E-Paper
Three generations of royalty
The story of the lives and times of four Indian maharanis, from 1870 to Independence and modern India.
Maharanis
Lucy Moore
Penguin/Viking
2004
History/ Biography
Pages: 352
Price: £ 20.00
ISBN: 0670912875
Hardcover
Maharanis chronicles the lives of four Indian queens — Chimnabai Gaekwad II of Baroda, Sunity Devi of Cooch Behar, Indira Gaekwad (who later becomes Maharani of Cooch Behar) and her daughter Gayatri Devi of Jaipur — from about 1870 to Independence and modern India.
Moore keeps a brisk pace with her anecdotes and snippets on the various families. For instance, you find out why Gayatri Devi and other women of royalty are always seen in chiffon saris. Indira, a style icon, pioneered the use of silk chiffon, a material used for negligees in Europe. According to Moore, 'chiffon's racy association with lingerie delighted Indira.'
But of all the Maharanis, Indira's mother Chimnabai comes across as the most delightful. Married at the age of 14, a shy and beautiful bride blossomed into the proud and fiercely nationalistic Maharani who never wore Western clothes but learned to play the piano, was an ace hunter, played tennis in her sari and loved roller-skating. "(She) used to zoom along the palace's long… corridors… her sari flying out like a flag behind her." All this in purdah!
Using a variety of published and unpublished sources, Moore gives the reader a ringside view of the glittering and privileged lives of Indian royalty, their relationship with their subjects and the British aristocracy and their uneasy equation with the government in India.
The result of this was a clash between east and west at home. The Maharajas wanted their children to be Indian but have the advantages of a British education — polish and sophistication. But along with the best education money could buy, many of the Princes with their 'Eton drawls and love for hunting and polo' also acquired Western vices.
This book is as much about Maharajas as it is about Maharanis. The 'native chiefs' had to constantly prove their allegiance to the British crown without upsetting the nationalist forces that had emerged in India.
