Surrounded by intrigue and machinations of this nature, peace of mind was in no way part of Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s life at this time. But if there was stress, she never revealed it. Quite to the contrary, she seemed to be at her best with the odds stacked against her, and for all her troubles in 1927, at a state dinner thrown for the visiting Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, Sir William Birdwood Bard, the Resident noted that he had ‘never seen the Maharani Regent more vivacious’.99 She enjoyed herself thoroughly, letting down her reserve, and circulating among all present that evening with unusual enthusiasm. The Valiya Koil Tampuran was also very relaxed, exuding bonhomie and humour with the guests. A jungle shikar he had organised for Sir William had been a great success and he was lauded for taking care of all the details at this ‘admirably designed’ shooting camp.100 In October none other than Mahatma Gandhi had also returned to Travancore and met with the Maharani at Satelmond Palace, expressing to Mr Cotton ‘his highest admiration’ for her.101 To the regret of her opponents, she remained popular both with high dignitaries as well as with common men and women. As Mr Watts declared in his demonstrative and grandiloquent manner:
Circles though small, are yet complete. That is what we proudly feel of Travancore. Set in the centre is our Maharani, radiating wisdom, courage, goodness, and a warm love to all her peoples. The patient light is to me, her Minister, a beacon ever showing the way to justice and to righteousness. Her Highness rules. And so a blessing lies upon this land.102
For all its embellishments and extravagant rhetoric, however, behind this veil of dedicated cooperation and loyalty too cracks had started to appear. The relationship between the Dewan and the Maharani, in reality, was reaching breaking point.
9
The Boudoir Dewan
In the eighteenth century as the mighty Zamorins confronted their inevitable decline, Martanda Varma in Travancore was carving out a centralised, modern state, vesting all power in the monarch. He crushed the petty princes of south Kerala, many of whom were his relations, and defanged the Nair aristocracy, until a military behemoth headed by his house reigned supreme in the region. But for all his remorseless ambition and brutal exercise of force, Martanda Varma was also a compelling strategist. While he expanded the borders of his state and annexed a number of regions, he realised that the people here regarded him merely as an invader and an alien brute. In fact, though their vanquished rulers fled before his mighty armies, the people consistently rebelled, refusing to capitulate, constantly questioning Martanda Varma’s legitimacy over their ancestral lands.1 Something, naturally, had to be done to quell this dangerous hatred for the new king. It was here that Martanda Varma’s shrewd genius unearthed a weapon more formidable than any other from the chronicles of history, deploying it masterfully to render all resistance to his power morally impotent. The Maharajah discovered the power of faith.
In January 1749, a decade before his death, Martanda Varma performed a fabulous, visually stunning ceremony in the great Sri Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Trivandrum. It was loaded with religious meaning, making a tremendous statement to the world at large. That morning the Maharajah laid his sword before the sanctum sanctorum of the temple, and through a number of elaborate and awe-inspiring rituals, dedicated his freshly forged principality to the presiding deity in perpetuity. Travancore, as it existed on that date, now belonged not to Martanda Varma or any of his family, but to Sri Padmanabhaswamy. The Maharajah assumed the ostensibly humble title of Sri Padmanabha Dasa, Servant of the Lord, hereafter claiming to rule over Travancore as the earthly representative of his dynastic deity. In an ingenious stroke, thus, the newly conquered territories went from being the rightful property of their dispossessed Rajahs to becoming the sacred estate of Sri Padmanabhaswamy. Any action against the ruler or the principality was now swamidroham, a crime against the almighty. Travancore, a state built over the debris of ancient houses of lords and princes, and despite the breaches of local law and canon in its very founding, acquired overnight a holy character.2
To question Martanda Varma was now tantamount to violating the sanctity of the hallowed deity in Trivandrum. This was the worst abomination for his orthodox, albeit reluctant, Hindu subjects, and a sure highway to hell. They were now bound to respect him as their sovereign and liege lord by religion. It was a masterstroke by the Maharajah who understood the importance of engineering public imagery and social perception. It created a welcome new narrative, painting Martanda Varma as a great devotee and supremely fervent protector of the faith, selling him and his house as exemplars of unparalleled devotion and spiritual surrender. Arguably, however, it was a calculated political move that sought to shroud the injustices of Martanda Varma’s conquests and dress the bloodshed of war in a cloak of religious mystique.3 He was hardly being original here, for sensible monarchs before him had always used faith as an instrument of power; even the Muslim Sultan Balban of Delhi had himself declared Allah’s Vice Regent on Earth in the thirteenth century in order to secure his power in an unstable political environment.4
If this were not enough, Martanda Varma proceeded to augment the standing of his family also in the eyes of the public, investing them with a semi-divine social personality. This may have been the result of bitter experience. A generation ago, powerful lords of the realm had few reservations about drawing blood from members of the royal house. They were not seen as sacred in the least, existing in a formal state of primus inter pares among other nobles and barons of the land. But this was about to change now. For, in June 1751, Martanda Varma, through means of another extravagant and inventive ceremony known as the hiranyagarbha, upgraded his own dynastic line in caste and social status. As early as 1739, in fact, the Dutch recorded that the Maharajah was anxious to perform a ceremony by constructing a ‘golden cow through whose mouth he was to go in and come out again at the tail in order to bear the title of Brahmin, which one of his ancestors held for himself through such a ceremony, while acquiring for his family, which was before of a lower kind, the elevation to the Kshatriya caste, His Highness wearing the thread on this account’.5 This too was hardly an original strategy: for the last many years the hiranyagarbha was being performed by poligar chieftains in the Tamil country, while closer home the Zamorin of Calicut had also undergone the procedure a generation before. In 1659 the ruler of Tanjore had passed through a golden cow into the arms of the wife of his chief priest, the lady playing ‘the role of midwife, rocking and caressing him while he cried like an infant’.6
Hitherto, the royal family were held to be superior only by a minor degree from others at court and were by and large considered Nairs themselves.7 However, for a good period of time they had been aspiring to propel themselves from the taint of being relatively ordinary in origin to a greater dignity; as early as 1683 Father Vincenzo Maria, one of the four Carmelite friars deputed by the Pope to Kerala, noted that the king of Travancore ‘is by caste a Nair or soldier, but desirous of ennobling himself, with a ridiculous invention he made himself a Brahmin’.8 Indeed, at one time, the Travancores were forbidden even from sitting in the presence of the Rajah of Cochin, who, despite his uninspiring military talents, was respected as the foremost legitimate Kshatriya prince in Kerala.9 The device to obtain superior status, then, was the hiranyagarbha, and Adriaan Moens, the Dutch governor recorded its execution in the reign of Martanda Varma’s successor some years later: ‘It is true he is not of noble birth, but he caused himself to be made a noble following the example of his uncle [Martanda Varma] who first caused himself to be ennobled. This is called by the people of Malabar “to be reborn” … It is derived from the droll ceremonial which the ennobled person goes through viz. passing through a big cow made of gold; after which the golden cow is beaten to pieces and divided among the Nambutiris or priests; and this king [i.e., the heir to Martanda Varma] was also so raised to nobility but with this difference that the ceremonies performed in his case were more complete and costly than those of his uncle, on account of which not only has he himself
been made a noble but his posterity also have been ennobled once for all.’10
This status having been obtained, successive Maharajahs performed a slightly amended version of the ceremony where they sat in a golden urn, representing a golden womb, while Vedic mantras for pregnancy and then birth were chanted, after which they emerged, ‘reborn’ and having, in the words of Kosambi, ‘acquired a higher caste, while the obliging Brahmins acquired the vessel of gold as part of their fee’.11 They all remained, nevertheless (though perhaps revealingly) very touchy about their new-found Kshatriya status, and one royalist historian would go to great pains in the late nineteenth century to ‘prove’ that the Travancore royal family had always been highborn and that hiranyagarbha had nothing to do with a caste upgrade.12 The fact, however, was that it had ennobled the dynasty, providing them, if not equality with Cochin, at least the pretensions of higher prestige and all the public ascendancy that accompanied it. All this concerted deification of the monarchy had, in the words of a staunch nineteenth century royalist,
…the desired effect, for since that time the people of Travancore have had a devoted attachment and sacred regard for the royal house … This religious regard for the sovereignty is so great that the people of Travancore, both high and low, would not dare to speak ill of the Maharajah or the royal family …Thus this wise [Martanda Varma] strengthened the position of his heirs with every support, religious, political, or military … so that the position of the Travancore sovereign has become somewhat parallel to that of the Pope in Rome; and therefore neither the people nor the servants of the State would dare to disobey the king or act against the wishes of the sovereign, whether royalty was represented by an ignorant minor, or an educated sovereign in his dotage.13
Thus Martanda Varma, once hounded and harassed by his nobles and people, established for himself and his successors an unassailable position as socio-religious dignitaries. He secured a permanent insurance against any challenge to royal authority through inventive ritual devices and through theatrical customs that could camouflage their lack of historical pre-eminence.14 In 1673 van Rheede had recorded that the subjects of the ruler were ‘not bound to observe any orders, commands, or whims and council decisions of the king which are not in conformity with their [own] laws, welfare, or privileges, and have not been approved in their own district and ratified at the meeting of their district assemblies’.15 As a scholar would remark, in the past:
The princes were never above the laws laid down by the [people]; they were as accountable as everybody else. On their part, they also never aspired to rise extraordinarily beyond the average citizen. Thus it is that one encounters a total absence of any carefully constructed self-image of royalty in Kerala literature, whereas the rest of southern India and India witnesses the same in ample measure in most royalist literature, including the prasastis. The overriding theme of these kind of writings was to construct a superhuman royal image of the kings based on origin myths, dynastic traditions, genealogies, etc. to legitimise their right as hereditary rulers. Even this aspect of divinization of monarchy to invoke religious symbolism and thereby legitimise political power was absent in Kerala. The first such instance came about in the late eighteenth century, when the Maharajah of Travancore attempted to legitimise his rule as Padmanabha Dasa.16
After Martanda Varma, thus, people began to ‘look up the Rajah with a degree of respect bordering on devotion’ and he began to be considered, in the words of a traveller, ‘the sacred representation of the tutelary divinity of the country … to whom the country is dedicated and belongs’.17 He, additionally, backed it in real terms by obtaining complete control over the army and divesting Nair lords of the final vestiges of feudal power. He began to import Tamil Brahmins to aid his government and to work closely with the royal family; owing to their own recent social promotion, they mingled less with Nairs as in the past and more with ‘twice born’ Brahmins, who were happy to recognise their new claims in return for economic rewards. As Susan Bayly notes, ‘it had come to be accepted that the king must have Brahmins to receive his largesse’, for without them ‘he could not make the transformation from blood-spilling warrior to divinely mandated king’.18 Much like he defeated rivals by commissioning mercenaries from outside, Martanda Varma began to replace the traditional influence of the Nairs, thus, with alien assistance. This too was a universally recognised political policy; throughout Central Asia and the Middle East, there were slave warriors called mamluks brought in from outside by great emperors, ‘due to a deep-seated suspicion’ towards local powers and nobles whose loyalties were at best dubious.19 Martanda Varma also assumed unto the government the estates of the old princes and barons he had destroyed so that 75 per cent of all agricultural land in Travancore was hereafter classed as pandaravaka or state land, giving him direct control over vast economic resources.20 Altogether as Robin Jeffrey points out, ‘non-Nair influences and institutions’ were created around the Maharajah, reducing that caste into a crippling state of dependence and a force incapable of challenging the pseudo-Kshatriya and imported-Brahmin centre.21
The Nairs were not, to be sure, however, completely ejected. They constituted most of the military; and leading officers and servants of the state, though no longer hereditary claimants, had to be invariably selected from their caste, at least until enough Brahmins were procured. Unlike in the past when wealthy and ancient houses claimed power, hereafter individuals even of humble backgrounds could rise by merit to serve the Maharajahs. As the Dutch governor Julius Stein van Gollenesse would remark, ‘All the great men of his kingdom called “Anavies” are men of common Nair origin and their rank is not inherited by their descendants; accordingly they depend entirely upon the ruler, they owe everything to him and they obey him with a slavish submission; and as their welfare depends entirely on the favour of their master, the king is served with great promptitude and from them he never need fear conspiracies against his person or possessions.’22 Their princely patrons could, thus, count upon their loyalty. For instance, Martanda Varma’s successor’s most highly valued general and minister was a Nair of obscure and impoverished origins, not from the recently divested traditional aristocracy. It was this man, Kesava Pillai,23 who led Travancore against the invading armies of the Sultan of Mysore and forged treaties of protection with the English East India Company, through all of which he remained steadfast in his loyalty to the Maharajah and to the enterprise that was modern Travancore. Of course, homilies were paid to the Nairs in general and they continued to be celebrated in official accounts as ‘the lords of the country’ and as ‘guardians of the public weal’. But in reality their power had reached its lowest ebb, and they knew it.24
A final, desperate effort to recover their lost prestige was made shortly after a young, indolent prince succeeded to power in 1798 and surrounded himself with a coterie headed by a ‘stupid and unprincipled’ Brahmin. His cabinet, a ‘triumvirate of ignorance, profligacy, and rapacity’,25 offered in the guise of economic reforms such tyrannical measures that a rebellion was provoked in the state, showing that the Nairs still had enough fight left in them. Its leader, Velu Tampi, was a Nair of superior family standing, who camped outside Trivandrum with a vast militia (something that Martanda Varma would never have allowed, and which was a sign that the royal family’s grip was slipping).26 He orchestrated an easy coup by which the cabinet was dismissed (and brutally punished) and Tampi himself took over the office of the Dewan of Travancore. As an administrator he was ferocious, and his adherents liquidated those who made the mistake of standing in his way. ‘His utmost merit,’ we are informed, ‘lay in the fact that he was a strong man and inspired dread.’27 A formidable dispensation began to exercise power, and Velu Tampi slowly even had the Maharajah quivering before him. A single Nair leader, it seemed, was on the cusp of undoing all that Martanda Varma had achieved for his dynasty, reclaiming power for the old feudal class of the land.
But attempting to reverse the course of history was an initiative
doomed to fail. By now the English East India Company had secured considerable ascendance over the internal affairs of Travancore owing to the fact that the state owed large sums of money to them from the war against Tipu Sultan of Mysore. Their Resident in the capital, Major Macaulay, initially saw in Tampi an able man who could help the Company recover its dues, and therefore boosted the Dewan with his own support, all at the cost of the Maharajah who could only fret and fume. But when Tampi attempted to raise funds by reducing the pay of the army, he found a mutiny on his hands, and 10,000 soldiers marched to Trivandrum to demand his dismissal. He was seen as working for the British and not for his Nair comrades and for the people of Travancore. He promptly obtained help from the Company’s forces and had the insurrection quashed. One particularly unfortunate rebel had ‘his legs tied to two elephants and the animals were driven in opposite directions, tearing the victim to pieces’.28 The Maharajah in 1805 was then made to give his blessings to a renewed treaty with the Company, doubling his tribute to them, and imposing fresh financial liabilities on the royal treasury. Supported by the British from the outside, emaciating the monarch on the inside, Velu Tampi became the most powerful man in Travancore, little realising, however, that these happy days were all a prelude to the cruel fate that awaited him ahead.
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