Ivory Throne

by Manu S. Pillai

  This thoroughly upset the Maharani and on the next date, two weeks later, the children were not allowed to go. Again on Onam day, when the princesses went to receive presents from Chithira Tirunal, Rama Varma was asked to wait outside. This provoked a firm message from the Maharani that if this were the code of conduct on these courtesy calls, she would ‘be reluctantly obliged to give up the idea’ of sending her children to the palace altogether.108 The response to this from Kowdiar Palace was that ‘His Highness the Maharajah as the Sovereign and the Guardian has the right to demand interviews with the Princesses unattended by anybody.’109 Unwilling to accept this, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi simply said her views had been explained clearly in her previous communications, and if her husband were not allowed to be present when the Maharajah interacted with her daughters, she would, not due to any disrespect or ‘spirit of contrariness’ but owing to ‘practical difficulties’, find it difficult to send the princesses.110 She was equally firm in writing to the Resident:

  My children (daughters) are only nine and six years old, and the Maharajah is a practical stranger to them. My proposal, which to me seemed eminently reasonable, was that they should go in company with my husband, but His Highness insisted that no one should be present when the visit was being paid—a proposition to which I have the strongest objection and to which I could never persuade myself to yield. Once they grow up I would certainly withdraw my objections, but not till then.111

  Upon receipt of the Maharani’s complaints, Mr Field spoke to the Maharajah and the latter agreed to get the promises confirmed in her settlement fulfilled and even showed him papers proving that he had already passed orders to the effect.112 The Resident then advised the Maharani to contact the Dewan to get the arrangements made accordingly, since it appeared that they were only pending implementation. As for personal complaints raised by her, he felt it would be difficult for him to intervene, as this was a family matter outside the purview of his position as British representative. Nevertheless, he invited the Valiya Koil Tampuran to meet with him in June to discuss these concerns of the Maharani soon after the family returned from their stay at Ponmudi.

  Accordingly, Rama Varma called on Mr Field on 9 June and engaged in a long discussion. The latter informed the Maharani’s husband that the Maharajah objected to him personally and perhaps he would be conciliated if the princesses were sent along with their aunts instead.113 Rama Varma, who was ‘friendly and reasonable’ at this interview, could understand why Mr Field could not intervene and also informed him that in reality the principal objection of the Maharani was not about her pending honours or dignities but about her children having to see the Maharajah alone.114 As for their two aunts, they led ‘secluded lives’ and were themselves averse to visiting Kowdiar Palace.115 The interview ended with the Valiya Koil Tampuran assuring Mr Field that nothing further was necessary regarding the complaints, if the settlement were really to be implemented, and the Maharani would not insist that he interfere in the family dispute. But she did want the Resident to ‘bear the matter in mind’, as it demonstrated yet again exactly what she had to put up with in her relations with the Maharajah.116

  Mr Field had already by now guessed that the Maharani’s grievance was about the courtesy calls her daughters were expected to pay and remarked that the trouble arose ‘in consequence of the wide difference in outlook and mode of life of the two Maharanis’ who were ‘incompatible’. He further noted:

  I suspect that the Senior Maharani does not approve of the conditions now prevailing at the [Kowdiar] Palace, and she both dislikes and fears the idea of her children being introduced to these conditions. While I think that the Senior Maharani would do better to be more diplomatic and worldly-wise, I think she should in fairness be treated with greater consideration and respect, not only as a member of the ruling family, but by virtue of the excellent service which she rendered to the State during the period of the Regency. A little give and take on both sides would settle the matter, but it is a difficult and delicate subject for intervention.117

  The Resident was right in suspecting that the Maharani was averse to exposing her children to the environment at the Maharajah’s palace. This was because the Junior Maharani’s siblings and mother, against whom disciplinary action had been taken during the Regency after the black magic episode, were once again frequenting Kowdiar Palace. Besides, the new palace manager was none other than Dr Nallaperumal Pillai, the very man who had been expelled in 1926 after he ventured to have the Kochu Koil Tampuran medically declared insane—he would shortly hereafter be honoured with the title of ‘Rajabhakta’ (faithful servant).118 In any case, with Mr Field unable to intervene, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi had to make her peace with Kowdiar Palace, and let her daughters see the Maharajah by themselves, even as her husband waited in an adjacent chamber. ‘I knew there was a dispute,’ Princess Indira would later remember, ‘but never knew the details.’ With state guards and an escort, she and Princess Lalitha would be driven to Kowdiar Palace every two weeks, the Valiya Koil Tampuran following in another car, since he was prohibited from sitting in the same limousine as his daughters on these visits.

  The Maharajah did not trouble the girls at all during his meetings with them, and on the contrary gave Princess Indira the impression of being ‘very sensitive’ and a fine individual personally. ‘He would give us toffees and ask routine questions: Where are you coming from? Is it raining there? What have you been studying? And more in that vein.’119 She got the impression that it was the Junior Maharani who insisted on these courtesy calls, but she herself was rarely present in those days. In fact, she seemed quite a formidable prospect for the children, and Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s nephew would remember times when she came to Satelmond Palace with her sisters and Kochukunji in tow. ‘They used to treat us very nicely, as if we were their own children, and pet us and take a great interest in this side of the family. It was as if the disputes vanished, as nobody spoke about it openly, and behaved with great courtesy when face-to-face. But while the Maharajah, his sister, and brother, were all wonderful, the Junior Maharani always looked very stern. She only spoke to the adults, and never said anything to us children, and there was no petting or cuddling at all. Her sisters, however, would love to sit and chat.’120

  The Junior Maharani had really come into her own after her son obtained his powers. Her high-spirited appetite for life was married to opportunity in its great fullness, and she became the mistress of her own destiny. No longer was she compelled to apply to Sethu Lakshmi Bayi for tour funds, or furnish answers about her activities, as she had been forced to during the Maharajah’s minority. No longer, also, was she officially ‘the Junior Maharani’ as the Viceroy had allowed her to be addressed with a ‘Highness’ at last, and declared her simply ‘the Maharani Sethu Parvathi Bayi’.121 Her reviews remained, however, quite a contrast to her splendid, regal cousin. The very Resident who referred to Sethu Lakshmi Bayi as the ‘grande dame’ of Travancore, considered the Junior Maharani ‘a Bourbon if ever there was one, learning nothing and forgetting nothing’,122 although his first, positive impression was not inaccurate either:

  What a clever, naughty, vivacious, humorous woman she is! Very much ‘all there’. Diplomatic too. Gets what she wants ‘across’ to you without seeming to express an opinion. Though I don’t altogether approve of her, I must admit she has that vitality I admire so much in women…123

  John Paton Davies, the famous ‘China Hand’ of the United States, considered the Junior Maharani ‘a lively conversationalist’ who could slide from one topic to the next with the greatest ease and comfort. ‘She told me about a visit she had made to Bali and the racial and religious ties between the island and Hindu India. She worried about how the Japanese might be treating the Balinese. Somehow we got onto the subject of a room that she was having done over at the palace, and her conviction that “modernistic” furniture was unliveable. Then a discourse on Indian painting. Inevitably we came to the matter of elephants. They have near-human inte
lligence, the Maharani declared. One of hers accidently injured a mahout, whereupon it burst into tears. Travancore, she went on, had a game sanctuary where no shooting was allowed. This brought to mind the Maharajah of Bikaner: “Poor Bikaner, he is not happy unless he is being photographed with his foot on the head of some unfortunate animal he shot.”’124

  Indeed, having explored much of India already during her son’s tours, her first expedition, only months after the Regency concluded, was to travel to Europe, a long-cherished dream, with her daughter. Together, the Junior Maharani and the First Princess became the earliest members of the royal family to venture across the ‘black waters’ that orthodox Hindus shunned, breaking taboo after taboo. She spent several months in Europe, leading to some grumbling at home about the expenses at a time when the state confronted the Great Depression. On her return, however, a grand reception was arranged in Trivandrum but the Junior Maharani so dominated affairs that day ‘that it was generally considered inappropriate for the Maharajah to have been present’, entirely in his mother’s shadow.125 The Resident also found the whole reception ‘almost completely devoid of sincerity’, stating that it was ‘engineered’ by the government so as to shut out the orthodoxy and their complaints.126

  In 1933, the Junior Maharani again headed West for a second time, with the Maharajah accompanying her on this occasion. Official publications waxed eloquent about the triumphal progress they made from one European capital to the next. Back home, however, ‘the gossips murmur that some temple treasures were sold to defray expenses, and this has given terrible offence in certain quarters’.127 Indeed, by 1934, the Maharajah would plan a visit to Ceylon and the East Indies, only to cancel it on being advised against the serious expenses involved, so the tour was accomplished a few years later.128 Other innovations were also occurring. The Maharajah and his mother, for the very first time, began to appear at private parties and receptions thrown by the Dewan and others.129 Indeed, when it was revealed that their hostess at a function organised by a Muslim associate was to be in purdah, the Junior Maharani refused to accept the invitation, until ‘the curtain had to be lifted temporarily and be dropped again when the reception was over’.130 In the late 1930s she would upset very many conservatives in Travancore by inviting to the capital, despite protests, none other than Margaret Sanger, ‘the family planning crusader’, to propagate the cause of birth control.131 There was great initiative in her and she championed even unusual causes, for which she was lauded, even as other aspects of her personality invited criticism.

  The travelling, however, continued unabated, so much so that shortly after his succession, the Princely India was advising the Maharajah not to become an absentee prince. ‘Since his Investiture with Ruling Powers just ten months ago,’ the Resident reported, ‘the Maharajah has been away in Simla and Delhi for over half that period, and this is strongly deprecated in Trivandrum.’132 ‘Your work,’ lambasted the paper, ‘demands your presence in your own capital, and not in the capital of the Indian Empire.’133 The response from Kowdiar Palace was to order the police to go to the post office and seize all copies of the Princely India, which continued to condemn several aspects of the new administration. The Resident deemed the confiscation as illegal under both British as well as Travancore law, and the Maharajah was forced to release the papers.134 Shortly afterwards, the Newspaper Regulation was made more stringent than before, and as a historian states, those papers favouring the government and its position on various topics were promoted, while those that expressed opposing views became victims of the law, silenced or banned.135

  The Junior Maharani was unusually suave when it came to public perception, however. Even in the days of the Regency she saw the value of cultivating the press and trying to manipulate the tone of its discourse. She not only foresaw objections to her maiden foreign tour but also ensured precisely for that reason a grand, ostensibly supportive reception to din out grumblers. Later, in what was an equally canny move, to make sure that her son and she received adequate and positive press coverage on the all-India stage, one the earliest acts of the new regime was to establish, with a government subsidy, a branch of the Associated Press of India in Trivandrum that ‘gave a lot of publicity to the doings of the ruling family’.136 With ‘a mania for self advertisement’, and aware that the law alone was barely an adequate means to mould attitudes in the press, proper strategies to deal with the media were employed.137 Sir CP, who was in the words of a future Viceroy, an ‘expert propagandist’, gave his generous advice in these matters,138 and in the future would himself declare that the Junior Maharani and her son ‘made regular propaganda for advertising Travancore’, ‘constantly talking to European friends and Indian Princes’ all about their state so as to make it ‘fairly well-known’ in circles that mattered.139

  It was a very wise strategy, for the Maharajah and his mother had in mind for the state and its people certain very bold schemes and reforms, some of which would have been impossible to even articulate only a decade ago, and which many felt were truly inconceivable even in the 1930s. Only this tremendous combination of clever management of public relations, the shrewd force of personality, and a determined refusal to capitulate or to change their course of action despite great pressure, could bring to fruition what was to become known as, and was always intended to be, the greatest act in the history of Travancore: the Temple Entry Proclamation.

  15

  A Palace Coup

  When Col Munro first arrived in Travancore in 1809, he discovered himself in the midst of the most staggering financial and political chaos. Velu Tampi’s rebellion had been violently struck down, bleeding the entire principality. The royal treasuries were barren. But what was perhaps most astonishing was the degree of malice and spite that divided the court into a number of warring factions. Indeed, such was the nature of affairs at the time that the unforgiving saga unfolding in the 1920s and 1930s between the Junior Maharani and Sethu Lakshmi Bayi paled spectacularly by comparison. These two twentieth-century princesses were no match for their crafty ancestors a hundred years ago; if now cousins were gripped in an epic contest for authority, the decades before Munro’s time witnessed the sordid episode of a treacherous mother turning against her own daughters. So intoxicated did this woman become with the enticements of power that she presided over great intrigues and illicit manipulations in pursuit of her goals, even, allegedly, seeing to the death of some of her own flesh and blood who had the misfortune of standing in her way. To those shocked by the battle between the two royal women in the twentieth century, these antecedents of their forbears proved that this was all perhaps a natural component of the troubled heritage of the ruling dynasty.

  The story began in 1788. In that year, the line of the Attingal Ranis was to go extinct due to want of females in the royal house. Two princesses, then, were adopted in keeping with tradition from the Kolathiri family and installed as Senior and Junior Ranis. These were the daughters of a Kolathiri princess by the name of Chathayam Tirunal, who was the mother of five girls. The youngest was none other than Princess Arya, the ancestress through whom Sethu Lakshmi Bayi and her cousin claimed membership of the Kolathiri line before their own adoption in 1900. But the daughters adopted in 1788 were the second and third children of Chathayam Tirunal, the former of whom begot a long succession of rulers starting with Gowri Lakshmi Bayi down to Maharajah Mulam Tirunal who died in 1924. In 1789, shortly after their adoption, Chathayam Tirunal was forced to abandon her ancestral home in Malabar and seek refuge in Travancore when the armies of Tipu Sultan ravaged their lands. In exile, the mother and her three other daughters were permitted to take up residence at Attingal with the Ranis. It seemed like a happy family reunion, but as fate would have it, was an arrangement destined to become ‘most unfortunate in its consequences’.1

  It so happened that Chathayam Tirunal was a masterful lady of terrible ambition, ‘a woman of violent, profligate, and sordid character’, in Munro’s words.2 Having lost all she had in her
homeland, she now set her eyes on her daughters, living in great state and comfort in Travancore, a large and impressive kingdom which alone had been able to withstand the invading hordes from Mysore. It did not, evidently, take the lady long, then, to become ‘jealous of the superior dignity of her daughter’, the Senior Rani. Soon she commenced a sequence of intrigues and schemes against her own more exalted offspring, persecuting them ‘with a malignity and rancour that embittered her subsequent life’.3 Two factions were born at court, ‘one consisting of the two [adopted] Travancore Princesses, and the other of their mother and three sisters’ till ‘their quarrels became so frequent that the Rajah was obliged to remove the latter to a separate Palace.’4

  But Chathayam Tirunal was not one to accept defeat or to contemplate chastened retirement; she was determined to regain what she had lost in the north, and more. Knowing that the reigning Maharajah, the successor of Martanda Varma, was disappointed by the character of his own heir (whose reign would thoroughly weaken the position of the state and provoke Velu Tampi’s rebellion), this lady suggested in 1795 the introduction of a male member from the Kolathiri dynasty, presumably a confidante of hers, into the royal family. The Maharajah, apparently, did not outright reject the proposal, alarming the Senior Rani who ‘earnestly resisted that design as hostile to her rights’ until the ruler ‘abandoned it in consequence of her remonstrances, and his own conviction of its entire illegality’.5 Its illegality was on account of the rule that only females could be brought into the dynasty by adoption, and their naturally born sons alone were entitled to succeed to the throne. In 1798, however, the Maharajah died, paving the way for the singularly unpropitious reign of his heir, ‘a young man of 17 years of age, without experience, principles, or morals—sunk in debauchery—at once cruel and weak—jealous of his power and ruled by a set of profligate wretches.’6 Soon after this, the Junior Rani died in childbirth giving birth to a boy. And in this situation the clever and perpetually scheming Chathayam Tirunal found a fresh opening for the pursuit of her own ambitions.