Come home to a palace

With a maharaja’s palace at its heart, Kanker is a forgotten place that few stumble upon. Kanker Palace is a 130-km drive from the Raipur airport in Chhattisgarh over the dusty NH 30, much of it still work in progress where the tollbooths have been put in.

The sun was hovering near the western horizon and clouds of red dust veiled the cattle and everything else on the road. It was dark when the car reached the gate with the golden rising sun insignia, the entrance to Kanker Palace. The drive ended in front of a circular lawn and there was the sound of clanging gongs and the light of flickering flames at the open doorway. The family gathered to greet me with a tika on my forehead, a marigold garland and the traditional aarti while a golden labrador watched peacefully.

I was led through a series of wooden doors into a bedroom almost the size of a football field, with a large four-poster at one end and another single bed at the other. A brocade punkah was suspended from the rafters of the high ceiling (I later found out it was 36-ft high). The bedroom led to a dressing room and another impossibly wide bathroom. It was old and well lived-in — it smelt like those old clubs that one wanders through with worn marble floors and antlered heads mounted high on the walls. Nothing like the sleek brocaded thing that we associate with the term heritage hotel, places where the marble is polished to an inch and old retainers are trotted out in new livery.

A tiger greeted me with its teeth bared in the red upholstered drawing room. The late maharaja Udai Pratap Deo had shot it in the act of chomping on its ninth victim. Thinking of what the conservationists I knew would say, I walked over to the tiger and inspected it at close quarters. Its coat had faded to a pale khaki, the effect of years of palace dust perhaps, and, barring its canines, appeared to have few teeth left. “Old,” I said wisely. “That’s why it became a maneater.” Jai, one of the members of the erstwhile royal family and the brain behind the heritage palace stay, must have heard that comment from activist-type guests before and refrained from making any comments of his own.

The late maharaja had a building called Baghwa Kholi, or the House of Tigers, on the grounds where he kept wounded tigers and treated them. Baghwa Kholi had a short tower in the middle and an iron gate that could be raised to allow the resident big cat to come and feed and be treated. Alongside Baghwa Kholi was the kitchen garden where Jolly, the third of the Kanker brothers, was growing bananas and cherry tomatoes and custard apples. There was also an orchard with 12 types of mangoes. All of these ended up in the Kanker Palace dining room.

Kanker Palace boasted elaborate woodwork keychains and plaques with the lion and unicorn crest — dating back from the time when this limestone palace was built in 1937. The crests on the room keys have been carved by rehabilitated Naxalite prisoners who are finding their way back to a more peaceful world through art. They had also carved a wooden panel with verses from the Bible which they intended for Pope Francis. For reasons unclear, I was told that the Centre discouraged them from sending the panel to the Pope.

At night, I could hear the hoot of the white owl that nested in the gulmohur tree, and a scatter of sparrows nesting in the rafters pecked at the wood and occasionally had to be chased out. A pair of black roosters strutted on the circular lawn in front, and further down the drive were ducks — though the birds were currently under attack from a marauding hawk. There was a host of guns on display in a cabinet in the drawing room but no one thought of pulling one out and firing a gun salute to chase the hawk away.

The palace was not on any Indian map of the high life, but groups of Americans came and went and took rides in the erstwhile royal family’s US army Jeep — not too far because it only gives three km to a litre of diesel. For a while it was good to lie back under the punkahs, basking in the peace and quiet and dreaming of how it might be if one were part of a royal family.

Anjana Basu is a freelance writer based in Kolkata

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