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There's an old cliché about no matter what truth you discover about India, the opposite
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I've always argued that India has always been deeply illiberal and my main piece of
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evidence for this is the way women are treated.
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Indian culture is unquestionably sexist and even in the year 2020, most women are second
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class citizens in India and yet Indian history is littered with badass women.
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Some of them are outliers operating despite social constraints but many of them were enabled
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by social norms, particularly in Kerala where for centuries a matrilineal system made women
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the dominant figures in their households with men taking a back seat and very often
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the women who have stepped forward to take charge have proved themselves to be capable
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of leading from the front.
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Let's shift the lens for just a moment to the present.
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At the time of recording this episode on January 16, 2020, protests have been raging against
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the Citizenship Amendment Act for a few weeks now.
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These are mostly spontaneous protests erupting from below instead of being managed from the
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top and it's especially striking to me how many women have come forward to lead the charge.
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Maybe these women will lead us towards more freedom and if they need to search for inspiration,
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all they have to do is look south towards Travancore.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Varma.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest in today's episode is a young historian, Manu Pillay and we'll be discussing his first
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book, The Ivory Throne.
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Manu, welcome to the show.
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Thank you for having me again.
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This is, I think, the third time.
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This is the third time.
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And we have actually in the past discussed how you kind of got drawn to history and stuff,
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but I'm going to ask you again because this is your first book.
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So in the context of your book, it's sort of worth asking, you know, why this subject
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and did you want to be a historian or did history happen to you after you decided you
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You know, history happened because of the stories, you know, as I've said before, I
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think in one of your earlier episodes and I recently wrote an essay about it about my
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great-great-grandparents who were both divorcees in the 1880s, both members of this, you know,
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so-called high caste Sanskritic universe, you know, both are very well educated.
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They were both from landlord families and so on and you would imagine at least my textbooks
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gave me the impression that, you know, people like this were patriarchal families.
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There was no concept of divorce.
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On the other hand, only widowhood could end a marriage for a woman.
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But you know, then I'd go back to Kerala and discover that the opposite was the case with
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my great-great-grandmother.
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She was not only a divorcee in her teens, really.
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She got married, I think, at 13 the first time.
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She was deeply in love with her husband who was a Brahmin, which again, you know, it's
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an inter-caste union, which is where Brahmin men could marry Naya women back in the day.
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And you know, she got pregnant.
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It was a female child, but it was a stillbirth.
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So when this poor Brahmin came afterwards to collect his wife and child and take them to
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his place, Brahmin's mother-in-law stopped him at the threshold and said, you know, the
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baby was a girl and because the baby died, there's something wrong with you.
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It's a little bit like in North India, women are blamed for the children they produce if
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they produce female children, you know, it's not considered a good thing, at least in very
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many rural orthodox families.
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Whereas here, it was the other way around.
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The man was blamed for, you know, having a dead baby girl because in a matrilineal family,
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the death of a female child is considered a bad omen.
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So the husband was told to go back, never come back and the marriage was dissolved.
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And even when we were kids, there was a stone there where, you know, we were often told
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that he sat on that stone and he wept for an hour before he left and some 33 years later
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when he was dying, he was on his deathbed, he actually sent a servant to express the
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desire to meet this first wife of his after over three decades.
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She didn't go, but three of her children actually went and met him.
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And I thought this was a fascinating thing that, you know, you're not only a divorcee
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in the 1880s, your first husband dies three decades later and your children go to meet
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your, their mother's first husband.
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And the second husband agrees to let his children go and meet his wife's first husband and things
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So this completely challenged everything I had been reading in my textbooks growing up
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I'm sure in Kerala people are slightly more aware of this if they grew up there.
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But for me, I think, you know, listening to stories like this was my first introduction
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to the matrilineal system.
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And I was always struck that, you know, this needed some kind of a wider dissemination.
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There is a lot of scholarly work on it.
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There is a lot of feminist work on the matrilineal system, but I thought someone needs to disseminate
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it to a larger audience.
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So is it fair to say that your desire to write the book came partly because no one had written
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this and you wanted to write it in a sense because this is a book you would have wanted
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You know, I mean, I was doing a lot of reading on Kerala history, you know, I was doing a
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lot of reading on academic books and, you know, historical work, etc.
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Somewhere in 2018, I came across the name of Saitulakshmi Bhai, who's the protagonist
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And I thought, you know, there's only one photograph of her with a little daughter in
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that picture, which you wish I could find online.
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In all the history books, she's mentioned briefly, but then very quickly people move
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And I discovered that, you know, all these rulers, there was a lot of general, you know,
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all about, everybody was very much about how they were good for development, how they were
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all very progressive and simple and so on and not like your usual image of an Indian
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Of course, slightly exaggerated that they were so simple, they weren't, they were royalty.
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Royalty is never all that simple.
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But I was always curious as to why this lady was sort of footnoted, why she never made
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it to that kind of a mainstream recognisability in terms of public intravenom in Kerala elsewhere.
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They vaguely knew her name, but they didn't know what happened to her.
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And most mysteriously, she had a little girl in that photograph.
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There was one article in The Hindu back in 2008, which had this photo of her and this
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And I kept thinking it's the matrilineal system.
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So that girl's descendants are members of the ex-royal family of Travancore.
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Where did they disappear?
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Because they didn't live in Trivandrum.
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The family that lived in Trivandrum was another branch from, say, Tulaikshmi Bhai's sister,
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Sayitu Parvati Bhai, who is the, let's say, antagonist of the book.
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Junior Rani and Junior Rani.
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So what happened to the Senior Rani's family?
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So you know, the moment I started asking questions about Sayitu Laxmi Bhai, I started asking
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other people, you know, what happened to this lady.
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A lot of elders, including a great uncle in my family who's now 99 years old, he said,
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oh, you know, if you ask questions about that, you're going to stumble on a lot of mischievous
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You shouldn't go down that route.
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And actually, when you're 18 years old and when you're told not to do something, you're
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obviously going to do the exact opposite and start digging up what you're not supposed
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So I think that's how I started asking questions.
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And initially, I came across some material, I got in touch over Facebook with one of her
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They sent me a book they privately published containing all her letters and private papers.
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And once they sent this to me, I was fascinated by the story, fascinated by the tragedy really
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in many ways, and even by her personality, you know, the kind of life arc she had.
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And I wrote, I think at that time, with a basic sort of reading with some books and
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this material from the letters, etc.
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I had, you know, in 2008, it was the age of blogs, and I had a blog that perhaps five
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people read, five people I knew, who were also interested in Kerala history.
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But this particular article about her, talking about her somewhat tragic life and career,
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and the way it ended on a very sad note, it brought me this barrage of trolling in 2008.
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2008 trolling wasn't a big deal.
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But suddenly there was like a heap of messages, comments under this blog saying, how dare
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There's one even rather casteist remark by one man saying, you know, we were kings back
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in the day, who belongs to that royal community, not the family, saying, you know, back in
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the day, if you would have written something like this, your head would have been chopped
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And I was like, you know, at 18, I was like, my God, what is it about this woman that triggers
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such animosity and hatred?
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Why is it that telling her story as it is seems to provoke so much angst and hate from
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all these unknown people I've never met on the internet, and who had never come to my
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blog before they heard that there was such an article on her?
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That's when I started deciding that, you know, I decided to sort of start digging up her
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story a little more, you know, discovering more details, trying to find out what exactly
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And that started really in 2009, and took me till 2015 to finish The Ivory Throne.
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And did you decide at that point that you're going to write a book or was it just...
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No, I was more interested in looking up the story, but somewhere along the way it turned
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into a book, because I realized there was no book on her.
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I mean, her granddaughter published this book of letters and so on, but there was no biography
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There was no Travancore history written in a revisionist style, you know.
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Most people may not know that in North India, for example, other parts of India, Travancore
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history is not really something you think about.
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But in Kerala, it's a pretty big deal, because that was Kerala's premier princely state.
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It had a major role in the culture and in the political evolution of the state.
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A lot of the parties, you know, the rise of communism, et cetera, it's linked to a great
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extent to Travancore and the policies of the last Diwan of Travancore.
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So Travancore was a big deal in Kerala history.
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So I was just, you know, keen to sort of fill this gap where this lady was concerned.
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And that, I think, I think I wrote my first draft of the book by 2011-12.
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And frankly, at that time, I thought it was ready to publish.
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I'm glad I didn't, because it would have been a hideous book that would have sunk without
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So it took another three and a half years to, you know, get, to beat it into shape,
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to get more material, to really research and put the pieces together, which took me
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to, you know, there's material from America, which I couldn't find in India.
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There's this obscure magazine that I was looking for, a journal that covered specifically
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the princely states, which was a massive source of information because every two weeks they
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had material on different princely states and what was happening.
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Couldn't find it in India, couldn't find it in Britain, finally ended up finding it
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in America and, you know, had to spend a bomb to acquire that material, a lot from the British
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archives, then from the Delhi archives, the Kerala state archives, interviews with lots
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of people, you know, because the protagonist and the antagonist both died in the 1980s,
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which meant that people who knew them, their children, they were still alive at that time.
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So I had to go talk to them, you know, and it was interesting to sort of go through that
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journey for five, six years and, and put together the story.
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Since then, you know, that book has not only filled a gap, I think to migrate advantage
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in terms of sales, et cetera, anytime anybody looks up Kerala on Amazon or Flipkart or whatever,
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this is the first book that pops up because there hasn't been a big mainstream book on
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Kerala for a very long time.
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There are academic books, there are books in Kerala, but for a larger pan Indian English
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reading audience, there hasn't been that much for a very long time.
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So anybody who now wants a book on Kerala history, this sort of shows up as the first
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And that's great for me in terms of sales.
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And I'm glad that the book helped resurrect Saitulakshmi Bhai and put her back in public
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imagination because she deserves to be there.
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And the book's also been optioned, I believe, for a potential web series.
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People keep saying film, but I think it's too big to be a film.
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The drama is far too intense to cover it in one two-hour film, end up being a shorty job
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if it's a film, I think.
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I can't really do justice to the story.
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And in contrast with the books you've spoken about in our previous episodes, but the ones
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that you wrote after this, there are no marauding elephants here, there are runaway elephants
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in one scene where somebody goes to a function and the elephants have run away, but there
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is much less bloodshed, but perhaps more human drama.
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So did you want to be a historian before you actually set upon this quest or did setting
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upon this quest naturally make you a historian because you're writing history?
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Yeah, I think it's the second way, which is that, you know, once I started the book, once
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I started doing my research, see, it also coincided with my master's degree in London.
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The fact of the matter was that I only persuaded my parents to let me go there because I wanted
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the archives and you can't really tell your parents that, you know, you want them to spend
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a bomb and send you abroad to write a book, no parent in India is going to allow that.
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So what was interesting was research methods we were taught for my master's program, for
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the thesis, you know, how to understand the archives, how to negotiate libraries and so
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I could apply that almost immediately to my own research.
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And once I started doing that, you know, I had another career then, I used to work in,
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you know, parliament first, then I worked in the British parliament for a while, then
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I worked with the BBC for a while, but it was the book and then the success of the book
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that really got me thinking and I was like, you know, this is something I'm passionate
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I am interested in history.
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I enjoy research, I enjoy sitting in archives and libraries and discovering, you know, things
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and I enjoy also, I think, bringing to the fore marginalized stories, both my first and
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my second book, they're both about, you know, either figures who are marginalized or a region
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that is marginalized, that doesn't get the attention it perhaps deserves in terms of
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Indian history, as we talk in general.
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So I think that triggered this desire to keep focusing on history and now I've taken the
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plunge now, I've become a full-time writer and, you know, researcher, so now there's no
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escaping with the consequences of what I have brought upon myself.
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So far it's worked out, but I'm under no impression that this, you know, you never know what the
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Three successful books does not mean that your fourth or fifth or sixth will always
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be a successful book, so you have to be prepared for the worst, but I've decided to take that
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gamble and, you know, take that risk.
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No, in fact, whenever the subject of you has come up in my conversations with other people,
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all of them basically have the tone of, how dare that scoundrel write three books before
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Has he even started shaving?
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How do older historians respond to what in their eyes must be this young kid just coming
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up and churning out book after book?
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You know, older historians have strangely been very generous.
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See, one advantage is that, look at the books now, the first one won the Sahitya Academy
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It was given by a panel of very distinguished scholars and two years later, I actually ran
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into one of the jury members who told me who I was up against and I'm not allowed to name
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the person, but it was very flattering to discover that I won despite that person being
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in the list and in the running for the award.
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Second book was not only critically acclaimed, it was also reviewed, glowingly in a peer-reviewed
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For me, I'm doing my PhD now.
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Although I want to bridge the academic world with a larger audience, you always have this
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fear, you know, are you somehow diluting historical research, are you doing it in the way academics
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So, it's good to be in a peer-reviewed academic journal because that means that your work
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And this was Rebel Sultans.
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This was Rebel Sultans in a journal called Studies in History and it was reviewed by University
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of Illinois professor and I was actually taken aback, I had no idea there was University
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of Illinois professor reading my work and even the praise, for example, on Rebel Sultans,
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the first book doesn't have any endorsements from any big names because that's not something
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The second book my publishers were keen, so I said, look, you reach out to whoever you're
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So, we reached out to Muzaffar Alam and he is a very senior scholar, you know, essentially
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the, you know, the big name of North Indian history and Mughal history and even the Deccan.
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He's worked a lot with Sanjay Subramanian and, you know, you discover...
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He basically came back saying he was working on something, so he wouldn't have time to
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go through the manuscript.
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And then, I'm not exaggerating, a day before we went to press, he emailed back saying he'd
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managed to read the manuscript and he would love to give her an endorsement for the book.
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For me, that was a great, you know, I felt really not only honored but also somewhat
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more confident because it's not easy for a Muzaffar Alam to sort of endorse your work.
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He's a very senior scholar, he's not the type to take, you know, carelessly or lazily written
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history very seriously, so that meant he appreciated it.
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Then my publisher told me that they ran into Rudraksha Mukherjee, who was also a very big
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He appreciated the book and now for the paperback edition, I think he's giving us an endorsement
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So, I think for me, having these big historians sort of support my work and encourage it is
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something I value a great deal.
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And I think going to see it, you always make mistakes, you're always learning.
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One of your works, I think no historian can confidently say their work is 100% solid.
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You're always learning things, they're always going to be minor errors and omissions and
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But you keep improving.
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So, I think it's good to have older historians sort of support that.
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Where some opposition has come, interestingly, is from some of my contemporaries.
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So, a lot of my PhD colleagues in London, most of them, I mean, the ones from India
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at least, they sort of frown upon this.
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I don't know if it's a case of sour grapes or if it's simply because, you know, they're
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like, no, no, no, you can't do this popular history thing.
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You know, academia is where you can do it soberly, properly.
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This making it engaging through writing and turning it into a storytelling process is
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It's fraught with lots of problems.
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And I agree, it's fraught with problems.
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But as you may have noticed with the first and the second, the third not so much.
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But the first and the second, it's rich with footnotes.
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I make sure that all my sources, the footnotes themselves sometimes have essay length material
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in them because I'm not trying to sort of cut down on the academic aspect of it.
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If you read the footnotes, it almost reads like it's part of an academic book.
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It's just the main narrative that I try and make attractive in terms of writing.
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Some people of my age perhaps disapprove, but, you know, because the older scholars
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who've established themselves and won their stripes and, you know, earned their place
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up there, they've been supportive so far.
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And for me, I think that is, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a mark of confidence.
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Therefore, even though my contemporaries may sometimes, you know, rant about me on Facebook,
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and I can see it, right?
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I can see that they're like, you know, how dare you do this and things like that.
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But, you know, I think it's good to know that older people support you.
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So it gives you the strength and the conviction to carry on.
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And also I don't really get the thing against popular history.
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I mean, the thing is, as long as the history is solid, why should it be a mark against
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it if it's written very well and therefore sells very well?
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You know, it's an Indian thing.
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Here we don't have that much popular history by academics.
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In the Western world, they always do it.
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Now, for example, the same people who say that you should not be doing a popular history.
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Sunil Khilnani is an academic, you know, he has a PhD.
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He used to be the head of the India Institute in London, which is where I'm doing my PhD
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Now he's moved back to an American university.
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He wrote this iconic book called The Idea of India in the late 1990s.
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He also did a book and I was his research assistant for that project called Incarnations,
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India Through 50 Lives.
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So it's 50 personalities.
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You've taken their profiles and you've tried to explain a broader Indian history through
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Now, neither he nor I are scholars on each of these people.
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I mean, you're taking a VK Krishnamenon, for example, you're taking a Buddha, for example.
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I'm not a Buddhist studies person, neither is he.
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We're not great scholars on Krishnamenon, neither is, you know, Dr. Khilnani.
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But the thing is that does not preclude us from being able to sort of do a decent amount
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of research on it and write about it.
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The argument that you have to be like a supreme expert on everything you touch is I think
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risky because that, I mean, it doesn't hold water.
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Western academics and he works in the Western world, which is why for them also doing popular
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history is not at all a surprising thing.
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I mean, right now there's Supriya Gandhi, who's just brought out a book on Dharashukha,
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the tragic Mughal prince, and there are lots of what ifs and, you know, romantic stories
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And she's done, at least from every, you know, bit I've read so far, she's done a very good
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job of negotiating that inaccessible, attractive language.
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So the thing is, Western academics and people in the Western world make the effort to do
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Here, however, academics have not, I think, reached out that much into the popular audience
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and another crop of historians has grown up who want to proactively touch and reach the
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And there's that break, therefore, which naturally, you know, breeds its own insecurities and
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competition and rivalries and so on.
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Historians are also human beings.
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It's not like we are about ego clashes and jealousies and rivalries and fears and things
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That's very much a part of anything, any human enterprise, and that I think exists more in
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But, you know, as more and more historians do make the effort, academic historians do
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make the effort to write for a lay audience, I think it's a constructive thing.
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On the one hand, you can't complain that history is being perverted by politicians, on the
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other hand, do nothing about it.
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And if you want to convince the masses, go out to the masses, go out to the intelligent
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reading audience, you know, go out and reach out beyond your seminar circuit.
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I think there is value in that.
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I think, you know, the fighting for good history happens at different levels.
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It's not merely about, you know, sitting in the seminar circuit and issuing papers that
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you and I will read, but not anybody beyond that.
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It has its value, it is from that that people like me benefit.
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We learn a great deal from there, but someone has to also connect it for people who are
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not reading the seminar papers.
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And also so much of the politics of the present and indeed so much of the present period is
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influenced by narratives about the past, which makes it all the more important that we examine
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those more deeply and challenge, you know, loosely held assumptions about the past.
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And I was sort of just sinking allowed yesterday and it struck me that, you know, many people
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call this current government a conservative government.
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But to me, in one sense, they are not conservative, they are radical, because I think what is
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inherent in Indian society is the fact that we are so assimilated, we take influences
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We are actually incredibly tolerant and that's almost a DNA of our society.
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And that is something that the current government by trying to overturn and by trying to paint
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the world in binaries is actually performing a radical act which goes against what our
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society is and it struck me again and I mean, this is a truism, but it struck me again while
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reading your book that Kerala is actually an exemplar of this in the sense that Kerala
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was one, probably one of the first globalized places in the world.
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Christianity came to Kerala before it hit Europe, as you point out in your book, early
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Islam came here and it came here peacefully in the lifetime of the prophet, in the lifetime
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Tell me a little bit about a sort of, you know, like your quote right up here at the
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lawal in 1607, he writes, quote, there is no place in all of India where contentment
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is more universal than at Calicut, both on account of the fertility and beauty of the
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country and of the intercourse with the men of all religions who live there in free exercise
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It is the busiest and most full of all traffic and commerce in the whole of India.
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It has merchants from all parts of the world and of all nations and religions by reason
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of the liberty and security accorded to them there, stop quote.
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And part of this obviously is because it's a port, right?
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Ports have always attracted foreigners.
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See, the idea of the foreigner as an alien is not something that port cultures or coastal
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cultures have in general because trade is the ecosystem that preserves these societies.
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Now look at, a lot of this is also linked to geography.
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Now Kerala is the sliver of the Indian coast.
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It's cut off by the Western Ghats from Tamil Nadu, et cetera.
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You can access through Palakkad, which is up north and then in the south, there's via
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Kanyakumari district, there's another area, there's another way to access Kerala or you
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will access it via the coast.
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But for the most part, Kerala sort of cut out from South Indian, from the peninsula
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as it were, which is why even when Vijayanagar was this great powerful empire in the south
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that practically conquered almost all of the empire, it never really conquered Kerala because
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Kerala was sort of its own zone, but it was also a very small area, which meant local
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economy was not enough to sustain any kind of grand civilization or any kind of grand
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extraordinarily wealthy society.
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That wealth came from trade.
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It was trade and pepper and calico, calico comes from calicut, fabric, that kind of trade
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that actually generated money for Kerala's kings.
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Even the idea of kingship in Kerala was very different from Tamil Nadu, North India.
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Kings were not kings who had large standing armies and things like that.
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Kings headed a network really of feudal lords, again linked to geography, there are 44 rivers
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We're talking about a time when navigating all this is extremely difficult, moving around
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is extremely difficult, which means that a king will only control his capital and the
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immediate surroundings and a lot of it is based on feudal levies and things like that.
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They had land revenue, but they didn't really depend very much on land revenue because trade
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brought them in multiples of what they earned through land.
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Kings had an incentive to promote trade, which meant what, promoting new people, new colors
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of people, new people of different faiths.
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There are no issues with that because their livelihood depended on it.
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None of this comes from entirely like noble thoughts, it comes because you have gains
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So Arabs, the Zamoran of Calicut builds up the city of Calicut, which becomes one of
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the great cities of the trading world.
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One of the reasons is that other rivals of his have Cologne and other places where the
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Jews and the Christians are dominant.
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The Arabs are sort of looking for a place.
#
That's when the Calicut is emerging as a new ruler and he says, hold on, I've got this
#
access to the sea, I'll give you very good terms of trade, I'll give you honesty, I won't
#
cheat you, I'll give you very, overall make up a setting that invites trade and commerce
#
to the city and that formula works.
#
The Arabs start gravitating towards this, the Chinese start gravitating towards it and
#
it's based on certain conditions that the city thrives.
#
Naturally there is a cultural impact on the area itself altogether.
#
The Chinese bring in, the Malayalees eat, we cook a lot of our food in what we call
#
China is China, it's the kind of utensil that came from China.
#
There are these legends in Kerala where there's this Nambudri Brahmin, for example, called
#
Pandampurathanamburi and how he keeps a Chinese merchant's treasure safe for a very long time
#
and how the Chinese merchant is very happy.
#
So you're meeting a Chinese foreigner with a Kerala orthodox Nambudri Brahmin in one
#
of Kerala's oldest legends because the foreigner is always present in Kerala's legends.
#
Islam is present to the extent that there is this wonderful story called Parai Petta Pandir Kulam
#
which is about a Dalit woman, a Paraiya woman, practically one of the lowest castes who marries
#
the sage Vararuchi through this adventure of their own and they have 12 children.
#
The 12 children includes one daughter from which a major matrilineal Naya family is descended,
#
the Kaulapara Mupil Nayas, but it also includes a Brahmin, the Merathol Agnihotri.
#
It also includes a carpenter called Perindachan, it also includes a Dalit man who actually
#
brings every time the siblings meet for feast, this is the man who brings beef, the udders
#
of a cow to this feast to where a Brahmin brother and the woman and all are present.
#
There's also a Muslim son and there's a son who's a deity.
#
So these 12 children represent different castes, different religions even and different ways
#
There's orthodox Brahminical vegetarian life, there's somebody who eats the udders of a
#
cow, everybody's represented in that one story of a Brahmin man and a Paraiya woman producing
#
the 12 castes and the 12 children and so on.
#
These legends are basically hinting at something of great value.
#
There are texts like the Kerala Olapatti which is considered the premier text that explains
#
It's not really a historically sound text, it was written somewhere in the 17th century,
#
some say even in the 18th century.
#
There's already foreign wars referred to in that with the Portuguese and people like that,
#
depending on which version of the Kerala Olapatti you read.
#
The oldest political legend of Kerala is about this king called Chairman Perumal who converts
#
to Islam and goes off to Mecca.
#
So you know in the oldest political legend of Kerala, there is already Islam and there's
#
So this is the ecosystem in which it works.
#
It was easier to cross the Arabian Sea and reach Kerala than for a Malayali to travel
#
by land all the way to Kashi or wherever else in North India.
#
The sea made access to other countries easier than it did to other parts of the Indian subcontinent.
#
So that is why Kerala evolved its own culture.
#
The funny thing is despite exposure with all these foreigners, it retained many of its
#
original tribalistic elements also.
#
A lot of tribal gods have survived.
#
Our Kaav culture, the groves have survived with what are essentially pre-Brahmin, pre-Sanskritic
#
The matrilineal system survived.
#
For some reason, despite all this exposure to patriarchal families and you know patriarchal
#
religions and travelers and traders, matrilineal stuck very strong in the royal families in
#
the landed communities of Kerala.
#
And even in some very prominent lower caste groups.
#
So you know Kerala retained some sense of its independent identity.
#
It retained a certain you know image of itself, all the same constantly interacting with the
#
For me, it's a great example.
#
For example, right now we're thinking about Indianness, right?
#
There are ways to retain your Hinduness, there are ways to retain your Sanskriticness, there's
#
ways to retain your Indianness as it were, within whatever cultural parameters you're
#
comfortable with, but also to engage with the world without feeling like it's some kind
#
of threat, without feeling that foreign ideas and foreigners and anything that comes from
#
outside is a bad thing.
#
You know, our history is full of the and factor.
#
You don't need to choose.
#
In fact, I had a great episode a year and a half back with Vikram doctor on Indian food,
#
which is basically about how all Indian food essentially came from outside.
#
There's very little that is originally Indian and yet all of it is Indian.
#
Yeah, sure, it came from outside, but we made it our own.
#
And a couple of thoughts strike me from what you just said.
#
One is the mistake I often make and I caution others against making is thinking of India
#
as that mental, you know, you have that mental map in your head that, oh, this is India and
#
there on the South, there's Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and these are all parts of this whole.
#
But as you point out, you know, this mental map is a relatively recent construction.
#
You actually have a Kerala if you look at it geographically, which is separated from
#
the rest of what we now call India, and as you point out, it's more plausible for a lot
#
of trade to happen over the seas than say for a Kerala Hindu to go to Kashi.
#
The other important thing that the syncretic Ness of Kerala illustrates to me is the value
#
of globalization and free markets that they lead to an open society necessarily, because,
#
you know, if you are trading in a free market, it is in your interest to trade with as wide
#
an economic network as you can.
#
You will discriminate less, which is not to say not at all, but you will discriminate
#
And, you know, that's the key to an open society.
#
You cannot have an open society without also having open trade and free markets.
#
But it's interesting that despite all of this, another thing that comes through very strongly
#
in your writing and in the ivory throne is that despite this openness and this globalization
#
and all of the, and even the matrilineal nature of society, which we'll discuss after this,
#
there are these very stark divisions, which are most clearly exemplified in the solidity
#
and the rigidity of the caste system, which is perhaps in many ways worse in Kerala than
#
What explains that contradiction?
#
Tell me a bit about that.
#
You know, Kerala was called famously the lunatic asylum of India by Swami Vivekananda.
#
He had seen the caste system.
#
And then he came to Kerala where he saw not only untouchability, but also things like
#
There are distances certain castes had to keep from other castes, which are superior
#
castes because even their shadow, even their breath, even passing nearby could pollute
#
I think you pointed out some castes cannot get within 90 meters of a Brahmin and 50 meters
#
There are rules like that about all of these things.
#
There's even in some parts of Kerala, I think in my, where my family comes from, this caste
#
doesn't exist, but there is a caste that was only allowed to come out at night.
#
They're not allowed to see daylight and be seen by other people during the daylight because
#
even seeing them, no matter what distance can pollute you.
#
So there's this kind of chaos and madness also in Kerala society.
#
You find this in some ways, I think part of it is also because of waves of immigration.
#
Now Kerala, from the beginning says that Kerala is a country of immigrants.
#
So the story is Parishuram brought all the Brahmins here and gave this land to the Brahmins.
#
But at first the Brahmins had to discover that the land was completely occupied by ferocious
#
Now you can read that as serpents or you can read that as local tribes.
#
And these Nagas would then push these Brahmins out.
#
The Brahmins had to come back again and then make peace with the Nagas except and why is
#
it that all Kerala houses have groves like in the house, one corner will be set apart
#
in the compound as a grove where it's allowed to run wild and anything is allowed to grow
#
and there'll be a Naga statue in that.
#
It's some kind of an old God that existed and the Brahmins basically accepted that God.
#
So as the waves of immigrants come in, you find an increasing amount of temple construction.
#
That's how a region that was largely forests and not agrarian yet becomes increasingly
#
That agrarian system seems to have been led by a lot of these upper castes, which is basically
#
the Brahmins and the Nayas and those who tilted towards the future upper castes.
#
Agrarian society meant wealth.
#
Wealth meant cornering resources and becoming more powerful, which meant that people who
#
originally lived there, which is the later Dalit castes of Kerala, the Kauravas, the
#
Puleyas, the Puleyas are an agrested slave caste.
#
But if you talk to them, the older members of the community, this is not written down
#
anywhere, but they have their legends of Puleya kings, of Puleya chieftains, of people who
#
had fought and so on in their community.
#
But these were all, I think, forest communities at some point, and they were slowly enslaved
#
as urbanization and agrarianism built up, thanks to the immigrant communities that came
#
in over different periods of time.
#
That's how the caste system picks up.
#
It's different groups that arrived at different times, sort of putting them into different
#
But all the same, the upper castes had a lot to gel with.
#
For example, in a Brahmin family, if there are three sons, only the eldest is allowed
#
to marry a Brahmin woman.
#
Because that way, you only have one line in which succession happens in the Brahmin community,
#
which means your property stays intact.
#
It doesn't get partitioned.
#
See, if all three brothers marry Brahmin women and have Brahmin kids, there are three heirs.
#
You have to split the property.
#
So if only the eldest produces a Brahmin heir, the other two brothers marry non-Brahmin women.
#
So they go and marry these matrilineal women from matrilineal communities.
#
So that may be a Kshatriya princess or it may be a Shudra naya.
#
Now remember, Shudra does not mean low caste in the sense, Shudra still Savarna, which
#
is in the Varna system.
#
So Brahmins in Kerala said it was Brahmins, a few upgraded nayas who wore the sacred thread
#
as officially Kshatriyas and then everyone else was a Shudra.
#
But the Shudras were powerful landed communities.
#
So they would marry these Shudra women also with the result that in the next generation,
#
you may have one son who is the Brahmin, say the temple priest.
#
The second cousin would have married would be the son of this princess or whatever and
#
The third brother's son would be the local warlord or naya chieftain or naya general
#
So all three are cousins.
#
They belong to different castes.
#
And they therefore ensure that that upper caste prerogative and power they have is preserved.
#
So the caste system was extremely brutal to those who are Avarna out of that system.
#
But the Savarnas made sure they were constantly gelling with each other through intermarriage
#
and through links of not only economic exchange, but also the exchange of blood.
#
In fact, there's an amusing chapter in the ivory throne about how you mentioned, you
#
know, upgraded nayas about how Martandu Varma who sort of resurrected the house of Travancoda
#
as it were, was an upgraded Naya, Naya that for respectability, they did various rituals
#
So he could call himself a Kshatriya.
#
A lot of, and the funnest is there are, there are families that got stuck midway, like they
#
were in the process of upgrading and then colonialism hits and they never quite complete
#
So usually people think that anybody in Kerala with the surname Varma, you know, your surname
#
really is a Kshatriya, like who belongs to one of these palace communities, but there's
#
a gradation within that.
#
So you have at the beginning, the highest Kshatriya in Kerala is the Kuchchan Raja because
#
his sacred thread is the oldest.
#
In fact, there's this funny story where Martandu Varma has defeated the Kochi Raja and they've
#
signed a treaty and they, you know, after they've done everything and they go and take
#
a dip in the pond because in those days, that's a cultural thing, you go and bathe together.
#
So then they take a dip in the pond and this Martandu Varma looks at the Kochi Raja sacred
#
thread and says, it's really filthy.
#
It's all like turned black with dirt.
#
And he says, you know, can't you clean this?
#
It's so pristine and white and so on.
#
And the Kochi Raja says, you know, my Poonula, my sacred thread is a little old as opposed
#
to yours, which is new.
#
The idea being the Martandu Varma is just a recent upgrade into the Kshatriya community,
#
whereas the Kochi Raja has been there for so long that even his sacred thread has turned
#
So there are families like the Kochi Raja.
#
Then there are later people, for example, the Travancore family and its networks, which
#
managed to gain the upgrade in the 17th century and the 18th century.
#
Then there's another family called the Thekkumkur and Vadkumkur Varmas.
#
They have the surname of Varma, but they don't have the sacred thread.
#
So they've literally been stuck in limbo where they're technically still naias, but they've
#
managed to get the surname of the Kshatriyas.
#
Then there are lower people like the caste of the Zamorin of Calicut, the Zamorins never
#
thought it was worthwhile to go through this process.
#
One tried and decided it was too expensive to try and get the sacred thread.
#
So they're stuck in another subgroup called Samantas, which are also neither naias fully
#
nor fully Kshatriyas, somewhere stuck in the middle.
#
So there is this, this process is fascinating because there are families you can specifically
#
identify that try to upgrade themselves within the last three, three and a half centuries
#
and got stuck at different positions in the caste system.
#
The British come and after that, there's no moving up or down.
#
Then you're stuck because the British have cataloging everything and creating like manuals
#
So whatever box you were found in, in the 18th century became your final box.
#
And the British of course are very good at putting you in these boxes for their own reasons
#
of classification, because they're trying to figure everything out.
#
And then those boxes will put you in become the fixed narrative and like we've discussed
#
There is no way to generalize.
#
For example, you know, you find that a lot of this privilege comes from who can sit and
#
eat with a Brahmin, for example.
#
Now, Nambudri Brahmins at Kerala are extremely orthodox.
#
Now the Zamorin of Calicut does not have a sacred thread.
#
He's not technically a full Kshatriya, but he has the privilege of eating with Nambudris.
#
Nayas in general cannot cook for Nambudris or feed them or sit and eat with them.
#
But one particular Naya family, the Kavalapara Mupil Naya, he has the privilege of eating
#
Now, within this there are ranges, a Poonul or a sacred thread wearing Kshatriya can sit
#
next to a Brahmin and eat in the same line.
#
Someone like the Zamorin can't do what is called Panti Bhojanam.
#
He can do Sakshi Bhojanam.
#
Sakshi Bhojanam is to sit in the same room, but not in the same line.
#
The caste system is so intricate, you know, there are people who can sit with, there are
#
people who can sit in the same room, there are people who can sit outside, there are
#
people who are not even allowed on the threshold.
#
My great-grandfather was a school headmaster.
#
He had these agressive labourers who belonged to Dalit communities.
#
They were not allowed to look at the house.
#
But because of Kerala's educational system, which had built up from the 19th century,
#
there were Pulaya Dalit teachers in his school.
#
And every year as the headmaster, he gave a grand feast for people in our house.
#
And it's fascinating to hear from my grandmother that even in the 40s, the rule was very similar
#
All the nayas could sit in the veranda outside the kitchen area and they would be served
#
their food there on leaves.
#
The Christians, etc. sat at a lower level because they were not allowed to sit inside
#
So they sat at a lower level on one of the steps and that's where they would eat.
#
And the Pulaya Dalit teachers, they would be served their food near the house, which
#
the labourers were not allowed near the house.
#
But because they were teachers, they were allowed near the house, but their food was
#
served in the cow shed.
#
So the feast is happening in different spaces because each space has a caste-related connotation.
#
It becomes extremely intricate and extremely complicated in Kerala.
#
And that, you know, that it also reveals a lot about the caste system.
#
The received wisdom we have that the caste system was Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra
#
and these were the four castes, etc.
#
There was no such pan-Indian caste system.
#
Every region, every place, it had its own Jati system.
#
The Varna system was just a theoretical construct and it was also an instrument of manipulation.
#
You could bribe Rajas to support various causes by promising them a higher Varna.
#
And you know, till the British came and looked up these texts and thought the texts held
#
reality, these were not considered real categories, you know, for people in their everyday lived
#
Their everyday lived lives were much more complex.
#
And I guess one could say that your location in the caste system could be gauged by your
#
location while at meal times.
#
Is this stuff that you kind of discovered with this granularity while you were doing
#
research for your book?
#
Or is it something that filtered down to you anyway?
#
No, it was in the course of the book because, you know, once...
#
Although the book is primarily about this wonderful feuding, like these feuding sisters
#
of Travancore, these royal women and that court intrigue and the Darbar politics and
#
And the British and how they intervene and all this.
#
In the process, because Sita Rashmi Bhai also ruled, there's policy, there's decisions
#
Looking up these is what led me into these aspects and I found that it was fascinating.
#
That's why the book took me six years.
#
Because I wanted to not only weave in the palace gossip and all that was happening in
#
a dramatic sense in the palace, but also these larger dynamics of a changing world.
#
Because once colonialism came in and independence is approaching, that period is extremely fascinating
#
I mean, where colonialism is slowly starting to recede and fade and Indian nationalism
#
How are royal families, you know, placed at that time in a very complicated position where
#
they're not sure which way the future is turning.
#
So at that time to study things with this greater granularity was, I thought, a very
#
interesting, you know, prospect.
#
And what you do very well in your book is that you set up the narrative by talking about
#
all the tumult in the region we now called Kerala, but, you know, there's Calicut and
#
there's Cochin and there's Travancore and all that for maybe 300 years before the British
#
finally come, you know, from the time the Portuguese come to Calicut and they have an
#
awkward time getting through.
#
And then the subsequent battles, Martanda-Varma, you know, and more part of Verma's, reviving
#
the fate of Travancore and then colonialism coming in and everything kind of settling
#
down to this default thing where the British are now in charge, just take me through a
#
little bit of the tumult of that period.
#
You know, it is a very bloody period in the sense that colonialism, so we were talking
#
about the Arab traders in Calicut and so on.
#
They had a wonderful equation going on for a long time.
#
Then you find that the Chinese withdraw from the international seas, which is a huge thing.
#
It's not given its due, but if the Chinese had continued to be in the Arabian Sea, their
#
ships were 10 times larger than these European ships.
#
The Chinese had the capacity to kick Europeans back to Europe and, you know, retain control
#
of the Arabian Sea and trade in general.
#
And were they interested in colonizing others like the Europeans were or were they just
#
I think they were happy to trade.
#
They had a few outposts here and there and they had a certain, let's say, network of
#
So the whole history of the subcontinent could have been different.
#
The Chinese had remained, but the Chinese became isolationist for some, their own internal
#
So the Chinese withdrew, so it was left, the seas were left only to the Arabs.
#
Now you have the Europeans coming in with their new technologies and their new angst
#
to sort of take charge of it.
#
They try and come and negotiate with these land rulers in Kerala, but they find that
#
they can't beat these rulers on land and the rulers have a good deal with the Arabs.
#
So why should they entertain these white men from what they think is a barbaric country?
#
They thought the Portuguese were barbaric.
#
You know, that's what the Zamarin thought, he thought of them as barbarians.
#
It's only later that colonizers started calling Indians barbarians.
#
First it was the other way around.
#
Then these guys discovered that they actually have more power at sea, the Portuguese and
#
the Europeans in general.
#
So they start, you know, essentially it's piracy and terrorism at sea.
#
They start sinking ships.
#
They start preventing trade from happening.
#
They start playing party pooper till these Rajas are forced to come to the table.
#
Now this unleashes a whole set of new dynamics because now what's happening is the old powers
#
like the Zamarin and his networks with the Arabs, they start fading and these European
#
companies come up and the European companies have an active interest in promoting smaller,
#
less ambitious rulers like the Zamarin, using them as puppets and building up their own
#
That's where you find the Kochi Raja comes up.
#
The Kochi Raja's career for the last five centuries has always been, has entirely been
#
being the puppet in the hands of one European company or the other.
#
The crown of Cochin, which is now kept in a palace in Tripunathra in a museum.
#
If you look at the crown, there's the emblem of the Dutch East India Company on it because
#
they made the crown and gave it to the Kochi Raja.
#
Even his crown is inscribed with the company's logo and a logo because he's not entirely
#
Now what happens in the south of Kerala, which is, you know, Travancore at that time is essentially
#
It's a small sliver between Kanyakumari and Trivandrum.
#
Nobody cares very much about it.
#
The family is not even considered fully Malayali.
#
They're very exposed to Tamil society, so they're not considered de facto Shuddha Malayalis.
#
Now this prince discovers that this chaos, to quote from a line from Game of Thrones,
#
You can use that to your own advantage.
#
He starts getting weapons from the East India Company.
#
The English are still not a major factor.
#
It's the Dutch by this time.
#
We're talking about the 18th century.
#
The Portuguese are displaced by the Dutch and now the Dutch are in control and the English
#
are about to displace the Dutch.
#
So Marthandorama acquires weapons, et cetera, from the English, he gets a prisoner of war
#
from the Dutch to come and start training his armies in a modern Western style.
#
He starts getting mercenaries from Tamil Nadu and does something unheard of in Kerala, which
#
is to start conquering territory.
#
Earlier when kings defeated other kings, they just made them vassals.
#
They do not annex territory.
#
Very rarely did that happen.
#
Marthandorama makes this his chief political activity and he ends up conquering everything
#
But the timing is also important because suddenly communication is easier.
#
The earlier hassles that existed, say in the 15th and 16th century, no longer apply in
#
Things are moving much faster.
#
The world is becoming a faster place.
#
The English companies are facilitating that.
#
New weapons and technologies are coming in.
#
New forms of fortification are coming in.
#
And he's reaching out to people beyond the Kerala ecosystem.
#
He at one point reaches out to Hyder Ali, asking for assistance.
#
So he builds up a new modern state in a modern changing universe.
#
He uses the chaos that colonialism and early colonialism is unleashing in the Indian subcontinent
#
and uses that to his advantage, to create the state of Travancore.
#
That is how he sort of turns a rather sad, declining situation to his advantage, benefits
#
Now, the funny thing is he's also a Hindu king with aspirations of his own.
#
So first he has to upgrade himself in caste because if you read Marthandorama's story,
#
what is fascinating is that he was still then first among equals.
#
Royal blood was not sacred.
#
His nobility was constantly trying to murder him when he was a prince because they don't
#
He decides therefore that royal blood must become more sacred.
#
People must hesitate to drop or sort of stab royalty and, you know, spill their blood.
#
So he decides that that means your caste has to be upgraded and a certain awe has to be
#
The Delhi sultans did it.
#
You use protocol and state and court decorum and culture, etc. to make yourself look extremely
#
powerful and extremely, let's say, otherworldly, superhuman in some ways.
#
So Marthandorama says, I need a caste upgrade.
#
All the Nabudri Brahmins in Kerala are in Northern Kerala.
#
So he's not, they don't actually live here, but he has to find a way to woo them and give
#
The process is the ritual called Hiranyagarbha, where they construct a cow made entirely out
#
The king goes in through the cow, sits inside the cow.
#
They chant mantras of birth.
#
And then he emerges from under the tail of the cow and now he's reborn.
#
He's now reborn as a Kshatriya who can wear the sacred thread, part of the Somavamsa or
#
the house of the moon, etc., etc.
#
So he gains first of all his caste upgrade.
#
The other thing is once you've got a caste upgrade, you can now no longer let your nayas
#
who are technically Shudras, you know, they can't come and touch you and serve you.
#
So you need Brahmins to come and surround you and sort of have this Brahminical decor
#
Now, as I said, all the Nabudris are in North Kerala.
#
He imports Tamil Brahmins by the thousands into Kerala, gives them various incentives
#
to come to his state, which is free feeding houses, lots of privileges and benefits, etc.
#
So the Tamil Brahmins come in and they start surrounding the royal family.
#
And then he creates a protocol around the royal family, which is even the language used
#
for royalty has to be highly artificial.
#
It's essentially like public relations now.
#
Politicians know that on the one hand, they have to be in touch with the masses, etc.
#
But the masses must never think of them as ordinary because familiarity breeds contempt.
#
So Marthand Verma knows this rule and he's doing this in an 18th century format, which
#
is that, you know, even as I said, language is artificial.
#
So when a normal Malayali like myself, when I wake up in the morning, the first thing
#
we do is palli dekha, which is to brush your teeth.
#
For royalty, the word is tirumutta vilaka, the cleaning of the royal pearls because royalty
#
doesn't have teeth, it has pearls, you know, when a Raja or a Rani goes for a bath, it
#
is not called a kuli, which is what we would use as a regular Malayali.
#
That would be the word.
#
They go for a palli neerata, the royal frolic in water.
#
When they eat, it's called amritheta, which is eating amrit or nectar.
#
You're not eating normal food.
#
When they cry, it's called trikandmervar kuva, you know, the royal like water is emerging
#
from its eyes and things like that.
#
Then when the queen of Travancore gets pregnant, you know, the proclamation is never, she's
#
Pregnancy is not a word you use for queens and royalty.
#
The word is tiruvayar vanu, the royal womb is occupied.
#
And then when the queen delivers the baby, it's tiruvayar orenju, the royal womb is vacated
#
because queens don't do such human things as give birth and get pregnant.
#
And when a Maharaja of Travancore is on his deathbed, they find a Tamil Brahmin and they
#
get this Tamil Brahmin to embrace the dying Raja.
#
He's handing over his sins to the Brahmin so he can get moksha and go straight to, you
#
know, whatever, heaven or whatever.
#
And the Brahmin is paid 10,000 rupees, taken to the border of Travancore and unceremoniously
#
kicked out to disappear with the sins forever.
#
You know, and when the king dies finally, it's called nadini.
#
He's ended ruling, his rule in this nadu, this kingdom, he's now moved to the other
#
kingdom, the heavenly kingdom to rule that.
#
So even the language is this highly artificial vocabulary is constructed around the royal
#
family to reinforce the idea that these people are so special, they're so wonderful, they're
#
so not like you and me, that is to be constantly regenerated and constantly done.
#
The irony is he ends up creating what, and Travancore consciously called itself a Hindu
#
state in the 19th century, called itself the Hindu state of Travancore.
#
But how was the Hindu state created with East India Company arms by a Dutch mercenary who
#
trained its forces, by Tamil mercenary armies and by a king who only after he did all this
#
using all these instruments of modernity, he also used Brahminical culture to Sanskritize
#
and to make himself the Sanskritic Indian king.
#
But that Sanskritism was backed by forces that were unleashed by colonialism.
#
It was backed by forces that were entirely modern and vintage and not ancient by any
#
It's really positioning.
#
Constructing your ancient unbroken pure Kshatriya lineage was a very modern enterprise.
#
No, and of course, you know, talking of these elaborate rituals and all that in your book,
#
there's a very long description and just reading it made me tired and want to dry myself with
#
a towel of the young sethu, Lakshmi Bhai, I think having a bath and the ritual it involved.
#
It is so incredibly elaborate.
#
I think everything would take two hours.
#
And what kind of strikes me also about Martin Verma is that he's a very interesting character
#
in that he seems to combine a medieval brutality with an almost modern sense of real politic.
#
And so I'll just read out a couple of quotes from your book that give a sense of that because
#
I found this quite fascinating.
#
One is, of course, you know, your other books have tons of violence in them.
#
This one doesn't have so much, but still this is a glimpse.
#
And what happens after he discovers a conspiracy in his court, quote, soon enough when evidence
#
fell into the Raja's hands of a conspiracy at court, he had the Pilamar arrested summarily
#
and presented proof of their perfidy in what was unprecedented instead of chastising the
#
nobles by demoting their powers, but otherwise leaving them unharmed.
#
Martin Verma ordered their immediate execution.
#
Their properties were attached and their women and children sold into slavery with not a
#
hint of mercy or sympathy and thus perished 42 noble houses of the realm, obliterating
#
internal opposition from the Raja's path and bringing the death knell of feudalism in the
#
Stop quote, very Game of Thrones style.
#
And the other quote is about when he's dying and you're right, quote, on his death bed
#
in 1758, he issued seven injunctions for political survival to his heirs.
#
The most crucial of which was that the friendship existing between the English East India Company
#
and Travancore should be maintained at any risk and that full confidence should always
#
be placed in the support and aid of that Honorable Association.
#
And there is this hint of practicality and like, I mean, I don't know whether it comes
#
from an understanding of what a force East India Company can be, or maybe it's just recognition
#
that his successors aren't as brilliant and enterprising as him, but it sets a tone for
#
what is to happen in the centuries to come.
#
It does, because without the British, the kingdom could not have survived.
#
You know, the brutality, as you mentioned, is actually quite striking because there are
#
still Fisher families outside Travandrum.
#
There are villages where they call fair fishermen, you know, villages, Valutha means fair.
#
The idea being these people are descended from these upper caste Naya women who Marthandavarma
#
Because by giving up these women and making them eat with and live with fishermen, you
#
are forever reducing their caste position.
#
They can never bounce back from something like that.
#
Killing a family member, killing all the men, the women can still have babies in that family,
#
the Vamsha still survives, but you demote them in caste, you completely make them important.
#
There's no way they can come back and harm you.
#
There are so many stories.
#
In fact, there's even a story, if you go to Travandrum, next to the Padmanabhaswamy temple,
#
there is this pond called the Padma Tirtha, it's a huge pond, massive tank really.
#
The legend goes that it wasn't originally so big.
#
Next to that, one of these courtiers had his huge mansion and the way Marthandavarma, once
#
he defeats his various enemies, what he does is, it's called Kolam Tondaga in Malayalam.
#
You not only destroy the house, you turn that spot into a pond and fill it with water so
#
that any sign of a house having been there completely disappears from local and public
#
You get rid of the lineage, get rid of even the land and the property on which these people
#
actually lived and suddenly these people cease to exist as far as the future is concerned.
#
They no longer exist as even a concept for other rebels to rally around and sort of make
#
them a focus for any kind of rebellion against the king.
#
You see that even with politicians now.
#
Why is it that the politicians always want to delegitimize somebody else?
#
You delegitimize your rival because you have to make sure they become completely important.
#
Nobody should be able to rally around them because they've been completely sort of stripped
#
of any kind of legitimacy in the political system.
#
And I guess fending them as anti-national is the easiest way to do that.
#
Just now there's a politician who said, oh, maybe we should send the actual correct information
#
on the CA to the Citizenship Amendment Act to Rahul Gandhi in Italian.
#
All of this is suggesting that he's illegitimate, he doesn't belong here.
#
It's trying to negate this person's right or even his claim to be here and saying that,
#
no, you are not a factor at all.
#
And all of this is about the optics as much as it is about politics.
#
And interestingly, you'd imagine that, you know, one reads about Marthanda Verma's brutality
#
and all of that and you see all the violence raging and you think, oh, okay, it's a typical
#
There must be toxic masculinity all over and yet, and yet, tell me a little bit about sort
#
of the matrilineal nature of Kerala society and how it sort of came to be and what form
#
it took through these centuries.
#
So the thing is people often say matriarchal, it's not matriarchal, it's linear, matrilineal
#
because at the end of the day, it's the men who actually hold a lot of power as well.
#
It's not like the men are completely divested of influence.
#
The only change is, to put it simplistically, the family is not man, wife and children.
#
It is woman, her brother and her children.
#
So the focus is the woman, the owner is the woman.
#
So in the Zamorin of Calicut's family, the eldest female, even if she's a 12-year-old
#
girl and the Zamorin himself is 70 and he's her grandfather's age, he's the grand uncle
#
of hers, he will still bow to her and call her Amma, which is mother because the woman
#
is the technical owner of the property.
#
She is the head of the family.
#
In Travancore, similarly, the Raja's wife is only called Ammachi.
#
Ammachi means mother of His Highness's children.
#
She is not queen, neither are his children royalty.
#
They are normal, ordinary people.
#
So for instance, one of the Maharajas of Travancore, let's say this one who died in 1920 for his
#
full title is His Highness Shri Padmanabhadasa, Vanchipala, Shri Moolam Dirunar, Damavarma
#
Kulasekara, Kiritapati, Mannya Sultan, Maharaja Raja, Rama Raja, Bahadur, Shamsher Jank.
#
And then of course there are his English titles.
#
But his son is simply Mr. Velayudhan Tambi and you can add a Shri, which is given to
#
Perhaps to his great relief.
#
But Tambi, which is a surname, means brother.
#
So you're saying this person's like a brother to the royal family, but he is not a Tamburan,
#
which means he's not a royal himself.
#
He's a relative of the royal family.
#
So the king's son is a mister, the king has a string of titles, the king's son is always
#
a mister and the king's wife is also a missus.
#
So a Maharaja of Kuchan, for example, had this very powerful wife.
#
The wife was never a Maharani.
#
She was always called, his name was Rama Varma.
#
She was called Lady Rama Varma.
#
She was never called Rani Parukutti Netiar or whatever her name was.
#
She's called Lady Rama Varma.
#
In his English title as Sir Rama Varma, his wife could be Lady Rama Varma.
#
But in his family title of Raja, the Rani ship went to his sister as per the matrilineal
#
And the sister's kids ascended the throne.
#
And the sister's kids are the heirs.
#
Heirs again, I mean, people often simplistically say it's the man's nephew who succeeds him.
#
There is no such rule that says the nephew has to succeed him.
#
The next oldest person in the matrilineal joint family is the ruler.
#
That may be your brother.
#
A nephew who's older than a brother, that nephew will rule first.
#
Even though he's technically a nephew in terms of relationship, if the nephew somehow older,
#
the nephew has the first claim to the throne, only then the other uncle who's younger.
#
So age is the determining factor for both the male as well as the female.
#
This is possibly the origin of fudging birth certificates.
#
It did not happen in UP Bihar sports teams.
#
So let's put it in the context of the Trivanko royal family.
#
The favorite analogy I give is through some of these court rituals.
#
So the Maharani of Trivanko, Setu Lakshmibai, for example, she is the Maharani, her husband
#
is only called the consort.
#
He's not even usually called husband, he's just called the consort.
#
The consort cannot sit in the presence of his wife unless she gives him permission.
#
He can't call his wife by name.
#
Till this husband of hers died in 1976, he always referred to his wife as her highness.
#
He would ask his grandchildren, where is her highness?
#
He'd never say, where's your grandmother?
#
He'd say, where is her highness because he was always aware that her position was superior
#
When they, you know, she was considered a great reformer because in the 1910s she started
#
traveling in the same car with her husband.
#
Her uncle was scandalized.
#
He said, he may be your husband, but he's your subject.
#
He cannot be seen seated next to you because to sit next to somebody signifies equality.
#
The queen's husband has no right to sit next to her.
#
He has to follow in a smaller car.
#
Back in the day, you know, they were not allowed to live in the same palace.
#
The queen's husbands lived in these smaller bungalows really attached to the palace and
#
they were summoned to the royal bedchamber whenever the queens wished and that was the
#
Usually, after marriage, et cetera, even when they had, you know, let's use the polite word
#
of sexual congress, even when they were, when they had to sleep with each other because
#
astrologers who decided when Shani was in the right place and Venus was in the right
#
place and things like that.
#
The consummation of the wedding basically.
#
The consummation of the wedding and, you know, for the initial phase so that you make sure
#
These husbands were not allowed to die in the palace.
#
You know, only members of the royal family can die in the palace.
#
Husbands are not members of the royal family.
#
So usually if they're dying, they could even be lifted with their deathbed and taken to
#
die elsewhere in a public building or a private building of their own, not in the palace.
#
And the wife and the children, the maharani and her children will not attend the man's
#
He may be your father, he may be your husband, but he's the subject of the state and royalty
#
does not attend the funerals of private citizens of the state.
#
That is how the system works for Maharaja's wives also, the Amichis, they are technically
#
private citizens of the state.
#
They're wives of the Maharaja and many Maharajas are deeply in love with their wives.
#
There's one who died in the mid 19th century.
#
Technically his wife was a nobody.
#
She has no state recognition.
#
She has some pensions and, you know, honors, et cetera, but she has no official recognition
#
from the darbar as a member of the royal family.
#
But when she dies, this man starts fasting and doing lots of religious ceremonies, et
#
cetera, and three months later he himself dies because this is all too much for him
#
You know, there's another raja whose first wife dies very young in childbirth and this
#
man for the next 17, 18 years, he doesn't marry because he can't somehow give up the
#
memory of his first wife.
#
Legally and technically in the official documents, the Maharaja has no wife.
#
Even the ritual of marriage in Kerala among matrilineal communities, all you have to do
#
You light a lamp, put a red silk and a cloth, a mundi and you hand it over to the lady.
#
If she accepts, you're married.
#
If she throws it in your face, you're not married and divorce is very easy.
#
All you have to do is, frankly, my ex-boss got in trouble for saying this, but it is
#
often said in Naya families that to tell a husband not to come back, all you have to
#
do is keep his things outside and, you know, keep his shoes outside or keep his spittoon
#
outside or his walking stick outside and he gets the clue.
#
Don't come back to this house.
#
That is as simple as divorce gets.
#
So there was this, what was the point I was making though?
#
We were talking about matrilineal.
#
I know, even the ritual of wedding.
#
So when the kings get married, what happens is the lady is invited to the palace and there's
#
a room where the wedding takes place.
#
There's a cloth and it's kept in a tray and there's a golden cup that's kept there with
#
And what happens is the actual handing of the cloth is done by the chamberlain.
#
It's not done by the king in person.
#
The chamberlain hands over the cloth.
#
The lady wears all these fine silks and etc.
#
She takes that golden pot of water and then goes into the king's bedchamber.
#
So one could argue that technically she's not even married to the king because the king
#
is like a saintly figure.
#
There is this one historian of Travancore who talks about how Marthandavarma, because
#
he creates all this protocol around the royal family and most importantly, he dedicates
#
He goes to the Padmanabhaswamy temple and says, all my conquests I dedicate to God.
#
It is often cast as this great spiritual act, but it wasn't a spiritual act.
#
What he was doing was again politics.
#
I mean, there may have been some spiritual angle to it, but look at this.
#
He was seen as an invader in other parts of Kerala.
#
Everywhere he goes, even after he's got the heart power, people treat him with illegitimacy.
#
They say, you don't belong here.
#
So you donate it to God.
#
You can criticize the king, but tomorrow onwards, once it becomes God's estate, you can't criticize
#
So that's why by handing it over to the deity in the temple and ruling as the deity's regent
#
on earth, you're basically precluding a lot of criticism.
#
Nobody can stand up to you.
#
It was the anti-national of its own time.
#
If you stand up to the king, you're actually standing up to God.
#
You're not a good citizen of the state, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So he reinforces this because of which the king starts being, to quote this historian
#
Shanguni Menon of the 19th century, who's a Darbar historian, the king is seen a lot
#
like the Pope, the semi-religious figure.
#
So the semi-religious figure is not technically supposed to have marriage and kids and carnal
#
So there is a little bit of that also, but yeah, there's a matrilineal system.
#
It spreads even in regular Naya families like mine, for example, in the old days when my
#
father passed away, there is that question of whether I should even have done the rituals
#
because his sister's children are the ones who have the first claim.
#
Nowadays, the children do it themselves.
#
But even then, somebody from the sister's family will stand with you and they will also
#
participate in the ritual because you can't entirely give up that old custom either.
#
And when people die, you have that period of pollution, right, you're not supposed
#
to go to temples for a certain number of days, 10 days or 12 days or something.
#
Technically, for a man's children, they're never polluted.
#
The day your father passes away, you can go to the temple if you want because you don't
#
That goes to a sister's family.
#
They are the ones who are polluted, not you.
#
No, and one interesting consequence of matrilineal system, and I'm guessing that there is causation
#
to this and not just correlation, is that the women therefore tend to be extremely empowered
#
in the sense I was, you know, just a couple of days ago, I was reading a biography of
#
Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein because I was sort of talking about that for my other
#
show, The Book Club and Storytell.
#
An interesting tidbit I picked up there is that her husband, Percy, gave her a book to
#
read, which was by this guy called James Lawrence, and it was called The Empire of the Nires.
#
And Mary Shelley, you've got to remember, is the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft.
#
She's a feminist herself and all that, but this book was too feminist for her.
#
So, you know, because what the book describes and what the Nires were and what Kerala society
#
was, is not just a matrilineal line of dissent and, you know, giving kingship and property
#
and all of that, but, you know, women were empowered, they would take multiple husbands,
#
they would, you know, have multiple sexual partners and, you know, all of those, what
#
we tend to think of as sanskar or whatever is actually something that which was brought
#
in by the British when they imposed the Victorian values.
#
I mean, as you've pointed out in the last episode we did, women in Kerala typically
#
went around bare chested till the British, you know, imposed their sense of shame on
#
And it was in fact considered rude to...
#
It was considered indecent, not even rude.
#
You were considered, I mean, not to use, pardon my French, but, you know, you were considered
#
a slut if you wore a blouse.
#
If you're a Hindu woman of high caste and you wore a blouse, they'd say, my God, why
#
Because only a woman of no culture, only a public woman would feel the need to sort of
#
cover herself up like that.
#
No decent woman would feel the need to cover herself because what are you, why you sexualize
#
In fact, if I'm not mistaken, there is an anecdote in Ivory Throne also where a queen
#
has a woman who dares to cover her breast in front of her, has her breast mutilated.
#
Yeah, there is a story.
#
Because she's like, hey, we are all, you know...
#
You can't go and, you can't go and dress like that.
#
But the polyantry is fascinating.
#
This idea of women having multiple husbands, as I said, not only divorce, but you could
#
have multiple husbands.
#
I have met a woman, she's still alive.
#
There's a town called Mamalikara, there's a village near that, which is where my ancestors
#
And in that village, I met a woman in her nineties who was married to two brothers.
#
She was co-wife to two brothers.
#
And this woman is still alive.
#
And of course it's very awkward to raise this question, but everybody in that village openly
#
says that madams refer to the senior husband or the junior husband based on the age of
#
these two men who were brothers.
#
And there is no embarrassment about it.
#
You know, there is a maid says, Avdutte Valiya Saar and Kocha Saar.
#
Saar is the English word, sir.
#
And Kocha in Valiya means junior and senior.
#
There is no embarrassment.
#
There's no sense of surprise because these things are not all that unfamiliar.
#
We like to pretend now.
#
We like to pretend that there is something taboo about this.
#
But the fact is, in rural Kerala, this sort of story is still, it doesn't startle anyone.
#
There are still families, there are still old people who've lived that life, who lived
#
in that polyandrous system.
#
My great-grandmother, there's a wonderful story about how she first started wearing
#
This is only in the 1940s.
#
She's already a woman in her 40s at that time.
#
Her second daughter gets married and the younger women are also wearing blouses and sarees,
#
They've stopped giving, they've given up the older tradition of wearing just the thing
#
So for the wedding, the boy's mother comes to the house and she brings with her and she's
#
come wearing this thing called the Rauka.
#
And my great-grandmother's like, my god, you're my age, but you're wearing a blouse and all
#
And she says, oh, don't you know, this is a new fashion, you know, it's 1940s now, such
#
a modern time, we should start wearing these wonderful new things called blouses.
#
And my great-grandmother wears it and first she's extremely ashamed about coming out in
#
So she'll wear it inside the house, show it to her daughters and hide it and fold it away
#
and put it away, thinking, oh my god, if I wear a blouse, what will my husband say?
#
What will my brothers say?
#
You know, how indecent of me to do that?
#
What will they think about me?
#
And finally it takes her children some time to persuade her saying that it's okay to wear
#
Wearing a blouse does not make you a bad person.
#
You know, this is a time where she belongs to that generation, but wearing a blouse is
#
My father's side great-grandmother, till she died in the 1970s, she never wore a blouse.
#
She said, I will not dress like this.
#
You know, this new, newfangled fashion that you guys have discovered, I'm not going to
#
So we have a photograph of her taken on one of those old cameras where you get these square
#
little pictures of her with a niece of hers or something.
#
The niece is wearing a blouse and a regular Malayali saree as it were.
#
The old lady has just got a loose cloth on one side of her shoulder.
#
So the other side is completely exposed and she's just got this.
#
My father says that it was, I mean, people didn't even look at it as bad or as something
#
to be embarrassed about.
#
That woman would, you know, people would come to the house.
#
She would have servants around the house.
#
This is an agrarian society, so a lot of workers would be around and she'd be the one managing
#
all this in the stop-less avatar because nobody looked at it with that sexual gaze.
#
Nobody looked at it with a gaze of that conveyed vulgarity or indecency in any way.
#
But these things can change very quickly, right?
#
That's the thing with sanskar.
#
Often things we think are ancient sanskar are not all that ancient, they're a very recent
#
No, in fact, and that's probably the worst thing the British gave us, this whole veneer
#
of morality which you put on everything.
#
And I think of, you know, we might be the most, if not one of the most sexually repressed
#
And a lot of it is, you know, because of shit like this, which the British brought in, we
#
They civilized a lot of their, you know, the British started calling us uncivilized.
#
They started calling us barbaric.
#
They said, oh, you don't even cover yourself well.
#
What is this like hideous culture?
#
And how can you be so proud of your culture if this is how you even walk around?
#
You know, there's this, I was reading a review yesterday of a book on the Devadasi Balasaraswati
#
and it's fascinating that in the review, it's not in the book, I think, but in the review,
#
the critic talks about how there was a famous Devadasi who would perform and these men would
#
gather around and one of her acts was to pretend she'd lost her hearing and look for it basically
#
in the crotches of all these men who had gathered and they'd all laugh, et cetera, et cetera.
#
It was sort of vulgar in some ways, perhaps it was some sort of playful, sexual, whatever,
#
but we were a culture that even had that.
#
And these patrons of Devadasis were all who?
#
Big temple Brahmins, big landlords, people like that.
#
So you're basically saying that Indian culture included landlords gathering around a woman
#
looking for her hearing in their crotch.
#
There were spaces to allow even something like that.
#
Now we're not getting into the politics of whether it was good for the Devadasi, whether,
#
you know, it was good for women and so on, but the point is there were cultural spaces
#
where there's that kind of sexual liberation.
#
And at least to my limited knowledge, Devadasis weren't slut shamed.
#
It wasn't, you know, it was a later equation of Devadasis.
#
The slut shaming also is because of Victorian change.
#
Victorians not only depose Rajas, which means what the patronage the Devadasis received
#
Suddenly from doing poetry and literature, et cetera, many of them are forced to actually
#
get into prostitution because they have to survive.
#
There is obviously prostitution.
#
One can't say that they weren't coerced and their bodies weren't used by men, but equally
#
it wasn't like they were without agency.
#
A lot of these women did have agency.
#
A lot of the women were beyond, a random man couldn't go and grasp them.
#
They chose their patrons if they were in positions of power.
#
And there are cases of Devadasis in positions of great power and great literate, literate
#
in places of great literary quality and great literary achievement.
#
We discussed Muddu Parani, for example, in our last session on my third book.
#
So, you know, there are, there are stories like that.
#
But the point is for a culture now where men go into clubs and beat up women for wearing
#
short clothes, hello, talk about this Devadasi who's looking for her earring in somebody's
#
She was, you know, part of India's tradition, as it were.
#
Tradition is not a rock, as I, you know, that's my latest analogy.
#
It's not a rock you put in a gilded cage and try to protect.
#
It's a breathing organism.
#
It has, it has an amorphous shape, you know, it is a shapeless commodity, frankly.
#
Just keeps evolving and changing with time, acquiring different hues based on what we
#
So to think that, you know, our culture is some kind of staid, sedate thing where everyone's
#
got their spines erect and they're wearing starched clothes and chanting the thousand
#
names of Vishnu every day.
#
There is, there is a culture far beyond this textbook version, which the Victorians and
#
the 19th century so-called reformers popularized.
#
And Kerala fell victim to this in a very major way because the matrilineal system completely
#
shocked all these people.
#
Polyandry shocked them even more.
#
And perhaps the idea of women holding property got even more scandalizing for a lot of men.
#
And your book, of course, is all this and more.
#
And the interesting thing about your book is that it's more than 700 pages, it's 20
#
chapters and a preface.
#
And we've just finished talking about the preface.
#
Let's take a quick commercial break and we'll come back and we'll actually talk about the
#
If you've gotten so far in this podcast, it means you like listening to good audio content
#
and you're thirsty for knowledge.
#
In that case, I'd urge you to check out Storytel, the sponsors of this episode.
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Storytel is an audiobook platform that has a massive range of audiobooks from around
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The international collection is stellar, but so is their local collection.
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They have a fantastic range of Marathi and Hindi audiobooks.
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What's more, I do a weekly podcast there called The Book Club with Amit Verma, in which I
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talk about one book every week, giving context, giving you a taste of the book and so on.
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As long as Storytel sponsors this show, I will recommend an audiobook that I liked on
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that platform every week.
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My recommendation for this week is the subject of this episode of The Scene in the Unseen,
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The Ivory Throne by Manu Pillay.
#
Yes, it's available as an audiobook on Storytel.
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So if you're enjoying this episode, you'll probably enjoy the audiobook as well.
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The Ivory Throne by Manu Pillay on Storytel.
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Download their app or visit Storytel.com.
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Remember that's Storytel with a single L, Storytel.com.
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Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Manu Pillay about The Ivory Throne, his book on Kerala, in particular,
#
the House of Travancore.
#
The book begins with a chapter on the most famous Verma of all time, Raja Ravi Verma,
#
which in many ways is a very apt sort of place to begin because his descendants basically
#
rule the rest of the book.
#
So tell me a bit about, you know, how Raja Ravi Verma coming up in the court of Aayilyam
#
Aayilyam Tirunel and his wife Kalyani Pillay, who was one of those amachis who sort of a
#
very powerful consort to the king as such, but after his death sort of fades away.
#
But an early patron of Raja Ravi Verma, who initially when he goes through the paint,
#
I mean, of course, because of his upbringing and everything, he is sort of taken in and
#
patronised, but people refuse to teach him painting, the established guys of the day.
#
And so what's happening there?
#
So Ravi Verma belongs to a group of 10 odd families, which are called Koyaldambarans.
#
Koyaldambarans are these ex-Rajas who immigrated from Malabar to Travancore, most of them during
#
the time Tipu Sultan invaded Malabar and they lost all their territories.
#
So they accepted pensions afterwards from the British and they decided to just come
#
and live in Travancore.
#
Ravi Verma's family, however, is the oldest, which came in the 17th century and they were
#
famous for an entire, for like nearly a hundred years.
#
All the kings of Travancore were fathered by men who were consorts to Travancore princesses.
#
These consorts, all the male consorts all came from the Kilimanur family for a very
#
So Ravi Verma was born into this family.
#
Now, a lot of legend has sort of cloaked his story after he became famous.
#
So there is a story, for example, that he was brought to court and he was rejected as
#
a princess's husband because he was too dark and how he said, oh, this was actually a wonderful
#
thing because if he had been forced to marry a princess, he would never have been able
#
to travel and discover his true calling.
#
It's rubbish because by the time he came to the Travancore court, all the princesses were
#
So there was no question of marrying a royal princess.
#
It's one of those later stories, masala that people add to the stories of famous men.
#
Even the story that, you know, he was some sort of self-taught genius in an artless universe
#
and he had to sort of struggle against the odds is exaggerated in some ways because there
#
was a lot of art in Travancore.
#
He was exposed to a lot of things.
#
For a long time, there was a painter called Ramaswami Naidu, there was before him a man
#
These people were men of talent who, you know, far surpassed him for a very long period.
#
But he did something very unusual, which is that Ravi Varma never got satisfied with court
#
settings and the patronage of one court.
#
He was there for 18 years, 1862, till the death of this king called Iliyam Tirunel in
#
The successor king did not like Ravi Varma, so Ravi Varma had no option but to leave.
#
Then he does something.
#
He takes advantage of the railways.
#
He takes advantage of patronage.
#
He's getting, you know, people are moving around, in India, it's finally possible to
#
move around with great ease.
#
So former Diwan of Travancore from a chief minister called Madhav Rao is now Diwan in
#
He uses that to bounce and get a painting commission in Baroda.
#
Then he gets another one, Mysore.
#
That's how Ravi Varma becomes this pan-Indian figure and leaves the Travancore setting.
#
If he had stayed content as a darbar artist, he would never have become famous.
#
It was not purely talent, perhaps there were more talented men than him in the darbar.
#
He's the one who made an opportunity out of it.
#
He saw an opportunity, recognized it for what it was and worked like a professional.
#
He diligently stuck to deadlines as far as he could.
#
He delivered on promises he made.
#
You know, even when he became famous, he once went to get a commission from the Nizam of
#
He was by then a very famous artist.
#
The Nizam made him wait for two hours and then finally just brushed him away.
#
But Ravi Varma's willingness to hustle is really something because, you know, that professional
#
ethic is not something that was linked to his background.
#
He came from a feudal background.
#
He had no reason to live a professional life like this.
#
What is interesting with the Travancore royal family and him though is that how his quest
#
to sort of build a career causes a lot of animosity in his personal life.
#
Now, Ravi Varma's wife is the grandmother of the future Maharani's of Travancore, Setu
#
Lakshmi Bhai and Setu Parvati Bhai.
#
And there, her marriage with Ravi Varma is extremely turbulent.
#
This woman, to begin with, is from an aristocratic family.
#
She does not understand why her husband needs a profession.
#
More scandalizingly, she doesn't know why on earth he wants to be a painter of all things
#
because painters were seen as artisans, they were not seen as artists, you know, signing
#
your name is an innovation and that he really begins in Travancore and brings a certain
#
respect to it, partly also because of his class.
#
And the combination of using the lithograph to spread his work-wide and, you know, signing
#
his thing, just, you know, as a branding exercise, you know, whether it's full or otherwise
#
But he also uses his class and caste connections.
#
The thing is, Ravi Varma, because he belongs to these families that supply his husbands
#
to royalty, he is essentially in many ways an aristocrat.
#
He's part of the cream of society.
#
So wherever he goes, he's not treated as an artisan.
#
He's treated as a gentleman artist.
#
And that's a very new sort of concept for an Indian painter in the late 19th century.
#
Now, the thing is, the wife doesn't like this.
#
It also means a lot of separation from her.
#
There's a charming story, but not charming really, but a very telling story about how
#
he wants, has disappeared for a long time.
#
Then he finally comes back to his wife's place and as usual, as a matrilineal husband, he
#
has to go to his wife's place to meet her.
#
She's gone for a bath or something or she's gone to the temple or something and he's got
#
this wonderful Italian chandelier to hang up there.
#
He tells all the servants, okay, go ahead and put this up before she comes back from
#
So it's a surprise for her.
#
She takes one look at this well lit, beautiful, expensive chandelier he's got from some God
#
knows which Maharaja or the other, commands her servants to pull it down and throws it
#
out of the window and she smashes it because she doesn't care.
#
She's like, you know, you've not been here for two years.
#
You can just waltz in with a chandelier and think that a present is going to sort this
#
She also, there's a record from her nephew talking about how she got addicted to alcohol.
#
Now, her sisters were already by that time, Maharani's of Travancore.
#
So she's essentially in their shadow on the one hand.
#
She's also got a husband who neglects her and you know, she therefore seems to have
#
a very difficult life and she dies a very untimely death in her mid thirties, you know,
#
she dies a very young woman.
#
Now Ravirma has three daughters and two sons.
#
One daughter really doesn't come into the picture.
#
The oldest son becomes a drunkard, disappears in 1912.
#
Nobody knows what happened to him.
#
There's a story that he disappeared into Goa and he married a Konkani Christian and there
#
are Christian descendants of Ravirma in Goa, but nobody's really heard of them after that.
#
The second son goes to the JJ school of art, learns art, et cetera, but has only a fraction
#
of his father's talent.
#
He doesn't become a famous name and he never manages to leave the Travancore Darbar in Kerala
#
and get stuck in that court environment.
#
Of the two daughters, this is where the politics comes.
#
Now, Manjali's have the word Saundhari Penkum for it.
#
Beauty wars, you know, small little petty disputes in the family.
#
The older daughter is not only good looking, she's extremely imperious and the mother's
#
untimely death means that she becomes the de facto head of the family.
#
The father's anyway traveling, et cetera.
#
So this eldest girl steps up and becomes the main force in the family.
#
That she's beautiful and imperious further adds to her personality.
#
The second daughter is not only not beautiful, she's got a squint, she's dark skinned and
#
she's therefore seen as the not pretty sister in the family.
#
The youngest one's also good looking.
#
So the middle sister's got this inferiority complex, you know, of sorts that not only
#
she's not the main person in the family, her sister's the head of the family, she's not
#
Now, it is these two sisters, their daughters, who get adopted into the Travancore Roy family
#
because the Travancore Roy family has kings and princes, but it's run out of female heirs.
#
Whenever that happens, they adopt girls.
#
In North Indian families, they adopt boys from various families, but in this case, they
#
So if they don't have daughters, they'll adopt girls.
#
And the backstory to this is that earlier, the two girls they adopted were the sisters
#
of Bhagirathi, who was Raja Ravi Varma's wife.
#
And therefore, they have an interest, especially the older one of them, who is Laxmi Bhai,
#
an earlier Laxmi Bhai, not the heroine of her story.
#
And she has an interest in getting her nieces, so to say, adopted into the-
#
Ravi Varma's grandchildren.
#
Basically, there were three sisters in the Mavelikara aristocratic family of royal descent
#
Two were adopted in the mid-19th century into the Travancore family.
#
The one who was not adopted is Ravi Varma's wife.
#
Now, two generations pass.
#
One of these queens has no children.
#
The other queen has only sons, no surviving daughters.
#
So the adoption is proved pointless because you produce boys and boys will rule, but boys
#
will not take the family forward.
#
So you need to adopt girls again.
#
So who do they turn to?
#
The grandchildren of their third sister, who wasn't adopted.
#
Those grandchildren are then brought into the family.
#
But now, the funny thing is this adoption is fraught with complications because in the
#
Travancore royal family itself, the heir apparent, who then dies very soon after, some say he
#
was poisoned to death, but there's no proof.
#
He basically objects to these girls being adopted for several reasons.
#
He says their grandmother, that is Ravi Varma's wife, was addicted to alcohol.
#
So this is not a good family.
#
And her brother, in fact.
#
There's cancer in the family.
#
That's why, you know, that's also not a good thing.
#
He thinks these girls are not suitable to be adopted.
#
You can't say Ravi Varma used his influence on Lord Curzon, the viceroy.
#
But the fact is that then Maharaja was keen on these girls, so they get it done.
#
One interesting thing, which I discovered after I wrote the book, and which really took
#
me aback, and it's funny how not a single biographer, even the most authoritative biography
#
of Ravi Varma by Rupika Chawla does not have this story.
#
And it's not made it to my book because I found it afterwards, is that there's one more
#
scandal in Ravi Varma's family, which was that his father-in-law was a murderer.
#
So Ravi Varma's mother-in-law, there's this magnificent painting he's done of this lady.
#
You know, this lady is, you know, he's famous for painting all these fair-skinned Indian
#
classical beauties, as it were.
#
This lady is not only fair-skinned, she's dark-skinned, she has blood-short eyes, a
#
mane of really like white silver hair, glaring out of the painting.
#
She's got a bulbous nose, not a classical Ravi Varma beauty you would expect.
#
But this one painting, I think, is the most striking portrait he's done because he's depicted
#
his mother-in-law exactly as she was.
#
Some say he's actually softened her appearance because she's a ferocious looking woman in
#
It was in the Travancore royal family, now I think in a private collection in Bangalore.
#
And this lady apparently was having, there's a story that she had a servant called Madhavan
#
and one day Madhavan was found killed.
#
The official story was he'd stolen 12 pieces of jewellery, so her husband caught him and
#
beat him up and murdered him.
#
Now the official who actually investigated it found that the murder was highly sadistic.
#
Someone had tried to gouge out his eyes, a massive jackfruit had been like used to beat
#
him up and then they tried to hang up the body or put it in a pond.
#
It's not clear what exactly happened, but they tried to make it look like suicide.
#
And this particular official said the police is not doing a good job of the investigation.
#
They're trying to cover this up as a suicide.
#
There's a covered up suicide in Mawalikara.
#
And the senior official says, no, this has to be investigated properly.
#
And they discover, and the question in Korea, there's a newspaper that says that Ravi Varma's
#
father-in-law suspected this lady, this ferocious lady in the painting of having an affair with
#
this servant called Madhavan and that is why he killed him in this sadistic fashion.
#
And the man was tried, he was taken to court and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
#
And this is not mentioned in any of Ravi Varma's biographies that his father-in-law was essentially
#
stuck in jail and that his mother-in-law was part of one of the big sex scandals of the
#
So anyway, so there's all sorts of chaos and problems in Ravi Varma's family.
#
Yet in 1900, these two girls are adopted.
#
Which are basically the elder daughter of Ravi Varma you mentioned is Mahaprabha and
#
she's a fair and beautiful one and her daughter is Setu Lakshmibai and the other one, yeah,
#
and the middle daughter, I can't pronounce, Kuchukuni, Kuchukuni.
#
So her daughter is Setu Parvati Bai, who were adopted as senior and junior Rani of Travancore.
#
Senior and junior Rani.
#
Now this brings in, now there was already politics between the sisters, you know, their
#
mothers did not get along, their mothers had their own issues.
#
Now this translates to the children as well, because what happens is Setu Lakshmibai, the
#
older one is the fair skinned, perfect child.
#
She's very good at her exams, she's very diligent, very obedient, her teachers all
#
love her and as senior Rani, she's very proper.
#
She's just like perfect senior Rani, does everything perfectly and she doesn't enjoy
#
So she's a very shy woman.
#
So people find it sweet, you know, she's in a position of influence, but she's also shy.
#
So like this, this evolving idea of ideal of Indian womanhood, which is that women should
#
She seems to fit all these new notions of what a girl should be.
#
And what you also, you know, describe in your book is how shortly after these two are adapted,
#
there are three deaths in the family.
#
Both the sons die and then the senior Lakshmibai dies as well and therefore Setu Lakshmibai
#
at the age of ten, five, at the age of five, six, is a de facto queen of Travancore.
#
So now this causes issues for her cousin because her cousin is the junior Rani.
#
Now implicit in that title itself is junior, junior, she's just a year younger.
#
Yeah, she's just a year younger.
#
And frankly, she has more of a personality to be queen.
#
She's rebellious, unorthodox, you know, she's the first person in the Travancore royal family
#
to take her daughter and go abroad for the first time, cross the Kala Pani on her own.
#
She goes to meet the Pope and the Pope's secretary says, oh, you know, with the Pope, you can't
#
really wear makeup, et cetera.
#
You have to be dressed a certain way and she tells him to essentially buzz off and say
#
that she'll dress exactly as she wants in front of the Pope.
#
In the 1930s, Trivandrum is an orthodox temple town and this lady has the gall really to
#
bring Margaret Sanger, the great birth control activist who even cheesed off Gandhiji to
#
come to this temple town and address a gathering full of men and about the advantages of birth
#
She's a very spunky, interesting lady.
#
Her politics is extremely complicated, but as a person, remarkable figure.
#
So you have a senior Rani who officially holds the limelight, who doesn't really, who's very
#
shy and retiring and is very sweet, but does not have this kind of rebellious personality.
#
You have the junior who hates being in the shadow, who hates being in the, not in the
#
limelight, who wants the limelight and who has the personality for it, but she's stuck
#
And although they're only five years old at the time, six and just under and just about
#
five, one year's age difference, although they're children, they're seen by the people
#
They're not little girls, they're senior Rani and junior Rani.
#
So from the beginning, there is protocol around them.
#
From the beginning, you know, they have to visit and meet state visitors and governors
#
and viceroys and people.
#
There is no, they have no friends.
#
There is no notion of childhood.
#
They're not even allowed to see their families except, you know, every six months their families
#
can come and stay, but otherwise they can't really have any access.
#
Even their fathers have to, you know, their fathers have to bow to them.
#
You know, they can't, you know, you can't call your daughter by name.
#
She is now her highness to you.
#
You can't really touch her head and pretend she's your daughter.
#
I mean, private, perhaps you can, but basically a lot of protocol comes into their life.
#
Now they grew up, they get their tutors and governors and they're raised in a certain
#
Now marriage comes into this.
#
Now already one is evolving into this good looking pretty one.
#
The other one is not, you know, like her mother, she's darker.
#
So during the adoption, a senior court here even said she's too black to be a princess.
#
There's an actual record of this, that this girl should not be adopted because she's too
#
dark and she doesn't look royal enough.
#
So you can imagine she's obviously affected by this constant comparison with her seemingly
#
How does marriage happen?
#
Boys are presented to these girls.
#
So the senior Rani is presented two brothers and she's made to look from a balcony and
#
choose whichever one she likes of the two brothers.
#
One would think that in courts horoscopes, et cetera, matter, no, that Rani chooses who
#
It's the job of the astrologer to make the horoscope match.
#
Otherwise he loses his job.
#
So she looks at these two boys.
#
The older one is this 20 year old, very handsome man.
#
She says she's a 10 year old girl.
#
She's like, no, no, no, this one is too much for me.
#
She chooses this diminutive looking 16 year old, you know, slightly sulky looking, less
#
It surprises everyone because basically the older boy as you describe him and he's even
#
depicted in a Raja Ravi Verma painting, which I then Google just to see what it's like is
#
basically a bare chested Virat Kohli.
#
In fact, there's one painting that's not in the book of him.
#
He's sort of, you know, held his hands like this, folded against his chest and he's again
#
shirtless and he's got his hair let loose a little bit and he's wearing a typical sort
#
of Munda around his waist and he's shirtless and he's looking out like that at the viewer
#
It's painted by Ravi Verma and he's strikingly good looking.
#
That's a wonderful painting.
#
Like he's, it's odd that in the early 20th century, this man clearly worked out a lot
#
because he's got the muscles and all of that, because this is a time when, you know, status
#
was in the size of your potbelly.
#
He's like, I'm like, this is your local Bollywood wannabe in the Lokhandwala Jiva.
#
So there's the painting you refer to is the Ravi Verma painting called Shri Rama vanquishes
#
the sea in which this one models as Rama for Ravi Verma.
#
His brother later gets smallpox and his face is completely left with pock marks and he's
#
not a very handsome man, but he's a very shrewd man.
#
And the brother's name is Rama Verma.
#
He's called the Valiya Koelta, the senior consort, because he's married to the senior
#
Now junior Rani the next year has offered husband choices for herself.
#
She's offered five men.
#
She decides to go and marry a good looking man who's also unfortunately the oldest.
#
He's about 11 years older than her, but she says, look, he's already got a BA degree.
#
He's a graduate from a university and all that.
#
So he must be a good pick.
#
And she marries him, which is a chap called Ravi Verma, which is also called Ravi Verma.
#
He's the Koelta on the junior consort.
#
Now the thing is the marriages turn out very interestingly for both women.
#
The senior Rani is married to this man and she is devoted to her husband.
#
He has the personality to go out.
#
He picks up now that he's picked up from a rural part of Kerala and planted in the palace.
#
He starts learning English and he starts reading a lot.
#
He acquires skills at shooting and sports and things that he enjoys this royal life.
#
And she's devoted to him.
#
And she finds that he's really good at the limelight and all of that.
#
So she starts increasingly supporting her husband.
#
Junior Rani's husband, and see they're not, although they get married at 10, the marriage
#
is only consummated at 14, not immediately their children.
#
So in the beginning they're allowed to play hopscotch with each other and play board games
#
and things like that for one hour every day, nothing more than that.
#
There's no contact beyond that.
#
Junior Rani's husband unfortunately is not, he's already a grown man when they marry.
#
So by the time she's 14 and ready to consummate the marriage, he's in his mid twenties.
#
He's got a graduate degree, but he's extremely orthodox.
#
So just as she's unorthodox and rebellious and she'll even play golf when she's pregnant
#
and go out riding and learn to drive and things like that, this man won't shake hands with
#
women thinking it's, you know, I'm impure.
#
At banquets he'll sit there clutching a lemon because eating meat and eating in the presence
#
of white people will make him lose his cast.
#
I actually highlighted that line in the book because it's such a fantastic detail that
#
at banquets he's sitting holding a lemon.
#
Lemon, because lemons absorb impurities from...
#
Oh, actually that's the reason you're holding a lemon.
#
It's the same principle, you hang a lemon outside your door because it absorbs all the
#
So naturally the Junior Rani's guests were not pleased when she was there and she's hosting
#
a party and her husband sits there pretending they're all unwelcome, impure guests.
#
And she was shrewd, a very, very clever woman.
#
For example, she was a vegetarian.
#
So there are these wonderful stories about how, you know, at garden parties there are
#
fish fry going around with toothpicks, et cetera, for people to eat them.
#
Now she couldn't offend her guests, but she was a vegetarian, so she couldn't eat the
#
So she would have tapioca or cassava cut in the exact shape and fried in the exact same
#
fashion and that would come to her on a tray.
#
So she could eat something that looked like fish, but it was actually vegetarian while
#
her guests ate the actual fish, while her husband sat there clutching a lemon.
#
So it's as complicated as that.
#
So Junior Rani's marriage is not very happy.
#
Now the coming of the husbands add new complications to this because in the matrilineal system
#
the sisters are supposed to be tight.
#
Now to begin with, their mothers have a politics, so the sisters, these adopted Rani's don't
#
Senior and Junior Rani don't get along.
#
The husbands come in, which means a new element comes in, succession, who produces the next
#
They've been adopted to produce the next Maharaja, you know.
#
And the thing to note is because all these people died, you know, you've basically got
#
a king who's passing 50, all his predecessor kings have died before 50.
#
So he is like, I need an heir now.
#
The kids have to produce heirs right away and the first son born out of either of these
#
two girls is the next ruler.
#
So now there is competition among them and you know, Setu Lakshmibai has a head start
#
She gets married at 10.
#
The other kid gets married around the same time and then they turn 14 and they...
#
Marriages are consummated.
#
So Setu Lakshmibai incidentally does get pregnant, but in the eighth month the baby I think dies
#
in the womb or something and essentially it's a stillbirth.
#
It is alleged that there is black magic involved.
#
There are stories there, but no evidence of that.
#
Royal courts are full of rumours and factions and things like that.
#
And once succession comes in, again the mothers get involved.
#
Because see the junior Rani's mother has always been in the shadow of her sister and her daughter
#
the junior Rani is also junior.
#
So now what happens is in 1912, at the age of 16, the junior Rani produces a male heir.
#
Suddenly this becomes in many ways her passport to prominence.
#
From being in the shadow of her sister, the senior Rani, she is now mother to the heir
#
The heir apparent is entitled to his own palace, to his own servants, to his own income etc.
#
Even though the boys are just a baby, she says as his mother, I should be able to manage
#
And the Maharaja says that makes sense.
#
He is, even though he is an infant, he is automatically heir apparent to the throne.
#
So everything an heir apparent is entitled to, the junior Rani gets.
#
So she moves out of the senior Rani's shadow.
#
The senior Rani meanwhile feels that you know, she has now suddenly lost all her prominence
#
because not only did she have this stillbirth after that, she had several miscarriages and
#
then for the next nearly a decade she doesn't have children, she is struggling to have children.
#
And eventually she has girls.
#
Whereas her sister produces the Maharaja, next Maharaja, she produces a girl to continue
#
the matrilineal line and she produces a spare to the throne in the form of a second son.
#
So she has performed her duty to the dynasty within a space of one decade.
#
She has gone ahead and produced three children.
#
Senior Rani has no children.
#
She only has two daughters much later after all the junior Rani's children are born.
#
So this to begin with, things are getting a little lopsided in terms of who is the main
#
Then we come to the year 1920.
#
And what was also interesting are the details in your book about how after this first son
#
is born, she is so paranoid that he is going to be sabotaged and he is going to be killed
#
as allegedly earlier kings might have been, that she doesn't allow anyone to meet the
#
Have free access to the boy.
#
Including the senior Rani Lakshmibai's husband, the renowned scholar Kerala Varma, who is
#
like a father figure to both these young girls.
#
Who is called the father of modern Madhyalam prose literature and all that.
#
And I want to come back to Sanskrit and Malayalam in a bit, but he is basically like a father
#
figure to both these young girls and suddenly one of them gets a son and he is not allowed
#
to be alone with the kid and ditto, of course, the aunt is like nowhere near the kid.
#
The aunt is not allowed because there are no rules.
#
It's just that it's very clear that you are not welcome around this child because people
#
Frankly, he is not a boy.
#
Again, that kid from day one is a future Maharaja.
#
He is seen therefore as that icon.
#
He is not seen therefore as a little boy.
#
He is not a normal baby.
#
And he also, he is also the relief for the baggage that these two women, junior Rani
#
and her mother have carried for years and years and years.
#
This is the deliverance.
#
A politics that starts with Ravi Varma's bad marriage.
#
So husband and wife don't get along.
#
Their daughters that produces politics between their daughters in terms of the beautiful
#
daughter who Ravi Varma paints and uses as a model and who's given, who's a de facto
#
head of the family and the not so beautiful daughter who's always in the shadows.
#
Who the mother liked apparently.
#
Then you have royal children who are now adopted into a royal family where power gets involved.
#
So in addition to family dispute and the usual family quarrels that all families have, power
#
I mean, the, the, the standard of the scale of the problem starts increasing, magnifying.
#
Now what happens is that Setu Lakshmi Baba becomes cornered at court, partly also because
#
she's extremely devoted to her husband and her uncle, the Maharaja, the old man, Moolam
#
Tirunar does not like it.
#
And he says, you know, this boy is just your consort, you should keep him in his place.
#
And the consort, her husband is also getting big airs about who he is in the sense that,
#
you know, junior Rani is the junior Rani.
#
She's junior to the senior Rani.
#
But for the husband, she's still a queen.
#
So he has to bow to the junior Rani also because she is still royalty and he's not.
#
He feels that as husband to the senior Rani, why should he bow to the junior Rani?
#
Whereas junior Rani says, whether or not I'm junior in my family is not your business.
#
As far as you're concerned, I am also a Rani.
#
So you have to bow to me.
#
So the feud begins between these two people and the senior Rani supports her husband saying,
#
you know, how dare you speak to my husband like this.
#
She's being cornered because she can't produce children.
#
All she has for support is her husband.
#
So she becomes increasingly close to her husband and junior Rani says, this is not your loyalty
#
should be to the matrilineal family, not to your husband.
#
This is also linked to that larger Victorian conversation that wives should be devoted
#
to their husbands, matrilineal system is bad, patriarchal families are better.
#
So this whole conversation is also part of that larger change in society.
#
What is also interesting is the Maharaja at that time is this man called Mulam Thirnar,
#
the uncle of these adopted Rani's.
#
He is entirely a puppet in the hands of some courtiers.
#
That is another fascinating story that tells you a lot about marriage and matrilineal in
#
So the Maharaja is married first to a lady.
#
She dies, leaving him a son.
#
He doesn't marry again for about 16, 17 years.
#
At some point, he falls in love with a lady called Karthiayini.
#
Now Karthiayini is the wife of a palace servant and she belongs to a family who traditionally
#
supplied women who husked the rice, et cetera, in the Padmanabhaswami temple.
#
So middle class Naya family, not aristocracy, not of especially high birth or anything.
#
And she is married to a palace servant called Shangubalai.
#
Now what happens is Maharaja falls in love with this married woman.
#
Shangubalai agrees to give up his wife.
#
So he divorces Karthiayini.
#
Maharaja decides to marry Karthiayini.
#
Maharajas can only marry from specific families called Amavidus in Trivandrum, which are the
#
families from which they take their brides usually.
#
He adopts Karthiayini into one of these Amavidus, raises her status in society.
#
She suddenly becomes an aristocratic woman through adoption and the Maharaja marries her.
#
In return, so now Maharaja is married to an already married woman.
#
In return for giving her up, the ex-husband is also given the title of Tambi and raised
#
into a very senior position in court.
#
And he becomes the real controller of the Maharaja.
#
Increasingly the Maharaja's access to the Maharaja, you know, a lot of decisions he
#
takes are actually channeled through this man called Shangubalai becomes Shankaran Tambi.
#
Through his second wife's first husband.
#
So once in court, there was a journalist who was asked in court who is Shankaran Tambi.
#
And he says the former husband of the Maharaja's present wife, because that was the fact of
#
I mean, it was the former husband of the Maharaja's present wife.
#
So this coterie around the Maharaja, Setu Laxmiva does not like, because she does not
#
like the corruption they're involved in.
#
She does not like the culture that's there.
#
When she's a child, she can't object.
#
But as soon as she turns 18, she and her husband start standing apart from her.
#
And there's even a rumor, like you pointed out, that this former husband of the present
#
wife was behind the three deaths that happened.
#
There was a rumor that he got those princes killed because they were in his way.
#
They didn't approve of him.
#
So he's essentially a shady character.
#
So Senior Rani is cornered, Junior Rani becomes the main person, the mother of the new heir,
#
Then in 1924, the Maharaja, the reigning Maharaja dies in his 60s.
#
This creates an awkward situation because Junior Rani's son is only 12 years old.
#
So he's not old enough to rule.
#
In North Indian patriarchal kingdoms, usually the British would appoint the widow of the
#
dead Maharaja as a regent and they would appoint a pro-British regency council.
#
And this is how the state would be governed till the boy grew up.
#
And in the interim, the boy would be trained by Englishmen to be loyal to the British Empire
#
Complete brainwashing would happen.
#
In Ravanko, however, because it was matrilineal, the law was very clear.
#
If there is no male or if the existing male member is not in a capacity to rule, either
#
for minority or for being mentally incapable or whatever, it is the power to rule goes
#
to the eldest female member.
#
What does that translate into?
#
Till the Junior Rani's son comes of age, power vests with the Senior Rani.
#
So for Junior Rani's son, what she suddenly discovers is her sister is going to rule,
#
So first she says there should be a council and she should be a member.
#
There have been regents in the past in Ravanko.
#
In fact, the word regent is a British invention.
#
In the matrilineal system, when a woman rules, she rules as Maharaja.
#
So in Malayalam documents, Setu Lakshmi Bhai is called Pooraadam Tirunal Maharaja, not
#
Colloquially, she's Maharani, but she's also a Maharaja when she rules.
#
And that means she has full powers.
#
There's no regency council put by the British.
#
She rules directly with the minister like all other rulers before her.
#
This now makes that power conflict between the sisters more direct because suddenly Senior
#
Rani is in power for the junior son.
#
So the next seven years, senior is in control and the junior is waiting.
#
She's dying to sort of get her son in power and she eventually manages to persuade Lord
#
Willingdon, who's the Viceroy, to reduce the regency by six months and get her son installed.
#
After which, you know, the feud between the sisters really does escalate in many ways.
#
And what is interesting here is that you would imagine that, okay, this young, shy girl who
#
is, you know, not very outgoing, you don't really know what she thinks.
#
She is now the Maharaja, as it were, and she will just let, you know, her officers and
#
whatever do their thing or her husband do their thing and take a back seat.
#
But no, this lady turns out to be extremely formidable and a significant early sign of
#
this being the YCOM rebel, you know, rebellion.
#
In fact, when she comes to power, the then British resident in a confidential document
#
to the Viceroy describes her as the pious, orthodox, domestic type, by which basically
#
he means she's housewife.
#
She's not really going to rule.
#
Her husband is probably going to control her and that's how the government will be conducted
#
until the Maharaja comes of age.
#
What they discover is no, she's actually got a mind of her own.
#
She is gentle, she is shy, she doesn't like the limelight, but she's also exceedingly
#
I mean, part of it is not surprising.
#
The fact is she's been cornered for the last decade in court.
#
So she has something to prove.
#
She knows that she's not going to hold power forever.
#
She's only going to hold it for a period of about seven to eight years and in that time
#
she somehow has to prove herself.
#
She has to do her best and she and her husband have this joint pact that they're going to
#
work as hard as possible and try and get, you know, carve out their place in history
#
because they know otherwise once the junior Rani's son comes to power, they're going
#
to be shunted back into the corner.
#
They're not really going to enjoy any influence after that.
#
So those seven years become very important for them and there is at that time this Vaikam
#
Satyagraha going on which is to open up all roads around the temple in Vaikam to Dalits
#
as well because till then Dalits were not allowed on the spot and there's a major agitation
#
going on in the middle.
#
There are floods in Kerala like the recent floods we had in 2019 and 2018, chaos happening
#
and this woman's come to rule, a woman everybody thinks is a housewife has now suddenly been
#
placed in a position of ruling.
#
She however breaks a lot of these notions about her.
#
She invites delegates to come and meet her, representatives of both sides.
#
She listens to her officials, she listens to these people and she comes up with a compromise
#
She meets with Gandhiji.
#
Gandhiji comes to talk to her and he's stunned because he comes to meet her not in the palace
#
because she moves around a lot.
#
She prefers staying in these little travelers bungalows in different parts of the state.
#
So when Gandhiji comes, she's staying in a guest house at Varkala beach and he's stunned
#
because he walks in and the story in the family goes that he thought that she was her lady
#
in waiting or something because he walks into a room and all he sees is this woman dressed
#
in plain white, no ornaments like just a single chain around her neck and standing in the
#
room with her husband and Gandhiji thought that a princess or a queen or a Maharani would
#
be in silks and wearing pearls and diamonds and things like that and he wrote in his journal
#
in his magazine called Young India that he walked in expecting something like that but
#
what he saw was this highly simple woman who should be a lesson to other Indian princes,
#
not only in simplicity but also in how she behaves and her sort of perspective and her
#
views and so on and she hammers out a deal with Gandhiji saying that she's not going
#
to bulldoze anything through.
#
She says reform you have to persuade people, win them over and through consensus is the
#
way she's going to work.
#
So she says fine they want access to the roads, she'll give them access to three roads around
#
There are four roads right, all four sides of the temple, take access to the three roads.
#
The fourth road which is considered the main entrance and the Brahmins are all objecting
#
saying lower caste people should not be allowed.
#
She said for the time being let that be in the hands of the Brahmins and she constructs
#
a parallel road and she says this is open to everybody irrespective of caste and slowly
#
over the next four or five years practically on a case by case basis based on issues in
#
different temples she starts opening up public roads to all castes till by 1929 basically
#
all roads are thrown open to people of all castes and this is what sets the stage for
#
something her successor does which is to throw open temples itself in the mid 1930s.
#
She sort of builds up that process and allows that to happen.
#
She appoints as one of the first things she does when she is put in power, when she inherits
#
power from her uncle is to place a woman at the head of the medical department.
#
That was essentially like the health minister at the time.
#
She gets a woman in that position.
#
She starts nominating women to the Legislative Council of Travancore, a second representative
#
house there also she nominates women.
#
The first feature film that comes out of Kerala has a Dalit woman playing an upper caste lady
#
and her life is threatened.
#
All these men say how dare a Dalit woman play upper caste roles.
#
This woman gives, the Marani gives her protection and actually ensures that she's kept safe.
#
As midwives, she opens up very simple stuff, but stuff that has major repercussions for
#
So, births, midwife classes are introduced, batches of midwives are trained and by the
#
end of her reign, one fifth of all the births in Travancore are handled in a professional
#
manner even in villages because these midwives are sent out even to rural areas.
#
And this is something which would never strike a male Maharaja and they never even get this
#
It's not really a thing for them.
#
But it's not like she focused only on health in women.
#
She also focused on public works.
#
Some of the biggest roads and highways and bridges that are still being used in Kerala
#
She allocated one fifth of her revenues to public works and one fifth of her revenues
#
to education, which meant there was a huge boost in school building and running schools,
#
including private schools.
#
She starts in a major way giving a lot of grants to even private schools so that they
#
Textbook development, etc.
#
Schools that don't have enough material, she'll send them from the capital.
#
Public works, you know, Cochin harbour, Cochin became again a port of significance because
#
she tied up with the Cochin Maharaja.
#
Cochin is not technically in her control, but she invested in it because she knew her
#
state would also benefit.
#
In fact, you've described that at length and that kind of struck me because it shows
#
an instinctive understanding, not just of the positive externalities of public goods
#
like a port like that, she's actually spending money of her own kingdom on what belongs to
#
Because like you said, Cochin is separate and British have control over the actual port.
#
And you know, to not be stuck in a zero sum mentality, to be able to understand that this
#
will benefit us also seems remarkably forward.
#
Another thing that struck me going back to her meeting with Gandhi was two things struck
#
Like when he goes to negotiate with her, one as you describe is that as he's leaving,
#
she says, I hope before you leave Kerala, you'll meet the other Mahatma.
#
And this other Mahatma she's referring to is Narayana Guru, who was actually from a
#
So it is almost astonishing that a Maharaja of a higher caste is, you know, referring
#
She never met him personally, she never met him, she knew his significance.
#
The thing is, what is interesting about her is it's very difficult to place her in an
#
exact box because she's not a feminist in the sense like like the junior Rani, she didn't
#
get a birth control activist to Trivandrum, but she's a feminist in the sense as J. Devika,
#
the feminist scholar in Trivandrum was telling me when I interviewed her for the book, she
#
created spaces for women.
#
She didn't promote individual women, she created spaces by putting aside seats for women in
#
the legislative council, by allowing women to go and study law, by giving scholarships
#
for women to go to medical school.
#
You know, these programs that she started, she started this very innovative scheme where
#
any girl in Travancore who went to college was invited automatically to tea at the palace
#
Just as a sort of incentive saying that, you know, you can get access.
#
She was the chief celebrity of her time.
#
So this was a way of, you know, inspiring girls to actually go out and study.
#
She was Kim Kardashian in the palace.
#
Well, I wouldn't give you that analogy, but yeah.
#
So she was, you know, she had innovative ways of promoting what she wanted.
#
So it was public works, but on a social level, look, the 1920s were a time of economic boom
#
till the great depression happens in 29, there's a huge boom around the world.
#
She realizes that who are the engines of the economy in terms of trade and enterprise,
#
the Nayas and the Brahmins, the upper castes are landed communities.
#
Land is sinking, agriculture is not the future, trade and business and factories and these
#
are the things that are the future.
#
The communities who that are doing this are who?
#
Syrian Christians who are in a privileged community and the Idawas.
#
Now the Idawas were a low caste community that cultivated palm trees and toddy tappers
#
But they also worked in Koya.
#
Now earlier they would produce Koya for local markets, their feudal lords, etc.
#
The colonial economy connected Travancore to the colonial ecosystem.
#
So suddenly the Koya mats and carpets and ropes were in high demand in England and in
#
Europe and different parts of the world, in America.
#
Suddenly the Idawas community started getting, instead of being paid in kind for their services,
#
they started earning cash.
#
With cash, they started buying land, their enterprises grew, the whole community started
#
rising and a guru like Shri Narayana Guru gave it moral force, gave as a reformer and
#
as a man who stood up for their rights and said that you don't need the approval of the
#
He gave it moral force.
#
So by the 1920s they became exceedingly powerful even though they were technically a lower
#
Sethu Lakshmi, I recognize that.
#
She realized that the Syrian Christians and the Idawas are the engines of growth.
#
She decided to promote these communities a great deal, much to the resentment of the
#
old feudal communities.
#
I mean think of places in India, there are places in Uttar Pradesh even now still caught
#
up in this feudal mentality.
#
So think of the 1920s in a highly caste-based society like Kerala, a woman coming in and
#
promoting a lower caste and a Christian group, she appoints a Christian as her chief secretary,
#
she appoints a Christian as her chief minister.
#
It was I think the second time in Dravenco's history that a Christian was made chief minister.
#
The first time was when the state didn't have much of a choice and the British resident
#
himself became the minister, but this was the first time she actually appoints a Christian
#
So she had guts to do a lot of things of that nature, but she personally remained extremely
#
There are amusing things like this, for example, when she came to power, both the British resident
#
and the man she chose as her chief minister, a man called Mr. Watts, both of these men
#
are in their fifties and they are both bachelors.
#
Sethu Rakshabh has no, no, no, I can't receive bachelors in the palace, I can't be seen sitting
#
and having conversations with unmarried men because she's orthodox, like what do people
#
So these poor men and middle-aged men are forced to go and marry women who are 20-30
#
years younger than them simply because the Maharani insisted they have to get married
#
and at the residence wedding, she even sends a nice present saying that, you know, congratulations
#
And the marriages are disasters because both are married highly younger, far younger women
#
than they should have and, you know, the marriages are disasters for them, but they had no option
#
but to get married because the Maharani of Trivancore would not receive them in her drawing
#
Every time she received them, she would make sure her husband was present.
#
Her enemies used this to say that she was not controlled by the husband and he's there
#
like this sort of conspiring weird influence behind her throne.
#
But the fact was that, you know, she said nobody should gossip about me having any contact
#
with unmarried men or any men face to face in a closed room.
#
So my husband will always be there and when a husband went hunting or shooting or whatever,
#
she wouldn't meet the Diwan.
#
It would be difficult for them to get meetings with her because she would not meet face to
#
She would correspond and write letters and do it through notes and files but not in person.
#
So personally, very conservative, but in terms of her policies, creating lots of spaces for
#
In fact, what struck me about her governance was that the way I would sum it up and tell
#
me if you agree is that she was liberal but not radical and an illustration of that being
#
again going back to her meeting with Gandhi when she meets him and she gives him the permission
#
to make a statement about her feelings and the statement he makes basically says that,
#
you know, that she isn't against, you know, this caste entry into temples and all of that,
#
but she is stuck in an entrance system where she cannot force it through herself.
#
But if public opinion, it's changed, then she can make it happen.
#
So she is not like a radical.
#
She's not trying to force change through.
#
She knows that things will take time.
#
She's all about consensus and compromise.
#
She's all about, you know, working slowly rather than leaping with great radical enthusiasm
#
because she somehow has a distrust of it.
#
She's always very cautious about what she does, but the result is that these seven years
#
that she's in power become a huge boom in Travancore because revenues rise, a port is
#
being built, the railways come to Trivandrum, electricity comes to Trivandrum, telephone
#
services are expanded and open to the public, things that are only available in the palace
#
are now open to everybody, girls are going to medical school and there are major incentives
#
A film industry becomes a reality in Travancore slowly with that first film that she supports.
#
You know, so all kinds of developments are happening.
#
Of course, in the palace, things are also going bad in the sense that her sister is
#
completely chafing under this regime of the senior Rani.
#
The junior Rani hates the fact that she has to live for so many years under her sister's
#
So there's feuds over how much money should be given to her.
#
So senior Rani says, your palace expenses, you decide how you want to spend it, those
#
But junior Rani also wants more money, like she says anything connected with the future
#
Maharaja she should be allowed to control.
#
But senior says, no, as the head of the matrilineal family, I am the eldest member, I will control
#
That is my privilege and prerogative.
#
And it is true, but senior Rani takes it very personally.
#
At one point, there's a black magic incident, you know, where they're trying to…
#
Tell me, that was fascinating.
#
Tell me a bit more about that.
#
I mean, you have a whole chapter on that.
#
Yes, you know, it's interesting, because you always think the British sort of had the
#
documents are all boring and stayed, etc.
#
But if you read these fortnightly reports that the British residents sent the viceroy,
#
not just from Travancore, but from any court, it is essentially a gossip sheet.
#
Are these available online?
#
They're in the archives, some in Delhi, but a lot in the British archives, because the
#
Indian copies were largely destroyed at the time of independence, so that Nehru could
#
not blackmail the princes.
#
So the ones, however, whatever they took, they took and put it in London away from the
#
reach of the Indian government.
#
So these are gossip sheets, because knowledge is power, intelligence is power.
#
You know what the weaknesses of a Raja are, who he's sleeping with, you know, whether
#
he's homosexual, things like that.
#
You discover little secrets like that about a man or about a ruling family, it's far
#
easier to control them.
#
You know exactly where to hit them, where it hurts.
#
So what's fascinating is in this black magic episode, the British resident had his spies
#
informing him exactly about how many rats were being sacrificed, where the priests came
#
from, how much money they had been promised, nothing escaped his eye, like he knew exactly
#
what was happening in the palace.
#
And this sets in, you know, starts turning other wheels, where the British start thinking,
#
oh my God, you can't have the Maharaja exposed to a condition like this, we must separate
#
And what the junior Rani was doing to Samapa, was alleged to be doing to Samapa was carrying
#
out rituals, which would even involve human sacrifice, where the idea was that the senior
#
Rani dies and her own kid, the next Maharaja is mentally incapacitated, so she basically
#
I mean, the record seems to suggest her mother, which is Ravi Varma's younger daughter, she's
#
the one who was the force behind this.
#
Junior Rani by herself, I don't think was much of a believer in black magic, but the
#
British often refer to the fact that the junior Rani's relations are a thoroughly bad lot,
#
Her brothers and her mother.
#
They say that whenever they come to the palace, it's chaos because they start putting all
#
these plots, they start working all these plots, which is why finally after this black
#
magic and all that, the mother and the brothers asked to leave, they're told to go back to
#
Maweli Karab, which is where they come from, and not come back to the palace, they're not
#
allowed to see the Maharaja without permission from the British really, and it's only after
#
the boy grows up and becomes king that they are finally allowed to come back.
#
So junior Rani spends a lot of her time traveling, she stays outside the state in Ooty and Calcutta
#
and places like that, and she's enthusiastic about going out.
#
Now here, there is a little bit of Sethul Akshmi Vais' fault in the sense that the world is
#
Sethul Akshmi Vais is still holding to that old royal protocol, because she thinks that
#
is her duty to preserve the existing system, build and change through consensus and compromise,
#
And that notion of royalty as being semi-divine must be above all criticism, you should always
#
So if you're going out for parties, if you're going out and meeting people in Calcutta,
#
et cetera, if you're traveling and that's costing the state a lot of money, these are
#
things that can be avoided.
#
In Sethul Akshmi Vais' view, you should not do any of that.
#
Why do you need to do that?
#
Stay in the palace and live your life.
#
Why do you want to travel and all that?
#
The junior Rani's take anxious to even cross the seas and go abroad.
#
So there's even in terms of their personalities, the two women don't match.
#
One in the junior Rani sees the changing world.
#
She wants to be part of this changing universe, this pan-Indian network of glamorous Rajas,
#
Rani's and people like that.
#
She wants to be part of that.
#
Senior Rani does not understand it.
#
Finally in 1931, November 1931, the regency comes to an end.
#
The junior Rani's son comes to the throne, which essentially means that man doesn't have
#
All the records suggest that he's a very gentle, wonderful human being, but as a king somewhat
#
devoid of power that he needed to wield because all that was controlled by his mother and
#
by his minister, the famous Sir C.P.
#
Ramaswami Iyer, who would be the last powerful divan of Trivandrum.
#
And from this time you start seeing Sethul Akshmi Vais starts receiving a lot of harassment
#
and it's all kinds of petty things.
#
It's almost payback for the seven years that she was in power.
#
Now her sister is basically giving her payback.
#
But it struck me that she is also sort of tied into a lot of these superficial symbolic
#
For example, she wants a 21 gun salute to continue after she's whatever and all of these
#
So I can understand that, okay, she's going to negotiate over whatever her royal salary
#
is and royal pension is or whatever, but there are also these other petty things.
#
For example, she's told that she must come and call on the Maharaj every two weeks and
#
she's like, I'm older than him.
#
Why should I go and call on him?
#
My mission is that he should come and call on me.
#
So then that proposal is gone.
#
Then they say, oh, your daughters must come and see him.
#
But when the daughters are sent, they're told to meet the Maharaja alone.
#
And she says, no, my daughters are girls, they're children.
#
The Maharaja, the junior Rani's son is a practical stranger to them.
#
They don't know him very well.
#
Till they grow up, once they grow up, they can see him alone.
#
But till they grow up, I will not allow my daughters to see the Maharaja by themselves.
#
Their father must be present.
#
Now the junior Rani hates the senior's husband.
#
So why would she want him in the room?
#
So they say, no, as head of the family, he may not be able to persuade you to come and
#
see him, but he definitely has control over the children.
#
He's their official guardian.
#
She has to live with that.
#
Then they say, all your jewelry must be sent to us for inspection every six months.
#
And Sethul Akshaybhai sees through the insult.
#
She's like, this is a way to get my jewelry back.
#
It has nothing to do with inspection.
#
Like every six months, you have to keep sending your personal jewelry for inspection.
#
She's like, just take the jewelry.
#
I'll make my private jewelry with my private money, with my income, my pension, and so
#
At one point, she wants to travel.
#
They won't let her travel.
#
There's even petty things.
#
For example, as Maharani of the state, she's entitled to guards and certain protection.
#
Now, she does not like living in Trivandrum once her sister's son comes to power, because
#
She doesn't want to stay there.
#
She builds a private house for herself outside Trivandrum in a village and she wants to retire
#
and live in the village.
#
But they say, oh, but your protection must come with you because you're the queen.
#
So instead of guards being posted there for a certain number of days, every day the guards
#
have to be changed, which means every day the guards have to go to the village, come
#
If you've got to pay for this, the senior Rani has to supply the money for this.
#
So she's like, you're trying to bleed me.
#
Then don't give me guards because I can't afford to have guards moving up and down when
#
they can stay there for 15 days at a stretch.
#
You know, let them stay there.
#
Why do you want to keep moving them up and down?
#
At one point, they take over her ancestral estate, the senior Rani.
#
She controls the 15,000 acre estate.
#
And it is through that that her servants are paid, her establishment is paid.
#
She doesn't have a separate income.
#
That is what supplies her, her chief source of personal income.
#
And the British basically shut their eyes and allow the Maharaja to do it because the British
#
are coming from a patriarchal thing.
#
They're like, yeah, Maharani must listen to the Maharaja.
#
She can't independently work.
#
They don't understand that in the matrilineal system, family matters are decided by the
#
The head of the family is the oldest member of the family, which whether it's male or
#
female, you have to listen to that person.
#
Technically, she will supervise the head of the family, but she has no voice there.
#
She, you know, when she rules, when she finishes her reign in 1931, she's ruled exceedingly
#
Nationalists like Gandhiji love her.
#
The people respect her and you find this even in records to the 19, late 1940s.
#
She's been out of power for 18 years, not seen by anybody but for 18 years.
#
But even VP Menon and his people who come to negotiate the integration with the Indian
#
Union say that the, that Setu Lakshmi Bhai is far more popular than the junior Raniya
#
son who've been ruling for the last 17 years because her memory is still extremely fond
#
as far as the people are concerned.
#
So she has to really negotiate with the Maharaja and finally get the British involved to get
#
a decent pension, which is 75,000 rupees a year.
#
Now you look at what North Indian Rajas of much smaller, poorer states were spending,
#
75,000 was a very modest amount.
#
So Maharaja with great resistance finally satisfies and gives her a 75,000 rupee pension.
#
She wanted more, but she gets 75,000 rupees.
#
His 18 year old brother or 19 year old brother casually gives him a 1 lakh rupee allowance.
#
So you rule for seven years, work hard and actually rule the state, you get only 75,000.
#
My younger brother who's just turned 19, a teenager, he gets 1 lakh a year.
#
So all of this makes her realize that she is essentially becoming a second class citizen.
#
This kind of pettiness you see even now in government, it's the kind of things the current
#
ruling dispensation, for example, does against a certain family, for example, or petty things
#
like denying leader of opposition post on certain technicalities, reducing somebody's
#
security, et cetera, which is not a bad thing, frankly, you still have security, but it's
#
all about making them feel like you are no longer what you used to be.
#
And that happened a lot here as well.
#
She was increasingly marginalized and cornered.
#
And finally, in the 1940s, she had an estate that she purchased privately in the hills.
#
So she and her family could have summer vacations there, taken over by the state.
#
It had to wait until after independence that she got it back.
#
The government of India gave it back to her, not the government of Travancore.
#
For 10 years, it was in the hands of the Maharaja because he said, no, I'm going to take over
#
Her private residence, she was told by the 1940s, you can't stay in your private houses.
#
You must live in Travancore.
#
And because her estate has been taken over, it means her servants are controlled by the
#
Her house is controlled by the junior Rani's son.
#
And perhaps the greatest tragedy of her life, that palace was built by her.
#
She raised her children there.
#
When the partition of family properties took place in the 1970s, the Maharaja claimed that
#
palace and even though she went to the Supreme Court, she didn't get it.
#
So the palace she built in which she lived, in which she ruled, in which her children
#
were raised, that also went to her sister's son.
#
So it was no wonder that as soon as independence came, the Maharani had two daughters.
#
The older daughter said, I am done with being royalty.
#
I mean, this is an oppressive, harassed sort of existence.
#
We've got, it's like living in a gilded cage.
#
You've got all the servants and technically the money and the privileges, but you have
#
You can't go from one room to the other without being followed by servants who are all paid
#
The other ones were actually in power.
#
So this resentment builds up.
#
So the daughter says, I am done being royalty.
#
I am going to Bangalore.
#
She goes off to Bangalore, buys a private house there, puts all her children into school.
#
So her, from being her highness, Uttaram Tirunalalithamba Bhaitambara and second princess of Travancore,
#
the girl becomes simply Lalita Varma.
#
She gives up her title.
#
She becomes just Lalita Varma, puts all her children into public schools, starts driving
#
And it's an education for her from day one.
#
There's this one wonderful story in the family about how she went to Bangalore club to shop.
#
Bangalore club has these shops and this is 1949, soon after she's arrived.
#
So she's put all the things in the basket and she's taken to the till and the lady says,
#
that'll be 89 rupees, madam.
#
And she says, what are rupees?
#
Because she's never actually dealt with currency.
#
She understands the wake concept.
#
So her driver from behind has to say, don't worry, let her go, I'll pay.
#
Because she's as, you know, alien to this independent life as that.
#
But from there, she starts becoming a very autonomous figure, becomes, as her children
#
say, her greatest ambition in life was to be a housewife because she had seen what power
#
She had seen what palaces and that kind of, that quest for money and power could do.
#
She didn't want any of that.
#
She just wanted her children to be happy, almost middle-class people who had little
#
jobs and little things and they all lived together happily.
#
And that is the life she wanted.
#
So Maharani Setu Lakshmi Bai would come and the story is, she came first in 1951 and she
#
was scandalized to discover that her children were crossing the road to go to school because
#
the school was the Baldwin Girl School on Richmond Road in Bangalore, just across their
#
gate and their gate was here.
#
She said, no, no, no, how these poor children look at them with their heavy bags and they're
#
going to school walking and they have to cross the road, it's very dangerous.
#
So while she was there, she insisted the children go by car and she had this stretch limo, a
#
All these granddaughters of hers would be put into this car and taken to school on the
#
And the story goes that in those days, Richmond Road was so narrow that when the front of
#
the car was in the school, the back was still in their house.
#
That is the kind of world they had to start adjusting to.
#
Then of course, 1950s, you know, ironically for a family that had all this protocol, 300
#
servants around them, you know, Martha and Aadma created all this artificial vocabulary.
#
They always refer to as Highnesses and all of that.
#
What happens in Kerala?
#
The commies come to power.
#
One day, Setu Lakshmi Bai wakes up and discovers her servants in the palace.
#
She's sent away most of them because the privy purse the Maharaja gets, he doesn't support
#
She has to live out of her own minor income of 50,000 rupees a year that the government
#
of India has bestowed on her.
#
She has to manage her palace with that.
#
So she's reduced her staff to 50 servants and 25 work for 10 days and then 15 days and
#
then the other 25 takeover.
#
So very small establishment, but they formed a union and someone's gone and put the communist
#
flag on top of the palace.
#
And that's when she discovers, why am I even living here?
#
You know, I'm not welcome here.
#
The Maharaja doesn't want me, doesn't seem to respect me.
#
I have to maintain a palace at great personal expense.
#
My daughters have left.
#
The younger daughter had gone off to Madras by then where her husband became a lawyer
#
because he wanted to have a profession.
#
She decides to move to Bangalore and this woman, you know, in the middle of a siege
#
practically by her servants where the police are deployed to make sure that she can safely
#
get out of the palace because they're refusing to operate the palace.
#
Palaces are not built like individual houses.
#
You can't just go and cook your food in the kitchen and not that she knew how to cook.
#
So you know, you needed your servants to operate it.
#
She leaves the palace and never comes back.
#
So she gets out of the palace, sits in her car.
#
First she drives to the Padmanabhaswamy temple, the family deity.
#
In the car, she turns around saying, forgive me.
#
I'm not staying anymore.
#
You are now in my heart.
#
I will never be able to see you again, goes to the railway station, which was the last
#
time in her life where a crowd of people bowed to her because they recognize the Maharani
#
She gets in a train, first goes to Madras from there, stays with her younger daughter
#
for a while, then drives off to Bangalore and in Bangalore, she purchases the house
#
next to her sisters, constructs a little bungalow there and it's called Srinivas.
#
And there's this wonderful envelope, you know, she, her title was fully was Her Highness
#
Shri Padmanabhasevani, Vanchidharma Vardhini, Raja Rajeshwari, Maharani Pooradam Tirunar,
#
Setu Lakshmi Bhai, Maharaja, Artingal Muttadambura and companion of the most imperial order of
#
That was her full title.
#
But as soon as she moves to Bangalore, she starts signing her letters, etc. simply Srimati
#
She's given up her titles.
#
Like her daughter, she just decides to become a nobody.
#
And then after this, from 1957, she dies in 1985.
#
All these, this two and a half decades order she lived, she never went back to Kerala.
#
And slowly the state starts acquiring her various properties.
#
She's told one fine day that the house that she'd built in the village where she wasn't
#
allowed to stay by the Maharaja, it was still hers, state wants to start an agriculture
#
She says, fine, take it.
#
Her husband had a house by the beach where he kept his things, etc.
#
State got involved and said, we are acquiring this for tourism purposes.
#
You have to give it up to the state.
#
Slowly everything is gone till finally in the 1970s, they want to set up a medical research
#
facility in her official palace.
#
Although the Maharaja is the owner and he eventually gets the compensation for it.
#
They can't do it without her permission because she's in possession of the keys.
#
So they, the man comes, MS Valiathan, the celebrated medical grandee.
#
So he shows up and he told me this, that he showed up there and everybody, many people
#
told her, don't do this.
#
How are you giving up your last thing left in Kerala to somebody?
#
And she sort of, he misses his flight.
#
By the time he gets to her house in Bangalore, it's midnight, this is in 76 or so.
#
And her daughter says, of course she's awake.
#
She's waiting to sign the papers and he brings her the paper.
#
She signs her right over the palace of claims that gives up her possession, hands over the
#
And then she looks up to him, holds up her hands and says, Valiathan, this is my freedom
#
at midnight because now she has nothing like for a woman who was queen from the age of
#
five, from the age of five, she had a 21 gun salute, she had 300 servants, her own father
#
Her husband refers to her highness.
#
She's never known a life different.
#
She's never known another existence from there suddenly.
#
And she turns to a family member and says, once I had a kingdom, but that is gone.
#
Then I thought I had my palaces, but that those are gone too.
#
Then I thought I had this house, but now I can only say I have this room because that
#
is what her life is reduced to that one room where she's increasingly crippled.
#
And she's stuck there and you know, all as a grandson told me, all she sees is the sun
#
and the morning and evening happening through her windows.
#
And she's just sitting there in that room for the next 20 years of her life.
#
And when finally she dies in 1985, she's cremated in an electric crematorium surrounded just
#
by family members like anybody's grandmother.
#
Nobody would know this was a person who once dealt with Gandhi, who once did with Mussolini's
#
daughter, who once impressed Rabindranath Tagore, who once ruled and controlled the
#
destinies of five million people.
#
She disappeared as a complete nobody.
#
And for me, that arc was fascinating to think that even now for people to give up power,
#
You know, when you have power, it's very difficult to give up your conveniences and enjoying
#
that power to give up money to become a nobody.
#
And here was this woman who, from the beginning, first she couldn't produce the melee, then
#
you know, she couldn't keep herself on good terms with her sister.
#
Then she was harassed a great deal by her sister and her son, the Maharaja made to feel
#
unwelcome in the royal family itself.
#
She sieged her palace and sort of took over control and she had to leave.
#
Her palaces itself were seized by various people.
#
Her children didn't want any part of her royal legacy.
#
And she ends up, you know, accepting the fact that she's become a nobody.
#
And for a Brahmin controlled palace where even her meals are cooked by Nambudriya, by
#
sacred thread wearing high caste groups, by the end of her life, it was Christian maids
#
and Naya, you know, so-called Shudra women who were cooking her meals.
#
And she lived with that sort of thing.
#
And that acceptance of her fate, understanding that the page of history had turned, not only
#
was the royal class irrelevant, she in particular was doubly irrelevant.
#
And she had been reduced to a footnote in the history of Travancore for all her achievements.
#
The future was controlled by the junior Maharani.
#
Ironically, the junior Maharani's family still live in a palace in Trivandrum.
#
And again, I didn't include this in the book, but if you look at the national archives,
#
there is this tone of surprise because VP Menon and his colleague Velodi, they come to
#
Trivandrum to negotiate privy purse and the allowances, etc.
#
And Velodi writes a letter to VP Menon in Delhi saying that, I was completely startled
#
by the fact that Maharaja is negotiating what amount he should get, what his mother, brother,
#
his family members should get.
#
But he did not once refer to the senior Maharani.
#
It felt as though she doesn't even exist as far as the Maharaja is concerned.
#
And they were surprised by the pettiness of it.
#
They were surprised that he wouldn't even acknowledge her existence to begin with.
#
And small things, for example, you know, again, it's not in the book, but in the archives,
#
they talk about how the Maharaja gets electricity exemption, free electricity for himself and
#
his brother's palace, nothing for the senior Rani.
#
So she is now, she's not getting a share of the privy purse.
#
She's getting 50,000 rupees as allowance in a year.
#
She has to maintain a palace, no privileges other than, you know, the money that she gets
#
and not even mentioned as a factor in the negotiations.
#
Finally, VP Menon and Velodi themselves go to the senior Maharani.
#
They find out from her and she's got pretty modest demand.
#
She's like, my children should not be treated unfairly.
#
If the other family is getting certain allowances, my children should get something similar.
#
In the end, they don't.
#
They get a smaller allowance because they have no power.
#
And it's interesting to see that although technically you're royalty, although technically
#
you're a queen, you're entirely powerless.
#
And having to live through that, I thought was interesting, whereas a junior Rani's family,
#
they continue to live there.
#
I think the last time the Maharani's met was before Sethul Akshmiwai leaves for Bangalore
#
And then they meet Wanspo in their life, which is 23 years, almost 23 years later in 1979.
#
Four years before the junior Rani dies and six years before the senior Rani dies.
#
The junior Rani calls up and expresses a desire to meet her older sister.
#
And the family tells me that she didn't want, the senior Rani didn't want to meet because
#
here she was a bedridden in Bangalore in this house and she didn't feel like, and this was
#
a past that she had forgotten that she, that was a different person and this was a different
#
A toxic world she left behind.
#
She didn't want to be part of that, but she couldn't say no either.
#
So they came, they had a nice little meeting, et cetera.
#
And that was that and you know, she did ask one thing apparently, and this I'm not putting
#
the book because I can't substantiate it with documents, but interviews with her family
#
members, they told me that she did ask the junior Rani that why are you even taking my
#
You know, that palace which she built where her children were brought up, which was home
#
for them, their final property in Kerala, why are you even claiming that?
#
And junior Rani had some answer for it saying, oh no, but you know, something on the other.
#
And she said, you know, she just smiled and she said, okay, fine, clearly this is even
#
asking for that much is too much as far as she was concerned.
#
So she said, forget it.
#
And her daughter's children, you know, they have very little awareness of their royal
#
I mean, they're aware of it.
#
They know that it's there and they know their grandmother was somebody important, but they
#
have very few royals because they're like, she abandoned it.
#
So why should we, you know, feel like we're entitled to something?
#
And I thought that there was a tragic element to it.
#
I mean, there is criticism that she presided over a feudal court.
#
It was casteist and she of course had her weaknesses and her flaws naturally.
#
But on the whole, if you look at the story, you know, it ends on a very tragic note.
#
And I was just keen to sort of make sure that, you know, this lady who led this very remarkable
#
life, forget the personal drama, even what she achieved in that space of seven years.
#
Those seven years are just remarkable, the kind of reforms and changes she made.
#
Keralites are still enjoying the benefits of those seven years.
#
The same roads we're still using that with the Cochin Harbor, the schools, the buildings,
#
the colleges, all of that is still there.
#
And I was like, that deserves some sort of commemoration.
#
So all the Travancore history you would find was pro Junior Rani's family because they
#
continue to live in Trivandrum.
#
They continue to have a very important sort of profile there.
#
They are influential people there.
#
So all the local historians are focused on them.
#
My job was to revise that record slightly and put things in the perspective because
#
To go beyond the scene into the unseen.
#
The line that really struck me from your story is the sort of the self-awareness and the
#
reflective nature of the Senior Rani when she signs away her final property papers and
#
says, this is my freedom at mid-night.
#
And it strikes me that, you know, the story you've told is from her childhood till, you
#
know, she's out of the throne.
#
And it strikes me that there's a fantastic story there as well of giving up royalty and
#
learning to live as a normal person and coming to terms with all of that.
#
And I'm sure some of that stripping the baggage of the past must also involve a lot of self-reflection,
#
which would be really interesting in a book.
#
But that's really not a task for a historian, but a novelist or a poet.
#
It will do well in a novel.
#
See, the thing is, when you're doing a biography, your greatest challenge is trying to get into
#
the mind of that person.
#
And here I was, a fairly young person starting at 19, and even when I finished, I was only
#
in my mid-twenties, trying to decipher the mind of a woman who had lived in a different
#
world, who had died 30 years before me, I mean, five years before I was born, you know,
#
and occupied such a different space altogether, and she's a woman.
#
So it's like, it's not easy to sort of penetrate a mind that is, you know, so lost in time
#
and so lost even in terms of its basic nature.
#
But you know, for me, it was a rewarding experience and the wealth of material.
#
The one thing, I think, the vindication really is that although she was treated badly and
#
she was written out of history, the records were there.
#
So for me, it was just a question of resurrecting her from the records.
#
The records make it very clear that she suffered, that she was treated badly, that she went
#
through everything from black magic to her money being reduced, to her palace being taken
#
And it tells you so much about human behavior as well.
#
It tells you that even you can have all the power in the world, you can have all the money
#
in the world, but decency is a quality that does not necessarily come to every human being.
#
So have a grandchildren let you book, how have they reacted?
#
For them, a lot of them, it's a surprise, a lot of them, they didn't know this.
#
They didn't know a lot.
#
I mean, they knew vaguely that she had suffered because she had come away to Bangalore.
#
So they knew that their family's exodus to Bangalore.
#
I mean, even now in India, we have people who have coronations and they pretend to be
#
Maharajas and they have these titles that they still use.
#
And here is a woman in 1950s itself, the family gives up everything and moves up.
#
And doesn't go back like they, as one granddaughter told me, they don't have a spot of land where
#
they can stick a needle and say this is ours in a kingdom that their ancestors ruled for
#
centuries because that's the choice that their family made.
#
So they were not aware of all the details of the extent to which their grandmother had
#
to face harassment and various problems, et cetera.
#
They were not aware of the degree to which court intrigue could completely upset a person's
#
Or even the things she achieved like winning Gandhi's respect, governing so well, you know,
#
being so reformist in her thinking about caste and gender, however she might have been in
#
All of that is pretty...
#
I think they were surprised in many ways by that.
#
One of the interesting things she also did was she struck down the matrilineal system
#
She inherited power through that system, but it was in her time that it was formally abolished
#
because by then the clamor for patriarchal families and nuclear families grew.
#
The thing was matrilineal families also joined families.
#
So which means all the properties tied up.
#
So as I said, the Erewas and the Christians are monied classes, they're moving ahead.
#
So the Nyayas felt we need to also move ahead.
#
Now all you have is land, so you sell the land, which means land has to be partitioned.
#
Partition means you have to break the joint family, which means the matrilineal family
#
And also your education system, your new morality is telling you patriarchy is the way to go
#
So all things come together in 1925.
#
This lady, Setu Lakshmi Bhai is the one who ironically ends up abolishing the matrilineal
#
And in many ways, she's the last representative of that system.
#
Her story is a story of how that conflict with an emerging new patriarchal morality
#
upsets and reduces the position of matrilineal women.
#
And the male Maharaja, who's technically her nephew and therefore lower to her in the family
#
hierarchy suddenly becomes the main person because he's a man.
#
And it's interesting, she is the last person to climb on that branch and then she cuts
#
So that's really been very fascinating and it's almost time to wrap it up.
#
But before we go, looking at modern Kerala today, it's kind of interesting that like
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you pointed out earlier, attitudes and social norms and mores that we think have come down
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from time immemorial can often be very recent, like for example, the Victorian morality and
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How much of that ancient Kerala, which you describe in your book through the middle years
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of the century, the empowered women and so on, is actually present in modern Kerala?
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You see, and the hints are very clear, for example, Kerala has the India's highest divorce
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That's partly because I think as a legacy of the matrilineal system.
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Which is, by the way, a great thing because it means more women are empowered.
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If you're in a bad marriage, leaving it is not taboo.
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I once wrote a column saying we should celebrate rising divorce rates, which of course got
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me trolled because it's like, what the fuck?
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No, but as an indicator, it's always a great thing because it shows that women will not
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take nonsense from their husbands simply to stay in a marriage.
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A high divorce rate is a mark that at least the women have that much agency.
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Similarly, people often say rape is highest in Kerala, reported rape.
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That is to say, women in Kerala feel that they can report it and there will be consequences
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to the culprits for that.
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Whereas in some states of India, there's so much taboo that most women won't even report
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Yeah, behind NUP, there's just no point.
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Yeah, so there's a high rape thing on record is a sign again that women are not, they don't
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feel like their life ends because of a violation of their person and their body.
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So there are advantages and you see markers like that which speak to you.
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But the other weird thing which is that the matrilineal system as it was fading, so my
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great grandmother, she went to school because by then it was normal for girls to go to school.
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And what was interesting though is this while girls were allowed to go to school, Kerala
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was one of the first places to allow girls to go to school because matrilineal permitted
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women literacy and education.
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That new system of education was a patriarchal one.
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So it was also the same textbooks and the same thing that subconsciously told these
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women, your job is to be good wives, your job is to be good mothers, you must be maternal,
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let your husbands handle things like that.
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So it also ingrained a strange kind of patriarchy in Kerala and that is also equally alive.
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So on the one hand, you do have women with agency, but you also have a deeply entrenched
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patriarchal mindset in Kerala now.
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Entirely artificial, entirely born out of male insecurities because in the 19th century,
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these men felt like they had to control their women to be masculine, but that also exists
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So you have both things that actually exist in Kerala.
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But one of the advantages that the state has because it had rulers like Sethul Akshami
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Bhai is that Kerala is talking the language of the right to internet because there's
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no roti, kapada, and makaan problem in Kerala.
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These things were already handled a while ago.
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Kerala is the one state where land reforms did work.
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It actually meant something.
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Earlier in many North Indian states, land reforms were just on paper.
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In reality, families managed to find loopholes and jump through it, whereas in Kerala, land
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reforms actually did take place and most of the land was in many ways redistributed and
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other people ended up getting lots of land.
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So there are changes in Kerala that were born out of not only the communists who did a great
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job at least for as far as welfarism is concerned, but also the previous royal rulers because
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under pressure from the colonial state, under pressure from a lot of missionaries, they
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had no option but to invest in education, but to slowly peel back social inequalities,
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build up infrastructure in the state, and that has therefore kept the state in a very,
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let's say, enviable position as far as human life is concerned.
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It has issues in manufacturing and industry, but overall, life in Kerala, you enter Kerala,
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the first thing you'll see is ads for fabric, textiles, and gold because it's one of the
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biggest consumer states in the country for gold and textiles because people have disposable
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You drive through Kerala villages, everybody has a pucca house.
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Most of these houses are flamboyant houses, often financed by Dubai money, but the point
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is that people have a lifestyle that is fairly superior.
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In fact, I read on the internet recently that there was a survey of the fastest growing
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cities in the world, and three of the top 10 were Kerala, and you could argue four if
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Sharjah is to be included.
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So let's move from the state of Kerala to the state of Manu Pillai.
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You told me the last time we met that you wanted to write three books before 30.
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You have written three books before 30.
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Is the rest of your life a long, slow decline like Setu Lakshmibai?
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What are you working on now?
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No, I am working on something.
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In fact, the research is more or less done.
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I just have to digest the research and start writing.
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So my deadline is 2022 to publish the book.
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So but that is a lot of work because I'm also doing my PhD.
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So I'm on leave at the moment, but I'd resume at the end of this summer.
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So I have to focus on PhD and my writing, and this is perhaps my most ambitious book.
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In many ways, it will probably be also my most controversial book.
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I mean, so far, you know, writing about forgotten Sultans of the Deccan, forgotten Queen of
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Travancore, you can say some important things, but you know, it doesn't upset the political
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weirdos that are out there.
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But the next one, I have a feeling might just get a few rotten eggs to sort of perk up and
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think my God, how dare he say this.
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So there is that project underway, but it will take me a while to actually, you know,
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Well, it's a pleasure having you on the scene and the unseen.
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I hope when your next controversial book gets done, do come here.
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This is one platform which will still welcome your political views.
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I'll let you know as soon as it's out so we can do a scene and the unseen.
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If you enjoyed listening to the episode, do go on over to your nearest bookstore online
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or offline and buy The Ivory Throne by Manu Pillay.
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Do search for his other books.
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You can follow Manu on Twitter at Unam Pillay.
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That's Manu upside down or backside, whatever, Unam Pillay.
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You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A the way the people in Kerala write Verma
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and not these ignorant North Indians.
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You can browse past episodes of the scene and the unseen at sceneunseen.in and thinkpragati.com.
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The scene and the unseen is supported by the Takshashila Institution.
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You can check out all their courses in public policy at takshashila.org.in.
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Thank you for listening.
