|
 'Society
didn't consist of individuals but of houses and it was important for houses
to maintain alliances. This applied tenfold among royal houses, where
a matrimonial alliance was the next best thing to a military alliance'.
As the need to make political alliance diminished, so other considerations
assumed great importance - economic factors, the preferences of parents
and rulers and, above all, the need to marry within princely circles.
'Our make-up was such that you could not marry an ordinary boy.' Only
someone from another royal family.
Although there were many princely families, the choice of brides or bridegrooms
was often limited. Brahmins could only marry Brahmins, Rajputs did not
marry Marathas, Muslims would not think of marrying Hindus and vice-versa.
And within each social group further taboos narrowed down the field considerably.
'The whole Rajput community is very close-knit'. 'We are all relatives
in different forms and so we have to hunt for suitable matches. My father
was a Sisodia, so I could not marry a Sisodia. I married into the Jhala
clan whose members cannot marry other Jhalas'. Among some Rajput families
there were also special relationships that were maintained by marriages,
such as the ancient alliance between Jaipur and Jodhpur, which meant that
when the last ruling Maharaja of Jaipur, Sawai Man Singh, was adopted
as Yuvaraj, he was married off as a boy of twelve to a Jodhpur princess
considerably older than himself - as well as being betrothed to a second
Jodhpur princess whom he married nine years later.
Among the few Sikh princely families, alliances
had to be sought outside their own small circle. 'It would be wrong to assume
that a Sikh could only marry into a Sikh family', declares Maharaja Sukhjit
Sing. 'Many Sikh states married into the old sardar families which were
powerful enough to muster political clout or had achieved a certain status
of their own, but a lot also married into very high-caste Rajput families
from the hills, as did Kapurthala. Among the Muslim royal houses choice
was more restricted, partly because of their widely differing origins, partly
because of the sectarian divide between rulers such as the Nizams of Hyderabad
who belonged to the Sunni Muslim sect and those, like the rulers of Rampur,
who were Shiahs. An almost unbridgeable social gulf separated a family like
that of the state of Cambay, who were Shiah Muslims of Persian Moghul origin,
from their near neighbors of Sachin State who were Shiahs of part African
descent. Muslim families of Afghan or Pathan origins solved the problem
by turning to their ancestral homes for brides. For the sons of the rulers
of the pre-eminent Muslim state of Hyderabad, princesses had sometimes to
be found as far afield as Turkey.
To assist them in their alliance-building, rulers employed their own match-makers,
Charans or priests whose job it was to find suitable husbands for the daughters
of the ruling house and to check with the clean Raj-barot
and the royal astrologer that the potential bridegroom's genealogical
tree was unsullied by marriages outside caste and that his horoscope matched
that of the bride-to-be. |
