royal house.

  The boy in question was a twenty-one-year-old called Kerala Varma, and was something of a unique contender within the wider Kilimanoor family. It was because of this that his horoscope and photographs had reached Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s hands as a potential consort for her daughter in the first place. ‘His uncle, you see, was a judge in Trivandrum, and one of those anglicised gentlemen who kept his favourite nephew close,’ remarks Princess Lalitha’s cousin. ‘And so compared to the other Kilimanoor boys, he had a different upbringing after high school. I think the judge intended for him to marry one of his daughters! It was then that they heard the Senior Maharani was looking for a son-in-law, and, as he was not one of the usual, orthodox crowd, the uncle thought he stood a reasonable chance at becoming a royal consort.’12 Kerala Varma himself would recall the way in which he was quite unexpectedly told about his impending exaltation. ‘My uncle called me into his chamber and asked me if I had anything in mind about marriage. When I said I hadn’t any plans, he asked me, “So how would you like to marry the daughter of the Senior Maharani?” I said I had no objections at all and that it would be my privilege!’13

  In January 1938 then, once the preliminary discussions had concluded, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi forwarded the proposal officially to the Maharajah, requesting him to commence preparations for the wedding. But permission from Kowdiar Palace was immediately denied. A young girl of fifteen, decided the Junior Maharani, could certainly not select her own husband (even though she herself had taken her pick aged ten). The Maharajah’s mother even offered to make some suggestions of her own, but Princess Lalitha wouldn’t hear of this. ‘Mother declared that if she were coerced to marry against her will, she would throw herself off the third floor balcony. It was a clever touch of drama, and it worked!’14 Mr Skrine was asked to mediate between the two houses on this, and help secure permission from the Maharajah. He called at Lalindloch Palace and after discussions with the Valiya Koil Tampuran and the Senior Maharani, Princess Lalitha was invited to meet him. ‘Young lady,’ he asked, ‘are you quite determined on the person whom you are going to marry?’ When she responded positively, he decided to play the devil and added, ‘Or have you any doubts at all; are you even a little undecided?’ That is when the princess made it clear precisely how unwavering she was in her choice. ‘No, none at all,’ she replied, with as purposeful an expression as she could muster to match her conviction.15

  The Maharajah, though, refused to sanction the wedding until Sethu Lakshmi Bayi personally visited him on a courtesy call. She agreed and thus, finally, Princess Lalitha’s wedding was confirmed for 12 September 1938.16 In the meantime the bridegroom-elect, in the rush and excitement of the proceedings, promptly failed his final exams at the College of Science. His plan, before the royal proposal changed his life forever, was to become an engineer. ‘He once made a water clock for mother, with a drop falling for every second,’ his daughter would recall. ‘It was a fantastic contraption and he would have made a good engineer if he had pursued it.’17 Instead his destiny was to live in a great palace and spend his future time mastering music and playing the veena, learning to paint from the favourite court artist of his royal mother-in-law, N.N. Nampiyar, enjoying the pleasures of riding and sport, and engaging in other princely recreations in the company of a doting princess. Though at the time, failing his exams came as a disappointment, it was not as daunting as being ordered to meet with the formidable Valiya Koil Tampuran for an interview. ‘Our first meeting was supremely formal,’ he remembers, ‘and it was really an interrogation. For example, he asked me questions about my reading habits and then suddenly demanded, “Who was the author of Ivanhoe?” I hadn’t a clue and blurted the first thing that came to mind for no specific reason: Rip Van Winkle!’18

  Shortly after this minor catastrophe began his professional instruction in royal etiquette. The Maharani’s brother-in-law was in charge of grooming her prospective son-in-law, and he took Kerala Varma under his wing. Along with a number of the official staff, they proceeded to Madras to high-end stores of the day for purchasing suits and other products on a reasonably lavish budget. While there, they stayed at Ramalayam, the sprawling mansion of the Junior Maharani in Adyar, who often herself visited the city as an active patron of the famous Music Academy there. Once the necessary purchases were made, they returned to meet the family priest who, as was traditional, gave the consort-elect an awkward overview of the gentlemanly and proper methods of lovemaking.19 Soon old Miss Watts, ‘large, dark, Eurasian, advising everybody, ordering everybody about, sympathising with everybody, the very hub of State and Society’ arrived on the scene in her enormous, equally imposing yellow car.20 She was to ensure that Kerala Varma’s table manners and other social skills were up to the mark, teaching him how to dress well, how to tie the perfect bowtie, and so on.21

  Princess Lalitha in the meantime carried on with her routine. ‘Lessons became a joke,’ her sister remembers, ‘and we barely studied anything. They were classes in name. All we did was to sit around and chat with our teachers. I remember once a pet cat of ours climbed atop an almirah and I got the asan to stand up and bring it down. And that was one lesson! Then Miss Poulose came and again all we did was chit-chat until the end of the hour. It was a very exciting time and all the talk was about silks and jewellery and hairstyles and that sort of thing.’22 The bhagvathar who taught Princess Lalitha music had decided unilaterally to terminate classes. Laughs her sister: ‘She studied for a little while and then the bhagvathar himself said, “My dear child, it is better if you stop.” So Appu Bhagvathar and Ranga Bhagvathar stuck to teaching me.’23 While Kerala Varma would make up for his future wife’s disastrous advances into the world of classical music, Princess Lalitha would give up much of her boyishness and turn into a still gregarious but considerably more feminine little thing. Only months before her wedding she wrote a letter to an imaginary friend in an imaginary world of her own. She was, of course, Miss Molly Gardner of ‘Rosewood Manor, England’, and her friend, whose cartoon she drew with bobbed hair and a pink frock, was Vera Rattler of no particular location:

  Darling Vera, Gee, thanks for a very charming letter. Old thing! I was so pleased to get it. Vera, my sweetheart! I am now, dear, going to be fourteen—next month on the fourteenth. Oh Vera, mum is calling me. So sorry but I can’t write any more now. Yours ever, Molly.24

  Before long August arrived and grand temple rituals and ceremonials in both Trivandrum and Attingal replaced the routine of this girl who was still very much a child. On the pre-decided ‘auspicious day’, the wedding took place, followed by a week of festivities in
the capital. Vast masses of people came out once again to celebrate not only the princess, but also their Senior Maharani who drove in state and showed herself to her subjects officially after many years. As part of her understanding with the Maharajah, she was also given her correct precedence at events, so that altogether it was a happy few days. The Resident was welcomed on a tour of the ‘astonishing temporary buildings attached to the 16th century palace in the Fort’ and wrote:

  Really vast halls, with lofty richly-decorated roofs and endless colonnades of solid looking round pillars, exactly copying the old style of architecture and most impressive. At the further end of the biggest hall, which must have been at least 200 feet long and 40 high, were two magnificent thrones, golden chairs on pedestals with canopies over them, side by side, with fairy lights outlining them and powerful flood lights illuminating them (the whole hall was artificially lit and had no windows). In contrast to this and three other smaller halls which were used for the receptions and feastings and theatrical performances and dances, which had been going on for 6 days, the rooms in which the actual ceremony had taken place was tiny—just space enough for a canopied dais and about 30 or 40 near relatives to stand around it, the ceremony consisting merely of the ‘giving of the cloth’ and garlanding each other in the presence of witnesses.25

  The Resident also, in the meantime, had worries about raising a toast on behalf of the Paramount Power to the newly-weds, as he later wrote:

  The festivities have been going on all week on a tremendous scale, the whole town being en fete … I had to make the speech proposing the health of the happy couple … and you have no idea how difficult it was to find something to say on such an occasion when you know nothing whatever about the bridegroom except that he has failed to pass his exams and is going to do nothing all his life except be the Princess’ consort, and the bride, though charming, is only just out of the nursery! He is 20 [sic] and she 15. However, the party went very well and we all enjoyed the very good food provided, and afterwards … I found myself, after the regulation, 5-minuted with HH sitting on quite a small sofa between the bride and her cousin, the First Princess, attractive girls both of them in their quite different styles, chatting away merrily about the wedding and the saris and the bride’s jewellery (she had some perfectly lovely earrings and clips on).26

  The wedding celebrations concluded with a durbar where Princess Lalitha and her husband appeared at court and paid their respects to the Maharajah. The next day they left for their honeymoon at Halcyon Castle in Kovalam. They were destined for a long and unusually happy marriage together, their personalities complementing each other perfectly. Sethu Lakshmi Bayi was also jubilant when she returned to Vellayini, now eagerly looking forward (in that typical Indian fashion) to the prospect of grandchildren. The year 1938 proved to be a greatly satisfying year for her—almost too happy to be true—with Kowdiar Palace cooperating generously in every respect, despite continued disagreements about temple entry and other matters of policy. The public also responded to peace that year between the two branches of their royal family. ‘The popular rejoicings,’ reported Mr Skrine, ‘were all the greater because the wedding signalised a long-hoped-for rapprochement between the two Maharanis.’27 But, in what was the curse of their clan, amicable relations were not fated to last, and less than six months later Sethu Lakshmi Bayi would confront her greatest battle yet with the Junior Maharani, one she was destined to lose, and which was the climactic culmination of her ultimate eclipse in Travancore.

  In 1934, shortly after the wedding of the First Princess, the Junior Maharani notified the Sripadam for an allowance for her daughter who was now eighteen. The Senior Maharani rejected the application on two grounds. Firstly, she clarified, the Sripadam was meant only for the two eldest Ranis (Senior and Junior), and not for all female members of the royal family. If every girl had a claim, such a claim would have existed from birth onwards, and the late Maharajah had rightly not charged expenses of the First and Second Princesses during his reign to the Sripadam, instead making allowances from the Civil List. The Senior Maharani also sought to quash the claim that reaching eighteen years made a female eligible for an allowance. Both she and the Junior Maharani had their expenses borne by the Sripadam from the time they were only children of five and four respectively, which negated this argument. In fact, the Senior Maharani stated, that their expenses as children were borne by the Sripadam, while the First and Second Princesses’ were not, proved the establishment was for the Ranis only and had nothing to do with age.28

  Secondly, the Senior Maharani pointed out, the Sripadam did not command adequate resources to offer allowances to every female in the dynasty. For one, with each newcomer, its limited funds would have to be redistributed, and this was not viable. For it would be she who would stand to lose the most in such an arrangement. The Junior Maharani had all her expenses taken care of by the Civil List and even an extra allowance from it, not including her personal allowance of Rs 12,000 from the Sripadam. The Senior Maharani, on the other hand, had only religious expenses covered by the Civil List and her other expenses, which included more religious and ceremonial obligations, and costs of her establishment, not to speak of personal allowances, were entirely from the Sripadam. Junior female members also received allowances from the Civil List, unlike the Senior Maharani, and as her manager put it,

  … if it is suggested [that] every female member of the Royal Family were to [also] be granted allowances from the Sripadam funds, it would lead logically to an absurd position namely that while the junior members would be receiving steady incomes consisting of allowances from Sripadam and the Palace, the Senior Rani would be left with a progressively diminishing income with no separate allowance from the Palace, the Senior Rani’s allowances being merged in the Sripadam funds.29

  The Maharani thus rested her case stating that as per precedent, it was only the Senior and Junior Ranis who were entitled to the Sripadam, and that there were not enough resources to distribute among other female members. But the Maharajah’s manager was not convinced and informed her that merely because Mulam Tirunal had allocated the Sripadam solely for the Ranis, it did not tie the present Maharajah to any tradition. It was also conveyed that in over a hundred years, at no time were there more than two females in the royal family, who were automatically therefore Ranis, and hence there was no precedent to go by with regard to other female members.30 This was untrue for in the early 1920s there were four females in the royal house, and logically the fact that at the time the First and Second Princesses had never drawn from the Sripadam ought to have been considered a precedent. But Kowdiar Palace denied this. As for the fact that the Senior Maharani would consistently lose income if the new proposal were effected, the manager dismissed it as ‘totally irrelevant’.31 The Maharani was also instructed, since she claimed an insufficiency of funds, to forward the Sripadam’s accounts for three years so that they might be inspected.32

  Soon after this the Maharajah found cause for dissatisfaction with the accounts because an auditor, Mr C.S. Krishnaswami Iyer, was sent from Kowdiar Palace in 1936 to review the books for a longer period. The audit was performed and a report was submitted to the Maharajah’s office by April 1938, but no information was passed to the Maharani thereafter for many months. However, inconclusive correspondence continued. The government were also corresponding with the Maharani since 1933 regarding the ownership of the Sripadam lands. She had been enfranchising certain properties classed as Erayali, which were given to families that provided traditional services to the Sripadam. But in modern times this had become a difficult problem for both sides. At this stage the Chief Secretary questioned her manager as to who had authorised the proceedings33 and on being informed that it was the Senior Maharani, he responded as follows:

  These lands are really pandaravaka or [government] lands and appertain to the Government of His Highness the Maharajah as in the rest of the State. The revenues of the Sripadam tract which have been, or which may be, se
ttled by the Government of His Highness the Maharajah from time to time as being the revenue derivable therefrom, have alone been assigned to the Sripadam. As against His Highness the Maharajah and his Government, Her Highness the Senior Maharani can have no rights in respect of the lands in the tract, Her Highness being entitled only to enjoy the revenues referred to above.34

  The claim being made, plainly, was that the Sripadam lands did not belong to the Maharani and she was only entitled to the revenues assigned by the Maharajah. A point in favour of this argument was that it was the government, under the seal of the Dewan, which collected Sripadam revenues and not Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s private officers.35 The latter, however, calmly directed the Chief Secretary to study the records and declarations of previous Dewans and governments, also pointing out that it was the Sripadam itself that had requested the Revenue Department to take care of its collections many years ago, before which it was independently administered.36 The argument, therefore, that it was government property simply because government officials undertook tax collections was declared fallacious, and a blind ignorance of the Sripadam’s history.