Uma also travelled extensively to source textiles and material from across the country, all by herself, on trains, planes and buses, with an unusual degree of freedom and independence. ‘In those days she looked quite Anglo-Indian,’ tells Rukmini. ‘Her bobbed hair was always coloured a deep red, and she was quite fair, and used to dress only in Western clothes—skirts, trousers, and the likes.’75 Sometimes when she went to Kerala and stayed at Ulloor with relatives, Uma used to board a bus to Trivandrum city in the afternoon. ‘Forget most people realising that this distinct-looking lady was “Princess Bharani Tirunal Uma Bayi Tampuran” of Travancore, most didn’t even have a clue that she was a Malayali!’76 Uma quite enjoyed travelling with the masses in this manner, and as part of her bohemian lifestyle, often went to meet with artists and poets across the country, or on trips exploring historical places. To further avoid detection when she went to Trivandrum, she always reserved her room at The Mascot under the name of Mrs Sharma or Mrs Raveendran. ‘It was a lot of fun,’ she laughs now, ‘though I only did it because the name Varma was a giveaway.’77 Her boutique, however, closed down after a few years owing to want of trained hands to help her run the place. ‘I had to do everything on my own, but I know grandparents were very proud of it. Grandfather used to come and sit with me in the afternoons, and he was always encouraging of the kind of work we did.’78 Very likely, he was most puzzled.
In 1963, Parvathi was married to a member of the Cochin royal family. It was the first time such an alliance had occurred between Kerala’s two princely dynasties. ‘It was all over the Malayalam papers,’ recalls the groom, Ravi Varma, ‘and even the dimensions of the plantain leaves on which the feast was served were recorded!’79 In what was different, however, Parvathi’s husband refused to surrender his public sector job in Kerala and come up to Bangalore. Both Rukmini’s and Uma’s husbands had, in the old palace style, stopped working after their marriages. ‘We had 800 rupees every month as our allowance,’ tells Rukmini, ‘and with other provisions and presents our father or grandmother made, we were very well off.’80 Both their husbands, then, had large farms on the outskirts of Bangalore, where they spent their time. Ravi, however, wanted to work, and so Parvathi joined him in Cochin, where she finished her studies and obtained an MA in Sanskrit. ‘In the beginning they were worried how she would manage after growing up in Bangalore, because Cochin is very orthodox. But we were all so surprised when she proved perfectly capable of waking up at 5:30 in the morning, bathing in a tank and going to temples, and not only living a rigorous life but impressing the old dames in Cochin by how well she did it!’81
For the next many years Parvathi remained in Kerala, sometimes even living in places like Mannar, a small town where Ravi’s work took him. ‘Locals would come sometimes on hearing I was a princess of Travancore. I never knew what to do at such moments because Bangalore had wiped all that out.’82 But Kerala Varma was concerned about his daughter living in Kerala in conditions he thought must have been difficult. ‘Once he came to visit us at Chowara where my husband and I were living in this palace that belonged to the Cochin side,’ remembers Parvathi. ‘He was so upset on seeing me alone in that massive building, with only one or two servants, that he turned around on the highway on his way back and came and spent another two days with me.’ Yet again, on hearing of a robbery in their palace, Kerala Varma despatched at his expense a guard with an Alsatian all the way from Bangalore. On visits to her parents, however, Parvathi’s husband came in for special treatment. ‘Since I came from Cochin, which was an independent royal family and not from one of the aristocracy within Travancore, the Valiya Koil Tampuran was at first hesitant to sit in my presence. It was quite embarrassing, but we eventually got to know each other better and he became more relaxed.’83 A few years later, Parvathi and Ravi returned to Bangalore when the latter found a new job, and Sethu Lakshmi Bayi purchased a property for them at Palace Orchards as a present.
The royal husbands, as a rule, treated the Maharani with a solemn reverence. ‘When my father married into the family,’ tells Devi Prasad and Rukmini’s son, ‘his mother told him, “There are two gods you must worship. One is the God in the heavens and the other is Her Highness the Maharani.” And so he was very much in awe of her.’84 Ravi also thought very highly of Sethu Lakshmi Bayi due to her reputation in his own family. ‘It was generally remarked that the Senior Maharani was not only a great queen but also a genuinely good human being. Everyone only had positive things to say about her.’ There was also a family story about how during weddings and celebrations in Cochin, the Maharajah of Travancore used to send gold ornaments and presents. Because of a historic rivalry between the two sides most Maharajahs sent presents of really poor quality. ‘We were told that it was only after Maharani Sethu Lakshmi Bayi came to the throne that she stopped this petty mockery and made certain that if gifts were coming from Trivandrum, they were befitting and not merely an attempt to insult Cochin.’85 For Rukmini, though, Parvathi’s marriage was the culmination of destiny. ‘You know how Martanda Varma never managed to conquer Cochin. So I used to tell my sister, “Parvathi, where great warriors and Maharajahs failed, you have done it! You have conquered Cochin’s heart!”’86
Lakshmi, in the meantime, grew from a smart teenager of the Beatles’ generation, into a determined young woman who decided she wanted to have a professional life. After her graduation she told her parents she was applying to the Lady Shriram College in Delhi for a postgraduate degree, and that she didn’t want to complete her studies after marriage like Parvathi. ‘They humoured me at first, thinking there was no harm in applying. But once I got in, mother said she had no intention of sending me all the way to Delhi. Eventually, we reached a compromise, and I was allowed to go to Mysore, only a few hours out of Bangalore.’87 Lakshmi, then, became the first member of the family to move into a public hostel. ‘She never advertised or gave a hint about her background,’ remarks a classmate, ‘but others used to talk about her as a member of a royal family and how she was born in a palace. She cloaked it all with modesty: no arrogance, no superiority complex, no condescending attitude. Instead, she had an admirable and unique quality in a time when society was still very caste and class conscious. She was warm, elegant, gracious and very “cool”!’88 Lakshmi also stood up for her principles, even if it included picking a fight with Lalitha. Arguments would ensue each time holidays approached as the daughter would insist on travelling by bus to Bangalore with the other girls, while her mother was dead against it, determined to send a chauffer. Similarly, Lalitha couldn’t help but pamper her children once these little tiffs had passed: for Lakshmi’s birthday, her mother once showed up in Mysore with a twenty-five-course dinner, much to the delight of her hostel-mates, tired of the dry food they were accustomed to eating there.89
It was 1968 when Lakshmi married Raghu, also from the Cochin family, and sometime later the two went to Germany where he finished his engineering studies. ‘It was great fun, and I saved up and travelled around Europe. It was the time when the hippies were coming to India, and we were going out and wandering in Europe!’90 On their return to Bangalore, Lakshmi began her career as a lecturer, and strangely enough Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, who had stood in Rukmini’s way, was hugely delighted. ‘I think,’ tells Rukmini, ‘it was because by Lakshmi’s time a great deal had changed. Besides, grandmother used to say that if she hadn’t been adopted into the royal family and installed as Maharani, she would have liked to be a teacher. So she was happy with Lakshmi’s choice for a career.’91 By 1972, Ambika, who studied psychology, and would volunteer with the Spastic Society in due course, was married to Jeeth, a surgeon and a captain in the Indian Army, before both of them migrated to England and stayed there until the late 1980s while she obtained higher qualifications.
Balan, in the meantime, emerged as the pampered favourite of his mother, and tended to get into all kinds of mischief as he grew up. ‘When he was around twenty, father’s secretary came in one morning and showed father th
e newspaper with a picture of Balan in it. Without telling anyone, he had participated in a motorcycle race all the way from Bangalore to Madras, and come back. It was only when the photograph was printed that we found out! Father was furious, but mother,’ laughs Rukmini, ‘loved him for it.’92 By this time he was a popular young man in Bangalore, famous for his long hair and for driving a Buick to college. Legions of girls at bus stops would wait to be offered a lift by ‘the Prince of Travancore’ and dozens of hearts were broken when in 1973 Balan left for the United States for his MBA at UC Berkeley. Upon his return two years later, he took over Kerala Varma’s business concerns. Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s other grandson, Shreekumar, in the meantime, was more academically and intellectually inclined, and went on to obtain an MPhil before becoming a journalist with The Indian Express. Living in Bombay, he ‘hung out with the likes of Amjad Khan (who spouted shayari to him), Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand (who invited him to join a political party he was starting), while writing for Cinema Today’.93 He returned to Madras in due course to become a professor and an award-winning playwright and novelist. Shobhana too distinguished herself in her studies, becoming a lawyer in the Madras High Court, and a prominent socialite in the city. In the words of one of her legal contemporaries, ‘She was so beautiful and intelligent that the whole Madras Bar wanted to marry her!’94
With even Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s grandchildren marrying and settling down, her Richmond Road house was inundated with little children. In 1962 Lalitha had, shortly after her thirty-eighth birthday, given birth to her youngest child, a daughter called Devika, twenty-two years Rukmini’s junior. ‘I remember grandmother once sitting in bed and telling stories,’ recalls Rukmini, ‘and there must have been a dozen kids all around her. And I thought, here was this woman who once yearned for children of her own and made pilgrimages and religious vows, and now towards the end of her life, she was surrounded by so many! I knew it made her very happy.’95 The entire family would get together regularly, as Radhika recalls. ‘We would all meet every Sunday, and we children had a great time playing games. [Lalitha] would have prepared a sumptuous meal for all of us, and at the end we all had to loudly say, LUHSY (Lalitha, you have surpassed yourself!).’96 After lunch the children would then run over to the Maharani and the Valiya Koil Tampuran. ‘I looked forward to these visits. She used to keep a jar of Nutrine sweets ready for all of us and we would sit beside her, at times on the floor below, or on a large armchair nearby and listen to her stories or read children’s comic strips from the Illustrated Weekly. Sometimes when we fought, great-grandmother was like a soothing balm. She always enquired about our studies and interests, and since she knew I was interested in art,’ continues Radhika, now a successful painter, ‘she said I should cultivate and pursue it.’97
Everything about the Maharani fascinated the younger children. ‘I remember seeing the inside of her stately black Humber,’ remembers Radhika, ‘and thought it looked like a drawing room, and not at all like our cars. It had a sofa and armchairs around which I could walk.’98 The car impressed others in the family too. ‘It had no number plate but the old Travancore royal crest, and we all were quite taken up with that, since we had never lived in the palace.’99 However, as the Maharani’s activities became increasingly confined to her home, the Humber was sold in 1967 and old Kunjukrishna Pillai, its driver, pensioned off. Her lunches too amazed the children. ‘I would go and peer curiously into her large silver plate and the small silver bowls with curries in them, and finally eye the potatoes in the pacha sambar. She would lovingly take out the potato and drop it into my open mouth. At times even when we were two or three kids, there were enough potatoes to give each of us as we sat admiring the bright red, polished, soft, leather slip-on shoes at her bedside.’100 The Valiya Koil Tampuran, now in his eighties, also became gentler than before. As Radhika tells:
I used to accompany him on his walks around the garden and watch him play Diabolo or ‘devil on two sticks’ as he used to call it. A strange game with two sticks and a string tied to them. He would throw a wooden hourglass shaped object up in the air and catch it on the string with the sticks. The whole feat was quite amazing. He also had a collection of magic toys. He used to pull them out and show us various tricks. We would watch the little magic show in amazement. On his walks he would also pluck some jasmine flowers and keep it in his palm. Much later he would put his hands on our nose so we could smell the fragrance.101
He also liked playing games of vocabulary. ‘He used to give us these brilliant old dictionaries he had, with the history of each word in it, and ask us to choose any. He always knew what every word we threw at him meant, even some very unusual ones starting with Z!’102 But what really fascinated the children were the prayers. For all their westernised lifestyle, members of Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s family remained fairly religious and had their respective japams in the afternoon. Lalitha worshiped Shiva while Indira had Ganapati. The Valiya Koil Tampuran’s japams were impressive. ‘He would sit down cross-legged on a little mat on the floor in one corner of the room. There were no idols or pictures of any god, not even a lamp was lit anywhere nearby. His eyes closed, fingers in a mudra, his back straight and upright, he would remain in silence. At times we kids might even enter the room, making noise, but he wouldn’t stir. After around forty-five minutes or so, he would open his eyes, bow down and prostrate. Then from a small box he would take out a little vibhuti and put it across his forehead and from another box a little sandalwood paste to apply in the centre of his forehead. He would get up and greet us, never scolding us for the noise.’103 Rukmini’s sons were close to the Valiya Koil Tampuran, with Venu sharing his interest in hunting and sport. ‘One memorable story he told us,’ remembers his brother, Jay, ‘was when Jim Corbett was commissioned to shoot a troublesome maneater, but failed, and great-grandfather took it out. But by the 1970s he regretted having killed all these animals. We used to throw stones at the red-throated garden lizards and he used to tell us to stop, telling how the ecstasy when you got your shot evaporated into agony when you saw the dead eyes. I also remember how he used to come to our rooms, whenever we were unwell, and sit by our bedside and talk to us. That was always special—this grand old man making conversation with us children, and taking everything we said very, very seriously.’104
Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, all along, loved hearing news of babies being born in the family. ‘In those days,’ laughs Devika, ‘there were babies being born every year, since my sisters obliged one after the other. And amooma [grandmother] rewarded the first person that came to her with the happy news. Of course we would all vie for the honour. I got lucky one time and rushed to her when my nephew was born, and I was given a beautiful brass bell in the shape of Hanuman.’ The Maharani wanted the girls in the family to be perfect, cultivated young ladies. ‘She used to give Radhika and me tips on how to conduct ourselves as proper young women—a challenge for her, since I was most unladylike and loved nothing more than to slide into my jeans and run around with Venu and Jay!’105 As it happened, it was Jay who spent a lot of his time with Sethu Lakshmi Bayi in the 1970s. As he recollects:
I remember sitting with great-grandmother and talking to her for hours on end. We would talk about a lot of small things as well as the books I had read from her collection. I remember she was surprised that I wanted to read her Georgette Heyer books as well as The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy and others by Frank G. Slaughter, Rider Haggard, etc., at a very young age. As I was staying in the same house as her for several years, I managed to develop a close relationship with her and she played an important role in my younger days as a guiding light. She also taught us stories from the epics, one chapter a day, and in such detail that it took her hours to finish a chapter. And when we finished, we’d ask to begin the whole thing over again, because she was an expert storyteller. She also told me once that we must aim to be cultured people and that a cultured person is someone who knows something about everything and everything about something. T
hat is why she read such a great deal, and really seemed to know about everything under the sun.106
On his visits from Madras, Indira’s son also shared a similar relationship with the Maharani. ‘From my early teens I used to write and it was a typical summer habit to sit by her side and read out my stories,’ recalls Shreekumar. ‘I don’t know, now that I think of it, whether she enjoyed it or whether she sat there and listened simply because I gave her no alternative! I would inflict a series of macabre murder stories upon her. But she definitely paid attention. I once mentioned a medicine to cure syphilis in a story, not knowing what it was, and she promptly stopped me and asked me to remove it if I didn’t know what it meant. I also listened to music with her—Yesudas, Devarajan and so on. She always pointed out the inflections and nuances of the singer’s rendition. She was very knowledgeable about classical music. Sometime in the 1970s Yesudas himself came to pay his respects and sang in person for her, and I was fortunate to be present. She really enjoyed that.’107
By the 1970s, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi had completed her transformation into an astonishingly liberal person and all the orthodoxy she imbibed early in life had dissolved altogether. ‘As I got older,’ Balan would later remark, ‘what I remember most vividly was her interest in the things we were doing, what we were planning to do with our lives, what the new India was all about.’108 The Maharani was genuinely interested in the world and the nation of young Indians emerging around her, even if she, as a symbol of another era, didn’t entirely fit into it. Proof of her growing openness came some years down the line when Jay and Radhika made marriages that many of their wider family did not approve. ‘I wanted to marry a Kannadiga girl,’ remembers Jay, ‘my childhood sweetheart, and it was great-grandmother who gave her support first.’109 But while this was still acceptable, since he was a male member of the family, what was much more controversial was Radhika falling in love with a friend of Venu’s. She was Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s eldest great-granddaughter, and a representative of the Attingal line. And to have her marry outside the community, many thought, was sacrilegious. But Radhika told Uma and Lalitha about her decision when she was seventeen, and about to leave for Madras for art school. ‘I think they hoped that five years down the line, by the time I returned, I would have given up my plans and would fall in line. Grandmother asked me to let her know whether I still felt the same way when I came back. And I did.’110
Ivory Throne Page 72