M.K Binodini Devi's Sense of Beauty
A Princess Writer and the Manipuri Aesthetic

L. Somi Roy *

Illuminating notes on beauty are part of Manipuri writer Binodini's award-winning novel, now translated into English.

My mother was a very beautiful woman. So said theater director Ratan Thiyam to me one day: "Imasi was a beautiful woman, with a sense of aesthetics in everything she wrote, in everything she did. Everything we do in her name must be filled with her sense of beauty."

I was reminded of his words as I translated her historical novel Boro Saheb Ongbi Sanatombi, now published as The Princess and the Political Agent. The Sahitya Akademi Award winning romance by Binodini, to use the literary mononym Maharaj Kumari Binodini Devi (1922-2011) used, tells the love story of the author's aunt Princess Sanatombi and British political agent Colonel Henry St. Patrick Maxwell - an enemy of her people, the British who vanquished her father Maharaj Surchandra Singh and his brothers in 1891.

As I worked on the translation, I was also struck beyond the challenge of the beauty of her Manipuri prose, to her descriptions of beauty, a Manipuri sense of beauty that suffuses her novel. Her portrayal of handsome princes and beautiful princesses, of mannered court etiquette, princely betrayal and craven colonialism is suffused with the Manipuri aesthetic Binodini held the highest and dearest called machu taba.

Literally "of the right colour", it is one of those concepts particular to a culture that defies easy translation. It is an aesthetic of sterling behaviour, in which notions of beauty, breeding, judgment, manners and grace, righteousness and ethics, and plain human decency nestle harmoniously. Machu taba is the quintessential aspiration of privilege and commoner alike among the Manipuris.

BEAUTY AND FASHION

Having grown up in the cloistered grandeur of the palace, as the youngest daughter of Maharaja Churachand of Manipur and his queen Maharani Dhanamanjuri, the picture of beauty Binodini paints in The Princess and the Political Agent is one of Manipuri privilege and aesthetic that she knew intimately. Her comportment, manner of speaking, her attire, the boldly original way she wore flowers in her hair, were emulated by the women of the land during her lifetime.

She told me that the contemporary dress of the working Manipuri woman called the sari-phi'in was an adaptation of the Assamese mekhla chador that Binodini and her friends - all of the first generation of Manipuri women who went to study in India - had introduced in the 1940s. However, she never wore the Manipuri phanek and the innaphi stole in the sari-phi'in style by the time it became popular in the 1960s, nor even a full stole, preferring instead a narrow scarf covering her head in her later years. Her way of wearing the innaphi with one side slung over her right shoulder was often copied by women of the day.

The backdrop of the novel is a forgotten chapter of the British Raj: the outrage of the Anglo-Manipuri War of 1891. The setting is the calamitous years of fin-de-siècle Manipur of an age gone by. She wrote in her writer's foreword to her novel, 'I have taken up a task well beyond my ability but I have tried to depict a Sanatombi of a world of alien ways who had lived during a time of great change in Manipur's history.' And if she found the world she depicted alien, how much more distant it was when she wrote her novel in 1976 and from Manipur today.

Binodini's imagination takes wing from cues she culls from the Cheitharol Kumbaba, Manipur's handwritten court chronicle of record. The Tibeto-Burman kingdom's courtly pageantry of the Procession of the Crow it regularly chronicles, an annual palace event Binodini saw growing up, is a display of power and masculine grace.

Binodini describes it in The Princess and the Political Agent: 'Noblemen from the four boroughs set out for the palace, sitting stylishly at an angle in their palanquins, hookahs in hand. Adorned with the blue vanda orchids of the Crow, noblemen attired in honorific purple and wearing armbands and bracelets of gold came in a procession towards Kangla Fort.'

'It is said that it was a time,' Binodini wrote in an essay on Keipha Selunga in 2000, "When Manipuri women adorned themselves to the nines. It was not with cosmetics. With striped embroidered sarongs tucked under their arms, with chignons falling in a tail. Wearing rows of necklaces, and flowers in their hair. Spreading the fragrance of ching'hi herbs wafting about them, the married women of Manipur decked themselves up. They did not wear any blouses. Diaphanous stoles covered their bodies. Those were the days when they adorned themselves with garlands of star jasmine they made for their chignons and posies of chigong'lei to wear in their ears. It was said it was an age when Manipuri women thought the time it took for them to make the garlands for their hair and posies for their ears was time well spent.'

She concludes: 'At this moment the thought strikes me, how would it be if one were to feature a beautiful model dressed to display the concept of beauty of that age as an item in the fashion shows of today?'

THE TRANSGRESSIVE AND THE TRADITIONAL

In setting The Princess and the Political Agent in a time of increasing outside influence, from India and from Europe, we see in her long and deliberate listing of traditional jewellery Binodini's urgency to catalogue and preserve: "Scarce of daughters, the Lady of Meisnam wanted her great grand-daughter to be very beautiful. She began to arrange complete sets of necklaces, bracelets and earrings of gold, chains of diamond shaped nganggoi, a necklace of oval kondum, a string of round bokul beads, chains with pointed kiyang pendants, and chains of marei pendants. Different kinds of rings - the beehive, navel of serpent, cluster blossom ring, and so on. The bridal chalices of bell metal, the silver betel nut holder, all were arranged.'

The winds of change are coded in Binodini's description of her eponymous Princess Sanatombi: '[She] wrapped herself in a striped sarong the colour of mustard blossoms. She put on a white half-sleeved shirt with embroidered lace borders of the kind that was worn in Calcutta by women of the progressive Brahmo Samaj families of the day. She only pulled on a red Kashmiri shawl over it. The shawl had a fine border of gold... She tied her long hair in a reverse chignon with its lush tail raised to fan up like a black mynah cock.'

Binodini's descriptions of Sanatombi further brushes in her character as an unconventional woman of orthodox Manipur who was ostracised when she became the consort of a British officer. Her description of the transgressive princess melds character and narrative with the literary and the visual: "She carried a parasol with a long handle in her hand. One day she would wear an embroidered sarong of black and white with an easy fall and a red stole, on another day a limp sarong of pale pink and a small rose stole. In her loosely tied chignon, she wore a sprig of lantana she grabbed from the hedge as she came out. On another day a bunch of blue floss flowers, and yet another time, she stuck in her ear an out-of-season red chili she found growing in the residency..."

It was a time of monumental change and the coming together of styles Manipuri and European. As Maxwell and the princess prepare to receive the Viceroy, Binodini has him say: 'Seeing a sequined velvet shirt, he said, "Are you going to wear this?"
"Yes."
"Go bare shouldered. Do what you do traditionally."
"Won't they laugh if I go bare shouldered?"
"No, they won't. Our ladies go bare shouldered when they really dress up formally. They wear their dresses across the breasts like you do."

'Sanatombi wore a finely woven sarong in black and white stripes with a hijam border. She wrapped it, tucked under her arms. She wore but a single gold kiyang strand embedded with emeralds. This necklace had been given to her by her great grandmother. In her ears were stone-studded earrings of Indian make. On her feet, she wore the red velvet slippers with the thin straps that Maxwell had brought for her from Burma. On top of them were fine golden chains, worn loosely like the women of Burma do. Red crepe embroidered with gold covered her body. She wore in her ear a posy of spiked ginger lilies that Mainu had already kept ready, and a spray of fragrant white patchouli blossoms in her chignon.'

Binodini was a knowledgeable lover of flowers. The pollination of the Manipuri and the European flowers in her prose. She describes Maxwell touring the hills of a Manipur he has fallen in love with: 'It was the spring month of Sajibu. Who knew what foreigner had planted them but among the flowering trees native to this land blossomed rhododendron and azalea. How bauhinia flowered red upon red and white upon white to blanket the hills, and bonsum trees grew straight and tall. And many, many ironwood and magnolia.'

After the princess becomes the consort of the British officer and move into what is today the Raj Bhavan of Manipur that Maxwell built, she describes the gardens they planted together: 'Jacaranda, oleander, flame-of-the-forest and the like grew among the long lived sacred fig and mango trees.'

Attesting to the Manipuri fondness for little fragrant flowers over showy beauty, she continues: 'Many flowers from foreign lands began to blossom, in many colours, in many seasons. Ginger lily, white patchouli, jasmine, star jasmine, and stone orchid slowly learned to flower alongside them.'

Her own personal love of orchids, evident in a later documentary film that she wrote for director Aribam Syam Sharma called Orchids of Manipur comes through here too: 'Attached to the tall trees, there flowered the golden khongammellei, the iyonglei orchid and yerumlei dendrobium, the foxtail orchid, and bunches of blue vanda orchids. How beautiful the new residency was, how lovely was the new household.' And the flowers of the land are allegorized in describing the beauty of its women. In The Princess and the Political Agent, Binodini quotes a traditional ballad sung by a sad and smitten swain:

'Oh, flower of the rains
Blossoming in the hills.
You dropped off the branch
Before you could adorn me.
What regret, oh what regret,
Oh, how filled with regret am I...'

THE BEAUTY OF THE ORDINARY

It is not surprising then that the Manipuri aesthetic that suffuses the writings of Binodini who studied art in Santiniketan are also shaped by her painterly observation of nature and the ordinary lifestyle of common people in her land. She loved to recall the remarks of her friend, Maibam Haricharan.

A courtly, erudite, and original thinker, Haricharan had once said to her that in the bamboo gate leading to a snug house of thatched wattle and daub, its porch of clay as neat as its clay yard hand-mopped daily to a polished finish, its little pond fringed with shrubs of scarlet hibiscus and with steps descending to a little bamboo jetty - all ringed with clumps of banana trees and bamboo groves - lay the unpretentious loveliness of Manipuri homes.

And so, Binodini writes of its effect on Maxwell: 'Their simple, lovely homes, with groves of bamboo, rows of banana trees, little ponds, duck, pigeon, chicken coops, and pig sties - all of them were new to him, new and beautiful.'

*

Does a culture have a distinctive sense of beauty, or is beauty a universally shared aesthetic? No doubt, the loveliness of a sunset, of a flower in bloom, of a beautiful woman in all her finery are appreciated across distant and disparate cultures with need for neither explanation or justification. Yet a civilization's aesthetic is often particular to that civilization. It is this Manipuri aesthetic that infuses her sterling prose with that courtly quality of machu taba and visual beauty as rich and embracing as in the gardens of the princess and her Political Agent.

In 1979, Manipuri writer MK Binodini Devi won the Sahitya Akademi Award for her feminist novel Boro Saheb Ongbi Sanatombi, a work of historical fiction based on the life of her rebellious aunt, Princess Sanatombi of Manipur.

Now translated into English by Binodini's son L. Somi Roy, "The Princess and the Political Agent" is published as a Penguin Modern Classic by Penguin Random House India.

The E-book of "The Princess and the Political Agent" is available here: https://amzn.to/2xVRuxa

A shorter version of this article was first published in The Voice of Fashion. (www.thevoiceoffashion.com).

Photographs courtesy: Manipuri Weddings (www.manipuriweddings.in) and Imasi Foundation (www.imasi.org). Manipuri fashion model by Wangkei phee Mantri.