Sony Thomas

“I was wrapped up in lotus leaves, which served as a make-believe womb, and held against mother’s stomach. I presume our priests recommended this peculiar ‘remedy’ to the problem that I was born but wasn’t supposed to be born without permission! Anyway, I was packaged like that, and the Maharajah performed the ceremonies he was meant to do months before my birth. And then the leaves were opened and I was laid on the ground. The maids and women there were all instructed to come forth with these joyous ululations and loud exclamations, and so there was a great hoo-ha about my so-called ‘birth’. Then the Maharajah ‘recognised’ me and proceeded to the naming rituals. To her dying day mother couldn’t stop laughing when she told us this story, though on that day itself she was firmly instructed not to betray any emotion lest offence be taken.14”
― Manu S. Pillai, The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore

“After the end of the war, Princess Lalitha did the unthinkable: she moved out of the palace, in pursuit of her own freedom. ‘It sounds very simple now,’ tells her cousin, ‘but at the time it was an extraordinary thing to do. Most people aspired to live like princes, with servants and luxury and all that wealth, but here was this young woman running away from it; giving up her golden spoon for something much more ordinary.”
― Manu S. Pillai, The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore

“While Gandhi and Rajagopalachari celebrated the proclamation, the all-India leader of the low-caste movement, Dr B.R. Ambedkar himself expressed a more lukewarm response. He was not, he made it clear, convinced that spirituality or emancipation were the real intentions of the Maharajah’s historic proclamation. Instead, it was knowledge that the ‘cessation of so large a community would be the death-knell to the Hindus’ and the fact that Ezhavas by their recent actions had ‘made the danger real’, that compelled the state to act in a substantial manner.125 If it were not for these political pressures, Travancore might never have changed.”
― Manu S. Pillai, The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore

“His Highness is ever on his guard as though he has been carefully tutored beforehand and is afraid to say anything … Apparently this attitude is inculcated by Her Highness, his mother.”
― Manu S. Pillai, The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore