She asked Moro to contact her husband, Brigadier Sukhjit Singh, at Kapurthala. Maharani Geeta Devi's response was imperious. He did not find Moro in the crowd, he says.Įarlier, in March 2003 in fact, the author had contacted the Tikka's mother where he expressed his desire to re-look at Anita Delgado and Jagatjit Singh not to do "a 'gossip' book (so many have been written already!) but a serious one about the end of the Raj through the life of the prince who ruled for the longest span." He also invited him to Kapurthala to visit the gurdwara where he celebrates his ancestor Jassa Singh's birth anniversary at a gurdwara built by Jagatjit Singh "in the presence of 40,000-50,000 local people". I presented him a book at the time on my ancestor, Jassa Singh." "This young man," he says, "came to see me in May 2004 saying he wanted to write a book on the Sikhs. The real problem, says Tikka, is in the way Moro has deceived them and misrepresented the family. Maharaja Jagatjit Singh continued to surround himself with glamorous women, and soon after Delgado, he courted Arlette Sherry, a giddy girl who ran off with his Cartier gifts and a boyfriend she had kept hidden, and Germaine Pellegrino who came to Kapurthala despite heing engaged to the Ford heir, Reginald.Įventually, he married another European woman, the Czech theatre actress Eugenie Grossup who suffered from "nerves" and took her life, jumping off the Qutub Minar with her favourite poodles under each arm. Incest was just another vice in the gossip that surrounded her till the end of her days. Gossip attributed covetousness to her nature, her secreting away of Kapurthala jewels, and accepting gifts from the Nizam of Hyderabad. Eventually, Delgado was exiled with an extremely handsome settlement, and went on to lead a luxurious (and not entirely lonely) life in Paris. The maharaja was persuaded by Mohammad Ali Jinnah not to make the affair public. She was rejected by the women of the zenana and by the status conscious British, and in the absence of friends to spend her days with, she resigned herself to luxurious isolation till, seeking companionship elsewhere, she seduced or was seduced by her stepson, Karamjit, the maharaja's favourite son from his fourth wife, Rani Kanari. Delgado wasn't the maharaja's first wife "" he had four earlier wives "" and they only married when she was five months pregnant with their child.ĭelgado, who came to India with visions of leading a gay life with a man she didn't really love, or love enough (thinking him some "Moorish prince"), learnt soon enough that her position as his fifth wife, a commoner and a foreigner was far removed from their giddy courtship in Madrid and Paris.
#NIFTY GAY INCEST YOUNG VERY YOUNG FULL#
What's getting everyone's knickers in a twist now is Javier Moro's book (Passion India, Full Circle, Rs 295) about the Spanish commoner who married the sophisticated Francophile Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala. Anita Delgado, the subject of the book, wrote a diary that was published by Elisa Vasquez de Gey in 1997.Įarlier, a Spanish paper had serialised her diaries in the newspaper in the sixties, but souped them up so that Delgado expressed her discontent and her son, Jit Singh, had them stopped after her demise in 1962. Why raise a controversy now?"īut where there's incest, money, power and glamour, there's also likely to be a potboiler. "A lot of garbage has been written on the royals, including the Kapurthalas," says Vishwajit Singh "" who insists on being identified as "not a member of this branch of the family" "" "but we've kept quiet about it in the past. "As far as I know," counters Javier Moro, in Madrid, "only Mr Shatrujit Singh has vented publicly his displeasure with the book." And adds for good measure, "Maybe it's time to remind Mr Shatrujit Singh that the times of the maharajas are over and that India is a democratic country with freedom of expression."įor someone sensitive to royal titles, whatever their relevance in republican India, the commonplace snub denoted by "Mr" should be obvious to the Tikka, who flaunts his hereditary title as heir to the kingdom that was once Kapurthala.
In another part of south Delhi, in his rooftop eyrie, Tikka Shatrujit Singh is surrounded by copies of emails and ageing photographs, and the laundry he's worried about is definitely not the kind he'd like to see being aired publicly. Malhotra is the low-profile publisher of Javier Moro's book, Passion India, which has sold 4 lakh copies in its original Spanish.
#NIFTY GAY INCEST YOUNG VERY YOUNG MOVIE#
"I've been getting calls from actors wanting to act in Penelope Cruz's movie on the Kapurthala family," he says. In a corner of south Delhi in a flat overlooking the neighbour's laundry, publisher Shekhar Malhotra is having a belly laugh. Kishore Singh finds that two Andalusian women a century apart are still creating rifts in the Kapurthala family.