Princess

Eight-year-old Asha was sent to a boarding school for little princesses. A scholarship winner from a middle class family, she was thrust into a world where they ate in fine china, swam in a pool upon a hill, spent weekends in their classmates’ palaces with hundred dogs and thousand staff.

 

Asha wove a fantasy life around herself where she was also a princess - the princess of Sopore in Kashmir - in hiding because of a threat to her family. Then she began to believe it. Seema is Asha’s daughter and now a 23-year-old journalist herself. She decides to go on a journey to locate her mother Asha’s school classmates. Many of the little girls Seema grew up hearing about are now Her Royal Highness, Her Majesty. Someone is the Maharani of Bikaner, someone else of Mewar. There is no official royalty in India anymore, but these women still live veiled, fiercely private and privileged lives. Seema embarks upon a journey to track them down, often starting with nothing more than a nickname.

 

As she meets more and more of these women, she finds that all their lives connect in some way – the royals still live in their own sphere, fraternizing only with each other. Many of them live double lives – putting up with sham marriages, illicit liaisons with politicians, sportsmen and actors. But on the face of it, they have to bow to tradition and chauvinism. They cover their heads in public and finish off a bottle of whisky in private. And they’re all practically related. Someone’s brother is married to someone’s sister.

 

A dark, closed world full of deceit, intrigue, decadence and simply too much money. As Seema meets and discovers these women, she is drawn to their magnetism, their grace and beauty and their total disregard for middle class morality. She becomes friends with some of them and begins to understand how the other half lives. Then she begins to get closer to them, socializing, bonding and becoming one of them. Before she realises it, she too, like her mother is spinning a web of lies and delusion around herself, fancying herself no less than royalty, dating crown princes’ and indulging in debauchery. But how far can you run from who you really are?

 

Agent: Anuj

Edit: Sharvani