Constance, our fiercely independent grandmother.

The lady you see in this photograph is my grandmother. She was born as Constance Karuna Charles to an affluent family in Mysore state, southern India, in the in the late 1890s. Around 1910, when she may have been about 12, her marriage was arranged with a man named Durraswamy around 1910. Two years later at the age of 14 she was left widowed, with one baby son in her arms – Arthur.

The Maharanis of Travancore

It was in the fall of 1900, that the Maharajah of Travancore adopted the two girls in this photograph (taken in c. 1905), as his Maharanis — and as his ‘nieces’. For in Kerala, queens were never wives of monarchs, but their sisters. Under the matrilineal system of succession, ranks and titles passed in the female line; the Maharajah was a ruler not because his father was king before him, but because his mother was queen.