Freedom at Midnight (25 page)

bristled with levers, accelerators, switches and alarm signals. They commanded the trains that delivered dinner to the prince's guests. By manipulating his control panel, the prince could pass the vegetables, send the potatoes shuttling through the banquet hall, or order a Red Ball express to the kitchens for a second helping for a hungry guest. He could also with the flick of a switch deprive a guest of his dessert, in which case the dessert trains went speeding past his waiting plate.

One evening, in the midst of a formal banquet in honor of the Viceroy, the prince's control panel short-circuited. While their Excellencies looked on aghast, his electric trains ran amok, racing from one end of the banquet hall to the other, indifferently sloshing gravy, roast beef and a puree of peas on the Maharaja's guests. It was a catastrophe without parallel in the annals of railroading.

Dogs were the peculiar passion of the Nawab of Junagadh, a postage-stamp principality north of Bombay. His favorite pets were assigned to apartments equipped with telephones, electricity and domestic servants, habita-i tions of a style and comfort vastly superior to that of all but a tiny handful of his subjects. They were borne off to marble mausoleums in a canine graveyard to the strains of Chopin's funeral march.

He marked the "wedding" of his favorite bitch, Ro-shana, to a Labrador named Bobby, with a grandiose ceremony, and he invited every prince, celebrity and dignitary in India, including the Viceroy, to attend. To his chagrin, the Viceroy declined. Still, 150,000 people crowded the route of the nuptial cortege, which was led by the prince's bodyguard and the royal elephants in full regalia. After the parade, the Maharaja offered a lavish banquet in the canine couple's honor before they were led off to their beautifully appointed bridal suite to consummate their union. Those proceedings cost the Maharaja £60,000, a sum which could have financed the basic human needs of 12,000 of his 620,000 impoverished subjects for an entire year.

The palaces of India's great maharajas were monuments that rivaled in size and opulence—although not necessarily taste—the Taj Mahal. Mysore's 600-room palace surpassed the dimensions of Viceroy's House itself. Twenty of those rooms were devoted exclusively to housing the collection of tigers, panthers, elephants and bison killed by three

generations of princes in the jungles of the state. At night, with its roofs and windows outlined by thousands of light bulbs, it looked like some monstrous ocean liner decked out for a gala sailing landlocked by error in the middle of India. Nine hundred fifty-three windows, each set in its hand-carved marble frame, covered one facade of Jaipur's marble Palace of the Wind. Udaipur's white-marble palace rose ghostlike from the mists of a shimmering lake.

Having decided during a visit to the Palace of Versailles that he had been Louis XIV in an earlier incarnation, the Maharaja of Kapurthala determined to reproduce the glories of the Sun King in his tiny state. Importing a horde of French architects and decorators, he built himself a scaled-down replica of Versailles at the foot of the Himalayas. He filled it with Sevres vases, Gobelin tapestries, French antiques, proclaimed French the language of his court, and dressed his turbaned Sikh retainers in the powdered wigs, silk waistcoats, knickers and silver-buckled slippers of the Sun King's courtiers.

The thrones in some of those palaces were the most elaborate and luxurious vehicles ever designed as receptacles for human posteriors. Mysore's was made from a ton of solid gold, reached by nine steps, also of gold, representing the nine steps of the God Vishnu in his ascent to truth. The throne of the ruler of Orissa was an enormous bed. He had bought it from an antique dealer in London and studded it with an appropriate number of jewels. It had a particular charm because it was an exact copy of Queen Victoria's wedding bed.

The throne of the Nawab of Rampur was placed in a hall the size of a cathedral. The columns that surrounded the podium on which it reposed were white-marble representations of nude women. The originality of his throne owed its inspiration to another idea provided by the Sun King. Cut into the rich gold brocade of its cushion was a hole providing direct access to a chamber pot. With an appropriate princely rumble, the ruler was thus able to relieve his royal person without interrupting the flow of the affairs of state.

Time often hung heavy on the hands of the indolent gentlemen who inhabited those splendid palaces. To fill it, they devoted themselves to two pastimes, sex and sport. Whether the prince was Hindu or Moslem, the harem was

an integral part of a real ruler's palace, the prince's private preserve kept regularly stocked with dancing girls and concubines.

Usually, the jungles of his state were equally a ruler's private preserve, their fauna, and above all, their tigers, of which 20,000 still existed in India in 1947, the protected prey of his rifle. The Maharaja of Bharatpur bagged his first tiger at eight. By the time he was thirty-five, the skins of the tigers that he had killed had been stitched together, to provide the reception rooms of his palace with what amounted to wall-to-wall carpeting. His territory also witnessed what was surely a record duck slaughter, 4,482 birds in three hours, during a shoot in honor of the Viceroy Lord Hardinge. The Maharaja of Gwalior killed more than 1,400 tigers in his lifetime and was the author of a work destined to a limited if select audience, A Guide to Tiger Shooting.

The acknowledged master of his generation of both activities was the Sikh Sir Bhupinder Singh the Magnificent, the seventh Maharaja of Patiala and father of the Chancellor of the Chamber of Princes. Indeed, for the world between the wars, Sir Bhupinder incarnated the ma-harajas of India. With his six-foot-four-inch frame, his three hundred pounds, his sensual lips and arrogant eyes, his black mustache swept up into perfectly waxed needle points, his carefully rolled black beard, he seemed to have stepped into the twentieth century off the ivory of some Mogul miniature.

His appetite was such that he could consume twenty pounds of food in the course of a strenuous day or a couple of chickens as a teatime snack. He adored polo, and galloping across the polo fields of the world at the head of his Tigers of Patiala, he accumulated a roomful of silver trophies. To sustain those efforts, his stables harbored five hundred of the world's finest polo ponies.

From his earliest adolescence, Bhupinder Singh demonstrated a remarkably refined aptitude for an equally worthy princely pastime, sex. As he came into maturity his devotion to his harem eventually surpassed even his passions for polo and hunting. He personally supervised the steady accumulation of its inmates, selecting new recruits with a connoisseur's appreciation of variety in appearance and accomplishment in action. By the time the institution reached its fullest fruition, it contained 350 ladies.

During the torrid Punjab summers, the harem moved outdoors in the evening to Bhupinder's pool. The prince stationed a score of bare-breasted girls like nymphs at intervals around its rim. Chunks of ice bobbing in the pool's water gave the hot air a delicious chill while the Maharaja floated idly about, coming to port from time to time to caress a breast or have a sip of whiskey. The walls and ceilings of Bhupinder's private quarters were covered with representations of the erotic temple sculptures for which India was justly famous, a catalogue of copulative possibilities to exhaust the most inventive mind and athletic body. A wide silk hammock slung in one corner of the room allowed Bhupinder Singh to suspend the laws of gravity while attempting to perform in that state some of the more complex maneuvers suggested by his ceiling.

To satisfy his insatiable habits, the imaginative Maharaja embarked on a program that would allow him to remodel the charms of his concubines as his own taste changed. Sir Bhupinder opened his harem doors to a parade of perfumers, jewelers, hairdressers, beauticians and dressmakers. He even kept a team of French, British and Indian plastic surgeons on standby to alter the physiognomies of his favorites according to the Maharaja's fluctuating tastes or the dictates of the London fashion magazines, which reached the palaces in a regular flow. To further stimulate his princely ardors, he converted one wing of the harem into a laboratory whose test tubes and vials produced an exotic blend of scents, cosmetics, lotions and philters.

All those piquant refinements ultimately only served to screen the fatal weakness in the Maharaja's Oriental pleasure dome. What man, even a Sikh as handsomely en-downed by nature as Sir Bhupinder was, could satisfy the 350 highly trained and motivated ladies lurking behind the harem's grilles? A recourse to aphrodisiacs was inevitable. His Indian doctors worked up a number of savory concoctions based on gold, pearls, spices, silver, herbs and iron. For a while, their most efficacious potion was based on a mix of shredded carrots and the crushed brains of a sparrow.

When its benefits began to wane, Sir Bhupinder called in a group of French technicians, who, he naturally assumed, would possess a special expertise in the matter. Alas, even the effects of their treatment based on radium

proved ephemeral, because they, like their predecessors, had no cure for the real illness from which the Maharaja suffered. It was not a lack of virility that afflicted the jaded and sated prince. His was a malady that plagued not a few of his surfeited fellow rulers. It was boredom. He died of it.

Inevitably, in god-obsessed India, legend and folklore ascribed divine descent to some princes. The maharajas of Mysore traced their ancestry to the moon. Once a year, at the autumnal equinox, the maharaja became, in the eyes of his people, a living god. For nine days, like a sadhu in a Himalayan cave, he secluded himself in a darkened room of his palace. He didn't shave or wash. No human hand was allowed to touch him, no eye to glimpse him during those days when his body was supposedly inhabited by a god. The ninth day he emerged. An elephant draped in gold tapestries, its forehead covered with an emerald-studded shield, waited at the palace gate to bear him amidst an escort of lancers on camel and horesback to an ungodlike destination, the Mysore race track.

There, before the multitudes of his subjects jammed into the stands, Brahman priests chanting mantras bathed, shaved and fed him. As the sun set and darkness shrouded the track, a jet-black horse was brought to the prince. At the instant he mounted it, thousands of torches around the perimeter of the track were lighted. In their flickering roseate glare, the prince galloped around the track on his black horse to the applause of his subjects, most of them grateful because the Son of the Moon was back among his people, some perhaps merely thankful for the picturesque pageant that the ruler had offered them.

The maharajas of Udaipur traced their descent from an even more impressive celestial body, the sun. Theirs was the most ancient and prestigious throne in India, a rule that had run uninterrupted for at least two thousand years. Once a year, the ruler of Udaipur, too, became a kind of living god. Erect in the prow of a galley resembling Cleopatra's Nile barge, he was borne back across the crocodile-infested waters of the lake surrounding his palace for a symbolic reinstallation in its premises. On the deck behind him the nobles of his court in long white muslin robes stood ranged in grateful veneration like the chorus of a Greek tragedy.

165

Less grandiose in their pretensions, but no less pious, were the rulers of Benares, the sacred city on the banks of the Ganges. By tradition the eyes of the maharaja of those blessed precincts had to open each day on a sole and unique vision, the Hindu symbol of cosmic eternity, a Sacred Cow. Each dawn a cow was led to the window of the princely bed chamber and jabbed in the rib so her mooing would stir the pious Maharaja from his slumber. Once, during a visit to his colleague the Nawab of Ram-pur, fulfilling that morning ritual posed a grave problem because the Maharaja's quarters were located on the second floor of his host's palace. The Nawab finally resorted to an ingenious tactic to maintain the integrity of his guest's dawns. He bought a crane which each morning hoisted a cow in a sling up to the Maharaja's bedroom window. Terrorized by her unnatural voyage, the poor animal emitted a series of moos so piercing they woke up not only the pious Maharaja, but most of the rest of the palace as well.

Pious or atheist, Hindu or Moslem, rich or poor, decadent or saintly, the maharajas had been for almost two centuries the surest pillar of British rule in India. It was in their relations with the states that the British had applied to greatest effect the "Divide and Rule" doctrine with which they were accused of governing India. In theory, the British could remove a ruler from his throne for misrule. In fact, a ruler could get away with almost any kind of outrageous behavior down to and including a few discreet murders without the British disturbing him—provided that his loyalty had remained intact. The inevitable result was a series of grateful and generally reactionary princely enclaves studded like anchors against a revolutionary wind throughout those parts of India ruled directly by the British.

The princes* loyalty took more tangible forms as well. The Maharaja of Jodhpur's Lancers led the charge that took Haifa from the Turks in Allenby's Palestine campaign on September 23, 1917.* Bikaner's Camel Corps fought at Britain's side in two wars in China, in Palestine, in Egypt, in France and under Mountbatten's orders in

* In a more peaceful sphere, the same maharaja had introduced Western society to the tapered riding breeches, jodhpurs, favored in his state during Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebrations in

Burma. Gwalior sent the beleaguered British three battalions of infantry and a hospital ship in 1917. All of those forces were raised, equipped, paid for and maintained by the rulers themselves, not the government of India. The Maharaja of Jaipur, a major in the Lifeguards, led his First Jaipur Infantry up the slopes of Italy's Monte Cassino in 1943. The Maharao Raja of Bundi won the Military Cross in action with his battalion in Burma.

The grateful British acknowledged their debt to their faithful and generous vassals by showering them with honors and the gifts that they loved best of all, jewel-studded decorations. The princes of Gwalior, Cooch Behar and Patiala were accorded the distinct honor of riding as honorary A.D.C.'s beside the royal carriage of Edward VII at his coronation. Oxford and Cambridge conferred their degrees, honorary and earned, on the rulers and their progeny. The bejeweled chests and the crowns of most loyal princes were embellished by the glittering stars of the Order of the Star of India or the Order of the Indian Empire.