The Maharani’s routine didn’t change too drastically for the first many years. ‘She woke up early in the morning, but didn’t rise from bed. She would continue lying down, reciting prayers and only much later would she actually get up. Her morning ablutions took an age, and then a silver service for breakfast with milk, idlies and her favourite chutney. At first she used to have those elaborate palace-style baths with many oils and all that, but after a decade or so, that stopped. She then dressed and settled into her day bed to read, followed by lunch, which also took an age. Then in the evenings she would walk in the gardens, go for a drive with some of us, or we would come and sit around her and chatter, like teenaged girls do!’43 The number of servants was greatly reduced. From eight personal maids, she now had two women in constant attendance, a Brahmin cook and a Brahmin lady server, and a few other servants and odd-job men. ‘But these people found it difficult to adjust in Bangalore and slowly the Brahmins returned to Kerala. And when it became difficult to find replacements in the kitchen, grandmother accepted a Nair lady.’44
That, by itself, proved a phenomenal reorientation for Sethu Lakshmi Bayi. In earlier days Nairs were not permitted anywhere near the royal family during meals. And now she had a Nair cook. During the time of the Temple Entry Proclamation, it was fundamentally caste prejudice that prevented the Maharani from giving the move her blessings. But now she saw the futility of that attitude. So much had changed and she accepted these alterations in her personal lifestyle with an increasingly liberal serenity. ‘Grandmother,’ tells Ambika, ‘was orthodox in her personal habits. But she was willing to change and saw it had to be done. I know my mother was instrumental in this. She used to go see her every evening, and over the years she witnessed this great transformation. By the 1970s, she had Christian maids, and she not only interacted freely with them, but also grew so fond of them that she used to give them presents and money very generously.’45 By the end of her life it would be a lady called Mary who nursed her (‘a real chatterbox, but devoted to grandmother’),46 and Sethu Lakshmi Bayi surprised herself by increasingly giving up the ritualism and antiquated habits that only a few years ago had seemed immutable. Though there was a certain element of tragedy (often in the minds of outsiders) that a once-majestic, hallowed figure such as her had to accept a series of ceremonial deprivations and make unexpected adjustments at so late a time in her life, the Maharani herself did not resent any of this. ‘My happiest days have been in Bangalore,’ she would confide in a nephew.47 ‘I know it was painful for her to give it all up in Trivandrum,’ remarks Rukmini, ‘but all the same, grandmother, despite her gentleness, was a strong woman, and she didn’t believe in being miserable when one had the option to adapt and find happiness.’48 For someone who had gone through many ups and downs in life, happiness, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi had learned the hard way, was to be consciously enjoyed, not demanded as a gift from the world around.
It was in fact the Valiya Koil Tampuran who amused the children with his enduring old-world idiosyncrasies even as his wife altered so much about herself and her ways. ‘He continued to lead a gentleman’s life and didn’t spend all the year in Bangalore,’ tells Shreekumar. ‘He had a room there, one in Madras with us, and then during winter months he would retire to Pothencode, where he still maintained a large staff of servants and got some of that old palace feel.’49 When indoors, he dressed in a closed-collar shirt (minus the diamond buttons from the good old days, however), and a mundu, but he never, ever stepped outside except in a three-piece (‘or, on his worst days, two-piece’) suit. ‘He also had some regular beggars in Bangalore. He would go by car to Commercial Street and they looked forward to his visits. It was quite amusing because he always distributed exactly the same amounts of money to exactly the same set of beggars!’50 Rama Varma might have left the old world behind him, but he had no intention of seeking a divorce from discipline, even where it concerned the distribution of his parsimonious charities.
In daily life too he remained steadfast. If he were in Bangalore, he would call on the Maharani after breakfast and spend an allotted duration with her. He always complained, however, that the Maharani too ought to have a more rigorous schedule. He was himself up at dawn, and even read his books for fixed periods, never going a moment over the hour, even if he had reached a very exciting part in the story. By nine o’clock at night he would be in bed. ‘Grandmother on the other hand, would stay up past midnight. Her dinners would go on for hours, and we would all be chit-chatting around her, mother sprawled on a very cosy sofa she had, and the rest of us stretched out in various parts of the room. And then, after we said goodnight, she had her prayers, so it was rarely before one o’clock in the morning that she slept! Naturally she woke up later than grandfather, who would complain that this was all unhealthy. He never said this to her directly. He would come and berate us for keeping her up all night!’51
Some of Sethu Lakshmi Bayi and Rama Varma’s most loyal old retainers and attendants stayed many years with them in Bangalore. For the Maharani it was her youngest sister Kochu Thankam who ran her household, while the latter’s husband served as her secretary. ‘It was quite amusing,’ laughs Rukmini, ‘to hear him run all her financial affairs by grandmother, who had really lost interest in these things. For instance, if she wanted to gift a certain sum of money to somebody for a wedding, she would send him a message. He would then rush to her room and say, “No no, Your Highness, we cannot give them so much. We can give them some but not so much!” And she would demand, “Why not? Go to the bank and get some money!” The poor man would then be forced to reveal to her that there wasn’t that much money in the bank any more to begin with.’52 But she wouldn’t budge. Instead, the Maharani accepted economies in the running of her own household, but couldn’t, in her old stately fashion, accept recommendations that she should not help those in need. ‘If there was a request even from someone unfamiliar, she would still do her bit for them. She was prepared to make sacrifices personally, but she felt she had a duty to those who still saw her as their queen and expected her patronage and support.’53 Then, of course, there were the annual presents she sent out to her brothers. ‘It was just seven rupees! But every year it would reach before their respective birthdays, and I remember her youngest brother remarking that it was the most wonderfully exciting thing to wait and wait for it, till the very end of his days.’54
The Valiya Koil Tampuran’s servants, however, found themselves dealing with a shrewd taskmaster who kept tabs even on the stores. ‘They were like these relics of the past that didn’t fit in at all in Bangalore, still bowing and doing all that.’55 But these chaste, old-fashioned people were also sitting targets for the girls’ pranks. Rama Varma had four menservants: one Tampan, two Tiruppads, and a Balan Nair. ‘They were always with grandfather when he went for a walk, or set out with a camera to take pictures in town, following him at a respectable distance. We called Nair the Shah of Iran because, you won’t believe it, he looked exactly like the Shah!’ chuckles Rukmini. One of the Tiruppads, on the other hand was christened Marilyn Monroe behind his back ‘because of his rather ample bosom’!56 Tampan was the favourite: ‘He used to do this ridiculous dance. If we were glum, he’d burst into the room and start his performance till we were in splits!’57 On another occasion Kunjukrishna Pillai, the Maharani’s driver, a very simple, orthodox man, with great faith in stories about devils and yakshis, was treated to the sight of an apparition in white under a tree in the garden. It gave the man a spectacular fright and only later did he realise it was poor Shobhana dressed up and parked there by Rukmini for the express purpose of scaring the living daylights out of him.58
By the time great-grandchildren were born in the family, with more distant a connection to the palace than even their parents, and who never knew Sethu Lakshmi Bayi as a queen, the old attendants in her house offered glimpses of a fast fading but still perfectly magical world. These children grew up in an urban Bangalore, playing cricket or football and going to school w
ith so many other ordinary friends. Kerala as well as the esteem their family and ancestors commanded there was a notion that was as remote as it was alien. Yet there were charming childhood experiences in the Maharani’s house. ‘I remember how Tampan used to sit and prepare the karipatti that the Valiya Koil Tampuran had with his toast,’ remembers one of them. ‘It was fascinating to watch. He would have this huge vessel with something similar to molten chocolate in it, stirring it slowly with a giant ladle. We were never eager to have it when it was dry and powdered, but always wanted a taste when it was pasty, and in semi-liquid form. It was so wonderful and fascinating to observe, and occassionally our friends from school would join in and return just as amazed by all these traditional practices. Sometimes we would be teased as “princes” and all that, but really it was more traumatic an experience than something to gloat about by then. If I were truly a prince, where was my palace? Or my Rolls Royce? We were even bullied over this.’59
It was in 1958 that the Maharani decided to get Rukmini married. ‘It was the one time,’ tells her nephew, ‘that she imposed her will on someone in the family. Never before, and never after did it happen. But that one time it did.’60 While Lalitha and Kerala Varma were in Europe, Rukmini had revealed to her that she had plans to become a doctor and wanted to apply for medical school in Madras after her intermediate studies at Mount Carmel College. ‘That was the only dispute I had with grandmother,’ she now remembers. ‘I said I wanted a career, but she disagreed and said very firmly that she wanted to see me settled as soon as possible. Father was very much in favour of my studying medicine, but grandmother would not hear of it. She knew medicine would take years and people told her I would never marry, like her niece who became a doctor and chose to remain a spinster. By the time my parents returned, grandmother had already taken her decision. Very rarely did she exercise her power in the family, but when she did, nobody dared say anything.’61 And so Rukmini, a former head girl at Baldwin’s, put aside all the prizes and certificates she had won at school for science, preserving them to this day in an old trunk, and decided to obey her grandmother.
It was a fateful decision. Had Rukmini studied further, proceeded to live in a hostel like other students, and embarked on a career, so too might have her sisters. As destiny would have it, however, that was not to be. When Uma wanted to pursue art at the Sir J.J. School in Bombay, she too was told she could not, and it was only after marriage that she received some training from the Fine Arts College in Madras, interrupted prematurely, then, by the advent of children. It didn’t help that Lalitha, though independent in spirit, deliberately did not want her children to be particularly career-minded. ‘She wanted them all around her, living blissful domestic lives in Bangalore. She, like the Maharani, had seen the worst of what power and ambition could do to human beings and she didn’t want any of that for her children. She simply wanted them to be ordinary, content people.’62 The only person to break out of the mould was Lakshmi because of her determination. But that was a decade later. In 1958, Rukmini concludes, ‘I was told categorically that I should not entertain hopes of studying, and must accept a proposal.’63
The candidate eventually chosen for Rukmini was Devi Prasad of the Poonjar Rajah’s house, a distant relation who was introduced to the family when he came to Bangalore for his engineering studies. By the time Lalitha and Kerala Varma returned from their holiday, not only had Sethu Lakshmi Bayi confirmed this proposal but wedding preparations had actually begun. Kerala Varma accepted his mother-in-law’s command, but was disappointed. ‘She threw it all away,’ he would later regret, referring to Rukmini’s excellent academic prospects had she pursued them.64 In January 1959, the wedding was celebrated at the Guruvayur Temple, in a departure from the old custom of conducting such ceremonies in the palace. ‘It was like a Page 3 event at the time, with pictures in the papers. And at Guruvayur, in what is unthinkable today, the whole temple complex was closed to the public and we had it to ourselves. When we came out, there were crowds of people waiting to see us, and a lot of excitement.’65 A decade after Independence, royalty still seemed to command much enthusiasm—or at any rate, curiosity—among the public in Kerala.
In December 1959, Rukmini had her first son and Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s eldest great-grandchild, Venugopal. ‘He was born under the star Rohini, which is Krishna’s star, and grandmother was so delighted, since Krishna was all she prayed and talked about! So she selected the name and called him Venu.’66 The 1960s and early 1970s, in fact, were a period of unprecedented joy for the Maharani. Her granddaughters were married during these years, and many new additions were made into the family. All the girls had grown into smart, intelligent women, making the most of their opportunities despite being denied official careers. ‘Grandmother was always at the head of all this, advising us, listening to us, and really delighted that we were able to lead lives with greater freedom than she had ever imagined possible in her day. I think she was very happy that in leaving the palace and making that sacrifice, at least she had allowed us a chance to develop our individualities.’67
In the 1960s, the Maharani constructed a palatial house for Rukmini within her compound, which locals took to calling ‘The Palace on Richmond Road’, and soon the place was constantly abuzz with visitors and with the sounds of music and dance. Rukmini had trained under the famous U.S. Krishna Rao and his wife Chandrabhaga Devi, mastering the Bharatanatyam dance form. Soon she would shock conservative opinion by giving a few charity performances, and by the middle of that decade would start her own dance school, attracting even students from overseas. But it all had to be wound down when someone from the family discovered that she had also been modelling and video reels were being displayed in cinemas across the state. ‘Everyone was shocked,’ she now recalls, ‘even though I had modelled for an innocent brand of silk saris, and there was nothing scandalous about it.’68 Either way, most of the family were united in their opinion that she should not get into entertainment, and with that Rukmini’s forays into dance came to a premature conclusion. ‘But I had grandmother behind me through all this,’ she now tells, ‘and I used to give her private performances in her bedroom whenever I felt an urge to dance.’69
Happily enough, however, dance was replaced by painting, in which Rukmini proved a great success, winning international acclaim. The Governor of Karnataka opened her first big exhibition in 1973 while in 1974 President V.V. Giri inaugurated a show in Delhi. A year later a tour of Europe followed, with successful exhibitions in Germany, arranged by C. Ranganathan (a grandson of Sir CP’s, ironically, and who, as ‘Rungie’, was a tennis partner to Devi Prasad, while his sister Geetha was Rukmini’s best friend). By 1976, Rukmini was in London where Lord Mountbatten (‘a very naughty old man’) opened her show, also singing praises of the Maharani. Into the early 1980s, Rukmini held exhibitions at prestigious venues in Bombay, where the press reported a ‘stampede’ to view her paintings.70 Art was not an easy journey either, to be sure. To begin with, Rukmini painted in an unfashionable realist style during an age of avant-garde and abstract expressionism. To add to this, her work became controversial for depicting male as well as female nudes, including in settings borrowed from Hindu mythology. Religious authorities and figures censured her work while haughty art critics thought she could have avoided such ‘obsolete’ art altogether. But Rukmini had the advantage of painting for her own sake and not for money or to win approval from contemporary artists, and she carried on despite obstacles. Exhibitions, however, had to be declined so as not to provoke the orthodoxy, and her paintings disappeared quietly into more tolerant international collections.
Uma, in the meantime, was also breaking new ground. In 1961, she married a cousin of Devi Prasad’s who was a chartered accountant. The couple went to Madras for a year, before returning to Bangalore, where they moved into a house on Promenade Road. ‘Father,’ tells Uma, ‘had bought a plot of land in Frazer Town and constructed bungalows for all of us. And when my husband and I returned from M
adras it was all furnished, with a staff ready for service, and grandmother gave me a car as a present. So we really didn’t need to do anything ourselves.’71 While Rukmini went from dance to painting, Uma began with art and then moved onto other interests. In 1963, she gave birth to the Maharani’s eldest great-granddaughter, Radhika, who remembers Uma being ‘completely absorbed’ by art in the 1960s.
‘She had a studio on the first floor and one had to hop, skip and jump each time we passed the room, to avoid stepping on a canvas or a tube of paint. It was full of her works, and she began with realism and slowly went through all possible styles, down to abstract and contemporary art.’72 More importantly, Uma in the 1960s and ’70s had some strong socialist leanings, like Lalitha at one time. She used to have debates and arguments on the topic with Kerala Varma consistently, often storming out of the house after intense, fiery discussions. By 1971 she ventured into the world of fashion by starting Bangalore’s first designer boutique. A team was painstakingly put together, with the now famous Prasad Bidapa as her assistant. ‘Uma,’ he recollects, ‘was well known in Bangalore at the time, and it was she who really brought the idea of fashion to the city. She was a catalyst not only in my career but also for the whole fashion scene here.’73 A number of high-profile shows followed and her star model was a ‘fantastic, absolutely stunning’ young girl,74 later to become famous as a politician and future minister in the Government of India, Renuka Choudhry.
Ivory Throne Page 71
