The Dancer and the Raja

by Javier Moro

  As soon as the English left he declared the independence of Hyderabad, without realizing that all his power had been supported by the Raj and that when the English left the network that protected him would also disappear. Although legally and constitutionally he had the right to do it, in practice it was madness because he did not hold the main weapon: the support of his people. He had lost touch with reality. On September 13, 1948, the government of India began “Operation Polo,” the code name for the invasion. It was a more violent attack than Nehru would have liked. In forty-eight hours, the independent state of Hyderabad no longer existed, and with it gone, a whole, very peculiar way of life vanished, based on a love of the arts, hospitality, courtesy, and an efficient administration that made no distinctions between castes or religions. For a few years the nizam occupied an official position in his former state, maintaining the twenty-one-gun salute, but with no power at all. Part of his wealth was confiscated, and he had no option but to accept a life pension of over two million dollars a year. He spent his days drinking coffee—some fifty cups a day—writing poetry in Urdu, and watching over the running of the university he had founded. At the end of his life, in order not to spend money, he darned his worn-out socks himself.

  August 15, 1947, was chosen by astrologers as the most auspicious day for India to commence its independent existence. The whole country was hanging on Nehru’s speech to the legislative assembly, but Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala decided not to alter his routine. After a frugal dinner and a walk in the garden of his palace, he went to bed at half past ten at night. He read the speech, which marked the start of the new era, the next day in the newspaper, as he had breakfast sitting in the Japanese room. “At midnight,” Nehru had told the world, “India will awaken to life and liberty. A moment rarely offered by history is coming closer, when the people will come out of the past and enter the future, when one period ends, when the soul of a nation, stifled for so long, will again find expression …”

  It was not a bad speech for his son Ratanjit’s classmate, thought the maharaja, putting a steaming cup of tea to his lips. Decidedly, Harrow was a good school and when the moment came, he intended to send his grandson there too.

  But he could not share the enthusiasm of the press, which reflected that of the delirious crowds who fêted the event in both countries. He had no reason to be happy, because he guessed that independence would involve tragedy. By dividing India to satisfy the demands of his old friend Ali Jinnah, the English drew the border, assigning areas with a Hindu majority to India and those with a majority of Moslems to Pakistan. On paper, the result seemed viable. In practice it was a disaster. In the Punjab, the frontier gave the city of Lahore to Pakistan, and Amritsar, with the Golden Temple, to India, cutting in two the lands and population of one of the most militant and united communities, the Sikhs. Lahore, the Paris of the East, the most cosmopolitan and beautiful city of India, the capital of the north, was going to become a small provincial town that would live to the sound of the muezzins in the mosques. The world of Jagatjit Singh had been mutilated forever.

  A few days later, another piece of news that appeared in the press greatly attracted his attention. In the composition of the first government of India, the maharaja saw the name of his niece, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Bibi to the family, the unruly, rebellious daughter of his cousin in Jalandhar. Nehru had named her health minister, the first woman minister in India. In this way, Bibi crowned a whole lifetime of dedication to the cause of independence, which had earned her arrest and imprisonment on two occasions, and beatings from the police at countless demonstrations. In 1930, when the famous Salt March took place, which Gandhi had organized to protest against the law that prohibited Indians from making salt without permission from the government, Bibi walked three hundred kilometers on foot at the head of an enormous crowd. Gradually she became something more than a leader of Gandhi’s “Quit India” campaign against the English. She fought tirelessly against the blots on society, denouncing child marriage, the purdah system, and illiteracy. The girl from a good family, who smoked and came back from Europe with lots of luxurious gifts for her cousins, the rebel who loved horses, ended up being a heroine for millions of her fellow Indians. For the first time in history, they could see what a woman could achieve in a democratic, modern state.

  On March 10, 1949, Jagatjit Singh arrived in Bombay prior to leaving on a journey to Europe. The events that had occurred since independence had forced him to remain in Kapurthala, where, just after Nehru’s speech, the world seemed to go crazy, just as he had predicted. Suddenly the greatest migration in the history of mankind began. The Hindus, who overnight had found themselves in Pakistan, sought refuge in India, and the Moslems of India, in Pakistan. The partition of the country, which Gandhi had always opposed, caused a real cataclysm. As many Indians died as Frenchmen died during the Second World War.

  The Punjab, the beautiful land of the five rivers, the crucible of civilization, was bathed in bloodshed of astonishing dimensions. The maharaja of Kapurthala witnessed impotently that brief and monstrous massacre, in spite of all his efforts to calm things down. “They were the worst years I remember,” Sukhjit Singh, the maharaja’s grandson, would say. Kapurthala escaped the worst, but not Patiala, whose rivers were found to be tinged with red every morning, from the blood of the bodies from the massacre the day before.

  When things settled down again, nothing was the same as before. The open, cosmopolitan, multicultural, and multireligious spirit that Jagatjit Singh had struggled so hard to imbue in his state had evaporated forever. Then, little by little, the Indian government started breaking the promises it had made to the princes. Forty-one states in the east of India were dispossessed of their sovereignty and put together to form a province called Orissa. Two months later, the states of Kathiawar, on the Arabian Sea, would follow suit, becoming the new state of Gujarat. Later on, it was the turn of the center of the country, where the states of Rajputana were merged into a new Union of Rajasthan. Now they were talking of doing the same with the Punjab … Fifty-five years directing the destiny of Kapurthala, and my whole life’s work is about to be wiped off the map, thought the maharaja, wounded and offended by the fact that the fathers of the nation, the great leaders, did not keep their word.

  From the old Imperial Suite—now renamed the Presidential Suite—on the fifth floor of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay, the same room that Anita occupied when she arrived in India, the room where Dr. Willoughby informed her she was pregnant, the maharaja could see the Gateway to India, the imposing triumphal arch that the English had built to commemorate the visit of King George V and Queen Mary for the Great Durbar in Delhi in 1911. How laughable it seemed to him today, that symbol of the most gigantic empire the world had ever known! The English had entered under its dome, and from that same place all the princes would have to leave to put the last of their wealth in a safe place before what was coming.

  The maharaja could also see, in the roadstead, the ship that was about to take him to Europe. For the first time he felt like going away and never coming back. At the age of seventy-seven, he was tired and had no more enthusiasm for life. He had lived intensely and he had enjoyed every moment, but recent events had left him prostrate and depressed. In those moments of melancholy, he remembered his loved ones, especially the sons he had lost. First was Baljit, at the height of his political career, in 1932, when he was barely forty, the victim of a sudden cancer. The second was Premjit, the soldier, who died in Srinagar, from a heart attack, in 1944. Ratanjit, the heir who would never reign, was left. He spent his time drinking and letting himself be bled dry by his English mistress.

  And Kamal. He had been reconciled to the son who caused the greatest scandal to ever hit the House of Kapurthala. But Kamal had redeemed himself. He had managed to increase the productivity of the lands in Oudh in a spectacular fashion. He had proved himself to be a serious administrator, so efficient that the maharaja finally called him back, t
o Kapurthala, to leave all important family matters in his capable hands. Kamal had become the pillar of his old age … How things turn out in life!

  Furthermore, he felt special affection for Kamal’s wife, known as Princess Kalpana. She had just appeared on the front page of Vogue wearing a Cartier ring. She had everything he liked in a woman: beauty, elegance, and intelligence. Yes, Kamal was his worthy heir. But along the way Jagatjit had also lost many friends, like a constant reminder to him of the futility of life, and that day he remembered them. The death that struck him most was that of Bhupinder Singh the Magnificent, the maharaja of Patiala, he of the cult to the goddess Koul, the hardened womanizer who had a massive heart attack at the early age of forty-seven. Faithful to himself to the end, nine months later a concubine with whom he had had relations the day before his death gave birth. Sons, friends, lovers …, life consisted of that, loss after loss. Now he was about to lose the throne, the very essence of his being. Soon there would no longer be a place for him in the world.

  He preferred to go far away. To flee, to flee from himself, to forget himself. Spend his time to the end on his real, deep vocation, women, the only beings able to console his old, wounded heart. A ray of hope dawned on the horizon and made the enjoyment of the journey seem more real. In London he was counting on seeing an Englishwoman again whom he had met in Calcutta and with whom he had become friends … and perhaps a little more than that. Ah, European women …! Even Nehru himself had succumbed to the charms and intelligence of one of them, no less than the wife of the last viceroy, Edwina Mountbatten. Rumor had it that they were very much in love, that they were lovers and met on the journeys the prime minister of India made abroad. Time went by, history moved on, the characters changed, but love survived. East and West, so different but so attractive to each other, like a man and a woman. Like the two faces of the same world.

  The maharaja also intended to travel to Spain to enjoy some good flamenco with Anita and their son, Ajit, who was working as cultural attaché in the Indian embassy in Buenos Aires, but who would be in Madrid for San Isidro. As the true son of an Andalusian mother, Ajit had inherited his taste for bullfighting and flamenco from his mother.

  That night the maharaja did not wish to go down to the dining room for dinner. He asked his assistant to have a light dinner brought up to the suite for him. Then he ordered the windows that looked out over the sea, and from which he could glimpse the lights of the ship on which he would sail the next day, to be thrown wide open. As usual, the night was humid and hot. Jagatjit Singh lay down on the bed, listening to the eternal cawing of the crows of Bombay mingling with the sound of the ventilator whose arms were turning slowly. The breeze moved the net curtains, which waved in the darkness like dancing ghosts. The halo of the waning moon peered in at a corner of the window.

  When his assistant came back, accompanied by the waiter who was pushing a trolley with his dinner, he found the maharaja in the same position, with an expression on his face that suggested a slight smile. Lying on the bed, he had the same aura of majesty as ever. But he was unmoving, with his eyes far away, and unspeaking. He had stopped breathing a few minutes before. The maharaja who had reigned the longest died gently, with no noise or suffering. Death was kind to him, as he had been with life.

  A few days later, in Kapurthala, his grandson and his son Ratanjit led the funeral cortege followed by a huge crowd of people who had come to pay their respects to the man who had ruled them for almost sixty years. Shopkeepers, businessmen, peasants, old people, and Sikhs with long white beards all wept disconsolately. An old Hindu priest hobbled forward to give his condolences to the family gathered by the body in the Shalimar Gardens, on the outskirts of the city. The maharaja’s body lay on the funeral pyre, on a bed of straw, in the purest Sikh tradition, according to which one is born with nothing and one dies with nothing. The venerable old man was an old friend of the dead man and his adviser on religious matters, history, and the Vedic writings. He squatted down and wept silently. “A great man has gone from us,” he said to his grandson, pointing at the maharaja’s body. “He set the state on its feet, and now it is going away with him.”

  Anita received the news in her luxurious flat in Marques de Urquijo Street in Madrid, in whose sitting room there hung a splendid portrait of her husband in gala uniform. According to her maid, Anita sat all afternoon looking at the picture, with her hands together as though praying for the man who had made her into a princess against all the odds, and whose protective shadow had vanished forever. Anita received condolences from friends all over the world, and General Franco himself granted her an audience in the El Pardo Palace to transmit to her the condolences of the Spanish nation. But the emptiness that the death of the maharaja left in her life was impossible to fill.

  The nostalgia she felt for India never left her. As the English were no longer there, she tried to go back several times, but the situation in the Punjab was dangerous. Besides, “Why go back?” Ajit asked her, who had become a playboy globetrotter and kept her up to date on any changes. “It’s better if you don’t go back, Mother,” her son wrote to her in 1955, “and for you to keep hold of the memories of the wonderful times you had. Everything is so different now, the spectacle is devastating. I wonder what you would feel if you could see how little there is left of your kingdom. The sad, empty rooms of the palace, the few pieces of furniture that were not sold off covered in dirty cloths and the Moghul-style windows that looked north, Mother, from which you dreamed of being as free as a bird, now without glass in them, letting the cold and snow of winter and the rain of the monsoons filter in between the banisters …”

  Anita never went back to Kapurthala. She took refuge in her memories and lived her last years keeping up to date on the news that came from India. The Congress Party had just passed a resolution to take away all privileges and pensions from the princes. Ajit was right, what sense was there in going back to a world that no longer existed?

  On July 7, 1962, Anita died in her home in Madrid, in the arms of her son, who arrived just in time to be with her in her final moments. When he went to bury her in the Sacramental de San Justo, Ajit faced an unexpected problem. The Catholic Church refused to authorize his mother’s burial in sanctified ground. The clergy alleged that when she had married the maharaja, Anita had rejected her Catholic faith. Even when she was dead, Anita was still pursued by the same forces that had belittled her and tried to push her aside when she was alive. Ajit had to invest a great deal of energy and time in convincing the clergy that his mother had never stopped being a Catholic. He had to present certificates and documents and request the intervention of servants and friends to support his allegations. The Virgin’s mantle, which Anita had offered to her people and which she later rescued from the drawers where a bishop as small-minded as the priests who were now after her had hidden it, served as proof that, even after she was married, she was still as devoted to the Virgin of La Victoria. The mantle ended up in the Cathedral Museum of Málaga, and the Virgin never wore it, contrary to Anita’s wishes.

  In the end, Ajit managed to convince the bigwigs of the church, who finally gave their approval for the burial, on the condition that no symbol of another religion appeared on the tomb. In accordance with the orders of the clergy, one week after having taken her last breath, Anita Delgado Briones could rest, at last, in peace.

  27 The child of that brief union is Sukhjit Singh, the present day maharaja of Kapurthala and general of the Indian Army, decorated several times for his heroic action in the 1972 war between India and Pakistan. He was interviewed for this book in May 2003 in Chandigarh (Punjab).

  WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM

  Ratanjit, the heir who never reigned, died in bed at home in Kapurthala in 1955 at the age of sixty-three. He was accompanied until the end by his English mistress, Stella Mudge. The bed was in the shape of a gondola, in memory of Venice, the city where they had met.

  His brother Kamal died in
1970, in New Delhi, of heart problems. Martand and Arun, the children he had with Princess Kalpana, the beautiful wife who had been on the front cover of Vogue, are now active in politics.

  Ajit, Anita’s son, lived as a dilettante and, faithful to his forbears, he dedicated himself with determination to his passion for women (it was said of him that he was a “ladies’ man”), jazz, and gastronomy. He came to own a huge collection of jazz records and had a reputation for playing the saxophone very well. He wanted to be an actor and lived in Hollywood for a while, where he met Jean Harlow and other stars of the moment. When he went back to India, he papered the walls of his bedroom with photos of famous actresses, but he never married. In the end, he was unable to fulfil his dream of attending the World Cup in football in Spain in 1982 because he fell ill with cancer and died on May 4 that same year in a New Delhi clinic, at the age of sixty-four.

  Bibi Amrit Kaur died two years after Anita on February 5, 1964, from a respiratory illness. She was seventy-five. She never got over the assassination of Gandhi in 1948 and said that without him she felt “rudderless.” Her cremation took place on the shores of the Jamuna River, in the Indian capital, and a huge crowd gathered to file past her ashes for hours.

  In 1975, with one stroke of the pen, Indira Gandhi abolished the last privileges that the maharajas had kept in exchange for peacefully bringing their kingdoms into the Indian Union. Tax exemption, life salaries, and titles were all taken away. The former princes began to be the object of implacable police and tax office investigations, so they gradually got rid of their possessions, selling off their palaces, furniture, and jewels. Those who did not feel devastated by Indira Gandhi’s hammer blow adapted to the new times as best they could. Some, like the maharaja of Udaipur, turned their palaces into luxury hotels, others became businessmen, and still others dedicated themselves to serving the interests of the new India, like the maharaja of Jaipur and his wife, Gayatri Devi, who were ambassadors in Spain, or the maharaja of Wankaner, who became a conservationist and spent his time protecting tigers, another species in danger of extinction.