The Great Maharajah Saloon Series / The Polo Bar in Jaipur
Brookhiser, Richard
THE GREAT MAHARAJAH SALOON SERIES THE POLO BAR IN JAIPUR T he Polo Bar of the Rambagh Pal- 1 ace, Jaipur, India, isn't as hard to get to as it sounds. You arrive in New Delhi at some ungodly early...
...You take a huge, vaguely Art Deco room, overlooking maybe the back garden, maybe the front lawn, thick as a golf green and twice as big, with small water channels of white marble and a toad or two...
...Equally typical of Ma, the trousseau had been left behind and neither she nor anyone else could remember where...
...But that class too has its characteristic virtues: service, liberality, fair play in games and in life...
...The recent spate of Raj revivalism isn't much use...
...At dawn, the courtyards fill with shrieking peacocks...
...A Princess Remembers, by Gayatri Devi, is available in any big Indian hotel bookstore...
...ran of Hurricanes for the British war effort, besides dispatching the army of Hyderabad...
...The palace in the name is not an affectation—the Rambagh was a home (they had a number) of the maharajahs of Jaipur—and to savor the experience fully it helps to know a little about Indian princely life...
...If you don't mind a THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 35 long wait, you can order your drink on the verandah outside...
...Maybe it was no favor to have prolonged the princes' existence...
...Finally, it was located at the Ritz Hotel in Paris . . ." Gayatri also got a serious, man-towoman talk from her older brother Bhaiya: After a long clumsy preamble, he came to the real point of his speech: I should accept the idea that Jai was attractive to women and they to him...
...If you get lost in the vast building, staff will direct you...
...Then they caught sight of the emblem of a flower...
...Then why shouldn't I be like that, too...
...What saves you from envy as you read it is the simple enjoyment the author took in her fairy-tale existence...
...Off-white banquettes line the walls, set with bright blue, red, and yellow pillows...
...The Maharani Sahiba got me admitted in the school and it is due to her kindness that I am now in the 10th class...
...Just because he marries you, you can't expect him to give up all his girls...
...He considered it his duty to help people in trouble...
...The British took a class of kings, and made a class of gentlemen...
...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988...
...They used to ride tiny silver bicycles, drive little silver cars, walk tightropes, and enact a variety of dramatic scenes...
...Most of it—The Jewel in the Crown, A Passage to India Gandhi—focuses on the clash of Brits vs...
...On the ballot sheet, we said over and over again, this is where the Maharani's name will appear, and next to it will be a star...
...In 1971, the Indian government, in part irked by such politicking as Gayatri's, in part obeying the egalitarian dynamic, stripped the princes of their titles and their government allowances...
...the grandest, Hyderabad, was larger than France, and its ruler was one of the richest men in the world (in 1939, he picked up the tab for a squadRichard Brookhiser, a senior editor of National Review, is the author of The Outside Story (Doubleday...
...As a girl, she fell in love with the young ruler of Jaipur...
...He never differentiated between Hindus and Muslims...
...It made the most amazing noise for a miniature weapon, and the parrots were the only ones to remain unperturbed...
...In 1976, the widow of the last maharajah of Jaipur wrote a memoir...
...In the early sixties, Gayatri Devi stood as an opposition candidate for parliament for Jaipur, which required her to spend long hours instructing illiterate constituents how to vote...
...She was the granddaughter of the Gaekwar of Baroda...
...If you got thirsty, servants just fetched you something...
...Ah, the flower of Jaipur—who else could it be but the Maharani...
...When you order your last gin and tonic in Jai's house, lift it in his memory...
...Bhaiya seemed almost shocked...
...The small room has been converted with imagination and taste...
...The ceiling is hung with an off-white by Richard Brookhiser cloth, to suggest a tent...
...Prince Philip wrote one...
...The Maharani beat her opponent by 175,000 votes...
...They were a relic from a period of Indian independence that had passed, and an anomaly, soon abolished, in the independent India that emerged...
...when they tell you it's made from purified water, you still don't take it—it's not purified enough...
...You fly to Jaipur, allowing an hour or two for the airport check-in, which is designed to detect the bombs of Sikhs or whomever (next it will probably be Tamils...
...Her new husband was a world-class polo player, hence the name of the bar, and the polo memorabilia which decorate it...
...There is Kipling for the Brits...
...There were hundreds of princely states of varying size and clout...
...No, No...
...A palace gardener wrote the best...
...Since you are traveling in India, you know not to take ice in your drinks...
...Jaipur was less opulent—slightly less...
...Some states were smaller than counties...
...I asked resentfully, knowing that I was so besotted with Jai that I couldn't possibly think of outside flirtations...
...Since the Rambagh Palace Hotel is the best in Jaipur, you are probably staying there anyway...
...Every summer Maharaja Sahib used to spend in England...
...a fountain trickles in the center...
...As a child, her favorite entertainers were the Gaekwar's trained parrots...
...On the walls hang polo mallets, trophies, pictures of teams past (the Maharajah is always identified as "H...
...After Jai's death, the principal of the Jaipur girl's school collected a book of tributes...
...But it was not as simple as that...
...They noticed a symbol showing a horse and rider, agreed with each other that the Maharani rides, so that must be her symbol...
...He was very fond of playing polo, and he was one of the famous players of the world...
...The story of the Rambagh's last owners has an unhappy ending...
...But the princes stand apart...
...As usual summertime came and Maharaja Sahib went to England...
...We'll vote for both...
...He died on the polo field...
...Indian nationalists, taking the side of the nationalists...
...When his body was brought to Jaipur, people thronged the route from the aerodrome to the City Palace in such a manner as if Maharaja Sahib would speak on seeing them...
...Gayatri Devi's husband did not live to see it...
...We enjoy the relics...
...If the Maharani is a star, then the sun must mean the Maharaja...
...Evidently, the coaching paid off...
...Britain's Indian empire, organized on feudal lines, tolerated the princes...
...The world was shocked with the news...
...When there was a game of polo in Jaipur, people used to come in countless numbers to see the polo and to cheer him with shouts and slogans in his praise...
...The Polo Bar is just off the verandah...
...Girls are different...
...By the terms of their accommodation to British hegemony, they surrendered foreign policy to the Viceroy, who also had the power to depose grossly incompetent rulers...
...Their way of life, you may say, was doomed—doomed since it became clear that modern India, unlike Europe, would be ruled from an imperial center...
...They were engaged to be married at the beginning of World War II...
...His late Highness Maharaja Sawai Man Singh was born at Isarda in 1911...
...All right, the star...
...The grand climax of their performance was always a salute fired on a tiny silver cannon...
...H. Jaipur...
...People were crying—if we had known that our Maharaja vould not return, we would never have allowed him to go...
...The Rambagh had been a hotel since 1959...
...He also loved his people very much...
...unfortunately, they never appeared at a more seasonable hour for imbibing...
...I used to work in the gardens of this great Maharaja...
...The current Indian empire, modeled on a democratic and socialist paradigm, could not...
...There was something infantilizing about their quasi-independent status...
...A t Independence, the new Indian nation absorbed the states, but the ex-rulers retained their titles, as wellas much of their prestige...
...Her mother, foresightedly, had already bought her trousseau in Europe: ". . sheets and towels in Florence and Czechoslovakia, shoes and matching bags at Ferragamo in Florence, nightgowns in mousseline de soie from Paris, and a host of other things...
...They are all like the hair on my chest...
...We should all earn such an obit...
...The Muslims of Jaipur will never forget this...
...When some Muslims wanted to leave Jaipur during the communal disturbances, he stopped them and told them, "No Muslim should leave Jaipur and go...
...He wooed her in Cannes and London, picking her up at the Dorchester in his Bentley...
...You arrive in New Delhi at some ungodly early hour, and ride to your hotel in a boxy Indian taxi, down the wide streets deserted but for barreling trucks and cabbies sleeping on roadside cots...
...What is the virtue in being a good ruler if you can be dismissed for being a bad one...
...When it was a palace, of course, the Rambagh didn't need a bar...
...Yes, that seems appropriate for the Maharani, but look, here is the sun...
...I remember one in particular in which a parrot was run over by a car, examined by a parrot doctor, and finally carried off by parrot bearers...
...Who could know he will not return...
...He died in England in 1970, in an accident during a polo game in Ascot Week...
Vol. 21 • February 1988 • No. 2
