Silks in a socialist storm

She moved through the corridors of power like a whisper wrapped in chiffon — her silks trailing softly behind Indira Gandhi’s khadi. Maharani Gayatri Devi, the last princess of Jaipur, was more than a royal figurehead. She was a symbol of a world caught in the crossfire between fading monarchies and rising socialism.

Her life was a gilded exit from an era that refused to let go. Draped in pastel saris and pearls, she bore the weight of history with poise, even as the winds of change swept through her kingdom. The palace walls still stood, but outside, a new India was taking shape — one where the crown no longer ruled unchallenged.

She wore chiffon like armour. When Gayatri Devi entered Parliament in 1962, it wasn’t merely a royal stepping into democracy, it was the arrival of grace into a system suspicious of it. She was poised, photogenic, and precise in her silences. It unsettled many.

India was still learning the vocabulary of equality. Gayatri Devi belonged to a world that spoke in inherited privilege and polished vowels. Yet she became a symbol of something modern: a woman in control of her image, her politics, her myth. To girls in convent schools and readers of Femina, she was aspirational. To socialists and bureaucrats, she was something else — a relic with reach.

In the Lok Sabha, she was both a statement and a contradiction. A queen elected by the people, she carried views steeped in imperial nostalgia, quietly at odds with Indira’s India — one built on dismantling the remnants of feudalism and privilege.

She was once described by Vogue as one of the most beautiful women in the world. But in Delhi, beauty had little currency. What mattered was alignment, and Gayatri Devi never quite aligned. Her charisma was political. Her popularity was not borrowed — it was inherited, refined, and made modern.

In 1975, she was jailed during the Emergency, reportedly sharing a cement-floored Tihar cell with common criminals. A princess in a prison sari. She never spoke in anger about it. The state had made its point. So had she.

While a political catfight between two strong women is a tempting narrative, it may not be rooted in truth. Indira, pragmatic to the bone, was perhaps not threatened by the Maharani’s glamour. She understood symbolism — and dismantled it quietly. In that sense, Gayatri Devi’s imprisonment was not a feud, but a reordering of memory.

The India she belonged to does not exist anymore. It died quietly, replaced by a democracy that, supposedly, no longer stops for pearls. But her memory remains — draped in dissent, a palace in exile, silks rustling against the wind.

And perhaps, in another realm, Gayatri and Indira sit over chai — two women who ruled in different ways, shaped by different wars.

Features