Rue du Bac
By then I had little connection to my home town. Milan, the sober industrial metropolis of Italy’s north – home, beginning in the 1950s, to a series of enlightened entrepreneurs and a sophisticated intellectual life – had long since folded in on itself and become drab and provincial.
A few years before that trip to Mumbai, I had separated from the artist I’d fallen in love with at nineteen, when his freewheeling lifestyle, his old-world manners and his lack of interest in all things material had presented me with an irresistible alternative to my own bourgeois upbringing. Marriage was never part of my plan, because I had no desire to replicate the family I’d come from. My father, a brilliant executive at a major corporation, was loving but mostly absent due to work. My brother and I, six years apart, had grown up as single children. And the intense bond I shared with my beautiful and idle mother suffered a huge blow just as I was entering adolescence.
In any case, the independent streak I shared with my lover seemed to bar us from repeating those mistakes. For years we lived in separate houses, me writing my articles and he painting his expansive watercolours of archeological ruins – and later, the large canvases of remote cargo ships on the high seas that would become his spiritual refuge. But then something changed and we tied the knot. Later, when our children were born, I found myself enchanted by my son’s impatient curiosity and my daughter’s inquisitive grace. And I became so attached to my family that for years I navigated the treacherous waters of marriage with both hands firmly on the helm.
When the separation came, it was both civilised and devastating. Perhaps I should have pursued my interests and left immediately. Instead I lingered for another five years in the home we’d all shared, my instinct pressing me to keep our family united, in whatever way possible. I was determined to be the kind of parents who can live up to the commitment they’ve made, even under different roofs. And it worked. Until my son left to study in England. Until my brother fell sick and died. And suddenly our beautiful home – with its grand ships sailing on motionless seas, my colourful suzani embroideries, our library in such disarray that I often had to rebuy books we already owned – had become a monument to absence. That’s when I surrendered.
* * *
It was therefore in a moment of rebellion, when it seemed like the future had nothing in store for me but more loss – my father had already passed away, my mother was in her late seventies and my teenage daughter would leave home after secondary school, just like her brother – that I decided to move to Paris. Perhaps it was recklessness: I was going to live in a place where I knew no one and could not even speak the language. And yet it was precisely this lack that motivated me. I wanted a new language, a new city, a new culture, a new beginning.
Then, in a stroke of luck, I found a lovely apartment in the building that was once home to a grande dame of Parisian literary society, Madame de Staël. ‘It’s a bit bizarre,’ said the friend who’d gone to take a look at it for me. ‘The walls are crooked, and I can’t promise you the floors are straight either, but there’s charm and fireplaces to spare.’
The day we left Milan, my daughter Maria Edmée and our terrier Ombra were wearing the same expression, somewhere between excitement for the new and fear of the unknown. As for me, I recognised that we were saying goodbye not only to our family life but to all the comforts that came with it: longtime friendships, a support network, our beautiful apartment with its gold-inlaid Art Nouveau doors and windows facing out on to a sprawling garden, and a spacious farmhouse kitchen, where so many of our friends had gathered. And yet I knew that I would miss none of it.
Paris was still caught in the languor of late August. So it was that I found myself sitting on the parquet floor of our new home on the rue du Bac, intent on dealing with the ungodly number of boxes we’d dragged along with us, when, slicing one open, I found a green folder with the words ‘Rani of Mandi’ written on it. It had been some months since I’d thought of that ill-fated princess whose portrait had captured my imagination in Mumbai. As soon as I’d returned from that trip, I’d asked an Indian friend to help dig up more details about her story. The Rani of Mandi had had two children, one boy and one girl, she wrote. The son had died several years ago, but the daughter was still alive – she was now a seventy-eight-year-old woman, and she’d said that the information accompanying the portrait of her mother in the exhibition I’d seen was incorrect. So the story wasn’t true after all? My friend had enclosed an address and phone number, along with a photo of a petite woman with shoulder-length silver hair wearing a turquoise sari and posing timidly before an enlarged portrait of her mother. Rani Nirvana Devi of Bilkha, it read. The address listed was in Pune, in Maharashtra, the large central state of India.
Of course, I’d thought, with a pang of disappointment. If the story about the Rani of Mandi and her jewellery were true, it would be well known. Then I’d tucked the letter back in the folder and stashed it who knows where.
Only when the note resurfaced in the chaos of my move to Paris did I realise how many questions remained unanswered; but trying to juggle all the pressing needs of my new life left me with no time to pursue them. Still, every day when I took Ombra for a run along the banks of the Seine, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d left something unresolved. However, the thought of dialling the mobile phone number of an old lady who lived on the other side of the world to tell her I was an Italian calling from Paris to find out if her mother really died in a Nazi prison camp was shameful even to consider. So I let it drop.
Then, one afternoon, seated at my desk, staring out the window at a patch of shifting sky, I reached for my phone. Outside the gulls were circling nervously, presaging bad weather. To my surprise, a friendly voice responded. ‘Yes … who did you say you are?’
In a flash, the rani’s sing-song English brought back memories of my sleepwalking days in Mumbai: when, during breakfast one morning, I’d watched a team of workers demolish a building between the ocean and my hotel using just one hammer each; when I’d discovered that the vultures, who for centuries had been picking Zoroastrian corpses clean atop Malabar Hill’s Tower of Silence, had flown elsewhere to escape the pollution. I remembered the chaste couples who sat along the crescent-shaped Marine Drive, staring out at the sea, growing less chaste as the night wore on until the police came to shoo them away; and the day that Vikram took us to a movie set, where, after an acrobatic duel, Aishwarya Rai, Bollywood’s most heavenly diva, came over to say hello, bewitching us with her impossibly green eyes while shyly extending her hand.
All of this rushed through my mind as an elderly woman’s childish voice explained to me that, unfortunately, certain information included in the exhibition deviated from the truth. The story of her mother’s arrest in Paris, yes, that was true. And it was true that she’d been sent to a prison camp. Except that the camp was in France – her daughter couldn’t remember where. And either way, Amrit Kaur didn’t die in 1941 but was freed after a few months. ‘I believe my grandfather, the Maharaja of Kapurthala, was able to organise a prisoner exchange,’ she said. ‘But captivity had taken a terrible toll on my mother’s health, and I think in the end it killed her. In any case, she died in London in 1948.’
When I asked about the jewels, whether her mother had really traded them to save others’ lives, she told me that she didn’t have the slightest clue.
‘Come to see me,’ she said, just when I thought the conversation was at an end.
I must have sat there silent, because she repeated herself: ‘It would be nice if you came to see me.’
There was something about her tone of voice that made the invitation feel like more than just a courteous gesture.
I turned my gaze back to the window; the sky was now shrouded in dark clouds.
‘I would love to,’ I replied, as the first raindrops began to strike the panes.
The World in a Garden
Setting off anytime soon, however, would have been impossible. I had a city to discover, a daughter to put through school, a job to keep up and a life to rebuild. Nevertheless, that brief conversation with the Rani of Bilkha had piqued my curiosity. On the web, you could find only a handful of facts about Amrit Kaur: she was born in 1904 in the small kingdom of Kapurthala, in north-west India; she was the fifth – and only daughter – of the maharaja’s six children, whom he’d had with as many wives; she’d gone to a boarding school for girls in Sussex; and, rather intriguingly, she’d posed for the camera of Lee Miller, in the days when Man Ray’s American muse was taking her first steps as a photographer at an atelier in Montparnasse.
A few days later, I went to do some reconnaissance at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. But there was nothing in the general catalogue under Amrit Kaur, Rani of Mandi.
On the other hand, the French newspapers abounded with articles on Amrit’s relatives, who paid regular visits to Paris between the 1920s and 1930s. I learned that her father, Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala, had purchased a home on a corner of the Bois de Boulogne, bordering the gardens of the Château de Bagatelle – a gem of Neoclassical architecture commissioned by Louis XVI’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, as an outpost for hunting trips in the Bois. The charming ‘Pavillon de Kapurthala’, now owned by the city, was under restoration, but where I found a construction site there once stood a garden with rows of grape vines – yet another of Paris’s bizarre traditions, these urban vineyards, a few of which are still flourishing, like the vineyard on the hill of Montmartre. In the age of Louis XVI, it appears, the most celebrated wine was produced by the multi-ethnic neighbourhood of La Goutte d’Or. Determined to make Paris his adopted home, in the interwar years Amrit Kaur’s father had even experimented a little with his own winemaking.
The newspaper clippings told of a gregarious and widely travelled maharaja: a tall man with a commanding moustache and an expression that, on account of the dark patches around his eyes, seemed grave even when he was laughing. In most of the photos he wore an achkan, a long brocade jacket buttoned up to his neck, with a belt studded with precious gems, trousers that tapered at his ankles, and a turban. But his face was clean-shaven. The fact that from middle age on he didn’t wear a beard, which Sikhs were forbidden to shave off, was a brazen sign of Westernisation, and it brought him no shortage of criticism in India.
Other photographs showed him in a top hat and tails, flanked by members of France’s elite such as Baron Robert de Rothschild, Princess Marie de Broglie and Countess Élisabeth Greffulhe. To his dear friend Marie de Broglie he presented a pet elephant named Miss Pundji – greatly appreciated until they found out she had the appetite of a dozen horses. So it was, after a while, that the princess entrusted Miss Pundji to the Jardin d’Acclimatation – a park with peacocks and other free-roaming animals in the Bois de Boulogne. However, the elephant must have maintained a special place in her heart, since the princess later had her buried in the castle gardens in Chaumont-sur-Loire, beside the graves of their family dogs. On the headstone, to this day, is a medallion with a photograph of Miss Pundji surrounded by the princess’s children, along with an epitaph that reads like a Proustian flourish: ‘Ô tristes que nous sommes / notre fantaisie ici enfouie ’ (How sorrowful we are / our fantasy here buried).
Amrit’s father and mother: Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala and Rani Kanari, c.1890.
The articles on Amrit Kaur’s polygamous father spoke of shooting parties, horse races at the track in Longchamp, evening concerts; of his Indian fourth wife, Rani Kanari, dressed like a Frenchwoman, in accordance with the Belle Époque’s latest whim; and of his Spanish fifth wife, Anita Delgado, dressed like an Indian woman, with a crescent-shaped emerald on her forehead. Much ink was also spilled on the social escapades of Brinda of Kapurthala, spouse of Paramjit Singh, the maharaja’s firstborn and Amrit Kaur’s half-brother – a gadabout who seems never to have missed a soirée, from the faubourg Saint-Honoré to the faubourg Saint-Germain. But the family member most admired by the French press was Sita Devi, known also as ‘Princess Karam’. Married to the maharaja’s fourth son, Karamjit Singh, she was a petite woman with a keen sense of style, whose delicate features lent an air of exoticism to the fashion magazines of the day. One sumptuous photograph taken by Cecil Beaton in 1934 shows her with eyes closed, as if dreaming, beneath a cascade of peony petals.
Amrit’s sister-in-law, Sita Devi of Kapurthala, also known as Princess Karam.
All of which attested to the wide renown of the Kapurthala family in France, though none of it revealed a thing about the maharaja’s daughter. What was she doing in Paris in the 1930s? I’d read somewhere that her husband was appointed ambassador. Did it mean that she was following him on some sort of diplomatic assignment? Most disappointing was to find no record of the portrait featured in Lee Miller’s first solo show in Manhattan, in 1933, mentioned in a review. Whatever connection Miller had had with Amrit Kaur was to remain a mystery, and not the last when it came to this story. The only interesting hit that cropped up was the Wikipedia page for the Clovelly-Kepplestone boarding school for girls in Sussex, where the princess’s name figured among the institute’s most famous alumnae – a rather vivacious student, it struck me, given that she’d directed an all-girl five-piece jazz band. Clo-Kepp, as it was nicknamed, wasn’t just any school, I came to learn. Its founder, Frances Anna Browne, was the sister of the theatre impresario Maurice Browne. Thanks to the Brownes’ connections, several noteworthy guests had paid a visit to the students at Clo-Kepp, including the great African American baritone and actor Paul Robeson, who starred in Othello at London’s Savoy Theatre; or Sir Ernest Shackleton, who lived nearby and gave frequent talks there on his expeditions in Antarctica. Tuesday evenings at Clo-Kepp were dedicated to needlework, but Mondays were spent rehearsing comedies for the stage, and on Saturday evenings they danced. Under the banner of religious tolerance, the school welcomed pupils from all over the world, with Jewish girls making up a third of the student body. I read this as a sign of a connection between the Indian princess and the Jewish world.
Just a week after my rather frustrating trip to the library chasing a ghost, Amrit Kaur took it upon herself to appear before me, in a group photograph.
I was out discovering Paris and had decided to visit the extravagant gardens of Albert Kahn, a Jewish banker born in 1860 in a Hebrew enclave of French Alsace. The son of a humble livestock merchant, Kahn had built himself an immense fortune from a sequence of formidable investments, allowing him to set up his own investment bank at the age of thirty-eight. He would eventually suffer huge losses in the 1929 stock market crash and die in poverty at the age of eighty, in his house in Boulogne, on Paris’s western outskirts – with the Germans at the door and just a few hours before bailiffs came to repossess even the bed he died on.
This visionary banker, who valued discretion over money, lived in a hôtel particulier overlooking a ten-acre park. Today, visitors enter the park through a building that houses a permanent exhibition on Kahn’s life. The evidence paints the portrait of a secular, frugal vegetarian, a nature lover and tireless spirit who spoke French with a strong Alsatian accent, avoided the salons, and never married. His ideal evening, according to those who knew him, was to have his driver take him outside Paris, roll the top down, and sleep beneath the stars – preferably somewhere near the sea.
Albert Kahn standing on the balcony of his Parisian office, 1914; the only photograph he ever posed for.
The building also houses a rotating exhibition of his unparalleled collection of ‘autochromes’. The predecessors of colour photographs, ‘autochromes’ were glass plates coated with dyed grains of potato starch and lampblack, producing a granular, watercolour-like effect, which had been invented by the Lumière brothers in 1903. Kahn invested a large chunk of his capital in a visionary project that took advantage of this new technology.
It had all begun in 1908, on a trip around the world, accompanied by his driver-engineer Alfred Dutertre and more than 4,000 stereotype plates. Together they photographed Japan, China and the United States. Then, a few months after his return to Paris, Kahn set off again, this time for Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil, along with a professional photographer, Auguste Léon. Together they’d experiment with the first autochromes.
Out of those experiences came the idea for an immense archive of colour images depicting the entire planet. By showing the human geography of every country and continent – customs, practices, beliefs, habits, expressions that now seem astonishing, with Ireland and the Balkans looking like realms from a fantasy novel – this archive, Kahn hoped, would become a means of bringing men closer together and pushing war further away. The historical context was one of colonial conquest – getting to know the ‘other’ was a means of managing and governing them more effectively – but Kahn remained a sincere utopian, convinced that the knowledge of humanity in all its various expressions stood at the foundation of building a culture of tolerance. All of his efforts from that 1908 trip on would be directed towards this goal.
Thus was born one of the most extraordinary endeavours in the history of photography. For over twenty years, from 1909 to 1931, when the economic crisis brought the project to a halt, Kahn deployed his resources to send five photographers and cameramen to map the entire planet. The result was a truly singular collection: 72,000 autochromes and 100 hours of film that together form the Archives de la Planète.
It was this project that served as the source of the rotating autochrome exhibition at Kahn’s gardens in Boulogne, and as fate would have it my visit coincided with a show centred on Kapurthala – the home of Amrit Kaur herself, in the region of Punjab.
The autochromes on display had been captured in 1927 by Roger Dumas, a photographer commissioned by Albert Kahn. The occasion was a golden jubilee party for Maharaja Jagatjit Singh, a Bois de Boulogne neighbour with whom Kahn had formed a lasting friendship. Fifty or so guests – European, Indian, and several family members – posed for Dumas against the palace backdrop. Seated to the right of the maharaja was a pale, lanky man with a pith helmet balanced on the handle of his cane whom I recognised to be the viceroy, Lord Irwin. To the maharaja’s left, her face obscured by the broad brim of a beige hat, in a silk duster coat worthy of a Fitzgerald heroine, sat Vicereine Lady Irwin. Next to her, in white, the Maharaja of Cooch Behar. And beside him, on the right edge of the photograph, I spotted the oval of Amrit Kaur’s face, one end of her orange sari draped over her head. I did the maths: she was twenty-three at the time and had been married for four years. Her husband, Joginder Sen of Mandi, was surely there in the photo as well, but I couldn’t place him.
It must have been my lucky day, because the autochrome exhibition was accompanied by a film of Jagatjit Singh’s 1927 jubilee, which offered a good look at Kapurthala in those years. Dumas had filmed the maharaja’s soldiers in their turbans and knickerbockers as they filed past a French-style palace: ‘Un petit morceau de France au pied de l’Himalaya,’ as the voice-over narrator put it, affecting a tone of admiration. Five elephants stood waiting for the guests, ready to carry them on gold and silver palanquins through the dusty provincial town, past the celebratory crowds in the streets. Another sequence showed the maharaja seated on one plate of an enormous balance scale, while on the other plate servants piled sacks of rupees and silver coins that would later be distributed to the residents. In contrast to that archaic rite, the voice-over spoke of an enlightened ruler who’d sparked industrial and agricultural development in his state, introduced administrative reforms, outlawed marriage between children and promoted free education for women. But above all else, Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala deserved to be remembered as an enthusiastic francophile: so enthusiastic that he made French the official language of his court. He added Victor Hugo’s poetry to the school curriculum; he wore Cartier jewellery at his jubilee; and he had his palace modelled on Versailles – except that, with an added touch of Indian sublimity, he had it painted pink.
Other footage showed the maharaja strolling through Albert Kahn’s garden with Baroness Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild at his side – both the Ephrussis and the Rothschilds had homes in Boulogne. So there it was, I told myself, right before my eyes: evidence that the Kapurthalas were in with the Jewish society of the day. Though what intrigued me most was the maharaja’s relationship with Kahn himself, that Alsatian banker who’d been such a major figure of his era and whom anti-Semitic France had been so eager to forget. I couldn’t help wondering if Amrit Kaur might have compromised herself, at the risk of arrest, to help rescue an old family friend who’d fallen into disgrace during a time of rampant anti-Semitism in France.
Copyright © 2022 by Livia Manera Sambuy
Copyright © 2023 by Todd Portnowitz