The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin Read online

  Naturally, many grumbled that with his tributes to the West and reliance on new freedoms enshrined in colonial law, Jyotirao was an unpatriotic lackey, and his partner an equally hopeless proposition. But as it happened, the Phules merrily exasperated the British too. In 1888, the colonial authorities extended to Jyotirao the honour of an invitation to dine with Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught. Jyotirao accepted, only to horrify his Victorian interlocutors by arriving in peasant’s garb, a torn shawl his chief accessory (well before Gandhi made a similar statement by going to meet the King of England in a loincloth). He proceeded to lecture Queen Victoria’s son that he must not mistake his dinner companions that evening as representative of India—it was the voiceless poor who were the soul of the land. On another occasion, when the local municipality sought to demonstrate loyalty to the Governor of Bombay through an extravagant 1,000-rupee present, Jyotirao alone among thirty-two members opposed the idea, insisting that the money be spent on something more worthwhile than fanning the already inflated vanity of yet another Englishman. Something such as education.

  Sharp in his attacks on hypocrisy within Indian society, Jyotirao was equally upset with the colonial tendency to privilege Indian elites even in Western institutions. What ‘contribution’, he asked, ‘have these [elites] made to the great work of regenerating their fellowmen? How have they begun to act upon the masses? Have any of them formed classes at their own homes or elsewhere, for the instruction of their less fortunate or less wise countrymen? Or have they kept their knowledge to themselves, as a personal gift, not to be soiled by contact with the ignorant vulgar? Have they in any way shown themselves anxious to advance the general interests and repay the philanthropy with patriotism? Upon what grounds is it asserted that the best way to advance the moral and intellectual welfare of the people is to raise the standard of instruction among the higher classes? A glorious argument this for aristocracy, were it only tenable!’ In other words, while the elites sought Western education and rights for themselves, they did not seem motivated enough when it came to empowering their own traditional inferiors. They too, essentially, were guardians of their own privilege.

  When Jyotirao died, a few years after he suffered a debilitating heart attack, many thought the nuisance had finally withdrawn to the proverbial grave (he was cremated, though he originally wanted to be buried). Savitribai, however, continued to infuriate the elders, breaching convention yet again by not only appearing at her dead husband’s cremation, but by also lighting the pyre. She died seven years later, following the great plague of 1897—after facing financial crises and a number of other personal and professional difficulties—but across western India and beyond, she is still remembered through the rousing anthem she left:

  May all our sorrows and plight disappear

  Let the brahmin not come in our way

  With this war cry, awaken!

  Strive for education

  Overthrow the slavery of tradition

  Arise to get education.

  It is no wonder, then, that hundreds of books have since been written on the Phules of Pune, whose tireless fight did not focus merely on the political, but unhesitatingly exposed the rot within traditional social structures—the nerve centre of Indian culture, and a place that few before or after them had the courage to try and question.

  THE AMMACHIES OF TRAVANCORE

  In 1912, a magazine in London carried a feature on the wife of an Indian maharajah. ‘Whenever a stranger goes to Travancore, one of the largest and most picturesque native States,’ it began, ‘they always tell him not to address her as “Your Highness”. They think this word is too dignified to apply to her. No doubt she is the Ruler’s spouse; but that does not make her the Maharani or even the Rani. She is only Ammachi, just the mother of His Highness’ children, and they believe that word is good enough to express her relationship to the man who is autocrat of more than 2,950,000 people, inhabiting [over] seven thousand square miles of territory, yielding an annual revenue of about £700,000.’

  Visitors to Kerala often found themselves fascinated by the matrilineal system that governed succession among its leading dominant castes. For here, to put it simplistically, a family did not consist of man, wife and children but of man, sister and her children. In the royal family too, much to the disbelief of outsiders, the wife of the maharajah was not his queen—she could only be addressed as ‘the consort’ and had no claims to being a ‘Highness’. There was, however, a maharani, the difference being that she was either the sister or niece of the ruler, and it was she who produced heirs to the throne through a male ‘consort’ of her own. Power always descended from uncle to nephew and not father to son, and no maharajah had ever inherited the throne from his father, and no son of his could ever claim anything more than a glamorous bloodline.

  Similarly, the husbands of the Maharanis of Travancore had no official standing at court and as late as the 1920s, when the ruling queen granted her husband precedence over her chief minister at a banquet, it caused a minor scandal—one could be married to royalty, but one remained a subject. If she went out, it was essential that her consort followed in a separate car, and if by some breach of protocol he travelled with her, it was essential he sat opposite and not next to his wife. At feasts in the palace, the maharani was served four varieties of payasam —her husband received two. Most tellingly, perhaps, the partners of the princesses of Travancore were not permitted to sit in their presence, and had always to address their wives as ‘Highnesses’, never by name. When the aforementioned maharani had earlier decided to ‘modernise’ things and permit her husband to take a seat and to drive with her, her uncle, the maharajah, ‘much disapproved’ of such radical innovations.

  If this was the status of the men who married the Maharanis of Travancore, the female consorts of its maharajahs were in a similar boat. When in the 1860s Theodore Jensen, a Danish painter, arrived in Thiruvananthapuram to do a portrait of the ruler and his consort, he was baffled to discover that they would not give him joint sittings even though the painting was to show them together. As Samuel Mateer, a contemporary missionary, noted, ‘The Ammachi… is not a member of the royal household, has neither official nor social position at court, and cannot even be seen in public with the ruler whose associate she is.’ When the maharajahs’ daughters were married, the fathers did not attend the ceremonies—they were his offspring but they were not his matrilineal kin. And when a maharajah died, his children were not permitted at the funeral. So too, when the consort of a Maharani was on his deathbed, he was removed from the palace. They could have been married for decades, but a consort always remained a mere consort and could not defile the palace by dying there.

  This was both on account of matrilineal conventions as well as due to reasons of caste. The wife of the maharajah, in particular, was never his social equal. The Ammachies were chosen from the Nair community, which was the most important non-brahmin upper-caste in Kerala. But its members did not wear the sacred brahminical thread and were, therefore, a rank below the Maharajahs of Travancore, who had acquired the thread and a social upgrade in the eighteenth century. Food cooked by his consort could never be touched by a maharajah (though fried items and pickles were exceptions—and it is very likely many princes cheated). Indeed, as late as the 1940s, wives of royal men were not entertained at feasts. As a member of the family would recall:

  The whole family would assemble for this ritual [feast] but not the Ammachies. They couldn’t come anywhere near us when a meal was being eaten and if by accident they did, then the whole meal had to be sent back—because if anyone below caste set foot in the room while the meal was in progress, it would have to be cooked again. Dinner was always a bit more relaxed because that was after sunset, when everything is more relaxed.

  For all this, however, the wives of the maharajahs were not concubines. They were legitimate spouses whose status, in the patriarchal system, is most comparable to morganatic wives, i.e. women married to high-born men on the
understanding that they could not inherit their titles and estates. Often the Ammachies were strong, accomplished women and their lives with the maharajahs moving romances. One maharajah in the 1850s hosted a durbar in honour of Queen Victoria to satisfy his British overlords. But once the formalities were over, he hastened to join his ailing consort, who died that very night, leaving him distraught. In 1882, another prince, upon the death of his wife—the woman with whom he could not be seen in public, whose food he was prohibited from touching, and to whom he could never grant more than aristocratic status—wrote: ‘The loss is an irreparable one and it is more than I could bear with all my fortitude.’ He didn’t marry again for nearly twenty years.

  In 1885, when the then maharajah lay on his deathbed, ‘he sent for his Consort and children, and they came before him in the evening very late. He beckoned his daughters to approach close to the cot, and the light not being very bright, he bade his Consort trim the flickering lamp, in order to enable him to see his daughters well, and he gazed on them for a while and wept. His Consort and children also wept; but he told them that God would protect and help them, and asked them to take leave. His Consort, his son, and daughters prostrated themselves at his feet, according to oriental custom, and took their last farewell. On the same night his Consort and his eldest daughter took ill, being overcome with grief.’ Part of the concern might also have been that this particular Maharajah had left them little money—his predecessor had ensured that his wife was extremely well taken care of, and this allowed him to depart somewhat in peace.

  History has erased the Ammachies from memory on account of the fact that their sons never succeeded to power—at least the consorts of the maharanis fathered monarchs and could therefore claim some celebrity, unlike the wives of maharajahs, who disappeared into the shadows after the lifetimes of their royal husbands. Kalyani Pillai, the wife of the maharajah who ruled from 1860 till 1880 was a poet of talent, with interests in art, culture, music, and more, emerging as one of the earliest patrons of Raja Ravi Varma, the painter. An exquisitely good-looking woman, hers are also some of the earliest portraits Ravi Varma did. She was also a very confident woman, this daughter of the chief minister of neighbouring Cochin state, who had been married once before she met the maharajah. Visitors to court called on her, and she scandalised the orthodox by taking English lessons and inviting missionaries to read the Bible with her in her palace. If an 1868 photograph is any proof, she was also probably the first Malayali woman to wear a sari. After her husband’s passing, however, an associate noted that ‘she is very thin and delicate looking, and has lost much of her beauty… She seems so friendless and lonely that I feel sorry for her…’ When she died in 1909, few outside Thiruvananthapuram remembered the remarkable lady once celebrated as Nagercoil Ammachi.

  Then there were consorts such as the one who features in that London magazine from 1912. ‘She has a light complexion and is short and very stout’, possessed as she was of ‘an excess of adipose tissue’ in a culture where every additional pound was seen as ‘a sign of prosperity’. This lady too had been married before she was espoused by the maharajah, the difference being that her husband, a palace employee, went on to achieve tremendous notoriety as a corrupt influence behind the throne. Soon the maharajah became putty in his hands, the consort retreating to an upstairs suite in her palace where she painted landscapes, while the ‘former husband of the Maharajah’s present wife’ became the real power in the state. When this penultimate ruler of Travancore died, his consort was forgotten too, though not her ex-husband, whose scandalous career continues to animate popular talk.

  The last Maharajah of Travancore never took an official consort. While there were rumours that his mother, who was the real force behind the throne, and his long-time minister had an ‘unholy pact’ to keep him under their thumb and prevent a third influence on him, the official line was that the maharajah disapproved of the very matrilineal system that had vested him with power: The idea of his wife being only the consort and his children being excluded from the privileges of his dynasty were most repugnant to him. Instead he lavished his attention on the offspring of his royal sister, who remembered that after signing over Travancore to the Indian Union in 1949, he went straight to the girls’ room and resumed a story he was telling them from one of the great Indian epics.

  But the story of the consorts does not end with the bachelor maharajah who died in 1991. The final chapter is yet to close, for living in Bangalore in an old colonial-era house on Richmond Road is the last of the male consorts who married a princess of Travancore. He was twenty-one when, in 1938, the daughter of the maharani spotted him from her palanquin during a procession. Before he knew it, he had been elevated as her consort. Independence followed a decade later and the world changed—the princess and he chose to give up their titles and begin a new life away from the kingdom her ancestors ruled. She passed away in 2008, but her husband still lives in their large, old house, as the final of those consorts who married into what was once the House of Travancore.

  MACAULAY THE IMPERIALIST WE LOVE TO HATE

  Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59) enjoys the unique situation of being that one British imperialist whom Indians of most political shades love to hate. Only infrequently is he remembered in the land of his birth, but in India, even the Internet generation has heard of Macaulay thanks to a controversial quote widely ascribed to him. And like most things widely ascribed in the Internet age to historical figures, this one too is a fabrication, intended to outrage thin-skinned sensibilities while reinforcing right-wing conspiracy theories. ‘I have travelled across the length and breadth of India,’ Macaulay allegedly declared, ‘and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief, such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such caliber, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and therefore I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self esteem, their native culture, and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.’

  Like most human beings, Macaulay was a man who said and did a number of contradictory things, some of which seem wholly unpleasant in retrospect. And while he did institute a new (enduring) education system in India and introduce the language in which we transact national business (English), we can be sure that he would never have endorsed the backhanded compliments which feature in that patently spurious quote. On the contrary, he despised all things Indian and spent his career admonishing Orientalists enamoured of Sanskrit and other subcontinental charms for wasting their time on ‘a people who have much in common with children’ (and therefore begged imperial supervision). Indian music, for instance, Macaulay dismissed as ‘deplorably bad’—the only point of debate was whether it was instrumental or vocal music that was worse. The Hindu gods, all thirty-three million of them, were ‘hideous, and grotesque, and ignoble’—Ganapati, for instance, was essentially ‘a fat man with a paunch’, and ‘In no part of the world,’ he claimed, ‘has a religion existed more unfavourable to the moral and intellectual health of our race.’ Even the higher variety of mortal Indian lacked sophistication according to him—a glance at the furniture in the Mysore maharajah’s drawing room horrified Macaulay into comparing His Highness to ‘a rich, vulgar Cockney cheesemonger’. But most preposterous of all was his hatred of tropical fruits—to him the mango was about as appetising as ‘honey and turpentine’.

  Macaulay was a consequence of his times, both in terms of his racism and his conviction that Britain ‘ruled only to bless’. But before he became the scheming imperialist of Indian contestations, Macaulay was a young parliamentarian who campaigned for Jews to be able to sit in the House of Commons. He was the parvenu idealist who penetrated the aristocracy and fought to abolish slavery. Ruin, he warned, was the
fate of those ‘who persist in a hopeless struggle against the spirit of the age’. It was also he who declared that, ‘If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait for ever.’ It was another matter, of course, that he buried these principles in India—as we saw with his defence of Clive earlier, Macaulay did not believe the same moral compass applied to people who belonged to different cultures. Or when their characters left much to be desired.

  ‘The physical organisation of the Bengalee is feeble even to effeminacy,’ he wrote infamously. ‘His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid. During many ages he has been trampled by men of bolder and more hardy breeds.’ This certainly upset many in Bengal, but to be fair, it wasn’t like Macaulay was taken very seriously back home either—his History of England may have been a bestseller, but Marx thought him a ‘systematic falsifier of history’, while J.S. Mill declared that despite his superior air, he was ‘an intellectual dwarf’.

  And yet, Macaulay made history in India. He came to this land with prejudice in his mind, condescension in his pen—and because he was offered a salary ten times what a political career in London provided, with a generous supply of servants. He championed unpopular changes: The Indian Penal Code was the result of his labours and remains the backbone of India’s legal system, despite its many un-Indian provisions. The Indian Civil Service too, from which are descended today’s bureaucrats, was designed by Macaulay. But it was his Minute On Education (1835) that cast his name in stone. Till Macaulay’s arrival, the East India Company supported what it deemed traditional Indian education in Sanskrit and Persian (i.e. education for an Indian elite who were largely brahmins and other high castes). Activists in Bengal, including the likes of Rammohun Roy, were already clamouring for access to Western schooling, and Macaulay was, to them, a godsend. ‘Does it matter in what grammar a man talks nonsense?’ he thundered. ‘With what purity of diction he tells us that the world is surrounded by a sea of butter?’ It was not the business of government to watch students ‘waste their youth in learning how they are to purify themselves after touching an ass, or what text of the Vedas they are to repeat to expiate the crime of killing a goat’ as was the case, he argued, with existing Sanskrit education.