The Dancer and the Raja

by Javier Moro

  But the maharaja continued to see her assiduously every time he went to Europe. They ended up being good friends, maintaining regular contact and sending each other mutual news through Ajit, who frequently traveled between Europe and India. Even at a distance the maharaja would be present in her life until the end. The first telegrams of condolence she received when her father died in 1931, and then in 1935 when Doña Candelaria died, were from the maharaja. Faithful to the tradition of protecting the women in his life, Jagatjit Singh was always concerned for the well-being and safety of his Spanish rani. When the civil war broke out, he settled her and her niece Victoria in a hotel in Britanny, and later, when the Second World War was looming on the horizon, he organized the move of both of them to Portugal, through the British embassy, where they remained until the end of the conflict. As Doña Candelaria had always said: “This man is a real gentleman.”

  Until the end of his life, the maharaja did not give up his determination to replace Anita with another European maharani. Sensitive and quick to fall in love, he was the ideal target for certain unscrupulous women who were more in love with his money than with his person. Arlette Serry was one of them. For two years she alternated between India and Paris, without ever committing herself, but without clarifying the situation either. The maharaja followed her like a lapdog. He spent long periods of time at the Pavillon Kapurthala trying for all he was worth to convince her to accept his proposal of marriage. His minister, Jarwani Dass, caught him one Friday night in the middle of his prayers, while Inder Singh, the captain of the guard, read paragraphs from the Granth Sahib out loud. When he was asked why he was praying at such a late hour, Inder Singh explained in secret that they were praying to the Almighty to give the maharaja strength and sexual vigor before he spent the night with Arlette. The next day Dass did not dare to ask if the prayers had borne fruit, but when he received a check for ten thousand francs from the maharaja without any explanation, he understood that God had listened to his master’s requests. When he was satisfied with his sexual performance, the maharaja gave out money among his ministers, secretaries, assistants, and servants—in proportion to each person’s position. Arlette, who was given wonderful Cartier jewels, took the lion’s share.

  But when the French girl got tired of bleeding him dry, she ran off with a boyfriend she had kept secret until then, the correspondent of an Argentinian newspaper in Paris. The maharaja was left greatly disappointed.

  Shortly afterward he met another Frenchwoman in Cannes, a woman called Germaine Pellegrino who had it all: beauty, intelligence, and culture. Although from the start she warned him that she was engaged to none other than Reginald Ford, the heir to the American car company, the maharaja invited her to Kapurthala and received her with all the honors. They spent many hours talking about politics and history and became great friends. They continued to see each other in Paris, and the maharaja ended up deeply in love with her. “I want you to be my maharani” he dared to tell her one day. She gave every sign of being very surprised, half indignant and half outraged. “How is it possible, sir, if Regi is my fiancé?” she answered. “The maharaja was devastated at Germaine’s refusal, and went through real agonies of love,” Jarmani Dass would tell. “He told me to do everything possible to convince her to marry him, or he would kill himself.” Dass was unsuccessful and the maharaja did not kill himself. He found out about the wedding of his beloved to Reginald Ford when he sent her, from Kapurthala, an antique pearl necklace of immense value as a birthday present. The note of thanks he received from Paris, signed by Germaine, said: “Thank you for the wonderful necklace, which I am delighted to accept as a wedding present.”

  The maharaja finally managed to get married in 1942, to a Czech theater actress he had met in Vienna six years previously. Eugenie Grossupova was tall and blond, with big, blue eyes. Like Anita, she was from a poor family that desperately needed help to stay afloat. But her character was very different: weak, shy, and with no skills for mixing in society. Otherwise her story was much like Anita’s, snubbed and despised both by the maharaja’s family and the English. On the death of her mother, who lived with her in one wing of the palace, the woman had an attack of paranoia. She was convinced that her mother had been poisoned and that she would be next. The loneliness, the boredom, and her neurotic character finally drove her to insanity. She decided to go away to the United States, where she said her only living relative resided. She stayed in the Maidens Hotel in Delhi to organize the details of the journey, but the English put many obstacles in her path. The Second World War complicated everything, from obtaining a visa to changing currency. Falling prey to a nervous breakdown, on December 10, 1946, she took a taxi to go to one of the most emblematic monuments, the Qutab Minar Tower, which dominates the city from a height of one hundred meters. She went up to the top with her two poodles, then she picked them up and jumped.

  The death of Tara Devi—the name Jagatjit Singh had given her when they got married in the Sikh religion—was just the type of news to excite the bloodhounds of the gutter press. The news came out on the front page of all the newspapers. For the maharaja it was another scandal, which was the source of all kinds of conjecture and gossip, and which finally sank him into a state close to depression. According to Jarmani Dass, he suddenly aged ten years: “What a difficult mixture, East and West, like water and oil …!” Dass would comment.

  Tara Devi’s death unleashed an exchange of letters between the maharaja and the British authorities whose tone was of an acrimony unknown until then. Jagatjit Singh directly accused the Political Department of having caused his wife’s despair and held them responsible for her death. The reply of that department, in a confidential letter of December 19, 1946, signed by J. H. Thompson, the secretary, was not long in coming: “If there is any responsibility for the death of Tara Devi, it is yours alone. I would be remiss in my duty if I did not remind Your Highness that when a man of your age marries a foreign woman, and when that foreign woman is forty years younger than her husband, he is running a grave risk. That risk, which Your Highness ran, has had an unfortunate and tragic end. And you cannot blame the Political Department for that.”

  At that time, the maharaja of Kapurthala was witness to the end of the world that he had known—and which coincided, furthermore, with the end of his life. As soon as the Second World War was over, the English announced the irrevocable decision to grant India independence. Although many of his colleagues never believed the English would break the historic agreements that linked them to the British Crown, Jagatjit Singh thought the maharajas would be left to their fate. Gandhi and Nehru had managed to galvanize the masses around the Congress Party, which had become a powerful organization that aspired to inherit the democratic government of a new India. After all attempts to agree among themselves had failed, there were difficult times ahead for the princes. The idea of giving up their sovereign rights or joining a democratic federation was still unacceptable to most of them. They found it impossible to make the leap from the Middle Ages into the twentieth century.

  Looking back was more comforting than looking to the future. Jagatjit Singh felt satisfied with what he had achieved. He had managed to turn Kapurthala into a model state in miniature, well administered and with no corruption. He had managed to attract capital to set up three factories and get an incipient sugar industry going. The high level of schooling of the children brought him the congratulations of the Europeans. The crime rate was very low. He had never used his exclusive right to impose the death penalty. He felt especially pleased at his skill when it came to settling conflict between the different religious communities. He had become a real juggler, removing a Moslem minister here, placing a Hindu administrator there, that is, shuffling the members of his government so that everyone felt represented. While in other parts of the Punjab there were frequent disturbances, Kapurthala was an example of peaceful coexistence. The city, as quiet and clean as a European city, with numerous gardens and impec
cable buildings, was a source of inspiration for architects and city planners who came from other areas of India. When a civil servant was posted to another state, he left Kapurthala convinced that the place he was going to was worse.

  But what the maharaja was most proud of was the devotion his people showed for him. Every year, in March, in the festival that marked the beginning of the summer, he went on the back of an elephant to the Shalimar public gardens and met his people, answering questions, taking an interest in people, and enjoying the warm affection of his subjects. He liked to remember the Christmas festivities to which he invited a thousand or so children to give them parcels of books, or the constant visits to the law courts, the police station, and hospitals, visits that allowed him to closely monitor the heartbeat of his administration. It is true that he traveled a lot, but he always rejected the accusation of his watchdogs, the governor of the Punjab and the top British civil servants, that his travels negatively affected the efficient administration of his state. As he got older, the maharaja placed all the emphasis possible on making Kapurthala a beacon of public-spiritedness and culture. He wanted to gain favor with men and with God. He wanted to be remembered for what he was, a benevolent ruler, open and just.

  It had been more difficult and complicated than any task of government to obtain an heir for the dynasty of Kapurthala. His daughter-in-law, Gita, could not give him a grandson, because the operations she had done in Paris failed and she was left sterile. The maharaja went ahead with his threat to marry his son to a second wife. He chose her himself from among the daughters of a raja of noble lineage in the Kangra valley, as tradition required. Gita tried desperately to prevent the marriage. She sought help from her mother-in-law, Harbans Kaur, whom she had supported years previously against Anita. But her mother-in-law turned her back on her. If she had had to accept that the raja got married a number of times, why could Gita not do the same? Was she not an Indian woman, like her? Humiliated and tired of fighting, Gita requested a divorce, left Kapurthala, and went to live in Europe with her daughters.

  In any case, it had been some time since she had had a proper married life with her husband. Ratanjit had fallen in love with an English dancer called Stella Mudge and was living with her. History was repeating itself; the son was doing the same as the father. But Stella was not Anita. Cold and calculating, her ambition was to become maharani of Kapurthala and she was totally opposed to the maharaja’s designs. Because she was European, she was not qualified to be the mother of the future heir to the throne. In the end Jagatjit Singh solved the problem as only he knew how: with money. He promised Stella a million dollars to convince his son to marry the girl from the Kangra valley, “that jungle girl,” as the English girl called her insultingly. In the end he got them married in a quick, almost secret, ceremony.

  But Ratanjit refused to consummate the new marriage. His new wife, perfumed and massaged by a dozen maids, waited for him every night, but always in vain. Stella literally forced Ratanjit to do his duty as a husband because that was the condition for her to collect the million dollars. One day, at seven in the evening, a sad, shamefaced Ratanjit arrived at the palace where his new wife lived and where the ministers, members of the government, and several chanting priests were waiting for him. He got together with the “jungle girl” in a bedroom and came out thirty-five minutes later with a “pensive, weary look,” according to witnesses. Having done his duty, he went back to Stella’s arms and they went off on holiday to Europe. Nine months later, his new wife gave birth to a baby boy. The maharaja was enormously happy. As a sign of thanks to the masters of Sikhism, he promised to educate him in the purest Sikh tradition.27

  In February 1947, the English Labour government, which sympathized openly with the Congress Party, named Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Queen’s cousin, as the new viceroy. He was entrusted with the express task of organizing the withdrawal of the English from India and the handover of power. As soon as he arrived in Delhi, Mountbatten called the maharajas together for a conference, which took place in the Chamber of Princes. Jagatjit Singh, with his chest covered in medals, his mustache graying, thin and leaning on a stick, attended the speech that marked the end of his period. “The die is cast,” said Mountbatten. There was no time to solve the problems arising out of the historic treaties between the princes and the Crown. If they wanted to maintain sovereignty and the right to continue governing, they had to sign a document called the “Act of Accession,” which would link them to one of the states, either India or Pakistan, which would take control after the British Raj. In this way, the empire handed the princes on a plate to Nehru’s Congress Party or to Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s Moslem League, whose leader was the maharaja’s lawyer friend. Neither the governors, nor the top British civil servants, nor the maharajas present at that meeting could believe what they were hearing. In one stroke, the viceroy was canceling all the commitments and agreements of the past, which had protected the princes and helped to perpetuate the Raj. It was a great betrayal, so great that the maharajas were left dumbstruck. Was this how England thanked them for the effort that once again the princes had made during the last world war? The nawab of Bhopal had sold his shares in the American Stock Exchange to pay for the planes that he offered to His Majesty. The nizam of Hyderabad had paid for the purchase of three squadrons of military aircraft. Three hundred thousand volunteer soldiers had been recruited in the different states, and the princes had bought the equivalent of 180 million rupees’ worth of war bonds. And now the Raj, which they had supported so generously, was handing them over to their enemies, the republicans of the Congress Party or of the Moslem League, which sooner or later would rob them of their sovereign powers.

  “Was there any alternative?” Jagatjit Singh wondered. Yes, to proclaim independence. But how long would a tiny state like Kapurthala last between two giants like India and Pakistan? Could the five thousand soldiers of his army repel an invasion? Survive the boycott? Separately, the states were all too weak to confront the two emerging nations. And together they could not find a common posture. Yes, Mountbatten was right, the die was cast.

  One after another, the princes began to give in to the viceroy’s demands, some voluntarily, others in the desire to participate as soon as possible in the new life of the nation, others with apprehension, dragged along by the inexorable winds of history. The first to sign was Ganga Singh, the maharaja of Bikaner, the one with the stuffed camel recipe. He believed in Mountbatten and in the leaders of the new India. Then, like ripe fruit, the others fell in turn: Jodhpur, Jaipur, Bhopal, Benares, Patiala, Dholpur, and so on. The maharaja of Kapurthala did not take long to come to a decision. In spite of having a majority population of Moslems, he inclined toward the Indian Union, a secular country as he had wanted Kapurthala to be and whose constitution offered greater guarantees in terms of the protection of the plurality of its citizens than Islamic Pakistan. The maharaja called a meeting with representatives of the people, village headmen, Hindu pundits, Moslem muftis, and Sikh priests to announce his decision to them, which was received in total silence. Only one person dared to make a comment, an old headman, who said to him, “That is all well and good, Lord, but who will dry our tears in the future?” The maharaja was moved and felt that that phrase was a tribute not only to his long reign, but also to the reigns of his forbears, who throughout history had found a way to be with the people in the toughest and most difficult moments.

  Only three princes refused to sign the Act of Accession. The nawab of Junagadh, the one who organized weddings for his dogs, wanted to join his state to Pakistan, against all logic, in spite of the fact that it was located in the heart of Indian territory. When his people, the majority Hindu, voted massively in a referendum in favor of India, the nawab had to flee in a hurry with his three wives, his favorite dogs and his jewels, to the neighboring country, at the threat of invasion from the Indian army.

  Hari Singh, the maharaja of Kashmir, was the opposite case: a Hindu in a
land of Moslems. He could not make up his mind between those who argued for integration with Pakistan, those who wanted to join India, and those who fought to make Kashmir an independent country. Perhaps Hari Singh let himself be tempted by the idea of independence, because he had an army capable of protecting the borders of his kingdom. But he woke up rudely from that dream when some Moslem guerrillas from Pakistan invaded his territory, pillaging, burning, and terrorizing the population. Forced to make a decision then, he opted to bring Kashmir into the Indian Union in exchange for protection against the invaders. New Delhi sent units of the army and all the fighter planes available to Srinagar, the Venice of the East that had so enchanted Anita. Kashmir stopped being a land of peace and became the battleground between India and Pakistan. Hari Singh decided to remove himself from hostilities and left his palace in Srinagar forever. He enjoyed a golden exile in Jammu, his winter capital. Curiously, his son, Karan, was named regent of Kashmir by the great enemy of the princes and the builder of independence, Nehru himself. A few years later, he won the elections and became the first prime minister of the new state.

  The third in disagreement was the nizam of Hyderabad, the man who had become enamored of Anita in 1914 and had showered her with gifts. Now an old man only one and half meters in height and weighing forty kilos, His Exalted Highness was still the most eccentric of the princes. Over the years his proverbial wealth had increased at the same rate as his miserliness, and he was now so miserly that he saved the cigarette ends left by his guests in the ashtrays. The doctor who came from Bombay to examine his heart could not take an electrocardiogram. In order to save money, the nizam had ordered the Hyderabad power station to reduce the voltage. Just like his colleague and friend Hari Singh of Kashmir, the nizam had a large army, equipped with artillery and aviation. When a top civil servant came to inform him of the British decision to leave India, he jumped for joy. “At last I’ll be free!” he exclaimed.