In a similar manner, the sister-Ranis also selected nobles of superior caste as their partners, and these gentlemen, chosen invariably from Ravi Varma’s clan, were equally disposable at will. Fancy titles were granted them but never any real power or royal status, and they were expected mainly to serve their wives by fathering the next generation of the dynasty. Indeed, as late as the 1920s, the Ranis’ husbands were ‘entitled only to a monthly allowance from the durbar of Rs 200 per mensem with meals from the palace and the use of a brougham and pair of horses’.24 Even into the 1940s, at grand banquets, while the Ranis and their children would be served four varieties of dessert, the consorts were entitled to only two, while ordinary guests had to satisfy themselves with a single option.25 Custom discouraged them from living with the Ranis, and they had to await royal summons whenever their wives wished to entertain them. Indeed, they were disallowed even from travelling in the same carriage as the Ranis, and if due to any reason they had to, it was essential that they sat opposite and not next to their wives.26 In public they had to bow to them and refer to them always as ‘Your Highness’. They were certainly fathers of Maharajahs, but in the matrilineal system it did not matter who your father was, as much as who your mother and uncle were. To those more accustomed to the patriarchal tradition, all this seemed rather outlandish and perhaps even unnatural. But as the writer in The Lady wistfully remarks, these sons and husbands were ‘used to this sort of procedure from long centuries of customary practice’ and would say with ‘smiles playing upon their lips’ that they were meant to be private citizens, even if they were born or married to royalty.27
The Travancore dynasty, however, was not really known for its fecundity and historically there was always a lack of girls born of blood royal. The family produced males in healthy abundance, but usually with fewer sisters to continue the line. Since the fourteenth century, in such instances it was customary to adopt girls from another old family in Kerala and install them as Ranis in Travancore, with their sons taking the dynasty into the next generation. These adoptions were always made from the house of the Kolathiri Rajah of Cannanore. Once a proud prince in Malabar (though nowhere as grand as the Zamorin), this was a Rajah who used to lord over a thriving port and, like all petty potentates worth their salt, flaunted a fanciful pedigree from ancient dynasties and mythical kings not to speak of the sun, moon and other heavenly entities. In other words, the Kolathiri line was equal in stature to Travancore’s, and their females were eminently qualified to replace the latter’s Ranis. In fact, Ayilyam Tirunal and Visakham Tirunal themselves were descendants of one such royal adoptee who was brought in from Cannanore and installed as Rani in 1788. By this time, however, the Kolathiri Rajah’s circumstances were rather appalling, and his family had swollen into several unwieldy, quarrelling branches. Its members, in the words of Canter Visscher, ‘both male and female, [were] so numerous that they [lived] in great poverty for the most part’.28 To add to their agonies, soon after 1788 they were forced into exile and had to abandon their ancestral lands altogether, when the fearsome armies of Tipu Sultan of Mysore routed their feeble defences and overran all of Malabar. Eventually the English East India Company annexed the region and most constituents of the no-longer-royal Kolathiri dynasty accepted the invitation of the Maharajah of Travancore, their affluent and still afloat relative, to settle in his state, where estates, pensions and the offer of a better life were placed at their grateful disposal. They were accommodated in various parts of the principality, with one division of these immigrants establishing themselves in the town of Mavelikkara, a hub of the pepper trade in bygone times.29
Among the Mavelikkara stock was a young princess by the name of Arya. She was considered especially important among all the exiles on account of the fact that it was her older sister who had been adopted in 1788 as the Rani of Travancore. In the decades that followed, Arya’s offspring became comfortably ensconced as aristocrats in Mavelikkara, when in 1857 the Kolathiris, despite their loss of princely status, were again called upon to supply two Ranis to the Maharajah of Travancore. That year, it so happened, the sole female member in the royal family, the only sister of Ayilyam Tirunal and Visakham Tirunal, died giving birth to a boy. This infant was expected to succeed his uncles one day as Maharajah, but without any sisters of his own, the line would terminate with him. It was to avoid this eventuality that Arya’s heirs, as close cousins of the royal house, were asked to provide two girls to be installed as Senior Rani and Junior Rani respectively. They were to be entrusted with the lofty task of furnishing successors for their adoptive baby brother, and it was thus that two children, great-granddaughters of Princess Arya, were separated from their mother and siblings in Mavelikkara and escorted to Trivandrum. Their ties with the Kolathiri dynasty were ritually severed and they were duly consecrated as Ranis of Travancore, with the elaborate names of Bharani Tirunal Lakshmi Bayi Tampuran and Bharani Tirunal Parvathi Bayi Tampuran.
Neither of the sisters was destined to lead particularly happy lives, however. This was partly on account of the onerous dynastic task they were encumbered with, as also because of the intrigues that inevitably plagued royal courts. The Junior Rani was widowed while in her teens, and selected a second husband in order to do her duty to the royal family. She produced five children but all three that survived were boys. They, of course, joined the ranks of future Maharajahs of Travancore but in turn had no sisters to give them royal heirs. In 1893, then, the Junior Rani herself died of cancer and any hopes of her producing female children were permanently dashed.30 Lakshmi Bayi, the Senior Rani, on the other hand, did not have any children at all, even though she emerged as a remarkable lady of considerable ability and personal accomplishments. Like Kalyani Pillai, she commanded excellent cultural attainments, especially when it came to music, and played the veena with expert facility. Her beauty is believed to have been quite exquisite; as Pierre Loti, the French novelist wrote, with forgivable Western hyperbole: ‘her face does not seem to belong to our times, and it is only in old Indian miniatures that I have had a glimpse of such princesses.’31 Following in Kalyani Pillai’s footsteps, Lakshmi Bayi also obtained a sound English education, and her letters to her consort, with such unorthodox romantic salutations as ‘My darling husband’, ‘My most beloved husband’, etc., are delightful works of prose that bespeak impressive literary potential.32 She also possessed considerable self-confidence that enabled her to call a spade a spade, and stand up even to dominating Maharajahs like Ayilyam Tirunal. At one time, when the latter wanted to dismiss her husband and select her a fresh consort, she stuck by her marriage, winning the appreciation of Queen Victoria for her ‘womanly’ loyalty and virtue, of which much was made in those days.33 In the 1880s, on a visit to Madras, large crowds of people came out to catch a glimpse of the Rani, who was something of a celebrity, perceived by many, to quote Loti again, as ‘a charming personification of India’.34
By the 1890s, however, Lakshmi Bayi’s singular preoccupation was posterity. Having no children of her own, and with the Junior Rani leaving behind only sons, it was evident to everybody at court that yet again the royal family would have to bring in girls through adoption. ‘Many thoughts in connection with this trouble my mind perpetually,’ the Rani wrote to a niece. ‘Oh God! I do not have the strength to think on this! The fortunate ones are those who can live happily without such thoughts.’35 As the eldest member of the dynasty it was up to her to set the wheels in motion and ask her adoptive brother, by now the Maharajah of Travancore, to adopt girls to succeed her as Ranis and to provide their lineage male and female heirs for the future. Lakshmi Bayi only hoped ‘to be spared long enough to bring up two girls as to inherit my estate and its appurtenances’, concerned as she also was that, like the Junior Rani, she too might die leaving the precarious issue of succession unsettled.36 To resolve this, however, she did not have to look very far, turning instinctively to her relations in Mavelikkara to select suitable girls there. And the children she had in mind came
not merely with the conventional Kolathiri bloodline that was mandatory for adoption, but also with a more fashionable distinction that rendered them immensely attractive as candidates. For they were grandchildren of none other than the most prominent subject of the state and that pioneering artist, Raja Ravi Varma.
The greatest casualty of Ravi Varma’s successes in the world of art was his family life. In 1866 he married a child bride aged about eleven, called Mahaprabha. Lovingly known by her vernacular pet name of Kochupanki, she was a member of the Kolathiri family with more than one intimate connection at the royal court. Her uncle was an influential grandee in Trivandrum,37 but in what was certainly more salient, Kochupanki was the youngest sister of the Senior and Junior Ranis of Travancore. Ravi Varma, in other words, was married to the sister Lakshmi Bayi and Parvathi Bayi left behind in Mavelikkara when they were adopted in 1857.38 The match was probably arranged by the Senior Rani herself, and proved most propitious for the young artist at the time. For Kochupanki brought him even closer to the royal house and her sisters went out for their way to help him navigate court politics, not to speak of frequently assisting him with presents of expensive art supplies. At the time of his marriage with Kochupanki, however, he was not so famous as an artist as much as another member of the court who happened to like to paint, and his intentions to take this up as a profession were unclear. The marriage, then, was just another alliance between two leading families of the principality. But, as fate would have it, the relationship was doomed to be unhappy from the beginning. For Ravi Varma was devoted to his art, with a vision that transcended the cloistered environs of feudal Kerala, looking out at the world beyond and all that it offered to a man of his creative temperaments. What Kochupanki, whose sex and circumstances precluded her from a broader world view, desired on the other hand, was her own notion of a regular marriage and domestic fulfilment.
At the time of their wedding she was still a child and did not make too many demands of her husband, happy to let him pursue his studies and spend all his time in Trivandrum. Even when she matured, Kochupanki is said to have been exceedingly understanding in the beginning, even if she did not comprehend why her aristocrat husband had to work so much at all or why, of all things in the world, he wished to be a painter. But with time the gaps of intellect and ambition between them, not to speak of their entirely divergent views of life, began to impose a strain on the marriage. Ravi Varma’s absences from Mavelikkara grew, and resentment and depression crept into Kochupanki’s life. Reports of his activities in Bombay and other great cities, that she could only vaguely and incoherently have known about, reached Mavelikkara. Exaggerated by gossipmongers and delivered to jealous relatives, Kochupanki found herself facing a frustrating combination of embarrassment and anxiety about a husband whose personality she failed to fathom and whose intellectual spirit she could never match. In the words of a descendant, ‘She was utterly incompatible with her husband, and his highly developed aesthetic sense and urges found no sympathy in her. She was exactly the opposite: a down-to-earth, plain, unimaginative woman while he took his sense of creativity to the heights of worship. She was often enraged at his using models for his paintings, and had no taste for beautiful things. The play of light upon skin or leaf would send her husband into ecstasies. But Kochupanki could not have cared less.’39 Ravi Varma too made few efforts to alleviate his wife’s stress, or sympathise with her unhappy situation, distracted and immersed in the artistic (and possibly equally material) opportunities the more cosmopolitan world outside Kerala presented him. Husband and wife seemed to occupy entirely different milieus to all who beheld them.
By the 1880s the marriage of the celebrated artist and his orthodox wife lay in a predictable shambles. Kochupanki, miserable and lonely, lost interest in living life for the sake of it and became, in the words of her nephew, ‘addicted to drink’.40 Her temper became uncontrollable; once when her husband brought home ‘a huge crystal chandelier of Murano workmanship, Kochupanki, angry at his protracted absence, threw it out of the door and the priceless artefact shattered to pieces’.41 It is also believed that both of them may have been tempted to pursue other relationships, given their prolonged separations,42 but Kochupanki had to grapple with an especially difficult psychological strain. She now had the unenviable reputation of being the neglected wife of a flamboyant Ravi Varma whose successes rendered him an object of envy and sarcasm among less gifted but stingingly vocal members of their class. This was in addition to her general feeling of inadequacy that came from having to live all her life in the shadows of her exalted royal sisters in Trivandrum. Alcoholism fused with relentless depression into a deadly cocktail and in 1891, while her husband sojourned in Bombay, Kochupanki died an inglorious and premature death. She was only thirty-six, leaving behind sorrowful memories of a life unfulfilled. Ravi Varma is said to have felt a sense of remorse when he heard the news, but this did not prompt him to hasten to Kerala. Instead, he continued with his commitments elsewhere, and by the time he returned home many months later, Kochupanki’s remains had already been turned to ashes and dissolved into sacred waters by her sons, where finally, one presumes, she found the peace that had always eluded her.
For all its tribulations, however, the marriage of Ravi Varma and Kochupanki was not without offspring, and five children were born to this unlikely couple. Two of these were boys named Kerala Varma and Rama Varma respectively. The former inherited his mother’s addiction to alcohol and ‘belying much early promise, turned a profligate’.43 Like her, he too did not survive his thirty-sixth birthday and is believed to have died in 1912 in an accident in the Himalayas where he was wandering for unknown reasons.44 The other boy followed in the creative footsteps of his father and studied painting at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay, going on to live a constructive life, even if he never achieved any comparable fame or celebrity as an artist. Of the three daughters, the eldest born in 1872 was named, like her mother, Mahaprabha, and was followed by Bhageerathi in 1878 and Uma in 1882.45 Mahaprabha was the beauty of the family. Fair-skinned, with very attractive features, rendered all the more appealing by an aristocratic demeanour, she was, according to a descendant, ‘an artist’s dream’.46 Her father recognised this and featured her in one of his most famous paintings, There Comes Papa (1893), and proceeded to depict many of his goddesses and celestial beauties in her image. The youngest girl, Uma, was also pretty but Bhageerathi, known within family circles as Kochukunji, presented a stark contrast to her sisters. Photographs reveal a much less appealing countenance, not helped by a conspicuous squint, and it is very likely she did not win any particular appreciation for her looks as a young girl.
In the late 1880s, before her mother’s death, Mahaprabha married a nephew of her father’s from the Kilimanoor family. Known as Kuttan Tampuran, he was an erudite scholar and one of the first members of the aristocracy to obtain a college education in Madras. He was also the author of a comprehensive and scholarly translation of the Sanskrit dictionary into Malayalam and English, and was to spend much of his life in similar intellectual pursuits.47 Sometime later, Kochukunji, the second sister, married a gentleman called Bhagavan Tampuran,48 and if Mahaprabha was the beauty among the sisters, he was the more handsome of their husbands. Tall, with a very strong, masculine appearance, he also possessed in great abundance something Malayalis were obsessed with: hair! For both men and women a wealth of hair was considered a major attraction and Bhagavan Tampuran was blessed with long, lustrous locks that are said to have reached down well below his waist. This he would tie up on the side of his head in an enormous (and then stylish) bun called kudumi, provoking much envy in less endowed men around him.49 Uma, the youngest, was also married in due course, although it was through the first two daughters that Ravi Varma’s name would gain an added sheen of princely class in the decades to come.
With the passing of Kochupanki, and with Ravi Varma travelling endlessly across India with his art, Lakshmi Bayi assumed the responsibility of looking aft
er his motherless children. She was not involved in the humdrum decisions about their lives but had tremendous influence over bigger matters, including their weddings. The Rani after all did have a vested interest in this, for her intention was for her nieces to give her baby girls she could adopt into the royal family as future Ranis and mothers of prospective Maharajahs of Travancore. With this in mind, she embarked upon a long pilgrimage in 1894 to the Tamil temple town of Rameswaram, accompanied by Mahaprabha and Kochukunji. The royal party journeyed hundreds of miles through the heat and dust of the peninsula, all the way to the eastern coast of India.
Rameswaram is considered one of India’s holiest cities, and legend places its origins in a deeply spiritual act by Rama, the mythological hero of the Ramayana. The story goes that after vanquishing the evil King of Lanka, Rama bathed in the sapphire seawaters at Rameswaram to wash away the bloody sins of war. He also consecrated a temple to Mahadeva here and for thousands of years pilgrims travelled to this town to undertake the ritual bath called Sethu Snanam and to worship Rama’s deity. Lakshmi Bayi too arrived here with the same intentions, and undertook that ceremonial dip in the sea, to wash away the accumulated sins of her ancestors, and propitiated Mahadeva for the baby girls she so ardently desired. And of course the locals were fascinated. For the custom among other pilgrims was to ask the gods for baby boys, but here was a devout queen who had travelled an enormous distance with the sole purpose of seeking a boon of little girls.
By the time the royal party departed Rameswaram, a great aura of magic and divine mystery had been built around them. It was said that the Rani, with her piety and absolute devotion, had succeeded in pleasing the deity. So much so that one day while she stood before the sanctum sanctorum of the temple, she had a divine vision of Mahadeva himself. He appeared before Lakshmi Bayi, the story goes, in all that majesty typical to gods while making such appearances in the mortal world, and proceeded to personally promise her the gift of female heirs in her line.50 Another version states that the deity featured in a dream the Rani had, for the same purpose of guaranteeing baby girls to her family.51 Either way, a fittingly dramatic and certainly apocryphal tale was woven around the whole affair, and by the time the pilgrims returned to Travancore, many were convinced that the fruits of their journey would be borne shortly. And oddly enough, whether by heavenly machinations, or by Lakshmi Bayi’s determined conviction or simply because of destiny, they were.
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