At Amethyst’s Folly, a pair of pale blue-green eyes holds mine. Durru Shehvar’s beauty is barely contained by the black frame that encases her face. Princess of Berar by marriage, imperial princess of the Ottoman Empire by birth, lover of Urdu literature and accomplished user of the quill, it was said she “embodied all of the empires ever created in this world”. She and a host of other queens and princesses from India look on from the many portraits at the ongoing exhibition curated by Bangalore-based Tasveer Gallery.
Who are these women — glamorous, powerful, leading ladies of places that have long fallen off the map? Rudyard Kipling believed that Providence had created the maharajas just to offer mankind a spectacle. Their vices and virtues and their lives and loves became part of folklore. The fairy-tale dimmed with Independence, but their legend lived on. However, the women of princely India lived shuttered in zenanas, except for a few who came from liberated families. The advent of portraiture in the subcontinent and India’s journey towards freedom and a new social order gradually changed that. Iconic photographers like Raja Deen Dayal and Cecil Beaton and studios such as Bourne & Shepherd and Lafayette captured this emerging India, including the royal jet set. And, it is some of these pictures that Tasveer brings to light.
Shilpa Vijayakrishnan, editor, Tasveer Journal, says, “We look at how photography enables historic documentation and social commentary. Women of princely India feature on the margins in books on royal fashion and cuisine but there has never been a show on them. Our exhibitions are accompanied by publications, and the book lists 137 portraits from the mid-19th to the 20th Century.”
Edited by Abhishek Poddar and Nathaniel Gaskell, and published by Mapin, it has photographs reproduced and collated by the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP). “Besides its own collections, MAP has borrowed from the Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, London. Others are sourced from Amar Mahal, Mehrangarh, Laxmi Vilas Palace Museum and the Swaraj Art Archive. Royal families also opened their albums for us. They were excited about the novelty of this idea but were particular about how the pictures were used — we can’t use them for merchandise. Some pictures have been retouched but we’ve retained the tone,” says Shilpa.
The pages are also interspersed with researched articles by Pramod Kumar K.G. on ‘Photographs of Women across Princely India’ at a time when photography was taking root here; Martand Singh, a royal, in ‘Incomparable Princesses of India’ writes on five iconic maharanis — his mother Sita Devi of Kapurthala, Indira Devi of Cooch Behar, her daughter, Gayatri Devi of Jaipur, Durru Shehvar and her cousin Niloufer of Hyderabad, whose lives he was a witness to; in ‘Images of Indian Royalty’, Amin Jaffer discusses the amalgamation of two cultures where the sitters were as much at home in Indian finery as they were in riding breeches and mink coats; and Shilpa Vijayakrishnan writes on how some of them challenged the subjugated position of women in ‘Behind the Veil, In Front of the Lens’.
A catalogue lists the women slotted by their princely states with interesting anecdotes — the daring Sita Devi of Baroda who married for love smiles into a mirror; Chimnabhai II, first president of the All Women’s Conference, rests her shoe-clad feet on the chaise longue; the fiery Nawabs of Bhopal stare defiantly at the camera; the pensive look of Victoria Gowramma of Coorg, Queen Victoria’s godchild; Sanyogita Bai Holkar of Indore in a bathing suit; and the many women of foreign origin such as Molly Fink of Pudukottai and Joan Falkiner of Palanpur who were maharanis in lands far removed from their own.
Vidya Singh of the royal family of Vizianagaram, whose aunts also find mention in the book, adds, “The beauty in the pictures lies in the aura of these women and the times they lived in.” It also comes from the romantic ideal of an age gone by.
(Maharanis: Women of Royal India (Rs. 3,950) is available at Amethyst. The exhibition is on till August 14, 11 a.m. to 7.30 p.m.)
