In his latest column friend and fellow journalist Aseem Chhabra writes about Manavendra Singh Gohil, whose two identifiable features are that he occasionally dresses up as a prince and that he is gay. Neither, I must add here, is an attribute nor an accomplishment. Nor, for that matte, a career.
Aseem has a justifiable grouse with Gohil, who has successfully managed to project his story in the Western media as one of hard struggle of a “prince” who came out in the face great royal familial ferment. After the 46-year-old Gohil was featured by Oprah Winfrey some years ago he was rocketed into an orbit no Indian gay man has managed. Aseem quotes from an essay published on Winfrey’s site before Gohil was interviewed on the show as saying, “In 2006, a royal Indian prince revealed a secret so taboo, it ripped his family apart, stunned a nation and made international headlines.”
Homosexuality has not quite been a “secret so taboo” in India which has “stunned” the nation. The essayist pulled that one straight out of his or her own ass. Except causing some predictable outrage and embarrassment to his immediate family Gohil’s homosexuality was a staggering non-event in Rajpipla, let alone Gujarat, India and the world. The immediate provocation that prompted Aseem to write about Gohil was a recent fundraiser in New York where the “prince” dressed up as, for want of a better word, a “prince” “trying desperately to sell himself.”
Let me give a context to Gohil and his princeliness. Gohil did not become gay by dint of hard work. He was born gay. Also, he also did not become a “prince” by dint of hard work. He was born a prince, such as it is. As kingdoms go, Rajpipla was more like an outhouse of a minor kingdom. Even those who believe in such non-sense as royalty would struggle to describe Rajpipla as a kingdom and its inheritors as princes.
The British developed a completely fake system of grading royalties and principalities during the Raj. Quite like those phony titles such as ‘Sir’, and ‘Rao Bahadur’, they had a system of gun salutes. Gun salutes literally meant the firing of canons in honor of a particular king or prince. The number of times that the canons were fired depended, in the Indian context, on how prosperous the kingdom was. The 21 gun salute was considered the highest honor. On the gun salute scale, it seems Rajpipla qualified for the 13 gun salute.
Think of the gun salute scale as the Richter scale, except the Richter scale is real science. The 13 gun salute may not seem that far from the 21 gun salute but it is actually very low because the magnitude that separates any two numbers on this scale drops dramatically with each lowering. To put in the terms most might understand, if the Nizam of Hyderabad was in the front row of Indian kings along with those of Gwalior or Vadodara or Mysore, Rajpipla would be somewhere close to the exit. I exaggerate, of course, but you get the point.
There is something instructive about the fact that Gohil is still holding on to two main identifiers of his life, his lineage and his sexuality, neither of which he played any part in creating. On the other hand, what difference does it make if he wants to dress up as a prince to raise money for a good cause?
