Tea With Her Highness Rajmata Gayatri devi Sahiba

Tea With The Queen Mum

by. Alex Ninian

Democracy may have diluted the feudal Indian royalty but some still cling to their past glories as Alex Ninian discovers in the opulent palaces in the pink city of Jaipur, capital of Rajasthan.

"When one was young,” said the Rajmata of Jaipur, “one had one's own elephants.” The Rajmata, or Queen Mother, is now in her late 70s, but looking beautiful and slightly exotic in a dark sari, she is still a strong and forceful personality.

I knew that elephants had been a measure of wealth and status among the old royal families in India. “My parents, the Maharaja and Maharani of Cooch Behar, had 60. My grandfather, the Maharaja of Baroda, had 99,” she explained.

I met her in Jaipur among the lupins and roses of the garden of her home, Lilypool, which is a compact mansion in the extended grounds of the Rambagh Palace. Christened Gayatri Devi, she went on from her royal parentage to become a queen in her own right as the Maharani of Jaipur having married the Maharaja “Jai” Man Sing.

She has always enjoyed the royal privilege of arriving a few minutes late and today was no exception. I got a sense of her background while I waited under a striped awning on the manicured lawn. A butler brought a tea tray. “A cup, or a mug, sir?” he said surprisingly. “I'd like a mug. It is hot and I am thirsty.” “From England, sir,” he declared rather than asked. “We have a big house in Ascot,” he reported, “and the town house in Mayfair. Her Highness spends the season there. I have been with her to England for 35 summers.”

She is one of the few people remaining who can describe and explain the life of fabulous wealth of the old feudal royalty, as well as full participation in the life of a modern Indian democracy.

“I am in The Guinness Book of Records twice,” she explains, proving the point in a couple of sentences. “First for having had the most expensive wedding in history and, second, after the royal privileges were removed and democracy took over, I had the largest majority ever recorded in a democratic election.” The latter was in the 1970s. “I took a stand against socialism and ran against the Congress Party of Mrs. Ghandi.”

The former was in the 1940s when there were so many guests that her father's palace in Bengal could not accommodate them. Her presents included a blue Bentley, a two-seater Packard and a mansion in the Himalayas. Her trousseau included sheets from Czechoslovakia, shoes from Florence, and nightgowns in mousseline de soie from Paris.

In 1975 she was imprisoned by Mrs. Ghandi on a trumped-up pretext, but eventually released without charge. The men of Rajasthan, largely of the soldier caste known as Rajput warriors, have been renowned as fighters throughout history. But the Rajmata, though not originally from Rajasthan, had to show fighting spirit of her own during those six months in a rat-infested cell.

Gracefully she walked me past the gazebo and the small fountain to the far end of the garden where a turbaned guard let me through a latch gate and into the lawns, topiary and large marble fountains of the Rambagh Palace.

When she and the Maharaja moved out, and into the (larger) City Palace, the Rambagh Palace was converted into a hotel, where I had the pleasure of staying. It has been restored to the full opulence it had at the height of the royal era and the rooms and suites, with chandeliers and agate pillars, look out on to lawns, fountains and marble colonnaded courtyards, and guests use the majestic dining room which once hosted the crowned heads of Europe. Peacocks strut and caparisoned elephants still parade.

In town, you know when you have reached the old city in the center of Jaipur, because everything becomes pink, or at least pinkish. The pinkest of all is the Palace of the Winds with its honeycomb of small open windows through which the ladies of the royal household could look over the town without being seen, and which also let in the wind.

The rest of the old city is a network of connected bazaars. Villagers in their brightest saris and jewelry come to sell produce and tie-dye in the crammed Chandpol Bazaar. In others, craftsmen make items of marble, gold, silver and leather.

The heart of the old city is the 1,000-room City Palace, still partly occupied by the current Maharaja and his family. “When my husband decided to turn the Rambagh Palace into a hotel,” said the Rajmata, “naturally I objected, but Jai said, We always have the City Palace; it is our real home.'”

I met the current Maharaja, Bhawani Singh II, the stepson of Rajmata, in the palace. Mrs. Ghandi and the Indian parliament phased out the privileges and titles of the old royal houses in 1972, but the arrangement was that anyone who was a ruling Maharaja at the time could keep the title for his lifetime, and Bhawani Singh qualifies as a real live Maharaja.

My letter of invitation caused a turbaned guard to escort me through gold-crested gates across pink courtyard after pink courtyard to the “ADC's room”. The aide-de-camp is a term hardly used in Britain since the First World War, but proper Maharajas have several. Retired army officers, they are military in bearing, in smart safari suits, and the one who brought me a cup of tea had a clipped, bristling moustache, while the one with the white handlebar version ushered me into the Maharaja's office. There seemed to be an army of assistant ADCs in turbans to keep the diary, take messages, collect and deliver, lift and lay and generally stand by just in case.

From the window one could see the gorgeously adorned Peacock Gate and the pavilion of the silver urns. These are five-foot vessels of solid silver, weighing a ton, which hold 250 gallons each. When the old Maharaja in the early 1900s went to England he took both vessels with him filled with Ganges water, so as not to have to drink plain English stuff.

The Maharaja stood up from behind his desk to shake hands. He wore a yellow sweater, open-necked shirt, and white linen trousers. Sixty-nine years old, he is a fit six-footer, with a round, smiling face. Unfortunately, his speech has been handicapped by a stroke and it was brave and considerate of him to attempt a halting conversation with a visitor. His ancestors included Maharaja Madho Singh who had nine wives, 7,000 concubines and 107 children, none of whom was “legitimate”. The present Maharaja was the first male “legitimate” heir to be born to a Jaipur Prince for three generations, and when he was born the palace fountains flowed with champagne.

He told me that after school at Harrow, he joined the 3rd Cavalry of the Indian Army where he rose to brigadier and commanded the paratroopers in the war against Pakistan. He was briefly imprisoned by Mrs. Ghandi in 1975 along with his stepmother, but now that is all forgotten.

In his western clothes, Bhawani Singh gives little hint of his fabled background, but there are pictures of him beturbaned, sitting on a silver chair, holding a jewel-encrusted sword. That same ancestor, Madho Singh, on festive occasions had to be held up by two men because of the weight of the bangles and bracelets which hung from shoulder to waist, a necklace of rubies, sapphires and blue diamonds, and a crown of emeralds and pearls.

His functional office sits below the private apartments which books describe as Jaipur-pink and white, decorated with mother of pearl and inlaid ivory, and furnished with crystal chandeliers, silver-embroidered curtains and silk carpets. Those rooms which are open to the public are an extravaganza of painted ceilings and frescoes coloured from jewel dust. The weapons room includes daggers with silver and crystal handles and the costume collection features Kashmiri goats-wool shawls and Benares silk saris.

The Diwan-i-Am, or hall of public audience, has handwritten Sanskrit scriptures and jewel-encrusted elephant howdahs.

Away from the old city, greater Jaipur seems to have a special mixture of working animals. Trotting pony traps overtake bullock wagons, horses pull loads of cane, elephants carry visitors through the town, and camel trucks tower over donkey carts waiting at traffic lights. They are engulfed in the usual chaos of motorised rickshaws and lopsided, battered, dirty buses crowded like cattle trucks. And it all takes place with the happy-go-lucky smiles of people driven by the life force to get on with things.

Three miles out there is a Water Palace in the middle of a lake, something like the Lake Palace of Udaipur but smaller and dirtier. At the viewing point, neither the hawkers nor the snake charmer seemed to mind the smell from the polluted water.

Four miles further on is the acme of the warrior cult. Like the Normans, the Rajput soldiers were builders of mighty forts and north of the Water Palace is the 400-year-old Amber Fort, which was the home of the Maharajas before they moved down to the palaces on the plain. It is the stronghold which dominated the region and it sits high on a hill, overlooking a lake which reflects its ramparts and terraces.

Jaipur has a bit of everything, from the cool breeze of the hill forts to the dusty plain, the colour of the Rajasthan saris and jewelry, the noise of daily life and the fabulous treasures of the palaces.

The martial traditions of the Rajputs have served them well. Only their own national politicians have been able to out manoeuvre them.

But not completely.