Freedom at Midnight (24 page)

Certain princes like the Nizam of Hyderabad or the Maharaja of Kashmir ruled over states which rivaled in size or population the nations of Western Europe. Others like those in the Kathiawar peninsula near Bombay lived in stables and governed domains no larger than New York City's Central Park. Their fraternity embraced the richest man in the world and princes so poor that their entire kingdom was a cow pasture. Over four hundred princes ruled states smaller than twenty square miles. A good number of them offered their subjects an administration far better than that the British provided. A few were petty despots more concerned with squandering their states' revenues to slake their own extravagant desires than with improving the lot of their peoples.

Whatever their political proclivities, however, the future of India's 565 ruling princes, with their average of eleven titles, 5.8 wives, 12.6 children, 9.2 elephants, 2.8 private railway cars, 3.4 Rolls-Royces and 22.9 tigers killed, posed a grave problem in the spring of 1947. No solution to the

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Indian equation would work if it failed to deal with their peculiar situation.

For Gandhi, Nehru and the Congress the answer was obvious. The princes* reigns should be terminated and their states merged into an independent India. That was hardly a solution designed to appeal to Yadavindra Singh and men like him. His state of Patiala in the heart of the Punjab was one of the richest in India, and he had an army the size of an infantry division, equipped with Centurion tanks, to defend it if necessary.

An air of concern and tension hung about the Chancellor of the Chamber of Indian Princes as he sipped his tea. Surely, he knew something on this May morning that the Viceroy of India did not know. He knew that 6,000 miles from his Punjabi state, in London, a man was making a desperate plea so that his future and -that of his fellow princes would not be that to which Nehru and the Socialists of Congress wished to condemn them.

The man who was to make that plea on behalf of India's princes was not a maharaja but an Englishman. He was in London without the Viceroy's knowledge or approval. Sir Conrad Corfield, a missionary's son, represented one of the great strengths and at the same time great weaknesses of the Britishers who had run India. Corfield had spent most of his career in the service of India's princely states, and as a result those states were his India. His judgment of what was good for India was what was good for her princes. He loathed their enemies, Nehru and Congress, with a fervor at least equal to theirs.

Corfield was, in May 1947, the Viceroy's Political Secretary, his deputy in exercising the authority that the princes had ceded to the King-Emperor.

Absorbed since arriving in Delhi by the task of finding a solution to the conflict between Congress and the Moslem League, Mountbatten had had little time to wrestle with the problem of Corfield and the princes. That had not disturbed Corfield. Deeply suspicious of his superior's ripening friendship with Nehru, Corfield had flown to London to obtain for his princes a better deal than he thought Mountbatten would be prepared to give them.

Corfield was making his plea in a room rendered unique in deference to the princes of India. The octagonal London office of the Secretary of State for India, known

since the days of John Morley as the "gilded cage," could be entered by either of two doors opposite the secretary's desk, doors exactly alike in every aspect of dimension and detail. Thus, two maharajas of equal rank could enter the secretary's presence at precisely the same instant, so neither would suffer a loss of face or precedence.

Corfield set his argument before the occupant of that office, the Earl of Listowel, with force and vigor. India's princes had surrendered their powers to the British Crown, and only to the British Crown, he argued. At the moment when India became independent, he maintained, those powers should revert to them. They would then be free to work out whatever new arrangement they could with India or Pakistan. Or if they chose, and it was practicable, they could become independent. Anything less, he held, would be a violation of the treaties that linked Britain to the states.

Corfield's interpretation was, in the strictest legal sense, right. Its practical consequences, however, would be appalling to contemplate. If the implications in Corfield's impassioned plea to the Secretary of State were realized, an independent India would be menaced with Balkanization on a scale that even Nehru had not contemplated in Simla,

It had once seemed to Rudyard Kipling that Providence had created the maharajas just to offer mankind a spectacle, a dazzling vision of marble palaces, tigers, elephants and jewels. Powerful or humble, rich or poor, they were an extraordinary breed, whose members had fueled those fabled legends of an India now on the brink of extinction. The accounts of their vices and virtues, their extravagant self-indulgences and prodigalities, their follies and their eccentricities had nourished a body of folklore and entranced a world hungry for exotic dreams. They had been the stuff of a myth sweeping disdainfully across the horizon of their impoverished nation on a magic carpet of wealth, leisure and unfettered self-indulgence. Their day was ending, but when the maharajas of India were gone, the world would be a duller place.

The legend that surrounded India's princes was the work of a relatively small number of their company, those rulers with the wealth, the time and the appetite to indulge

their most imaginative fantasies. A series of consuming passions united those extravagant gentlemen, and they indulged those passions with rare devotion. Hunting, cars, sport, their palaces and harems all figured among them, but most often, jewels were the maharaja's obsession.

The Maharaja of Baroda practically worshiped gold and precious stones. His court tunic was of spun gold, and only one family in his state was allowed to weave its threads. The fingernails of each member of the family were grown to extraordinary length, then cut and notched like the teeth of a comb so they could caress the gold threads into perpendicular perfection.

His collection of historic diamonds included the Star of the South, the seventh-biggest diamond in the world, and the diamond offered by Napoleon III to Empress Eugenie. The most precious baubles in his treasure chest were a collection of tapestries made entirely of pearls into which had been woven ornate designs of rubies and emeralds.

The Maharaja of Bharatpur had an even more remarkable collection. His masterpieces were made of ivory, each representing years of labor for an entire family. Their work demanded an extraordinary exactitude, peeling down the ivory of elephants' tusks. The largest topaz in the world gleamed like a Cyclopean eye from the turban of the Sikh Maharaja of Kapurthala, its apricot brilliance set off by a field of three thousand diamonds and pearls. The fabulous treasure of the Maharaja of Jaipur was buried in a Rajasthan hillside, the site guarded from generation to generation by a particularly bellicose Rajput tribe. Each maharaja was allowed to visit the site once in his lifetime to select the stones which would embellish his reign. Among its marvels was a necklace composed of three tiers of rubies each the size of a pigeon's egg and three enormous emeralds, the largest of which weighed 90 carats.

Centerpiece of the great collection of the Sikh Maharaja of Patiala was a pearl necklace Insured by Lloyd's of London for one million dollars. Its most intriguing item, however, was a diamond breastplate, its luminous surface composed of 1,001 brilliantly matched blue-white diamonds. Until the turn of the century it had been the custom of the Maharaja of Patiala to appear once a year before his subjects naked except for his diamond breastplate, his organ in full and glorious erection. His perform-

ance was adjudged a kind of temporal manifestation of the Shivaling, the phallic representation of Lord Shiva's organ. As the Maharaja walked about, his subjects gleefully applauded, their cheers acknowledging both the dimensions of the princely organ and the fact that it was supposed to be radiating magic powers to drive evil spirits from the land.

An early Maharaja of Mysore was informed by a Chinese sage that the most efficacious aphrodisiacs in the world were made of crushed diamonds. That unfortunate discovery led to the rapid impoverishment of the state treasury as hundreds of precious stones were ground to dust in the princely mills. The dancing girls whom the resulting potions were meant, in a sense, to benefit were paraded through his state on elephants whose trunks were studded with rubies and whose ears were decorated with elephantine earrings composed of the prince's surviving diamonds.

The Maharaja of Baroda went about on an elephant even more gaudily arrayed. The animal was a hundred-year-old monster whose great tusks had skewered twenty rivals in as many combats. All his equipment was in gold: the howdah in which the prince rode, his harness, the great saddle cloth, or shabrack, covering his back. Like pendants, ten gold chains hung from each of the pachyderm's ears. Each was worth $60,000. Each represented one of his victories.

In both practice and folklore, the elephant had been for generations the princes' preferred means of locomotion. Symbols of the cosmic order, born from the hand of Rama, they were in Hindu mythology the pillars of the universe, the supports of the sky and the clouds. Once a year, Maharaja of Mysore prostrated himself in veneration before the largest bull elephant in his herd, thus rekindling his alliance with nature's forces.

A prince's standing might be measured in the number, the age and the size of the animals filling his elephant stables. Not since Hannibal marched across the Alps had the world seen a collection of elephants to rival those put on display once a year in Mysore for the Hindu festival of the Dasahra. One thousand animals draped in elaborately woven blankets of flowers, their foreheads studded with jewels and gold, paraded through the streets of the city. To the strongest bull elephant went the honor of carrying

the throne of the maharaja, a pedestal of massive gold draped in gold-brocaded velvet and surmounted by an umbrella, the symbol of princely power. Behind that animal came two more animals decorated in comparable splendor and bearing empty howdahs. As they came into sight, a respectful silence smothered the crowds along their path. Their empty howdahs were supposed to contain the spirits of the maharaja's forebears.

In Baroda, the princes' fetes were inevitably highlighted by elephant fights. Their combats were terrifying spectacles. Two enormous bull elephants driven mad with fury by lances thrust into their flanks like a picador's jab at a fighting bull were unleashed on each other. Shaking the ground with their enormous weight and the sky with their frightened trumpetings, they fought until one of them was killed.

The Raja of Dhenkanal, a state in eastern India, provided thousands of guests each year with an opportunity to witness an equally impressive but less bloody exhibition by his elephants, the public copulation of two of the most select animals from his stables.

A Maharaja of Gwalior decided before the turn of the century to ornament his palace with a chandelier carefully calculated to surpass in dimension the largest chandelier in Buckingham Palace. When he had ordered it in Venice, someone pointed out to the Maharaja that the roof of his palace might not support its weight. He resolved the problem by having his heaviest pachyderm hoisted to the palace roof with a specially constructed crane. When the roof failed to collapse under the animal's weight, the Maharaja announced—correctly, it turned out—that it would support his new chandelier.

The coming of the motorcar inevitably confined the royal elephants to ceremonial, rather than functional tasks. The first automobile imported into India in 1892, a French-made De Dion Bouton, was destined for the garage of the Maharaja of Patiala. Its pride of place was recorded for posterity by the number on its license plate—"O." The Nizam of Hyderabad acquired his automobiles with a technique worthy of his legendary appetite for economy. Whenever his royal eyes fell on an interesting car inside the walls of his capital, he sent word to its owner that his. Exalted Highness would be pleased to

receive it as a gift. By 1947, the Nizam's garage overflowed with hundreds of cars that he never used.

Inevitably, the favored automotive plaything of India's princes was the Rolls-Royce. They imported them in all forms and sizes, limousines, coupes, station wagons and even trucks. The Maharaja of Patiala's tiny Dion was eventually dwarfed in his automotive stables by his mechanical elephants, twenty-seven enormous Rolls-Royces. The most exotic Rolls in India was a silver-plated convertible belonging to the Maharaja of Bharatpur. Rumor had it that mysterious, sexually stimulating waves emanated from its silver frame, and the most gracious gesture the Maharaja could accomplish was to lend it to a princely colleague for his wedding. Bharatpur had also ordered a Rolls-Royce done up in a shooting brake for his hunts. One day in 1921, he took the Prince of Wales and his young A.D.C. Lord Louis Mountbatten out after black buck in it. "The car," the future viceroy of India noted in his diary that night, "went over wild, open country, smashing through holes and over boulders, heaving and rocking like a boat at sea."

The most extraordinary princely vehicle in India, however, was a Lancaster styled to the bizarre design of the Maharaja of Alwar. It was gold-plated inside and out. The chauffer, manipulating a steering wheel in sculptured ivory, reposed on a gold-brocaded cushion. Behind him, the body of the car was a perfectly reproduced replica of the coronation coach of the kings of England. By some mechanical miracle its engine was still able to hurl that weighty vehicle along the road at seventy miles an hour.

With all the revenue, duties and taxes amassed in the states at their disposal, the maharajas of India were uniquely armed to indulge their personal eccentricities.

The passion of the Maharaja of Gwalior, who ruled over one of the best-run states in India, was electric trains. Even in his wildest pre-Christmas fantasies, a young boy could not conjure up an electric-train set to rival the Maharaja's. It was laid out over 250 feet of solid silver rails set on a mammoth iron table at the center of the palace banquet hall. Special tunnels cut in the palace walls prolonged the tracks into the royal kitchen. The Maharaja's guests were placed around the table, and the ruler sat at their head presiding over a mammoth control panel that