Books. Putting royalty in a contemporary, urban context

Maybe because it’s a book about royalty, or maybe because there was a prince and a maharani present, Chennai folks turned up in their finest at Amethyst café for the launch of Amrita Gandhi’s Live Like A Maharaja .

As she captured the lives of India’s erstwhile rulers and their descendants on film for the Royal Reservations series on NDTV Good Times since 2007, Amrita says she found she had enough material to pen down a book about their regal lives.

The book, she says, is like a royal how-to guide with anecdotes and suggestions taken from the lives of maharajas and their families still living in grandiose palaces across the country.

From a secret recipe for lemon pickle to a beauty scrub princesses use before wedding, from getting the perfect cut on a bandhgala to table-setting tips, the book promises details one can easily incorporate into city life.

The first copy of the book was unveiled by Yuvrani Radhikaraje Gaekwad of Baroda and presented to Nawab Mohammed Abdul, the Prince of Arcot. This was followed by the reading of an excerpt from her book detailing her twin encounters with Raja Jigmed Namgyal of Ladakh – once at a Café Coffee Day in Delhi and then at the Stok Palace in Ladakh – and the stark difference in both meetings. With her grounded point of view and genial tone, Amrita’s book strikes a pleasant balance between awe and surprise at the lives of the royals. The toast of the evening, however, was Radhikaraje Gaekwad who in her brief talk gave a rather amusing image of life in Baroda’s Lukshmi Villas palace, the only unaltered private residence in the country.

While it’s easy to imagine the luxury of palatial life, she says its rather like pouring new wine into an old bottle. “With the kitchen in a separate wing of the palace, my tea often changes three hands before it reaches me, sometimes lukewarm,” she says, adding that even simple things like fixing a leaking faucet becomes an issue when it involves undoing engraved tiles and irreplaceable jade fittings.

“It’s a lesson in living,” she gracefully admits. Later, in conversation with Jean Francois Lesage, who runs a hand embroidery atelier Vastrakala in Chennai and heir to the famed House of Lesage, Amrita discusses how one can bring the decadent ideas of the royals into the interest of the contemporary world.

It’s all in the details, says Lesage, who believes personalising and making favourite objects more intimate is a very royal tradition. “You can invent your own coat of arms – think of your sitting room as your kingdom,” he adds. But not the aggressive decadence, he cautions, just little details to create an air of refinement.

As the soiree came to a close, guests were served a traditional Kashmiri Kahwa and a lauki kebab – recipes from Amrita’s book, revealed to her by royal family members.