Ivory Throne
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After the end of the war, Princess Lalitha did the unthinkable: she moved out of the palace, in pursuit of her own freedom. ‘It sounds very simple now,’ tells her cousin, ‘but at the time it was an extraordinary thing to do. Most people aspired to live like princes, with servants and luxury and all that wealth, but here was this young woman running away from it; giving up her golden spoon for something much more ordinary.’6 While Satelmond Palace extended over 28 acres of land, some years before the Maharani privately purchased an adjacent property as well. ‘We used to call it akkarakunnu—the hill on the other side—and she had it registered in the names of her daughters. There used to be an old, distinctly unattractive building there, which was in Lalitha’s share of the property. It was a typical, agraharam-style village house, without modern amenities and structures, and definitely a far cry from the palace! Sometimes, less important guests were accommodated there, but it was mostly abandoned all those years.’7
Now, however, Lalitha and Kerala Varma took it upon themselves to proceed to the building, have it whitewashed, and spruced up for the exclusive use of their children and themselves. ‘She was very determined to leave that starchy palace environment. “I won’t have my children grow up like this,” she used to say, and she always complained about how wrong the royal lifestyle was. I think it also affected her that she had not, in all these years, seen her mother genuinely happy in the palace.’8 As her daughter would add, ‘She hated the titles, and the servants, and the guards, and the unnecessary flattery and traditional sycophancy that plagued the palace. I remember her saying things like “It was completely crazy” or if we asked her something years later, she would say, “I don’t wish to remember all that.” It was a sentiment she sternly clung to all her life. In fact it was as if she were always waiting for the opportunity to give it all up.’9 While the Valiya Koil Tampuran did not approve, ‘He knew,’ remembers the cousin, ‘that she was perfectly capable of defying him when it came to such things, and that she had made up her mind. But it wasn’t in a negative sense. In fact he used to walk everyday to the cottage at akkarakunnu to see her and the children, and they too every day drove across to the palace to be with the Maharani.’10
Overnight, thus, the girls were plucked from Satelmond Palace to this private house next door, leaving behind all that rigid protocol that enveloped their antiquated lifestyle. But this was merely a preparation for what really lay ahead, for Princess Lalitha had even more ambitious plans. ‘Once Independence came,’ Rukmini describes, ‘mother decided to leave Trivandrum altogether. Moving to akkarakunnu was the first step, but she realised that no matter how “ordinary” she tried to become, in the end she was the princess of Travancore and would always be treated like that in the state’s capital.’ But if she left the state itself and went somewhere else, she would have more freedom and a better shot at leading the ordinary life she so craved. ‘In fact it was her life’s greatest ambition to become a housewife!’11 Sethu Lakshmi Bayi did not like the idea of being separated from her daughter and the girls, but as usual, she did not obstruct Lalitha’s plans, perhaps well aware that the world was changing and more than cosmetic changes were the need of the hour. ‘I think the Maharani’s greatness lay in her breadth of mind. While she herself might not have agreed with many things, she never imposed her views on her children. She let Lalitha make her own choices and live life on her own terms, which in a time of joint families, not to speak of royal families, was a very unique quality.’12
And so began Lalitha and Kerala Varma’s wanderings. ‘In 1948, we spent six months or thereabouts,’ the latter remembers, ‘in Kotagiri. The Maharani visited us there, and I remember her going as a guest of honour to St Mary’s Convent. Then we had a long stint in Coonoor till finally we landed up in Kodaikanal.’13 For the first two places, Lalitha took with her the children’s tutors, an English companion called Miss Netto (‘who also acted as our tailor and designed some lovely frocks’),14 and a nurse, Alice, besides the usual servants on her payroll. In Kodaikanal, however, she discarded the academic staff and decided it was time the children went to a public school. ‘It was called Presentation Convent,’ Uma recalls fondly, ‘and we were absolutely thrilled to be wearing uniforms for the first time in our lives. We had seen cousins and relatives go to school like this, and always felt we were missing out on something. I think most children hate going to school, but we loved it.’15 Rukmini adds, ‘I think mother herself had always wanted to go to school. But because she never had the opportunity, she was keen her children went.’16
One of the family’s close friends at this time was none other than the Junior Maharani’s younger son, the Elayarajah Martanda Varma. ‘We first began to socialise on friendly terms,’ remembers Kerala Varma, ‘sometime towards the end of the war. I used go out riding in Trivandrum, as did the Elayarajah, and often our paths would cross. His wife Radha and he subsequently used to visit us at Kovalam when we stayed there for picnics and hosted little parties. And for some reason, when we went off to hill resorts in the late 1940s, the Elayarajah would follow with his wife and daughter, and we would have a very jolly time, all of us together. He really wanted to do something to patch up the old disputes, and to get to know this side of the family.’17 Lalitha’s cousins, who were in their teens, had also joined them that summer, one of whom recalls an amusing episode involving the Elayarajah:
The house Lalitha rented in Kodaikanal did not have many bedrooms and so my brothers and I slept in the living room. The windows did not have bars and we left them open at night, because there was a lovely breeze. One morning, at around seven o’clock, the Elayarajah jumped in through the window! We were all shaken out of our sleep, but he hushed us quickly and told us to be quiet. He had come to surprise Lalitha and Kerala Varma, who were, to his greatest joy, adequately surprised and frankly a little taken aback! We all had an early breakfast with him, and he then left. Radha wasn’t part of this incident, but we would all meet up practically every day and go to the local clubs or for walks and drives. It was a lovely holiday and I think the children of the ‘warring Maharanis’ got on very well indeed. The Elayarajah, like Lalitha, had some of that delightful irreverence and independence of thought, and a great appetite for fun.18
Indeed, while there was a deficiency of trust between the two palaces, Lalitha personally had no problems and trusted the Elayarajah almost implicitly. It was in Kodaikanal that they received news, for instance, of Kuttan’s death in 1949. While she and Kerala Varma left for Trivandrum immediately, they did not tell the children, who were entrusted to the Elayarajah and his wife instead. ‘Radha was an exquisitely beautiful woman,’ recalls Rukmini, ‘and I think we had a good time with them, until we figured out what happened in the palace. Then we were upset, but they took good care of us. I think the Junior Maharani’s sisters were also there, and one of them, Bhavani, had a roaring sense of humour and she loved Uma and me and entertained us a great deal when we were upset. The youngest sister, Rajamma was there too, and she had her son with her, whom we called Kunjannan. He was, to us little girls, this strong, teenaged, older boy we were all in awe of at the time!’19
While the girls went to school in Kodaikanal, Lalitha took driving lessons, or chit-chatted with Radha, when their husbands set out to explore the hills on horseback. At one time all of them very nearly got into a car accident too. The Elayarajah was driving Lalitha’s Buick but miscalculated a U-turn on a cliff. On another occasion, Lalitha was trying to negotiate a hairpin bend and almost went over, with the girls in the back.20 Save for such situations, however, it was a beautiful time for the young parents and their four children, away from the capital. ‘But,’ as Rukmini tells, ‘it was difficult to make it permanent.’ In those days these hill stations practically shut down when the season ended, and everyone made an exodus back to the plains. Schools functioned, because they were boarding schools, and even the hospitals were closed. ‘So we had to return to the palace. Mother disliked this, but grandfather insisted we spend a
t least some months there, so off we would go, lock, stock and barrel, back to Trivandrum and to being little princesses!’21
Changes, in the meantime, were afoot in the capital also. Although India had attained independence, the Maharajahs continued to sit uneasily upon their anachronistic thrones, having only surrendered foreign relations, communications and defence to the new Government of India. In internal matters, they remained independent. By 1948, however, plans were formulated to merge the princely states with India, and constitute new political units across the country. This was, essentially, a death blow to the princes, who were about to lose all their authority. Nehru’s government was essentially politely asking their entire class to retire from history. In 1948, Mountbatten himself visited Trivandrum (‘I remember his imposing motorcade driving up the gates of Satelmond Palace’)22 and commenced preliminary talks, after which the famous V.P. Menon, an uncompromising and redoubtable civil servant, who served as Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel’s right-hand man, arrived the following year to chart out the details.
Menon was a tough taskmaster who did not particularly care for the princes, though his mandate was to diplomatically win them over. He would tell how as a poor boy struggling to make his way through life, ‘I went to a shop one day and watched a Maharani buy a hundred expensive saris. Another time I was present when a Maharajah walked into a sporting goods shop and casually ordered 100,000 rupees worth of hunting rifles. And one day on my civil service assignments, I was stopped at 15 different state customs posts on a thirty-mile drive through Kathiawar. I thought it was time this sort of nonsense was stopped.’23 And as destiny would have it, it was for him to dissolve the old states forever, and obliterate them from the maps, really delivering a funeral oration to the last standing vestiges of the British Raj.
The proposal for Travancore was to merge with Cochin into a united bloc. The Maharajah was offered the position of Rajpramukh, a kind of ceremonial governor, and the ruler of Cochin was to be his deputy or Upa-Rajpramukh. Chithira Tirunal, however, insisted on not having a deputy, which, as Menon noted, ‘was certainly unfair to the Maharajah of Cochin’, but because the latter was too old in any case, he did not object.24 As it happened, Cochin’s last princely ruler made few impositions on the Government of India. He had ‘practically no demands at all. A typical request of his was that free copies should continue to be supplied to him of the Panjangam or Almanac, which was published by the Cochin Government annually, and was priced at a few annas! He was prepared to efface himself completely in order that his people might enjoy a larger life.’25 The Maharajah’s privy purse there was fixed at Rs 2,35,000 per annum.26
Chithira Tirunal, however, took some more time and effort to persuade. ‘The devotion of the present Maharajah,’ Menon noted with a hint of annoyance, ‘to Sri Padmanabha [his family deity] borders on fanaticism.’27 He told the Government of India that since he ruled the state on behalf of the deity, this belief would have to be accommodated, or else he would be compelled to abdicate. ‘I told him,’ Menon later wrote, ‘not to take a pessimistic view of the position; that there were few problems which human ingenuity could not solve.’28 After a liberal annual grant was settled on the temple, the Maharajah came to his own privy purse. Chithira Tirunal had been drawing Rs 27 lakh per annum, which Menon felt was too extravagant. Instead, Rs 18 lakh was offered and accepted, all of which was his personal income.29 He evidently dedicated a portion to the temple, but others in the royal family, such as the Senior Maharani and her children had neither any claim on this, nor did they request it. The Maharajah was also persuaded to give up the 20,000 acres of Crown lands he controlled, though he retained the Sripadam Estate for some more years. In addition to this, as Rajpramukh he was given an allowance of Rs 3,66,000, so that altogether, Chithira Tirunal’s finances remained stout in consolation for relinquishing his ancestral inheritance.30
In what was unusual, Menon decided to settle allowances on junior members of the royal family also, which came as a blessing to Sethu Lakshmi Bayi and her daughters, who would otherwise have lost their sources of income. ‘The Valiya Koil Tampuran had some eccentric demands, like being allowed to continue owning guns without licence and the Senior Maharani hoped her Regency pension would be paid for life.’31 Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s regular allowance was fixed at Rs 50,000, equal to the Junior Maharani’s; indeed, it was for the first time in history that the Junior Maharani was at par with the matriarch of the royal house. To placate the Maharajah’s mother, additionally, and to win her son’s cooperation in the negotiations, her daughter, the First Princess, was given a higher allowance of Rs 22,000 while Princesses Lalitha and Indira received Rs 19,000 each per annum.32 The Elayarajah had a handsome Rs 1,26,000 while his wife received Rs 3,000. Consorts of female members of the royal house received Rs 4,000, while the junior girls, including the direct nieces of the Maharajah, had Rs 10,000 each.33 Thus the Junior Maharani’s family, exclusive of Chithira Tirunal’s luxurious privy purse, received a grant of Rs 2,49,000 every year, and Sethu Lakshmi Bayi and her family had Rs 1,36,000.
What moved Menon to make this exception in Travancore–Cochin by settling on junior members of the royal families also an income was a moving visit to Cochin. Here he encountered the royal family, living very much like commoners for no other reason than that there were too many of them. Cochin, a fifth the size of Travancore, in 1949 had a remarkable 223 princes and 231 princesses, some of whom, due to the want of resources, even took up ordinary vocations like government service and teaching. He would later write:
I met some of these princes and princesses. As I talked with them I was reminded of an aviary in a certain State, which possessed a rare collection of birds. When the State was integrated the popular ministry, apparently on the principle of ahimsa [non-violence] let the birds loose! The poor creatures were soon devoured by other birds and beasts of prey. The princesses, at any rate, had all along led a sheltered existence; most of their husbands, instead of supporting them, had themselves to be maintained by the State. I felt it would be inhuman to expose the princesses to a competitive world without making some sort of a provision for them. The Government of India subsequently decided to continue the allowances to those members of the ruling family who were living on the day the covenant was signed. No responsibility was accepted in respect of any further additions to the ruling family.34
It was essentially an act of generosity towards Cochin’s princesses. But it came to the rescue of the Senior Maharani and her daughters in Travancore, who had financial independence from Kowdiar Palace now, and for whom too the relentless bars of the gilded cage were finally thrown open. They were to taste, for the first time in decades, something they had long craved: freedom.
On 19 August 1949 Lalitha and Kerala Varma arrived in Bangalore, where they had chosen to spend their next sojourn away from the palace. Many years before, in 1933, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi herself had wanted to visit this ‘garden city’, with its wide, tree-lined avenues and pretty boulevards and parks, but had not been granted permission to go from Kowdiar Palace.35 Now it was her sister’s son who visited a friend here and returned with an excellent review for Lalitha and her husband. Promptly, then, the couple and their daughters drew up their plans for the city, and arrived here with their retinue. A house was found in Malleswaram, and they began what, little did they realise at the time, was destined to become a permanent stay.
Although perched in the middle of the territories of the Maharajah of Mysore, Bangalore had been under British control until Independence. This arrangement dated back to the late eighteenth century when the East India Company defeated Tipu Sultan and reinstated the Hindu Wodeyar dynasty as rulers of that principality. Troops of the company, who according to treaty were to be stationed permanently in the state, were moved from the malarial environs of Seringapatnam to the village of Bengaluru, with its more salubrious climate that suited the English officers. Over the years, two towns formed here: the old ‘City’, which remained with the Maharajah
, and the new ‘Cantonment’ under British rule. ‘City and Cantonment were separated by a wide belt of undulating green’, marked by ‘parks, lake, orchards, golf courses, and playing fields, interspersed with a few handsome official residences and public buildings’.36 Localities called ‘towns’ such as Benson Town, Fraser Town, and Richmond Town, began to develop, and the city attracted large numbers of foreign as well as Anglo-Indian settlers, while the older areas, under the Maharajah’s control, remained predominantly Hindu.
‘Bangalore in those days, was really like a resort town but it did not have the disadvantages of places like Kodaikanal,’ remembers Rukmini. ‘Because of its military presence, the city did not close down when the season ended, and there was no dearth of excellent, even famous, schools here. The crowd in general was also highly polished and unusually cosmopolitan; I would say even more than Bombay. There were very many Europeans, right down to the early 1970s, working as heads of foreign firms in the city. It had a very leisurely pace, but one never got bored in Bangalore. There was always something to do.’37 Lalitha and Kerala Varma, then, took the decision to settle here for good. In September 1949, a house was purchased at No. 9 (later reassigned as No. 8) Richmond Road from a Persian family, the Kazeroonis, who were relatives of the former Dewan of Mysore, Sir Mirza Ismail. On 3 October, the family moved in with great jubilation into what was finally their own little home in their own little place.38
Lalitha got down briskly to the task of decorating and setting up her household. ‘It’s really quite amazing how she did it. She took to it like a duck to water, as if she had always been living like this!’ Suddenly, Lalitha was driving her own car, cooking in her own kitchen, sending her kids off to school—things she had ardently hoped to one day be able to do when she lived in the palace. ‘I still remember how thrilled she was when she came back from the market in Malleswaram one day and announced, “Children, I have seen my first brinjal today!” She had never really seen raw vegetables before. Or for that matter a real kitchen! I can’t explain how excited she was about setting up her own home in Bangalore, on her own terms, and with none of that “royalty business” she so resented. She always wanted to become an ordinary person, and she was able to do that now, in a perfect jiffy! One day we were there in the palace, with all our kowtowing attendants and guards, and the next in an ordinary house in Bangalore, becoming completely new people.’39