This might seem like a post out of context. But when it is the story of life, it fits in everywhere and anywhere. The Ivory Throne is the true life story of Maharani Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, the last ruling queen of Travancore. It wasn't because she was a Queen that I liked her story. The evolution of her character and its integrity, and the graceful dignity with which she conducted herself through the trials and joys of life, is inspiring, to say the least. All the familial and political drama aside, it was she as a person and her life away from the royal platform that I was drawn to. And it felt like she taught me a few life lessons, poignant and philosophical. If you manage to inspire even one other person with your life, during or after your time, then it has been a meaningful one. And from this narrative of her life and times, I think Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, clearly led a very meaningful one.
She was marked for royal adoption way before her birth. She was uprooted to her royal home at age 5. Overnight, her blissful childhood turned into a series of royal rituals, orthodox traditions and loss of privacy, all in one stroke. Her stoic resilience, the strength of which she had to turn to multiple times during her life, must owe its roots to this one incident. Away from her family for long, forlorn months, she retreated inward from the start. I think she learnt early on that when life gives, it takes away as much, so that it doesn't leave one with too much to exult or brood over. It just goes on and on, relentlessly. (kaalachakram)
The experiences in life either make or break you. Her resilience always ensured that nothing broke her. She came out of every single one of them, not unscathed, but stronger for it. There are two things that stood out to me from her life. Once long after her exile, when her granddaughter asks her about having been forced to leave her palace, she replies that 'they are just things that happened in a land somewhere far, far away'. She had distanced herself from it, not because it hadn't affected her, but just like everything else, she had accepted it gracefully. (Had she just been painfully hiding her pain from the rest of the world, she would have suffered. But she seems to have been content in her new life. We will never know if she regretted the loss of her old life at all.) And the other takeaway for me from this book is the dignified brilliance with which Sethu Lakshmi Bayi remained true to herself through all the blows that life threw at her, some of them, fatal in their strike. Life has its way to go high and low, for each of us. But in all that, it takes a lot of courage and integrity to remember that we come equipped to handle it all without giving up, and without compromising who we are in the process. We will all have our flaws but we needn't lose out in the struggle owing to our inherent dichotomies.
The one other thing, I think, contributed to the integrity of her mind, was her discipline in her physical life. While not all of have the privilege of time or resources to practice such elaborate rituals that enhance well-being and make it a part of our everyday life, it is possible to do our own little bit suited to our circumstances. Discipline is something that grounds us and we need some anchor in this very chaotic world. What can also equip us to traverse through this world, scary in its vastness, is knowledge. There is this little snippet where her grandson talks about her tip to them on the importance of being cultured. And interestingly, she defines a cultured person as someone who knows something about everything and everything about something. And that is why she read a great deal, apparently. One can only strive to put it all into practice. But for shedding light on this important theoretical bit, I will always be grateful to Sethu Lakshmi Bayi and to Manu S Pillai, who authored this brilliant book, that made history a little bit more accessible.
