Ivory Throne
Page 93
The Second Favourite, Sankaran Tampi, notorious as the ‘former husband of the Maharajah’s present wife’ and the most powerful man in Travancore.
© Nirmala Devi, Thiruvananthapuram
The scene before the adoption durbar in 1900 where Sethu Lakshmi Bayi and Sethu Parvathi Bayi became princesses of Travancore.
The Sri Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Trivandrum, the vaults of which hold fabled treasures beyond imagination.
Sethu Lakshmi Bayi after her installation as the Rani of Attingal, ‘a land of Amazons’ once ruled by a line of warrior princesses.
Sethu Lakshmi Bayi with her husband Rama Varma, the Valiya Koil Tampuran, in a wedding portrait by N.N. Nampiyar.
Sethu Parvathi Bayi with her husband Ravi Varma Jr, the Kochu Koil Tampuran.
Sethu Lakshmi Bayi in a 1910 portrait by Mukundan Tampi.
The Senior and Junior Ranis of Travancore in their teens, on the eve of their great rivalry to produce the heir to the Ivory Throne.
Sethu Lakshmi Bayi in 1913, aged eighteen, when she took over the management of her ancestral estates and began to stand up to venal courtiers.
Gowri Parvathi Bayi, the previous Regent of Travancore in the early nineteenth century, seen here with her nephew and niece.
Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, seen here with her daughter, came to be ‘held in the greatest reverence and esteem throughout the State’ during her Regency in the 1920s.
Sir C.P. Ramaswami Iyer, the famous Madras lawyer and one of the ‘cleverest men in India’ was a loyal supporter of the Junior Maharani.
The British Resident C.W.E. Cotton, who observed sharply happenings at court and the war between the Maharanis.
Mr M.E. Watts, the Christian Dewan in a Hindu state, whose appointment by Sethu Lakshmi Bayi provoked considerable agitation.
Rama Varma, his archrival the Junior Maharani, and the latter’s son, Maharajah Chithira Tirunal. ‘Nothing will,’ bemoaned the Resident, ‘terminate the feud between the Junior Maharani and the Valiya Koil Tampuran but the death of one of them.’
The Senior Maharani with her family in 1928. The British considered her ‘a real little grande dame’ and the ‘best of the lot’ in Travancore.
The Junior Maharani with her daughter and son, the Maharajah, in 1933. A ‘more amiable Catherine de Medici’, she emerged as the power behind the throne by 1932.
© National Portrait Gallery, London.
The Senior Maharani and the Valiya Koil Tampuran after the conclusion of the Regency in 1931. They went into retirement and led largely private lives with their daughters, the Second Princess Lalitha and the Third Princess Indira.
Princess Lalitha and her husband, whom she first saw on a street during a temple procession, in 1938.
Princess Indira with her first husband in 1945.
The Senior Maharani and her family in 1945, by which time they were entirely isolated in the corridors of power.
As the 1940s passed, the ‘notoriously simple’ Senior Maharani became disillusioned with the drama at court, and immersed herself in family and children.
The Junior Maharani remained at the helm of affairs in Travancore, though the British Resident remarked that she was really the ‘villain of the piece’.
Princess Rukmini, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s favourite grandchild, as an infant.
Rukmini (centre) with her sisters Parvathi and Uma in the late 1940s at Satelmond Palace.
In Kodaikanal the princesses were sent to school for the first time.
Their parents spent their final years of royal life at Satelmond Palace.
By 1949, Lalitha, seen here with her family, transformed herself from Her Highness the Second Princess of Travancore to Mrs Kerala Varma of Bangalore.
In 1952, Indira left the ‘golden cage’ in Trivandrum and moved to Madras with her second husband, K.K. Varma, an industrialist and lawyer.
Lalitha’s house on Richmond Road in Bangalore, which became a scene of many parties, Sunday gatherings and domestic bliss.
Lakshmi, Lalitha’s fourth daughter, with the family pet, Rex. She would become the first member of the former royal family to carve out her own career.
Parvathi, Rukmini, and Uma in their teens in Bangalore in the 1950s.
In the late 1950s the Senior Maharani and the Valiya Koil Tampuran also relinquished the palace and moved to Bangalore. The Maharani gave up her string of titles, effacing herself into an old, storytelling great-grandmother.
By the 1960s the Varma family was westernised and indistinguishable from the ‘smart set’ of Bangalore. Rukmini, Uma, Lakshmi and Parvathi grew into attractive young women, going on to lead independent lives. Their brother, Balan, was Lalitha’s favourite, to whom the palace and life there were merely stories hesitantly told in the family.
Sethu Lakshmi Bayi and the Valiya Koil Tampuran after one of the Maharani’s later birthdays.
Lalitha and Indira in the 1960s, which was perhaps the happiest phase of their lives.
Rukmini in 1976 at the opening of her London exhibition by Lord Mountbatten.
Sethu Lakshmi Bayi towards the end of her life, when she spent most of her time in a small room ‘watching the dusk slip in and out of a series of windows’. (Below) From Satelmond Palace to No 7 Richmond Road: her final home.
The Junior Maharani on one of her birthday ceremonials at Kowdiar Palace, where she and her family (below) continued to live after Independence, largely in the old regal fashion.
Sethu Lakshmi Bayi and Sethu Parvathi Bayi, with the latter’s children, in 1979 when they met after nearly twenty-five years of silence. They would never see each other again.
About the Book
In 1498, when Vasco da Gama set foot in Kerala looking for Christians and spices, he unleashed a wave of political fury that would topple local powers like a house of cards. The cosmopolitan fabric of a vibrant trading society—with its Jewish and Arab merchants, Chinese pirate heroes and masterful Hindu Zamorins— was ripped apart, heralding an age of violence and bloodshed. One prince, however, emerged triumphant from this descent into chaos. Shrewdly marrying Western arms to Eastern strategy, Martanda Varma consecrated the dominion of Travancore, destined to become one of the most dutiful pillars of the British Raj. What followed was two centuries of internecine conflict in one of India’s premier princely states, culminating in a dynastic feud between two sisters battling to steer the fortunes of their house on the eve of Independence.
Manu S. Pillai’s retelling of this sprawling saga focuses on the remarkable life and work of Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, the last—and forgotten—queen of the House of Travancore. The supporting cast includes the flamboyant painter Raja Ravi Varma and his wrathful wife, scheming matriarchs of ‘violent, profligate and sordid’ character, wife-swapping court favourites, vigilant English agents, quarrelling consorts and lustful kings. Extensively researched and vividly rendered, The Ivory Throneconjures up a dramatic world of political intrigues and factions, black magic and conspiracies, crafty ceremonies and splendorous temple treasures, all harnessed in a tragic contest for power and authority in the age of empire.
About the Author
Manu S. Pillai was born in Kerala in 1990 and educated at Fergusson College, Pune, and at King’s College London. Following the completion of his master’s degree, where he presented his thesis on the emergence of religious nationalism in nineteenth-century India, in 2011–12, he managed the parliamentary office of Dr Shashi Tharoor in New Delhi and was then aide to Lord Bilimoria CBE DL, a crossbencher at the House of Lords in London in 2012–13. That same year he was commissioned by the BBC as a researcher to work with Prof. Sunil Khilnani on the ‘Incarnations’ history series, which tells the story of India through fifty great lives. The Ivory Throne is Manu’s first book.
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First published in India in 2015 by
HarperCollins Publishers India
Copyright © Manu S. Pillai 2015
P-ISBN: 978-93-5177-642-0
Epub Edition © November 2015 ISBN: 978-93-5177-643-7
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Manu S. Pillai asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by him and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same.
All rights reserved under The Copyright Act, 1957. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers India.
Cover photograph: Museum of Art & Photography(MAP)/Tasveer
Cover design: Shivang Joshi
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