The Dancer and the Raja (11 page)

³
A word of Persian origin. Zen means “woman” and zenana could be translated as “women's paradise.”

⁴
The word rajput means “son of a prince.”

PART TWO

The Lord of the World

13

Pomp and luxury have gone with the raja's life since the very moment of his birth. The inhabitants of Kapurthala remember clearly how they were woken by cannon shots announcing the long-awaited news of the birth of a Crown Prince at two o'clock in the morning on November 24, 1872. Forty days of festivities followed, which cost the treasury a million rupees and which were attended by the governor of the Punjab and the maharajas of Kashmir, Patiala, Gwalior, and other neighboring states. The authorities distributed alms among the poor and declared an amnesty for the twenty-eight prisoners in jail. The joy with which the people celebrated his arrival was proportionate to the long wait and uncertain situation created by the sovereign at the time, Raja Kharak, who suffered from attacks of transitory dementia. The doctors had forced him to spend long periods in an asylum near Dharamsala, a small city in the foothills of the Himalayas. Everyone who thought that he was incapable of procreating had a surprise when the baby's birth was announced.

The surprise was especially unpleasant for a branch of the family that claimed the throne and immediately questioned the veracity of the news. According to them, the baby's father was not Raja Kharak, but an aristocrat from Kapurthala called Lala Harichand, who had given his own son to the maharani in exchange for being named state finance minister. The British were believed to have thought up the plot to avoid the members of this branch of the family taking power. They were categorically opposed to this for one simple reason: that branch of the family had converted to Christianity a few years earlier thanks to the good offices of some English Presbyterian missionaries. For Christians—even if they were from the royal family—to sit on the throne could have very dangerous consequences in the always complicated ethnic and religious puzzle of an Indian state.

Whether true or not, the fact is that these members of the family took the matter to the highest authorities of colonial power, even getting as far as the office of the viceroy, who ordered a report from the official doctor in Kapurthala. Dr. Warburton carried out a little investigation by questioning the midwife and nurses who had attended the maharani. He was also able to hold a direct interview with the latter by means of a female interpreter, since it was totally forbidden for men to go into the zenana. In his report he concluded that the maharani was the real mother of the infant, paving the way for formal recognition of the heir. The offended branch of the family reacted by saying the doctor was corrupt and had been paid off, and they did not cease in their efforts to denounce the affair. They became so impertinent that they were expelled from Kapurthala and forced to go and live in Jalandhar. By way of compensation, the colonial government allowed them to use the title of raja and gave them titles naming the recalcitrant members of the family Knights of the Star of India and of the British Empire. The matter was settled with the official explanation that it was only a matter of the usual disputes that occur in royal families over succession. But the family division would end up having interesting consequences.

Five days after the birth, the women of the house celebrated the traditional ceremony to protect the child from the evil eye. For a whole night they intoned religious chants while the soldiers of the regiment banged big drums at the palace gates. On the tenth day, hordes of servants set to cleaning the walls and floors of the palace and the members of the family poured huge jugs of milk down the entrance steps, thus celebrating the moment when the mother was no longer “impure.” On the twelfth day, in another ceremony also inspired by Hinduism, the official state astrologer made his appearance. He read the child's horoscope, making a large number of comments about his star chart, on which he had written four names. Instead of the father doing it, as he was shut up in the asylum, it was the child's aunt who chose one of the names, which she then whispered in the baby's ear: Jagatjit—“Lord of the World”—would be his name. At the end of the ceremony, the astrologer read out the complete name of the heir to the throne of Kapurthala: Farzand-i-Dilband Rasik-al-Iqtidad-i-Daulat, Raja-i-Rajagan Jagatjit Singh Bahadur. For the English: Rajah Jagatjit Singh.

The little boy was brought up in the
zenana
, surrounded by
ayas
, servants, and nursemaids in an atmosphere of comfort and luxury unimaginable for any European child. Being the only son and, therefore, the heir, from his earliest childhood he grew accustomed to being the center of attention and to being treated with the honors due his rank. There was always someone fluttering around him to prevent him falling ill or to deal with any of his needs. It was enough for him to hold out his foot, and a servant put his shoes on. He raised a finger, and another came to comb his hair. He never raised his voice because it was not necessary. A look was enough to transmit a desire, which was immediately interpreted as an order. Even the oldest servants prostrated themselves before the boy, touching his feet in a sign of veneration. His health was followed with the greatest attention. An
aya
took the boy's chamber pot daily and scrutinized his stools most carefully. If she found anything strange, he was immediately treated with medicinal herbs, and, if it was more serious, she called the official doctor. Every day, during his entire childhood, he was bathed, and his hair was washed and then dried with him lying on a bed of plaited string, under which there was a little oven where there were embers and incense burning, leaving his hair perfumed. Then he had to submit to a complete massage with cream of almonds that were ground up fresh every week. Then he had his first dealings with corruption: he tried, unsuccessfully, to buy off the
ayas
in order to skip the massage that bored him so greatly. Throughout his childhood he was always accompanied, at all moments, by servants, and later by tutors and teachers, to the point that he was not alone for a single instant. Perhaps for that reason he traveled so much as soon as he was older, in order to find his true self on the roads of the world.

He did not know his father, who lived locked up in the asylum. The only thing he remembers about him is his death, because it was followed by days of mourning during which professional mourners invaded the palace halls with their weeping. Jagatjit was five years old and he was to inherit a kingdom. He inherited the thirteen-cannon salute of honor that the English had granted Kapurthala, the title of His Highness, and the fifth position in order of precedence among the sovereigns of the Punjab. But above all he inherited a colossal fortune, which was out of all proportion to the size of Kapurthala—six hundred square kilometers, tiny in comparison with the six thousand kilometers of the neighboring state of Patiala. That fortune he owed to his grandfather, Rajah Randhir Singh, who had made the right choice when he opted to side with the English when the mutiny broke out in 1857. It was a revolution, during which the Hindu and Moslem soldiers who made up the regiments of the Indian army rebelled against their superiors, the British officers in the pay of the East India Company. Although the reasons for the rebellion had to do with their fear of being converted to Christianity and the increasingly authoritarian attitude of the all-powerful company, the immediate pretext for the mutiny was based on the rumor that the new gun cartridges were greased with animal fat. That represented an insult both for the Hindus, who thought it was cow fat, and for the Moslems, who feared it was pig fat. The atrocities committed by both sides during the months the mutiny lasted became a landmark in the history of the British colonization of India. Considered by the Indians as their first war of independence, the mutiny favored the emergence of Indian nationalism and opened a breach that would culminate ninety years later in independence. For the English, who took several months in putting down the rebellion, it meant the end of the supremacy of the East India Company, which had handled matters in India as a private business since the seventeenth century. Queen Victoria took control of the government of the immense colony, and, in a proclamation made in 1858, attempted to ensure the loyalty of the princes. The English—barely a hundred and thirty thousand of them in a country of three hundred million—needed the princes to administer such an immense territory, as long as they could control them and keep them happy in some way. “We will be the guarantors of the authority and future of the native princes as governors of their states,”ran the proclamation. “We will respect their rights, their dignity and their honour as if they were ours.” It was a historic moment when the kings of India stopped being kings and became princes. Protected by the British umbrella that guaranteed their borders, their earnings, and their privileges for them, the sovereigns lived from then on in security and peace of mind, unlike their forbears. They no longer had to answer to their people, but to the supreme power of the British Crown, which showered them with honors, titles, and salvos of cannon shots so that each of them was situated in what was considered the correct order of precedence. Very skillfully, the English placed them like satellites, each in his own orbit.

The stability provided them by the Pax Britannica made them malleable and corrupt. They ended up relying more and more on the English, convinced they were essential for their own survival, when in fact it was the princes who had been essential for the survival of the British in India. In that way the rajas gradually moved away from their people, forgetting the precepts of simplicity and humility inherent in Hindu society and beginning to live in an ostentatious manner, competing with each other and emulating the colonizers. They also wanted to be English, but it was hard for them to achieve because they came from a feudal society.

For having allied himself with the British during the mutiny, Randhir Singh of Kapurthala was rewarded with enormous stretches of land confiscated from the raja of Oudh, who had opted for the rebel side. And so, the misfortune of one made the prosperity and happiness of the other. Those lands provided Kapurthala with a huge annual income of two million, four hundred thousand rupees, which went directly into the raja's pockets. At the age of five, Jagatjit Singh was already rich.

14

The raja grew up with one foot in the deep India of his glorious ancestors and the other in Europe. One foot in a feudal world and the other in the twentieth century. Some teachers gave him classes in physics and chemistry, and others taught him the
Kamasutra
, a Sanskrit text from the fourth century written by a wise man who invented a sexual code to guide men in the art of love. While he was still a minor, the state was administered by a succession of brilliant English civil servants, some of whom became governors-general, as was the case of Sir James Lyall. Those superintendents were aided in their task by men in their confidence who made up the council of state civil servants, and together they gradually introduced reforms and perfected the administration in such a way that, when he was eighteen and took power, the young raja would find the house in order. For example, they reduced the number of ministries, merging Finance and Tax Collection into one, and they eliminated the Ministry of Miscellaneous Matters, which covered the administration of the stables, the elephants, and the zoo.

The education Jagatjit received from carefully selected tutors was liberal. At the same time he learned good manners, the requirements of protocol, and the values of Western democracy, but without the obligation of having to apply them because he would rule absolutely over the three hundred thousand souls in Kapurthala. The influence of his tutors aroused great curiosity in him regarding England, its history, its values, its institutions, and its customs. England was the supreme power, and in his eyes it represented the source of modern civilization. The best cars, the fastest ships, the most solid buildings, the greatest empire, the most advanced medicine … England was all that.

How does a combustion engine work? What is the sea? What difference is there between a sepia print, a lithograph, and a photograph? His tutors were the people who satisfied his childish curiosity and opened his eyes to the world because in his family environment no one had the slightest idea about life beyond the borders of India. The contacts that, because of his position, he maintained from an early age with British aristocrats familiarized him with the elite of that society that he so admired and that welcomed him as one more in the family. For that reason he applied himself to the study of English with special determination. He soon learned to speak it fluently and with an impeccable accent so British that it was strange to think he had never been to England. His fascination for that country widened to include the whole of Europe, the cradle of the great technological innovations of the end of the nineteenth century. Machines replaced the work of man, devices for talking over a distance, for reproducing pictures in movement, flying machines … the list of inventions able to seduce the imagination of a boy was interminable. And it was all happening in Europe. And so he set himself to learn French, and in a short time he was able to speak it and read it well too. He shared, like many of his countrymen, a great gift for learning languages. It is rare to find an Indian who does not know two or more languages, the minimum for making oneself understood in a country with fourteen official languages and more than five hundred dialects.

At the age of ten, the raja spoke six languages. Apart from English and French, his mother tongue was Punjabi, similar to Hindustani, which he also knew, as well as Sanskrit, which he studied with an elderly Hindu holy man, and Urdu (ancient Persian), which was the official language of the court. This old custom inherited from the Moghul Empire, which lived on for a century after the empire disappeared, showed the long-lasting influence the Moghuls had on India.

Jagatjit Singh came to embody the drastic change that had occurred in Indian monarchs due to Queen Victoria's proclamation. In very few years, the rajas had found themselves forced to leap forward by centuries. And Jagatjit showed himself to be a real acrobat, able to leap from one world to another in a completely natural way. He was the first in his family to dress as a European, to play cricket and tennis, to eat Western dishes, and to practice a sport as English as pig-sticking—hunting wild boar with a lance. But he went to the council of ministers on the back of an elephant, wearing a diamond crown, a necklace of thirteen strings of pearls, and a plume of feathers fixed to his turban. He inherited a kingdom with all the exterior signs of the monarchy, with all the ceremonies and rituals of coronation, but which, in fact, was a leftover from the past and in which was missing the very substance that made sense of the monarchy. He had been taught that serving the people was the most important mission in his life, but deep down he knew, like all the other sovereigns, that his position was assured by the English, and that his job was for life. Therefore, the really important thing in order to enjoy a life of comfort and pleasure was to get on well with those in power. A good relationship with the British was thus placed above the concept of serving the people. It was a system with a fault in its foundations, but which at that time seemed as solid as it was eternal. The winds of history would take care to put things in their right place.

The sudden change in the raja's lifestyle would not be carried out without upsets or problems. It is not easy to reconcile cultures as different as that of the English and the Sikhs; it is not easy to be an Indian king and a British gentleman at the same time; ancient and modern, democrat and despot, Oriental prince and European vassal. Even more so when the absence of a father figure, together with the weakness of his mother, a traditional woman who belonged to another time, left him without the confidence necessary to face up to a changing world, to solve the conflict of having to be a king without really being one. Perhaps for that reason Jagatjit Singh began to externalize his psychological problems and took to eating. At first no one was alarmed; quite the opposite, the round-bellied heir to the throne was a decidedly fine-looking boy. But later, when at the age of ten he crossed the line of a hundred kilos, panic began to spread. Dr. Warburton, the official doctor of Kapurthala, put him on a strict diet, which brought no results. The boy continued to get fatter and fatter and slept too much. From that time came his habit of asking for help to tie or untie his
churidar
, very wide Indian-style pajama trousers held up with a silk rope round the waist. Later, when he got back into physical shape, he continued the custom and extended it to tying his turban. Inder Singh, the captain of his escort, would be the one in charge of dealing with that particular whim of his master's for years.

“Brought up an only child, fattened up since he was small, first by his wet-nurses and then by his
ayas
, the boy has acquired some dreadful eating habits,” stated Dr. Warburton in his report to James Lyall, the tutor of little Jagatjit, who was very concerned at the turn the progressive weight gains of the prince was taking. “For now, the only thing we can do is to try another diet,” suggested the doctor.

“What if that doesn't work? What is the outlook if he keeps getting fatter?”

Dr. Warburton looked at him over the top of his glasses. He had just read an article in a medical journal and feared it could well be applied to the case of Jagatjit.

“Let's hope he does not suffer from a kind of morbid infantile obesity, a rare illness. The patients fall asleep standing up, and go on getting fatter and fatter until serious breathing difficulties appear …”

There was a silence, interrupted by Lyall: “And …?”

“Many of them die before they reach adulthood.”

Lyall was speechless. After all the scandal caused by the other branch of the family, the fact of being left without a direct heir and with no chance of having another would present a very thorny problem to the Political Department of the Punjab.

“We'll see how he goes on,” continued Dr. Warburton. “I hope it's only the expression of psychological problems showing themselves in an obsession with food!”

Jagatjit stayed put at a hundred and thirty kilos. It was a lot for a boy of eleven, but at least his weight stabilized, which was a relief, even if only momentarily, for his tutors and the doctor. At that age, the members of the court decided to find him his first wife. The boy had nothing to say on the matter because there was no possibility of a choice. This was demanded by tradition. Besides, he could consider himself lucky because, as a Sikh, the number of wives he could take was not limited, unlike Moslems, who have no right to more than four. Only when he had come of age and had taken over control of the government would he have greater freedom to choose his wives, although direct access to women from other families of the nobility would always be very difficult, because the families got them engaged when they were young girls.

A large group of courtiers traveled to the Kangra valley, some two hundred kilometers from Kapurthala, in search of a girl of high caste of Rajput origin. They wanted a union that would be able to strengthen links with the great families of the Rajputana, the homeland of the Rajputs, where the ancestors of the raja originated, and with someone belonging to a very high caste to improve the “pedigree” of the line of Kapurthala. Originally Jagatjit's family had belonged to the caste of the
kalal
, who in olden times were in charge of making alcoholic drinks for the royal houses—a mediocre caste. Jassa Singh, a brilliant forbear helped by the Sikhs who at that time formed part of a new religion, was able to bring together an army, rise up, and unify Kapurthala. But the stigma of the
kalal
still weighed heavily on some members of the court, who were very punctilious with anything to do with genealogy. Did a Punjabi proverb not say, “Crow,
kalal
, and dog, do not trust them even when they are asleep”? For that reason it was important to improve the bloodline.

In every town, the arrival of the retinue charged with finding a bride was announced with the beating of drums. Girls of marriageable age were examined so meticulously that there were even complaints about the extreme zeal of the courtiers when it came to assessing the physical attributes of the candidates. The courtiers from Kapurthala came with the arrogance given them by the fact they represented a prince, however fat he was. They knew that the dearest wish of thousands of families was to marry one of their daughters to a raja. For that reason it was necessary to check that the papers of the girls were not mixed up, that the information was all true, and that no member of the retinue should accept bribes in order to include a young girl who was not appropriate among the candidates.

Finally they decided to choose a beautiful girl the same age as the raja, called Harbans Kaur. She had big, dark eyes and her skin was as golden as wheat. She was Hindu and belonged to the cream of the high Brahmin castes. They negotiated the terms of her dowry with her parents, which would be made effective at the time of the marriage, set for April 16, 1886, when the young couple reached the worthy age of fourteen.

The wedding was performed strictly according to the Sikh tradition. The raja did not see his bride's face until that very day, and he did so by means of a little mirror placed between them. “I stood looking into her dark eyes, the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen. Then I smiled, and she returned my smile,” he wrote in his diary. What was not recorded in any diary was the reaction of Harbans Kaur when she discovered the swollen face of her beardless husband, his triple chin, his drooping eyes, and his enormous belly. No diary would tell in detail what must have been her first impression, and then her first night of lovemaking, she submissive and frightened, he inexpert and dangerously fat. What did get out was that the marriage was not consummated.

To the concern that the court and the family felt for the raja's health—which apart from his obesity showed no signs of narcolepsy or breathing difficulties—was now added a deep concern regarding his sexual life and thus for the future of the dynasty.