False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma review: An alternative princely drama

Through Ravi Varma’s paintings, a historian explores how princes, their queens and ministers deftly played the chess game set by the British Raj in pre-Independent India

A dot here, a daub there and a brush stroke later, Manu S. Pillai brings to life the world of princely India between the Great War of Indian Independence and India’s Independence in his latest book False Allies.

The book is a revelation about an India caught between the mandarins of the Raj, the rising scribal class of Indians and five princes as it follows the footsteps of Raja Ravi Varma. While Ravi Varma may be credited with creating the images of Hindu mythology, it is his commissioned work in royal households that Pillai uses to tell a tale that’s different from the one we are used to hearing and reading.

Pillai, who also happens to be a Malayali, uses the artist’s life and work as a sutradhar (a connecting thread) between the kingdoms of the five princes. He smashes the notion that the royalty of pre-independent India was only about exotic lifestyles, indulging in baubles of extravagance or wasting away in a haze of opioids. Instead, a complex nuanced world is revealed using the royal goings on in Travancore, Padukkottai, Baroda, Mysore, and Mewar. Pillai shows the readers how the princes, their queens and ministers deftly played the chess game set by the British Raj.

Art as backdrop

A gorgeous collection of Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings is used to show the courtly drama with the frame becoming the backstory of how a painting came to be. Indeed, one of the revelations in the book is how close the princely states were working towards a constitutional mode of governance based on laws, and not just royal whimsy as we have been previously led to believe.

Pillai shows the political savvy of Maharaja Sayaji Rao whose story is the stuff of dreams beginning as an illiterate farmhand to guiding the destiny of Baroda. “The system that divides us into innumerable castes... is a whole tissue of injustice, splitting men equal by nature into divisions high and low, based... on the accident of birth,” writes Pillai, quoting the Maharajah who supported the education of B.R. Ambedkar at one point of time. This description is a far cry from exotic images created by earlier historians. Describing the same prince, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre wrote in Freedom at Midnight: “The Maharaja of Baroda practically worshipped gold and precious stones. His court tunic was of spun gold and only one family in his state was allowed to weave its threads. The fingernails of each member of the family were grown to extraordinary length, then cut and notched like the teeth of a comb so they could caress the gold threads into perpendicular perfection.” It is this contrast that Pillai shatters with ease.

Pillai is in his element when he narrates the dealings between officials of the Raj and princes of Travancore. The jackfruit murder of Mavelikara brings alive his story-telling skill as he marshals his reference material to tell the tale which was sought to be wiped away by the royal house considering the tawdry nature of the crime. The 1862 crime where a man is beaten with a jackfruit on his abdomen and private parts provides the link between the House of Travancore and artist Raja Ravi Varma.