From A Playboy To A Pauper

From a playboy to a pauper 

Indian king dies in mud hut

In his youth, he lived the hell-raising life of a playboy monarch. He went carousing with other princes, owned luxury cars, lived in a palace, married a princess and was famed throughout India for his skill as a big game hunter. This week, beneath a leaking asbestos roof in the mud hut that became his home, the last king to sign away his lands and merge with India after independence in 1947, died alone and in poverty.

Brajraj Kshatriya Birbar Chamupati Singh Mahapatra cut a sorry figure in his final years

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 Brajraj Kshatriya Birbar Chamupati Singh Mahapatra, the former ruler of the tiny eastern principality of Tigiria, cut a sorry figure in his final years. Cataracts had taken much of his sight by the end and he was almost deaf. Abandoned by his family, he survived on the charity of local residents who gave him meals. His former palace had long since been sold off and converted into a school.

Despite this fall from the heights of luxury, Mr Mahapatra expressed no bitterness. Before his death, aged 94, he reflected on a life well lived. “Then I was the king, now I am a pauper, but I have no regrets whatsoever. Do you think I would have been living so long if I were unhappy?” he said. 

Spanning 45 square miles, Tigiria was the smallest of 26 princely states that agreed to merge with the new India in 1947. Lying in the eastern state of Orissa, the principalities were exempt from British rule as colonial forces expanded from Bengal, seizing land from the Hindu warriors of the Maratha empire.

When the Marathas were crushed and Orissa conceded to the British by the Maharaja of Nagpur in 1803, Tigiria and its neighbouring principalities were set aside.

The rulers of the 26 princely states traded with the British East India Company, lived off the taxes of their subjects and enjoyed the fruits of India’s steady modernisation.

“I would often visit Calcutta with my friend, the former king of Puri, and stay at the Majestic and Great Eastern hotel there. I would drink to my heart’s content and have a good time,” Mr Mahapatra told The Indian Express two years ago.

As Indian independence became inevitable, the rulers of the principalities merged with the new nation. 

Mr Mahapatra was awarded a government salary of 11,200 rupees (£1,100), until that income was cut off by Indira Gandhi in 1975. Long before then, he had sold off his palace and moved in with his old drinking companion, Gajapati Maharaja, in Puri.

He returned to Tigiria in 1987 and built the hut that would be his home for almost 30 years.

He had been encouraged to go into politics but refused, saying that he could not “bow to people”.