Cooch Behar

The adversaries were Jai of Jaipur and his most fervent admirer and keenest rival, Bhaiya, the 19-year-old Prince Regent of Cooch Behar.

Chaplin’s Girl Miranda Seymour 2009

Indira, the widowed Maharani of Cooch Behar now part of Western Bengal, helped to set the raffishly imperious tone for the behaviour of Indian royalty when abroad.

Chaplin’s Girl Miranda Seymour 2009

Back in Cooch Behar, and living on a stringent alcohol-free diet, Bhaiya was feeling low.

Chaplin’s Girl Miranda Seymour 2009

‘I watched you in City Lights,’ a glamorous young Indian admirer Bhaiya, Maharaja of Cooch Behar would write to Virginia several years later, his memory of her performance as vivid then as upon first viewing.

Chaplin’s Girl Miranda Seymour 2009

‘Cooch Behar is very dull–no ‘alk’ no Bag o’Nails; nothing but work and sleep.

Chaplin’s Girl Miranda Seymour 2009

Another 1953 letter that surfaces in these heaps of closely written notes and scrawls is from Bhaiya, recalling old times and still unashamedly envying Jai because Jaipur, unlike Cooch Behar, so it seems to the jealous Bhaiya, still operates as before the birth of Indian independence, in 1947 ‘just like the old states’.

Chaplin’s Girl Miranda Seymour 2009

Harrow-educated Bhaiya of Cooch Behar, closest cohort to Jai, was completing, in 1935, his first year at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Chaplin’s Girl Miranda Seymour 2009

Jo had received confirmation of the news she was dreading: Jai intended to marry, as his third wife, Ayesha of Cooch Behar.

Chaplin’s Girl Miranda Seymour 2009

The land for the Club building was donated by the Maharaja of Cooch Behar and he was the only one whose rickshaw (There were no cars those days) was permitted to be parked in the main porch of the Club.

THE DARJEELING CLUB LTD.(THE PLANTERS)ESTD. 1868 -THE RAJ LEGACY 2008

However, there was considerable controversy both in Britain and among the Brahmo Samaj when he gave his under-age daughter Sunity in marriage to the Maharajah of Cooch Behar; as a result, Britain returned to its love-affair with Rammohun Roy Burton, 1998: 41-42.

The Rammohun Roy connection 2008