Sunday, July 22, 2001		Article

Creatures of leisure
Of maharajas’ idiosyncrasies
Abhay Desai

It is more than a month since Nepal woke up to the carnage in Kathmandu. Even in neighbouring India, which is accustomed to the whims and madness of maharajas over centuries, the tragedy is still unbelievable. For a 29-year-old crown prince to gun down his family is nothing short of horrifying.

In the past though, disputes over accession often led to son killing father, brother killing brother. All that is now part of historical folklore. Descendants of those ill-fated families have still many more gory tales shut in their closets. But what makes interesting reading are the idiosyncrasies of their forefathers.

This is because of the common obsession with royalty the world over, to this day. As Diwan Jarmani Das, wrote in his book, Maharaj: "The perversions, indulgences and little whims of stunning cruelty have always appealed to popular imagination. The world still loves a royal!"

So there’s the story of the Maharaja of Saliana who had dovetailed his love for food and the macabre into a steamy whole through a so-called gourmet recipe. This involved sticking a live bird into a puri, quickly deep-frying it and bringing it to the table for the bird to fly out in front of amused guests.

Then there was the Maharaja of Alwar, a brilliant Sanskrit-speaking royal, who burned his polo pony in a fit of rage. A benevolent ruler like Shah Jahan maimed the men who built his Taj Mahal in the same manner as the mighty Pharohas of Egypt blinded those who erected their magnificent pyramids.

Observed Mahatma Gandhi: "Just as it is no credit to the people, who mutely suffer the loss of basic human freedom, it is no credit to the princes that they allow themselves powers which no human being, conscious of his dignity should possess."

Ironically though, the Sanskrit meaning of the word ‘raja’ was both "one who rules" and "one whose duty is to please". But as Sharada Dwivedi noted in her book, Lives of Indian Princes, the fount of kingly arrogance stemmed from an inherent belief that "he is born with the divine right to rule".

A common and off-repeated tale from different parts of India is that of a prince lying asleep in a field and wakes up to find that a cobra had spread its hood to shield his face from the sun. This protection was considered a sign of divinity. After this, there was nothing wrong in appropriating powers no mortal can!

Debauchery was once such privilege. For instance, the Nizam of Hyderabad had in addition to his legal quartet of wives, 42 other begums in the zanana and 44 khanazads or women attendants. And if they were inadequate, he would often marry a new woman on a Thursday and divorce her on Friday.s

But then, what outnumbered his women were his riches. He once decided to count his pearls. Buckets and buckets of pearls of all shapes and sizes were poured through grading machines that were normally used to grade gravel and then laid out to dry uncovered on the roof of his sprawling palace.

Those were days when a maharaja could snap his fingers and order a dish, thus: "Take a whole camel, put a goat inside it, and inside the goat a peacock, inside which, put a chicken. Inside the chicken put a sand grouse, inside it put a quail, and finally, a sparrow. Then put the camel in a hole and steam it."

Indulgence often took bizarre turns like the Raja of Junagarh holding lavish weddings for his numerous dogs. And then, there was the handsome six-and-a-half foot tall Maharaja of Patiala, Bhupinder Singh, to whom the origin of the expression, ‘Patiala peg’is ascribed. It so happened that the burly king once invited the British viceroy’s team for a friendly engagement of tent-pegging in his home state. The home team felt nervous and feared that if they lost the game, it would be their skulls on which maharaja would peg his spear. So a conspiracy was hatched.

On the evening before the encounter, the viceroy’s team was entertained to the pouring of a double measure of whisky in every peg. In the meanwhile, the pegs used for tent-pegging were replaced with smaller ones for the viceroy’s team and larger ones for the home team. The upshot was that the former lost. Incensed by the defeat, the British regent went up to the maharaja to complain that the pegs had been replaced. Bhupinder Singh conceded: "Yes, in Patiala, our pegs are larger!" Nobody dared to seek a clarification whether the maharaja meant the pegs in the game or the pegs of whisky. MF