Daily Recco, December 8: The royal intrigues of The Ivory Throne

Two girls — first cousins — barely a year apart in age, are adopted into a royal family. The matrilineal system of the royal households makes the elder cousin the Senior Rani (queen) and the younger one the Junior Rani. The quirks of fate leave it such that the Senior Rani is the regent to the minor king whose mother is the Junior Rani. The intrigues that follow in the Travancore Palace form a large part of writer Manu S Pillai’s debut non-fiction book — The Ivory Throne.

The intrigues would put soap-opera vamps of the day to a royal shame. And remember that the rivalry between the queens is generational — they were adopted by the adversarial sisters, Mahaprabha and Kochukunji. The adoptive mothers spared no pains in teaching the daughters the scheming, cunning and shrewdness in the game of one-upmanship against the other. It was like each one was raising her coterie, which would eventually lead to a tragic contest for power and authority between the Ranis in the years to come.

While the author does his best to retain the tone of neutrality in his narration, one cannot help but notice a slight tilt of sympathies for the Senior Rani. But for such a gripping narration, we are prepared to indulgently overlook that slight.

The 700-odd-page book, however, opens centuries before the Ranis were even thought of. In 1497, Vasco da Gama lands in Kerala in search of the Oriental spices that were worth their weight in more than gold. However, his arrival does more than just maritime trade. With traders from all parts of the world including the Dutch, the Arabs, the Greeks and the Romans making their way into Calicut, there was a struggle for power by the Occidental forces to possess the prized land and its resources. The turn of events led to the rise of brutal but extremely astute Marthanda Varma — the Maker of Modern Travancore — in 1729, who ruled the land with ruthless efficiency. The author introduces Marthanda Varma’s brutality and ruthlessness as, “He set an eerie example for instance, by slaughtering his own cousins in cold blood when they refused to fall in line with him.” The ruthlessness of the maker is reflected in his descendants. 

As an author, Manu Pillai gives a rounded and exhaustive context to the era, the royal lineage and the societal practises of that time. For instance, he details the feminist and very liberal nature of the Kerala society in the bygone era, where women having open sexual relations was not frowned upon. He blames the present prudishness of the society there on the Christian missionaries. In their need to ‘civilise’ India, the missionaries imposed their Victorian ideas and morality upon the land, effectively clamping down on the freedom of women for aeons to dawn, he details.

This wonderful slice of history wrapped in Pillai’s delectable narration was published in 2016 and won him the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2017. The 700-page book is totally worth your time, we assure you.

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