HYDERABAD: One of the small LED screen lights up when you touch it – Early years, Nice – begins the scroll when you touch the play button. “Niloufer and her mother went to live in the Grand Palais, in the Mediterranean city of Nice. Niloufer was eight years old.” Then a stunning image greets you with a warmth, her mischievous smile is infectious. You might catch yourself smiling, unconsciously. She also reminds you of yesteryear actress Madhubala.
Only when you are soaking in the beautiful face, another image where she is standing tall, in what seems like a garden echoing the words, “No more Rafaths will die,” will leave you surprised. But those words resonated with curator Birad Rajaram Yajnik when he met historian Arvind Acharya.
“Princess Niloufer’s marriage was undergoing a lot of stress because she didn’t have children. Somebody told her, the work of a princess is to produce an heir and a spare. And she said, I have neither. So she started taking great interest in the health of all her staff. Among them was this lady called Rafathunnisa Begum. Rafath became pregnant and Niloufer followed up with her pregnancy everyday. After delivery, Rafath never came back to work. Niloufer asked why and they said, Rafath died. And at that point Niloufer said, “No more Rafaths will die hereafter. I am going to build a hospital.”
“I narrated this to Birad (Rajaram Yajnik) and he caught on to that point,” recalls Acharya.
A visual story of the princess, who was first married to the younger son of the Nizam, Moazzam Jah, is woven around these powerful words curated by Birad Rajaram Yajnik.
The visuals take us through Princess Niloufer’s life in Istanbul, Paris and Hyderabad.
But there is another long story that precedes the meeting of Acharya and Birad, the story of how Acharya caught hold of “five suitcases” filled with Princess Niloufer’s belongings and how the two got together to tell the lady’s story to the city of Hyderabad.
Going back to how the “five suitcases” were served to him on a silver platter, Acharya recalls, “In 2003, I got a call. There was a lady on the other end of the line and she said,” begins Acharya, in a British accent imitating the lady, “Mister Acharya, I would very much like to talk to you about a beautiful woman from Hyderabad. Now even if she didn’t say of Hyderabad, I would still be interested. But anyway, I said, who is this about? She said, Princess Niloufer and my ears picked up.”
She went by the name Evelyn Pope, was married to Edward Pope who was first married to Princess Niloufer. “I have five suitcases of documents, papers, photographs, passports, her hair sample all sorts of letters from the Nizam, from the Duke of Windsor and Jawaharlal Nehru and so on and on and on,” Evelyn Pope told Acharya.
He met her the following day and answered the many questions Evelyn asked him about the Nizam. It was easy because, “I belong to the family that served the Nizam for a brief period. She was convinced that I was legit and then I asked where the papers were?
She said, let’s go take a look. With her walking stick, the 77-year-old took me to her cold basement and the first thing I saw was a handwritten letter from Jawaharlal Nehru with a seal on the back,” Acharya tells us.
The letter read:
My dear Princess Niloufer,
We are going through a very hard time on account of foreign exchange. But I do want to let you know, that I have told Sir Gopala Swamy Iyenger to release all your money in pound, sterling immediately.
Sincerely,
Jawaharlal Nehru.
“It then took me three years after that to go through 15,000 documents and the most interesting ones were picked up by Birad,” he points, in praise for the curator.
Acharya then met with BV Papa Rao, special advisor to Telangana Government. “I told him that 2016 will mark her 100th birth anniversary. The support was immediate and the exhibition is now on,” says Acharya who is currently based in New York.
“I am happy that in Niloufer Hospital many Rafaths have lived and Rafaths’ children have also gone into Niloufer. So it’s a long continuing saga. In 1949, Niloufer left Hyderabad, never to return. 1963 she married Edward Pope and when she died in 1989, Edward Pope married Evelyn Pope and Edward died and Evelyn is the woman who gave me all the material,” Acharya finishes Niloufer’s story.
Curator’s Take
One thing Birad noticed while going through the life documents of Princess Niloufer was that she lived in three cities that have a certain historical importance. “Istanbul, Paris and Hyderabad and that idea was intriguing for me. Then I also thought that we should give Hyderabad a digital exhibition rather than just an ordinary exhibition. This installation is similar to works we installed in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Washington DC etc. The way we have used technology to tell her story stands out,” shares Birad adding that he sure was mesmerised by Niloufer’s personality. “She had the determination of Florence Nightingale, the beauty of Marilyn Monroe and the class of Lady Diana – that is Princess Niloufer for me,” he beams.