Ivory Throne

by Manu S. Pillai

  You are quite right in saying that his sudden resignation would create a sensation and give food for undesirable talk and newspaper scribbling, but if I yield to his protest for fear of facing a situation of the kind, whenever in future I am unable to see eye to eye with the Dewan on State matters, he might carry the point with the threat of resignation. It is certainly essential in the interests of efficient administration to maintain the prestige of the Dewan, but when this cannot be done without imperilling that of the Ruler … you will doubtless agree that the former should give away. In any case Mr Watts has concern with the administration of this country only for a few months more, whereas mine extends a few years longer. Also his resignation, if ever it takes place, will be attributed by the intelligent people to pique rather than to just indignation born of a genuine sense of wrong.99

  Sethu Lakshmi Bayi was obviously determined in this matter, revealing again the occasional staunchness that lay behind her normally gentle exterior, latent until it was provoked out of its state of regular composure. ‘I know in his heart [he] desires to remain on as Dewan,’ noted the Resident, aware that even Mr Watts was taken aback by the Maharani’s decision to put her foot down on this occasion when he threatened to resign.100 She, in the meantime, had even decided that in the event that he did carry out his distasteful threat, the Devaswom Commissioner would be placed in charge of the administration till a suitable candidate was found, even if the fact that he was an ‘ultra orthodox Brahmin’ would offend the Nairs. Asking the Dewan to contemplate the writing on the wall, she noted:

  I am extremely sorry that you should have brought matters to a head by your threat of resignation in the event of Rangaswami Iyengar succeeding to the post of the Director of Public Instruction. If you consider that to continue in office after Rangaswami Iyengar’s appointment would be incompatible with your honour and principles alike, I shall say no more, as I have decided to give Rangaswami Iyengar a real chance to prove his competence. I am perfectly sensible of the direct and indirect consequences of your threatened precipitate action, and perhaps the most humiliating and painful of them all would be to face the inevitable taunt that the very man in supporting whose nomination I went out of my way and raised a storm in the country, unprecedented in its violence and extent, eventually fell out with me. If you are still determined to resign and are not going to be influenced by any other consideration, than that which has so far weighed with you, I request I may be informed when you propose relinquishing your office, so that I may instruct you as to whom to hand over charge.101

  This letter was not only an admonishment and clear articulation of her lack of trust, disfavour and her more than evident disappointment at having backed such an unreliable person in the face of loud opposition, but also a clever manipulation that steeped the Dewan instantly in guilt at having forced her to the wall. He had acted churlish and cantankerous for far too long and while she was accommodating at first, he had carried it too far, compelling her to put her foot down, no matter what the implications to her own government and her reputation. The Government of India also backed her and a telegram from Delhi made it clear that the Dewan had to be induced to ‘moderate his attitude’ and realise that he was, after all, an employee, and not the source of all authority in the state.102 The Resident’s suspicion that he really desired to continue as Dewan and that he had not quite expected this forceful response from the Maharani was now confirmed. For soon after her verbal dressing-down to him, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi received from the Dewan an apology, again couched in words of great loyalty and the usual flair for histrionics:

  The possibility of Your Highness being exposed to humiliation and painful taunt leaves only one course open to me. I should be something less than man did I not stand between your Highness and that. Dissociating myself from my office, I find I have strength and the courage to bear my cross, humbled and shorn of pride. Therefore, I surrender my position to Your Highness. I am prepared to give Mr Rangaswami Iyengar another chance, as desired by Your Highness. The safeguarding of the prestige and authority of the Dewan will, I am sure, be safe in Your Highness’ keeping, so long as the incumbent commands Your Highness’ confidence. I have caused Your Highness more pain than I thought. I am sorry. I too have suffered over this incident.103

  A rapprochement was, thus, effected, and as it happened, Iyengar proved to be a success as Director of Public Instruction, uncovering major irregularities in the Department of Education the following year, and putting an end to a great deal of inside corruption.104 But peace between the Maharani and her Dewan was not to last, for soon they were to argue about a similar appointment of a judge to the High Court. ‘I cannot help observing that I am becoming increasingly nervous when I am obliged to take an opposite view to yours on public questions,’ she wrote to him, afraid that he might continue this tendency of making a public spectacle of all their disagreements.105 By 1929 their relations were so fractured that it had become ‘impossible and Her Highness has become altogether unwilling to give him an interview as she informed me she was afraid he might be rude to her’.106 As it happened, the Dewan was quick to lay the blame for all his troubles with the Maharani at the door of none other than the Valiya Koil Tampuran, whose earlier indiscretions seemed to have invited for him the misfortune of being everyone’s favourite scapegoat. But it did not convince many, and as a future Resident noted,

  The trouble between Mr Watts and ‘the Palace’ lay not in the big question of policy but was due to the fact that Mr Watts considered that he alone, as Dewan, was the actual Ruler of the State and that Her Highness should blindly follow his advice. If this advice was not always taken, he lay the blame on Her Highness’ Consort, the Valiya Koil Tampuran, and talked of him as ‘the Boudoir Dewan’.107

  Indeed, when Mr Watts left the state at the conclusion of his term, there were even rumours that he had in his possession letters of recommendation given by Rama Varma to various candidates to enable them to get government jobs, and that he had plans to publish these in newspapers to discredit the Valiya Koil Tampuran.108 Nothing of the sort really transpired, but it was clear that by the end the Maharani’s husband and her Dewan could not agree. ‘The position in 1925-26,’ it was reported, ‘was that the Valiya Koil Tampuran and Mr Watts were great friends.’ But soon afterwards, the Dewan was ‘beginning to become swollen-headed and undoubtedly hoped to become the uncrowned king of Travancore.’ With the passage of years, and with the Maharani making it clear that she and not he was the head of the government, and that she had no intentions of sitting quietly at the margins, allowing him to run the state all by himself, ‘Mr Watts became more and more headstrong, and took upon himself to pass orders in cases where it has always been the custom for the Ruler of the State to do so. Thus started the gulf which thereafter became wider and wider between the Dewan and Her Highness the Maharani Regent. The Maharani Regent began to demand explanations from Mr Watts, and in some instances, I understand, she cancelled his orders. Mr Watts ascribed these actions by Her Highness to the interference of the Valiya Koil Tampuran and instead of being a great friend … he became his bitterest enemy.’ Such was the hatred, in fact, that the Dewan now harboured for Rama Varma that by 1929 ‘he was unable to say anything bad enough about the Valiya Koil Tampuran’.109

  The Maharani, however, did not make too much of this. It had become a force of habit for those who opposed her to target her husband. But with the termination of the loyalty and friendship of Mr Watts, she was genuinely pained. She could discern a pattern in his behaviour, oscillating between overblown claims of fealty and absolute recalcitrance, but this did not mean she could not appreciate his positive qualities, including a drive to do good and to improve the lives of her people. Writing at the height of her dispute with him, she seemed unhappy and resigned at the turn of things, even though she was determined in her stand.

  I am only too glad to testify to his great powers of initiative, drive, and general parts, not to speak of the facility and virility of his spe
ech and writing. If his intolerance of restraint had been less pronounced, if he could have viewed public questions with greater detachment and calmness, if he could have brought to bear upon big questions more judgement than passion, it would have been difficult to beat him as an administrator. He has besides rendered considerable personal services to me. If he does go, I shall be genuinely sorry. [However,] in accepting Mr Watts’s challenge I do not regard the issue as between Watts and Rangaswami Iyengar, but as between my sense of fairness and his prejudice.110

  In 1925 Sethu Lakshmi Bayi fought a veritable battle of principles against the orthodoxy to appoint Mr Watts her Dewan. And in 1928 it was precisely those very principles she defended again, this time battling the man she had once protected from insult and opprobrium, even if it meant losing him and facing humiliation and ridicule from all her jeering opponents in Travancore.

  10

  Black Magic

  In the early nineteenth century, when Col Munro arrived in Travancore, the state had just emerged from the violent throes of the revolt of Velu Tampi. His comrades and he had been utterly routed but the British were yet to decide whether or not the principality, with its finances and administration in such spectacular chaos, deserved retention as an autonomous unit. Annexation was a perfectly real possibility. The Maharajah was supremely incompetent, marked ‘by imbecility, caprice, and other qualities’ making him ‘wholly unequal to the task of Government’.1 Real power was then entrusted to the son of a previous ruler, Ummini Tampi, who now held the position of Dewan.2 He was a capable man like the redoubtable Velu Tampi, keeping the monarch on a tight budgetary and political leash, working closely with the British authorities. But in 1810 when Rani Gowri Lakshmi Bayi came to the throne, he met in her his final match. While she acknowledged the supremacy of the English East India Company, she refused to tolerate further humiliation in the form of Tampi’s dictations, finding an artful way to eliminate him from the state altogether.

  In a manner that distinguished her relations with Munro, she played up her ostensible helplessness, projecting herself as a vulnerable female in need of protection from the vile intentions of all the evil men around her. Playing a damsel in distress was a cunning strategy to dissociate herself from the foolish reign of her predecessor, and win sympathy from the new Resident and his masters. ‘As I consider the gentlemen of the Company in the light of parents, and myself as their daughter, I have committed my cares and services to them, and expect the comfort and happiness of myself and my country from their justice and protection only. If the Company do not protect and assist me,’ she asked with dramatic poignancy, ‘who will protect me?’3 Gowri Lakshmi Bayi, thus, having touched a chivalrous nerve with Col Munro, the latter decided to play a knight in shining armour to this helpless Indian princess. The Rani then went on to state categorically what she desired. ‘My representation is this, that I do not require the services of the present Dewan. As I am a woman, it is not becoming to write more but I earnestly trust that my wishes may be taken into serious consideration, and that the present Dewan may be removed from office.’4 It did not help that the incumbent had embezzled property belonging to the demised Velu Tampi, and this became the crime for which he was to be expelled. Col Munro gallantly shouldered the Rani’s cause and ordered the ‘harsh and vindictive’ Dewan’s removal.5 Following this, the Rani conveniently informed him that since she regarded him as her brother, nothing would please her more than if he took up the position himself.

  Ummini Tampi, after some retaliatory seething and intriguing against the Rani and Resident, was banished to Chingleput. By all accounts he was an unpleasant man and the previous Maharajah had openly declared that if he had had a chance, he would have liked to himself shoot him. Tampi also likely deserved the punishment imposed on him. But at the time of his departure, Gowri Lakshmi Bayi revealed herself to be so vehement in her hatred that she was prepared to inflict on him a low, personal blow. The Dewan, it so happened, had a lover called Umayamma, who was a dancing girl attached to the government natakasala. It was customary for officials of the state to select women as paramours from this establishment, but as the Rani wrote to Col Munro, ‘they are invariably recalled on the death or dismissal of those officers’.6 The banished Dewan’s only request in his defeat was that his darling of fourteen years be allowed to accompany him. The Rani, in her vengeance, however, refused. It was Ummini Tampi’s fate to languish alone in prison until his dying breath, pining for his beloved, who also, presumably, spent her days in romantic misery, cast from the embraces of one official to the next.7

  The Umayamma in question here was perhaps a regular courtesan. But there was an older institution in Travancore, and indeed in other parts of India, where women were dedicated to deities and temples, their lives committed in service of god, dancing and singing and preserving high culture in great Hindu temples of the land. Indian history and tradition resound with stories and legends about these devadasis, maidens of god. A two-thousand-year-old inscription of Emperor Asoka tells the tale of a painter, Devadinna, and Sutanaka, the beautiful devadasi he loved. The Meghadutam of the legendary poet Kalidasa portrays a vivid picture of the great shrine of Mahakala in Ujjain, which ‘resounded with the sound of the ankle-bells of the dancing girls’.8 An eighth-century king of Kerala went on to dedicate his own daughter to the deity at Srirangam, while in the thirteenth century a Kupaka prince enjoyed a heady romance with another devadasi serving in the temple of Siva at Kandiyur.9 These women enjoyed a high position in society and ‘they were honourable invitees in all important festivals and ceremonies, such as the coronation of kings’.10 They were educated women of wealth and means, instituting endowments, building temples and more.

  Indeed, even in the colonial nineteenth century, devadasis remained dedicated to their vocations, some winning fame as musicians and actresses. The ‘queen of theatre’, for example, in Madras was a Kumbakonam-based devadasi called Balamani, and trains passing through the station would halt for fixed periods there to allow passengers to attend her shows.11 She donated liberally to temples in the region, and her Balamani Ammal Company was a haven and refuge for abandoned and homeless women. She never married, and as irony would have it, died in poverty, but during her heyday she was tremendously influential, rumoured at one time as the mistress of Mulam Tirunal in Travancore.12 Devadasis were also among the earliest brand ambassadors for Indian art and culture abroad; as early as 1838 a troupe travelled West becoming ‘the first indigenous artists to perform all over Europe’, even dancing at the French court in Tuileries and becoming, reportedly, ‘instant celebrities’.13 Even M.S. Subbulakshmi, the doyenne of Carnatic music in the twentieth century, who arguably did more to popularise Indian music around the world than anyone else, was descended from a line of accomplished and highly talented devadasis.14

  Nineteenth-century Victorian moral values that were imposed by the British in India and latterly embraced by local elites, however, began to alter the position of the devadasi. Ancient Indian texts like the Natyasastra, remarks J. Devika, classed women into categories such as kulina and veshya. The former was a chaste householder, one to provide heirs and a womb to preserve the purity of her line. The latter, on the other hand, was ‘the vessel of culture, the provider of pleasure—aesthetic, intellectual, and bodily pleasure—to men of a certain social standing, at a price’.15 Veshyas were not in any way judged or considered low for being ‘vessels’ of culture. On the contrary, they had serious social contributions to make, and money earned by them was poured into a number of public ventures of one kind or another. There was the possibility of oppression, as in every field. But the stigma attached to their dance and art and music, intertwined as it was with sexuality and expression, was new-found and a consequence of Western cultural attitudes that frowned on women’s bodies, and the use of these without a badge of marriage. While on the one hand women were being liberated and sent to college and asked to take up vocations, on the other, their sexual personality had to fit the pat
riarchal model of a daughter, sister, wife or mother, and cease to exist outside these catholic parameters. Indeed, as Girish Karnad notes, even M.S. Subbulakshmi’s ‘spectacular career had much to do with the way she managed to shed all traces of her devadasi past and transform herself into the perfect image of a Tamil Brahmin housewife’.16

  The art of the devadasis, though, was valuable, and would be cast in a more ‘acceptable’ mould by reformers so as to correspond with the new sensibilities of upper class Indians. Rukmini Devi Arundale, for instance, stripped the Bharatanatyam dance drama, once performed in temple mandapams, of its eroticism and adapted it to the Western-style stage, giving it respectability, even while wrenching it from its ancient custodians, the devadasis. In Kerala the Mohiniattam was stigmatised because of its overtly sexual tenor but Kathakali, which was more dramatic, retained patronage.17 While ancient Indian painters did not shroud the flesh and sought to celebrate sexuality, Raja Ravi Varma made even his voluptuous female figures ‘sensuous but not seductive, forthcoming but not coquettish’.18 The devadasis did not take all this lying down and in Madras efforts were made to unionise and resist this attempt to impose Western moral codes on their ancient religious and artistic practices. A memorandum submitted by one devadasi association made it clear that they ought to be treated as a minority and their rights and privileges jealously guarded from ‘the autocracy and high-handedness of the more powerful’ who had ‘no right to impose their views and fancies’ on their community.19 They pointed out that as women ‘enjoying special rights of property, legal status, religious honours, and recognised independence sanctioned by ancient scriptures, traditions, and customs’, they resented now being asked to fit into the mould of kulina householders by ‘a very small section’ of pseudo-puritan Hindus. They also, interestingly, pointed out that ‘we are women not having the disadvantages of [most] Hindu women but possess, on the contrary, all the privileges of males in regard to property, special laws of inheritance, rights and privileges in temples’.20 Asking them to transform into kulina ladies was also a means for taking away these rights they had enjoyed since time immemorial.