July 1988
HINDU BOOK REVIEW
Scindia, Vijaya Raje
Last Maharani of
Gwalior
An Autobiography Author: Vijaya Raje Scindia 279 pgs. SUNY
Press $10.95 pb, 34.50 hc
This is a with book: written with Manohar
Malgonkar, like the flock of personality books that are winging their way
up the New York Times bestseller list on the hot air of gossip and mean
spirit. Thank the Hindu Gods of the Scindia royal family that Last
Maharani is not of that distasteful genre. Malgonkar serves the elegant
purpose here of creating pungent English prose, not purveying dynastic
dirt.
Not that this tale lacks spice and fire. As the Maharani, the
elected representative of her Gwalior (Maharashtra, central India)
district, ended up on the jail side of Indira Gandhi's 1975 emergency
rule, she has plenty of gritty anecdotes and thoughts: her son's sour
disaffection from her as mother and in political allegiance; the senseless
ransacking and despoliation of her homes (palaces actually) by Keystone
Copper tax officials and her hard, but spiritually rewarding, months in a
women's jail. There's a velvet dignity even in the Maharani's thrusts of
the verbal lance, and the suffering of those years warrants some probing
anguish. Her life is tangibly more fascinating than Jacqueline Kennedy
Onassis', and the Maharani of Gwalior is certainly as well-known in India
as Jackie Onassis is in America.
This, though, is much more than
women battling it out in the political ring. Vijaya Raje Scindia was the
last queen of one of the twilight kingdoms of India, a karmically final
period when the British Raj, beaten by Mahatma Gandhi, gave way to the
democratic union of India. The diminutive royal kingdoms with their
maharajas, maharanis and heirs apparent and fabulous palaces and tiger
hunts and horse races didn't fit into the new incarnation of India. The
kingdoms were signed away, the royal families given purses and allowed to
live in their palaces, but those too were eventually sucked into the
political maelstrom of the fledgling republic. All this took several
decades, and it is the Maharani's chronicling of this period and the
childhood years of her life that is page-turning absorbing.
That
Vijaya Raje became the maharani of Gwalior was in itself unlikely. No
Gwalior court advisor or astrologer would have foreseen it 80 years ago.
For Vijaya Raje was not of the Scindia clan that had carved out and ruled
Gwalior for centuries. The blood of the Nepalese royal family - the
Bahadur Ranas - flowed in her, a lineage far removed from Gwalior. And the
royal lines have always been very fussy about marrying within the family
gene pool. But neither did Vijaya Raje scurry about the Kathmandu palaces.
She was born on an estate in the town of Sagar in Madra Pradesh, the
heartland of India, and a thousand miles distant from Nepal.
It
turns out that her grandfather, Khadga Samsher Rana, a key scion of one of
two rival royal factions in 1880's Nepal, had been involved in a
successful assassination plot of the king, for what apparently he thought
were reasons good for the country. He became commander-in-chief of the
armies and the virtual ruler, though his brother Bir Samsher was made the
new king. But the king's wife poisoned him against Khadga, and he was
banished from Nepal, forced in his thirties to take refuge with the
British Raj in India and establish an estate in Sagar. Vijaya Raje
remembers him, when she was two years old, when he was being bundled off
into a car to be taken to Kashi (Shiva's city) on the Ganges to
die.
So with that bit of skulduggery history, she begins her life,
taking the reader into fascinating glimpses of secret royal talismans that
bring great or devastating luck and the opulent lifestyle of the last
Hindu royalty. After a broken engagement with another lineage, Vijaya Raje
- a reedy girl, cosmopolitan yet religious, vegetarian and wearing Swadesh
cotton saris in lieu of Paris silk saris-marries the Maharaja of Gwalior,
Jivajirao Scindia. Photos and an index are included.
Article
copyright Himalayan Academy.
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