King Kothi Palace 1942: A thirteen-year-old girl dressed in a pale-yellow chiffon sari, sequined purse clutched to her side and golden heels strapped to her feet steps down from a Rolls Royce at the purdah gate. Ushers rush to lower the purdah. She, along with her father and two younger brothers, climbs onto a chabootra and proceeds towards a gentleman of slight stature, red Rumi topi on his head: His Exalted Highness: The Nizam of Hyderabad.
From beneath lowered lashes, she watches her father’s motia-pink turban bob as he bends from his waist to perform the farshi adaab and offer on a white handkerchief, eleven gold and one silver coins.
‘Dhanraj, are these your children?’ asks the Nizam.
‘Yes, Sarkar. May I present my oldest daughter?’
It’s her first time in high heels and she is wary of tripping. The girl takes a tentative step forward.
‘Do you enjoy attending the Mahboobia School?’
Head raised a tiny bit, the girl answers in a cool and collected voice. ‘I love Hyderabad, but I must confess the education isn’t on par with Bombay.’
Eighty years later, Princess Indira Devi Dhanrajgir has lost none of her spark. Inside the breathtaking drawing room of Gyan Bagh palace, she thrones on a chair with golden arms and regales visitors with stories from days gone by.
When complimented on her still radiant beauty, the Princess interlaces her fingers and blushes. ‘You do know that I’m ninety-three ?’
Indira Devi’s earliest memories are of being tutored at home by an English governess, Miss Joan. The young Indira played carrom with Maharajah Kishen Pershad (twice Prime Minister of Hyderabad). Nawab Salar Jung III presented her a Shetland pony for her first birthday. Upon reaching school-going age, she started attending Bombay’s Queen Mary’s school.
Every day, her governess would bring her lunch in a silver tiffin carrier and lay it out on a table with a white Irish linen tablecloth and gleaming cutlery. Out of the tiffin carrier emerged, a five-course meal, starting with soup and ending with meethi dal and rice. The regalia intimidated the other little girls. She spent her lunch breaks alone, waiting for someone to have the courage to befriend her. At last, a girl named Sunita Shirodkar approached her and said her father was Indira Devi’s mother’s physician.
From a framed photograph behind Indira Devi’s armchair, the bejewelled and turbaned Raja Saheb Dhanrajgir looks with benevolent grace as she says, ‘My father, like the other men in our family, enjoyed the good life.’
The Princess’s grandfather Raja Saheb Narsinghji Bahadur was known as the Rockefeller of the South, so the good life was the Dhanrajgirs’ for the asking. The family owned palaces in Bombay, Hyderabad, and Poona. At one time, their landholdings stretched across the Deccan Plateau.
Raja Saheb Dhanrajgiri owned seven Rolls-Royces and employed Lord Mountbatten’s erstwhile cook. He and the family’s five other cooks must have been kept frightfully busy. For Raja Sahib hosted dinner parties every evening which were attended by a smattering of musicians and poets. Says Indira Devi tongue in cheek: They could only play their instruments or recite if requested to do so. Otherwise, they had to keep quiet.
The Princess remembers meeting the noted poet Allama Iqbal at Dhanraj Mahal as a child of five. Since then, both poets and poetry ingratiated themselves into her life. She taught herself how to type and started composing couplets in Urdu on the lawns of Gyan Bagh Palace. This she had to do on the sly from her Papa (Raja Dhanrajgir). In her words: Those days, writing poetry was like carrying on a romance.
Raja Dhanrajgir also forbade his daughters from singing and dancing in public and from cutting their hair short. Indira Devi never appeared before her father without her head covered.
In the late 1940s, she struck up an unlikely friendship with Makhdoom Mohiuddin , who was both a member of the Progressive Writers Association and the Communist Party of India. Mohiuddin’s leftist leanings deterred him from attending Raja Dhanrajgir’s soirees for a while. But somehow, Mohiuddin became a frequent guest at Gyan Bagh Palace.The Siasat published one of her poems alongside Makhdoom Mohiuddin’s with their photographs side by side. Much to the latter’s embarrassment, his comrades gave him tremendous grief for his friendship with a “Maharani”.
Rani Pramila Devi, Raja Dhanrajgir’s wife, passed away when Indira Devi was just sixteen. She assumed the role of a surrogate mother to her three younger siblings and a companion to her aging grandmother. A Maharajah whose name she doesn’t reveal asked for her hand in marriage and her father approved the match. He was the Indian ambassador to a country in Europe. Marrying the Maharajah meant leaving India. But the Princess didn’t have the heart to abandon her grandmother to caregivers and nurses and turned down the Maharajah’s proposal. She claims they remained in touch as “friends” until the Maharajah’s death. Raja Dhanrajgir didn’t find the matter amusing, but Princess Indira Devi held firm.
A few years later, she married a renowned Telugu poet, Seshendra Sharma. Her marriage prompted her to give up writing poetry.
‘There can’t be two poets in one family, darling,’ she says.
Raja Dhanrajgir’s children certainly gave him much consternation with regards to their affairs of the heart. Sometime in the mid-1950s, the royal family of Nepal was the Dhanrajgirs’ neighbours in Koregoan Park in Poona. They sent a proposal for a girl from their family to Princess Indira Devi’s younger brother Raja Mahendragir. The Nepali Princess was as dainty as a porcelain doll, wore magnificent dangling earrings, and came with a dowry of two and a half crore rupees. Raja Dhanrajgir accepted the proposal, but the young Mahendragir remained non-committal.
A few years passed and the royal family of Nepal grew restless and demanded the Dhanrajgirs set a wedding date. On persistent badgering from his father, Mahendragir revealed he was already married to a Muslim girl from Bombay. A livid Raja Dhanrajgir threatened to disinherit his son and throw him out of their palace. Indira Devi intervened on her brother’s behalf, and the Dhanrajgirs accepted their Muslim daughter-in-law. The Princess emphasizes they never forced her to convert.
Sadly, the marriage didn’t last as Mahendragir was fond of brandishing his rifle every so often and scared off his wife. He married for a second time — another Muslim girl, from Hyderabad’s aristocracy. The pair shared a passion for shikar and remained happily married, at least for a while.
To the Princess’s left is a photograph of the Princess with Pandit Nehru, taken on his official visit to Hyderabad in 1954. Her take on Police Action is that there was no circumventing it. ‘The razakars had made everyone’s lives miserable. During their rampage, we moved all our valuables to Poona.’
Both modern day politics and modern-day parties leave her nonplussed. ‘I hate it when all dinner party guests are interested in is whether you’re serving Black Label or Blue Label,’ she says with a wrinkle of her nose, before adding, ‘The parties my Papa held were so elegant. Everyone thought the women in our family didn’t do any work when we hosted parties, but we did plenty.’
At this statement, I drop my pen and stop taking notes. ‘What did you do?’
‘We never entered the kitchen. But we laid the table and arranged the flowers. By the time our guests arrived, we had made a quick dash to the hairdressers and donned our saris. No one would ever guess.’
Listening to Indira Devi’s stories was like holding a looking glass that showed a reflection of all that was grand and elegant in the twentieth century. A prominent writer once told her we only read about people like you in storybooks.
Princess Indira Devi is every inch what one would imagine a fairy-tale princess to be. She attributes her joie de vivre to the fact that she thrives in the company of other people. And, before we parted ways, she left me with this line: I have led a fascinating life. One can’t ask for more.
Photography Credit: Syed Omer
| 
