Cuttack: This tale is surely the real life, Indian version of the Chinese flick ‘The Last Emperor’.
Brajraj Mahapatra, the last tenuous thread to princely India lived and snapped in obscurity. On November 30, Mahapatra died and all that he was surrounded with was poverty and lots of love, affection and prayers of people of Tigiria.
Last living ‘king’ from British India had departed, ending the dynasty his forefathers from Rajasthan had established in 1246, in the hilly and heavily forested Tigiria.
With the demise, the bamboo cot in a derelict hut where the 95-year-old king lived became a mute witness to the miserable life of the King who died as a pauper.
His ‘kingdom’ was Tigiria, in Cuttack district, 60km from Bhubaneswar and what was the king’s last wish?
He wanted his loving subjects from Purana Tigiria to collected Rs 10 each to cremate him at the place of his death.
The subjects of this benevolent king remember him as flamboyant, yet kind-hearted and generous man who broke out of the image of a royal and became more of a paternal figure for them. The reward for his affection was that he was addressed as ‘aaja’ (grandpa) rather than ‘Raja’ (king).
A villager recalls how the king used to believe in giving even when he had little for himself.
At a point of time, the king, a motorbike enthusiast in his younger days, had gone bankrupt and had even started living on the beneficence of the villagers, but he would never take more than what he needed.
He had built a hut for himself on a hillock and used to hire autos to take him to places. But, his dignity and self-respect remained inseparable from him, say the villagers.
An alumnus of Rajkumar College in Raipur, Brajraj wrote extensively for magazines. He received an yearly honorarium of Rs 50,000 a year from the college — he was a liftime member of its governing body. This money he dispersed among the needy.
Brajraj ascended the throne in 1943 and was dethroned in 1947 when he, along with 25 other heads of princely states of Odisha, signed the instrument of accession in the presence of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel at Cuttack. However, with kingship and the Privy Purse gone, Brajraj soon became an alcoholic and eventually estranged from his family- wife Rani Rasamani Devi and six children.
Turning down chief minister Biju Patnaik’s offer to contest the elections post-Emergency on grounds that a king could never beg for votes, Brajraj later resorted to selling away his property to meet his requirements.
Tigiria was one province which did not have jails for criminals. All that it had for a jail was four pillars and a roof without walls. The biggest punishment that a Tigiria subject could get from his king was that the King stopped speaking to a convict.
Remembering all the goodness that King Brajraj stood for, the subjects now want to build a memorial in his name.
