Echoes

It seems as if the passing of time instead of erasing my memory or decrease my popularity awakens more curiosity and increases the demand for information on my character.

In summer of 2006 the Albert Kahn Museum of Boulogne, France, manages to get a hold of my biographer: they are interested in contacting her because the museum is preparing a grand exhibition of  Udaipur and Kapurthala two Indian Principalities with two paradigmatic monarchs, one Rajputah and the other Sikh, one Anglophile and the other Francophile…

Elisa Vázquez collaborates with the museum and discovers the great friendship which my husband the Maharajah maintained with Mr. Albert Kahn. Both after World War Two, defended that the knowledge of culture and beliefs was the only way two save the differences between the people of the earth and achieve world peace…

The exhibition was a huge success. So much so that it received over one hundred thousand visitors in nine months.

More news was waiting. The director of Asian art of Christie’s, London, gets in touch with my biographer. He explains that the inheritor to the House of Kapurthala  suggested that he speak to her in relation to the sale of jewels which is going to take place in the month of December of 2007. During said act  a bunch of gems that belonged to me were to be auctioned and they need to be formally documented that I was the proprietor of said pieces: two collars, two brooches, two pairs of earrings, one bracelet and my most favourite jewel, the crescent moon shaped emerald. For the catalogue, my biographer lent Christie’s various portraits from the beginning of the 20^th century in which I appear wearing said jewels.

But things did not stop there…

One of the photographs lent to said auction was an oil painting by E. Patry who made a portrait of me in 1907. While observing the photograph a responsible of heritage from the Maison Melleiro, Paris, discovered something that I wore on my hair, like a brooch and recognized the peacock shaped brooch with almost two thousand diamonds which Melleiro had crafted in 1905 for my husband. It was the same brooch that the Maharajah wore over his turban the day I saw him for the first time.

Think of the faces on the jewellers of last century if they were told that, more than 100 years later somebody was to find in a portrait of me one of the historic pieces which had come out of Melleiro’s workshops!

Well, as you can see, it is as if my story resists to conclude, every once in a while new and colourful echoes of my legend come back to the present…