Sunanda K Datta-Ray: The 'three Indian princesses'

Frank Owen Salisbury's painting, The Sen Sisters, is as much our heritage as Karun Krishna Majumdar's relics. It also testifies to a passage in India's historical evolution

Returning to the controversy (which might get sharper) over Wing Commander Karun Krishna (Jumbo) Majumdar's war memorabilia, I am reminded that the First World War hero Laddie Roy and the legendary Rosie, Pansy and Violet Sen also belonged to the same Anglicised Bengali milieu rooted in the 19th century blending of European and Indian lifestyles of which little trace remains.

While the auction of Jumbo Majumdar's medals fell through, Frank Owen Salisbury's circular painting, The Sen Sisters, went for £96,000 to an anonymous buyer in New York some years ago, without creating a ripple in India. Rosie and Pansy were still beautiful women (Violet was dead) when I used to visit their mother Mrinalini Sen as a boy. She was my grandmother's aunt, a vivacious woman with an exciting past. I remember her presiding over a birthday cake on the dead Violet's birth anniversary and her son telephoning his greetings from Gauhati. It was excellent cake and the bizarre ritual didn't matter. Pansy never married and Rosie lived in Chandigarh with her husband and two sons.
 

Their father, Nirmal Sen, son of Keshub Chunder Sen, the Brahmo Samaj pioneer, worked in London's India House. His daughters grew up there. Salisbury never visited India but painted 12 panels for Calcutta's Victoria Memorial. He writes in his memoirs, Portrait and Pageant, that Sir Rajendra Nath Mookerjee took the girls ("three Indian princesses") to his studio. Struck by their looks, he wanted to paint them. "With their black and gold and rich green saris, they made an enchanting group, and rarely have I found a picture go so well and straightforwardly. The calm serenity of the Indian spirit is well seen in these three Sen Sisters; it seemed to me as they sat there that out of their dark eyes flashed the light of the East".

Salisbury gave the painting to the Metropolitan Museum, which sold it. The Indian Air Force generously intervened when Jumbo Majumdar's decorations weren't sold. That should be a matter of great celebration but for certain niggling doubts that may seem churlish in view of Air Marshal Anil Chopra's magnanimous offer on NDTV to personally pay ~20 lakh for the relics of the man who is honoured as the Father of the Indian Air Force. Chopra commanded Jumbo's old Number One Squadron, which is all the more reason why he, too, should want all doubts cleared. So, here goes...

First, where have the medals been all these years? The two Distinguished Flying Crosses (DFC) were awarded in 1942 and 1945. Majumdar died in February 1945 just after receiving the Bar to his DFC. His son Sailen, who tried to sell the trophies by auction in London, says they were "lost" until he recovered them. Who lost them and when? How, when and where were they recovered?

Second, the auctioneer's catalogue indicated some of the diaries and log books are photocopies. Where are the originals? Who made the copies? Are other copies floating about?

Third - and most important - is the IAF certain the medals are not also copies? I ask as a layman ignorant of military artifacts but with some experience of collecting silver and stamps. What worries me is the information - and I hope it's wrong - that DFC insignia don't carry the recipient's name. In that case, how does one know these crosses were awarded to Jumbo and not to someone else? Or even that they are not duplicates?

Fourth, the price puzzles me. The highest auction bid was £15,500. Yet the IAF apparently agreed to £25,000 plus a 20 per cent buyer's premium, meaning it will fork out £31,250. No price is too high to reclaim a national heritage but was this the best possible deal? Did the IAF appeal to Sailen Majumdar's loyalty to the values his gallant father epitomised?

Finally, if the other questions are answered satisfactorily and there is no alternative to paying £31,250, I wonder why Majumdar's only daughter, Anjali Lobo, isn't in the picture at all.

Laddie left no mementoes I know of. A faded photograph of Salisbury's painting (together with a photograph of her interviewing H G Wells) used to hang in Mrinalini Sen's Calcutta house, which was pulled down long ago. If I remember right, Violet's only son Gautam has a picture of his mother copied from the painting in his bungalow in Ahmedabad.

The original should have been bought for the Victoria Memorial. Not only is it as much our heritage as Jumbo's relics, it also testifies to a passage in India's historical evolution.