The King in Exile- The Fall of the Royal Family of Burma

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I schemed for his forty-first son, Thibaw, to supersede his half-brothers to the throne. For seven years, King Thibaw and Queen Supayalat ruled from the resplendent, intrigue-infused Golden Palace in Mandalay, where they were treated as demigods.

After a war against Britain in 1885, their kingdom was lost, and the family was exiled to the secluded town of Ratnagiri in British occupied India. Here they lived, closely guarded, for over thirty-one years. The king's four daughters received almost no education, and their social interaction was restricted mainly to their staff. As the princesses grew, so did their hopes and frustrations. Two of them fell in love with 'highly inappropriate' men. In 1916, the heartbroken king died. Queen Supayalat and her daughters were permitted to return to Rangoon in 1919.

In Burma, the old queen regained some of her feisty spirit as visitors came by daily to pay their respects. All the princesses, however, had to make numerous adjustments in a world they had no knowledge of. The betrayed, beautiful First Princess returned to live in Ratnagiri; the Second Princess settled in Kalimpong. where she and her adoring husband set about reinventing themselves; the charming Third Princess was unlucky in love, but lucky otherwise, and the ambitious Fourth Princess made a dramatic bid for her father's kingdom. The impact of the deposition and exile echoed forever in each of their lives, as it did in the lives of their children.

Written after years of meticulous research, and richly supplemented with photographs and illustrations, The King in Exile is an engrossing human-interest story of this forgotten but fascinating family.

"Thibaw, the last king of Burma, belonged to the Konbaung dynasty. Th a line of rulers known as 'Kings who rule the Universe' and treated as demi-gods by their subjects. His wife, Queen Supayalat, had great influence over him and is said to have been the true ruler of the kingdom during their seven-year reign.

In late 1885, after defeat in a war against Britain, King Thibaw, the heavily pregnant Queen Supayalat, their two very young daughters, and the king's junior queen, Supayagalae, were exiled to India. Here, in the culturally alien and remote town of Ratnagiri, they lived for over thirty years.

The First, Second, Third and Fourth Princesses, so called for the sake of brevity by the various British officers in charge of the family during their exile (the princesses, as per custom, were known by lengthy titles and not common names), were brought up in Ratnagiri by parents mourning their loss and nursing their wounds. Like their parents, the princesses were not allowed to interact freely with the residents of Ratnagiri. There was no question of them enrolling at a local school or playing with the town children; even if the British had permitted it, it is unlikely their parents would have. So they lived, attended to by an army of servants and assistants, until the princesses were all in their thirties. By this time, two of them had fallen in love with highly unsuitable' men, and all four of them had been endowed with a deep awareness of their ancestry, a sense of entitlement, and a feeling of bereavement. None of them had received the kind of exposure or education necessary the outside world. to adequately equip them for life

King Thibaw died in 1916 without ever setting foot on his homeland again. His junior queen had died a few years before him. Both were entombed in Ratnagiri, where their mortal remains lie to this day. In 1919, not long after World War 1 (1914-18) concluded, Queen Supayalat and the princesses were permitted to return to British- occupied Rangoon.

This book tells the story of King Thibaw, his wives, his daughters and his grandchildren. It has not been written as a work of fiction-1 found the actual story too captivating to add any embellishments. (The bizarre twists and turns their lives sometimes took were truly stranger than any credible fiction could ever have been!) The raison d'être of the book is to provide an insight into, first, how an all- powerful and very wealthy family coped with forced isolation and separation from all that they had once known and cherished; and, second, how the family lived once the exile ended. When I first started researching for this book, I thought I would end with the death of the Third Princess, that is, on 21 July 1962. But the more I delved, the more I realized that for a sense of completion and closure one needed to examine the lives of the princesses' children as well, for the children's lives were inextricably intertwined with those of their mothers, and they too were impacted by the deposition, the exile, and their lineage.