Ivory Throne

by Manu S. Pillai

  By 1944 things had not improved and the then Resident, Mr Todd, noted after a year in office that the state was a ‘one man show’ because of which ‘intrigue and favouritism’ flourished and in turn had ‘driven out individualism and sapped energy and initiative’.79 ‘Although the Dewan’s flair for publicity keeps [the] Maharajah and Maharani in a dignified limelight,’ he added, ‘I do not think the Ruling family are in close enough contact and sympathy with their people. The Senior Maharani, when Regent, was very popular with the people but the Junior Maharani does not seem to appeal to the common herd. The scandal attached by rumour to the association of the Junior Maharani and the Dewan can, I am sure, be discounted but there is no doubt that the former well appreciates her family’s dependence on the protecting strength of their indomitable adviser.’80

  For some 10 years now Sir C.P. Ramaswami Iyer has been in Travancore. First as legal adviser to the Junior Maharani struggling to end the galling Regency of her rival, the Senior Maharani, then through the Federation negotiations and up through the many years as Dewan, Sir C.P. Ramaswami Iyer has become the only power in the land … [He has a] quick brain and arresting personality … [but was] Intolerant of opposition to his set purpose, contemptible [sic] of his colleagues—or rather subordinates, for he brooks no colleagues, he is yet too proud of his established reputation to associate himself with scandalous misrule or a weak case … Vain, he is very susceptible to flattery, although he evaluates flattery from an Indian on a different scale from the flattery of a European. From the former he expects and demands it, from the latter he, at heart, prefers and feels complimented by, friendly candour. Likes to be treated as a cosmopolitan, man of the world rather than as an Indian; and although he pays lip service to nationalism and his religion he voices, privately, much contempt for his politically minded compatriots and the superstitions of the ultra-devout … There is a grandiloquent bi-cameral legislature but driven on the tightest of bearing reins, and little individualism is shown by the opposition—or tolerated for long. The Dewan does not believe in democracy in an Indian State.81

  Referring to the approach of Independence, Mr Todd felt Travancore would entertain, like other well-run political units in India, aspirations for freedom. ‘But can,’ he asked, ‘sovereignty be sustained on imported talent and imported vitality? Many sovereign States import experts for a brief period and for a definite purpose, but what of a State which must import its Prime Minister and the heads of all important departments? Sovereignty,’ the Resident concluded, ‘is not in the name alone, but in the purity and temper of the metal.’82 It was something of a prescient pronouncement, for when the time came, indeed the Maharajah would do his best to retain Travancore as an independent kingdom, aided, as always, by Sir CP in this mission which was, from its onset, doomed for disastrous failure. Travancore was forged on the eve of the British Empire in India, and the destiny of its Ivory Throne was also to fade with its patron power.

  While the Dewan controlled all aspects of the administration, his efforts were not futile and were successfully reflected in the finances of the state. By 1943 the treasury collected Rs 375 lakh, and by 1944 the revenues were expected to exceed Rs 400 lakh.83 Since the Second World War was raging, the Government of India were somewhat disappointed that only Rs 23 lakh had been offered that year for the war effort instead of a more generous amount.84 But while these numbers were a natural progression from the historically well-administered system of the state, the reputation of the principality exceeded its due, mainly because, as the Viceroy put it, of ‘much propaganda of a competitive and slightly aggressive kind’. He also felt that the government ‘is a good deal less solid than that of Mysore, as it depends on the personality of the Dewan who seems to have a finger in every pie’.85 In Mysore, the Maharajah had developed strong institutions, while in Travancore it was a sturdy Sir CP propping up a good-looking façade of stability. Writing in his diary in 1945, Lord Wavell noted:

  The Maharajah of Travancore is entirely overshadowed by his mother, the Junior Maharani, and by the very forcible Dewan, Sir C.P. Ramaswami Iyer. He is not altogether a fool, but does not have a chance with these two dominant personalities; there is no doubt that Travancore is a one-man show, and the one man is Sir C.P. There is no doubt about his efficiency, his charm when he chooses to exert it, or his determination to get his own way. How good the state administration really is behind its impressive façade is hard to say.86

  The practice, evidently, was for the Junior Maharani, the Maharajah and their Dewan to meet every day. ‘Thatha would go to Kowdiar Palace in Trivandrum,’ his granddaughter would write, ‘dressed in a dhoti, long coat, turban, and angavastram (long cloth worn over the shoulder, sometimes around the neck), with a load of files. The Maharajah, Maharani, Thatha and officers concerned would all sit on the floor on mats in a big hall and hold discussions.’87 Sometimes Sir CP’s forceful dominance was less dignified; for example, once he walked into Kowdiar Palace and flung a file at the Maharajah, who was playing tennis. ‘My Brother,’ the Elayarajah would tell, ‘was a perfect gentleman and instead of reacting, silently ignored and swallowed this affront. But I could not take it. I just could not digest the sight of my Brother being insulted thus. I paid him [Sir CP] back in the same coin.’ The Maharajah’s brother, who had something of a temper, picked up the file and flung it right back at the astonished Dewan.88

  In many ways, in fact, the younger son of the Junior Maharani was proving to have a mind of his own, and strong convictions he would not renounce in the interests of simple obedience or mere courtesy. Writing about him as early as 1938, when he was only fifteen and about to appear at his first big public function as chief guest, the Resident mused that ‘Sir CP will presumably write his speech for him, but the boy’s got plenty of character and will of his own—much more than the pleasant young Maharajah unfortunately. There may be serious trouble one day in that quarter,’ Mr Skrine mischievously added, ‘not so much between the two brothers as between the Elayarajah and his imperious mother.’89 The statement was an interesting one, and indeed by the end of the 1940s the Maharajah’s brother would embark on some very unexpected plans, not least of which was to extend a warm hand of friendship to Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s side of the royal family.

  18

  Rivers of Blood

  With the surrender of the Axis forces in the summer of 1945, the Second World War came to an end, culminating with the suicide of its wicked architect, Adolf Hitler. The honour of victory for the Allies in Europe was, however, largely a moral one for the time being, as emerging from the war they found, for the second time in a generation, their economies in monumental ruins, with grave social unrest simmering underneath. The world after 1945 was a new place, its previous character only barely recognisable. Great imperial houses had been toppled and emasculated; communism raised its head in a horrified Western heartland; Europe was divided; and the Cold War was about to commence. Great Britain, the world’s most formidable empire, was about to forfeit its proud appellation of ‘great’, and the sun was beginning to set on the ruins of what was once Pax Britannica. It was the dawn of a whole new era, shaped by an epic battle of ideology and politics between the United States and the Soviet Union, at the end of which destined to emerge was the world as we know it today.

  The repercussions of these vast changes were naturally felt in India, the jewel in the British Empire’s crown, yearning to cut loose and chart its own fate. With finances in a precarious state, and with Gandhi determined to wrest India free, the British Crown had no option but, ultimately, to concede Independence after two centuries of an unequal marriage. It was a time of public rejoicing in British India. The Congress and its arch-rival, the Muslim League, though, fought over the spoils of a hard-won war, doomed to divide India in violence. But what of those great ‘Pillars of the Raj’, those aristocrats and princes, without whom a proverbial handful of Englishmen could never have prevailed in a tumultuous subcontinent as this? Of those who saved the British in
their time of need and financed their armies; whose loyalty during the Great Rebellion of 1857 tendered ‘breakwaters in the storm which’, as Lord Canning declared with grateful relief, ‘would have swept us in one great wave’?1 The fairy-tale wonder and extravagance of the Raj could never have flourished had it not been for the faithful allegiance of this assortment of India’s most unpredictable, colourful gentlemen: the Maharajahs.

  It was the British who, by the middle of the nineteenth century, united India, a chaotic patchwork of warring states and decayed empires, into a singular political and economic entity. Yet the destinies of two-fifths of the subcontinent, with all its many millions, remained in the fickle hands of ‘native’ princes and chiefs (they were never acknowledged as kings). Lord Macaulay dismissed them as ‘nominal sovereigns sunk in indolence and debauchery, chewing bhang, fondling concubines, and listening to buffoons’ while others decried them as vulgar ‘sinks of reaction and incompetence and unrestrained autocratic power’.2 Of the nearly 600 regal houses in India, most were petty potentates presiding over ‘postage stamp’ principalities. Only forty qualified as ‘real’ princes, with the stately devices of royalty and incomes higher than at least a million rupees.3 Their defences and foreign relations surrendered to the Paramount Power, they were in return guaranteed for their fealty a degree of internal autonomy. A hierarchy of jealously guarded and supremely bombastic privileges and titles, not to speak of carefully numbered gun salutes, distinguished and flattered the more important, wealthier princes from their lesser peers. At the apex stood, thus, the Nizam of Hyderabad, one of the richest men in the world who alone was entitled to the style of His Exalted Highness. At the bottom languished a ‘prince’ whose ‘princely state’ did not extend beyond a few acres of grassland nobody cared about.

  As a rule, the Nawabs and Maharajahs of India were a race grown fat lording over the abiding miseries of their impoverished subjects. ‘Though their lives are intertwined with the destinies of several millions of the human race,’ lambasted one critic, ‘few can boast to the qualifications or the character that entitles a man to assume the functions of kingship.’4 Indeed, the vast majority of India’s princes were known not for their emphatic solicitude for the masses as much as for the notoriously glamorous lifestyles they led, all at the expense of their suffering subjects. With an average of eleven titles, 5.8 wives, 12.6 children, 9.2 elephants shot, 2.8 private railway cars, 3.4 Rolls Royces, and 22.9 tigers killed, the Maharajahs had plenty to keep them merry while their people toiled through the business of everyday survival.5 It was a peculiar sight in India to see splendid palaces towering above a barren setting of destitution and hardship. But the princes were by and large blind to the world around them, more interested in playing up their competitive ostentations, than applying themselves to good government.

  Thus, the robust Maharajah of Patiala, for instance, is said to have spent his time collecting concubines with great avidity; at the height of its glory his harem comprised 350 handpicked ladies, earning him the byname His Exhausted Highness. In Kapurthala the reigning prince declared he was a reincarnation of Louis IV of France and built himself a miniature Versailles in the Himalayan foothills.6 The sixth Nizam of Hyderabad collected diamonds and baubles with a connoisseur’s keenness, although he was perhaps better known for beginning a family tradition of sending out all his clothes to be laundered in Paris. Even when committing suicide, princes could not be more inventive; one particular prototype methodically drank himself to death in his favourite European hotel; his drink of choice: expensive champagne. Interestingly, their people too found remarkably creative means to attract princely attention for their problems. In an amusing episode, the Nizam ran over a poor old woman when out on a drive. A generous amount was granted to her family as compensation, but very soon observers noted that ‘whenever the Nizam went motoring there was much difficulty in clearing the road of the aged poor, who had been deliberately put in the way by their impecunious relatives’.7

  There were, of course, exceptions that proved this rule of royal depravity. For every dozen or so of degenerate, conceited princes, there was perhaps one good ruler who sought to provide his subjects a standard of life superior to that in British-ruled provinces. Mysore, one of the greatest princely states, was famously progressive and more industrialised than any other part of India. In Baroda, the British did its people a favour by deposing a Maharajah who spent his time commissioning carpets of pearls, and installing in his place a young prince who would earn the love and respect of his subjects by far-sighted policy. In the 1940s, the ruler of Jaipur imported a minister from Mysore and sought to replicate its successes in his desert principality, starting schools, abolishing purdah, and so on. And, of course, in the south there was Travancore, guided by a line of fairly enlightened rulers into the higher echelons of progressive governance, winning appreciation from all quarters.

  It was quite natural, then, that when talk commenced of India’s independence from British rule, the more prominent princely states despised being classed with the predominantly north Indian ‘Rolls Royce’ Rajahs, who were little more than exotic feudal lords and anachronisms that survived into modernity. Even some of those who viewed their principalities as personal estates, such as the Nizam of Hyderabad, entertained serious hopes of attaining complete independence owing to their wealth. In the late 1920s, when the Government of India contemplated dominion status for the subcontinent under Lord Irwin and desired to bring the princes within its purview, the latter fought strongly for their rights. The Paramount Power, whose influence arose from individual treaty relations with the Maharajahs, could not transfer such authority to any elected government that might rule in British India, they had argued. Travancore too, at the time under Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, made it clear that the state had every right to sign fresh alliances as an independent unit with any such elected government in greater India.8 The principality, well administered, wealthy, and with a relatively moderate royal family, felt it deserved to be allowed to continue in power.

  By 1946, however, the tide was flowing in a quite different direction. As Louise Ouwerkerk noted, ‘When Independence drew near, the Princes changed from bulwarks into stumbling blocks.’9 Repeated and determined attempts to constitute a federation, comprising princely states and British provinces, had failed. Independence for India looked more feasible than ever, and the Maharajahs began to fret about their future. It was at this time that Sir CP, who had in the 1930s advocated Travancore’s claim to be treated as independent in any future arrangements contemplated by the Paramount Power, decided to strengthen the position internally so as to weather the storm inevitably lying ahead. He knew, tells Robin Jeffrey, ‘that public opinion in the State would oppose independence, and favour Travancore’s joining an Indian union led by Gandhi, Nehru, and the Indian National Congress’. And so, ‘if the plans for an independent Travancore were to have a chance of success, he would need the support of local politicians’.10 Unfortunately for the Dewan, however, from the time he arrived in the state in 1931, through the Abstention Movement and later the demand for responsible government in 1938–39, he had been far from a darling to local leaders, most of whom had, at some point or the other, had to languish in jail at his authoritarian instance.

  By the end of the war, the Government of India once again allowed elected governments in the provinces (they had resigned in 1939 when India was dragged into war without the consent of its people), and Sir CP realised that, for all their hatred towards him, the leaders of the Travancore State Congress, ‘were yearning for a share’ themselves in the local administration.11 These men, after all, were part of the legislature before the movement for responsible government forced them into the political wilderness. In 1944 they had returned, with smaller numbers, and acted as a popular opposition to the government, but they wished now to be more than suspended in a state of perpetual hostility. They had the ambition and skills to function in government, and were individuals of education and standing. The Dewa
n decided to exploit the natural frustration that arose among many of them, as a result of his own policies ironically, and present himself now in a new, more friendly avatar as a messiah of change prepared to work with, rather than against, them. The gates of the government, he determined, would be thrown open to the political pariahs, in what was meant to be a moment unique in its magnanimity.

  Early in 1946, therefore, Sir CP announced a grand scheme evidently based on the ‘American Model’, to share power in a partnership between the princely regime (with himself as its executive), and its elected representatives. ‘He appears to have calculated,’ Jeffrey continues, ‘that he could devise a constitutional carrot, tempting enough to win [the politicians’] cooperation, yet one that would leave the substance of power with the princely government.’12 Adult suffrage was offered but there would be no elected minister at the helm of affairs. The prerogative to appoint the executive head, it was clarified, would continue to vest with the Maharajah. Those elected representatives, then, would instead be formed into committees that could oversee different aspects of the administration.13 The idea was not at all an innovation by Sir CP; as early as the 1920s, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi had involved, precisely for these reasons and with astute objectives, members of the public through boards in the process of government. The Maharajah’s administration wound this down, realising belatedly its virtues some fifteen years later, at its own peril; by this time ambitions had exceeded the old wine in new bottles that the royal regime had on offer.