The Dancer and the Raja (37 page)

It had been more difficult and complicated than any task of government to obtain an heir for the dynasty of Kapurthala. His daughter-in-law, Gita, could not give him a grandson, because the operations she had done in Paris failed and she was left sterile. The maharaja went ahead with his threat to marry his son to a second wife. He chose her himself from among the daughters of a raja of noble lineage in the Kangra valley, as tradition required. Gita tried desperately to prevent the marriage. She sought help from her mother-in-law, Harbans Kaur, whom she had supported years previously against Anita. But her mother-in-law turned her back on her. If she had had to accept that the raja got married a number of times, why could Gita not do the same? Was she not an Indian woman, like her? Humiliated and tired of fighting, Gita requested a divorce, left Kapurthala, and went to live in Europe with her daughters.

In any case, it had been some time since she had had a proper married life with her husband. Ratanjit had fallen in love with an English dancer called Stella Mudge and was living with her. History was repeating itself; the son was doing the same as the father. But Stella was not Anita. Cold and calculating, her ambition was to become maharani of Kapurthala and she was totally opposed to the maharaja's designs. Because she was European, she was not qualified to be the mother of the future heir to the throne. In the end Jagatjit Singh solved the problem as only he knew how: with money. He promised Stella a million dollars to convince his son to marry the girl from the Kangra valley, “that jungle girl,” as the English girl called her insultingly. In the end he got them married in a quick, almost secret, ceremony.

But Ratanjit refused to consummate the new marriage. His new wife, perfumed and massaged by a dozen maids, waited for him every night, but always in vain. Stella literally forced Ratanjit to do his duty as a husband because that was the condition for her to collect the million dollars. One day, at seven in the evening, a sad, shamefaced Ratanjit arrived at the palace where his new wife lived and where the ministers, members of the government, and several chanting priests were waiting for him. He got together with the “jungle girl” in a bedroom and came out thirty-five minutes later with a “pensive, weary look,” according to witnesses. Having done his duty, he went back to Stella's arms and they went off on holiday to Europe. Nine months later, his new wife gave birth to a baby boy. The maharaja was enormously happy. As a sign of thanks to the masters of Sikhism, he promised to educate him in the purest Sikh tradition.
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In February 1947, the English Labour government, which sympathized openly with the Congress Party, named Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Queen's cousin, as the new viceroy. He was entrusted with the express task of organizing the withdrawal of the English from India and the handover of power. As soon as he arrived in Delhi, Mountbatten called the maharajas together for a conference, which took place in the Chamber of Princes. Jagatjit Singh, with his chest covered in medals, his mustache graying, thin and leaning on a stick, attended the speech that marked the end of his period. “The die is cast,” said Mountbatten. There was no time to solve the problems arising out of the historic treaties between the princes and the Crown. If they wanted to maintain sovereignty and the right to continue governing, they had to sign a document called the “Act of Accession,” which would link them to one of the states, either India or Pakistan, which would take control after the British Raj. In this way, the empire handed the princes on a plate to Nehru's Congress Party or to Mohammed Ali Jinnah's Moslem League, whose leader was the maharaja's lawyer friend. Neither the governors, nor the top British civil servants, nor the maharajas present at that meeting could believe what they were hearing. In one stroke, the viceroy was canceling all the commitments and agreements of the past, which had protected the princes and helped to perpetuate the Raj. It was a great betrayal, so great that the maharajas were left dumbstruck. Was this how England thanked them for the effort that once again the princes had made during the last world war? The nawab of Bhopal had sold his shares in the American Stock Exchange to pay for the planes that he offered to His Majesty. The nizam of Hyderabad had paid for the purchase of three squadrons of military aircraft. Three hundred thousand volunteer soldiers had been recruited in the different states, and the princes had bought the equivalent of 180 million rupees' worth of war bonds. And now the Raj, which they had supported so generously, was handing them over to their enemies, the republicans of the Congress Party or of the Moslem League, which sooner or later would rob them of their sovereign powers.

“Was there any alternative?” Jagatjit Singh wondered. Yes, to proclaim independence. But how long would a tiny state like Kapurthala last between two giants like India and Pakistan? Could the five thousand soldiers of his army repel an invasion? Survive the boycott? Separately, the states were all too weak to confront the two emerging nations. And together they could not find a common posture. Yes, Mountbatten was right, the die was cast.

One after another, the princes began to give in to the viceroy's demands, some voluntarily, others in the desire to participate as soon as possible in the new life of the nation, others with apprehension, dragged along by the inexorable winds of history. The first to sign was Ganga Singh, the maharaja of Bikaner, the one with the stuffed camel recipe. He believed in Mountbatten and in the leaders of the new India. Then, like ripe fruit, the others fell in turn: Jodhpur, Jaipur, Bhopal, Benares, Patiala, Dholpur, and so on. The maharaja of Kapurthala did not take long to come to a decision. In spite of having a majority population of Moslems, he inclined toward the Indian Union, a secular country as he had wanted Kapurthala to be and whose constitution offered greater guarantees in terms of the protection of the plurality of its citizens than Islamic Pakistan. The maharaja called a meeting with representatives of the people, village headmen, Hindu pundits, Moslem muftis, and Sikh priests to announce his decision to them, which was received in total silence. Only one person dared to make a comment, an old headman, who said to him, “That is all well and good, Lord, but who will dry our tears in the future?” The maharaja was moved and felt that that phrase was a tribute not only to his long reign, but also to the reigns of his forbears, who throughout history had found a way to be with the people in the toughest and most difficult moments.

Only three princes refused to sign the Act of Accession. The nawab of Junagadh, the one who organized weddings for his dogs, wanted to join his state to Pakistan, against all logic, in spite of the fact that it was located in the heart of Indian territory. When his people, the majority Hindu, voted massively in a referendum in favor of India, the nawab had to flee in a hurry with his three wives, his favorite dogs and his jewels, to the neighboring country, at the threat of invasion from the Indian army.

Hari Singh, the maharaja of Kashmir, was the opposite case: a Hindu in a land of Moslems. He could not make up his mind between those who argued for integration with Pakistan, those who wanted to join India, and those who fought to make Kashmir an independent country. Perhaps Hari Singh let himself be tempted by the idea of independence, because he had an army capable of protecting the borders of his kingdom. But he woke up rudely from that dream when some Moslem guerrillas from Pakistan invaded his territory, pillaging, burning, and terrorizing the population. Forced to make a decision then, he opted to bring Kashmir into the Indian Union in exchange for protection against the invaders. New Delhi sent units of the army and all the fighter planes available to Srinagar, the Venice of the East that had so enchanted Anita. Kashmir stopped being a land of peace and became the battleground between India and Pakistan. Hari Singh decided to remove himself from hostilities and left his palace in Srinagar forever. He enjoyed a golden exile in Jammu, his winter capital. Curiously, his son, Karan, was named regent of Kashmir by the great enemy of the princes and the builder of independence, Nehru himself. A few years later, he won the elections and became the first prime minister of the new state.

The third in disagreement was the nizam of Hyderabad, the man who had become enamored of Anita in 1914 and had showered her with gifts. Now an old man only one and half meters in height and weighing forty kilos, His Exalted Highness was still the most eccentric of the princes. Over the years his proverbial wealth had increased at the same rate as his miserliness, and he was now so miserly that he saved the cigarette ends left by his guests in the ashtrays. The doctor who came from Bombay to examine his heart could not take an electrocardiogram. In order to save money, the nizam had ordered the Hyderabad power station to reduce the voltage. Just like his colleague and friend Hari Singh of Kashmir, the nizam had a large army, equipped with artillery and aviation. When a top civil servant came to inform him of the British decision to leave India, he jumped for joy. “At last I'll be free!” he exclaimed.

As soon as the English left he declared the independence of Hyderabad, without realizing that all his power had been supported by the Raj and that when the English left the network that protected him would also disappear. Although legally and constitutionally he had the right to do it, in practice it was madness because he did not hold the main weapon: the support of his people. He had lost touch with reality. On September 13, 1948, the government of India began “Operation Polo,” the code name for the invasion. It was a more violent attack than Nehru would have liked. In forty-eight hours, the independent state of Hyderabad no longer existed, and with it gone, a whole, very peculiar way of life vanished, based on a love of the arts, hospitality, courtesy, and an efficient administration that made no distinctions between castes or religions. For a few years the nizam occupied an official position in his former state, maintaining the twenty-one-gun salute, but with no power at all. Part of his wealth was confiscated, and he had no option but to accept a life pension of over two million dollars a year. He spent his days drinking coffee—some fifty cups a day—writing poetry in Urdu, and watching over the running of the university he had founded. At the end of his life, in order not to spend money, he darned his worn-out socks himself.

August 15, 1947, was chosen by astrologers as the most auspicious day for India to commence its independent existence. The whole country was hanging on Nehru's speech to the legislative assembly, but Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala decided not to alter his routine. After a frugal dinner and a walk in the garden of his palace, he went to bed at half past ten at night. He read the speech, which marked the start of the new era, the next day in the newspaper, as he had breakfast sitting in the Japanese room. “At midnight,” Nehru had told the world, “India will awaken to life and liberty. A moment rarely offered by history is coming closer, when the people will come out of the past and enter the future, when one period ends, when the soul of a nation, stifled for so long, will again find expression …”

It was not a bad speech for his son Ratanjit's classmate, thought the maharaja, putting a steaming cup of tea to his lips. Decidedly, Harrow was a good school and when the moment came, he intended to send his grandson there too.

But he could not share the enthusiasm of the press, which reflected that of the delirious crowds who fêted the event in both countries. He had no reason to be happy, because he guessed that independence would involve tragedy. By dividing India to satisfy the demands of his old friend Ali Jinnah, the English drew the border, assigning areas with a Hindu majority to India and those with a majority of Moslems to Pakistan. On paper, the result seemed viable. In practice it was a disaster. In the Punjab, the frontier gave the city of Lahore to Pakistan, and Amritsar, with the Golden Temple, to India, cutting in two the lands and population of one of the most militant and united communities, the Sikhs. Lahore, the Paris of the East, the most cosmopolitan and beautiful city of India, the capital of the north, was going to become a small provincial town that would live to the sound of the muezzins in the mosques. The world of Jagatjit Singh had been mutilated forever.

A few days later, another piece of news that appeared in the press greatly attracted his attention. In the composition of the first government of India, the maharaja saw the name of his niece, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Bibi to the family, the unruly, rebellious daughter of his cousin in Jalandhar. Nehru had named her health minister, the first woman minister in India. In this way, Bibi crowned a whole lifetime of dedication to the cause of independence, which had earned her arrest and imprisonment on two occasions, and beatings from the police at countless demonstrations. In 1930, when the famous Salt March took place, which Gandhi had organized to protest against the law that prohibited Indians from making salt without permission from the government, Bibi walked three hundred kilometers on foot at the head of an enormous crowd. Gradually she became something more than a leader of Gandhi's “Quit India” campaign against the English. She fought tirelessly against the blots on society, denouncing child marriage, the purdah system, and illiteracy. The girl from a good family, who smoked and came back from Europe with lots of luxurious gifts for her cousins, the rebel who loved horses, ended up being a heroine for millions of her fellow Indians. For the first time in history, they could see what a woman could achieve in a democratic, modern state.

On March 10, 1949, Jagatjit Singh arrived in Bombay prior to leaving on a journey to Europe. The events that had occurred since independence had forced him to remain in Kapurthala, where, just after Nehru's speech, the world seemed to go crazy, just as he had predicted. Suddenly the greatest migration in the history of mankind began. The Hindus, who overnight had found themselves in Pakistan, sought refuge in India, and the Moslems of India, in Pakistan. The partition of the country, which Gandhi had always opposed, caused a real cataclysm. As many Indians died as Frenchmen died during the Second World War.