75 years ago, a queen jumped to her death from Qutub Minar

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75 years ago, a queen jumped to her death from Qutub Minar

Rani Tara Devi Of Kapurthala Was A Czech Beauty Who Had Been A Rising Star At Vienna’s Burgtheater Before She Met Maharaja Jagatjit Singh And Accompanied Him To India. She Jumped Off The Qutub On December 9, 1946

Abhilash.Gaur@timesgroup.com

09.12.2021

By December 1946, the tall woman with wide-set eyes was a familiar sight at New Delhi’s Maidens Hotel. She had been staying there for about a month. Every day, she took her dogs out walking. But on the morning of the second Monday – December 9 – she came out of her suite alone, hailed a taxi and sped towards the Qutub Minar.

The 13th-century tower lay outside the capital, about 20km away. On arriving at the Minar, the woman left her handbag with the driver and started up the stairs. The Minar is taller than a 20-storey apartment building and not an easy climb even for someone in fine fettle. Had the driver glanced up, he couldn’t have read the look on her face when she appeared at the top. But he would have frozen in shock as she jumped to death.

A woman so beautiful that she had wowed Vienna’s elite on her first major stage appearance 11 years earlier, now lay smashed beyond recognition. Who was she? The contents of her handbag revealed she was Rani Tara Devi, 33-year-old estranged wife of Kapurthala’s ageing Maharaja, Jagatjit Singh.

After a post-mortem next morning, Tara Devi was buried at the Nicholson Cemetery near Kashmere Gate in Delhi, and forgotten.

A charmer on stage

But Tara Devi wasn’t her real name. A Kapurthala state declaration submitted to the British in 1940 mentions her name as ‘Engenie’ Marie Grosupova, which might have been a typist’s mistake. Eugenie is the more likely name.

The Rani was a Czech national, born on January 22, 1914. Dr Leon Pistol, who had been her guardian in Vienna from the age of 4 to 20 years, told the Canadian newspaper Photo Journal that she was the daughter of “a very wealthy member of the Hungarian nobility”. Before she accompanied the Maharaja to India, shortly before WW-II started, she had been a promising new dancer on Vienna’s most famous stage, the Burgtheater.

In 1935, Eugenie had landed a meaty role as Anitra in Henrik Ibsen’s drama Peer Gynt. The press admired her for her beauty, femininity and dancing. Austrian papers such as Die Stunde mentioned her as Nina Grosup-Karatsonyi. After her suicide, papers in America, Europe and Australia also used the name Nina Grosup, so did Pistol. So, Nina is what we’ll call her for the rest of this story.

A royal whim

After making a splash on the stage in 1935, why did Nina disappear from it? In April 1947, four months after her suicide, Pistol told Photo Journal that the Maharaja had been present at the Burgtheater during one of her performances. “Immediately after the performance, Nina’s mother called me to tell me that the Maharaja wanted to bring them all back (to India) with him,” the article written in French says.

Another article published in the Sydney edition of The World’s News on August 23, 1947, also says, “On the opening night she received an ovation from the crowd, and a huge bouquet of roses from the Maharaja of Kapurthala, who had been admiring the dancer from his box.”

Pistol said he opposed the Maharaja’s offer because Nina had signed a three-year contract with the Burgtheater, but “the suitor-royal simply shrugged his shoulders and offered to buy out the contract in question for $20,000.”

Soon after this, Nina, her then 46-year-old mother Marie Grosupova, and a 64-year-old maid/governess named Antonia Kaura, “followed the Maharaja to Paris, London, and finally, to India”.

It’s difficult to verify Pistol’s claims in detail but the International Herald Tribune of June 28, 1938, describes a luncheon hosted by the Maharaja at the George V hotel in Paris at which ‘Mme Grosup’ (Marie), ‘Mlle Grosup’ (Nina) and ‘Dr Pistol’ were among the guests. Clearly, Pistol’s story had a kernel of truth.

By the time WW-II started in 1939, the Grosups were installed at Jagatjit Palace in Kapurthala, although Nina and the Maharaja weren’t married until then.

Unhappy marriage

The Maharaja was well-known in Europe and America and his engagements were regularly covered, so strangely his marriage to Nina didn’t draw the press’s attention, maybe because it was absorbed by the war. But it is a fact that Nina and he were married, and she was given the Indian name Tara Devi, because the question of “the grant of a British passport to Rani Tara Devi (formally Miss Grosup, a Czechoslovak citizen), wife of His Highness the Maharaja of Kapurthala” did arise in 1942.

It wasn’t a happy marriage. Reports after Nina’s suicide said they had separated in 1945 and she had been living alone. Pistol said she had intended to visit America in December 1946 to settle there. The World’s News article said she had asked Pistol to buy her a house near New York City.

Was it suicide?

From the first, Pistol said he suspected foul play in Nina’s death. He alleged that a month before she died, she had written to him saying, “Every day when I go out with my dogs somebody is asking me questions and follows me. I don’t know what he wants.

He pursued the case for some years. The National Archives of India has a 1948 record of an “Enquiry by Mr Leon Pistol, guardian of late Rani Tara Devi of Kapurthala, regarding her death in 1946.” In 1952, Pistol also sent a request to the PM “for assistance and advice regarding investigation into the mysterious death in 1946 of Eugenie Grosup, popularly known as Rani Tara Devi of Kapurthala.” But by then, the Maharaja had died and the Rani, whom few knew while she lived in India, had been completely forgotten.