The Dancer and the Raja (24 page)

The raja is overjoyed. He is dressed in a suit of gold brocade, and his neck, chest, and wrists glitter with the sparkle of diamonds and pearls; Jagatjit looks majestic at his son's wedding. Under his turban crowned with a tiara of emeralds, his dark eyes shine with the satisfaction of a sovereign and father who has done his duty by ensuring the continuity of his line. Determined that his son's wedding shall become part of history, he has hired the services of the only Indian film producer of the moment, who films the celebrations in Kapurthala for posterity with a camera bought directly from the Lumière brothers.

He also manages to have his son's wedding pass into the history of India, but for another reason. Once again he decides to break with tradition, which requires the newlyweds to leave the ceremony separately, the bride covered with her veil and in a palanquin closed with curtains. This time the couple parade in a carriage bearing the state coat of arms, escorted by uniformed guards on horseback. They ride through the streets of Kapurthala amid the frenzy of the crowds, waving to the people as they go by, until they come to the women's palace, where they receive the good wishes of hundreds of Indian lady guests. For Harbans Kaur, this new gesture of disdain for tradition is an outrage. “For my father-in-law, it was an audacious blow against
purdah
, a blow that generated a considerable number of comments within the state,” Gita would say. “After that he continued to defy the conventions. He never asked me to observe
purdah
, except when the more orthodox women in the family were present.”

Gita ends up exhausted at the end of her wedding day. She dreams of retiring to her rooms and getting into a hot bath prepared by her maid. It is the dream of a single woman, which belongs to the past. The reality is somewhat different: she and her husband are led back to the palace, where the servants accompany them to the bedroom door. After attending to their needs, the servants bow and disappear. This is the moment when Gita faces up to the destiny that has been mapped out for her, and which she has accepted in the end. “For the first time I realized we were going to be on our own for the rest of our lives. I felt overcome by the idea that my husband was a complete stranger to me.”

31

As soon as the pomp of the Crown Prince of Kapurthala's wedding is over, an event considered of great importance appears on the horizon: the Great Durbar in Delhi, the ceremony of the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary as emperor and empress of India. To commemorate the first visit of British sovereigns to the subcontinent, the English have built a triumphal arch of yellow basalt on the promontory that dominates the Bombay roadstead. Given the name of Gateway to India, its powerful silhouette is the first thing the King and Queen/Emperor and Empress see of India. In its shadow they are welcomed with all the honors on December 2, 1911. It is the first stage of a journey that will take them to Delhi to be the center of the greatest event in the history of the Raj, an event that will mark the high point of the British Empire.

No one talks of anything else in the palaces of India, where feverish preparations are being made to play a large part in the ceremony for their emperor. The richest of the princes, the nizam of Hyderabad, opens the season for pomp and extravagance by having the goldsmith Fabergé make a replica of the façade of his palace in gold and precious stones to adorn the pavilion of his royal house at the Durbar in Delhi. Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala has Jacques Cartier travel to India to design a great ceremonial necklace for him, which will pass into the history of jewelry, using the gems in the crown treasure, among which is the famous 428-carat De Beers diamond.

For Kapurthala, the Great Durbar acquires special significance because His Highness will enjoy the double honor of receiving the decoration as grand commander of the Star of India from the hands of the emperor himself, who, at the same time, will grant him the hereditary title of maharaja—great raja. And all this by virtue of his loyalty to the Raj and for contributing to the stability and prosperity of Kapurthala. In spite of the differences he still has with the British authorities, no other piece of news could make him happier.

But this is not the case with his wives, including Anita. How will protocol treat them? Harbans Kaur is sure that the English, who are the organizers of this great event, will respect her special place as first wife. It will be a new opportunity to impose tradition and, at the same time, to pit herself against that Spanish woman. Anita is afraid they may humiliate her, and she is also rather tired of battles that she does not wish to fight. Although she has won some, thanks to the constant support of her husband, she has serious reasons for fearing that she may lose the war. The Crown Prince's wedding has not helped to improve relations within the family, quite the opposite. Except for Kamal, who went back to England just after the wedding in order to continue with his studies in agricultural engineering, the other sons have behaved coldly and in a distant way with her. Kamal and Rani Kanari are her only allies, but they are too weak to impose their views.

Anita was naive to think that the sons would have any influence over their mothers because they were young and educated in England. Quite the opposite has happened: the mothers have influenced their sons. Now it seems that her stepsons also ignore her. And that hurts, because they live under the same roof. There are wounding little incidents. For example, several times, at lunchtime for the family, there is a plate missing: hers. Anita is forced to ask for one. Other times, at the garden parties, the teas that the English residents in Kapurthala attend, such as the doctor or the civil engineer, along with their wives, the raja's sons offer drinks to everyone except her. They do not introduce her, and they never address her in conversation. They act as though she did not exist. Anything goes in order to put the outsider in her place.

And Gita? Her caste and racial prejudices, buried in some part of her mind during the years she spent in France, have flourished again, stronger than ever, like a tree whose branches had been pruned. She no longer sees the world from the point of view of a Western woman. For her, her father-in-law is a lecherous old man who has allowed himself to be seduced by a vulgar “Spanish dancer.” By imposing her on the rest of the family, the raja is contributing to bringing down the category—the caste—of all of them. For that reason she does not want a friendship with Anita, and for the same reason she decides she does not want to live in L'Élysée. “We aren't children anymore,” she told Ratanjit. “We need our own independence.” It took her some trouble to convince her husband to talk to the maharaja. “Even after the wedding, my father-in-law always treated him like a little boy.” The sovereign has agreed to his request without making any difficulties and has offered to let them live in his love nest of recent years: Villa Buona Vista. “I was very surprised he agreed so readily to our wishes,” Gita would say, “because he was a domineering man who was used to always having his own way. Later I realized that he did it to ingratiate himself with me. He needed all the friends and allies he could get to counteract the negativity caused in his family and environment by his relationship with the Spanish woman.”

But these tactics do not work for the maharaja. Gita, like the other women, is upset by Anita's role as “lady of the house.”

“She wants to be treated as the official maharani,” she dares to say to her father-in-law one day.

“I sent you to France so you could become a modern woman and I'm beginning to realize I've wasted my money,” the maharaja answers, angry and disillusioned at his daughter-in-law's attitude. “The years you spent in Europe have not made you more open-minded. They were wasted.”

Gita later said, “I did not answer him, but I would willingly have told him that I was shocked at the cold, insensitive way he treated his wives. I had caught Harbans Kaur crying on more than one occasion over the wedding preparations. If I'd had to make a huge sacrifice to accept the responsibilities of my marriage and my position, as the highest authority in the state, he should have been capable of doing the same.”

In the midst of all this palace intrigue, Anita tries to keep her calm and not lose sight of her aims. She would like to go unnoticed and be invisible if possible, but her husband does not let her. He needs her, as was proved during the wedding. Fearful that the women's anger may be taken out on her son, Anita worries about the safety of little Ajit. At nights she has trouble sleeping again and she is full of anxiety. She is the victim of nightmares in which she always sees herself running away with the baby in her arms, fleeing from a vague danger that finally catches her by the throat and wakes her up suddenly, soaked in sweat and tears. Only the sweet, serene presence of Dalima manages to get her back to sleep. The fairy-tale story of the curtain raiser at the Kursaal is turning nasty. She does not know what to do to change the direction events are taking. The weapons she has at her disposal, her frankness and spontaneity, are no good in this war.

For the first time in his life Ratanjit, until now a docile son with a complex about the paternal figure in his life, decides to face up to his father.

“My mother has asked me to intercede with you for you to reinstate her rank.”

“No one has taken away her rank.”

“You know what I'm referring to. That Spanish woman acts as though she were the maharani of Kapurthala. My mother feels bitterly rejected. I'm asking you to behave according to our traditions, as the rest of us do.”

“The woman that you so disrespectfully call ‘that Spanish woman' is my wife. I am just as married to her as you are to Gita.”

“She's your fifth wife.”

“So what? She is the woman with whom I share my life. And I have given her the title of maharani. Your mother is faithful to
purdah
, and I don't reproach her for it, but we have evolved differently. I've told you a thousand times, but you don't seem to want to understand. Do you perhaps think your mother could have organized your wedding, for example? Could she have attended all our European guests? I need a woman who is free of the ties of
purdah
at my side. I thought my son would be able to understand that. But I can see not, that he is only capable of sticking his nose into his father's private affairs in order to criticize.”

“My husband and I often discussed the problem” Gita would say. “As a princess brought up in the Hindu tradition, I could not accept my father-in-law's behavior. As a woman, I was upset at my husband's mother's suffering, whose heart was broken by the maharaja's rejection. At the end of all our deliberations, a decision was made: we could not accept his marriage to the Spanish woman. We informed my father-in-law that from then on we refused to have anything to do with Anita and that we would not be present at the celebrations and receptions that we knew she would be attending.”

A drastic decision of this kind is a humiliating blow for the maharaja. His son has taken his mother's side. To a certain extent this is logical, but it was not necessary. The maharaja is not against his first wife. The fact that he does not share his life with her or with his other wives does not mean that he has abandoned them. He would never do that, and therefore he is annoyed at being accused of precisely that. He knows his son well and he knows that he is incapable of standing up to his father in that way, and so he attributes the insolence of his behavior to his daughter-in-law's influence. High-caste Hindu princesses, imbued with prejudices regarding their superiority, take the divine origin of their lineage very seriously. From Sikhism and its precepts about equality among men they have learned nothing.

But life has many ups and downs, and in the same way as he has put all his efforts into making Gita into the future maharani of Kapurthala, Jagatjit trusts that one day the opportunity may come for him to repay such ingratitude.

During the two weeks of festivities around the Durbar, princes, clan chiefs, representatives of the provincial governments, Indian aristocrats, the British community, and the foreign guests, plus eighty thousand soldiers, invade the city of Delhi, whose population increases from two hundred and fifty thousand to half a million. It is a marvel of organization. The English have set up forty thousand tents, built seventy kilometers of new roads, forty kilometers of railway, eighty kilometers of water channels, and a gigantic amphitheater with space for a hundred thousand people. The emperor's enclosure has two hundred and thirty-three tents, fitted with marble fireplaces, panels of carved mahogany, gold dishes, and crystal lamps. The others, equally luxurious, house the different royal households with their own entourages of courtiers, assistants, guests, servants, grooms, and so one. Each enclosure is different. The raja of Jamnagar's tent is covered in oyster shells, the symbol of his state on the shores of the Arabian Sea. At the entrance to the raja of Rewa's enclosure, two splendid tame tigers stand guard. This raja has requested permission to offer them as a gift to the emperor during the ceremony, but has been wisely refused.

Around the tents there are gardens in which roses have been planted in the colors of each state, lawns with avenues that are perfectly looked after, pools, parks, polo fields, stables for horses and elephants, parking space for landaus, carriages and cars, and the thirty-six railway stations for the private trains of the princes. Anita is impressed. She notes in her diary: “I had never seen so many gold thrones in all my life, so many elephants decked out in precious stones, so many solid silver carriages. And the Rolls-Royces! … Never in any event before have so many Rolls-Royces been seen parked one next to the other. God alone knows how much such a display cost with so many kings, each concerned to appear richer and more powerful than all the others.”

The parties take place one after another at a dizzy pace: garden parties, purdah parties for the ladies, games of polo, and public and private entertainment of all kinds. Harbans Kaur attends the reception held by Queen Mary, accompanied by her daughter-in-law, Gita, who acts as interpreter for her when the sovereign asks them a few courtesy questions. Anita, of course, is not invited to the official receptions. This is not Calcutta and, although she would like to greet the governor of Bengal and his wife, she could not even get close to them. Once again, her case has aroused a copious exchange of letters between different civil servants. In the end, a letter from the viceroy to the secretary of state for India, in London, has solved the situation as follows: “No invitation will be sent to Prem Kaur of Kapurthala to attend the garden party which Her Majesty the Queen will hold for the wives of the princes, but she will be accommodated at any act where there is no possibility of her meeting, or being presented to Their Majesties. As for the Durbar, she will be given a seat at the back of the amphitheatre and she may attend the coronation ceremony like any unofficial spectator.”
¹⁷

The Durbar, as such, takes place on December 12, 1911. The spectacle is unforgettable for all those present: for the peasant who has walked for days to see his emperor, for the young men dressed in white cotton cloth perched among the branches of the trees, for the twelve-year-old girls with their babies in their arms, and also for the emperor and empress, who find themselves facing an ocean of green, yellow, mauve, blue, and orange turbans that stretches as far as the horizon. “This is the most wonderful thing I have ever seen,” George V would declare, sitting by his wife on a solid gold throne on a stage well above the level of the crowds, his shoulders covered in a cape of ermine and protected from the blazing sun by a purple and gold canopy. It is the view of a man who knows that, without India, Great Britain would not be the largest empire the world has ever known, or the number one power in the world.

The places of honor are occupied by the princes, followed by their relatives and members of the nobility, dressed in their gala clothes of brocade and gold. Each of the maharajas is wearing the most famous jewels in his treasure. Jagatjit Singh is wearing his enameled sword decorated with precious stones and an emerald as big as a plum in the brooch on his turban; Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, a diamond chest-piece; the maharaja of Gwalior, a pearl belt, and so on. George V appears wearing the new imperial crown of India, sparkling with sapphires, rubies, emeralds, and diamonds, the work of the jeweler Garrard, who has charged sixty thousand pounds for that gift from the Indians to their emperor. In order that the ceremony should not seem like a second coronation, which would imply a service of religious consecration, inappropriate owing to the presence of so many Hindus and Moslems, the Royal Household has taken the decision for the King to appear already wearing the crown and for him to receive the homage of the princes sitting opposite his throne.