New Delhi: Writer Dharmendra Kanwar still remembers the thrill of Gayatri Devi’s visits to her school in Jaipur. Students at Maharani Gayatri Devi Girls’ School would manufacture excuses to leave their classrooms just to catch a glimpse of the former maharani.
“The highlight of those days was when this extraordinarily attractive maharani visited the school in her French chiffon. It was something to be able to tell our classmates: I saw her,” recalled Kanwar, a student of the 1970 batch and author of The Last Queen of Jaipur: Legendary Life of Maharani Gayatri Devi. Back then, the glamour was the main draw, not the fact that Gayatri Devi was also a Swatantra Party MP — one who would later spend time in Tihar during the Emergency rather than bend.
Standing in the same room with her, Kanwar said, was like a dream. She was an international style icon and UK Vogue had placed her among the world’s ten most beautiful women. Her signature look — soft chiffons in pastels, sleeved blouses, and polki or pearl necklaces — was adopted by women across the country.
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But Gayatri Devi herself later said she was not aware of just how much of an influence her style had.
Behind the poise, pearls, and politics was also a woman with a healthy appetite for sport, food, travel, and lively conversation.
“She was great fun to be with,” recounted actor Sharmila Tagore in an interview after Gayatri Devi’s death in 2009. “Not one of those boring people. She was genuinely, thoroughly fun.”
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First Ayesha, then Gayatri
Before she became Gayatri Devi of Jaipur, she was Ayesha at home.
Born on 23 May 1919 in London, she was the fourth of five children of Prince Jitendra Narayan of Cooch Behar and the Maratha princess Indira Raje of Baroda. At her birth, the pandit had declared the Hindi letter “ga” to be the most auspicious. But her mother called her Ayesha — after the heroine of H Rider Haggard’s gothic-fantasy novel She. The majestic female lead had supernatural powers and was known as “She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed”.
“I’ve had a very happy life. I have no regrets. I’m not a nostalgic person. I live in the present…Why grumble about things that don’t go your way? Make the most of life,” she said in her last interview.
YouTube screengrab of Gayatri Devi
She studied in Santiniketan during Rabindranath Tagore’s lifetime, and later in England and Switzerland. In her memoir A Princess Remembers, she described a “carefree tomboy childhood” — shooting her first panther before she turned thirteen, travelling across Europe with her mother and siblings, and learning to ride and drive.
When her father died young, her mother ran the princely state of Cooch Behar alone. Little Ayesha grew up understanding that women could run kingdoms.
Of outwitting elders and secret meetings
When Gayatri Devi was 12, her mother threw a party. Among the guests was Sawai Man Singh II, the Maharaja of Jaipur, known as Jai to those close to him. That first glimpse later blossomed into a clandestine courtship.
“There was the challenge of outwitting our elders, of arranging secret meetings,” she wrote in her memoir. “And every now and again, there was a marvellous, unheard-of liberty of going for a drive in the country with Jai, of a stolen dinner at Bray, or of an outing on the river in a boat. It was a lovely and intoxicating time.”
What complicated matters was that the maharaja already had two wives and four children. But the couple decided to marry anyway. They tied the knot in 1940, when she was 20.
Her mother had reservations because Jaipur was a conservative state, where women were expected to observe purdah. But the maharaja made his young bride a promise: he would stand beside every decision she made to transform Jaipur. He kept his word.
Once she arrived in Jaipur, Gayatri Devi began pushing at traditional boundaries. The Maharani Gayatri Devi Girls’ School, which still runs today, was one of her earliest contributions — an institution that tackled the near-total exclusion of women from education in the region. She also challenged purdah through the daily demonstration of her own life. She drove cars, played polo publicly in pants, received the world at Rambagh Palace. The old rules no longer applied.
“Rajmata Gayatri Devi rewrote the script for how royal women should live in modern India,” Kanwar, who worked with Gayatri Devi for decades, told ThePrint. “She stepped out of the zenana where royal women were supposed to spend their time in religious ceremonies and other related activities. While she participated in these rituals, she also played tennis, went horse riding, and drove around in her car.”
The maharani versus Congress
Politics was never on the cards for Gayatri Devi until the years leading up to the 1962 parliamentary elections. That’s when, she wrote in her memoir, she was approached by the Congress to contest from the Jaipur constituency.
She came to two conclusions after long discussions with her husband: politics was an option, the Congress was not.
“We debated the whole matter over and over again… though I had given very little conscious thought to politics, somewhere in my mind, ideas and thoughts and arguments had been forming,” she wrote.
‘Mother (Shakuntala Masani), Gayatri Devi (Ayesha) & Dahyabhai Patel, Swatantra Convention, 1962’ | Source: Author
Soon after, she became involved with the Swatantra Party, a classical liberal political outfit founded by C Rajagopalachari. To her, the party was “like an island of sanity in the turbulent political sea around us.” Gayatri Devi’s original intent, she recalled in A Princess Remembers, was simply to canvass for Swatantra Party candidates, raise funds, and hold fetes.
“If my principles meant anything at all, then I couldn’t help to weaken an honest opposition party, even though I couldn’t yet bring myself to join it,” she wrote.
But she took the plunge shortly afterwards, and when the Jaipur constituency needed a candidate for the 1962 Lok Sabha election, she was the natural choice.
The campaign was not easy. Hindi was a barrier. She had her speeches translated from English and spent hours memorising them. She drove to remote villages in a jeep for two months. Her days were beginning at six in the morning, ending after midnight, with clean sheets and a working bathroom becoming what she called her new luxuries.
On polling day in 1962, she won 192,909 votes out of 246,516 cast — 78 percent — the largest majority recorded in any democratic election in the world at the time, confirmed by the Guinness Book of Records. She held that seat for three consecutive terms.
In 1965, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri again asked her to join the party. This time too, her answer was no.
But Gayatri Devi’s presence in Parliament irked Indira Gandhi. According to author-journalist Khushwant Singh, Gandhi “hated princely privilege even more than her father,” and Gayatri Devi represented everything she opposed. The two had known each other since girlhood — both had attended Santiniketan — but all gloves were off now. Gandhi had once reportedly even insulted her as a “glass doll” in Parliament.
Khushwant Singh’s theory was that Gandhi “could not stomach a woman more good-looking than herself”. And that Gayatri Devi “brought out the worst in Indira Gandhi: her petty, vindictive side.”
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Tihar and after
Whatever their personal equation, Indian politics was hurtling toward a dark era and Gayatri Devi would find herself dealing with more than barbs.
When Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency in 1975, Gayatri Devi was charged under the Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Activities Act, for alleged undeclared gold and wealth. In July that year, she was sent to Tihar, where she spent five months.
In her memoir, she attributed her imprisonment to years of vocal opposition to the Congress and to a domestic and international popularity that made her dangerous. After her release, she stepped back from politics. She realised serving people didn’t require being in Parliament.
“I made that mistake,” she said, “thinking that by being in politics I can do something for India.”
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
