One chilly January night, three younger royals dined at a palatial mansion in Allahabad, now Prayagraj, in 1911, across the time the British administrative centre witnessed an historic occasion.
The metropolis, positioned on the confluence of the Ganga and the Yamuna rivers, was the venue of what got here to be generally known as the Allahabad Exhibition of 1911, inaugurated on December 1, 1910, by John Hewett, the British lieutenant governor of the United Provinces.
On show on the exhibition, which ran until February 1911, have been crafts and expertise from around the globe, together with stalls – or fairly Mughal- and Rajasthani-architecture-inspired pavilions – that hosted German Engineering Works, British producers of agricultural gear and home equipment and the artworks of Abanindranath Tagore.
Celebrated singers and courtesans Gauhar Jaan of Calcutta, the primary Indian artist to report on the gramophone, and Janki Bai Allahabadi have been invited to carry out on the exhibition, which drew guests and visitors not solely from Indian royal households but in addition from the world over.
The hum of their enthralling voices appears to have been drowned, not less than in in style reminiscence, by the sounds of flying machines. British aviation pioneer Walter Windham who had introduced two airplanes to the exhibition organised aerial demonstrations for the crowds.
On February 18, 1911, French pilot Henri Pequet flew a Humber-Sommer biplane carrying round 6,000 to six,500 letters and postcards from Allahabad over the Yamuna River to Naini, a distance of 13 km. This was the world’s first official airmail flight, commemorated with a particular shiny pink cancellation stamp depicting an aeroplane, mountains, and the phrases “First Aerial Post, 1911, U.P. Exhibition Allahabad.”
Among those that attended this gala exhibition have been the great-grandson of Queen Victoria and the eldest son of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, the Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm Victor August Ernst, and the Oxford-educated, globe-trotting Kumar Sidkeong Tulku Namgyal, who was thought of the reincarnation (tulku) of a Buddhist spirtual grasp, Karmapa Lama, and was recognised by the British because the inheritor to the throne of Sikkim.
These two males had little in frequent, other than their enchantment with the Burmese princess Hteiktin Ma Lat, the daughter of the Burmese Prince of Limbin, who was himself the cousin of the final king of Burma, King Thibaw.
After the third Anglo-Burmese War and the autumn of his kingdom in 1885, Thibaw and the royal household have been exiled to British-colonised India. They first landed in Calcutta after which moved to the Bombay Presidency, with the Limbin Prince finally settling in Allahabad along with his household, leasing a mansion on Clive Road.
It was in Allahabad that Ma Lat, born in Calcutta in 1894, acquired her schooling, constructed her social life, and met the 2 males who could be captivated by her magnificence.
Maharaja Kumar, described as a religious Buddhist of quiet and amenable character, attended the exhibition on the invitation of the British, who have been conscious of his repeated, unsuccessful makes an attempt to discover a appropriate bride – a quest that had led him to strategy aristocratic households as far-off as Japan.
His streak of poor luck lastly got here to an finish because the 33-year-old Kumar, aided by the machinations of the British Government of India and the lieutenant governor of the United Provinces, met the “English-educated and talking” Ma Lat throughout his go to to the exhibition.
Though data don’t describe their interplay on the exhibition, the occasion doubtless served as their first level of acquaintance – an introduction that might be adopted by additional conferences in Allahabad.
Amid the festivities surrounding the grand exhibition, Ma Lat’s aunt and uncle organised a gala dinner at their mansion in Allahabad. The visitor record included native Indian elites, British officers and Kumar, however the night grew to become all of the extra fascinating when German Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm turned up uninvited. British officers near Wilhelm later recounted how he steadily remarked that the teenage Ma Lat was probably the most putting girl he had encountered throughout his jap tour.
Another visitor on the dinner, Ethel Anderson – poet, novelist, and painter, who in 1904 married British Brigadier-General Austin Thomas Anderson, stationed in Lucknow and Bombay – recounted the occasions of that evening in an essay revealed in 1952.
Waxing eloquent about Ma Lat’s porcelain-like, biscuit-tinted, and delicately luminous look that so captivated Wilhelm, Anderson described the full of life banter between the prince and the princess. When the prince teasingly remarked that the gorgeous Limbin mansion, doused in tender mild filtering via its archways, will need to have been designed both by an eccentric architect or by a whole novice, the princess – evaluating the construction to wedding ceremony desserts – retorted {that a} cook dinner was accountable for its finesse.
To this, the prince replied {that a} honeybee appeared a extra doubtless architect, for laid out earlier than them have been a myriad of intricate Indian dishes. These included deep-fried unripe poppy heads coated with gram flour, which the prince significantly loved, a dish made with rice, meat, vetches and vinegar served with a sauce of floor coriander seeds and mint, and incomparably wealthy pulaos, kebabs and paranthas.
While Ma Lat’s cautious flirtation with the German Crown Prince got here to nothing, love quietly blossomed between her and Kumar. Following Ma Lat’s return to Burma along with her household in late 1911 or early 1912, the 2 exchanged letters expressing the ache of being separated and their longing to see one another once more. They additionally mentioned potential timelines for his or her marriage – finally deciding on 1915 – and sometimes debated variations of their customs, together with what sort of costume and jewelry could be applicable for the marriage.
Correspondence between the 2 got here to an finish in 1914, a 12 months earlier than their wedding ceremony, when Kumar out of the blue died underneath suspicious circumstances – though some suspected British foul play. Upon ascending the throne of Sikkim in February 1914, Kumar’s assertive and unbiased nature as king quickly grew to become evident, straining his relations with the Political Officer, Charles Bell. In December 1914, whereas Kumar was considerably indisposed, a British doctor from Bengal administered a heavy transfusion of brandy, wrapped him in a number of blankets and saved a hearth burning beneath the mattress. Kumar is reported to have died throughout the hour.
Several years later, in 1928, Ma Lat married Herbert Bellamy, a British-Australian horse breeder, bookmaker, and orchid collector who had moved to Burma on the suggestion of the Sultan of Johor (a state in southern Malaysia).
In current years, the reminiscence of Ma Lat and the culinary splendour of the Limbin eating desk have been swept into the booming spectacle of culinary-heritage tourism. With historical past more and more diminished to social-media aesthetics and enterprise enterprises capitalising on the demand for Instagram-ready cultural experiences, the Rampriya House – a colonial-era mansion of the Pratapgarh property in Prayagraj – is now marketed as Ma Lat’s former residence, a declare I’ve not been in a position to confirm or discover proof for therefore far.
The mansion was supposedly constructed within the 1800s for Pratap Bahadur, the Raja of Pratapgarh, and named after his spouse, Rani Rampriya.
The home now hosts curated eating experiences that promise a style of the previous, fastidiously recreated by a feminine Brahmin cook dinner, whereas concurrently selling the venue because the place the place Ma Lat dined with – or, in accordance with the web, hosted – the Crown Prince of Germany. It displays a deliciously twisted, commercially-driven alliance within the panorama of social-media-worthy heritage experiences, which thrives alongside more and more hostile on a regular basis meals encounters marked by caste and communal boundaries.
Neha Vermani is an Honorary Fellow within the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at Durham University. She is a historian of early trendy South Asia, and her analysis focuses on the intersections of meals practices, materials tradition, and scientific and moral discourses on the physique, the senses, and the pure world.
