Breaking out of purdah
Lee Langley
MAHARANIS by Lucy Moore Viking. 120, pp. 351, ISBN 0670912875
© £18 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Reading Maharanis has something of the poignant pleasure of rummaging in the attic of a great house fallen into desuetude: here are reminders of another age. Princesses stroll in their gardens in the Indian moonlight, fireflies flickering like stars, or roller-skate gaily through their marble palaces, saris billowing, with a staff of 400 to keep the place in order. We share the sense of loss Browning discerned in a Venice deprived of splendour 'when the kissing had to stop'. Think of them dressing for dinner on a tiger hunt in the
jungle (white tie and tails, evening gowns and emeralds) while a 35-piece band played in the dining tent. Back at the palace, guests chose their preferred mode of transport for the following day: 'horse, elephant or Rolls-Royce'.
Lucy Moore's vivid and richly detailed book opens at the Coronation Durbar for George V held outside Delhi in 1911: British administrators, suspicious, often mean-minded, were leaning on the Indian princes, determined to keep them suitably subservient. Soon Indian nationalists were flexing muscles sore from beatings administered to dispel seditious gatherings. And women emerged from purdah after centuries of hidden, separate lives to take a tentative step into the outside world. The first to do so were the most privileged and confined: the Maharanis.
The book charts the lives of four women: two grandmothers, a daughter and a grand-daughter. It offers the surging dynastic rivalry and rebellious love of a romantic novel, but the author does not neglect the politics: we get the troubled lives of the Maharajas, and the violent conflict that resulted in the jewelled patchwork of old. princely India being ripped apart and refashioned into the India of today.
Lucy Moore's four women are linked by blood and marriage: Chimnabai, Maharani of Baroda, emerged from purdah to become one of the founders of the women's movement. Sunita Devi was married at 14 to the Anglophile Maharaja of Cooch Behar. Chimnabai's daughter Indira, a tempestuous beauty, rejected the impressive alliance arranged for her and eloped with Jit, the younger son of the Cooch Behars — to the dismay of both families.
Indira's daughter Ayesha married the love of her life, the glamorous, poloplaying Maharaja of Jaipur, and moved from socialite girlhood to a career as a crusading politician.
It is hard to mourn the dismantling of the absurdly over-privileged royal houses, the profligacy, the often irresponsible power. But there were progressive princes who voluntarily relinquished some of their privileges in the cause of the new India, and were then betrayed. This is a story with a bitter undertone.
But for much of the book we follow the charmed lives of glittering people, Europhiles educated in England or by much-loved English tutors, moving in the hectic social swirl of the European haw monde, on close terms with British royalty. Queen Victoria greeted Sunita Devi with a kiss when they met; later. Victoria was godmother to her child. Prince Philip wrote, after a visit to Ayesha and Jai, 'Every moment was sheer joy.' There is hunting in Scotland, yachts, sports cars,
favourite suites at the Dorchester and the Ritz. Indira of Cooch Behar liked to choose her bath towels in Czechoslovakia and her hand-made shoes from Ferragamo, on one occasion ordering 200 pairs, dispatching a bag of jewels to decorate them.
Ayesha's political career put her on a collision course with another Indira, Mrs Gandhi, who pursued her with a vindictive passion. For the crime of possessing foreign currency (i119 and 10 Swiss francs lying on her dressing table when government tax inspectors raided her home) Ayesha spent almost six months in prison, without being charged. Today, in her eighties, she lives with her memories in an airy modern house in the grounds of the Jaipur palace. There are elements of Greek tragedy in all these lives. Husbands and brothers died young of alcohol poisoning and polo accidents; later, Congress, under Mrs Gandhi, tricked them out of their constitutional rights.
Lucy Moore ponders the old stories of family curses in a fairytale life: 'These extraordinary women, so blessed with intelligence, charisma, beauty, wealth and position, seem somehow damned too, as if the gods really are jealous of those upon whom they have showered blessings.'
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