M A I N   N E W S

Special to the tribune
Camilla’s visit underscores India’s royal association
Shyam Bhatia in London

With Dr Ali’s help, she managed to reduce and then give up smoking. He was also instrumental in encouraging her in the past to participate in week-long trips to the Himalayas.

Jumbo affair

Another India link is Camilla’s brother, Mark Shand, for whom India has become a second home, thanks to his lifelong love affair with the Asian elephant. Shand was an unruly teenager on his way to Australia when he stopped over in India, ostensibly for a few days but stayed on for much longer.

Later, he started the conservation charity, Elephant Family, and wrote his best seller “Travels on My Elephant”, an account of his 800-mile trip across India on the back of an elephant called Tara.

Currently, Tara is kept in an animal reserve in central India and is said to “cry” whenever Shand visits her.

“It’s not as if I had a lifelong interest in elephants,” he explained in a recent interview. “It was only when my grandmother died, and I was going through all her papers, that something sparked my interest.

“I thought, that’s it - I’ll go to India and buy an elephant. I planned to ride it across India, which I wrote about in my book. I don’t know what it was about Tara, a young female I found. I was just drawn to her. I didn’t even look at the other elephants. She was just perfect, I just knew and I chose her. The old ‘mahout’ kept asking why I was choosing her and I said ‘I don’t know, there’s something about her, she’s beautiful’. She wasn’t in good shape, but all I can say is that it was like falling in love.”

First royal visitors

The first Prince and Princess of Wales to see India were George and Mary (later George V and Queen Mary) who embarked on a royal tour of the country between November 1905 and March 1906. They started in Bombay and travelled all the way to Bengal, also visiting Indore and Burma (which was then administered from India). Mary was later quoted as saying: “Lovely India, beautiful India,” while her husband commented on how the Indian Princes “ought to be treated with greater tact and sympathy, more as equals than inferiors”.

They returned to India a few years later as King and Queen when a Durbar was held in Delhi to mark their coronation a few years earlier back in the UK.

It was during this Durbar that George V announced that the capital of India would be moved from Calcutta to New Delhi. When he made his announcement, George was wearing the Imperial crown of India, containing 6,170 diamonds, along with innumerable sapphires, emeralds and rubies. Mary was presented with the Delhi Durbar Tiara, consisting of emeralds and diamonds.

George and Mary’s grandson, later Edward VIII, visited India between 1921 and 1922, but the next ruling monarch to tour India was Edward’s niece, the current Queen Elizabeth II, who has been to India in 1961, 1983 and 1997.

Arguably, the strongest link between British royals and India was forged during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). Victoria forged what has been described as an “intense” relationship with her Indian Muslim servant, Abdul Karim, originally a clerk from Agra, to whom she signed letters as “your loving mother” and “your closest friend”.

It was Abdul Karim who introduced her to curry and helped her to write and read in Urdu and Hindi. The Queen described him to other members of the royal family as “good, gentle and understanding”.

Crown jewel

An equally controversial and politically more fraught relationship was forged with Maharaja Dalip Singh, the last independent ruler of the Punjab, who was deposed by the East India Company at the age of 11 in 1849. Converted to Christianity and brought to England in 1854, Dalip Singh suffered the confiscation of the famous Kohinoor diamond - then the largest diamond in the world and currently valued at several billion pounds - which was handed to Victoria.

Dalip Singh was a royal favourite for many years (the Queen is reported to have written about him, ‘Those eyes and those teeth are too beautiful’) and Victoria was godmother to several of his children.

But the Queen refused to return the Kohinoor, despite several personal appeals from the deposed Maharaja who eventually died a lonely and impoverished exile in Paris. The Kohinoor was re-cut on Victoria’s instructions and is currently set in the crown of the late Queen Mother.

Camilla is a thoroughly decent and caring human who does not crave the jewels sought by the courtiers surrounding her husband’s great, great, great grandmother, although she can rest assured there are still valuables to be had from India represented in and by those Indians who have mastered skills like yoga and ayurveda. Camilla and other visiting foreigners are the fortunate beneficiaries of such expertise that is arguably of more value than a treasure trove of diamonds and sapphires.