The following is an excerpt from 'The House of Jaipur: The Inside story of India's Most Glamorous Royal Family' by John Zubrzycki. This has been published with permission by Juggernaut Books.
Main photo caption: Gayatri Devi and Sawai Man Singh II of Jaipur, known to their friends as Ayesha and Jai. She was his third wife.
The story of Ayesha and Jai’s courtship, their engagement and ultimately their wedding occupies more than sixty pages of A Princess Remembers. Much of it reads like a fairy tale, complete with a dashing Prince Charming, designed to elicit breathless wonder from the reader. Stolen moments in Budapest and Bombay, picnics in private corners of the vast grounds of the palace in Cooch Behar, a marriage proposal while driving in Jai’s Bentley. As Ayesha’s schoolgirl crush turns into a teenage fantasy and then a full-blown romance, she weathers Ma’s misgivings, Bhaiya’s warnings, Indrajit’s regret that Jai, his hero, had stooped to an alliance with the ‘broomstick’, and Ila’s accusations that she was too ‘spineless’ in Jai’s presence and would never cope with his philandering. Missing from her memoir, like so much else that might have contradicted the overromanticized life story she projects, is the opposition to the marriage from the British, who considered scuttling the whole arrangement, fearing it would lead to unrest between Jaipur and other states in Rajputana. Then there was the hostility of the Jaipur nobility, the broader Rajput establishment and, finally, the reaction of Jai’s two Jodhpur-born wives.
While Marudhar, who took a traditional view of her role, accepted Jai taking a third wife, Jo had tasted freedom, albeit briefly, through her friendship with Virginia and her two visits abroad. What little we know about Jo’s reaction to the news of Ayesha’s engagement to Jai comes from a letter she wrote to Virginia just before Christmas 1938. ‘I bet she is happy now that she is hoping to get what she wanted all the time. Hope this hasn’t worried you too much, but I had to tell you. I haven’t got anyone except you, Anita and Grandy, whom I can call my friends.’ It is doubtful that Jai recognized the depth of affection between Jo and Virginia or ever realized that Jo saw her American friend as an escape route from the tradition-bound life she felt so trapped in. With Ayesha about to become Third Her Highness, Jo was to assume a very secondary role. Moreover, she knew almost nothing about Ayesha, who would be coming into the royal household as a complete outsider.
Gayatri Devi, described in Vogue as one of the most beautiful women in the world, at the Rambagh Palace.
Jai’s attempts to console Jo about his engagement were clumsy to say the least. Throwing a party on the night he told her was probably the least considerate thing he could have done. Nor did his engagement mean the end of his affair with Virginia. In March 1939, he wrote her a letter expressing his pining for her.‘I wish to God that you were here. There is nothing I long for more than to have a real friend by me and, darling, you know how I feel towards you . . . Please, darling, write to me.You can understand the conditions I live in here. I need you in every way . . . all my love, for ever, Jai.’
Two months later he was back in England, where Virginia was busy helping Grandy prepare for the public opening of the family home, Osterley. Notwithstanding the fact that Grandy and his wife seemed closer together than ever, Jai and Virginia spent their last London summer dining at Ciro’s or the Coq d’Or and watching plays in the West End. Jo wrote to Virginia urging her friend not to mention Ayesha.Virginia heeded the advice. Meanwhile Bhaiya, probably thinking that Jai’s imminent marriage meant that Virginia had got over her infatuation with his soon-to-be brother-in-law, wrote to her in July 1939 saying that he was ‘still crazy’ about her ‘and always will be’. Jai, however, never quite let go of his feelings for Virginia. According to Bubbles, his father kept an inscribed photo of her on his desk until his death in 1970.
The threat of war meant that Jai had to cut short his European holiday and return to his military duties in Jaipur. But he managed to spend a short time in Kashmir, where Indira had rented Moon House in Srinagar for the family. Chimnabai and several of her grandchildren from Baroda took a house nearby. Khusru Jung, who was now the commerce minister in Hari Singh’s government, turned up with some relatives and the Nizam of Hyderabad’s brother and wife. The families spent their days together picnicking, going on boat rides on Dal Lake, playing card games and rounds of tennis, cricket and hockey. ‘I was living in the clouds because every morning we rode together, and with Baby and Menaka as chaperones we went on bear hunts or picnics or for shikara trips. I remember it all as the last idyll of my girlhood,’ Ayesha writes.
Also present in Kashmir was Sher Ali Khan, the uncle of the cricketer Tiger Pataudi and a close friend of Bhaiya’s. As is clear from his memoir, The Elite Minority, The Princes of India, the twenty-six-year-old was infatuated with the young Ayesha – and it is possible that she reciprocated at least some of his cloddish attempts at affection. His description of summer in Kashmir is full of silent walks and horse rides and of hands occasionally touching. Sher Ali confesses to lying awake at night ‘producing thoughts that kept sleep away’ about the time they spent together alone in a grove of pine trees. At one point he overhears Ayesha telling Baby:‘Just my luck he had to be married.’ While reading her palm he predicts:‘You will get what you want, but there is no limit to what you want. Eventually you will get your wealth, but at the expense of real wealth.You will live long – [a] very long life, still trying to find what’s real life.’
US First Lady Jackie Kennedy with Gayatri Devi and Man Singh II at a polo exhibition match in Jaipur, 1962. Man Singh II would die on the polo field in 1970, aged fifty-seven.
Sher Ali and Ayesha remained close friends despite his move to Pakistan after Partition. He describes her as an ‘enigma, entangled in her own thoughts, even from childhood, quite happy in her own company and sometimes more relaxed with strangers than in her own crowd’, an observation that is borne out by many of her closest friends.9 His recollections about their time spent in Kashmir, just a year out from her wedding with Jai, are particularly prescient. ‘For Ayesha to be in love with Jai was like an illness. She wasn’t certain where it began. It had come without much awareness, without symptoms, unless one could call symptoms the joking that had gone on between them from the very beginning, more from him than from her.’ From the moment he had arrived in his Rolls-Royce convertible at Woodlands back in 1930 as the ‘Maharaja . . . from Rajputana and on top of that from Jaipur’, Ayesha had fallen in love ‘not so much perhaps with the man himself, but with the idea of him’. Sher Ali puzzled (perhaps out of jealousy) over her motivations to be Jai’s third wife.‘How could she compromise on her background, her mother being such a sophisticated person and both her grandmothers, paternal and maternal, so enlightened on such subjects – of child marriage and dual marriages, and what they couldn’t understand they attributed to other motives.’ Did the promise of glamour turn puppy love into real love, he wondered. Or was it a chance to swap Cooch Behar with its mud houses and thatched roofs for the fortresses of Rajputana with their legendary treasuries full of jewels?
According to Sher Ali, the thought of emulating Indira and creating another scandal appealed to the headstrong Ayesha, even though the controversy over her being neither a Jodhpuri nor a Rajput paled into insignificance when compared with Indira’s dumping of Scindia of Gwalior for the second-in-line to the throne of a minor state. Jai, he believed, took a more practical approach to the whole matter. ‘Marriage was a necessity and to produce children a duty, to the state and to the House.’ One more wife made no difference. Ayesha could ride well and she loved shikar and sport. He could take her to polo matches and parties when he was abroad; she could dine and dance with him at clubs and restaurants.
Ayesha’s initial crush had evolved into a full-blown infatuation, a blind adulation that was highly addictive. Jai was the supreme Lothario and his storybook kingdom was the ultimate aphrodisiac. Seduced by the glamour that Cooch Behar could never provide, Ayesha was prepared to become the dutiful wife of a man she naively believed would always support her even if it meant going against the strictures of Jaipur’s conservatism. Accepting her role reveals the extent to which Jai and Ayesha viewed their relationship as a means to fulfilling each other’s aspirations.
Back at the Residency in Jaipur, practical matters were occupying the minds of British oficials who toyed with vetoing the marriage – something that was within their powers. Jai’s decision to choose as his third wife someone the India Ofice puzzlingly described as a ‘non-Aryan’ would deliver a ‘serious blow to Rajput pride of race’. Although the rulers of Cooch Behar were Kshatriyas, they were seen as inferior to the Rajputs. Jai’s argument that 350 years earlier one of his ancestors had married a Cooch Behar princess didn’t cut much ice, given that the state’s rulers had been tainted by intermarriage with princesses from neighbouring, mostly tribal, hill states. ‘It is for the Rajputs themselves to maintain their prestige and traditions in such matters and all we can do is to point out to them, as has been done in this case, the consequences of departing from their customs,’ B.J. Glancy, the political adviser to the viceroy, wrote to Lord Linlithgow. Then there were the apparently undeniable reports that Jai’s finance minister, Pandit Amarnath Atal, was illegally channelling funds from the state’s public works budget to build the ultimate in palatial accommodation for Ayesha. Finally, the British feared that the marriage would be an affront to the other wives, particularly now that both of them had produced sons. Alarmed by the possible consequences of the marriage, Linlithgow sent for Jai. According to his ADC, Major Parbat Singh, Jai told the viceroy that while he had the power to depose him, he had no control over his private life. He was going to marry Ayesha whatever the consequences. Seeing his determination, Linlithgow shook Jai’s hand and wished him luck.
Gayatri Devi campaigning as a Swatantra Party candidate during the Lok Sabha elections in 1962. She won with what was then the biggest margin in India’s history.
While it stopped short of vetoing the marriage, the India Office refused to give the union its official endorsement. An edict from Linlithgow stated: ‘No officer of my Government should attend, whether from Cooch Behar or from Jaipur, or anywhere else, and no congratulations or good wishes should be offered unless with the preface that the offerer stands in his private capacity only.’ Jai’s long-term mentor and the commander of the Jaipur State Forces, Amar Singh, also joined the boycott. If he married into a ‘good Rajput family’ he would certainly attend the wedding ‘but not if you marry into that family’, he said.
Unaware of the behind-the-scenes machinations, Indira, Ayesha and her siblings plunged headlong into making preparations for the wedding. Thanks to Indira’s foresight, most of Ayesha’s wedding trousseau had been purchased in Europe before the World War II broke out – sheets and towels from Florence and Czechoslovakia, shoes and matching bags at Ferragamo, nightgowns in mousseline de soie from Paris. A special shopping expedition was arranged to Calcutta to buy saris. Indira left her daughter alone to make her selection, only to be shocked on her return at the garish colours she had selected. Indira herself ended up choosing two hundred saris in silk and chiffon, some embroidered with gold thread. Ayesha’s presents included a black Bentley from the Nawab of Bhopal that Jai would later make her swap for a much older blue one, and a two-seater Packard from a Jaipur noble. Chimnabai gifted her a house in the Himalayan hill station of Mussoorie.
In Cooch Behar arrangements were being made to host the two hundred or so wedding guests, each with their own entourage of servants. The numbers would have been larger had fewer trains been requisitioned for the war effort. Archways were erected under which the bridegroom would pass and bunting and lights were hung from houses and public buildings. Jai’s retinue alone consisted of forty nobles from Jaipur. Each was supplied with a richly caparisoned elephant for the wedding procession.
Ayesha spent 8 May 1940, the day before the wedding, fasting, bathing in scented oils and having her skin rubbed with turmeric paste. She then performed the traditional pujas required of a bride. Nerves took over and, instead of sleeping, she spent much of the night talking to her sisters. In the morning she heard the firing of a nineteen-gun salute to announce Jai’s arrival. ‘Only then did I believe with total conviction that after all the years of waiting I would actually marry my beloved.’
Unlike her mother’s Brahmo Samaj wedding, Ayesha’s was replete with ritual and symbolism. Her forehead was smeared with sandalwood paste to indicate the virtuous life she was expected to lead as a wife. After Jai’s arrival, the customary presents from the groom to the bride were brought in a ceremonial procession to the palace and laid out in the durbar hall. They included traditional jewellery, a dozen sets of women’s clothes and auspicious food items. Symbols of good fortune, auguring longevity for her husband, her children and herself, such as a conch shell bound in silver and a silver mirror, were wrapped in a banana leaf and carried by Ayesha to a shrine where she offered up prayers to Ganesha.
Jai’s appearance at the ceremony was heralded by the booming of cannons and the music of marching bands. Ayesha was carried into the main courtyard of the palace in a silver palanquin and was given away by Bhaiya. After the religious rites, Ayesha and Jai went upstairs where their families were waiting for them. After touching their feet, they were offered a traditional thali to share. Ayesha offered Jai the first mouthful of rice and he reciprocated. It was then that the champagne came out. In the end the only Rajput ruler to boycott the wedding was the Maharaja of Dungarpur. Udaipur’s maharana, the seniormost Rajput, did not attend because he was too frail to travel, but he sent two representatives – a gesture which amounted to a formal seal of approval to the marriage. One factor that brought Udaipur to the table was Jai’s promise that if Ayesha had a son, he would never succeed to the Jaipur throne. Cooch Behar’s British Resident defied the viceroy’s orders and was present at the ceremony. The celebrations in Cooch Behar went on for a week, but the newly-weds left after two days for their honeymoon in Ootacamund, or Ooty. The journey to the hill station gave Ayesha her first taste of purdah. Her railway coach was surrounded by canvas screens and the car waiting for them at Calcutta had curtains separating the driver from the passenger seats. At Woodlands all the male servants were sent away, even those she had known most of her life. Indrajit, who was accompanying her, kept asking if she was going to live like this for the rest of her life. In the end Ayesha could not hold back the tears.
Things were more relaxed in Ooty, where the couple enjoyed rounds of tennis, horse riding, picnics and dinner parties. Ayesha, however, was not allowed to attend formal receptions at Government House. ‘Although I wasn’t exactly in purdah, still, on occasions where there might be older and more orthodox princes among the guests, Jai didn’t want to put me in the embarrassing position of being the only Maharani to show her face in public,’ Ayesha would later write. ‘He told me that this would also be true in Jaipur in the beginning because I hadn’t yet met the people.’To put his new wife’s mind at ease, Jai told her there was no question of her remaining in purdah for her entire life.‘Let’s wait for a year or so. When people gradually get used to the idea, you can drop purdah altogether.’
Jai left Ayesha in Ooty to go to Bangalore to play polo and to be with Jo and their children, Joey and Pat. After a few days he wrote to say he was missing her and that she should join him.When she arrived in Bangalore, she went straight to their apartments, too fearful to meet Jo again, this time not as a friend but as Jai’s third wife. After half an hour, Ayesha’s ADC returned to say that Jo had invited her for tea. The meeting was a tense one that the two women tried to cover up with small talk. Only after Jai returned from his polo match did the mood relax somewhat. That night Jai, Ayesha, Jo and Bhaiya dined together.
Ayesha maintains that even if Jo resented her presence, she never showed it and always treated her with kindness. Jo’s sons insist that everyone got on well.‘In those days, lots of people had two wives,’ Joey would later recount. ‘We were all treated the same. We never felt “this is my mother, and this is not my mother”. Our father got on well with all of them.’The children distinguished one mother from another by saying big mama, middle mama and little mama.‘I can’t remember any of the parents giving us a long lecture about a new mother coming to the house,’ continues Joey, speaking of Ayesha’s arrival.‘In our family, if your father and mother did something, it was all right. It was something that was built into our culture.’ To this day many people in Jaipur remember Jo as being lively and mischievous, a person with a good sense of humour. Some insist that she was far more beautiful than Ayesha.
Quentin Crewe writes that in the early years of Ayesha and Jai’s marriage, Jo was seen as spoilt and an intriguer. Now in her mid-twenties, she had little to look forward to apart from the pleasure she got from her sons. Whenever she was in the City Palace there was no question of anything other than living in purdah. Within that world she did exercise a degree of power, being in charge of the zenana deorhi and holding the keys to Jai’s private treasure vaults at Moti Doongri, a small family fort on the outskirts of the city. But the moments of freedom she enjoyed in England would not return. She never went back to Jodhpur after her marriage – off ended bythe palace’s refusal to give her a gun salute equal to that of her aunt, First Her Highness.The constant problem of not knowing who to believe in Jaipur makes it dificult to draw conclusions about Jo or for that matter anyone else in the extended family. ‘One cannot be sure that those who speak ill of her do not do so out of some obscure loyalty to Jodhpur, or because she may have reprimanded them – and these things are long remembered,’ warns Crewe. Although Jo continued to write regularly to Virginia, she never saw her again. As a token of their friendship, she sent Virginia a bronze cast of her slender arm. ‘And I did keep it with me. In over fifty years, I’ve never forgotten Jo,’Virginia later said.