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Why the lives of royalty continue to fascinate us
Summary
We may believe in the idea of republics, but can't pass up a chance to peek into the lives of kings and queens“This could be the perfect setting for a murder mystery," chuckled my friend Milena as we drove up to the ornate gates of Dhenkanal Palace, 75km from Bhubaneswar. “Nine guests arrive at a palace for a holiday. Next morning there are eight."
It was indeed very Agatha Christie meets Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
The 19th-century palace glowed in the afternoon sun, yellow and white, like a pineapple gateau, its gates guarded by two snarling mythical lions. A sign warned “Beware of Dogs" and an old maroon Austin Cambridge with a DHA licence plate stood outside, as if waiting for some portal to open to another age. A wizened old guard with an impressive handlebar moustache wordlessly unlatched the gates. As we walked in, parrots shrieked in welcome. Or perhaps in warning.
Dhenkanal Palace in Odisha, like many royal residences in India, is now also a hotel. On paper we are all staunch believers in republics, but royalty remains our guilty pleasure whether it’s the House of Windsor or our homegrown versions.
When I read Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’ Freedom at Midnight as a teenager, the most exciting bits involved the shenanigans of the royals from the 500-plus princely states of India. India’s princes, wrote Lapierre and Collins, had on average 11 titles, 5.8 wives, 12.6 children, 9.2 elephants, 2.8 railway cars, 3.4 Rolls-Royces and 22.9 tiger scalps. In socialist India, where excess was frowned upon, this felt both vulgar and alluring. Now palaces-turned-hotels feed into feudal fantasies to be kings and queens for a day.
A princess in a royal palace sounds like the stuff of fairy tales. The reality can be more sobering, says Meenal Jhala Singhdeo, the current yuvrani of Dhenkanal. She says the palace was in such disrepair that she would sleep with a pillow over her face because plaster kept falling from the ceiling. During the monsoons they needed buckets everywhere. Termites bored into the old walls. A leopard wandered in because the mud wall of the fort had collapsed.
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Meenal came up with the idea of the homestay. She had seen it done to great success in Rajasthan. But Dhenkanal had rotted in the Odisha heat and rain. One wing had just two drop toilets and no electricity. Plumbing and wiring had to penetrate 20-inch thick walls. They tried to keep as much of the old fittings as they could but when they had to cut down a teak tree that had grown in the bathroom, she hugged it and wept.
When they opened with two rooms in the early 1990s, bookings would come on aerogramme letters, sometimes from as far away as England. “We would go ourselves to pick up the guests from Bhubaneswar which was about two hours away," laughs Meenal. “If somebody asked for a washroom, all we could do was speed up. Or use the bushes." The impetus was obviously economic but she admits, “It was also mental stimulation especially for the ladies who were often confined within the four walls of the palace."
Business was slow. After a few years they stopped, unsure if it was worth the struggle. But then slowly they picked it up, renovating it room by room, furnishing each one in its own eclectic style. One room had hand punkahs on the wall, another had Kutchi embroidery. Our sunken bath came with a mural of Krishna and naked gopis. “It was our home and we needed to restore it, tourists or no tourists," says Meenal.
I had gone looking for a palace and stumbled upon a home, a grand home with sprawling gardens where civet cats roamed among the fig trees, but a home nonetheless with its residents ambling in and out of our lives.
The day we arrived, as we settled in, Milena sent a text message. “Lunch is ready. The raja is in the house." An elderly couple was sitting at the head of dining table. We did awkward namastes. The man beamed and said, “Please join us." The long table was laid out as if for a state dinner, the place settings all rani pink. Eve, our photographer friend from New York, on her maiden visit to India, looked gobsmacked. Lunch with true-blue royalty had obviously not been on her India checklist. I wanted to take a picture to send to my mother but felt too embarrassed.
“Madam, which country are you from?" The former maharaja asked Eve genially. At 25 years and three months, Kamakhya Prasad Singh Deo had been the youngest MP in the Lok Sabha in 1967. Since then, he’s had stints in the Rajya Sabha, become a brigadier in the Territorial Army, won and lost elections. All that I learned later. At lunch, he was just an affable gentleman with impeccable manners. The table service looked starchily formal but the food was homey, sweet-tart pumpkin, rohu fish in mustard sauce, crispy wafer-thin bitter gourd, steamed chhena sweets. The maharani—“Please don’t call me that," she said hurriedly—was amused at Bengalis who found pumpkin curry exotic. “But it’s very simple Odiya home food," she protested.
As I got up for seconds, I noticed the palace Labradors (of “beware of dogs" infamy) had snuck into the dining room and were snoring gently under the table. “They always do that," said their son Amarjyoti Singhdeo. He had not joined us for lunch. He was in the kitchen. This was turning out to be a more homespun royal experience than I had imagined.
The next day, Kamakhya Prasad had forgotten where Eve was from but his delight in seeing us remained undimmed. “Can I join you?" he said almost apologetically as we sat in the garden having tea, as if this was our house and he was the guest. It was oddly touching, like a king who had misplaced his court.
The Singhdeos of Odisha, it turns out, are not originally from Odisha at all. They trace their ancestry back to Rajput chieftains in Raja Man Singh’s army. They had been awarded tracts of lands in what the Mughals regarded as the Wild Wild East, home to mosquitoes, elephants and forest tribes. “Birbhum in West Bengal, Manbhum in Bihar, Singhbhum in Chhota Nagpur," said Amarjyoti. “Together they add up to Bir Man Singh." Amarjyoti, usually diffident, turned out to be a walking encyclopaedia of Dhenkanali trivia about boomerangs and claw weapons left behind by the besieging Bhosale army or the cameo played by a Dhenkanal palace car in Subhas Chandra Bose’s daring escape from house arrest in Calcutta. The connections between the two families ran deep. Bose’s father was once the private tutor of the Dhenkanal princes.
One day after lunch, Amarjyoti casually asked, “Are you interested in elephants?" A herd, 58-strong, had been spotted nearby. Off we went on a wild elephant chase. As the sun set over lush green fields, we city-slickers stood squinting at the forest, missing the elephants for the trees. Suddenly we saw them, ears flapping, trunks swaying. As a tusker crossed the road, the onlookers squealed and scattered. Amarjyoti said they would feed all night on the fields, an all-you-can-eat buffet. “Dhenkanal has no mining. So elephants from other regions are coming here, leading to territorial fights between them, something I’ve never seen before." He can identify the outsiders. The ones from the iron mining areas have redder hides.
As the tusker crossed the road, it looked truly regal, a king striding past puny subjects. The gawkers shrieked, in awe and terror, but Amarjyoti stood quietly, watching the elephant pass.
The truth was both were just kings in name, presiding over shrinking realms in the new India.
Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.
Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr
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