In 1752, shortly before the last Zamorin was toppled in Calicut, a hitherto forgotten dynasty made a thunderous reappearance upon the political landscape of Kerala. They had a pedigree that matched the Zamorin’s, and at one time it was to their port of Quilon that the world came in avid search of spices and trade. Their Jewish and Christian merchants had dominated commerce for long years until the Arabs combined with Calicut and transformed the rules of the game, leaving Quilon a shadow of its former greatness. In the centuries that followed, the royal family there became so divided and diminished into feuding households, that they were practically nobodies in the larger scheme of things, their land a political backwater. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the Zamorin was forging grand alliances with Turkey and Egypt, deploying colossal armies in his wars against the Portuguese, here in the south its princes were fighting petty clannish battles with minor militias supplied by petty warlords.42 While Manavikrama sneered at presents Vasco da Gama offered him, the humble ruler in Quilon not only lapped up similar trinkets but also submitted gifts in return to honour the Portuguese.43 The wide disparity in prestige between the Zamorin and these southern princes could not be overstated.
In the early eighteenth century, however, this house, known as Kupaka, was to experience such a wonderful resurgence that all Kerala sat up and took notice. They had carved up the south into small principalities among their various offshoots, with the extreme south in the hands of the Rajah of Travancore. He ruled over a tiny patch of land between Cape Comorin and Trivandrum, hovering at the periphery of Kerala’s dynamics, with a voice so feeble that it was universally neglected. Travancore cut a miserable figure before the remainder of Kerala’s princes; in fact if any of the Kupakas possessed at least a semblance of power, it was the branch in Quilon. Like Cochin, the prince of Travancore was perpetually vassal to one force or another. In the sixteenth century the emperors of Vijayanagar seem to have levied tribute from him, and by the seventeenth it was the Nayaks of Madurai who periodically plundered his lands. The Nawab of Arcot, a representative of the mighty Mughal emperor, followed, adding ignominy to the prince’s unglamorous circumstances by treating him merely as a zamindar (landlord) at his court.44 It was with some surprise, then, that Kerala awoke with a jolt when this house of perennial tributaries produced a valiant prince determined to rewrite history and drive a fear of mortal existence through the heart of the coastal polity, saving his lands from that destructive wave of invasive war that would engulf all else very shortly.
It was a prince of Travancore by the now-hallowed name of Martanda Varma who achieved this dramatic revitalisation of the Kupaka dynasty, resurrecting their former pride and standing. Born in 1706, he was, in the words of a contemporary, a ‘man of great pride, courage, and talents, capable of undertaking grand enterprises’.45 These were desperately desired qualities at the time, for by now his house had hit rock bottom. Respect for royal authority was at a complete discount and it was Nair chieftains who decided all affairs at court. Atop every hillock and across every river ruled a Nair lord, enjoying hereditary sway over his estates and engaged in fickle battles with assorted neighbours.46 But for all their ceaseless infighting, the Nairs were wholly united in the preservation of their mutual interests by keeping the Rajah permanently emasculated. Temples too, controlled by influential Brahmin grandees, existed in imperium in imperio, as states within a state, and together these factions jealously guarded their privileges from any encroachment by the monarch. As one of Martanda Varma’s powerless predecessors lamented bitterly, ‘the nobles only desire that the kings sit on the throne like mute statues and do only what the nobles wish them to do!’47
Martanda Varma, however, was determined to put an end to this, and enthusiastic about employing all varieties of violence and intimidation to achieve his goals. Even before he succeeded to the throne, he was thoroughly despised by the most powerful clique in Travancore. Known as the Ettuveetil Pillamar (Lords of the Eight Houses), these Nairs had for long harassed the royal family and tamed the king into spectacular impotence. They whimsically played one branch of the Kupaka clan against the other, keeping its princes forever at war while reaping all the rewards of the attendant lawlessness. The Rajahs were unable to retaliate, as custom precluded fealty to any one king alone, and the Nairs were free to make or break their promiscuous allegiances as they pleased. Their impunity was also due to the fact that tradition denied Rajahs the power to divest any noble family of its ancestral rights. Martanda Varma, however, had scant respect for such usages. He earned the wrath of the Pillamar in the 1720s by scheming to rein them in with the aid of superior mercenary forces from outside Kerala, demonstrating early on that he was thirsting for a fight. For years, then, legend has it, these nobles hounded and chased him from one place to the next, reducing him into an illustrious fugitive in constant fear of physical liquidation. Meanwhile, he could only bide his time patiently and vow ultimate revenge on his adversaries when his day came.
That day came in 1729. Upon his accession, Martanda Varma, as a confirmed enemy of the aristocracy, sent a chilling message across Kerala, showing himself capable of not only breaching age-old mandates of tradition, but also of exercising ruthless force to satisfy his ambitions. He set an eerie example, for instance, by slaughtering his own cousins in cold blood when they refused to fall in line with him.48 While this was essentially a family affair, it spelled out to one and all that Martanda Varma hadn’t any scruples about breaking rules or committing sin. He had a cold, calculating zeal that sent a shiver down the back of the feudal class. The Pillamar were promptly on their guard, for they had supported these murdered cousins, and it was patent they would be next to confront Martanda Varma’s vendetta. Soon enough, when evidence fell into the Rajah’s hands of a conspiracy at court, he had the Pillamar arrested summarily and presented proof of their perfidy. In what was unprecedented, instead of chastising the nobles by demoting their powers but otherwise leaving them unharmed, Martanda Varma ordered their immediate execution.49 Their properties were attached and their women and children sold into slavery, with not a hint of mercy or sympathy. And thus perished forty-two noble houses of the realm, obliterating internal opposition from the Rajah’s path and ringing the death knell of feudalism in the region.50
Over the next two decades, Martanda Varma unleashed a formidable military campaign in south Kerala. He first went to war against his uncle who ruled Quilon. Having annexed his territories and acquired the old port, he moved to conquer other branches of the Kupaka dynasty. He suffered a number of defeats and reversals and at one point nearly lost everything when rival relations united to destroy him. But then, he recruited a contingent of Tamil mercenaries, and with their aid regained the upper hand, using stratagems of war traditionally never observed in Kerala.51 In 1746, the last of his fierce opponents gave up resistance and fled, paving the way for Martanda Varma to claim unchallenged sovereignty over the now-united Kupaka kingdom. By 1749, he began to muscle into domains of other dynasties as well, beyond the frontiers of the old Kupaka country, reducing them to ashes.52 One clever pretext after another was always tailored to justify these aggressions, and with his growing military clout, few were able to stall his advances. There was no clemency and by 1752 the armies of Travancore were hammering at the trembling gates of Cochin, having taken by force all the lands south, destroying also, in the process, the final vestiges of Dutch influence in Kerala.53
While Martanda Varma was building strong armies and emerging as the new fountain of power along the coast, the proud Zamorin had turned into a forlorn relic of the past. All that was needed to shatter his derelict jigsaw state was a fateful confrontation with the arriviste warrior from the south. In 1762, Travancore’s soldiers, under the united command of a central authority, routed the paralysed jumble of feudal lords and spiritless retainers deployed by the Zamorin, decisively crushing any remaining prestige that ancient dynasty could claim in Kerala. The balance of power firmly tilted south, and it was up
to Martanda Varma’s house to guide the future destinies of the land in a changing world. In 1766, when Hyder Ali dispossessed the Zamorin and other northern chieftains forever, it was only Travancore that could withstand his threat, holding its own in the south until the Lion of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, marched in and waged a bloody war in 1789. But he too failed, ultimately, to take Travancore. A terrible heavenly downpour reinforced the bravery of the Nairs (aided by the English East India Company) to destroy the invaders. Martanda Varma’s legacy was destined to survive for many more years.54
Travancore’s unchallenged pre-eminence in Kerala was short-lived, however, as the political winds were blowing in a new, unprecedented direction, mortgaging its destiny to the newest foreign entrants in the subcontinent. The sceptre of colonialism commenced its rise in India, and this foreign power was shortly to dispose of even such tremendous powers as the Mughal emperor and the Marathas, claiming a right of conquest over the entire subcontinent for the first time in history. Martanda Varma apparently recognised this turn of the tide well beforehand. The Zamorins had taken a hostile position against the Portuguese and the Dutch in the name of dynastic gallantry. And they had lost. Discerning a lesson in political pragmatism, Martanda Varma chose, therefore, not to stand in the way of the ascent of the British and sacrifice the conquests of his lifetime at the altar of princely vanity. He satisfied himself instead with the role of a secondary partner to India’s new rulers. On his deathbed in 1758 he issued seven injunctions for political survival to his heirs, the most crucial of which was that ‘the friendship existing between the English East India Company and Travancore should be maintained at any risk, and that full confidence should always be placed in the support and aid of that honourable association’.55 His successors followed this fiat to the letter, making up with loyalty and obedience to their foreign overlords what they often lacked in personality and vigour.
Their people, of course, were rather less well disposed to this colonial marriage of expediency between a monarchy of recent vintage and an empire of foreign origins. As in the rest of the world, the dawn of the nineteenth century witnessed a Kerala at the very cusp of modernity, set to unleash many waves of change and turmoil upon its restless society. The old ways were discarded in favour of new. Victorian morals and views on life were superimposed awkwardly on the ‘heathen’ practices of yore. In the hasty name of ‘progress’, many of those remarkable distinctions that had once set Kerala apart from the rest of India, and indeed the rest of the world, were relinquished. Material prosperity of the classes and, to a lesser extent, the masses, grew. Modern forces were painfully birthing a new people, inching towards a common nationality alongside the remainder of India that was to fulfil its ‘tryst with destiny’ only in 1947. In the interim, rebellions, first violent and armed, then cultural and socio-economic, were provoked, and that strategic relationship advocated by a dying Martanda Varma was more than once challenged. The aspirations of the people were given expression in communal rivalries among themselves first before they integrated against the princely government ruling over them, in effect as a glorified, worshipped, and romanticised local arm of the empire; as a client regime of the British. The fact, it was ultimately realised, was that the fortunes of Kerala’s last prominent princely line were inextricably intertwined in an umbilical bond with the fate of the imperial enterprise in India. So long as the sun did not set on the British Empire, Travancore would endure.
This book is a chronicle of those fascinating times, from the era of Martanda Varma, the masterful warrior king, down to India’s liberation from colonial rule two centuries after his passing. It is the story of those intervening years when the region became a smouldering cauldron of social, political and cultural contestations, which would leave in their wake a new land so different from its incredible ancestor in the era of the Zamorins and the Portuguese. It is the story also of a monarchy that was constantly reconciling its dynastic prerogatives with the demands of its colonial masters, or trying hard to harmonise social forces that slowly drained power from its hands. Martanda Varma’s heirs were enlightened despots, offering their people many material rewards of modernity and standards of living superior to elsewhere in India (with enduring results in present-day Kerala). But these very gifts of noblesse oblige mutated into tools with which the masses would clamour for power and the right to determine their own course devoid of inherited dynastic paternalism. While the Maharajahs began to get comfortable on their thrones and convinced themselves of their own benevolent despotism, the people rose to challenge that entire world and chart a future guided by their collective aspirations alone.
The story of this tremendous transformation is told through the life and times of perhaps one of the most distinguished rulers of Travancore in the modern period. During the 1920s the stormy fortunes of the five million subjects of the state were entrusted into the misleadingly gentle hands of a female monarch, destined to go down in history as the penultimate ruler of Travancore and the last queen of the Kupaka dynasty and its Ivory Throne. She presided over the state during a most critical period, serving her people with considerable ability even as she watched her dynasty suffer inevitable strategic attacks outside while crumbling with dissent within. She occupied a riveting world of court intrigues and illicit conspiracies, hatched not only by scheming politicians beyond the walls of her palace but also by ambitious members of her family in an all-engulfing contest for power. With remarkable stoicism, however, she navigated her troubles—personal, political and dynastic—winning the reverence and love of her people through far-sighted policy and good government. Reigning with much aplomb and majesty on the eve of the dissolution of India’s gilded world of Rajahs and Maharajahs, she earned the unstinting admiration of both the colonial empire that had shaped the country’s past and of nationalists like Gandhi who were moulding its future. And when the final moment of reckoning came in 1947 and Travancore faded before a greater idea of India, she renounced her illustrious (and frequently violent) heritage and effaced herself from the land of her ancestors, as an ultimate romantic emblem of a Kerala that once was. Years later this last heiress of Martanda Varma’s line would die faraway from the kingdom she once ruled, concluding with a tragic dignity a story that had begun generations before.
Note to the Reader
The names in this book follow a certain pattern. For male rulers of the House of Travancore I have used their star-names (tirunals) to avoid confusion. For instance, between 1829 and 1924 all the Maharajahs of Travancore, with one exception, had the personal name, Rama Varma. They are therefore distinguished by their star-names as Swathi Tirunal, Ayilyam Tirunal, Visakham Tirunal, and Mulam Tirunal.
For women, I have retained their personal names in most instances, but wherever confusion is likely to arise, I have relied on nicknames, while full names are given in the endnotes. Thus, for instance, where three women—grandmother, daughter and granddaughter—are all named Mahaprabha, I have retained the proper name for one of them while the others are referred to by their nicknames.
Some titles and names in this book have also been standardised throughout the main text. For instance, the word ‘Maharajah’ alone has variously been spelt in different sources as ‘Maharaja’, ‘Maha Raja’, ‘Maha Rajah’ and so on. So too surnames like ‘Iyer’ have been spelt sometimes as ‘Aiyar’ or ‘Aiyer’. Original versions may be found in the endnotes and the bibliography, but throughout the principal text, I have chosen the ordinarily used version and employed that alone for consistency.
The images in this book, unless specifically mentioned, are either from open resources (such as the paintings by Raja Ravi Varma) or from private collections and the albums of members of the Travancore family.
ORIGINS
The matriarchs of Mavelikkara
1
A Painter Prince
In 1862 when Ravi Varma was presented at court to the Maharajah of Travancore, little did he presume he was destined to emerge as one of the great luminaries
of his generation. He had arrived in Trivandrum, the principality’s capital, as a physically unprepossessing, swarthy stripling, whose facility and sophistication, however, belied his age. At fourteen, he had, in the manner of the Malayali aristocracy of the day, had an education in Sanskrit and Malayalam, with an honourable appreciation of music, drama and, rather unusually, painting. His family were country aristocrats lording over a few thousand acres of freehold at the grace and favour of the Maharajah, who was closely connected to them by marriage. It was, in fact, the principal occupation of the men of Ravi Varma’s clan to marry princesses of Travancore and to spend the remainder of their days in splendid luxury. But that was if they were fortunate, for the number of princesses unengaged at any time did not always match the hordes of eligible young noblemen in waiting, and more aristocrats were left disappointed than exalted to a life of courtly recreations.
Used as he was to a country setting of fields, temples and rustics, for the young boy Trivandrum was a majestic change. Its architecture, a charming blend of the Kerala and European styles, was vastly different from that of his traditional home in Kilimanoor. There were leafy avenues and well-kept boulevards where the Maharajah went out for his drives, surrounded by public buildings, libraries, schools and all the other accessories of a nascent modern state. There were Englishmen and women, novelties he had never before seen, while at court munificent patronage was extended to some of the best musicians, artists and scholars in southern India. The Maharajah, having taken a liking to the boy from Kilimanoor, gave him leave to stay in the capital under a special sponsorship to study art. Accordingly, the uncle, who had chaperoned him to Trivandrum, installed Ravi Varma at their family’s townhouse and departed, leaving the teenager a responsible master of his own destiny.1
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