Ivory Throne
Page 49
A fact which I do not think he [the Maharajah] realises and to which his mother’s intense and unreasonable antipathy towards the ex-Regent blinds her, is that the latter is held in the greatest reverence and esteem throughout the State, and, unless the Maharajah’s final orders are in keeping with the high position of the ex-Regent—not to speak of his own dignity—they will be received by his people in silent resentment.164
And they were. Writing in November 1924 the then Resident, Mr Cotton, had warned that the Junior Maharani was already ‘like the French after Sedan, counting the days for “la revanche” as soon as her son is vested with ruling powers’.165 And no sooner had Sethu Lakshmi Bayi resigned authority than the Junior Maharani had her revenge. Lord Willingdon rewarded the Maharajah with power after years of his mother’s efforts while his aunt received lofty words of admiration and praise, but little else. Even as he plunged India into an era of political chaos seated in Delhi, little realising it the Viceroy also abandoned Sethu Lakshmi Bayi to an uncertain fate. But she reconciled to this. ‘I emerge a wiser woman from the Regency,’ she ruminated in a pensive letter to the Valiya Tampuran of Cochin, ‘and have learnt that often in this world one gets kicks for honest, selfless work, while the canting self seeker wins half pence.’166
RETIREMENT
Lalindloch Palace, Vellayini
14
A Real Little Grande Dame
‘Thank God the Regency has terminated,’ sighed Sethu Lakshmi Bayi in a letter to Mr Raghavaiah, ‘and I am experiencing now the comfort of retirement and freedom from the worry and cares of office.’1 It was a decorous and formal response to his homage to her work in Travancore, but the reality was that the Maharani had a great deal to be anxious about. The niggardly manner of deciding her settlement hardly heralded an untroubled retirement, and the attitude of the new regime so soon after gaining power suggested little that was propitious. All varieties of harassment were to be inflicted upon her, and it did not matter that she was the head of the royal house, its matriarch or even an ex-Regent who had ruled by inherent right. The authorities were determined to drain even the last vestiges of influence she possessed in that position. A letter, then, to the Valiya Tampuran of Cochin was more honest, where she expressed how ‘After seven years of strenuous work performed under very difficult conditions I am naturally sighing for that quiet and peace, which I fondly hope may be my portion in retirement.’2
While the Junior Maharani took pleasure in travel, socialising and a diversity of entertainments, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi retreated, partly also for reasons of health, into a quiet, more relaxed but charmingly refined style of living. Perhaps in anticipation of difficulties emanating from the Maharajah, towards the conclusion of the Regency she acquired a number of private properties for the use of her daughters and herself; from her retirement till 1938 she tried to literally stay away from the centre of power. ‘My parents,’ Princess Indira would later remark, ‘seemed to specialise in finding unknown but beautiful spots’.3 Rama Varma would then assume responsibility over planning the structures, having something of a talent for elegant architecture, while the Maharani designed the gardens and general landscape in partnership with her expert brigade of gardeners. In 1930, for instance, a vast rural estate was purchased by the Vellayini Lake, 8 miles outside the capital, and a country house, ‘far removed from the active concerns of the town though near enough to command its conveniences’,4 was constructed there. With ‘a forest of palm trees all about the lake, and glimpses of the vivid green of paddy fields, a more pleasant site could hardly be found,’ pronounced a contemporary travelogue,5 and for Sethu Lakshmi Bayi this became a favourite abode surrounded by simple villages and much peace and quiet.
Unlike Satelmond Palace, where the premier structure contained several wings and housed all the members of her family, the abode in Vellayini had separate stately buildings. The Valiya Koil Tampuran and his attendants occupied a large premises of their own; all of the Maharani’s official establishment and servants had buildings unto themselves; while she herself resided in an exquisite bungalow, with large, airy rooms and ‘surrounded by excellent rose gardens with a very well done arbour, about 9 or 10 feet high, covered in greenery and flowers and very soothing to look at’.6 Her sisters and their families, who normally accompanied her, had a bungalow at a distance and ‘after supper every evening we would walk up to the main palace and spend time with the Maharani’.7 There was also a large patch of shared gardens, beside which Sethu Lakshmi Bayi had a granite pavilion constructed, with a black-and-white chequered floor. It was here that she received visitors in the late hours of the afternoon, with fresh coconut water served them in traditional copper tumblers, while members of the royal family sipped out of silver glasses. ‘She also had a tall silver plated Krishna statue here, which was installed in such a manner that she could view it from her own part of the grounds on the other side.’8
As her daughters grew up, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi had another palace building constructed across the gardens from the pavilion for their use. Rama Varma called it Lalindloch Palace, with the first part of the name (‘Lal-Ind’) being a mix of the children’s names (Lalitha and Indira), and the second a Gaelic term for ‘lake’. Surrounded by vast verandahs on all sides, it had enormous apartments with high, vaulted ceilings and huge windows. One section with all its suites of rooms was allotted to Princess Lalitha and the other to Princess Indira. ‘There were maids for everything we did: one pair to bathe us, another to dress us, another to watch over us while we played, all of whom slept on mats around our beds at night. Now that we think of it, it feels like we lived on another planet altogether!’9 Every year the family would spend months at a stretch staying at Vellayini, wandering out for picnics, going rowing in the lake, riding around the countryside, or merely exploring the vast grounds around the palace, which were very nearly a dense tropical forest. ‘The mosquitoes here these days are simply beyond conception,’ Princess Lalitha complained to her father on one occasion. ‘I mean the awful nights when they bite and suck one’s blood till I verily believe we rise up each morning perhaps ounces of blood less than we went in!’10 But for all that it was a very calm lifestyle, and ‘we all just lounged about all day, with everything taken care of ’.11
All of the Maharani’s establishment of about 300 servants would attend to the family even in Vellayini. ‘They were not all deployed at once, and every ten days a new set of about 100 would take over, and the previous 100 would go on leave.’12 They were paid modest salaries, and the palace guaranteed meals, clothes, and other needs. ‘It was absolutely amazing, the logistics of managing the whole place, and there were clear hierarchies; we never even saw all the classes of servants, or knew them, because there were too many, spread across departments and parts of the estate.’13 None of them came from poor backgrounds. On the contrary, the menials and maids hailed from respectable Nair families, who considered service in the palace as a veritable honour, while cooks and serving staff were all Tamil Brahmins or castemen of the royal family. There were ‘inside servants, outside servants; upstairs servants, downstairs servants; kitchen staff; garden staff; garage boys; the sweeping staff; the laundry staff; the official staff; the valets and menservants; the liveried guards; and heaps and heaps of people in general’!14 Besides these servants, there were special men to maintain the stables, the tennis courts, the palace dispensary, the palace electrical substation, as well as the chief royal carpenter called Kesavan Moothassari, ‘a dour, quiet person’ who took his orders from the Maharani and her husband.15 The manager would, every time vacancies arose, select men or women and Sethu Lakshmi Bayi and others in the family would pick their individual choices after the Valiya Koil Tampuran had finished conducting his extensive background checks. And then, of course, there were ‘so many drivers who lazed around pretty much every day and invariably got into scraps over a pretty housemaid’!16
This very substantial establishment, including the soldiers on guard duty, was catered to from the
huge palace kitchens. Known as the madapally, it was housed in a separate building altogether, ‘always so smoky, with delicious aromas, although we rarely saw the inside.’17 This department of the palace alone employed twenty-four cooks, and every afternoon attendants would carry massive copper and silver vessels, full of hot food, on their turbaned heads into the great hall where the royal family dined. ‘It was such a procession, with lines and lines of these men coming out of the madapally, and each meal was a great ritual.’18 The head of all this was considered one of the ‘unsung heroes’ of the palace. ‘He was the finest vegetarian cook we knew,’ the Maharani’s nephew would tell, ‘and was innovative and experimented with new dishes that he tasted elsewhere.’19 There was a large green marble hall at Satelmond Palace used for lunch, and a long plantain leaf would be laid before the Maharani, with silver bowls and plates placed on them. To wash hands there would be ‘a servant holding a basin, another standing by to pour water out of a pitcher, and yet another attendant with a towel on the arm’.20 While Brahmin servants cooked and served the food, ‘once you finished eating they wouldn’t touch the plates, which had to be removed by lower-caste Nair ladies’.21 For all the Brahmin influence, though, the best item on the menu was a certain black, spicy teeyal mix, the recipe for which the Valiya Koil Tampuran acquired from a tribal settlement in the forests.22 As for the rest of the meal, as Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s granddaughter would remember:
[The Maharani] had to have a certain number of dishes in front of her. For lunch she would have two curries cooked in a certain manner with curds as the base, one dal curry, two vegetable curries with gravy, and one dry vegetable, plus a silver bowl with rice in it, from which she would help herself. For tea there had to be ten things, six salty and four sweet. For sweets there was apam, made of bananas and rice flour fried in ghee, and a kind of a halwa made of arrowroot, sweet but very bland. Among the salty dishes there was a variety of bhajiyas and pakoras (a type of fritters) fried in batter, and varieties of dosas (savoury pancakes) and idlis (steamed rice-cakes). The whole family would assemble for this ritual, but not [the wives of male relatives]. They couldn’t come anywhere near us when a meal was being eaten, and if by accident they did, then the whole meal had to be sent back—because if anyone below caste set foot in the room while the meal was in progress, it would have to be cooked again [for these wives were all Nair women]. Dinner was always a bit more relaxed, because that was after sunset, when everything is more relaxed.23
The palace would always have guests coming in and out, all through the year. Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s sisters were always close; Kutty Amma did not accompany her to Vellayini because her children went to school in Trivandrum, and instead moved to the royal residence in the Fort when the Maharani withdrew from Satelmond Palace. The other sister, Kochu Thankam, however, acted as Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s principal companion, who also brought up her children during the Regency years. And she moved around with the Maharani during her long sojourns everywhere. Her younger brother, known as Uncle Chodhi, who was unwell, also stayed on the palace premises, taking a keen interest in the studies of his royal nieces. Other brothers, who were employed in Madras, Bombay and at other places in upper India, visited now and then with their wives and children, on all of whom the Maharani lavished presents. If they visited Satelmond Palace, they would stay at The Hermitage, a guest house on the grounds, but at Vellayini they occupied a part of the Valiya Koil Tampuran’s large building, and servants would be allotted to care for them during the duration of their holidays.
Meals were the only instances where caste came into the picture with the Nair sisters-in-law of the Maharani; their food was sent to their apartments and they could not be invited to join the royal family in the dining halls. ‘It was not that she herself cared for these customs,’ tells a granddaughter, ‘but life in the palace had a number of guidelines and traditions she was expected to uphold.’24 That perhaps explains why once meals were out of the way, the Maharani interacted quite freely with her Nair relations. When one of her brothers married and introduced his bride for the first time at the palace, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi made the usual presents of gold jewellery and gilt mundus to the young girl. ‘Normally,’ her niece remembers, ‘she would not have touched my mother, but to everyone’s surprise—and it was very unusual for them—she herself draped the mundu around my mother, touching her freely and without inhibitions. My maternal grandparents were so astonished that the Maharani was treating their daughter as one of her own. That was besides the fact that they were already stunned by her very presence. They had never seen anyone so fair-skinned and beautiful, and all she wore for make-up was her black tikka!’25
Sethu Lakshmi Bayi invested an unusual degree of interest in her nephews and nieces. The husbands of her two sisters served as her private secretary and manager, and received salaries from her treasury. All their expenses—meals, clothing, stay and more—were taken care of by the Maharani, as were the academic expenses for their children. She encouraged them to study, so that Kutty Amma’s son and younger girl were both educated at the Madras Medical College and then in England, going on to become renowned names in their fields,26 while one of Kochu Thankam’s sons also pursued medicine, and the other two studied in the United States.27 The six children of her two sisters grew up around Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, and although their parents always referred to her as ‘Her Highness’, she would have none of it from the younger ones in the family. ‘We used to refer to them as Valiyamma (senior aunt) and Valiyachan (senior uncle),’ one nephew recalls, ‘but it was customary not to address them directly when in their actual presence.’28
We used to play around in the palace compound and in the late afternoon the Maharani would come out for her walk in the garden. There would be the household guards and a dozen servants, with someone holding up a large parasol, all walking silently behind and around her at a distance. I would join her and I still cherish the conversations we had. She loved gardening and would tell me the finer points about how to grow different plants. She was very knowledgeable about a lot of subjects and often corrected me if I said something wrong. The relationship was easy and free of reserve with us, and she laughed and behaved with effortless informality. Of course we held her in very high esteem, and all of us thought of her as our guardian angel. According to the acharam (custom) of those days, though, we would not sit in front of her, and always stood with folded arms. About an hour later, this procession would return to the palace and I would go back to play.29
While her sisters were always close to her, she saw the children of her brothers less frequently. But even with them, she was always concerned and anxious to help. In the 1940s when her youngest brother’s daughter was afflicted by polio, ‘my parents were devastated’, the latter remembers. ‘But then the Maharani started reading more about it, ordered medical books and journals and advised my father on exactly how he should care for me. She recommended a lot of ayurvedic treatments, and made sure they were all performed. She was very sad that one of her nieces should suffer something that could not be cured. She also prayed. She vowed to offer a leg made of pure gold to the Muruga Temple at Palani if I got better, and as I did, she had a solid piece crafted as promised, which, as you can imagine, cost quite a bit. When someone asked her about the expense, she simply told them, “It is my wish, it is my money, and I want to do this.”’30 Years later after an operation was conducted on her niece’s leg, her brother and his wife needed a big car to take all their belongings from Madras back home to Coimbatore. ‘The Maharani would hear nothing of hiring a car, and she sent her imposing Humber all the way to her [other brother’s] Harrington Road bungalow, fetched us and had us driven to Coimbatore. It was only after this that the driver returned to her.’31
When her youngest brother, with youthful remiss chose to go on a leisure trip shortly before his examinations in London, and got into a car accident, he was ‘very scared and very sad that he might disappoint her, because she had financed his education. But she said
it didn’t matter, and what did was that he was safe. That was the effect she had on the rest of her family; nobody feared her temper, for she rarely got angry, but they were all very upset if they disappointed her in any way.’32 Anger did, however, reveal itself in Sethu Lakshmi Bayi on the odd occasion, as Princess Indira remembers. ‘The grounds [at Satelmond Palace] were quite vast. Stray dogs managed to sneak in and wander about. After lunch my sister and I used to give them food placed on banana leaves. One day, mother learnt that some of the cooks were in the habit of chasing them away by pouring boiling water on them. She was a very gentle person, but cruelty was something that never failed to arouse her ire. I saw her really angry that day, her beautiful and expressive eyes flashing fire.’33 The rest of the time, however, she remained perfectly unflappable, something like, as her grandson would remark, a ‘benign presence’ at the pinnacle of the rest of her family.34
Yet the majesty of royal life pervaded everything she did. The pattakkars were the highest class of palace servants, and it was ‘deemed the greatest honour to serve as a household guard’.35 With their scarlet tunics with silver braids and decorations, and huge, flat turbans (‘like Tipu Sultan’s, with silver hangings’), the royal family’s crest emblazoned on their chests, these men would always be marching around the palace, escorting members of the family from one room to the next or accompanying them on walks and drives. ‘Everywhere you’d turn there were always these characters hovering around,’ one of the Maharani’s granddaughters would later laugh, ‘and the maids were in awe of them in their excellent uniforms and looking like soldiers.’36 Whenever Sethu Lakshmi Bayi came downstairs, ‘they would greet her by doing a namaskar with folded hands, starting at the top of their heads and then bowing right down to touch the ground, with a lot of fluttering and waving of their hands in between. They had to do this seven times and it was quite an amazing sight.’37 When her brothers arrived, they too first called on her formally, in what was called ‘temple dress’, with a mundu around their waist and the upper shawl never draped across the torso but tied around the midriff. They would then greet her by throwing their sacred threads over the shoulder to the elbow, ‘and then first doing a namaste and then moving both hands outwards and in again in a fast motion, meaning “Many, many greetings”’.38