Gayatri Devi

Gayatri Devi, Maharani of Jaipur, died on July 29th, aged 90
The Economist, 20-Aug-09

Though India has not been ruled by princes for many decades, it is not hard to find princesses about the place. Bollywood stars, for example, in sheaths, shades and bling, whose every move and change of wardrobe is recorded in flashy magazines; fashionistas, aping Kareena’s T-shirt or Priyanka’s bobbed hair, who spend their afternoons eating ice cream in Delhi’s malls; and the VIPs, or VVIPs, who force their cars through the traffic with horns blaring, and who refuse the indignity of being searched at airports.

In contrast to these one may sometimes find, at high tea at the Delhi Polo Club or in the lounge of the Taj hotel, the genuine article. Gayatri Devi was among the most famous of these. Her beauty was astonishing, praised by Clark Gable, Cecil Beaton and Vogue, but liner or lipstick had nothing to do with it. She had a maharani’s natural poise and restraint. From her grandmother, she had learned that emeralds looked better with pink saris rather than green. From her mother, she knew not to wear diamond-drop earrings at cocktail parties. A simple strand of pearls, a sari in pastel chiffon and dainty silk slippers were all that was required. The fact that she looked equally good in slacks, posing by one of the 27 tigers she personally eliminated, or perched, smoking, on an elephant, merely underlined the point. She was a princess, and a princess could make Jackie Kennedy appear almost a frump.

Money was never lacking in her life. As the daughter of Prince Narayan of Cooch Behar, in West Bengal, she grew up with dozens of staff and governesses recommended by Queen Mary. Thirty horses, six butlers and four lorryloads of luggage accompanied the family to their holiday cottage. “Broomstick”, as the family called her—other members were “Bubbles” and “Diggers”—was polished up in Lausanne and Knightsbridge, where she rather redundantly took a secretarial course. Her future husband, the Maharajah of Jaipur (“Jai” to her) first appeared at Woodlands, the family home in Kolkata, resplendent in an open-top green Rolls Royce. When she married him in 1940 her presents included a Bentley, a hill-station house and a trousseau that was left for collection at the Ritz in Paris. Their life came to revolve round the polo seasons in which he starred: winter and spring in India, summer in Windsor or Surrey, the thundering chukkas interspersed with plentiful champagne.

Yet there was an oddity about Gayatri Devi. She was a tomboy who liked to keep company with the servants, worrying about their wages, and with the mahouts, learning their songs and stories of elephants. After meeting Jai at the age of 12 she began to wish she could be his groom, fortuitously brushing his beautiful hand as she handed him his polo stick. Distinctions between raja and praja, prince and people, did not bother her, and she could be as cavalier about the yawning social divide between women and men. As Jai’s third wife, she should have been in purdah in a “city” of 400 other lounging and sewing women, watching the world through filigree screens. Instead she kept him company in the palace, riding and big-game hunting, or flying to Delhi in her private plane to shop. And she set up a girls’ school in Jaipur through which, she hoped, other daughters of the nobility might eventually learn to stick up for themselves.

The perfumed prison
Independence in 1947 brought a democratised India and the replacement of the 562 princely states with centralised, socialist government, but her attachment to “my people” did not change. Command, like style, came naturally to her. In both Cooch Behar and Jaipur, arriving becomingly wind-blown at the wheel of her Buick or her Ferrari, she would be greeted with flowers and incense and with deep prostrations in the dust. The villagers trusted her to help them, so she tried. That intimate understanding between ruler and ruled, she often said later, was sadly missing from modern India. It went with the crumbling of modern Jaipur which, under the maharajahs, had been a glorious desert city of wide avenues, palaces, peacocks and pink walls. She always saw it that way.

In 1960, having asked Jai’s permission and summoned the party secretary to the palace, she joined the liberal Swatantra party to oppose Jawaharlal Nehru’s left-wing Congress. She did not like socialism or five-year plans. A run for parliament two years later for the Rajasthan constituency gave her the world’s largest landslide, 192,909 votes. But this was hardly surprising. The people were voting for “Ma”, their princess, an exquisite figure in pearls and pale chiffon enthroned on a palanquin of carpets, who nevertheless called them her sisters and her brothers.

She continued to field their problems to the end of her life, though her political career as such did not long outlast a spell in Delhi’s Tihar prison in 1975, under Indira Gandhi. The charge was currency offences, based on a few Swiss francs found in her bungalow among the jade, rose-quartz, Lalique and Rosenthal. The prime minister seemed mostly to object to her aristocracy. Gayatri Devi softened the blow by pouring French perfume into the open sewer in her cell. As it ran through the building, Asia’s largest prison and one of its worst, other prisoners gathered to inhale the wafting vapours, the true scent of royalty.