The Dancer and the Raja

by Javier Moro

  Harbans Kaur, the official wife, had no say whatsoever in these dealings. Like the other women, she knew it was the custom and accepted it as something natural, as she also had to accept the multiple marriages, however little she wanted to share her husband with another woman or other women. They were habits so deeply ingrained that they were not questioned, and they formed part of the ancestral way of life. The first wife would always enjoy the privilege of having been the first and would therefore command special respect. She would be charged with maintaining “sisterly” relations with the new ones, sharing advice and secrets in order to gain greater levels of pleasure for her husband.

  In the case of Jagatjit, it was his own family who sent for the expert nautch girls, real beauties who knew how to adopt the sophisticated postures that centuries of Hindu art had immortalized in the bas-reliefs of the temples, postures inspired by the Kamasutra, which was still the basis of the education in sex and love of well-born Indians. The rules of the Kama—about Love—were a kind of technical manual written in a precise style, with no obscenity, describing the warlike and political strategies necessary to conquer a woman. Lovers were classified according to their physique, their temperament, and above all the dimensions of their member, measured in inches. The proportions of the bodies of the men and women represented in the temple sculptures corresponded to the sexual characters described in the Kamasutra. For example, the “gazelle-woman,” with firm breasts, wide hips, rounded buttocks, and a small yoni (no more than six inches), is very compatible in love with the “hare-man,” sensitive to “tickling on the thighs, on the hands, on the soles of the feet and on the pubis.” The “stallion-man,” who likes robust women and big meals, gets on wonderfully with the “mare-woman,” with her full, strong thighs, whose sex smells of sesame and whose “house of Kama has a depth of nine fingers.” Adolescents from aristocratic families learned postures such as the “opening of the bamboo,” “the nail,” the “lotus position,” the “tiger’s claw,” or the “hare’s leap” even before they learned algebra or mathematics. One of the most popular positions, described in detail in the Kamasutra, had a mystical name: “The duty of a devout man.” It was a question of penetrating the woman like a bull mounts a cow: standing and from behind, pulling her hair up with one hand; she lent herself graciously to this, leaning forward and holding her ankles with both hands. Even their moans were classified according to the degree of pleasure obtained: that of the dove, the cuckoo, the green pigeon, the parrot, the sparrow, the duck, or the quail. “… Finally, from her mouth will come inarticulate sounds as she goes on reaching new heights of pleasure,” concluded the chapter in the Kamasutra dedicated to “The groans of love.”

  The family hoped the dancers could get the raja to “function.” But the result was always the same: the raja enjoyed sex a lot, but had difficulties in copulation because of his belly, which pressed down on and squashed his penis even though he had an erection.

  It was then that a middle-aged courtesan called Munna Jan intervened. Traces of her legendary beauty could still be seen. She had been called several times to find a solution. “If the main obstacle is the prince’s belly,” she suggested, “let us consult the elephant keeper.” The keeper, or mahout, was a thin, bony man who wore a red turban and a worn military jacket with no buttons. He declared that the pachyderms did not reproduce in captivity, and that was not because they were shy, but because they required a special posture and angle that they could not achieve either in the zoo or in the stables. He had thought of a trick to solve this problem. He had built a small pile of earth and stone in the wood behind the new palace. There the female elephants lay down and the slope made the “work” of the male easier. The result had been spectacular. The trumpeting that cut through the nights in Kapurthala was perfect proof of it, as was the growing number of baby elephants that were being born.

  The mahout’s declaration brought hope back to the court. How could they apply his idea to the case of the raja? The answer did not take long to come. The engineer J. S. Elmore, who was a clever Englishman, set himself to design a sloping bed, made of metal and wood, and provided with an elastic mattress, inspired by the keeper’s idea. During the week it took to make it, he consulted several times with Munna Jan regarding the peculiarities of the invention and asked for her girls to be the ones to try it out with the raja. The splendid courtesan sent her most beautiful companions and the smile of satisfaction they gave those waiting in one of the halls of the palace for the “test” to be over said it all. What a success! The raja had managed to copulate … Several times!

  Nine months after that glorious day in the history of Kapurthala, Harbans Kaur gave birth to her first child, a boy whom they called Paramjit Singh. King Edward VII sent a telegram of congratulations, which filled the young prince with joy. To thank her for services rendered, the raja decided to reward Munna Jan with solid gold anklets and a pension of a thousand rupees a month for life.

  5 Durbar is a word of Persian origin that means “meeting of the court.” The term, widespread in India, is used to designate any important meeting.

  16

  In 1893, Jagatjit Singh made his first trip to Europe to attend the wedding of the Duke of York, the future King George V, whose friend he later became. His intention was to go on from there to Chicago, where the Universal Exhibition was being held to commemorate the fourth centenary of Columbus’s discovery of America. In total, the trip would last eight months—his first contact with the outside world.

  He was accompanied by a large retinue, which included his corpulent finance minister, who wore a thick, black beard rolled up in a net; his doctor, Sadiq Ali, dressed in a dark European suit and a light-colored turban; his chief of staff, a giant with the look of a holy man, thanks to his gray beard and mustache; and a European lieutenant—Colonel Massy, a man of about fifty with an incipient belly and whose glossy top hat, as shiny as patent leather, contrasted with the profusion of turbans. In the group photo they had taken in Paris, the raja appears seated and with his septer in his hand, wearing a light-colored silk coat, European trousers, a wide tie, and a salmon-pink turban. Fatherhood and the exercise of sovereignty, or perhaps the simple fact he had become an adult, were helping him slim down. He was still fat, but not as obese as before. The surprise in that photo was the presence of the person sitting on a chair next to the raja: a young woman, with fine features and small, dark eyes, wearing a long-sleeved satin dress of European style and cut. It was his second wife, Rani Kanari, a gay, refined woman, with whom he was deeply in love. Also originating from the Kangra valley, like his first wife, she came from the same kind of family: she was a Rajput from a time-honored lineage but with no fortune. Caste in exchange for money: the aristocracy of the Brahmins—Hindu priests—married its daughters to men of dubious lineage, as long as they were extremely rich.

  However, in the case of Kanari there had also been love. The raja had gone to see her in person and had fallen in love with her; she was different from the others. Kanari was not the prototype of a submissive Indian woman, like Harbans Kaur, his first wife. She had personality and a sense of humor, although she spoke no English and had never been out of the Kangra valley. One meeting was enough for the raja to propose marriage to her. In his diary of the journey, Jagatjit Singh would make reference to the kind of wife he was seeking, and that he thought he had perhaps found in Rani Kanari then, and eighteen years later in Anita Delgado: “At present, an educated Indian feels the need to have an intelligent wife in his home, capable for her qualities and personal achievements of being a worthy companion to share his joys and sorrows.” Most Indian women were used to living in the zenana and hardly took part in their husband’s social life at all. In fact, many Indians frowned on the freedom with which Englishwomen went to the club or mixed in society. Their women remained at home. But the raja was an educated Indian, very much influenced by the liberal, Anglophile education he had received. Indian women could satisfy
him sexually or could be the mothers of his children, but it was not easy to find one to share all aspects of his life. It had never been easy, perhaps except for the emperor Shah Jehan, who, after meeting Mumtaz Mahal, remained with her for her whole life. Now, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the raja’s dream, shared by various of his friends, was to find a woman capable of being a wife and friend at the same time and able to move in both worlds—East and West—with the same ease as he did. As he knew that what he was seeking was harder to find than a needle in a haystack, he was convinced that he would have to “shape” that wife, as long as she had the basic qualities essential for it: a minimum of curiosity and above all a desire to open up to an unknown world. That was what he hoped to achieve with Rani Kanari, and for that reason he had insisted so much on taking her on the trip; besides, that way he would have someone with whom he could have fun and share the good times.

  But he had come up against total opposition on the part of the British authorities. Alluding to matters of protocol, they did not authorize him to travel with any of his “ranis,” not even with Her First Highness Harbans Kaur—that was her official title. Then he began to think of a way to get round the problem. He had to act with caution because the previous year another conflict had arisen that had cost him a severe reprimand from the English. His “inappropriate behavior” during a holiday in Simla—the little city located at the foot of the Himalayas that the British had made into their summer capital because there they could get away from the infernal heat of the plains—had provoked abundant correspondence between Colonel Henderson, of the garrison in Lahore, and Sir James Lyall, his ex-tutor, now governor of the Punjab. They reproached him for allowing himself to be led on by his friend, the raja of Dholpur, a die-hard womanizer the English considered to be a consummate rogue because of his making use of the ancestral practice of obtaining girls from the mountains by buying them from their impoverished families in the tribes. They accused the rajas of Dholpur, Patiala, and Kapurthala of using an Indian officer as a go-between. “The alibi they have prepared,” said a letter from Colonel Henderson dated in Lahore on March 4, 1892, “is to say they are looking for servant girls for the zenana, and it will be very difficult to prove otherwise, even though we know the aim is to get concubines. When they go into the harem of some chief, these girls work as servants for his wives, although they are at his disposal for the purposes of concubinage, and neither the wives nor the girls have any objection to it. We do not know exactly how far the raja of Kapurthala has gone in these proceedings.” Later the letter accused the raja of Dholpur of being the instigator and main guilty party in this practice and hoped that the exemplary punishment imposed on the go-between—two years in prison—would teach the young princes a lesson. “We consider these practices highly immoral, against our laws, and we hope to put an end to them very soon,” the letter went on, which, however, ended admitting implicitly that it was a custom so deeply rooted that it would be almost impossible to eradicate. “I want to mention to Sir James Lyall that there is a prosperous tribe in the mountains, which is not poor and occupies the villages around Kumaon. Their daughters not only never get married, but are practically unmarriageable. They all follow the custom of going down to the plains to be kept as concubines by rich men or to earn their living as prostitutes. And they do not do it for want of money, but because it is their custom.” It was not easy to impose British ethics and values on an archaic society such as the one in the India of the time, where, among certain groups, the practice of giving up their daughters to prostitution was not only beyond reproach, but sacred. On the other hand, the kings of India had always had concubines, since it was a matter of a custom as ancient as the monarchy itself, and few sovereigns were prepared to do without it. There was a religious origin for this. An ancient Hindu belief attributed magical powers to courtesans, which permitted kings to fight evil spirits. In olden times, the maharaja of Mysore, a pious and powerful man, placed the two best-known and especially most depraved prostitutes in the city at the head of the procession during the Dussehra festivities. It was imagined that, thanks to the large number of sexual experiences they had had, they had been able to accumulate the magic powers that men lose when they have intercourse. From time immemorial, the belief existed that courtesans empowered and protected kings. European monarchs must have thought the same because they too surrounded themselves with beautiful women, sometimes cultured and intelligent, whom they showered with titles and honors. And they did it in spite of the opposition of the church.

  In India, concubines ended up living in the palace, classified according to their category: A1, A2, B3, and so on, with simple village girls being the lowest. One of them, generally of humble origin, had the unique and exclusive mission of controlling the quality of the royal semen, because the “good quality” of the offspring depended on it, and, in consequence, the “good quality” of the government they would eventually have. Therefore, checking the semen was a matter of state. In India it has always been thought that abstinence causes an excessive accumulation of sperm, and that this can “go off,” exactly the same as milk or butter. Therefore, this concubine was kept informed of the number of the monarch’s sexual encounters and, if there was too much time between them, she presented herself before the prince to collect his semen, by skillful manual means, in a cotton cloth, which she then burned in the garden in the presence of a civil servant who possessed the ostentatious title of Keeper of the Royal Emissions.

  Although it was not easy to recognize concubines from their manner of dress, because they were all very elegantly dressed, it was possible from the jewels they wore, since their number and quality indicated the place they occupied in the zenana. They could also be recognized at mealtimes since the main wives ate from gold plates while concubines used brass bowls. Generally, the women were happy in the harem because there they could escape from a life of poverty in the countryside; furthermore, they could be sure that, even when they were removed from the list of favorites, neither they nor their children would ever lack for anything. In order to control the population of the harem, the raja was forced to make them have their tubes tied after their second child.

  Bought—or not—from the hill tribes, the fact is that the raja of Kapurthala was never short of concubines. His ministers, who were sophisticated men, sometimes found themselves forced to abandon their tasks in the service of the state in order to find women for him. “I have been in Kashmir and I have brought two girls for His Highness,” said one of them in a letter. “The problem is that you are never free from suspicion on the part of the Rajah that you too have not enjoyed them.”

  The friction that existed between the raja and the English authorities was the consequence of the paternalism that ruled relations between the Crown and the princes. But the original contract, that of the famous proclamation by Queen Victoria, stipulated that no one could get involved in matters in the zenana, the harem of each prince, or in internal affairs of the states. Those areas were sacred. But sometimes the princes had whims that the English could not allow. The raja of Kapurthala had become very angry because they had forbidden him to hire a German private secretary called Rudolph Kohler. “It is not desirable for rajas to employ European foreigners,” the Political Department had answered, “because they can do damage to us. For example, they can pass on information to the Russians, who want to get a foot in the door on the sub-continent. The Government of India does not look kindly on the hiring of foreigners in native states. We can only trust the English, as a class, and unfortunately not all of them.” The raja thought the authorities were overstepping the mark and had insisted on hiring the German. Dr. Warburton, consulted by the secretary of the Punjab government, wrote a negative report on the hiring of Kohler, alleging a powerful reason: the German spoke English very badly and, therefore, would be an extremely poor secretary. Jagatjit was incensed and refused to speak to him for some time, like a child who is not given what he wants. He wrote to the gove
rnment secretary, complaining that, if the raja of Dholpur had been able to take on a Frenchman, why could he not take on a German? The English closed the matter in a forceful way. One day the police turned up with an order for the German’s expulsion. They took Rudolph Kohler away, and he never set foot in Kapurthala again. The speed of the police action was due to a warning from Dr. Warburton that “the Rajah is under the influence of the German, who has managed to get money from him and is indulging in scandalous behaviour.” The doctor was probably referring to the famous orgies to which they were invited by the raja of Patiala. Warburton’s letter ended by saying that “the Rajah is furious at the refusal to hire Rudolph Kohler and will not listen to reason or attend to his professional duties.” The raja was angry.

  From that experience Jagatjit had learned that is was no good standing up to the authorities. Ready to take Rani Kanari away on the trip by any means—“just in case his sperm went bad”—he chose not to go on insisting and set in motion a secret plan as he finalized the preparations for the journey. “Hundreds of my subjects lined both sides of the road to wish me a good journey, and showed all the signs of sadness at my temporary absence,” wrote the raja in his diary on the day of his departure. When he went through Agra on March 8, 1893, he wondered if he would see a monument to equal the marvel of the Taj Mahal in Europe. Much later he would write that, of everything he had seen in the world, the unique and incomparable Taj was “the jewel of the earth.”