The newly-married bride never came to her husband's home alone. To add to the staff already provided by her husband, she brought a retinue of her own servant women who had attended her as a young girl and with whom she had close bonds. 'My mother had hundreds of maids, mostly from Osian where she came from,' recalls Padmavati Devi of Jodhpur, Maharani of Baroda. 'Since there were umpteen relatives each with umpteen members of their retinues and then the retinues' umpteen staff, there were hundreds of women in the Jodhpur zanana, but it was like one big happy family. They were all fantastically dressed and because they used to keep ghunghats you sometimes mistook the maid for the mistress - I mean, how many ghunghats are you going to lift to see who it is?' If they were unmarried these maids or bais were generally found husbands from among the dadas or male staff of the mardana, and since they had come as part of a bride's dowry they were widely regarded as a ruler's property, with few rights of their own, as also were their children. According to the census of 1921 there were 48,000 such Darogas, as they were known, in Jodhpur alone; a community built up over many generations that remained entirely dependent on the rulers and nobles who, to all intents and purposes, owned them, and looked after their well being.

Purdah did not prevent many royal ladies from travelling extensively, but it required special arrangements and particular apparatus or articles of clothing such as the burqas worn by Muslim women or the 'little umbrella with brocade curtains reaching right down to the ground with slits and little windows at the front' that Shashi Wallia's mother always carried when she went out into a public place in Dewas. Shahvar Sultan of Cambay remembers as a child leaping up to try to see beyond the 'suffocating' red curtains between which they were required to pass on railway platforms; Nirmala Raje Bhonsle of Baroda recalls jumping into small palanquins or walking inside box-like curtained frames on wheels as they were pushed up to cars or railway compartments: Leela Moolgaokar of Gwalior has memories of visiting local sardars' daughters in the shigram, a 'bullock-cart with a curtained canopy on top with two small domes, the bells round the bullocks' necks making a lovely jangling sound as we went along'.For special occasions such as processions or festivals many states had their own enclosures for the purdah women, such as the justifiably famous Hawa Mahal or 'Hall of Wind' overlooking the main street in Jaipur which was connected to the City Palace zanana by a series of passages. Some states even had movable enclosures on a grand scale and in Rewa there were two magnificent elephant-drawn chariots: one for the mardana, the other for the zanana, each of which could accommodate over a hundred spectators. Their principal use was for the Dassera festival, when the palace women would be transported out to the site where the demon Ravana was annually burnt in effigy amidst a blaze of fireworks.

Zanana quarters were rarely unfriendly or silent. 'They rang with sounds of life and laughter and if people weren't happy they seemed full of good cheer.'

Yet however relaxed the atmosphere might be, 'all chatter and laughter stopped the moment His Highness appeared'.As well as music and cheerful sounds the zanana was also filled with colour. Many of the states - most notably the Rajputana states of Kishengarh, Bundi and Kotah and the Punjab hill states - had their own long-established schools of art patronised and encouraged by their rulers, whose palace walls were richly decorated with wall-hangings, frescoes and miniatures portraying both religious and secular scenes. Every state also had its own local art forms and crafts. In Kathiwar and Kutch many a zanana wall was decorated with embroidered or beadwork hangings made by local womenfolk. Adding further colour were the clothes of the occupants themselves; saris or skirts, blouses and shawls worn by both the privileged and by their attendants - 'reds and blues and greens and silver and gold'.

We used no soap in those days. Instead there were three silver bowls, each with a different oil for the face, the body and the hair and four copper vessels filled with four kinds of fragrant herbal waters. Your hair was washed first, using green thali paste made from freshly-plucked leaves, then washed and oiled with coconut oil and dried with a thin porous material called tortu. Then your body was washed, powder gram (chick peas) was applied and removed with a circular sort of sponge called incha made from a fibrous bark, and you were washed again with warm Nalpamaravellam water, absolutely red in colour and made by boiling the bark of forty different trees. Your body was oiled and massaged and your face, taking great care that the oil did not get on the hair because it contained saffron which prevented hair growth. Finally, your hair was slowly dried over fragrant smoke from a karandi, an iron pot filled with live coals with all sorts of herbs in it. After your hair had been combed a powdered here was rubbed down the parting in the middle, which was to prevent colds.

The fact that the zanana was officially out of bounds to the male sex did not mean that it was inaccessible to visitors, female or male, even it the latter might have to conduct their business from the far side of a curtain or a chik screen. The visits of traders or sellers of wares were always particularly welcome, as Leela Moolgaokar remembers:

The attarwalla (perfume-seller) would come and the bangriwalli with her bangles, and in Gwalior there used to be these very thin bangles which were made in Czechoslovakia and fitted you so tightly that it was a feat getting them over your wrist. Then, of course, the rangari (dyer) would come and you would order the colour for your saris of Number 26 Dacca muslin. Another thing was that just before the cold weather, a man would come with his wife carrying a bag matka (earthen pot). They would put a charcoal fire underneath it and make the matka really hot. Then there used to be a special type of material in cotton but like taffeta, which he would put on the matka, fold it and then press it in a particular way with a tongs-like instrument fold it again and pinch it, and then fold it another way and pinch it again. We would have our waistcoats and chughas (coats) made out of this material with the design which was done by the tongs, and that would have our waistcoats and chughas (coats) made out of this material with the design which was done by the tongs, and that would be lined with thin cotton wool and Dacca muslin Number 26. Even the Sardars; wives would get this done. They did it so quickly and we'd all sit around and watch them.

Local women were also frequent visitors during the day, for just as the ruler received male petitioners in the mardana so too did his consort receive requests or complaints from the women. 'Courtiers' wives came and the commoners.

'In Baroda, as in nearly every Hindu state, the royal ladies' food was prepared by Brahmin palace cooks. Many households had very strict taboos governing the cooking and handling of food, particularly if the ruling family was itself of high caste. In Mysore the royal family paid for the upkeep of a number of temples, so whenever there was a relgious festival special food known as prasadam or offerings from the gods, consisting of 'various types of rice and payasam, all the south Indian delicacies', was cooked by the temple priests and sent up to he palace. In Travacore the food was prepared by Brahmin women: 'It always had to be cooked by Brahmins and served by Brahmins, but after you had finished eating they wouldn't touch the plates, which had to be removed by lower-caste Nair ladies.' The meals themselves also followed a set pattern. 'My grandmother's meals were always quite a ritual,' explains Rukmini Varma:

She had to have a certain number of dishes in front of her. For lunch she would have two curries cooked in a certain manner with curds as the base, one dal curry, two vegetable curries with gravy and one dry vegetable, plus a silver bowl with rice in it from which she would help herself. For tea there had to be ten things, six salty and four sweet. For sweets there was apam, made of bananas and rice flour fried in ghee, and a king of halwa made of arrowroot, sweet but very bland. Among the salty dishes there was a variety of bhajiyas and pakoras (type of fritters) fried in batter and varieties of dosas (savoury pancakes) and idlis (steamed rice-cakes). The whole family would assemble for this ritual, but not the Amachis (the wives of the men of the royal family). They couldn't come anywhere near us when a meal was being eaten and if by accident they did, then the whole meal had to be sent back-because if anyone below caste set foot in the room while the meal was in progress it would all have to be cooked again. Dinner was always a bit more relaxed because that was after sunset, when everything is more relaxed.

In some wealthier states the women and children of the ruling family are offered plates or thalis of gold. When Gayatri Devi had visited Baroda as a child this had caused her some embarrassment, 'because I had a little girl-friend who was also at the table but while I had a gold plate she only had a silver one.' It was only when she grew older that she learned the conventions governing the use of gold and silver among Indian royalty: 'Every Indian woman in India, however poor she may have had a bit of gold on her because a woman is supposed to be Lakshmi, the Goddess of Wealth, and gold represents wealth. Because they respected royal blood did you wear gold on your feet and if you were of that class you never put on silver.' Yet even golf by itself was considered vulgar in some states. 'For us gold was only the metal in which precious stones were set,' declares Padma Lokur of Bhor. 'We never wore full gold bangles on our wrists, only pearl ones. It was our servants and countries' wives who wore gold jewelry.'

Every married princess had her jewelry given to her at the time of her marriage by her husband and other relatives, but in addition there was also the state jewelry and the personal jewelry belonging to her husband's family. This was kept in a strong room known as the Toshakhana and looked after by a khazanchi or state treasurer, which like so many occupations in the state was a hereditary profession handed down from father to son. In every state a distinction was drawn between personal jewelry, bought by rulers out of their privy purses and state jewelry, which usually took the form of ancient family heirlooms and regalia going back in some cases many hundreds of years. Jewelry worn on state and public occasions nearly always belonged to the state and was jealously guarded and zealously rationed in use by its guardians. In Baroda, the state treasurer was known as the Jamdar who possessed a book 'that was ten feet long giving the description of every piece down to the minutest detail.' Every time an item of state jewelry was worn a prescribed routine had to be followed:

In the morning there were cotton saris worn, because we had to encourage the Indian handloom industry, but in the evening you could wear georgette with a golden border - and jewelry was compulsory. The Jamdar would take it out and hand it to the maid who had to sign for it by putting her thumb-mark in the book. She brought it to us on silver thalis. There was no 'I' d like this' or 'I' ll wear that'. You had to wear all these things from the Jamdar khana according to turn; one group of earnings, necklace and bangles one evening, the next evening another set. Then after dinner you removed your jewelry and next morning the maid took it back to the Jamdar.

As might have been expected, Maharani Chimnabai of Baroda became a leading proponent for the ending of purdah. 'My grandmother argued, "You talk about the emancipation of women and this and that and yet we are all put in this purdah. Whether you allow me or not I am going to give it up". And she did give it up, although she always insisted that unmarried girls were not to be taken into public places and that when men came - particularly Maratha men - we should cover our heads with our saris.'

The real change did not begin until after the end of the Second World War. In Patiala the purdah revolution was led by the Maharani, albeit a little reluctantly at first and only after the encouragement of her friends, among them Sardar H S Malik, the State's Dewan, and his wife.
Although the Maharani rode and shot she did everything in purdah and purdah meant that when she came along the road they used to shout, 'Bandobast! Bandobast!,' and all the people on the road had to get off or look the other way. But there were a lot of Americans in Delhi in 1945 and we knew some of them and invited them to Chail. During one of these visits I said to the Maharaja, 'It's a great pity that none of these people can every meet your wife, because she is such a charming person and would create such a tremendous impression.' So finally he agreed and she came out of purdah - and soon afterwards all the Sardarnis (wives of Sardars) came out of purdah, too.

In Jaipur, also, the lead came from the top. 'My husband was trying to get the other women out of purdah,' Gayatri Devi explains. 'We would give receptions in Rambagh when my husband would ask some of the nobles to come with their wives - but very few would do so. After that he said, "We must do something about breaking purdah." But I was only twenty-one or twenty-one at that time. "Nobody's going to follow me," I said, 'But give me a school and I promise you within ten years purdah will be broken." And that is how the Maharani Gayatri Devi School, which is now one of the premier schools in India, began in Jaipur.