TEACH ROYALS THEIR HISTORY

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July 16, 2011
by Rajesh Ramachandran

LIKE literacy campaigns in illiterate, backward regions of the country, the Union government now needs to launch a national history mission to educate the princelings of former royal families about their ancestors and what they did to the people of this country.
In Madhya Pradesh, home to some of the biggest Maratha kings of yore, the BJP government was caught trying to remove the stains of Scindia history in school textbooks by deleting a passage from Subhadra Kumari Chauhan’s famous poem celebrating the martyrdom of the Rani of Jhansi ( Khoob ladi mardani… ). Sure, there’s the distinct smell of the brave Rani’s blood on the hands of the Scindias and all the Hindutva whiteners of the Sangh Parivar cannot blank out their alliance with the British when the Rani was getting killed outside the Gwalior fort.
Similarly, another old vassal of the British, the former Travancore royal family— suddenly in the news for the breathtaking riches found in the hidden cellars of the Padmanabhaswamy temple— is now talking about its ancestors rising in revolt against the British East India Company. This claim made by the current head of the family — posing as a former maharajah though Balarama Varma, the last Maharajah of Travancore, died in 1991 and since then there are no maharajahs, former or current— surpasses even the Scindias’ attempts.

Pretender

But then, the pretender princeling could be forgiven for his sudden loss of memory. After all, anyone could lose his sense of balance if out of the blue a treasure trove worth Rs one lakh crore is found in one’s backyard. And good history teachers need to revive them from their shock.
It is a fact that Travancore was the only native state in Asia to defeat a colonial power conclusively at the battle of Kulachal in 1741. It is also a fact that the Dutch fleet surrendered to the Travancore army and its chief Eustachius De Lannoy went on to become the Big Captain or Valia Kapitaan of the Travancore Nair Army. But then, these forces were not turned against the British or any other foreign power, but against smaller kingdoms in what is now south and central Kerala.
Marthanda Varma, the founder of the Travancore state, took over the reins of the kingdom by defeating and killing his cousin Padmanabhan Thampi and the eight feudal Nair households of Thiruvananthapuram.
He brutally killed all of them, confiscated all their wealth, dug ponds where their houses once stood and in a most cruel act, handed over all the innocent womenfolk — grandmothers, mothers, sisters, daughters, granddaughters — every single woman member of these ruling families to strangers of the local fishing community so that their progeny would never lay claim to the throne of Travancore. Some of the wealth found in the Padmanabhaswamy temple cellars obviously belongs to those wretched mothers. But most of it ought to be war loot from smaller kingdoms like Kottarakkara, Kayankulam, Kollam and Ambalapuzha that were annexed.
Marthanda Varma’s successors had struck an alliance of undying loyalty with the British East India Company that sapped the native state of its independence over the decades. And while Pazhassi Raja, a northern Kerala king, really “ rose in revolt against the British” in 1793, the Travancore family remained a loyal ally of the British.

Traitor

At the turn of the Nineteenth Century there was a popular uprising against the Travancore Raja and his corrupt Prime Minister Jayanthan Sankaran Namputhiri. The weak king was forced to replace Namputhiri with a dynamic young rebel, Velu Thampi.The nation first heard about Thampi when Subhash Chandra Bose, after establishing the provisional government of Azad Hind in Singapore in 1943, listed Thampi among the great patriots who fought the British Empire.
Thampi had taken on the British about five decades before the first war of independence in 1857. He failed and when surrounded by British forces, committed suicide inside a temple in 1809, about 100 km away from Thiruvananthapuram. The British then carried his corpse to the capital to be gibbeted. His proclamation at Kundara, a call to arms, against the British was probably the first such by an Indian freedom fighter. One of the first statues of martyrs built by independent Kerala’s government was that of Thampi. But the Travancore history texts till Independence had termed Thampi a traitor for having fought the royal family’s colonial masters.
Worse, Travancore along with Hyderabad, Junagadh and Kashmir, had refused to join the Indian union in 1947. Instead, the Prime Minister, CP Ramaswamy Iyer, mooted an ambiguous ‘ American Model’ constitution outside the Indian union.
His police mowed down hundreds ( some say thousands) of protesting Communist party workers in Punnapra and Vayalar hamlets in Alleppey district. The Travancore family was deaf to the dying protesters’ cry of ‘ American Model in Arabian Sea’. Iyer finally fled Thiruvananthapuram when his nose was chopped off by an RSP activist in a failed assassination bid that probably led Balarama Varma to sign the instrument of accession in 1948.
And now a pretender insists that the Travancore family had risen in revolt against the British in what seems to be part of a propaganda war to claim the Padmanabhaswamy temple treasures as offerings by the royalty.
Kerala, particularly Travancore under the royal family, was a poor, backward, caste- ridden place that was transformed by three waves of social reform movements — led by the missionaries, Marxists and the Guru — that though contradictory of each other, built modern Kerala’s progressive social structure. Foreign Christian proselytisers even bought slaves from the regressive Travancore state, and converted and set them free to live a life of dignity. And of course, they set up schools, colleges and hospitals creating the new elite of Kerala.

Travesty

The great Sree Narayana Guru consecrated an ‘ Ezhava Siva’ telling the Nairs and Namputhiris to mind their gods. His re- interpretation of the Advaita philosophy lent confidence to the Ezhavas, the largest backward community in Kerala.
And the Communists set the bodies and minds of the oppressed, bonded labourers of the feudal lords free. If Kerala’s social indicators have leapfrogged into the Western European league, it is in spite of the Travancore family. After all, they used to collect tax from backward caste Hindu women who wanted to cover their breasts! Before setting out for Gwalior and Thiruvananthapuram, the proposed national history mission should visit 7, Race Course Road to tell the Prime Minister the story of the Bhagat Singh trial.
The greatest youth icon of India’s struggle for independence was betrayed by a contractor, Sobha Singh. In what appears to be false testimony, Sobha Singh identified Bhagat Singh during the trial as the person who threw the bomb down from the visitor’s gallery of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi. Sobha was not a legislator, nor a journalist, nor an official, and had no business to be there at that very moment. But this extremely dubious testimony was accepted by the court. And Sobha became the biggest contractor in Delhi and was knighted by the Empire.
Now, Manmohan Singh wants to honour the memory of this man who betrayed the nation’s biggest hero. Singh has asked Sheila Dikshit to rename Windsor Place after Sir Sobha. Hope he doesn’t write to Parkash Singh Badal to get Jalianwala Bagh named after Dyer.
rajesh. ramachandran@mailtoday.in