- Royal Patronage, Power and Aesthetics in Princely India by Angma Dey Jhala
Angma Dey Jhala’s central interest is the lives of zenana women under the Raj, particularly women of the nominally independent princely states. The first premise of Royal Patronage, Power and Aesthetics in Princely India is that the wealth of the ruling families in these states enabled women of their courts to be disproportionately important as collectors and consumers. Its corollary is that by virtue of their traditional dynastic rule these states shaped the idea of traditional India featured in historical fiction and film.
Jhala builds Royal Patronage around a set of case studies featuring primary research set in a survey context that is both synchronic and diachronic, looking back to 1857 and, occasionally, even earlier. This strategy widens the range and potential audience of Royal Patronage without sacrificing the details she has unearthed, but it means setting some of her gems in the foil of received opinion.
Her method works best in the opening chapter on “The Dholpur Jewellry Dispute.” In 1911 the young Maharaja of Dholpur died without issue. His successor claimed that some jewelry in the possession of the widowed Maharani was not stridhana, her personal wealth, but darbar, state property. The outraged Maharani returned to her family in Nabha with the jewelry. Having established the distinction between stridhana and darbar in a particular legal dispute, Jhala moves into a more general account of the kinds of property that adhered to the woman herself as opposed to husband or state and the relationship between jewelry and the rituals of kingship going back as far as Sanskrit records.
After detailing the royal patronage of jewelers and the role of the royal consort as herself a jewel on display, Jhala returns to the legal case, reconstructing the Maharani’s formal ornamentation, naming and describing the jewelry that would have all but covered her body. Jhala convincingly highlights “the role of zenana women as collectors, transmitters, patrons and custodians of jewelry, cloth, clothing and decorative ornaments in the early twentieth century” (68).
Jhala structures chapter 2 around a contrast between two comparatively recent cookbooks: Cooking of the Maharajas (1975) and Royal Indian Cookery (1987). She presents these works as capstones to a history of culinary hybridity preserved by British women writing to orient colonial brides, and by Indians of the new middle class incorporating Western foods into Indian cuisine. Cooking of the Maharajas was written by Sally Holkar with her husband and onetime Stanford classmate Richard Holkar, prince of Indore, after their marriage in 1966. Jhala associates Sally Holkar’s account of culinary acculturation with the “pseudo-spirituality” of the 1960s (94). It is true that Holkar interleaves the traditional stories of her guru, the family’s Brahman chef, with her recipes, but that linkage owes more to the rhetoric of post World War II so-called ethnic cookbooks than to the Indophilia of the Beats or the Beatles. That the spirit of a culture infuses its food has been a commonplace since Angelo Pellegrini published The Unprejudiced Palate in 1948.
The Holkars’ next project was to support the region’s handloom weaving through the Rehwa Society, and Sally was a founder of Women Weave, a non-profit that trains poor women to create and market fabrics. Jhala ascribes a neo-colonial subjectivity to Holkar, but saving the Maheshwari sari in the world is a logical extension of preserving culinary tradition at home and one of many Indian inflections of arts and [End Page 527] crafts ideology. Jhala understandably favors the living history approach of Manju Shivraj Singh’s Royal Indian Cookery to work devoted to preservation, but her argument would have been better served with a British counterexample that jibed with her accounts of colonial wives adapting to India, after the manner of Flora Annie Steel’s The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (1888).
In Jhala’s third chapter, “The Tawa’if and the Maharani: The Influence of Royal Aesthetics on Indian Cinema, Tourism and...