Читать книгу China Hand - John Paton Davies Jr. - Страница 15

At Trivandrum I found myself unexpectedly in a reviewing stand seated on the right of the Maharani of Travancore. I had arrived at Trivandrum, the capital of Travancore, that morning and sent a note to the Diwan, or Prime Minister, asking for an interview with him. He had courteously received me, and also arranged for his barrister son, Pattabhi Raman, to show me a solemn religious procession later in the day.

Pattabhi Raman met me at the foot of the canopied reviewing stand, outside of Trivandrum and beside a broad road, freshly covered with white sand, leading to the shores of the Arabian Sea, less than a mile away. Thousands of townspeople and country folk tranquilly lined the road, across from which groves of coconut palms rustled in a light breeze.

Without fuss or fanfare the Maharani and the Princess arrived in a long Cadillac. Pattabhi Raman presented me to the Maharani, an attractive woman in perhaps her mid-forties, and to her daughter, who in her early twenties, was, as princesses are supposed to be, beautiful. The Maharani was the sister of the preceding Maharajah and mother of the reigning one. Her son was now Maharajah not because her brother had died without heirs but because in Travancore succession proceeded from the Maharajah to his sister’s son and not to his own. Therefore the spoiled three-year-old son of the beautiful Princess was heir apparent. P.R. said that the young Maharajah was more interested in his nephew than in his own son.

This mode of determining succession seemed to me to have one evident advantage over the familiar passage from father to son. One could be sure of an unbroken bloodline so long as the women of the ruling house produced both sons and daughters. From the woman’s point of view, it ensured feminine dominance without the burdens of authority. What chance did a maharajah have, boxed in by mother and sister? He owed his princely legitimacy to his mother, not his father, and eventually would be deprived by his sister of dynastic immortality through his son.