I Wanted To Impress My Kids With The Glories of Rajnagar / Mithila / Tirhut

For us Maithils, it is always a sense of loss. You try to pull away from being a Bihari. You don’t want to be a subset of Bengal. It has been always difficult for me to explain to my bacchas (a very Shillong Khasi kids) what Mithila means. In their last visit to their ‘gaam’, I decide to take them to Rajnagar, site of the abandoned headquarters of British India’s largest zamindari (and one of the poorest regions of India).

Raj Darbhanga, a shrotriya brahmin (a small inbreeding clan of brahmins who don’t eat food cooked by the other brahmins) zamindari had lots of pretensions, first obviously trappings of being a Maharaj or a king. Then as a patron of Sanskrit, Maithili and Tantra. Obviously, if you are rich enough to own private aeroplanes, newspapers and property from Kolkata to Switzerland, you can always have pretensions. You can challenge the abolition of zamindari in the courts by claiming that your extortionate lifestyle is protected by constitutional fundamental right of property and win. But the legal victory was a short lived one. First amendment to the Indian constitution placed limits on the unfettered Right to Property.

Defeated by the new mass political leaders, Sir Kameshwar Singh imagined that he could buy himself a seat in the first Lok Sabha elections of 1952. His agents were told to procure the ballot from his roots (at a very modest payments) and stuff the ballot boxes. He lost to the Congress candidate. But it was to be a temporary loss, Sir Kameshwar Singh managed to get himself elected to Rajya Sabha on Jharkhand Party ticket.

We were in Rajnagar, Italianate administrative headquarters of Raj Darbhanga started by Kameshwar Singh’s uncle Laxameshwar Singh. But keeping the tradition of the lineage, Laxameshwar dies son less. His brother Rameshwar Singh the tantric inherits the imagination. He manages to witness his grand folly come alive till the 1934 Bihar earthquake lays all that to waste.

Kameshwar Singh, his heir is more interested in buying Marie Antonniete’s necklace, funding Hindu causes, getting his portrait in the National Portrait Gallery and yes getting a wife who would produce a son. I obviously don’t tell the bacchas of ribald songs popular amongst the subaltern classes questioning the virility of Raj Darbhanga and full of questions about the purity of his blood lineage.

Maybe one day I will tell them the story, maybe that would impress them more than the cement elephants holding up the ruins of Durbar hall.