On June 6, 1925, a motor hearse followed by 25 motorcars veered through a series of tombs of all shapes, sizes and designs resting alongside tree-lined cobbled pathways to enter the Pere Lachaise cemetery. That was forty-six summers before a certain James Douglas Morrison’s mortal remains made their way into arguably the world’s most visited boneyard in Paris, and his rather nondescript sepulchre amidst a forest of regal and grandiose mausoleums and tombs started annually attracting millions of visitors across the world. Likewise, Jacob Epstein’s previously infamous and controversial Hopton Wood stone sculpture of a vast winged naked angel at the tomb of Oscar Wilde was unveiled a decade ago and had become quite a cult already.
Death of an Indian royal
The hearse-led funeral cavalcade, comprising family members and elite European friends of an Indian Maharajah, slowly stopped in front of the Byzantine Revival architecture-inspired crematorium designed by Jean-Camille Formigé. The coffin was taken out of the hearse by the entourage members and was carried inside.
In the coffin was the body of the then ruler of Gwalior, Madho Rao Scindia, in his royal robes with all the insignia of his rank, who had passed away on the previous day, June 5, 1925, at the reconstructed and plush hotel of Château de Madrid in Neuilly, on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, near Paris. The majesty from central India had undergone serious surgery in Paris and was subsequently recuperating at the ritzy retreat on the outskirts of the French capital for a few weeks before unexpectedly breathing his last due to pneumonia following pulmonary congestion in his second-floor suite inside the opulent château.
Meanwhile, after his body was placed at the designated spot inside the crematorium, two of his family members “kissed the coffin” in taking a last farewell. The Indian royal was officially cremated at the necropolis that had by then hosted the burial of many world-famous personalities, including French authors and playwrights like Molière and Honoré de Balzac, Polish composer Frédéric Chopin, French stage icon Sarah Bernhardt, and German-born father of homoeopathy Samuel Hahnemann among others.
An unobtrusive cremation
It was initially decided that the cremation of 48-year-old monarch Scindia, a veteran of the Boxer Rebellion in China and World War I for the British forces, should be carried out in accordance with Hindu rites on the banks of the Seine, but the Parisian authorities refused to entertain the request. Then, the request was made to set up a funeral pyre at Pere Lachaise, but that, too, was denied by the prefect of the local police as they feared that too much attention would be attracted. Incidentally, the then ongoing controversy surrounding Wilde’s tomb over Epstein’s sculpture of the nude angel with exposed testicles was believed to be one of the reasons for the authorities not favouring any unwanted and unpleasant attention at that time.
Earlier, an all-religious ceremony took place at Château de Madrid before the body of the then head of the Scindia dynasty, who was once an Honorary Aide-de-camp to King Edward VII, was taken out for the funeral procession to the Parisian cemetery that took its name from King Louis XIV’s confessor. Eventually, an extremely simple cremation in the presence of a Hindu priest was carried out at Pere Lachaise by the bereaved family of the ruler of one of the most powerful states of erstwhile British-ruled India. Once it was over, Scindia’s ashes were taken to the Columbarium inside the burial ground and were kept there for a month.
Ashes from Pere Lachaise to Prayag
Subsequently, the urn containing the ashes “was transported in a private train to Marseilles, where it was ensconced in a private stateroom on an ocean liner the Scindia darbār (court) hired exclusively for the journey,” mentioned in the book, Royal Umbrellas of Stone: Memory, Politics, and Public Identity in Rajput Funerary Art, written by Melia Belli Bose.
“The royal remains were met at the dock in Bombay with full military honours. Several Indian princes and citizens of Gwalior made the trip to pay their condolences. The urn was then transported from Bombay in a private car on a specially ordered train, which made a stop at each state capital en route to Gwalior, allowing the state’s ruler to pay his respects and take a final darśan (viewing) of the ashes.”
“After arriving in Gwalior, the urn was conveyed by a traditional śav yātrā (funerary cortege) to the Scindia necropolis at Shivpuri, some thirty miles away. Finally, Madho Rao’s ashes were re-cremated at Shivpuri in a full Hindu dāh saṃskāra (ritual of last rites) ceremony,” Bose stated in the book.
A portion of his ashes was interred in the ground, while the other part was consigned to the waters of the holy Ganges at Allahabad (now Prayagraj) following a huge procession and with full state honours of the British Raj on July 13, 1925.
Unlike the sombre, low-key affair in Paris, the Allahabad event was quite grand, befitting the royal status of the deceased ruler of one of the wealthiest rulers in British India. While describing the sea of people for the procession to Triveni Sangam (confluence of three rivers), a newspaper report published by the UK’s The Civil & Military Gazette wrote, “Coolies hustled rajas, and beggars rubbed shoulders with bankers. In front and behind, as far as one could see, was simply one seething mass of humanity.”
Indian tombs at Pere Lachaise
When I contacted the Pere Lachaise authorities recently, they mentioned no other instance of a Hindu cremation at the world-famous garden of remembrance with over one million internments, at least, as per their knowledge. However, almost seven decades before Gwalior’s liege lord Scindia, whose grandson Madhavrao and great-grandson Jyotiraditya went on to become central ministers in independent India, another Indian royal had her last rites performed at the Pere Lachaise.
Former Queen of Awadh and mother of Wajid Ali Shah, Malika Kishwar, also known as Janab-i Aliyah, was also buried at the 110-acre cemetery, consisting of a dedicated Muslim enclosure alongside a Jewish enclosure as well as a Chapel, in January 1858 — a year after the Sepoy Mutiny toppled the multifaceted Nawab. Behind her tomb lies white marble tombs of nine Parsi individuals, presumably from India, as the inscriptions in Indian languages highlight. One of them was the tomb of Fazulboy Visram Eprahim, a former president of Bombay Municipal Corporation, who died in 1913.
However, several decades after Scindia’s inconspicuous cremation, a prominent Parsi from India was laid to rest at Pere Lachaise as Tata Group’s erstwhile pioneering supremo JRD Tata was buried next to his parents, Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata and Sooni Ratan Tata, whose original French name was Suzanne Brière, in 1993.
Interestingly, even though the lesser-known story of Scindia’s cremation was somewhat forgotten, the Pere Lachaise cemetery recently boarded the Bollywood bandwagon with the female lead character of Kizie Basu (played by Sanjana Sanghi) proposing the male lead of Manny (played by Sushant Singh Rajput) in Rajput’s last film Dil Bechara (2020) inside the stony jungle of mausoleums and tombs located on the Boulevard de Ménilmontant in Paris.
Suvam Pal is a Taipei-based media professional, author & documentary filmmaker. He tweets @suvvz. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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