Maharanis: Not a Book Review

A few weeks ago I happened to learn that Rajmata Gayatri Devi, the dowager Maharani of the erstwhile princely state of Jaipur, passed on at a ripe old age of 90. She was acclaimed for her beauty and her charity work. I, of course, came to know of her existence by serendipity. I was 12 years old then and was down with measles. I had had to miss a fortnight of school and was confined to my bed, which was quite an annoyance for my hyper energetic personality. One afternoon, my mother, handed me a copy of "A Princess Remembers," which are the memoirs of Maharani Gayatri Devi. I remember being struck by her beauty and completely enraptured by her life. Therefore in my mind, I associate the personality with the book that had fascinated the imagination of a young girl on the threshold of puberty. Years later, a month before leaving to come to the United States, I fell ill. I was married then but still wanted to convalesce at my parent's home. Therefore for three weeks I was staying with my parents. One afternoon, I stumbled across this forgotten book and picked it up to read it. As an adult I read the book and could discern that it was a sugar coated, one sided account of her life as she saw it. Clearly it wasn't a very objective account as she had tried to present the darker side in the best possible light. Of course one would attribute it to her grace and dignity rather than viewing life through rose-tinted glasses.

I have been wanting to read "Maharanis" by Lucy Moore since a very long time. Finally I got around to reading it. To me this was a third person account of their lives therefore would be objective. This book traces the life of Maharani Gayatri Devi, her mother and her two grandmothers. It is a fascinating story of four extraordinary women who lived their lives during the waning years of the British Empire and the Indian Princely States. It is a wellknown fact that Gayatri Devi's grandfather the Maharajah of Baroda was a great man who worked for betterment of his subjects and reforming his state. He was a fierce critic of the British and has always been hailed as a nationalist. He was one of the few, if not the only, ruler of a princely state to openly support the Indian National Congress. Unlike his contemporaries he was not given to leading a licentious life full of excesses. His daughter, Gayatri Devi's mother, became a widow at thirty. However, contrary to Indian societal norms, she did not resign to living an austere life of a widow but instead ruled on behalf of her minor son. She was in fact a merry widow nicknamed by her friends as Maharani of couche partout a parodized version of her title Maharani of Cooch Behar. It also speaks about her two grandmothers, Chimnabai of Baroda and Sunity Devi of Cooch Behar who are potrayed as strong women. They strived for women's education and emancipation. They were married to men different in character, the former was married to Sayaji a nationalist and faithful man (a rarity in that class), while Nripendra an overt Anglophile with a roving eye. The Baroda and Cooch Behar prince and princesses were educated abroad, the sons apparently did not possess strength of character and were given to alcoholism while the daughters were strong and wilful. Gayatri Devi became the third wife of the Maharajah of Jaipur, a handsome polo player whose first two wives were political alliances. She marries him for love and grows from a young girl in awe of her husband's larger than life personna to becoming a politican and celebrity in her own right.

It is full of anecdotes as well as historic accounts of the current events occuring simultaneously in India's struggle for freedom. It highlights the fact that how British used the princely states for their machinations to spread and continue their imperial power over the subcontinent, and completely disregarded the princely states during the process of transferring power to India.

It is an interesting account of these four extraordinary women who broke the tradition of purdah (being veiled and not seen in public) and used their position to better the lives of the less privileged. Their lives were extraordinary with immense luxury juxtaposed with harsh reality and tragedies that really made them human. They experienced extreme joy along with such tragic events. One would think that such a position of priviledge made the male members ill-equipped to deal with the sea of change that was occuring within the Indian subcontinent. Those who follow Indian history must be well aware of the horrors of Emergency and the dark period of Indira Gandhi's rule in which democratic values were held to ransom. This book reveals that aspect as experienced by Gayatri Devi who was then into active politics and in opposition to Mrs. Gandhi. These two women, born into priviledged backgrounds, two years apart and studied together in Shantiniketan, had a strong dislike for each other. However they were bound by the tragic events that occured in their lives. When Mrs. Gandhi lost her son to an airplane accident, Gayatri Devi with all her grace and dignity called her to offer her condolences, which were not accepted by Mrs. Gandhi. It speaks volumes about their individual personalities; grace of one and the petty-minded behavior of the other.

This book traverses across three centuries; the nineteenth, twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first,and chronologically traces the lives of these four extraordinary women and their families. This book is an interesting read, however it is not a testament to feminism. These women were in privileged positions and were therefore an exception than the norm. The majority of women in the country did not afford the luxury of freedom of choice.

"Family Matters" by Rohinton Mistry

For the past few days I have been reading Rohinton Mistry’s book “Family Matters,” which was published in 2002. The book is based in Mumbai in the nineties and is a story of a seventy-nine year old Parsee widower who is suffering from Parkinson’s disease. One evening he suffers a fall and is incapacitated due to it. He is living with his two step children who cannot bear the burden of taking care of him. They therefore callously dump him in their half-sister’s matchbox apartment in the city. Although sad the author has written with wry humor and the language is exquisite.

Those who don’t know, Parsees are Iranians who fled religious persecution and sought refuge in India in the 7th Century AD. They escaped to preserve their Zorastrian religious traditions and entered the subcontinent through the western coast of Gujarat. They enjoyed religious tolerance in India for many centuries and prospered under the British rule. They are called Parsees because they spoke “Farsi,” which is the spoken language in Iran. My alma mater, Sir J.J. School of Art was started in 1857 with the benevolence of a Parsee philanthropist Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy. The author belongs to the Parsee community as well.

Zorastrians worship fire as they believe that the energy of the creator is represented by fire or sun. The Parsees are very orthodox and a non-Parsee cannot enter their fire-temples. As a child I was so fascinated by the fire temples and used to ask my Parsee friends to describe the interior of the temple. Having grown up in the city and exposed to Parsee culture, especially their food, this novel appealed to me on more levels than one. While reading the book I imagined the scent of sandalwood, the frankincense burnt in the evening, the aroma of dhansak and patiyo, the rustling of beautiful silk gara sarees worn during their weddings and navjote.

The main protagonist, the aging Parsee widower, had fallen for a non-Parsee woman in his youth. She was of a different faith therefore their romance was met with strict opposition. What follows is a tragic sequence of events, which are started by the religious bigotry and unrequited love! This begs the question as to whether it is worth preserving traditions at the cost of ruining so many lives.

The romance in the novel reminded me of the story of one of my classmates from India. She belongs to the Parsee community and fell in love with a guy who belonged to an equally orthodox Hindu Brahmin community. Of course all through their college years in India they totally hid their romance from their parents. The guy came to the United States to study in one of the Ivy Leagues and soon after made plans for my friend to join him. She came to the United States on a student visa and they both started living together. The news reached her orthodox family who threw a fit. Her grandmother called her up and said “Stop this nonsense and come home right this very instant.” Armed with defiance and courage, a product of the geographical distance and being in love she told her grandmother, “You must be out of your mind.” So the grandmother started emotionally blackmailing her telling her that her actions have caused her heart trouble and many other ailments. My friend was completely defiant!

Her boyfriend (now husband) proposed marriage to her a couple of times but she preferred living with him only to spite her family. Finally they got married, more from an immigration perspective than societal norms, which wasn’t attended by any member of their respective families. Eventually both the families were embarrassed by their bigotry and had a wedding reception in India for my friend and her husband. Of course today everything is hunky dory with both the families but my friend and her husband don’t miss a chance to poke fun at their families!

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

I had this book sitting on my desk for the past two months and had not got a chance to read it. I happened to finally read it over the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. This post is not a review. I have linked two excellent reviews for your reading pleasure; one by NY Times and the other by my blogging buddy Lotus. Kiran Desai's mother Anita Desai is a prolific Indian writer, whose work I had read years ago in India. I was curious about this book for two reasons; one because this book has won the Man Booker prize and the other because I had heard her interview with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air and was quite impressed.

I absolutely love the author's writing. The book has melancholy and sadness in it, which is interspersed with humor and wit. She has wonderfully depicted the different classes of Indian society in post colonial India. Being of the same generation as the author I share a lot of observations with her. Having grown up in a cosmopolitan city like Mumbai (formerly Bombay), which has its share of "brown sahibs," who are Oxbridge educated anglophiles whose formative years were in pre-independance India. Therefore they have a chip on their shoulder and are more English than the British themselves. My generation, however is confident about our Indian identity and can step back and look objectively at such pretentious elitists!

She has also poignantly depicted how poverty and helplessness and a feudal mindset gnaws away the dignity of the lower classes of society. Although the book is set against the backdrop of the Gorkhaland movement, it is not at all political. It is more anecdotal as it describes the effect it had on the lives of the people living along the Indo-Nepal border. One of the characters, Gyan with slight education joins the movement without really identfying with it but more as an outlet to his anger and frustration. Though not directly, I can draw parallels to the religious fundamentalism in India in the nineties, where some impressionable youth fell for the hatred spewed under the name of faith!

She has also described the lives of illegal immigrants in New York, who are lured by the ambition of earning dollars. They live like cattle under inhuman conditions and since they don't have proper paperwork, they are taken advantage of by their employers. In her interview on Fresh Air, she mentioned that she had actually walked into the kitchens of restaurants in New York and interviewed these members of the shadow economy. The book is sad and has honestly painted the grim reality of life in the developing world (I HATE the word "Third World") yet she has beautifully managed to not let the reader feel depressed at the end!

All in all I enjoyed the book thoroughly as you could move those characters out of the colonial town at the foothills of Himalayas and place them in Mumbai (built by the British). It reminded me of quite a number of Bombayites (not Mumbaikars) with their affected accents and cute weekend homes with picket fences, their high teas with dainty cucumber sandwiches and pastries! Their sense of privilege over their servants, who always feel deferential to their employers. Also living in the city are the sons of the soil "Shiv Sainiks" who are against anything that is perceived as "western," without even understanding the philosophy of Hinduism!

Book: Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

This afternoon I was listening to Terri Gross's program, "Fresh Air" on NPR. She was interviewing Ariel Levy, the author of "Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture." From the interview I gathered that the book challenges the raunch culture that you see in America today and views it from a feminist perspective. The interview was very interesting and unfortunately I had not heard of this book until then. This book is now on my wish list. It puts things in perspective when people like Paris Hilton are role models for today's teens. You know how her popularity rose after her infamous sex romp tapes were leaked.

As soon as the interview ended, I went online to read more about this book. For those who are interested, I found the synopsis on the publisher's site. For your convenience I have included it later in this post, the rest can be found here.

Publisher Comments:
Meet the Female Chauvinist Pig — the new brand of "empowered woman" who wears the Playboy bunny as a talisman, bares all for Girls Gone Wild, pursues casual sex as if it were a sport, and embraces "raunch culture" wherever she finds it. If male chauvinist pigs of years past thought of women as pieces of meat, Female Chauvinist Pigs of today are doing them one better, making sex objects of other women — and of themselves. They think they're being brave, they think they're being funny, but in Female Chauvinist Pigs, New York magazine writer Ariel Levy asks if the joke is on them.

In her quest to uncover why this is happening, Levy interviews college women who flash for the cameras on spring break and teens raised on Paris Hilton and breast implants. She examines a culture in which every music video seems to feature a stripper on a pole, the memoirs of porn stars are climbing the best-seller lists, Olympic athletes parade their Brazilian bikini waxes in the pages of Playboy, and thongs are marketed to prepubescent girls. Levy meets the high-powered women who create raunch culture — the new oinking women warriors of the corporate and entertainment worlds who eagerly defend their efforts to be "one of the guys." And she traces the history of this trend back to conflicts between the women's movement and the sexual revolution long left unresolved.

In the tradition of Susan Faludi's Backlash and Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, Levy pulls apart the myth of the Female Chauvinist Pig and argues that what has come to pass for liberating rebellion is actually a kind of limiting conformity. Irresistibly witty and wickedly intelligent, Female Chauvinist Pigs makes the case that the rise of raunch does not represent how far women have come, it only proves how far they have left to go.

Among other things:

I am currently reading this wonderful book, Landscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred and the Civic in India’s High Tech City (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), by Smriti Srinivas, who is an Associate Professor at UC Davis. I just got that yesterday and couldn't put it down. Those of you who are interested in urban studies, anthropology and cultural juxtaposition between the modern and traditional, this is the book! It is an academic work with years of research, I honestly preferred it to the book that I was previously reading, Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat." I have picked this up and once I am done then I shall go back to Friedman's book.