The Private Life of an Indian Prince

About the book

The Private Life of an Indian Prince is a 1953 novel by Mulk Raj Anand, published by Hutchinson in London. It is set in the months after Independence, when the hundreds of princely states that had survived under British rule were being asked to join the new India. Anand tells the story of one such state, and of the ruler who could not accept that his world was ending. The book is at once a political novel, a love story and a portrait of a man destroying himself.

The novel is told by Dr Shankar, the Maharaja's personal physician. In a short author's note, Anand warns the reader that the 'I' of the book is not the author: Dr Shankar has taken possession of the narrative, becoming Sancho Panza to the prince's Don Quixote, while Anand looks on, as he puts it, like Shiva's searing third eye. The device lets Anand be both inside the palace and outside it, sympathetic to his characters and merciless about them at the same time.

ਕਹਾਣੀ

The book opens on a rainy afternoon in the Simla Hills. Dr Shankar is woken from his siesta by Munshi Mithan Lai, the Maharaja's former tutor and now his private secretary, with the news that His Highness cannot be found. The Maharaja has slipped away to meet a young Englishwoman, and Captain Russell, who hopes to use the affair to blackmail him, has already rung the police. The whole household is in a panic: the instrument of accession to free India is still unsigned, and the Praja Mandal, the people's movement in the state, is watching for any excuse to damn him.

The missing Maharaja is the ruler of Sham Pur, a small fictional hill state. He has refused to sign away his throne, insisting on complete independence for his state rather than joining the Indian Union. Behind his defiance stands his mistress, Ganga Dasi, a powerful and illiterate hill woman he has installed in his palace ahead of his three legitimate maharanis. To feed her greed he extorts large sums from his starving peasantry, and the extortion provokes a revolt that brings down the displeasure of the government in Delhi.

The Maharaja loses both contests he picks: with his mistress, whom he meets with tears and self-deception, and with his people and the government, whom he meets with grand gestures and lies. Exiled to London, he seduces a shop girl with all his old princely finesse, but he cannot forget Ganga Dasi, and his love for her brings about his downfall.

Dr Shankar: the man who tells the story

Dr Shankar is the novel's conscience and its comic centre. A liberal-minded doctor who studied in Lahore and London, he owes his position to the Maharaja, who lent him twenty thousand rupees for his studies in England, and he knows it. He sees the prince clearly, as a self-willed ruler who quotes Manu and Plato to justify his power, and he serves him anyway, flattering him and shutting his eyes to what he does not want to see. His shame at his own timidity, and his affection for the prince he cannot save, give the novel its painful honesty: the reader watches a decent man make himself part of an indecent system.

Themes: the end of the princely states

Anand's subject is the end of feudal India. For generations the princes had ruled as protected allies of the British crown, their borders fixed by treaty and their armies forbidden to fight each other. With nothing left to conquer, Anand argues through his narrator, they turned to the only conquest left to them: women. The novel shows what that world cost: peasants taxed into starvation, wives set aside for mistresses, and a ruler who mistakes his own appetites for the will of God. Against it Anand sets the new India taking shape around Sham Pur: the people's movement, the government in Delhi, and ordinary men and women who have stopped believing that a prince is anything more than a man.

Why does the Maharaja refuse to join India?

The short answer is pride, and the longer answer is fear. The Maharaja has been raised to believe that he rules by divine right, in the line of Rama of Ayodhya, and that democracy means reducing everyone to the level of the ignorant herd. Ganga Dasi encourages him, because independence keeps her in the palace. And behind both stands a simpler truth: accession would mean accounts, elections and an end to the money, and the Maharaja has never lived in a world where anyone could say no to him. His refusal is not a policy. It is the last act of a man who has mistaken his palace for the world.

ਲੇਖਕ

Mulk Raj Anand (1905 to 2004) was born in Peshawar and studied at Khalsa College, Amritsar, before moving to England, where he took a doctorate in philosophy at Cambridge in 1929. In London he moved among the Bloomsbury writers and met E. M. Forster through T. S. Eliot's magazine Criterion. With R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao, he became one of the pioneers of Indian writing in English, beginning with Untouchable (1935), the story of a latrine cleaner, and Coolie (1936). The Private Life of an Indian Prince came after a run of novels about ordinary Indians, including Two Leaves and a Bud (1937), The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters and The Sword and the Sickle (1942), all listed in the first edition as his books so far. He returned to India in 1947, founded the art magazine Marg, and received the Padma Bhushan in 1968 and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1971. He died in Pune in 2004, aged ninety-eight.

Reception and legacy

The publisher calls The Private Life of an Indian Prince Anand's most profound study of human nature, and later critics have called it a powerful impeachment of the decadent aristocracy that ruled princely India. It has never matched the fame of Untouchable or Coolie, the novels that made Anand's name, but it has stayed in print for seventy years, and it remains the sharpest novel about the princes' last days: funny, angry and unsparing about a world that vanished almost overnight, and about the men who could not survive its going.