Mysuru, KARNATAKA :

by Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem

Mysuru :

Today I’m writing this article about Royal weddings of long ago from a place that seems like it has been caught in a weird time warp. I say this because our Coffee Estate where I am on a holiday right now has been without a working telephone landline for the past three months. The best mobile phones too just become expensive paperweights, unable to serve their intended purpose. Although privileged to be located amid lush sylvan surroundings in the midst of the best that nature has to offer, most estates like ours are tucked in the nooks and crannies of the hills where mobile signals simply fail to trickle through. Electricity too is a commodity that cannot be had for the asking just because you have a meter and a line hooked to an electric pole.

Nobody who is entrusted with the responsibility of keeping these facilities working has been able to summon the will or the sense of commitment to do anything about it despite all the hue and cry raised by subscribers who are cut off from a civilisation that thrives on constant wireless connectivity and only keeps complaining constantly of insufficient speed! After I complete this article I’ll have to drive ten kilometres with my laptop to the nearest village where a sufficiently strong mobile signal becomes available for me to mail it to the SOM office.

This business too is not as simple as it seems. I’ll have to wait patiently in my car and keep a watch on the signal strength before pressing the send button precisely at the right moment. It’s a little like skeet shooting, thankfully a sport at which I happen to be pretty good! Well, going back just a little bit from the time zone where I am now standing I would like to draw your attention to how things were in the forties in Royal Mysore.

Girija Madhavan, a multi-talented lady who sometimes takes readers down the memory lane with her nostalgic writings and paintings, recently talked of the way Royal weddings used to be held (SOM dated 20th June, 2016). She recalled how her late father M. Venkatesh used to attend the Durbars of the Maharaja and she has also sent a picture of the silver salver on which the wedding invitations used to be placed before being handed over to the VIP invitees. My late maternal grandfather Alhaj M. Khaleelur Rahman, then a prosperous merchant on Ashoka Road, was a person who was very close to the Royal family and who used to be invited to Dasara Durbars and all the Royal weddings and other functions that used to take place during his time. His son, Prof. M.J. Sadiq, my maternal uncle, who used to teach Zoology at St. Philomena’s College, still has in his possession the salver on which his father received the invitation to the weddings of the two sisters of the Maharaja held in the year 1941.

Weighing exactly 350gms and made of 97% pure silver by C. Krishnaiah Chetty and Sons of Bangalore, its purity and paternity are stamped on the reverse. It is very similar to the one in possession of Girija Madhavan although slightly different in shape. Incidentally, my uncle, Prof. Sadiq is a very meticulous person who is a sort of chronicler of all events in our family besides being the curator and caretaker of the family heirlooms. If you want to know what the cost of onions or sugar or rice used to be in any given year ever since he started wielding a pen probably in the mid-forties, he will turn the pages of his record books and give you the exact figures in less time than it takes for the Google search engine to do the job!

He has also preserved all the invitation cards of all the weddings that have taken place in the family ever since he was a little boy. Incidentally, he found a mention in Star of Mysore last week for being the first person to suggest in a letter to the editor three and a half decades ago that the Hardinge Circle would be a good place to install the statue of H. H. Sri. Jayachamaraja Wadiyar.

R. Kasturi Raj Chetty, who became the eighth Vice-Chancellor of the Mysore University (1948-50), used to be very close friend of my grandfather and the two would attend most public functions together including the ones at the Palace. The wife of the VC for whom my late grandmother, Zaibunnissa was a favourite friend, would come in a separate chauffeur driven car to pick up my grandmother on her way to attend such events. It appears the two ladies even used to do their shopping for silk saris together. It certainly must have seemed very unusual at that time for a lady from a tradition bound Muslim household to be seen socialising as she did when most of her counterparts led a home-bound existence. ‘Good old Days’ indeed!

e-mail: kjnmysore@rediffmail.com

source: http://www.starofmysore.com / Star of Mysore /  Home> Feature Articles / July 08th, 2016