Like in the old fairy tale of the 12 dancing princesses who disappear every night from their palace, there are elements of the fabulous in some of these real life stories of 11 Indian queens.
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Some of them are taken from historical records. Others are first-person accounts, as in the case of Gayatri Devi, who spins a tale of how she maxed her first election for the fledgling Swatantra Party in 1962; it is as effortlessly told as the chiffon saris she draped for her rallies.
As the introduction tells you, “The descriptor ‘queens’ in this book covers all women who were rulers, or of royal birth — empresses, queens, regents, princesses, begums and so on.” The ‘so on’ is deliciously ambiguous as not all of them were necessarily of royal birth and some had a mixed lineage that was decidedly exotic.
Certainly, this is so in the case of Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s portrait of Begum Hazrat Mahal, the wife of Wajid Ali Shah of Awadh, who became the Regent after the death of the Nawab that saw her 12-year-old son put on the throne in 1857. As Mukherjee tells us, quoting the historian Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, Hazrat Mahal came from a very humble background: her father was an African slave. Never mind that they endorse the Marxian claim of ‘Oriental Despotism’.
Many of them are contemporaneous records created by sycophantic courtiers who tend to either glorify or destroy the feminine attributes of a queen on her gaddi. Perfumed lives devoted to pleasures of the soul and flesh add to the aura of queens such as Nur Jehan.
Ruby Lal depicts Nur Jehan or ‘The Light of the World’ on a tiger hunt, riding atop an elephant, with the brisk efficiency of a miniature painter. Ruskin Bond’s is a magical tale of a rani and a mongoose, both lost to the world. Like his seven-year-old self, we too are lost in the magic of ‘raja-rani’ stories repeated at bedtime.
The writer is a Chennai-based critic and cultural commentator.
The Book of Indian Queens
Aleph olio
₹399
