Ivory Throne

by Manu S. Pillai

  She has a point. While the first two generations that came out of the palace did not completely succeed in freeing themselves from the easygoing life that was guaranteed by the affluence and wealth that accompanied them, much of that has now dissipated. And confronted with prosperity of a much more regular nature, the generations that followed have moved on in life and got down to work. Today, Venu, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s eldest great grandchild, is a business executive in Sydney, with his Australian children studying medicine and law respectively. Jay divides his time between the United States, Europe and Bangalore in his pursuit of hyperrealism in art, while his daughter worked in Vietnam and now lives in Germany where she is a manager for PUMA. Balan’s daughter worked with the International Water Management Institute in Sri Lanka and is a climate change and water expert, while his son is a Berlin-based lighting designer. Shreekumar’s children are employed as an illustrator and audio engineer respectively. One of Uma’s sons is an environmentalist while the other spent years on a kibbutz in Israel. Parvathi counts among her children a surgeon, while Lakshmi’s daughters are both professionals in the United States. Devika’s eldest son works at Amazon in London, with dreams of retiring to Cape Town with his South African wife, while her middle son is setting up a business in India. Her youngest is at university in Canada.

  What is interesting is that many of this proliferation of men and women descended from Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, spread across the world now, have never set foot in Kerala. While the press, when referring to ‘the royal family of Travancore’ alludes entirely to the seven individuals descended from the Junior Maharani, the line that actually has female successors is the thirty-two-member-strong Senior Maharani’s branch. While Kowdiar Palace has no female heirs to carry on the temple traditions they seem desperately anxious to preserve, the scions of what was once Satelmond Palace do not seem particularly interested in effecting a return to those traditions. Whether Balan and Shreekumar, both successors to the Junior Maharani’s grandson who currently heads the dynasty, intend to ever take over what their grandmother renounced needs to be seen when the time comes. Indications are, however, that the family has little interest in positions of authority. As Lakshmi dryly remarks, ‘What line of succession? What title? The temple should be protected and its customs upheld, but I don’t think the deity exists to flatter anyone’s vanity or sense of self importance.’30

  This attitude seems to have permeated the younger ranks of Sethu Lakshmi Bayi line. In recent years, many of her great grandchildren and their issue have become curious about their history, but still maintain a studied distance. As Shreekumar’s younger son states,

  … my personal stance is that I’m not really interested in royalty. It had its place in history, sure, but I find it’s time people stopped associating themselves with legacies like they matter … There’s nothing more distressing than twenty-first-century people proclaiming to be something more special than others on the basis of … what exactly? The nitty gritty is that it certainly doesn’t help when people introduce you saying, ‘This is Raja Ravi Varma’s grandson.’ No, he wasn’t my grandfather. And I don’t have his paintings etched on my forehead. I like art and respect history. But maybe we should leave behind some of the weight we’re carrying. I don’t like to be allowed in temples where I feel no connection, while folks who might really feel some satisfaction from their prayers stand at the door. And the whole thing’s caste-based, so by now we should have realized that it stinks of every sort of arrogance. I guess I can call myself lucky for certain privileges but it’s better to have earned it. And since I haven’t earned it and in some sense live off the last trickles of that wealth, I feel … guilty?31

  That urge to rebel against the crushing weight of history, which began with Lalitha in the 1940s, has not taken leave of Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s heirs. But there is increasing curiosity in Thiruvananthapuram on account of the fact that the line of the Attingal Ranis today exists in the form of Lalitha’s descendants alone. And true to the world of today, these present-day Attingal heiresses are independent women with lives of their own. Of the four girls through whom the line will continue, for whatever purpose, into the future, the eldest, Ambika’s daughter, is a researcher at the Genetic Engineering Department of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. Radhika’s daughter, with Zoroastrian blood through her Parsi father, is a national-level women’s rugby player. Parvathi’s granddaughter works at an investment consultancy. And Lakshmi’s only granddaughter goes to school in the United States. None of these girls fit the bill of the traditional Attingal Rani, though there is in their contemporary independence, if one insists on stretching romance and nostalgia, a distant glimpse of those original warrior queens. But the world has changed, and the Attingal Rani has become irrelevant.

  Much of the royal heritage in Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s family has been reduced to stray pieces of furniture and to the artworks that adorn their homes. But even as the Maharani’s line merges and melts into contemporary India, Rukmini remains as a final living monument to the era that once was, rich with memories, sorrowful with regrets, but a reflective testament to times gone by. The Maharani’s house has already been torn down to make way for today’s buildings. Soon it will be the turn of Kerala Varma’s home as well, for it is prime real estate that cannot be bequeathed to any one of his seven children alone. What will Rukmini, who has given away everything, do when she loses the roof over her head and the protection of her aged father? ‘Well, you see,’ she says, laughing, ‘my grandmother made such a great transformation, moving from a huge palace in Kerala to a house in Bangalore and becoming a nobody. I am already a nobody! And in a few years I will make my own transformation from this house to a little hut somewhere on the outskirts of Bangalore. That is what will happen!’32

  Even in this exaggeration, there is an element of tragedy.

  When Lalitha first arrived in Bangalore in 1949 and found a home for herself, a home away from the gilded world she despised and where generations of her family would now be reared, filling its every nook and cranny with stories and memories, she lit in one room of the bungalow an oil lamp. It was a kidavilakku, an eternal flame that she, in gratitude to the heavens for granting her the freedom she craved, promised to keep burning for as long as she drew breath. Till 2008, Lalitha tended to her lamp, and as she lay on her deathbed she entrusted it to Rukmini. The latter has since dutifully followed her mother’s instructions and nourished the flame. But one day not so far away in the future, Rukmini knows that the time will come when No 8 Richmond Road will go. And on that day, as she lets the lamp burn out after a lifetime of over sixty years, it will be her poignant charge to release all those succeeding children of Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s bloodline, already spreading around the globe, from their adopted roots in Bangalore as well.

  When the time comes, it will be Rukmini’s duty to close the final chapter of this story.

  Notes

  Please note that all italics within quoted text are the author’s.

  INTRODUCTION: THE STORY OF KERALA

  1. Nigel Cliff, The Last Crusade, p. 3.

  2. See Nigel Cliff, op. cit., for more on Europe’s background at this time.

  3. Ibid., pp. 82–84.

  4. Zamorin is the anglicised version of Samutiri.

  5. K.K. Nair, By Sweat and Sword, p. 23.

  6. Jonathan Gil Harris, The First Firangis, pp. 84–89.

  7. K.K. Nair, op. cit., p. 134.

  8. Not least because da Gama, before taking off, decided to kidnap a number of random, bewildered fishermen from the beach and carry them off with him to Portugal where they were baptised as Christians with great fanfare.

  9. Hermann Gundert and T. Madhava Menon, Kerala Pazhama, p. v, and Mansel Longworth Dames, The Book of Duarte Barbosa, Vol. I, p. 95.

  10. The Zamorin had defeated the Kolathiri some years before when a prince of that family eloped with a Calicut princess, incensing the former.

  11. K.V. Krishna Ayyar, The Zamorins of Calic
ut, pp. 165, 168.

  12. The Zamorin could raise 30,000 men at a day’s notice and 100,000 in three days. See K.K. Nair, op. cit., p. 74.

  13. Quoted in K.V. Krishna Ayyar, op. cit., p. 207. The Zamorin, it is noteworthy, allowed the residents of the fort, women and children included, safe exit before he tore it down. This was a courtesy the Portuguese never extended to him in their attacks.

  14. See, for instance, A.P. Ibrahim Kunju, Rise of Travancore, p. 2.

  15. Of course, the local Rajahs also learnt to use this strategy against the Europeans. As early as 1513 the Portuguese would complain that they knew ‘why the king of Cochin having 30,000 Nairs and the king of Cannanore having 60,000 do not go to destroy Calicut; because they want to keep up this dispute (between Calicut and the Portuguese) till the end of time. They (Cochin and Cannanore) do not wish to make war, but want us to do so.’ The Dutch would state the very same when writing to the Rajah of Cochin 200 years later: ‘I do not know how much blood has been spent by the Dutch East India Company to aggrandize your family … The Company is not averse to giving support to Cochin agreeably to our treaty, but they will not at all times send soldiers to find your Highness’s battles.’ See K.K. Nair, op. cit., p. 13.

  16. Heber Drury, Letters from Malabar by Jacob Canter Visscher, p. 64.

  17. According to Krishna Ayyar, op. cit., the Zamorin had sometime in the fifteenth century defeated the Quilon (Kupaka) Rajah, invading his territories up to Odanad, and in return was ceded some territory, rights in the Sri Padmanabhaswamy Temple, and paid tribute. The temple rights were later transferred to a Nambutiri family who continued to enjoy these koyma privileges even into the 1930s.

  18. Quoted in R.S. Whiteway, The Rise of Portuguese Power in India, p. 27.

  19. K.K. Nair, op. cit., p. 26.

  20. Syed Iqbal Hasnain, Muslims in North India, p. 110, and Tirithdas Hotchand, Shah Abdul Latif’s Immortal Song, p. 43.

  21. See Nigel Cliff, op. cit.

  22. One of the reasons the Syrian Christians did not warm up to the Portuguese was also that the arrival of the latter coincided with a ‘sudden strengthening of the Syrians’ ties to the west Asian patriarchates’ and there was ‘an influx of west Asian bishops and attendant monks who arrived in India claiming authority from the Nestorian Catholicos’. The Syrians received them with ‘ecstatic adulation’ even as the Portuguese considered them ‘vile Nestorian heretics’. See Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses, and Kings, p. 259.

  23. Susan Bayly (1984), ‘Hindu Kingship and the Origin of Community’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2, p. 194.

  24. Susan Bayly, Saints … op. cit., p. 252.

  25. See Susan Bayly, ‘Hindu Kingship …’ op. cit., for more on this topic.

  26. The Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine (1812) (Google Books), p. 101

  27. Henry E.J. Stanley, A Description of the Coasts of East Africa and Malabar by Duarte Barbosa, p. 128.

  28. K.K. Nair, op. cit., p. 117.

  29. As K.K. Nair states, because war was such a regular affair here, the Nairs developed the institution of the ankam where representatives fought instead of entire armies, keeping casualties to the minimum even while settling wars and politics. The system appears to have impressed even the Portuguese, for in 1661 their commander challenged the Dutch to an ankam where a single champion would take on five Dutch nominees. See K.K. Nair, op. cit., p. 104.

  30. Krishna Ayyar, op. cit., p. 171. Susan Bayly even speaks of Christian chavers in her work, citing an instance in the sixteenth century when some such Christian warriors vowed to kill the Rajah of Cochin for their lord, the Vadakkumkur Rajah, and even succeeded in their mission.

  31. K.K. Nair, op. cit., p. 72.

  32. Ibid., p. 58.

  33. See Mansel Longworth Dames, op. cit., p. 42. There were some restrictions, of course, and women could not select partners from below their caste and social standing on pain of death. In Edward Grey’s The Travels of Pietro Della Valle in India, p. 379, we read: ‘The Gentile Nairi have no peculiar Wives; but all Women are common amongst them; and when any man repairs to visit one of them, he leaves his weapon at the door, which sign sufficiently debars all others from entering in to disturb him; nor does this course beget any difficulty or jealousie … The children neither seek to know nor many times do know who their Father is but their descent by the Mother is alone considered, and according to that all inheritances are transferred. The same rule is observed among Princes and their Wives, the Queens, who are the King’s Sisters, being used to marry other neighbouring Kings, and to go into their States to have children, who are to succeed in the Kingdoms of their Uncles, and by this means are of Royal blood both by Father and mother. These Princesses are held in great esteem by the Kings, their Husbands; yet if they are minded to try other Men they are not prohibited, but may and often times do so, making use of whom they fancy for their pleasure, but especially of some Brachman, or other of their Husband’s principal Courtiers, who with their privity and consent are wont to converse and practise with them most intrinsecally (sic) in the Palace.’

  34. See Wendy and Rex Rogers, The Psychology of Gender and Sexuality, p. 207.

  35. Mansel Longworth Dames, op. cit., p. 124.

  36. J. Talboys Wheeler, A Short History of India, pp. 119–20.

  37. The Dutch governor Adriaan Moens would in fact tell how the Zamorins, once ‘the most powerful and the most wealthy’ in Kerala fell because they ‘did not maintain their authority sufficiently but allowed pretty well all the courtiers to meddle with the affairs of the kingdom, and even the women had their say in State affairs, especially the mothers of the heir apparent’. See Selections from the Records of the Madras Government Vol. 13, p. 132.

  38. F. Fawcett, Nayars of Malabar, p. 198.

  39. John Henry Grose, A Voyage to the East Indies, p. 244.

  40. Adriaan Moens, the Dutch governor, would note in 1781 that the Zamorins had by this time lost all their spirit. Shortly after the debacle in 1766, Hyder Ali had to withdraw from Kerala due to his wars in the north and a new Zamorin returned to Calicut. However, he proved singularly inefficient and could not hold his own during the second invasion by Hyder some years later. ‘The indifference of the Zamorin to the Nabob’s last invasion was surprising to me. He heard that the Nabob had taken possession of the neighbouring kingdoms of Cotteate, Coddagamale and other territories thereabout one after the other, and that his turn was to come next, and yet he remained absorbed in trifles instead of thinking of the defence of his kingdom. Not a month before he had to flee, I received letter after letter from him dealing only with the appointment of a Namburi (sic) or priest in the Triporatty (Tripurayar) pagoda by the king of Cochin, in regard to which he had not been consulted. The position in regard to this pagoda is that the appointment of the Nambudri must be made after both the Zamorin and the king of Cochin have been informed. He asked as strongly for my support in this matter as if his head and the existence of his kingdom depended on it. Whilst he was busy with the dispute about this pagoda, the Nabob took one fort of his after the other till, without having made any resistance to speak of, he took to his heels after having first let himself be nicely befooled by the French Governor of Mahe, and left his kingdom a prey to the Nabob.’ See Selections from the Records of the Madras Government, Vol. 13, p. 133.

  41. In a single engagement, for instance, the Zamorin lost 18,000 soldiers once, and according to Krishna Ayyar he could raise well over 100,000 soldiers altogether.

  42. Leena More, English East India Company, p. 10.

  43. B. Sobhanan, Rama Varma of Travancore, p. 12. As late as the 1830s Travancore paid a formal tribute to the Nawab of Arcot before he was removed by the British, and the tribute was transferred to the latter.

  44. Fra Bartolomeo quoted in Shungoonny Menon, A History of Travancore, p. 182. The Dutch were less flattering, though they too respected his ability. Julius Stein van Gollenesse would note how Martanda Varma was ‘an able and untiring prince, but very cruel
and so conceited and arrogant that he aims at nothing less than the supremacy over the whole of Malabar; and no doubt he would have gained his object had not the Hon’ble [Dutch] Company been in his way.’ See Selections from the Records of the Madras Government, Vol. 13, p. 53.

  45. Sheikh Zainuddin Makhdum would state: ‘There are in Malabar chieftains whose territories do not exceed one Parasang … while others have powers over more extensive territories. Of these some have at their command one hundred soldiers or less, or two hundred to three hundred, thousand, five thousand, ten thousand, thirty thousand, hundred thousand and more, and so on. Some territories join in league and are governed by two or three persons together. And of them some have greater power and bigger army. Quarrels and skirmishes take place occasionally among them but this does not affect their coalition rule.’ See K.K. Nair, op. cit., p. 110.

  46. Quoted in Mark de Lannoy, The Kulasekhara Perumals of Travancore, p. 28.

  47. See the ballad Tampimar Kathai and Ibrahim Kunju’s work for more on this.

  48. P.K.S. Raja, Mediaeval Kerala, p. 185.

  49. According to the contemporary Dutch governor, Julius Stein van Gollenesse, ‘The other states have, without harmony (which is seldom found in the ruling families), little power; but this chief [Martanda Varma] on the contrary has with the help of the English, had all the noblemen of the state, both Pulas and Gurips, put to death or banished the country except the Pula of Bariatto. Since that time he not only rules supreme but by confiscating their goods and lands he has so increased his treasures and revenues that he excels the other rulers in the greatness of his expenditure.’ See Selections from the Records of the Madras Government, Vol. 13, p. 53.