BiographyOne of a the oddities of humankind is that the proletariat idolises royalty - as long as they remain powerful and extremely rich. The House of Windsor is in woeful decline, public-relationswise. The Queen no longer has a yacht to call her own. Prince Andrew was criticised recently for using an aircraft of the Queen's Flight to fly up to Scotland for a game of golf. As Cicero commented so pithily, "O tempora! O mores!"
However, when the British Empire was at its apogee, royal privilege used to be absolute and astutely exercised. Queen Victoria, as Empress of India, allowed many of the people of the subcontinent Indian rulers to venerate, as well as herself. The British supported the ancient rajahship of the so-called "Native States" to help maintain a delicately balanced hegemony with the minimum number of soldiers and administrators necessary.
The British sought to enhance their prestige and authority in India with grandiose displays of wealth. Moore fortifies her colourful account of the 1911 Coronation at Durbar, celebrating the accession of George V, with some impressive statistics. The 233 campsites of Coronation Park, near Delhi, occupied 23 square miles, with a temporary population of 250,000. A light railway was constructed to serve the park's 16 stations, though the principal guests brought their fleets of motor cars. The Maharajahs of Hyderabad, Mysore, Baroda and Gwalior - each entitled to a 21-gun salute - and many lesser dignitaries were in compulsory attendance to signify obeisance to the King-Emperor in a ceremony witnessed by 50,000 people.
Only Baroda's costume and accessories, without his jewelled sword and Star of India, the highest Imperial decoration, were less magnificent than expected, an early proclamation of his progressive nationalism.
The maharajahs (Hindi for "great kings"), who were called princes, and their wives, the maharanis, were encouraged to flaunt their immense wealth until, after Independence was enacted in 1947, the new republican government took away their titles and most of their properties.
With the exemplary stories of princesses of three generations, from their luxurious heyday under the Raj to the relative austerity of modern times, Moore depicts the extravagant indulgence of inherited feudalism and the ways of adaptation to life without it. She portrays four maharanis of extraordinary beauty and remarkable intelligence, Chimnabai of Baroda, Sunity and Indira of Cooch Behar and Ayesha of Jaipur. Her well-researched, well-written, well-illustrated book presents 150 years of India's political and social history at its most entertainingly gaudy and enlighteningly thoughtful.
Even before independence there were stirrings of feminist emancipation, pioneered most notably by Chimnabai. Aristocratic ladies led emergence from the segregation of purdah. The Barodas' daughter, Indira, daringly refused an arranged marriage and married a man she loved, a son of the Cooch Behars. When he died of alcoholism in 1922, when that infirmity was endemic among young Indian princes, she abstained from the traditional (illegal) practice of sati, choosing not to burn alive on her husband's funeral pyre.
As the Regent of Cooch Behar, she declared her own independence. She spent much of her time gambling and gambolling in European high society, in which she had so many lovers she was nicknamed the Maharani of Couche Partout, bedding down everywhere.
Lucy Moore's perception of the exotically picturesque in Oriental dress, customs and behaviour, reported in prose suffused with what, to use a phrase of hers, can be described as "the rich spicy scent of incense," renders her maharanis a good deal more glamorous than the wives of the soccer millionaires and showbiz stars of the tabloids. And in the book there is the benefit of the Maharani of Baroda's advice on how to achieve queenliness. Avoid cocktail parties and never, never wear emeralds with a green sari.
Patrick Skene Catling's memoir, Better Than Working, was recently published by Secker & Warburg
Maharanis: The Lives and Times of Three Generations of Indian Princesses By Lucy Moore Viking, 351pp. £20