“They got up late and had breakfast at 11 am. The senior-most queen was Bakhtawar Kaur, who lived in Rajindra Kothi in the Baradari Gardens.” The concubines with their children and aides lived in the Zenana.
Hundreds of workers served in the royal harem. My father was a cook in the royal kitchen. But now governments protect killers (many not hanged despite death sentences) and commoners end life,” she says alluding to farmer suicides. “It is said that kings ordered executions at the slightest of pretexts. She shuttles between Chandigarh and Canada and as anti drugs activist. “My biggest moment,” she exclaimed.Īt her Sector 40 residence in Chandigarh, she calls the time gone by as golden. It was a homecoming for someone who tended to four of the 360 concubines of the Maharaja in the 1930s. Lying on that bed, I relived my whole life in a blink: I was not only seeing the chamber but was also a guest! Maybe, God has kept me alive for the moment,” says Man Kaur. “I could not believe my luck! I was staying in Room Number One of the hotel, the place where the Maharani lived. It was a renovated version of the famed Rajindra Kothi. A few days back, when she visited Patiala, the Marathon organisers arranged her stay in a Heritage Hotel, Neemrana, in the Baradari Garden. “She dreamed of it,” says her son Gurdev Singh, 78, a veteran athlete. She always wished to see the chamber of eldest Maharani Bakhtawar Kaur. Her Patiala visit, however, was not about the Marathon alone. Her feat in the Patiala Marathon 2016 set her apart. Popular as ‘Bebe Man Kaur’, she is like Fauja Singh, the famous Marathon runner, elder than her by a few years. From the present, she is a winner of over 20 medals in 100m, 200m and 400m races in tournaments held across the world. She has a treasure of stories - her own, though, runs quite differently, at times, in parallel. For Man Kaur, 101 (or as old as the wrinkles she wears), the splendour of the princely state of Patiala remains undying, unsurpassable - she was a part of it as an assistant for the queens of colourful Maharaja Bhupinder Singh. The rest of the two-line tale is: dono mar gaye…khatm kahani (they died, that’s the end of the story). The music was composed by Anand–Milind and the lyrics were penned by Sameer.She’d remind you of an oft-repeated, varyingly described popular tale, akin to a limerick: ‘ek tha raja, aur ek thi rani/bahot sari rani (there was a king and a queen, maybe, so many queens’).
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