When change is impossible
Those of my generation who are recent converts to binging on Netflix can find enough and plenty reason to procrastinate about work, or manage sans sleep, to catch up, as I did, on all episodes of The Crown. Britain’s constitutional monarchy is thrilling for being all too human when what the public expects from it is a daily dose of glitz and glamour. For those of us with even a passing interest in the history of recent times, the references to incidents and names to which our parents had a ringside view, and which we devoured hungrily as second-hand but salacious information, is addictive. There’s Dickie Mountbatten making unsavoury references about his wife Edwina cuckolding him with Nehru, Princess Margaret’s unhappy affairs, Prince Philip’s alleged liaisons, the abdicated Edward VIII’s attempts to win back the monarchy, Prince Charles’s estranged childhood from his parents, Jackie Kennedy’s pronouncements of Buckingham resembling “a provincial hotel” and finding its chief occupant “unintelligent and uninspiring”, and sundry others including the occupants of 10 Downing Street whose lives hardly stand up to scrutiny.
Reporting the goings on and decisions of Westminster to the Queen may be a tiresome custom for the prime ministers, but the British are anything if not hideously ritual-bound. The recent marriages of Princes William and Harry have shown the enduring fascination commoners have for royalty, something Indira Gandhi squelched in India with the withdrawal of the privy purse. The maharajas and maharanis had a popularity they proved at the hustings, and might as easily have formed a lasting federation, but were too split by the petty grievances of history to offer a challenge to the authoritarian resident of No. 1 Safdarjung Road. Nor could they summon up a unifying figure among themselves to lead the front.
While most princes have faded into history, a few have remained in the eye of the people. They have chosen to work just as tirelessly as the British monarchy on what might seem banal to most democrats, but there is the expectation of royal appearances at marriages and death ceremonies, the annual show of “loyalty” by clansmen in what appear anachronistic durbars, and even the stultifying formality of greetings and costumes that defines their status. Spouses and heirs have their share of public “duties”, issues of inheritance are complicated by primogeniture, and members are shunned for marrying beneath their class.
Like their counterparts, India’s royal families have made attempts to appear progressive, to change with the times, often against resistance from within. Unlike the British who have not “sullied” themselves by entering politics or aligning themselves with parties, India’s royals have gravitated naturally towards it, as if to the election born. Some have despaired of politics but continued to serve without a constitutional role; others have created value — and jobs — by turning their palaces into hotels: the same egalitarianism Elizabeth was forced to endure when the crown opted to open Buckingham Palace to the public.
There might be something charming about those English sofas and ageing carpets, but it would be completely understandable if the heirs chose to be rid of it all to embrace the sparse severity of minimalism. In India too, there is a quality of quaintness about the unchanged salons and apartments the royals are confined within, but those rigid trappings must make for a claustrophobic existence. Living in the pages of history can prove to be oppressive. Unfortunately, even if they want to, change is not always possible. The crown, even when absent, has its obligations.