One cold January evening, three young royals dined at a palatial mansion in Allahabad, now Prayagraj, in 1911, around the time the British administrative centre witnessed an historic event.
The city, located at the confluence of the Ganga and the Yamuna rivers, was the venue of what came to be known as the Allahabad Exhibition of 1911, inaugurated on December 1, 1910, by John Hewett, the British lieutenant governor of the United Provinces.
On display at the exhibition, which ran till February 1911, were crafts and technology from around the world, including stalls – or rather Mughal- and Rajasthani-architecture-inspired pavilions – that hosted German Engineering Works, British manufacturers of agricultural equipment and domestic machinery and the artworks of Abanindranath Tagore.
Celebrated singers and courtesans Gauhar Jaan of Calcutta, the first Indian artist to record on the gramophone, and Janki Bai Allahabadi were invited to perform at the exhibition, which drew visitors and guests not only from Indian royal families but also from across the world.
The hum of their enthralling voices seems to have been drowned, at least in popular memory, by the sounds of flying machines. British aviation pioneer Walter Windham who had brought two airplanes to the exhibition organised aerial demonstrations for the crowds.
On February 18, 1911, French pilot Henri Pequet flew a Humber-Sommer biplane carrying around 6,000 to 6,500 letters and postcards from Allahabad over the Yamuna River to Naini, a distance of 13 km. This was the world’s first official airmail flight, commemorated with a special bright pink cancellation stamp depicting an aeroplane, mountains, and the words “First Aerial Post, 1911, U.P. Exhibition Allahabad.”
Among those who attended this gala exhibition were the great-grandson of Queen Victoria and the eldest son of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, the Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm Victor August Ernst, and the Oxford-educated, globe-trotting Kumar Sidkeong Tulku Namgyal, who was considered the reincarnation (tulku) of a Buddhist spirtual master, Karmapa Lama, and was recognised by the British as the heir to the throne of Sikkim.
These two men had little in common, apart from their enchantment with the Burmese princess Hteiktin Ma Lat, the daughter of the Burmese Prince of Limbin, who was himself the cousin of the last king of Burma, King Thibaw.
After the third Anglo-Burmese War and the fall of his kingdom in 1885, Thibaw and the royal family were exiled to British-colonised India. They first landed in Calcutta and then moved to the Bombay Presidency, with the Limbin Prince eventually settling in Allahabad with his family, leasing a mansion on Clive Road.
It was in Allahabad that Ma Lat, born in Calcutta in 1894, received her education, built her social life, and met the two men who would be captivated by her beauty.
Maharaja Kumar, described as a devout Buddhist of quiet and amenable character, attended the exhibition at the invitation of the British, who were aware of his repeated, unsuccessful attempts to find a suitable bride – a quest that had led him to approach aristocratic families as far away as Japan.
His streak of poor luck finally came to an end as the 33-year-old Kumar, aided by the machinations of the British Government of India and the lieutenant governor of the United Provinces, met the “English-educated and speaking” Ma Lat during his visit to the exhibition.
Though records do not describe their interaction at the exhibition, the event likely served as their first point of acquaintance – an introduction that would be followed by further meetings in Allahabad.
Amid the festivities surrounding the grand exhibition, Ma Lat’s aunt and uncle organised a gala dinner at their mansion in Allahabad. The guest list included local Indian elites, British officers and Kumar, but the evening became all the more interesting when German Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm turned up uninvited. British officers close to Wilhelm later recounted how he frequently remarked that the teenage Ma Lat was the most striking woman he had encountered during his eastern tour.
Another guest at the dinner, Ethel Anderson – poet, novelist, and painter, who in 1904 married British Brigadier-General Austin Thomas Anderson, stationed in Lucknow and Bombay – recounted the events of that night in an essay published in 1952.
Waxing eloquent about Ma Lat’s porcelain-like, biscuit-tinted, and delicately luminous appearance that so captivated Wilhelm, Anderson described the lively banter between the prince and the princess. When the prince teasingly remarked that the stunning Limbin mansion, doused in soft light filtering through its archways, must have been designed either by an eccentric architect or by a complete novice, the princess – comparing the structure to wedding cakes – retorted that a cook was responsible for its finesse.
To this, the prince replied that a honeybee seemed a more likely architect, for laid out before them were a myriad of intricate Indian dishes. These included deep-fried unripe poppy heads coated with gram flour, which the prince particularly enjoyed, a dish made with rice, meat, vetches and vinegar served with a sauce of ground coriander seeds and mint, and incomparably rich pulaos, kebabs and paranthas.
While Ma Lat’s cautious flirtation with the German Crown Prince came to nothing, love quietly blossomed between her and Kumar. Following Ma Lat’s return to Burma with her family in late 1911 or early 1912, the two exchanged letters expressing the pain of being separated and their longing to see each other again. They also discussed possible timelines for their marriage – eventually settling on 1915 – and often debated differences in their customs, including what kind of dress and jewellery would be appropriate for the wedding.
Correspondence between the two came to an end in 1914, a year before their wedding, when Kumar suddenly died under suspicious circumstances – although some suspected British foul play. Upon ascending the throne of Sikkim in February 1914, Kumar’s assertive and independent nature as king soon became evident, straining his relations with the Political Officer, Charles Bell. In December 1914, while Kumar was somewhat indisposed, a British physician from Bengal administered a heavy transfusion of brandy, wrapped him in multiple blankets and kept a fire burning beneath the bed. Kumar is reported to have died within the hour.
Several years later, in 1928, Ma Lat married Herbert Bellamy, a British-Australian horse breeder, bookmaker, and orchid collector who had moved to Burma at the suggestion of the Sultan of Johor (a state in southern Malaysia).
In recent years, the memory of Ma Lat and the culinary splendour of the Limbin dining table have been swept into the booming spectacle of culinary-heritage tourism. With history increasingly reduced to social-media aesthetics and business enterprises capitalising on the demand for Instagram-ready cultural experiences, the Rampriya House – a colonial-era mansion of the Pratapgarh estate in Prayagraj – is now advertised as Ma Lat’s former residence, a claim I have not been able to verify or find evidence for so far.
The mansion was supposedly built in the 1800s for Pratap Bahadur, the Raja of Pratapgarh, and named after his wife, Rani Rampriya.
The house now hosts curated dining experiences that promise a taste of the past, carefully recreated by a female Brahmin cook, while simultaneously promoting the venue as the place where Ma Lat dined with – or, according to the internet, hosted – the Crown Prince of Germany. It reflects a deliciously twisted, commercially-driven alliance in the landscape of social-media-worthy heritage experiences, which thrives alongside increasingly hostile everyday food encounters marked by caste and communal boundaries.
Neha Vermani is an Honorary Fellow in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at Durham University. She is a historian of early modern South Asia, and her research focuses on the intersections of food practices, material culture, and scientific and ethical discourses on the body, the senses, and the natural world.
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