The French have found a way to cope with the unrelenting bad economic news in Europe: escape to India. Not the real India but a fantasy land far removed from the realities of sinking currencies and credit-rating downgrades.
Paris metro stations are papered with huge posters for ?Rani,? this year?s Christmas-season television special about the improbable adventures of a dispossessed marquise in 18th-century France and India. While, for a much more elite public, the house of Chanel unveiled on Dec. 6 to 200 handpicked guests, including Frieda Pinto and Sonam Kapoor, its Paris-Bombay collection at a sumptuous durbar in the Grand Palais.
The title ?Rani? is helpfully translated for the French public as ?the Hindi word for the raja?s wife.? The raja, who makes the French renegade Jolanne de Valcourt his wife, is played by Hrithik Roshan, the only name Indian actor in the series. The lead role is played by French actress Myl?ne Jampanoi who was married in real-life to Indian model and actor Milind Sonam.
However, being the wife of an Indian raja is just one of the avatars in the incredible career of a woman who ?will neither submit to men nor to her destiny,? and whose adventures lead her to assume, one after the other, the incarnations of ?Bastard,? ?Brigand,? ?Slave,? ?Mistress,? ?Untouchable,? ?Condemned,? ?Queen,? and, finally, the one to which she is entitled, ?Marquise.?
In all of these roles, Myl?ne?s considerable physical charms are revealed in one rape, love or bathing scene after another. (France TV2 warns the series may not be advisable viewing for children under the age of 10, which seems rather a low bar to this viewer.)
There was much less flesh and much more opulence on display at the Chanel Paris-Bombay event, where Karl Lagerfeld was dubbed ?the maharajah of the Chanel palace.? The banquet room created in the cavernous glass-roofed Grand Palais, built for the Universal Exhibition of 1900, included sculpted marble walls in the Mughal style, lavish fruit and flowers arrangements, crystal chandeliers, and the Chanel Express, a miniature silver train inspired by the one that graced the table of the Maharajah of Gwalior carrying carafes of whiskey around the superbly decorated table.
In an interview posted on the Chanel web site, Karl Lagerfeld admits that, to him, ?India is an idea. I know nothing about the real India.?
As in ?Rani,? Chanel?s Paris-Bombay collection is the stuff of dreams, a fantasy meant to appeal as much to wealthy Indian customers as to European or American ones anxious to escape the depressing realities of global economic distress.
Lagerfeld?s reaction to being queried about the appropriateness of such unabashed opulence in such hard times ? ?There is no question of giving in to the general gloom!? ? was widely reported in the French press, whose main preoccupation these days is the threatened downgrade of France?s triple-A credit rating. Mr. Lagerfeld waved off the threat, exclaiming, ?But who are these people? Who has given them the power to distribute these As? We don?t even know who they are.?
During the Great Depression, when French luxury couture and jewelry houses lost most of their wealthy American patrons, Indian royalty came to the rescue, placing enough orders with Cartier, Boucheron, Christofle and Louis Vuitton to more than carry them through the lean years.
In his book, ?Made for Maharajas: A Design Diary of Princely India,? Amin Jaffer documents the real ranis, including Brinda Devi of Kapurthala, who inspired Cole Porter?s song ?Let?s Misbehave,? written for the musical ?Paris? and Indira Devi of Cooch Behar, who gamed at the Casino Toquet and wore jeweled sandals made for her by Ferragamo.
Indian royals were welcome fixtures of the European social scene and eager consumers of European luxury goods during the interwar years. Cartier famously created thousands of pieces of exquisite jewelry for Indian royals, who included Bhupindra Singh of Patiala, the Agha Khan, the sultan of Mysore, the Nawab of Rampur, the Nizam of Hyderabad and the maharajas of Kapurthala and Nawanagar.
In the French television serial ?Rani,? the opulence of Indian royalty and of the French 18th-century aristocracy are recreated with as much pomp as Chanel?s more exclusive durbar. There are endless scenes of richly dressed Europeans and Indians in glittering castles and palaces. But the darker side of a time when fabulous wealth was amassed in a society rife with corruption and marked by cruel exploitation is also part of the story.
At one point, an aristocratic administrator summons to his lavish castle in the French provinces the thoroughly corrupt police chief who is tasked with finding the falsely accused Jolanne so she can be transported to Paris and guillotined. ?That you are corrupt does not concern me,? he says. ?Everyone is. But what I cannot abide is that you are both corrupt and incompetent.? In France, where multiple corruption scandals involving prostitution rings for senior politicians and uncompetitive bidding for lucrative government contracts have grabbed headlines this year, these words surely resonate.
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=b60df6a1616e683847b7dad6767f1d95
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