Free The Dancer and the Raja by Javier Moro

The master of every important station is usually an English employee who, in uniform just like at home, orders the trains to move or halt with his whistle.
    But every principality is still ruled, as it has always been, by local sovereigns who hold absolute power within their borders and who are known by different names according to their different traditions. The name changes just as the flags and police and military uniforms change, which Anita glimpses out of the train window. In the sultanate of Bhopal, an important railway junction where the train stops for several hours, the women rule, the famous begums covered from head to foot in burqas . “They look like ghosts!” says Anita when she sees an official photo hanging on the wall in the station. In the state of Hyderabad, one of the biggest in India and also a Moslem state, the sovereign is known as the nizam . In other Moslem states they are called mir , khan , or mahatar . The Hindus usually call them rajas , a word of Sanscrit origin that means at the same time “he who governs” and “he who has to please.” In certain places the term rao is used, such as in Jodhpur, or rana , as in Udaipur, which makes the young Spanish girl burst out laughing, “A rana is a frog! … I prefer to be the wife of a raja!” In olden times, those who were especially venerated had the prefix maha added, which in Sanscrit means “great.” So a maharaja is, literally, a great raja. Today the distinction of maha is only granted by the supreme authority, the English viceroy, to reward services to the Crown or the loyalty and importance of some sovereigns. The English do not allow the rajas to be known as kings, as they were in the past. In the British Empire there is room for only one king: the King of England.
    This does not prevent them from proclaiming the glory of their ancestry, like the maharaja of Udaipur, who believes himself to be a descendant of the sun, or the maharaja of Jodhpur, who believes in turn he is descended from the moon. Other more recent ones, such as the Holkar of Indore or the Gaekwads of Baroda, started out as ministers or generals and, thanks to their astuteness and the political power they managed to accumulate, ended up as sovereigns. They all belong to the select club of Indian aristocrats that Anita is about to join. Many of them are personal friends of the raja of Kapurthala. Some of them are educated and seductive, others cruel or ascetic, others very vulgar, yet others a little crazy, and almost all of them eccentric. The people adore them, because they see in their princes the incarnation of the divinity. Since the dawn of time, children in India have grown up hearing about the fabulous adventures of their heroic kings, embroiled in terrible struggles against vile despots. There are stories that speak of sophisticated palace intrigues, betrayals, and conspiracies, stories that describe the nighttime escapes of princesses in love, the erotic nights of the favorite concubines, the sacrifices of queens driven to despair … Stories that talk about vast wealth, of truly luxurious palaces and gigantic stables of horses, camels, and elephants. Stories in which the border between reality and myth is so blurred that it becomes hard to know where one ends and the other begins.
    And there are also love stories, like the one symbolized by a monument that Anita can see in the distance, from the train, which on its way north goes round the city of Agra, the ancient capital of the Moghul Empire. With minarets that rise into the sky and a dome of white marble where the sun’s rays blaze, the Taj Mahal evokes the grandeur of love and the futility of life. A mausoleum designed by a Moghul emperor called Shah Jehan to honor the memory of the woman with whom he one day fell in love, the Taj Mahal has a sense of serene majesty, a feeling of immortal beauty that leaves no one indifferent. “An emperor who fell in love with a