These kinky rulers

I was doing a little research on the princely states of India prior to the country’s independence. I wanted to construct a reading comprehension passage for my students on those states so that the students would realise what a complex country India was when Mountbatten was grappling with the Congress leaders and Muhammad Ali Jinnah to determine the destiny of the independent India. What I stumbled upon turned out to be as entertaining as enlightening though I couldn’t use much of that stuff in a passage for my students.

Quite many of those princes were fabulously funny creatures. Their egos and their antics made me wonder how such caricatures become rulers [even today] and why the substantial part of human history dedicates itself to recording the follies and villainy of these cartoons.

Of the 565 princely states, over 400 were nothing more than fiefdoms of some 50 square kilometres or less in area. A good number of them were efficient administrators, no doubt. But some of those who presided over large kingdoms were sheer megalomaniacs if not sheer neurotics.  

The Maharaja of Baroda, for instance, used court tunics of spun gold. One particular family only was allowed to weave their threads. The fingernails of each member of that family were grown to considerable length which were then cut and notched like the teeth of a comb so that they could caress the gold threads into perfection.

This king also had a collection of fabulous diamonds including the Star of the South, the seventh biggest diamond in the world. His royal elephant was decorated with ten gold chains, each of which was worth 25,000 British pounds in those days.  He also organised annual elephant fights in which two elephants were made to fight with each other after they were driven mad by lance wounds. The fight went on until one of the elephants killed the other.

The Raja of Dhenkanal also used elephants for entertainment, but not violently. His hobby was to exhibit the copulation of elephants for public entertainment.

Elephants played quite a role in the lives of most of those kings. The Gwalior King wanted to install a chandelier that would surpass the one in the Buckingham Palace but was told that his ceiling might not hold such a mammoth chandelier. He got the heaviest elephant of his kingdom raised to the roof of the palace with the help of a specially constructed crane to prove that his roof was strong enough. He was right, fortunately.

The Maharaja of Junagadh was more fond of dogs than elephants.  He celebrated the wedding of his favourite bitch Roshana to a Labrador named Bobby by inviting all the prominent people of the kingdom and around including the British Viceroy. The Viceroy declined the invitation. The canine party cost the country 60,000 British pounds. That in a country which had 620,000 impoverished subjects.

Mysore Maharaja impoverished his treasury when a Chinese sage told him that crushed diamonds had aphrodisiac potency. Hundreds of precious diamonds were ground to dust and the potions made with it were fed to the royal concubines.

 

Bhupinder Singh of Patiala in 1911
Image from Wikipedia

Women were a weakness of all the kings. The award for maximum sexual delights should go, however, to none other than Bhupinder Singh of Patiala.  His harem consisted of 350 beauties some of whom joined him in the swimming pool, all naked, and served him whisky as well as entertained him with some of the most complex positions described in the Kamasutra.

All the kings of Patiala had a special bone in their penises apparently. Until the turn of the twentieth century, the King would appear in public fully naked once a year wearing only a diamond breastplate which had 1001 brilliant blue-white diamonds. His penis would be in full and glorious erection.  It was believed in the country that the royal erection radiated magical powers which could drive out evil spirits from the land.

We could go on and on. Our rulers were great entertainers, in short. As I continued my research, which obviously was not giving me the stuff for the comprehension passage, I halted to wonder whether some of our present leaders are any different.