May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (31 page)

When I met Scindia in 1988, she was still a member of the opposition and had become active in the cause of the right-wing Hindu religious revival movement. She had split bitterly with her son, who had surprised many by becoming a minister in the Congress party government of Rajiv Gandhi—who was of course the son of the woman who had put the former maharani in jail. The Scindias’ most recent public quarrel had been over the marriage of the son’s daughter to the son of the former maharaja of Kashmir, in an extravagant, ostentatious celebration at the Gwalior palace. Vijayaraje Scindia used the occasion to score a political point against the prime minister and her own son as well. “When the country is going through all these difficulties, you shouldn’t have this grandeur, this show,” she said.

By contrast, Gayatri Devi, the onetime maharani of Jaipur, had quit politics, but her election to Parliament in 1962, which she had won by a majority of 175,000 votes, had earned her a place in the
Guinness Book of World Records
for the largest majority won by any candidate running for any election in any democratic country in the world. Her life is important because she represents one kind of woman—and, in fact, man—who made it in politics in independent India: the former ruler whose still-loyal onetime subjects voted their candidate into Parliament with a massive majority and then served as a potent power base. But I am also mentioning her here because I cannot resist dipping into the storybook life of India’s most alluring former princess.

The Jaipurs were among the richest and by far the most glamorous clan of the nation’s royalty, and even more than the others, whose combined kingdoms once made up one third of the country, they lived in the India of glitter and excess: tiger shoots, polo matches, party weekends at hunting lodges surrounded by the golden desert of Rajasthan. Gayatri Devi’s grandfather kept trained parrots that rode little silver bicycles; her mother had a gold tongue-scraper and also a live turtle encrusted with diamonds and rubies that she used as a good-luck charm at the gambling tables of France. Gayatri Devi had grown up as the daughter of the maharaja of Cooch Behar, in a palace in northeastern India with four hundred servants. She shot her first panther when she was twelve, went to finishing school in London and Switzerland, and then fell in love with the young maharaja of Jaipur, “Jai” to his friends. He was one of the world’s finest polo players and liked a good party. She became his third wife and had to adjust to life
in Jaipur with the other two. “I think it’s much easier to get on with your husband’s other wife, who has an official position, and a status, than his mistress, who is usurping you,” she said. Her husband died in 1970 of a heart attack during a polo match.

In late 1986 I went to see the former member of Parliament at her home in Jaipur. She received me at the Lillypool, the name of the large sun-filled house on the grounds of her former residence, the Rambagh Palace. Three decades earlier the family had turned Rambagh into a luxury hotel to pay for the upkeep, and at the time of my visit, tourists could stay in Gayatri Devi’s old bedroom suite for $250 a night. At first she had treated the guests as interlopers and had stationed her maid outside the door of Rambagh’s indoor swimming pool so she could do her laps without disturbance from unseemly American and European tourists. Her husband put a stop to that, and over the years she had learned to adjust. The Lillypool, after all, wasn’t so bad. The house was airy and spacious, with yards of paisley, tables of polo trophies and a signed photograph of Prince Charles in a silver frame. When I arrived, a servant directed me to a plump white chair in the living room, and soon a cup of tea materialized. After some time, so did Gayatri Devi, still striking at sixty-seven, walking briskly forward in an unregal outfit of dark brown slacks and a plaid cotton shirt. She took a seat on a sofa with her elbows on her knees. “I was always a tomboy,” she said in a throaty English accent that made her sound like an Indian Tallulah Bankhead. “If I got up in the morning, it was ‘Rush, rush, I’ve got to go riding.’ There was no time to look in the mirror and pluck an eyebrow.” In her youth,
Life
magazine called her one of the most beautiful women in the world. She had an athlete’s figure, dark eyes, full lips, lustrous hair. She almost never wore makeup. But for all her style, she was never particularly interested in clothes, and her friends in India still sighed that she wore her saris too high off the floor. In New York and London, she was an otherworldly addition to the social circuit; she liked to collect people, and she was much collected herself. Jacqueline Onassis stayed with her at the Lillypool in 1983, and in 1985 Mick Jagger dropped by her stepson’s house. I found the former maharani magisterial, haughty, entertaining and no doubt capable of great charm. But on the morning I spoke to her, she seemed under strain; for months she had been engaged in a long-running feud with her stepson over rights to the Jaipur estate, estimated to be worth $400 million. The stress showed in her tired, lined face, although she was still a trim, elegant woman who had kept her hair
brown and who still favored, for the evenings, a double strand of pearls.

In the old days, before the princely kingdoms became part of independent India, twenty or thirty guests would come to stay at Rambagh, spilling from the marble veranda onto the dance floor and into the gardens, where two hundred kinds of roses grew. By Indian standards, the one-hundred-room Rambagh was a small, cozy palace. The fun never stopped. “Quite a lot, we went riding in the morning,” Gayatri Devi remembered. “Then we came back and had breakfast in the big dining room. Guests did whatever they liked—some went riding, some went for an early morning shoot, some might get up late. After breakfast, I had a bath, changed, then went to my office. In those days there was quite a lot of Red Cross work to be done, and I had started a ladies’ club. Then after the partition of India there were all the refugees who came in, and I started schools for them and all that. Then we’d all sit in the front veranda of Rambagh before lunch and have a drink, and there’d be lunch, and most people went for a siesta afterwards. In the afternoon there would usually be a polo match; then there would be tennis on the lawns here. And after that a lot of people would go play squash—really athletic we used to be, come to think of it. Then there would be time to change again for the evening. We would have drinks, and dinner different places—sometimes in the summer it was on the lawn, and now and then we would go up to Mooti Doongri, that little fort in front there. It was a nice life.”

By independence, in 1947, that life had ended. The new Indian government officially abolished the princely states, and in the following years her husband was a maharaja in name only, with no kingdom left to rule. In 1962, in an attempt to gain political influence while appearing to remain neutral, he allowed his wife to be put up by an opposition party for election to Parliament. For the former maharani, this was a journey into an India she had never known before. As she explained in her biography, written with Santha Rama Rau: “I had never before heard of electoral rolls, did not know the names of the different constituencies, and did not realize that there were special seats reserved for Harijans and the tribal people. I knew nothing about election agents, nominations, withdrawals, or parliamentary boards.” She campaigned by jeep for thousands of miles across Rajasthan and struggled to make speeches in her rudimentary Hindi. “The whole campaign was, perhaps, the most extraordinary period of my life,” she wrote. “Seeing and meeting the people of India, as I did then, I began
to realize how little I really knew of the villagers’ way of life.” She spent the next fifteen years as the member of Parliament who wore chiffon saris and French perfume, but she emerged as a formidable power because of her enormous base of support among her husband’s former subjects in Rajasthan.

Another woman whose relationship with an influential man led her to politics was Nehru’s sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who had a brilliant career as her brother’s ambassador to Moscow, London and Washington, and who in 1953 was elected as the first woman president of the United Nations General Assembly. The international press at first did not know what to make of her. “How would you describe the sari you are wearing?” one reporter asked at the U.N. news conference following Mrs. Pandit’s election. Mrs. Pandit would not sink to this. “Did you ask my predecessor to describe his suit?” she retorted. In her autobiography,
The Scope of Happiness
, she noted, “I was very put out that in this age of women’s emancipation, and after all the years I had been in public life, such inane inquiries should be put to me simply because I was a woman.”

In 1986, I went to see Mrs. Pandit after my editors at the
Post
asked me to write a story with an Indian angle about the Public Broadcasting System’s Masterpiece Theatre series
Lord Mountbatten: The Last Viceroy
. Mrs. Pandit had been a personal friend of Louis Mountbatten’s, or Dickie, as she called him, so in search of reminiscences I found my way up to her house on a road lined with jacaranda trees just outside Dehra Dun, a resort town 125 miles north of New Delhi. “I’m awfully amused that someone should want to interview me,” Mrs. Pandit announced when we sat down on cane chairs in the cool winter sunshine of her garden, which looked out toward the tree-covered hills that announced the beginning of the Himalayas. “I’m not interviewable.” Her view was that as a retired eighty-five-year-old woman she was no longer news, but I spent the morning enchanted and fascinated by her memories, anecdotes and political opinions. Mrs. Pandit was one of the great figures of modern India, and like her niece, Indira Gandhi, she had seen it all: the grandeurs of the old Nehru home in Allahabad, the freedom struggle, Mahatma Gandhi, prison, her brother’s rise to the position of prime minister. She had broken with Mrs. Gandhi during the Emergency, when she spoke out against her, and the rift between the two women, who were said not to trust each other, never healed. But in a larger sense, it seemed to me that rivalry between Nehru’s daughter and sister over who should inherit the family political legacy was inevitable.

On the morning I met Mrs. Pandit, I noticed immediately that she had the deep-set eyes and wide mouth of her brother, and it was startling to see so much of his face in hers. She was dressed elegantly in a blue silk printed sari with a navy cardigan, and age had brought a certain softness and sweetness to her. This did not mean she had lost her sense of humor and a predilection for saying whatever she pleased. She casually referred to Queen Elizabeth II, another old friend, as “not a great intellect, of course, but a warm person of many interests,” and also spoke her mind about the relationship between her brother, a romantic and impassioned man, and Mountbatten’s dazzling and difficult wife, Edwina. As the last British viceroy, Mountbatten had been thrown into a relationship with Nehru by the forces of history, and their goal was nothing less than the creation of modern India. Edwina was an important part of the chemistry that made it work. When things seemed to be at their worst, she was able to charm and provide solace for the moody Nehru; whether the close friendship became more intimate than that is something that has fascinated the Indians for years. In 1985, the especially juicy parts of
Mountbatten
, a well-received official biography by Philip Ziegler, were serialized in Indian newspapers, creating a brief flurry of fresh gossip about the threesome, but Ziegler in the end evaded the issue, describing the relationship between Edwina and Nehru as “intensely loving, romantic, trusting, generous, idealistic, even spiritual,” and adding that “if there was any physical element it can only have been of minor importance to either party.” The journalist M. J. Akbar, in his biography of Nehru, took the speculation a step forward when he quoted an Indian politician’s son who said he walked into Nehru’s bedroom to announce dinner one night and came upon Edwina and Nehru in what the politician’s son described as a “clinch.”

Mrs. Pandit had her own ideas. “Edwina was a great friend of my brother’s,” she said. “A man and a woman can be great friends. I’ve had many good men friends, but I haven’t been to bed with them. I think Edwina was an extremely fine woman who was drawn on many levels to my brother. I pity a woman who wouldn’t have been. And he found in her a woman with whom he could exchange many thoughts.” If the relationship did become intimate, she said, “I’m glad. What can I say? I’ve seen many of the letters, and I’ve found they are some of the best literature I’ve read. But that’s my brother.”

Oddly, for all her time in public life in India—as a member of Parliament and the cabinet, and as the governor of the state of Maharashtra—Mrs. Pandit claimed in her autobiography that “I am not a
politician. The ways of modern politics are not my métier; the slippery road of intrigue that politicians have to climb is not for me, even though the prizes at the end may be considerable.” The morning I was with Mrs. Pandit, she looked back on her life and concluded, not unhappily, that the years of “great fun” and “great moments” had come to the last chapter. “You read the papers, and one by one the people I’ve known are no more,” she said. “It makes one feel rather lonely. It’s almost a desolate feeling. I feel it every morning when I get up. This is the biggest argument I have with my daughters, but I say this from the depths of my feeling. I honestly feel that having outlived everybody, it is high time for me to go on to a better world.”

As moving and inspiring as Mrs. Pandit was for me, it remained undeniable that she owed more than a measure of her success to her brother. After I spoke to Mrs. Pandit, I began to wonder: Was there any woman in Indian politics who had succeeded without a relationship to a powerful man? Was there one woman who had been able to succeed on her own? I hoped that education and social change might have created such a woman, but instead modernity seemed to be taking the political tradition of “bahu-beti-biwi”—that is, daughter-in-law, daughter and wife—down bizarre new roads. In the state of Tamil Nadu, for example, there were actually two women, a wife and a mistress, who publicly fought over the right to succeed one of India’s most popular politicians, the former matinee idol and Tamil Nadu chief minister M. G. Ramachandran. Both women had costarred with MGR, as he was called, and over the years they had maintained an uneasy coexistence. Their leading man’s death in 1987 set off a political circus that began while his body was still lying in state. On one side was what the press and those in the controversy dubbed the J-1 camp, for Janaki Ramachandran, the sixty-four-year-old long-suffering wife, who had appeared with MGR in three films; on the other was the J-2 camp, for Jayalalitha Jayaram, the clever, wildly popular forty-year-old “sultry siren” of the Tamil Nadu cinema of a decade before. She was universally described as MGR’s lover, although she preferred “protégée.” As Tamil Nadu watched transfixed, Jayalalitha kept a vigil by MGR’s body for twenty-one hours, withstanding fatigue and a group of women from the J-1 camp who, she told
India Today
, “started stamping on my feet, driving their nails into my skin, pinching me, and so on.” When Jayalalitha tried to climb alongside MGR’s body for the funeral procession, she was assaulted by a nephew of MGR’s wife and forced to retreat. “I was disgusted with this uncouth behavior,”
Jayalalitha complained to
India Today
. MGR’s wife was soon victorious as the new chief minister, but only temporarily, and by early 1989, neither of MGR’s women was in power.