In the age of selfies and Instagram, comes an exhibition on royal portraiture – ‘Maharanis: Women of Royal India.’
Indian royalty and the splendour and spectacle of its courts have for long been a matter of great curiosity to millions across the world but what distinguishes this exhibition is that, instead of focussing on the traditional trope of the Maharaja and his accomplishments, the lens - and sometimes even the gaze - is a female one.
Lifting the centuries-old purdah, which screened the outside from them, the haunting portraits offer a rare peek into the lives of the enigmatic women of royal India. Half a century of the public and private lives of the women of erstwhile princely States are chronicled in this display, which opened on October 3 at Kolkata's Harrington Street Art Centre.
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Curated especially for the 10th anniversary celebrations of art exhibitors, Tasveer, the story of the royal families of Travancore, Jammu & Kashmir, Tripura, Rajasthan and many more are told through images and pictures painstakingly sourced from the Victoria & Albert Museum and National Portrait Gallery in London, the Museum of Art & Photography Bangalore, Amar Mahal Museum & Library in Jammu and the archives of assorted sub continental collections, some private and others institutional.
Resplendent in their grace and dignity, they capture the glamour and guile of the era in a way perhaps no modern photographic medium can. Beauties such as Maharani Gayatri Devi (voted by Vogue as one of the most beautiful women on earth), the Maharani of Cooch Behar, Maharani Sita Devi of Baroda, the legendary Maharani of Kapurthala and Princess Niloufer, an Ottoman princess who married the son of the Nizam of Hyderabad, arrest you with their regal presence.
Luxurious and unapologetically hedonistic, the pictures are a fashionista’s delight and you sense how easy it must have been for Indian royalty to take the fashion-houses of Paris by storm. Dazzling Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels sets, sheer French chiffon, puff-sleeved blouses, navratan necklaces, pearl ear danglers; classics that are still celebrated and echoed by contemporary designers like Sabyasachi.
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An accompanying 192-page coffee-table book, edited by Abhishek Poddar and Nathaniel Gaskell, will be released next month and the teaser promises: “With portraits both formal and candid, and equal parts nostalgia and history, this volume points us towards the ways in which these women navigated the traditional and the modern, and influenced political and social change in their time.”
Yes, the Maharanis were much more than chiffon chic, and it is this important socio-historical evolution that the exhibition only cursorily traces. Straddling the fascinating liminal between portraits and photographs, it could have benefitted from some interactive curation. Documenting the provenance of each work and providing background information on the world being captured by the photographer would have helped the lay exhibition-goer to better appreciate the collection.
One hopes the book will satiate the interest piqued by the show, which is on till October 14.