No wonder then that you have some of the most amazing stories of their lives. Passion India is one more, of the Raja of Kapurthala in the Punjab. A small principality of some hundreds of villages, in two separate pockets, it had also been gifted a big estate in Oudh, after the 1857 rising. The raja was the fattest of Billy Bunters. They married him at 14, and waited for an heir with great anxiety. The problem was copulation. A British engineer devised a mechanical device, based on a study of elephant doings, to help him succeed. Oh, what have we not done, in the service of England. By 30, he had become a slim, tall man, with four marriages. He shaved off his beard, but did sport a turban as and when he felt like it. He mastered French, and spent most of his time in Europe.
In 1908, he fell for a 17-year-old bar girl in Madrid. She was poor, and he prevailed over her family. He took her to Paris, educated her in the graces, and took her around Kapurthala on an elephant. Harbans Kaur, his senior wife, and the other Sikh ladies, resisted this madness. He already had four sons, some her age. The class-conscious British refused to treat her as a maharani.
Imagine a young Spanish girl, in lonely isolation in the Punjab, no phones, no aeroplanes, no nothing. He supported her, but it could not work. After a son by her, like any good raja, he drifted to other women. His Spanish rani too got restless and fell for the youngest foster-son. The relationship was discovered, the raja eventually packed her back to Spain, with a good pension, where she lived a long life in comfort. Then he started a long line of white replacements, the last a Czech, who committed suicide jumping from the Qutab.
The first book on this titillating tale was published by Diwan Jarmani Das, a Kapurthala minister, in the 1970s. Since then, there have been more. In fact, having lost the empire, Westerners are now mining this lucrative subject. Moro’s book is good for a long train or air journey. The tale is interesting and amusing, and describes a period which, thank God, can never be again.
The funny thing is that Indians seem to love being ruled over and bullied by rajas. Their peccadilloes do not bother them. Sardar Patel blew them away in 1950 but I still read with amusement of individuals, some just small zamindars, referred to in politics, as raja of this and raja of that. What raja and what kingdom. But what’s in a title?
