The secret of Amrit Kaur, the book by Livia Manera Sambuy

Gradually the tale of a forgotten princess becomes a portrait of women across centuries and continents and, at times, an author’s life path that ends with the awareness that the pain of a loss is natural, but the prolongation of mourning is an act of ignorance.

Daughter of the maharaja of Kapurtala and wife of the raja of Mandi, Amrit Kaur goes to Paris in 1933 and never returns home, effectively abandoning her children, a four-year-old and an eight-year-old girl. What kept you in Paris until it was too late to return? Was it her choice or did someone pull her away from her life?

A mystery that, as stories often do, bewitches those who write them, sneaks into other thoughts and pushes to be revealed. “I was in Mumbai for work,” remembers Livia Manera Sambuy. “I had set aside a day to be a tourist. I was in a very particular psychological state, two weeks before there had been my brother’s funeral …

Is it in that state of mind that he “meets” Amrit Kaur?
At the Prince of Wales Museum there was an exhibition of photographic portraits of maharajas and maharani that came from the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum. I enter, more to escape the heat than for interest, and among others I see the face of a young and beautiful woman, tall and dark, with an impalpable sari, a diamond necklace and two long strings of pearls. On the left ring finger an emerald-cut diamond by Cartier, which later ended up in a jewelry auction in New York.

Not much for an Indian princess …
Yes, His Royal Highness Amrit Kaur was the only daughter of Kapurthala’s Maharaja Jagatjit Singh Bahadur: her father spent a quarter of his income every year to buy pounds of pearls and nut-sized emeralds.

At the time of the photo, Amrit was 24 years old.
She had gone to London with her young husband, the Raja of Mandi, to introduce herself to King George V and Queen Mary. She had had a European upbringing, in England and France, a privilege for some Raj princesses that amounted to a jousting ride in modernity only to be pushed back centuries. She struck me by her caption: she explained how Mandi’s rani had been arrested in 1940 by the Gestapo in occupied Paris, accused of having sold her jewels to help some Jews leave France. And that she died in a concentration camp shortly after. How was it possible that the daughter of a maharaja linked to the English crown could have spent years in a concentration camp and how was it possible that nothing was known about this story?

What answer was given?
It seemed that someone had erased parts of the story. Almost immediately I discovered, talking to Amrit’s 80-year-old daughter, Nirvana Devi of Bilka, known by everyone as Bubbles (Bubbles), that her mother had not died in a concentration camp but still disappeared, abandoning her and her little brother.

The beginning of the investigation

So he slips into a sort of time machine, in the Parisian milieu of the very rich rajas, among intellectuals and spies, briefcases that have mysteriously reappeared in California …
I tried to build a large group photo with Amrit in the center, which gradually became clearer and clearer. I knew nothing of the Raj, of these sovereigns to whom the English Empire granted the maintenance of titles, honors and riches in exchange for the renunciation of supreme authority. They lived in glitz, like Alvar’s maharaja who, when he got tired of his gleaming cars, had them buried, or Cooch Behar’s femme fatale Indira Devi who placed her chips on the green table playing with a live turtle on whose shell she had set three rows of rubies, diamonds and emeralds… In the 1920s, the maharajas who went to the French Riviera to spend the winter brought kilos of precious stones from Cartier, Bucheron or Mellerio to create wonderful jewels which they then went on to collect the following year.

Amrit’s father, Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala, was well connected …
He spoke many languages, together with his family he frequented artists and intellectuals, he had important relationships, he will try to use them to free his daughter from the Besançon camp.

From her research, Amrit’s bond with the visionary Jewish banker Albert Kahn emerges, a letter from Wiston Churchill who intercedes for her when she is in a concentration camp … And also that the princess is an absolutely unconventional woman, a feminist in a strongly male chauvinist.
She knew the situation of women in India, she had fought for their rights long before Gandhi understood the importance of women’s emancipation. She participated in the great assemblies of Asian women, in 1928 she had led a combative delegation to ask Viceroy Lord Irwin for the abolition of child marriage, she asked for education for women and the abolition of polygamy.

Yet it is her husband who humiliates her …
He does this publicly, taking a second wife. Immediately after, Amrit leaves for Paris.

The question that drives the research is: for what reasons does a loving mother abandon two children? A still bleeding wound for Bubbles, to which she wants to give answers.
Bubbles is now 90, living in Pune, West India. What she knows about her from her mother, she has heard from me, in her house they have never talked about her again. Little did she know about her internment in the Besançon camp, where Amrit is treated particularly harshly.

A valuable clue

Valuable news has reached her from America.
Yes, a briefcase that belonged to Amrit and abandoned there in 1938, with documents and letters, came to the surface in California. Including an anonymous letter warning the princess against returning to India.

Who kept the briefcase?
Ginger, a burlesque dancer.

A real twist … How did you trust her?
I had to dismantle some prejudices, more than one. In addition to being a dancer and model for artists, Ginger is a history buff. The story of Amrit Kaur touched her, she was told that the story of this woman was important. She quit her job and went back to college in order to have the tools to do her research for her. She then she went to work at the San Diego Women’s Museum.

She writes that telling Bubbles the truth about her mother Amrit helped herself to clarify many things about her relationship with her mother.
I grabbed the lifeline that another daughter threw at me from the other side of the world, I gave Bubbles memories he didn’t have, I stitched two lives together and at the same time, at the end of the job, I gave myself up. I realize I had stitched up something for myself. Some of my wounds that did not heal almost suddenly lightened. Perhaps the fact of having allowed a woman of now ninety to know before she died why her mother had abandoned her had closed a circle, how to metabolize a difficult relationship and find a happy ending in moving forward.

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