Javier Moro

Il Corriere de la Sera.
Taino Danilo,
31 maggio 2006

In India una soubrette spagnola mise in crisi la morale vittoriana COLONIE Javier Moro ricostruisce la storia di Anita Delgado e del signore di Kapurthala. Una ballerina andalusa che, all’ inizio del Novecento, fa innamorare un maharajah e lo segue nel Punjab è una favola bellissima. Comunque finisca. Ci sono gli occhi e i capelli neri; le caviglie sottili; il mento sempre all’ insù come solo la sfrontatezza giovane può mostrare. Le paure, prima del denaro che non finisce mai e poi dei misteri dell’ India, delle altre mogli, dell’ harem, delle masse dei miseri, delle ingiustizie. Ci sono le lingue e le maniere regali da imparare a Parigi, prima di partire per il lungo viaggio. La nave che porta in una città che si chiama ancora Bombay, tra le divise degli ufficiali dell’ impero più vasto del mondo, i baffi impomatati, i turbanti e gli sfarzi dei ricchissimiprincipi locali e il treno che conduce nell’ interno. E lui, nobile, alto, colto, paziente, un po’ Oriente e un po’ Occidente, che aspetta. C’ è la favola, fino in fondo, nel libro di Javier Moro, Passione indiana, da qualche giorno in libreria. Una favola costruita su una storia vera, sul viaggio incredibile di Anita Delgado da Málaga a un caffè-concerto, con flamenco, di Madrid fino al regno di Kapurthala, la «Parigi del Punjab», e ritorno in Europa. Ma c’ è molto altro. Soprattutto, c’ è la veramontagna che l’ affascinante Anita non potrà mai scalare: l’ ostilità dei britannici alla «spagnola» che avrebbe potuto rovinare il loro tessuto di successioni programmate nei possedimenti del Raj e che mise in crisi la morale tardo vittoriana di chi dell’ India aveva ormai perso il fascino e non era più sulla stessa lunghezza d’ onda della «colonia» più straordinaria che a ogni impero sia mai capitato di avere. Il libro di Moro - spagnolo di cinquant’ anni, autore, tra l’ altro di Mezzanotte e cinque a Bhopal assieme a Dominique Lapierre - è un intreccio di ricerca storica, compreso il diario di Anita, di romanzo e di scavi culturali. E proprio l’ attrazione e la repulsione che India e Occidente vivono da sempre è il filo rosso che corre nel libro. Il maharajah di Kapurthala, Jagatjit Singh, ammira gli inglesi e ne è allo stesso tempo disgustato, li trova arroganti e «freddi come il marmo». Anita è affascinata dalle ricchezze ma vive l’ ostilità delle altre mogli del marito.

Le cortigiane vorrebbero fuggire in Europa ma la famiglia le trattiene nelle tradizioni e nelle frustrazioni di essere donne in India cent’ anni fa. La finestra più interessante che Moro apre, però, è forse l’ involuzione che progressivamente soffre l’ impero britannico in India, un moralismo fondamentalista che arriva a ordinare che «la spagnola rimanga fuori dalla vista dei membri di governo presenti» a un evento sociale organizzato a Lahore dal governatore del Punjab. All’ inizio della colonizzazione, sottolinea Moro, i viceré britannici non alzavano muri tra indiani e occidentali, «le idee e le persone si mescolavano liberamente». Gli inglesi seguivano le usanze locali, compresa quella di prendersi una bibi, cioè una compagna indiana, non importa se nobile, dell’ alta società, ex schiava o prostituta. Gli atteggiamenti non ortodossi erano più che tollerati, come quello di Ab Begum, una sofisticata cortigiana «che nel diciassettesimo secolo si presentava nuda alle feste di Delhi senza che nessuno se ne accorgesse visto che dipingeva da cima a fondo il suo corpo». Sir David Ochterlony, massima autorità britannica a Delhi alla fine dell’ impero Moghul, riceveva «sdraiato su un divano, succhiando un narghilè, con indosso un camicione di seta» e ogni sera le tredici mogli lo seguivano in processione per la città. A un certo punto, il moralismo vittoriano e la realizzazione che la mescolanza delle razze rischia di minare il consolidamento dell’ impero, l’ atteggiamento britannico inizia a cambiare. Gli occidentali si ritirano via via dietro un muro di rigidità sociali e politiche. Questi sono gli anni indiani di Anita Delgado, che con il muro di rigore e sussiego si scontra nel modo più doloroso, qualcosa che incrinerà anche il suo amore per il maharajah. E in questa distanza rimarcata tra Occidente e India matura probabilmente almeno una parte della fine del più grande impero coloniale della storia. È una favola popolata di nababbi, di secchi ricolmi di gioielli, di amori, di passioni, di meschinità, di delusioni, quella raccontata da Moro (e acquistata, per i diritti cinematografici, dalla neoproduttrice Penélope Cruz). «La ruota del karma gira per tutti» e ognuno, alla fine, trova il proprio destino. Anita, il suo maharajah, l’ India e l’ Impero britannico ormai avviato verso un declino rigido e rassegnato. Il libro: Javier Moro, «Passione indiana. La fiaba vera della ballerina andalusa alla corte del maharajah», Mondadori, traduzione di Jole Da Rin, pagine 408.

The Telegraph.
By Gajinder Singh.
September 24, 2006

A bestseller. A lawsuit threat sucking in Penelope Cruz. A century on, a maharaja’s marriage to a Spanish dancer is still igniting passions At 18, the maharaja has such a large tummy that he needs an elephant-keeper’s help to make love to his queen. By 35, the now-slim and refined globe-trotter who dines with Europe’s royalty has plucked a 17-year-old flamenco dancer off a Madrid nightclub and made her his fifth and favourite wife.

Fifteen years later, the forward-looking ruler of Kapurthala is advised on his divorce by a brilliant lawyer named Mohammed Ali Jinnah when he catches his Spanish queen getting pregnant by one of her stepsons. Racy enough for Hollywood star Penelope Cruz to want to bring the tale to the world’s movie theatres with herself in the lead role. Yet, how much is truth and how much embellishment? The tumultuous marriage of Maharaja Jagatjit Singh and Anita Delgado, regular tabloid fare during their lifetimes, is igniting passions a century after their fairytale union, with a Spanish novelist penning their “true story”.

The maharaja’s great-grandson, Shatrujit Singh, plans to sue Passion India author Javier Moro for slandering the family with his “pack of lies” and threatens to block its filming by Cruz. Moro’s defence is that he “sacrificed the historic(al) truth for the truth of fiction” to be able to “better imagine what went through the heads and hearts of the characters”. Sure enough, he is ready with his take on the allure the white woman holds for Indian royals: “So it is not surprising that all well-born Indians, swayed by the teachings of the Kamasutra, have dreamed at some time or other of having relations with European women. Having a white woman was considered as an exterior symbol of great luxury and exotic splendour.” But he also concedes that the well-travelled Jagatjit, with his cosmopolitan tastes, would have found no real companionship among his virtually purdah-bound Indian queens.

For him, it was love at first sight when he saw the Madrid café owner’s daughter — “tall, with clear skin and very black hair, huge sleepy eyes” — swirl at a club. Persistent requests, assurances and gifts break down the Delgado family’s resistance to the idea of giving their daughter away to a foreigner with a harem. But the ecstatic maharaja is careful to get Anita groomed in etiquette, fashion and stately duties in Paris before she can land in Kapurthala for the wedding with his child in her womb. Her first few years as Maharani Prem Kaur — her new name though the British never

She makes a splash in Indian high society, has the Nizam of Hyderabad eating out of her hands and, over the frowns of the disapproving British rulers, charms the bonnets off their wives. Five years later, the romance is dead when the prince’s roving eye settles on an Englishman’s wife. But it’s almost another decade before the increasingly lonely Anita falls for stepson Kamal. “The man is a volcano of activity,” Moro writes. Kamal is a people’s prince. He goes to the villages every morning and speaks to farmers; he persuades his father to create a cooperative and a system of soft credits for the farmers. But when the affair is out, he isn’t man enough to run away with Anita leaving behind his privileges.

One particularly sore point with Jagatjit’s descendants is Moro’s claim that the maharaja forced Anita to abort her illegitimate child, at a risk to her health, before divorcing her and packing her off to Europe with son Ajit and a generous allowance. There she lives for nearly 40 years, a picture of Kamal always at her bedside, till her death in 1962. Jagatjit continues to visit Anita during his Europe trips, although even before her departure he has taken in a French mistress, Arlette Serry. Later, he marries a Czech actress. She, however, decides to jump off the Qutab Minar with her two poodles a few years later.

Jagatjit’s descendants think Moro has done a hatchet job on the maharaja, and sure enough the author delights over his — and other Indian princes’ — whims, weaknesses and bizarre sexual habits. Patiala’s Bhupinder Singh has an “insatiable sexual appetite”. More than a page is devoted to his surreal tantric orgies involving naked virgins — the high priest pouring wine over their heads for Bhupinder and his guests to suck the trickle off their skin. Yet Jagatjit is saluted as a “great man” who turned Kapurthala into India’s most advanced state, making female education compulsory, rooting out crime and corruption, keeping communal peace and even giving industry a leg up. Moro’s aim of portraying “the India of the last days of the Raj” isn’t worth more than a few paragraphs on Nehru and Gandhi — “that madman” to Anita. There are passing references to Amrit Kaur, the maharaja’s niece who always stands by Anita. She later joins the freedom struggle and becomes a minister in Independent India.

However lofty the objective, the book is finally a tale of infatuation and incest. The Jagatjit-Anita alliance has obviously caught warm-blooded Spain’s fancy — there are several other Spanish books on the subject, unlike India where there isn’t a single one. Did passion die out with the princely states? Maybe it’ll need a Penelope Cruz to arouse it again.

Society & the Arts books.
By Dilip Bobb.
India Today, 8 March 2006

“The Maharaja of Kapurthala falls for a Spanish Cinderella who in turn goes for his son. Romance and disgrace in an Indian court” Providence created the Maharajas in order to offer a spectacle to the world. Rudyard Kipling’s famous observation serves as a fitting epitaph for Indian royalty and their extravagant lifestyles after Mrs Gandhi pulled the gilded plug. No collection of royals lived in such dissolute splendour, none less so than Jagatjit Singh, Maharaja of Kapurthala. A hardcore Francophile, he built palaces that were a replica ofthose in France: his own palace was called L’Elysee. If L’Elysee was his greatest extravagance, it also symbolised the juiciest scandal of the time, involving his fifth wife, Anita Delgado, a 16-year-old, middle class Spanish girl who Jagatjit saw in a Madrid café- cum-cabaret where she worked as a stagehand, and fell obsessively in love with. It was a scandal in itself and so out of character. He had fallen for a Spanish girl when he was enamoured by all things French, a woman with no pedigree when he was obsessed with lineage and caste, and above all, someone who was almost the same age as his son from his first wife. His decision to marry Anita was akin to an earthquake in Indian political circles and the upper echelons of colonial power.

Jagatjit, however, was also a rebel, frequently abandoning custom and royal tradition for convenience, practicality or whim. Like most royals, vanity was his Achilles’ heel and the conquest of a beautiful young Spanish girl was his way at showing his diamondencrusted finger to high society. Anita Delgado would be Eliza Doolittle to his Professor Higgins. He movedher into a luxury apartment in Paris, showered her with expensive clothes and jewellery and hired a Frenchwoman to teach Anita the proper social graces to allow her to mix with the upper class.

Javier Moro, a Spanish journalist, has labelled his book fiction which is odd considering the amount of research he has done and his knowledge of India. He bases his book on diaries that Anita maintained ever since her Cinderella tale began and his own interviews of people with knowledge of Kapurthala, including surviving members of the former royal family. Where fact ends and fiction takes over is difficult to say but her fairy tale life explodes in her face as another scandal erupts, this one much bigger. She falls in love with Kamal, the Maharaja’s youngest son. Jagatjit’s fury when he finds out and the damage to his ego and reputation force him to banish her to Paris. She died a few years later in Madrid, in the arms of Ajit, their son. It is an absorbingstory and Moro has done an exceptional job in chronicling a little known saga involving one of India’s most colourful royals. There are plans to make the book into a movie starring Penelope Cruz. What this book does prove is that when it came to India’s erstwhile royalty, fact was often stranger than fiction.