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SIGNIFICANT aspects of what we in the twenty-first century would consider to be the ‘private life’ of the maharajas — marriages, familial relationships, life in the zenana, the status of palace women, and the structure and scale of royal households — were intensely public and political. A sense of this is conveyed in a work called the Pratapa Prakasha (The Glory of Pratap) by the court poet of Jaipur, Krishnadatta, dating from about 1802. In this work, Krishnadatta extols his patron, Sawai Pratap Singh (r. 1778 — 1803), to the rival Maratha chief, Peshwa Baji Rao II (r. 1775 — 1818), by elaborately describing his daily routine. The king arises in the sacred hour before dawn (Brahmamuhurta), meditates on his guru, the Lord, and places his left foot on the ground after catching a glimpse of the sacred cow and giving charity ceremonially. Then he sits on a stool studded with jewels and washes his mouth. After hearing petitions and listening to music composed by himself, he takes a ritual bath with waters brought from all the sacred rivers. He then makes the daily donations to Brahmins who come from all over, dresses ceremonially, and goes to the temple of his patron deity Govinddevji to offer ceremonial worship. An elephant fight is arranged for his entertainment, after which he rides horses of prize breeds, harnessed with saddles studded with gems, at the royal stables. He then retires to his palace and rests for a while before lunch is served for him, his nobles and his kinsmen. Everyone is then summoned to the public durbar, where the nobles and kinsmen take their assigned places. The king changes into ceremonial robes for the durbar and is followed by hundreds of attendants, bodyguards and officials. Servants carry sacred water from the Ganges in a pot, a golden inkstand, fans, swords, shields, and maces. After attending to the business of state, the king turns to his scholars and artists, hears philosophical disputations, poems of eulogy, and musical performances. The court is then dismissed, and the king changes again, to practice archery. His bath house is well-equipped, and he bathes and changes again. In a different pavilion dedicated to leisure activities, the king then plays chess for some time, before ordering a dance performance to the accompaniment of music. The dancers, beautiful women, are rewarded generously. The programme ends around midnight, dinner is served, and then the king retires to his inner apartments attended by his eunuchs.
This elaborate and almost ritualised description indicates the enormous symbolic importance of every aspect of the king’s daily life. Most pre-colonial sources that have been studied hitherto convey the same sense of elaborate ceremonial in somewhat formulaic terms, making it difficult to gain a picture of what life in the palace was really like. It was not until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the new genres of colonial account and royal memoir developed, that a richer sense of palace life emerged for the public at large. This chapter provides an overview of life in the royal households and palaces of India between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, exploring in particular the way in which royal marriages shaped the nature of the household, family life, and personal relationships within ruling elites. The focus is on the women — wives, mothers, daughters, concubines, and servants. Marriages had long been used by India’s rulers to cement political and military alliances. This is apparent in the paintings commissioned at royal courts to commemorate these occasions, such as the depiction of Jagat Singh’s wedding at Udaipur in the 1730s. From the sixteenth century onwards, the prominent Rajput ruling lineages of Amber, Marwar and Mewar entered into marriages over generations, as they struggled to forge political alliances with each other while negotiating their relationships with non-Rajput rulers. Other newly ascendant elites followed the same principle: thus the Maratha ruler Shivaji (r. 1664-89) married his second son, Rajaram, to Tarabai, daughter of Hambir Rao Mohite, the scion of another distinguished Maratha clan and commander-in-chief of his army. Given their political utility and their role in articulating relative rank within a broader hierarchy of ruling elites, the sons of powerful houses in particular entered into multiple marriages. These allowed rulers to construct the broadest possible network of alliances to consolidate their political power. The number of wives a ruler had may also have depended on his perceived status and prospects. In the nineteenth century, the East India Company and then the British government steadily expanded their control over India’s princes, typically through subsidiary alliance treaties that inaugurated ‘indirect rule’. The changed historical circumstances gave rise to several factors that ultimately reduced the incidence of polygyny among the Indian princes. One factor was that under indirect rule, the British monopolised the use of military force, controlled foreign relations, and settled disputes between princes. A second was colonial disapproval, reflected in the pressure from residents at the courts of various princes to curtail household expenditure, including entitlements for multiple royal wives. In these changed circumstances, polygyny lost its material usefulness. A third factor in the demise of polygyny was the pressure to modernise, felt by the princes themselves at different stages and to differing degrees... However, the changes in attitudes were not yet pervasive. Evidence from the early twentieth century suggests that multiple wives and concubines continued to be regarded as signalling appropriately virile kingship: Any Rajput price who did not possess half a dozen legal wives and at least as many concubines would have been regarded by his peers as something of an eccentric or, worse, too impoverished to afford a properly-stocked harem or even, the ultimate insult, lacking in manly vigour. It was also from the early decades of the twentieth century that a handful of India’s ruling elites began to marry spouses of their own choice, heralding the emergence of aspirations to companionate conjugality. Indira Devi of Baroda married Jitendra Narayan of Cooch Behar (r. 1913-22) in 1913, in the face of stern parental disapproval; the wedding took place in London, with no members of the bride’s family present. Her daughter, Gayatri Devi, overcame her mother’s scepticism to marry the handsome Man Singh II of Jaipur (r. 1922-70) and become his third wife in 1939. Similarly, in 1941, George Jivaji Rao Scindia of Gwalior (r. 1925-61) decided to marry Lekha Divyeshwari Devi, daughter of an exile from the Nepalese royal family, after the breakdown of marriage negotiations with Tripura. By the 1940s, perhaps in the context of looming Independence and the growing political pressures on the Indian prices, polygyny had all but disappeared from ruling households. Another source of potential tension in royal households was that wives from other ruling families came with their own income, often negotiated before the marriage. As testimony from the early twentieth century suggests, ‘the idea was to see that your daughter was properly looked after by her husband’. The administration of such entitlements required its own staff, such as clerks (kamdar) employed by the rani in question. These kamdars "created a tremendous lot of friction in the palaces" because of their complex loyalties and their positions of influence over the Maharanis’. Female seclusion and veiling were complementary practices that asserted the rank of the women involved, and of their households. Giles Tillotson has pointed out that ‘the idea that a royal palace should contain accommodation for women away from the public gaze is expressed quite clearly in the Manasara’, the classical Sanskrit text of the norms of palace architecture. Evidence from seventeenth-century Jodhpur shows how access to the zenana (women’s quarters) could become more restrictive over time. Sur Singh of Marwar (d. 1619) consolidated his authority against challengers from within his extended Rathor clan by bringing all of his forefather Rao Jodha’s descendants into a single, hierarchical order under his control. At the same time, he also forbade his brothers and sons, and even the women of his chiefs, from entering the royal zenana. Such an edict would have served to distinguish the royal women from even their peers in the aristocracy. Both female seclusion and veiling may thus have become more stringently enforced as lineages rose to political power and prestige. Women travelling out of the palace would be transported in palanquins that screened them from any outsider’s gaze. For the elite women marrying into royal families, their ancestry continued to be significant in the marital household, particularly in a polygynous environment with competing wives. A rani’s natal lineage could determine her rank in the marital household, her proximity to the ruler, and the political fortunes of her progeny. This was especially true in a context where, though primogeniture was desirable, the succession often passed to younger sons for other reasons — such as the strength of their faction in the royal household or at court. Such succession disputes could escalate into violence, as in the household of Rana Raj Singh of Mewar (r. 1653-80). One of his ranis wished to make her own son Sardar Singh the heir, and turned her husband against his eldest son, Sultan Singh. The Rana killed the Prince with his mace. When the plot was discovered, the Rana is said to have killed the ambitious Rani as well, and Sardar Singh committed suicide. Even when the anointed heir’s position was secure, ranis of the older generation could still compete for his affections, given the rank and influence that followed from proximity to one who would eventually succeed to the throne. Vijaya Raje, who married into the Scindia ruling family of Gwalior, recalls how, in the 1920s, her husband Jivaji Rao Scindia had to contend with the coddling of two mothers, both of whom competed for his affection. They spoilt him outrageously, and each in subtle ways tried to prejudice him against the other. Excerpts used with permission from Maharaja—The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts, edited by Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer. Published by Roli Books
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