A Passage in India : Ex-USC Student’s Princely Wedding Bows to a Lavish Past and a New Order

The bridegroom rode to the ceremony in a solid silver carriage. A coachman held a golden umbrella over his turbaned and plumed head. Around his neck were seven strands of pearls so outrageously large they looked like perfectly round pigeon eggs. He wore another necklace of sparkling diamonds and rubies as red as blood.

The tiny, nervous bride was practically carried to the altar by jewel-encrusted female relatives who gripped her firmly by the elbows. She was covered head to knee by a red veil spun of gossamer Benares silk as fine and sheer as a spider’s web, so translucent that it barely dulled the brilliant sheen from her saree.

‘Only’ 40,000 Spectators

The wedding of Prince Vikramaditya Singh, a 23-year-old former polo-playing student at USC, and Princess Chittrangada Raje, 20, may have seemed grand to outsiders, but by the standards of Indian royalty, it was fairly intimate--only 40,000 or so folks gathered in front of a 455-room palace to see the offspring of two of India’s noble families joined in wedlock.

And only one elephant. A perfectly fine elephant, nevertheless, painted electric blue with the portrait of a tiger on the sides of its head so that every time the elephant blinked its giant lids the tigers came to life.

But only one, after all, and this caused some of the several dozen kings, maharajas and princes assembled for the occasion to sniff in disdain, using their finest Oxford-Cambridge English to do the damage.

A Mind-Boggling Event

“I suppose this is a grand wedding by today’s standards,” said Maharajhiraj Himmat Singh, 62, uncle to the former Maharaja of Jodhpur, “but if you really wanted to see something you should have seen my younger brother’s wedding in 1946. . . . We were greeted by 10,000 camels in full regalia. By God, that was a mind-boggling event. You can’t imagine. Ten thousand camels. Life magazine was there and so was the (National) Geographic.”

To be sure, that was before India won its independence from the British empire, before the lands of the Indian princes had shrunk to a few hundred acres, before their royal allowances were terminated by the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to make a political point. And it was before they were forced to sell their palaces to hotel chains and pose in them like living relics, tired, tweedy old men with their memories and their polo scars.

The marriage of Prince Vikramaditya, son of the former Maharaja of Kashmir, and Princess Chittrangada, daughter of the man who once stood to inherit the princely throne of Gwalior, was a revival of sorts for the princely Indian traditions that were protected and even pampered by the English imperialists--steeped as they were in their own indulgence of caste and pomp.

As it turned out, it was a revival with a twist, a curtsy to the past that was also a bow to a new political order in which one-time maharajas engage in democratic politics. This was also a political marriage, something equivalent to Sharon Percy, daughter of the former Illinois senator, marrying John D. Rockefeller IV, or, as Karan Singh, the father of the bridegroom, volunteered, “Nixon’s daughter (Julie) marrying Eisenhower’s grandson (David).”

Karan Singh, 56, is the former Maharaja of Kashmir, the beautiful mountain valley in northwest India. Madhav Rao Scindia, 41, the father of the bride, once was in line to inherit the kingdom of Gwalior in what is now Madya Pradesh state. The kingdoms were formally abolished at the time of independence. But traditions are slow to change in India, and a surprising amount of the power and influence remain intact.

Two Cabinet Ministers

Both fathers--still informally called maharajas--have served as cabinet ministers in the ruling Congress Party government. Karan Singh has been touted on occasion as a potential ambassador to the United States. Scindia still sits as minister of railways and is a close political ally of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

“We are the only former princes to be in the Cabinet,” said the irrepressible Karan Singh, who hands visitors a short autobiography when they enter the elegant study of his New Delhi residence. “We are both of us active and successful political figures.”

Both the bride’s father and the bridegroom’s father are referred to as “21-gun maharajas.” Assigning gun salutes to the various Indian princes was another one of the British imperial touches; the more important the maharaja, the more guns fired in his honor.

The other, unmentioned similarity that connects the two fathers is that they have managed to keep money in their respective families. Karan Singh still owns the hillside palace that is the best hotel in the tourist mecca of Srinigar, the Kashmir capital. Scindia has money in cotton gins and textile factories; he is Gwalior’s biggest employer.

Palace Painted White

The Kashmir Singhs and the Gwalior Scindias are among the few royal families with enough money left to throw such a wedding. In preparation for the event, Madhav Rao Scindia widened roads in the city and painted the huge Jai Vilas Palace wedding-cake white. Newspaper reports placed the cost of the wedding at more than $1 million.

Because he was spending his own money, there appeared to be few objections to the lavish event. Interestingly, most of the respect Scindia appears to enjoy in this city of 800,000 comes from his position as railways minister.

“He is doing very well,” said Jay Dayal, 60, a kerosene stove repairman. “He has brought the train from Agra here three days a week.”

In a smaller way, Gwalior is a reflection of the immaturity of the Indian electoral system. The immaturity is most graphically represented by the hereditary line of national rulers that began with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru; both his daughter, Indira Gandhi, and his grandson, Rajiv Gandhi, have followed Nehru to the prime minister’s office.

In India, democracy remains a dynastic affair at other levels too. The Indian princes, scorned and stripped of their titles by Indira Gandhi after the 1970 elections, have come back in force through the electoral process. No fewer than 17 former monarchs serve in the upper and lower houses of the Indian parliament.

Originally, there had been a little griping about last weekend’s wedding by leaders of the opposition political parties, including the Gwalior prince’s own mother, the formidable Rajmata Scindia, who complained that it was poor taste to stage a huge wedding while the surrounding countryside was suffering a severe drought.

The Rajmata, who in 1977 was sent to jail as an alleged threat to the state during Indira Gandhi’s “emergency,” refused to permit her portion of the palace to be painted for the wedding. It remained an ugly, unlit, brown blotch on the edge of the gleaming white palace, outlined with white lights.

But both Scindia and Singh, the two fathers, were sensitive to the drought issue and held back on such things as extra elephants and food as a symbolic gesture of solidarity with the drought victims. Singh even invited guests to a post-wedding reception of “austerity tea,” instead of cakes and liquor, today.

But, despite the austerity, everyone at the wedding seemed to have a good time. The Rajmata stepped down from her principled political perch and attended the ceremony. Her son and political enemy, the father of the bride, touched his mother’s feet with his fingertips as a sign of ultimate respect.

“Today,” said the handsome, outspoken Rajmata at the wedding, “I am a grandmother, not a politician. I am here attending the marriage of my granddaughter. After two days, I will again lead processions of protest.”

A Dramatic Setting

The setting for the wedding could not have been more dramatic. The palace, a British-designed Italian doric structure, resembled a giant wedding cake even before its new paint. The palace features a central dining room so large that a former maharaja installed a solid-silver toy train to carry cigars and brandy to his guests at the other end of the long table.

A traditional Hindu altar of mud and brick, with a golden silk canopy, was built on the lawn. Hindu pandits --Kashmiri priests--carefully measured the platform where the ceremony took place. They decreed that the bridal bench, where the bride and bridegroom knelt, facing each other, must be no more than four times the length of the bride’s forearm.

Flowering banana plants were placed in each corner of the canopy, symbolizing both male and female fertility. There were coconuts glazed with gold, representing the sun; clay pots to please the mother goddess and silver urns filled with water from the River Ganges.

Astrologers had been consulted, and it was determined that 7:54 p.m. Friday, Dec. 11, was the most auspicious time for the wedding.

The journey to the altar was perhaps a longer one, in several senses, for the bridegroom than it was for the bride. Vikramaditya Singh--known to his American friends as Vic Singh--had studied at the University of Southern California, where he majored in business administration besides being a star player on the school’s polo team.

“He is a fine player,” said the polo team captain, Don Gray of Palo Alto, one of several USC classmates who attended the wedding. “He is what I would call a thinking player.”

Like the other California guests, Gray appeared a little overwhelmed by the scale and the grandeur and chaos of the event. As he talked with a reporter, several musical ensembles competed for the attention of the guests, one playing typical Indian shenoi music, another a beautiful Sanskrit marriage hymn; a brass band kicked into “Marching Through Georgia.”

“I knew they had palaces here, but I didn’t think it would be anything like this,” said Gray. “It seems that from the time I arrived here everything is so steeped in culture.”

Groom Lived in Westwood

When he was at USC, Vic Singh lived in Westwood, drove a Lotus Esprit sports car and entertained guests for brunch Sundays at the Westwood Marquis Hotel. He had money, but, after all, being rich is not such an unusual thing at USC.

“He had a fairly modest apartment,” said another USC friend and wedding guest, Jennifer Bandy, 20, of Dallas. “His parents wanted him to live like any other college student. We became really good friends on the polo field. He is an exceptional man and a perfect gentleman.”

The young prince is handsome, with a narrow, hawk face complete with a long, slightly hooked nose. He wears a wispy black mustache, which makes him look like a silent-era movie star or one of the warrior princes depicted in Indian miniature paintings.

He dated American girls and, his friends confide, may have broken a heart or two. A year ago, he said, he seriously considered staying in the United States.

Missed Homeland Culture

But he found he missed the culture of his ancient homeland. “Tradition and culture is seriously lacking in the United States, more so in L.A. than in other parts of the country,” he said.

On one of his vacation trips back to India, he met Chittrangada, his future bride. The handsome prince must have seemed worldly and romantic to the shy princess.

Unlike her future husband, she did not have the opportunity for a foreign education. Asked about his daughter’s education by British author Ann Morrow, her Oxford-educated father, Madhav Rao Scindia, said: “Daughters are lovely things, lovely to cuddle and always favorites with their fathers. She will get married.”

And last Friday she did, a small figure trembling before thousands of townspeople shouting: “The daughter of Gwalior is married. Long live the Maharaja of Gwalior.”

It was not an arranged marriage in the classic Indian sense. Karan Singh insisted that his son was free to marry anyone he wanted, “even an American.”

Both Played Badminton

The Kashmiri maharaja described the marriage as the result of a “badminton courtship.” Before their marriage, the heavily chaperoned couple played the game on the lawn of the bridegroom’s family home in New Delhi.

“Our marriage was not arranged in a point-blank way,” said Vikramaditya Singh. “But we met with the intent of a possible marriage.”

After meeting his future bride several times over a period of four years, Singh said he fell in love.

“I’m in love,” he said shyly. “Very much so. She is a beautiful, warm person. Very down to earth, not snobbish or affected.”

On Monday, three days after their wedding, the young couple had checked into the bridal suite of the luxury Oberoi Hotel in New Delhi. The bride answered the telephone with a happy trill. She summoned her husband to the phone with an adoring nickname, Veevee.

“Yes,” said young Vikramaditya, the wedding had been a grand success.

“I was delighted,” he intoned, his voice seeming deeper and more resolute, perhaps because his new wife was standing nearby. “It was like a fairy tale for me, too.”