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132 14 OF ROYALTY AND ROYAL WEDDINGS “you understand,” the courtier said, “that his majesty does not give interviews. He cannot be quoted. This is just an informal conversation for your background information.” But, I asked, can’t I use indirect quotes to describe what His Majesty said in an informal conversation? Well, yes, this was conceded. This was a discussion that I had twice just a year apart on the fascinating fringes of the Indian subcontinent, in Nepal and Afghanistan. In both cases, I was, according to royal officials and local journalists, the first foreign correspondent to be granted the privilege of “an informal conversation” with a monarch who had recently assumed direct responsibility for his government. Both kings were seeking foreign understanding of their controversial personal rule. In both Kathmandu and Kabul, I had cultivated enough friendships with royal ministers as well as senior journalists who had palace connections to offer the test case for the kings’ new public relations efforts. The royal conversations came during a couple of years when I also was a personal guest for the weddings of an Indian maharaja and a Himalayan crown prince, both of whom I had earlier come to know, on the understanding that I was invited to report the weddings for the Associated Press. And there was a third wedding in this period, with a bride purchased from the United States Educational Foundation in India. It was very royal, too, but someone else reported it. The first South Asian monarch whom I met was the druk gyalpo of Bhutan, Jigme Dorje Wangchuck, at his temporary capital, Paro. I spent more time with him—during interviews, informal chats, archery contests, lama dances, and other events—than the other kings. His story is told elsewhere. A nearby Himalayan kingdom, Nepal, was more readily and frequently accessible . As the only Western journalist in that period who visited Nepal regularly Of Royalty and Royal Weddings 133 and took a serious, continuing interest in its affairs, I got to know it fairly well. In the spring of 1962 I sought an interview with King Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev. I was not very optimistic about getting it. The king did not grant interviews, indeed was a shyly retiring person whose closeted upbringing apparently had left him lacking in self-confidence. He seldom even talked with ambassadors accredited to his court or to other foreigners, and he rarely ventured out of his palace compound. Besides, a number of people in Kathmandu knew that I had been critical of him in the past for having abolished a democratically elected government and imprisoned in 1960 its prime minister, B. P. Koirala, whom I’d gotten to know well in a number of interviews. Anyway, in April 1962 I asked for an audience with the king. I wanted to ask him about Nepal’s relations with India and other subjects. Relations with India were topical at the moment. India controlled Nepal’s access to the outside world; trade and communications with the only other contiguous neighbor, across the roadless Himalayas to Tibet and eastern China, were virtually nonexistent . The king had recently visited New Delhi for talks with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. For years, Nehru had treated Koirala like a younger brother, helping his Nepali Congress Party grow until it won a 1959 election and then supporting its experiment with democratic government. Angered by the king’s abolition of the government and jailing of Koirala, Nehru had secretly authorized support for guerrilla harassment of the royal regime by Nepali Congress members based in India. The king had, in the polite language of diplomacy, discussed with Nehru the subject of stopping “outside interference,” which Nehru did not admit existed. A network of Nepali official and journalist friends helped convince the palace that I would make a good trial effort for the king to reach the outside world. When I was ushered into a small audience building in the royal compound to meet King Mahendra on April 22, one of those officials translated from Nepali into English. The king spoke English well, but he apparently wanted this buffer to give himself time to think and to introduce an element of deniability into anything that I might attribute to royal thinking, however vaguely. Besides, he was fairly stiff. This presumably was a result of having led a cloistered palace existence. Mahendra was, after all, a Hindu deity, so he could not readily...

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