A prince among men

PRINCE OF GUJARAT
Rajmohan Gandhi
Aleph
500 pages; Rs 265

One had read about benign kings in mythological stories as a child. As one grew up, one realised that such people existed only in story books. In reality, they were cruel and unscrupulous, rich beyond imagination while their subjects lived in grinding poverty. There are many who bristle every time an ex-royal uses honorifics of the past: Maharaja, Rajkumari, Nawab. After reading Prince of Gujarat, we know there was one exception to the stereotype: social reformer and freedom fighter Gopaldas Desai. The book, sometimes languid and meandering, manages to tell an extraordinary story.

Desai became the prince of Rai-Sankli and Dhasa, both in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, in 1912. One of his first acts was to set up councils of villagers at both the places, which had the authority to overrule his decisions. The villagers didn't hesitate to exercise this power - it wasn't reform just on paper. Once, Desai had wanted a bidi seller imprisoned and swiftly deported after he was caught selling to children, but the council used its veto and gave the man sufficient time to leave the village and spare him the ignominy of spending time behind bars. Desai carried out several reforms in his early year: female literacy, removal of untouchability and reduction of rural indebtedness.

What caused the ruler to behave like this? Remember, this was before Mahatma Gandhi returned to India from South Africa in 1915. So he couldn't have been an influence. Desai in his formative years was influenced by Lokmanya Tilak and Aurobindo Ghose, but radical social reform was not on their agenda. Desai in his lifetime (1887 to 1951) didn't quite spell out what inspired him. Rajmohan Gandhi says two factors could have been at work here. One, the Desai household was thick with intrigue, injury and death, which may have stirred some deep revulsion in the young prince. Two, he must have realised that his ascension to the throne was a matter of fate. The previous ruler, his maternal grandfather, had no male heir, so he adopted him as a son, which put him in the line of succession.

Soon after he took over, Desai's run-ins with British officers and their Indian stooges began. Those were the days when even lowly British officers could talk down to Indian princes. Most princes acquiesced because their survival depended on the British. Desai refused to give gifts to officers who retired or were posted out, stand up when visited by an officer or wait indefinitely at the border to receive a servant of the Raj. Officers come and go, he would say, but princes stay on for life.

A crisis occurred towards the end of 1921. The governor of the Bombay presidency, Lloyd George, was visiting Rajkot in January 1922 and the political agent demanded Desai to be present to welcome "His Excellency". By now, under Gandhi's influence, the young prince had thrown himself headlong into the Non-cooperation Movement. He didn't go for the reception. The Raj demanded an apology for the disrespect. Desai refused. He was ready to let the British confiscate his estates rather than live in disgrace (some of his cousins could have been plotting for his removal.)

Help rendered to his subjects had generated for Desai debt of Rs 1 lakh. He could have passed it on whenever his estates were allotted to others - the new ruler would have extracted it from the peasants. But that's not the legacy he wanted to leave. Thus, he decided to sell all family jewellery to repay the debt. Since this would have given the royal household a bad name, Desai's father-in-law ferried all the jewellery to his place where it was sold at the throwaway price of Rs 20 a tola. Desai also mulled a satyagraha to highlight the injustice done to him, but gave up the idea possibly because Gandhi had called for peace just two months ago. In July 1922, Desai was stripped of his principality.

After this, Desai devoted himself to the freedom movement and social reform. In 1930, when his wife, Bhaktilaxmi, was pregnant with their last child, Desai announced that if it is a girl, he will marry her to a Harijan. Today, such a proclamation may be seen as a domineering father depriving his daughter of the freedom of choice, but at that time it was nothing short of radical. As luck would have it, the child was a boy. In May 1947, just when the British were about to leave India, the principalities of Rai-Sankli and Dhasa were restored to Desai. In all probability, the same day Desai turned them over to India - the first prince to do so. A little later, when there was an attack on Muslims in his home town, Vaso, Desai left his work at the Constituent Assembly and rushed there to restore order. He never sought office for himself, though four men he mentored went on to become the chief minister of Gujarat. He died in 1951.

He was, by all accounts, not just another prince.