Ivory Throne Read online

  Éléphants du Radja de Travancor (Elephants of the Rajah of Travancore) (1848), lithograph by L.H. de Rudder based on a drawing by Prince Aleksandr Mikhailovich Saltuikov.

  The Ivory Throne

  Chronicles of the House of Travancore

  MANU S. PILLAI

  HarperCollins Publishers India

  For Indrani

  Contents

  Introduction: The Story of Kerala

  Map

  Family Tree

  Note to the Reader

  1. A Painter Prince

  2. The Queen of the Kupakas

  3. Three Consorts

  4. The Second Favourite

  5. Her Highness the Maharajah

  6. A Christian Minister

  7. Malice Domestique

  8. Tea and Troubles

  9. The Boudoir Dewan

  10. Black Magic

  11. In Letters of Gold

  12. Mother and Son

  13. La Revanche

  14. A Real Little Grande Dame

  15. A Palace Coup

  16. The Ultimate Eclipse

  17. The Villain of the Piece

  18. Rivers of Blood

  19. The Reluctant Princess

  20. Once I Had a Kingdom

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Index

  Bibliography

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgements

  Photographic Inserts

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction: The Story of Kerala

  In July 1497 when Vasco da Gama set sail for India, King Manuel of Portugal assorted a distinctly expendable crew of convicts and criminals to go with him. After all, the prospects of this voyage succeeding were rather slender considering that no European had ever advanced beyond Africa’s Cape of Good Hope before, let alone reached the fabled spice gardens of India. Da Gama’s mirthless quest was essentially to navigate uncharted, perilous waters, and so it seemed wiser to invest in men whose chances in life were not especially more inspiring than in death. Driven by formidable ambition and undaunted spirit, it took da Gama ten whole months, full of dangerous adventures and gripping episodes, to finally hit India’s shores. It was the dawn of a great new epoch in human history and this pioneer knew he was standing at the very brink of greatness. Prudence and experience, however, dictated that in an unknown land it was probably wiser not to enter all at once. So one of his motley crew was selected to swim ashore and sense the mood of the ‘natives’ there before the captain could make his triumphant, choreographed entrance. And thus, ironically, the first modern European to sail all the way from the West and to set foot on Indian soil was a petty criminal from the gutters of Lisbon.1

  For centuries Europe had been barred direct access to the prosperous East, first politically when international trade fell into Arab hands in the third century after Christ, and then when the emergence of Islam erected a religious obstacle in the seventh. Fruitless wars and bloodshed followed, but not since the heyday of the Greeks and Romans had the West enjoyed steady contact with India. Spices and other oriental produce regularly reached the hungry capitals of Europe, but so much was the distance, cultural and geographic, that Asia became a sumptuous cocktail of myth and legend in Western imagination. It was generally accepted with the most solemn conviction, for instance, that the biblical Garden of Eden was located in the East and that there thrived all sorts of absurdly exotic creatures like unicorns, men with dogs’ heads, and supernatural races called ‘The Apple Smellers’. Palaces of gold sparkled in the bright sun, while precious gems were believed to casually float about India’s serene rivers. Spotting phoenixes, talking serpents, and other fascinating creatures was a mundane, everyday affair here, according to even the most serious authorities on the subject. But perhaps the most inviting of all these splendid tales was that lost somewhere in India was an ancient nation of Christians ruled by a sovereign whose name, it was confidently proclaimed, was Prester John.2

  It was long believed that there lived in Asia a prestre (priest) called John who, through an eternal fountain of youth, had become the immortal emperor of many mystical lands. Some accounts said he was a descendant of one of the three Magi who visited the infant Jesus, while a more inventive version placed him as foster-father to the terrible Genghis Khan. Either way, Prester John was rumoured to possess infinite riches, including a fabulous mirror that reflected the entire world, and a tremendous emerald table to entertain thirty thousand select guests. Great sensation erupted across Europe in AD 1165, in fact, when a mysterious letter purportedly from the Prester himself appeared suddenly in Rome. In this he elaborately gloated about commanding the loyalties of ‘horned men, one-eyed men, men with eyes back and front, centaurs, fauns, satyrs, pygmies, giants, cyclops’ and so on. After vacillating for twelve years, Pope Alexander III finally couriered a reply, but neither the messenger nor this letter were ever seen again.3 Luckily for Europe, the travels of Marco Polo in the thirteenth century and of Niccolo di Conti in the fifteenth painted a rather more rational picture of Asia on the whole, but they were still convinced of the presence of lost Christians there, egged on by religious fervour and the commercial incentives of breaching the monopolised spice trade.

  If da Gama and his men, weighed down by centuries of collective European curiosity and imagination, anticipated the legendary Prester as they stepped on to the shores of Kerala in India, they were somewhat disappointed. For when envoys of the local king arrived, they came bearing summons from Manavikrama, a Hindu Rajah famed across the trading world as the Zamorin of Calicut.4 This prince was the proud lord of one of the greatest ports in the world and a cornerstone of international trade; even goods from the Far East were shipped to Calicut first before the Arabs transported them out to Persia and Europe. Until the Ming emperors elected to isolate themselves from the world, huge Chinese junks used to visit Calicut regularly; between 1405 and 1430 alone, for instance, the famed Admiral Zheng He called here no less than seven times with up to 250 ships manned by 28,000 soldiers.5 In fact, even after the final departure of the Chinese, there remained for some time in Calicut a half-Malayali, half-Chinese and Malay community called Chinna Kribala, with one of its star sailors a pirate called Chinali.6 The city itself was an archetype of commercial prosperity and medieval prominence; it hosted merchants and goods from every worthy trading nation in its lively bazaars, its people were thriving and rich, and its ruler potent enough to preserve his sovereignty from more powerful forces on the Indian peninsula.

  Da Gama and his men received one courtesy audience from the Zamorin and they were greatly impressed by the assured opulence of his court. But when they requested an official business discussion, they were informed of the local custom of furnishing presents to the ruler first. Da Gama confidently produced ‘twelve pieces of striped cloth, four scarlet hoods, six hats, four strings of coral, a case of six wash-hand basins, a case of sugar, two casks of oil, and two of honey’ for submission, only to be jeered into shame. For Manavikrama’s men burst out laughing, pointing out that even the poorest Arab merchants knew that nothing less than pure gold was admissible at court. Da Gama tried to make up for the embarrassment by projecting himself as an ambassador and not a mere merchant, but the Zamorin’s aides were not convinced. They bluntly told him that if the King of Portugal could afford only third-rate trinkets as presents, the mighty Zamorin had no interest whatever in initiating any diplomatic dealings on a basis of equality with him.7 Manavikrama, it was obvious, could not care less about an obscure King Manuel in an even more obscure kingdom called Portugal, and with a pompous flourish of royal hauteur, he brushed aside da Gama’s lofty ambassadorial claims.

  The Zamorin was not unreasonable, however. H
e clarified that the Portuguese were welcome to trade like ordinary merchants in the bazaar if they so desired, even if no special treatment was forthcoming. Da Gama, though livid at his less-than-charming reception, had no option but to comply, having come all the way and being too hopelessly outnumbered to make a military statement to the contrary. And so his men set up shop in Calicut, under the watchful eyes of the Arabs, peddling goods they had brought from Europe; goods, they quickly realised, nobody really wanted here in the East. The hostility of the Arabs did not help either; for they, recognising a threat to their commercial preponderance, initiated a policy of slander, painting him and his men as loathsome, untrustworthy pirates. When complaints about this were made to the Zamorin, they were met with yawning disdain, not least because the Portuguese had precious little to contribute to business or to the royal coffers. The first European trade mission, thus, was a resounding flop as far as the Indians were concerned, and when da Gama’s fleet departed Calicut three months later, they left behind a distinctly unflattering impression on the locals.8

  In Europe, however, the expedition was received as a great success, as it had finally broken the thousand-year Arab monopoly, and also because the few goods da Gama had successfully bartered in Calicut fetched sixty times their price in Western markets. In March 1500, therefore, King Manuel assembled a second armada to go to India. This time they were better prepared and more confident, led by the redoubtable Pedro Alvarez Cabral. It also helped that by the time they arrived in Calicut, the forbidding Manavikrama had died and a younger, more amenable prince was parked on the throne. The Portuguese got off to a more promising start, as a result. But their enthusiasm waned when they realised that demand for European goods continued to be feeble at best. In the spice auctions too, wealthy Arabs consistently outbid them and Cabral’s ships were not filling up as expected. As the weeks passed he began to grow impatient and belligerent. The policy of defamation unleashed by the Arabs incensed him, and he suspected they were colluding with local suppliers to prevent the sale of spices to the Portuguese. At one point, then, Cabral sacked an Arab vessel, provoking retaliation from Muslim merchants who burned down his warehouse and killed between fifty and seventy Portuguese men. Cabral took to the safety of the sea and looted every ship he could find and, in what was meant as a lesson to the Zamorin, bombarded Calicut from afar for an entire day, killing nearly 600 people.

  Cabral had realised by now that there was no way he could trade in this city so long as the Arabs held sway. He decided, in what was a calculated move, therefore, to sail south into an alternative harbour and try his luck there. During his months in Kerala, he had learnt a fair deal about regional politics and identified a very useful chink in the Zamorin’s armour. And this was the port of Cochin in the south, held by a Rajah called Unni Goda Varma. This prince was a dynastic descendant of the Chera kings of yore and possessed a pedigree and caste superior to that of the haughty Zamorin. Yet he had been enslaved by Calicut: he had to pay tribute; all his pepper had to be submitted to his overlord; he was not allowed to mint currency; and perhaps most humiliatingly, the scion of the Cheras was prohibited from tiling the roof of his own palace, forced to thatch it instead, like the hut of a common peasant.9 Cochin resented this debasing treatment imposed by the Zamorin and so, when Cabral’s ships appeared by his shores, the Rajah received them with open arms, magnanimously granting several trade privileges and much pepper. He hoped, as Cabral knew and exploited, that with the aid of the Portuguese, he would finally be able to throw off Calicut’s yoke and regain his independence and dignity.

  It was a fateful juncture in the history of Kerala. Essentially, at this moment, Cabral had declared war between Portugal and Calicut, and Unni Goda Varma had rebelled against his feudal master after generations of servitude. The Zamorin, when he heard of these proceedings, was furious. He resolved not only to cut down the arrogant foreigners, whose only advantage was a superiority of arms and better navigational skill, but also to punish his audacious tributary. An enormous army started southwards while a massive fleet of eighty ships sailed out of Calicut to confront the Portuguese. Unni Goda Varma, incidentally, was prepared for a showdown and began to gear up for war. Cabral, however, knew that for all his bravado and grandstanding, the Portuguese were no match for the Zamorin and would only be utterly routed if they engaged in a full-fledged military conflict. To the great chagrin and disappointment of his new ally, then, Cabral had the lights of all his ships put out and in the dead of the night slunk out of the harbour and sailed off to Portugal, leaving a trembling and perfectly betrayed Unni Goda Varma to the mercies of an incandescent Zamorin.

  For quite some time the Portuguese repeated this exercise of harassing Calicut from a distance, sailing out to Cochin to load their ships, and then fleeing the moment the Zamorin’s forces arrived to face them. In 1502, for instance, da Gama himself returned and irrevocably upped the ante by not only looting Arab ships in the vicinity of Calicut, but also sinking a vessel full of pilgrims returning from Mecca, including women and children. He instigated the Kolathiri Rajah of Cannanore, another resentful foe of the Zamorin,10 to open hostilities and then demanded that every one of the 5,000 families of Arabs in Calicut be expelled and the Portuguese be awarded an absolute monopoly over the spice trade. In another merciless episode, da Gama captured and sacked twenty-four ships headed for Calicut, and then set them as well as the 800 crew inside on fire. To add insult to the injury, an exalted envoy was tortured and returned with dogs’ ears sewn on his head, with a note suggesting that perhaps the Zamorin should ‘have a curry made’ of the burning human flesh.11 As usual, the moment 50,000 soldiers marched into Cochin, the Portuguese set sail, abandoning Unni Goda Varma once again to his own feeble defences.12 The Rajah, as it happened, had to flee with his life and seek refuge inside a temple sanctuary this time.

  For the many years after this, the Zamorin was engaged in an uneasy tango with the Portuguese, on land and at sea. Trade, in the meantime, suffered as the latter initiated a policy of blatant terrorism in the Indian Ocean, with the Arabs unable to hold their own against these aggressions. In 1508, then, the Zamorin in alliance with the Sultan of Egypt and the Ottoman Turks inflicted defeat on the Portuguese, only to have the favour returned in 1510 when the latter invaded Calicut itself and set the royal palace on fire. When such multinational partnerships failed, some decades later the Zamorin forged an alliance with the Adil Shah of Bijapur and the Nizam Shah of Ahmednagar, and together they battled the Portuguese in 1571. The Zamorin, as his part of the joint offensive, seized their fort at Chaliyam and ‘demolished it entirely, leaving not one stone upon another’, according to a contemporary account.13 But, as usual, the enemy was quick to recover, and this costly sequence of sanguinary war and desultory peace cascaded into the seventeenth century as well.

  It was only after the arrival of other Europeans in India that the Zamorin was finally able to expel the Portuguese from Kerala. In 1663, in alliance with the Dutch, he mounted his strongest campaign ever and together they conquered Cochin. But if anyone expected an era of peace to follow, it was rendered only a daydream. For the Dutch smoothly slid into the political vacuum left by the retreat of the Portuguese and, to the abiding resentment of Calicut, assumed the mantle of protecting the Rajah of Cochin. They even went out proactively to interfere in regional affairs, instigating a rebellion here or settling a succession dispute there, and otherwise undermined the Zamorin’s power. This, in fact, was a deliberate strategy on their part, for they wanted the Kerala princes and chieftains to remain forever embroiled in petty warfare, which produced ample opportunities for the sale of the by now prized European weapons in return for pepper and other spices, not to speak of widening Dutch influence on the coast.14 This would only be possible so long as there was no dominant authority in Kerala and so one by one they signed independent treaties with even the smallest princelings and chieftains, all at the expense of an increasingly exhausted Zamorin.15

  By the end of the s
eventeenth century, Calicut’s pre-eminence in Kerala lay in complete shambles and the Zamorin’s influence was at its lowest ebb. As the traveller Jacobus Visscher noted, his splendour had been ‘considerably diminished’ by war and it was ‘quite a fiction’ to claim he was the leader of all Kerala now.16 The Kolathiri Rajah in Cannanore, who ruled over the northern extremity of the coast, was now completely independent; in central Kerala the Rajah of Cochin remained safe under Dutch assurances; and further south, whatever distant standing the Zamorin commanded came to naught.17 These territories were further divided under smaller chieftains, and the whole region turned into one messy political scramble, with the Dutch having the last laugh as they walked away with heaps of pepper and money. In earlier days spices produced in the region were by and large channelled to Calicut, and the harbours of the minor Rajahs were only really ports of call for those headed to the Zamorin’s famed capital. Now, however, each of them attempted autonomously to woo anyone who would heed their call to patronise their respective cities, actively instigated by the Dutch. Commerce began to become irregular and less profitable while petty squabbles grew aplenty all across the land.

  At the turn of the eighteenth century, Kerala’s last great age before the advent of the colonial era was inching towards a traumatic conclusion. Calicut’s glory, built through a dynamic partnership between its cultivated Hindu princes and spirited Muslim merchants, characterised by an equally sophisticated internationalism, was reduced to a wistful memory. Beleaguered by incessant war and refractory allies, the diminished Zamorins were no longer lords of one of the world’s great free cities; they were fighting now for their very political survival. They were rendered ordinary, like the other parvenu forces thrashing about on the coast. In the face of determined hostility from European powers that demanded unfair privileges and discriminatory concessions, striking at the very roots of the free trade that had brought prosperity to Kerala, the Zamorins floundered and fell. They did, however, fight valiantly for many long years, and as late as 1607, after a century of battling the Portuguese, the traveller Pyrard de Laval was still able to write: