The Ivory Throne

Title: The Ivory Throne – Chronicles of the House of Travancore

Author: Manu S Pillai

Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2015 (First)

ISBN: 9789351776420

Pages: 694

Kerala had in force a peculiar form of matrilineal system to transfer inheritance from one generation to the next. While everywhere in India the buck passed from father to his son, it was from the maternal uncle to his nephew in Kerala. The master of the house was technically a woman, whose brother managed the affairs of her estate with practically no curbs on his power. However, he could not alienate property and had to hand over the rein to his sister's son at retirement or death, usually the latter. Availability of girls in the hereditary line is a crucial requirement of such a system. The Travancore royal family also practiced matriliny and they adopted two girls as heiresses from a branch of the Kolathiri dynasty residing at Mavelikara. They were cousins and got absorbed into the ruling house as Sethu Lakshmi Bayi (the Senior Maharani) and Sethu Parvati Bayi (the Junior Maharani). Unfortunately, the Senior Rani didn't have any children in the early years while a boy was born to the Junior Rani. Succession was thus ensured for the Junior’s clan, but when the ruling Maharaja Moolam Tirunal suddenly died, the heir was only a child. In the circumstances, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi assumed power as Regent and went on to rule Travancore in an unusually benign and progressive manner. The Junior Maharani’s clan tried every weapon in their arsenal to thwart the regency and assume power for her son, who became Maharaja Chithira Tirunal. After the transfer of power when Chithira Tirunal came of age, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi was unceremoniously side-lined from all avenues of statecraft. Disgusted at the vengefulness of the ruling family and irresponsible labour-unionism among the palace staff, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi left Travancore for good and settled in Bengaluru for the rest of her life. This book tells the story of that great Queen of Travancore who was an enlightened despot who offered the people many material rewards of modernity and standards of living. Manu S Pillai is a young historian who once managed the parliamentary office of Shashi Tharoor and this is his debut work.

Pillai has included a glimpse of Kerala history and a somewhat detailed snapshot of the violent advent of Anizham Tirunal Marthanda Varma to the ivory throne, which was the traditional seat of the royal family. Conspiracies and intrigues were commonplace in the palace till its very end. The author makes a subtle hint that the three miscarriages of Sethu Lakshmi Bayi which denied her the opportunity to give birth to a crown prince was the result of some (as yet unknown) foul play. Mutual trust was unheard of. When the Junior Maharani’s relatives came to visit the Senior, they came prepared with cooked food to eat in fear of poisoning. Rules of precedence were strictly observed and the Senior Maharani’s consort, who hailed from a noble family though not of the royal clan, had had to remain standing in the presence of the Junior. This book elevates Sethu Lakshmi Bayi with an impeccable stature and uncomplaining dignity. She did not care for fashion and was never seen except in the ascetic, almost virginal, white robes. With her prodigious administrative acumen and exceptional ability, she spent all the time in ceremonious religiosity or at work. The unassuming, simple yet commanding Maharani became an ideal monarch in the conception of her times and to those whose opinions mattered. As an icon of grace and moral virtue enjoying a material sway over her people, she could do away with a lot of social ills the previous rulers did not dare to remove, such as obscene recitations at temples called Purappattu and animal sacrifices in some temples. However, the reign was not all carrots. She wielded the stick occasionally by enacting laws restricting press freedom to ward off criticism against her government and members of the royal family.

This book presents a survey of the reform measures that transformed Travancore into a modern society. It was the first princely state in India to envision adult franchise at the village level and power was devolved to local bodies. Getting matriliny out of the society was a challenging prospect in a highly conservative state like Travancore. In 1912, the state gave its first boost to nuclear families by allowing men to bequeath part of their self-acquired property or money to wives and children instead of the ancestral house called Tarawad. Thirteen years later, in April 1925, matriliny itself was terminated, permitting partition of property, legalizing all Sambandhams (temporary marriages). Malabar followed suit in 1933 and Kochi only in 1938. The reform was eagerly awaited for long and within five years of its enactment, 23,000 tarawads in Travancore were partitioned. Matriliny no doubt invested women with much power, but it is decried as immoral and barbarian. However, the author and most feminists reminisce about it with a touch of nostalgia and sense of loss.

Those who study the fault lines of Kerala society would immediately perceive its highly communal character. The major caste groups among Hindus are divided into warring factions while the minorities have rolled themselves into an impermeable ball of orthodoxy. This shameful thinking on communal lines is a legacy of the royal era when the bureaucracy was opened up from the clutches of expatriate Brahmins to the local aspirants. Each community organised themselves into pressure groups to protest against Brahmin hegemony and to share the spoils when the government loosened its hiring policy. In 1916, the students of the Maharajas College in Thiruvananthapuram were not allowed to vote for the most outstanding pupil of the year as ‘caste prejudice played a great part in the elections and merit was ignored’. When M E Watts was appointed as the State’s first Christian Diwan in 1925, he followed it up by appointing a fellow Christian as the Chief Secretary. Even the press acted on communal lines by promoting tensions between communities. Officers from one community could have their reputation maligned by the newspapers owned by a rival group.

The role of Sir C P Ramaswamy Iyer in the last two decades of Travancore’s existence is profound. Many books have been written on the subject. Pillai dedicates considerable space to paint him black as a villain on account of his invaluable help done to the Maharaja and Junior Rani’s party in prompting the British to end the regency before it was due. As a reward, Sir CP was made the legal and constitutional advisor of the newly installed Maharaja at a hefty salary of Rs. 72,000 per annum, comparable in magnitude to the outgoing regent Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s package of Rs. 75,000. The superior salary gave him precedence over the incumbent Diwan. Both Thomas Austin and M Habibullah relinquished their positions as the Diwan owing to Sir CP’s interference, who had a marked anti-Christian bias. However, the author’s surmise that the Temple Entry Proclamation – which allowed entry of all lower castes inside temples in 1936 – was ‘a desperate attempt to fracture the alliance between the Christians and Ezhavas who might have formed a united front against the government’ is too farfetched. Maharaja Chithira Tirunal and Sir CP actively promoted temple entry of lower castes while Sethu Lakshmi Bayi was wholeheartedly against it. She never again visited Sri Padmanabhaswamy or any other temple after the entry of downtrodden castes was allowed in these places. In the nine temples she controlled as the Attingal Rani, low castes were not allowed entry. In 1938, the administration forced her to extend the proclamation to these too, by forcibly attaching Sreepadam Estate to the Maharaja. Pillai’s eulogies of the Rani have been successful in exalting her to the pinnacle of glory in readers’ minds till this very point. After that, her ultra-conservatism on this issue turns the horrified readers away from the queen at this lack of empathy to the fate of the lower castes, who were not even treated as humans.

This book faithfully reproduces the legend of a village girl who was elevated as Her Highness Sri Padmanabha Sevini Vanchi Dharma Vardhini Rajarajeshwari Maharani Pooradam Tirunal Sethu Lakshmi Bayi and later back to the common fold as Mrs. Sethu Lakshmi Bayi residing at Bengaluru. The narrative is heavily biased against the Junior Maharani and her family in that all the machinations and conspiracies are solely attributed to them and a clean chit is given to the Senior. He lays shocking allegations of black magic with a prospective human sacrifice at their door. Even the moral character of the Junior Rani is tarnished by seemingly innocuous retelling of unsubstantiated palace rumours. This one-sided narrative damages the credibility of Manu Pillai’s objectivity and judgement and the utility of this book. He even suggests that the royal clan of Chithira Tirunal might have appropriated valuable gems and jewels from the treasure trove kept at Sri Padmanabhaswamy Temple for their personal enrichment. This huge book with 555 pages of narrative and 106 of notes looks like a craftily designed ploy to highlight the absence of eligible female heirs in the discredited Junior Maharani’s clan and to drop clever hints that many eligible ladies are available in the Senior’s family even now. This is especially important as the current heir would play a major role in the administration of the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple even in in these times of democracy.

In spite of these drawbacks, this book is a definitive descriptor of the era in the English language as Robin Jeffrey’s The Decline of Nair Dominance was of the late-nineteenth century. The Senior Rani and her family’s exodus out of Travancore and their heroic efforts to re-invent their career and destiny without any royal pretensions and as members of the common public all over the world is nicely described. The total subordination of Travancore to the British and the emasculation of its military are clearly spelt out in the book. Pillai explains it with an amusing example. The Nair brigade, who acted as the army, was assigned the responsibility of chopping and cooking vegetables for the Maharani’s birthday feast. What was astonishing is that this was taken as an honour rather than an affront. The book is a pleasure to read with the author’s free-flowing diction.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star