228\. The Man Who Lived A Thousand Lives: Prisoner of War (Ep 2)
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Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnon and me William Drimple. We're doing the second part of the second half of the bagel if you like the crumb bagel so we were talking about the Maharaja's gardener. I'm so impressed by this story I have to say that Anita's come up with it. Oh how sweet. I spent quite a lot of time digging up in Maharajary archival stories and I'd never heard of this guy not once not even a whisper of him.

But that's why this works really well, because it's the journo knows and the historian in you. And it was just the photo. Again, it's always photos are the gateway to me. So just to remind you, if you hadn't heard the last episode, I was on a trip with Willie to Bangalore for the Lit Fest.

And even though many locals said, oh, there's nothing to see in Bangalore, just you're better off going to Sringapatnam. I was busy sending you off to Mysore to Sringapatnam. Yes, I know. Just go somewhere else. Go somewhere else. And yet, a lovely man called Vinay took us on a tour. I went with my family around Bangalore and Cubbon Park, which is a

park, a really beautiful park actually, interesting park in Bangalore at all the imperial whispers that have been left behind. In the last episode, we talked about Queen Victoria statue with broken finger. This photograph he just showed me, this was the man who greened Bangalore and it was a little white haired German man called Gustav Hermann Kronbegel.

The thing about him was that nobody else I spoke to in Bangalore knew about him at all. You know when you get this sort of thing that just lodges in your head and you have to scratch it out and scratch it out and scratch out a story? I did. I tried. This is it. An amazing man who, as we're going to go into, makes his name. We talked in the last episode of how he became the man Friday to the Maharaja of Baroda.

But how Mysore is going to make his name, Mysore, the second richest state in India at the time or province in India at the time, and how this is a place that transforms his life. And yet he goes from being this beloved of Maharaja's to being a man who will die in penury and sadness because he will be interned twice during the wars because

because he's a German and because the British are running India. And because despite any amount of protesting from the Maharaja, they can't circumvent the fact he's an enemy alien and he'll be put into an internment camp. There's all sorts of stories about this, aren't there? The guy who did five years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrer, he was interned in Dehradun and his wanderings around Tibet was when he escaped from the internment camp. So the Germans who were interned, and we'll come to this, maybe we shouldn't sort of

do the Dalrymple thing and tell you all about it at the beginning. But I'm just going to say, there were thousands of Germans who had been working in India, some for many, many years, and they were all interred during the war. And what happened in those internments, we'll come to that in a moment, because that too was not easy on Herkram Begel. But just before we get to that, can we please, could you share with the class that fabulous story you told me about

My favourite Dalrymple, your daughter, who has got her French exchange partner who is over and you told me the most charming thing. Go on. So this is a very nice war story turned contemporary story. My wife, Olivia Fraser, is the great, great niece or something like that of Lord Lovett, the war hero.

And the point of this story is that my daughter's French exchange has come to stay in Delhi. And she is the fourth generation of this family that have been the French exchange for Olivia's family. And it starts the story when Lord Lovett, having famously come ashore at D-Day with his clan Piper,

And he doesn't have a gun. He has his umbrella and the Klan Piper. And there's been subsequently documentaries about all this. And a German machine gunner actually had both of them in his sights and said, I can't possibly shoot a man with an umbrella and a man playing the bagpipes. Yes, yes. And as late as, I think, 1980s, there was some anniversary of D-Day when the machine gunner was found and produced to tell the story. Anyway,

About two weeks later, famously D-Day turns into this nightmare of the hedgerows of Normandy and all the panzers turn up, all Hitler's tank divisions that have been waiting for the British to invade elsewhere, suddenly two weeks later get to the

point of the invasion. And there's a terrible moment of crisis when the advancing forces who've made it inland into Normandy at D-Day are met with the full force of the Third Reich and all the panzer divisions. And there's massive casualties. And among them is Lord Lovett, who having nonchalantly walked ashore with his piper and umbrella is now bleeding to death under a French hedgerow.

And he is sitting there thinking that his end has come and that his division, I think, has moved on and he's just bleeding out. When a French priest appears on a bicycle, a curé, and finds him here, realizes he's alive and realizes that he's savable. And so presumably doesn't put him on the back of the bike, but certainly comes and rescues him and heals him and puts him into his own bed, apparently. At great risk to himself, one

One should say. And then personally rows him in a rowing boat across the channel. Oh my goodness, this is such a good story. It's a good story, isn't it? And of course, Lord David lives on to become a politician. And from that point, the Fraser's and this family, the Dunor have always exchanged ideas.

And four generations of unsophisticated Fraser men from the highlands of Scotland, from Invernesshire, have fallen in love with incredibly beautiful Dunorwa French women descended from the brother of the Curie. And Lorenza is the fourth generation. And she just arrived today to come to the Jaipur Literature Festival with me. And there is no apology I make. I know we're meant to be talking about Crombegels. I do not apologise for making you share that story. Because when you tell me my jaw just hit the ground, it is absolutely the storyline for a film. Anyway, back to Crombegels.

Back to our friend, Kronbegel. So he comes to Mysore and I mean, I've sort of said it's the second richest province, but can you give us a little bit of an idea of how the Maharajas lived at that time and just how, when we're talking wealth, we are talking dripping with wealth.

wealth, bling, gold, and sandalwood smelling nice too. So a fifth of India, some cognitions even make it a quarter of India, is never ruled by the British. It's ruled by the independent Maharajas and Princes and the Zams and Nawabs who've made deals with the British. Independent-ish, I was going to say, because you have a resident. I mean, actually, I would challenge and say it's

in name only. You know, they keep their names and title, but it is the resident who does push things around. They have a British resident to make sure they don't sort of, you know, perform anti-British actions and controls their, if you like, their foreign policy, their external relations with the state.

But often internally, they do quite wacky things that are completely of their own. And there are some states such as Travancore in what's now Kerala, which are incredibly well governed and have much greater literacy than parts of Britain at this point, thanks to the very advanced education system that the Maharaja Travancore brings in. There are others who are sort of so famously dripping in wealth, they don't know what to do. Most famously, Hyderabad. Hyderabad is the richest state.

state in India and the Nizam of Hyderabad is the richest man in the world. And there are stories that he has sort of 25 men just to grind his walnuts and 55 to dust his chandeliers and all these sort of things.

But one of the best and best administered is the state of Mysore, which is rich on the sale of sandalwood, which it has not quite a monopoly, but certainly by far the largest output because the forests of the Mysore region particularly suit the sandalwood tree.

By the way, even today, I mean, I've just come back from Mysore, you can't move for sandalwood gifts and scent and oud coming from sandalwood. It is a place that still smells of its past and its past wealth. It is the Wajia dynasty who are the Maharajas at the moment. And I think I might have mentioned last time that Chamarajendra Wajia, who is the 10th Maharaja of Mysore, is very, very close to the Gaikwad of Baroda. And they basically talk over the hedge and

And he says, your lawns are looking good. He said, well, it's my German. I've got this German. Do you want to borrow? And so, you know, he's lent out crumb bagel to different various assorted Maharajas. But what crumb bagel does, so he goes over and he starts working for the Maharaja of Mysore. And he immediately starts doing these actually really forward thinking transformative projects.

So, I mean, what he says is that, you know, this is fabulous land to grow and he's very excited, but it's also fabulous land for fruiting trees. So, he starts this system of importing

exotic plants, especially trees from places like Australia. So he starts experimenting fruiting trees from Europe, the ones that he knows, the ones that he's seen at Kew, but also from Australia. And he realizes that actually the Oz ones, they do much better in the climate. There's two, I think, which from my memory of, I once did a botanical tour of Bangalore in the days before the 1990s when it was the city of gardens.

And casarina and eucalyptus, I remember, are the two Australian trees that do best in my soil. I had an entire list of flowering, but it's fruiting ones that I want to talk about now. Because what he does is he realises that they work really well. So he starts importing millions of saplings from Australia.

And what he does, which is really forward thinking, is he sends notices out to the Mysore farmers. Do you remember last time I told you he transformed the farmers' lives by telling them how to line those tanks so that they weren't dependent on the monsoon? I mean, really quite scientific breakthrough kind of stuff. He then sends notices to Mysore farmers saying, "Look, come to the Larlberg," which is where he's based. We talked about the Larlberg in the last episode. He sells them for just one rupee

a tree, which is not much back then even because what he wants is a proliferation of trees throughout the province. And not only does he sell them the saplings, but detailed instructions, which are translated for them, both verbally and written, how to grow them and how to take care of them. And that is how he creates sort of the system of orchards throughout Karnataka and fruit becomes a thing that farmers again can have an income. They've

They put fish in their tanks and they had fisheries. Now they've got trees. What he also does as a horticulturalist, he always goes further. This is what I love about Kronmegel, is that he starts collating. He's got a real scientist mind. And bear in mind that this is the little boy from Lowman who worked in Hyde Park

hedgerows to try and get on the ladder. But he collects papers and writes papers on the pests that attack all the plants that he's introducing with these amazing drawings of the pests so that the farmers on site can recognize them and know how to deal with them. Now, this was meant to be a really detailed

archive, which unfortunately over time has been lost. And so a lot of that knowledge has been lost as well. Funny enough, Mysore has a tradition of very clever botanical planting. And Tipu Sultan, who was a kind of usurper who took over the Mysore state from the Wadiyas, supposedly as their sort of military generals, Tipu introduced sericulture, the planting of mulberry trees

And Mysore to this day is the center of the Indian silk industry. This is why this series is so great, because through the green and the color of the gardens that you walk through, you can find imperial history. And I think that's wonderful. I think it's a really interesting thing. So another thing that he is instrumental in, Mysore has this amazing festival of Desera, even now. So Desera celebrates, you burn huge, enormous effigies of Ravan, the demon king,

who Lord Rama in the Ramayan defeats. And there's fireworks, there's feasting, there's the burning of this great effigy. Here in England, think of Guy Fawkes times a thousand because these effigies are enormous. I remember going to my first Desera festival when I was just a kid, maybe five or six years old, not in Mysore, but in UP in Kanpur. And I was terrified, absolutely terrified. The scale of this, the scale of the people, the burnings, it was

It was really overwhelming. My kids rather loved it. I remember taking them to Old Delhi when we first moved to Delhi. There's a famous Dussehra ceremony near the Red Fort. And these enormous ravens that are sort of 50 feet high get lit. Kids loved it. So what is fascinating, again, and Crumbagel, again, being so much more than just a horticulturalist,

He's also a man who knows how to get messages out. So he realizes that he's going to have basically a captive province. Everyone's going to come to the Mysore Palace and come nearby to the Dessera celebrations. So he brings a display of the latest tools and machines for agriculture to show to all the farmers who are there as part of the Dessera celebration so that they can see, learn where to get, and therefore explore all of this knowledge that he's brought from Europe along with sort of tools that he could help import.

And he starts in 1912, after doing this very successful thing in 1910 and 1911 with the Deseret festivals, he starts in 1912 the Mysore Horticultural Society to train gardeners from all across the state, all under his eye, in the Lyle Barg, of how to do things properly, you know, with plants they may not recognize. And he puts into effect a thing called cereal plantations.

blossoming in Bangalore. So this is a way of, you plant different trees along a boulevard or different plants in a bed. So you will create something he called perpetual spring. So all of these different trees will flower at different times. Petals will always flutter down on the Bangalore boulevards because of these trees that flower at different times in the year.

And that is how, you know, people start calling Bangalore the Garden City from this time. There was a character when I was younger and as a young journalist going to Bangalore called T.P. Issa, who was the great botanist of his period in Bangalore. And he wrote a book called Bangalore Garden City. And he was very sad because I went and interviewed him in the early 90s, just when Bangalore was turning into a tech centre.

So it's now one of the richest cities in India, but it's lost this extraordinary legacy. And I remember Ishar saying that he produced this book 10 years earlier in, I think, 1980, Bangalore, the Garden City. And he said half the trees in the book had now been sawn down in 10 years to create new tower blocks and new tech centers. And these may have been some of the trees that Krumbagel plants, either by his own hand or by importing and sending them out.

So, I mean, you know, that's sad. That feels awful when trees are cut down. And when they're crumb bagel trees, I don't know, a certain great appointments for me anyway. Now we're all on team crumb bagel. Crumb bagel. Yes. Let's put his name on the map, guys. Anyway, so he started as well, again, forward thinking man that he was. And this, again, would have pleased the Maharaja of Mysore so much. He said, look, I come from a land of flower shows. Why don't we have the greatest flower show India has ever seen? And he creates flower

this amazing flower show in the Larbagh, which I believe still goes on today, I'm told. And it's one of the three biggest flower shows in the world at the moment. Literally, still? That's what I'm told, yeah. The transformative power of Crumbagel, though, is when he came to Bangalore, there were four public gardens. And by the time he leaves, or sort of hops off the mortal coil, as it were, there are more than 100.

Isn't that great? What a legacy. What a legacy to leave. Anyway, just when he's at the height of his powers, though, we're getting to 1918 now, war breaks out in Europe and the entire British Empire gets pulled in. And despite the efforts of the Maharaja, the British insist Crumbagel, along with all people of German origin, need to be rounded up and put into an internment camp.

And this man is distraught and he begs the Maharaja, you know I'm loyal. You know I love India. I'm an Indian now. I'm not a German. I've left India.

Germany when I was just 14, 15 years old. Why? Why is this happening to me? And a big Anglophile. Yeah. And an Anglophile. And so why? And he begs the Maharaja to intervene and the Maharaja talks to the resident and tries to say, look, can we do something for him? He's not an enemy alien. But the British aren't having it. It is one rule, any one of German origin is to be rounded up. And you can understand why they're doing it as well because

you know, sleeper agents, special agents, spies, they're having to contend with all of this all over their empire because the Germans also in an effort to destabilize Britain will try and destabilize the empire. That's what they will do as well. So,

So the Maharaja is absolutely powerless. And Krumbhegol by this time is a young family as well. He's got kids. He's got his wife, his English rose, Clara, who he's brought to India with him. He's made his life there. And he says, what am I going to do? All of his assets are seized. All of his savings are seized. Everything is seized.

The only thing that isn't seized, which he is going to have to liquidate really quickly, are some of his stocks and shares that he's managed to put money in. So he's taken away to an internment camp with 8,000 others, I learn, in Amadnagar.

So that's interesting because that, funnily enough, is where young Sam, my son, is today. Really? Give him a call and tell him to try and find out where this internment camp is because I'd love to know what the building was. I don't have any further details other than from his letter, it was Abednagar. So I'll tell you what I suspect it was because Abednagar has this famous fort which is built by the Marathas and then re-fortified by the British after they defeated the Marathas.

And it's famous for its enormous rock-cut moat, which means that it's very difficult to escape from. It's like a kulditz or an alcatraz. And that's where they put Nehru in the Second World War. Oh, my God. In Ahmednagar. This is so interesting. And he wrote The Discovery of India in Ahmednagar. Oh, my goodness. Right. So I would imagine he was put in the fort. Well, I mean, it's a convincing argument. And unless anyone listening here knows better, I'll go with that. But while he is in the internment camp, something terrible happens. Something terrible.

what happens to him, the other Germans, and some of whom are very sympathetic to the German fatherland, they stand by Germany and they hate Britain and they've come to do business in India for whatever reason. But they're one day apparently talking very disparagingly about the natives and about the Maharaja and Kronbegel stands up for him and gets badly beaten up. And he writes a letter to the Maharaja saying, I've been beaten for standing up for

for you. You know how loyal I am. Help me. Get me out of here. He writes in this letter, if they deport me to Germany, what will I do? I only know about tropical horticulture. I will never work again. He's so desperate. The Maharaja again goes to the British saying, look, please, please let him out. And there are two other Germans who the Maharaja is very fond of at this time. A man called Exner and another one called Königsberger. One's an architect and one's an interior designer. And

And they're all interred.

And he says, look, they've all been working with me for years. Just please let them out. Kronbegel in particular is getting really bad treatment in there. And the British say, no, they are going to stay interred for the duration of the war. But they come to this compromise where they're allowed to continue working on their designs for either gardens or buildings while they're in the camps. So they're spared any kind of hard labor. And it is the absolute best he can do. This was the deal that the British came to with Nehru in Abhinagga, that he could continue writing his memoirs. And he wrote The Discovery of India. Yeah.

and was given a full library to work from. There's something in this, the history of Amun-Nagar and all of its guests. I think there's something in this, isn't there? This is so great. I think there were many other major Congress politicians with Nehru. Gandhi wasn't there. Gandhi was put somewhere else. Gandhi was put in Aga Khan's house in the middle of Bombay. The house is still there in the middle of Malabar Hill.

And Gandhi has ever sort of spectacularly luxurious place to be poor in. That famous quote by Sir Rajanidhi Naidu that it costs us a fortune to keep Gandhi in poverty. Yes, that's right. But look, the Maharaja has to also give a concession for this concession to be made.

he has to agree that whatever these three German men do when they get out, when the war is over, the British are of course going to remain. And whatever work they have done, there must not be their name on the list.

on those edifices, those buildings, those, you know, streets of lampposts, they must be erased. And so when they do come out and, you know, they're in a state of poverty, Crumbagel writes that he has to liquidate all his shares because he has to keep his family fed. And his family don't know any other home other than India. His children don't know any other home other than India.

So they come out and you've got evidence of this. Koenigsberger, for example, who is the designer architect, he builds a place called Balbhaven in Bangalore, but nowhere in the foundation, normally in the foundation stone, you have the name of the architect and it is not there. And Kronbegel's designs, it's sort of like a deletion of the man completely and he's penniless. So what he has to do

again, is lean on the favor of a man who holds him in high esteem, luckily, is the Maharaja. Because he's got nowhere to live. He can't afford to pay for anything. So the Maharaja gives him a place called Granite Castle.

which is fabulously named. Sounds like it's an Aberdeen rather than Mysore. Even though that is his house, whenever, I think this is also very interesting because you can see where the man's heart beats. Crombeagle, whenever he is asked for his address, just gives it as Larlberg, his finest work. You know, the Larlberg gardens that he inherited, the ones that Tipu had planted there.

graciously on and then they pass into his hands when he starts working for the Maharaj of Mysore. That is his home. That's what he believes is his home. And in between the wars, he works on this masterpiece of his. It's a blank canvas. All the other projects that he's worked on, other landscapers have worked on them before because they are royal parks or they're gardens that have been owned by the royal family for generations. But in Brindavan, he's given a completely blank canvas

canvas and he creates, and this is after suffering quite a lot during the war, these sweeping terraces, straight avenues, it's all divided in quadrants, which is actually the Islamic sensibility. The Chabag system, yeah. And he uses everything that he's ever learned. He writes the story of his horticultural life in this garden. And so from this sort of awful disaster, he creates this beautiful garden.

This would make such a good movie, this story. I love the idea of it. Just hear the soaring violins at this point. Yeah. And the fountain suddenly, you know, sort of being turned on for the first time where, you know, a man who has known enormous unhappiness is finally doing something again. He can throw himself into this and become happy for a while at least.

And this is a place that generates wealth. You know, I think I said it was still, even today, 2 million tourists a year go to the Brindavan gardens. And he also starts talking a little bit politically at this point, but it's not politics, you know, of an imperial kind. He's not talking, he doesn't, never criticizes the British. In fact, you know, if you remember, he's known for moving the Queen Victoria statue into Covent Park. But what he does do is,

is he starts saying, look, can you just stop thinking about Bangalore in particular as a place of industry and what now has become a tech centre? But can you just start thinking that horticulture is going to bring you wealth? Look after your land. And it's a really green message. I'll read you an extract from one of his letters.

The works of the horticultural department does not begin and end with sweeping lawns, roads and planting a few flower beds, but developing its economic, scientific and educational work. The botanical gardens should be maintained not only for the purpose of advancing the study of native and other plants, but turning the varied resources of the vegetable kingdom to useful and commercial ends. And he's begging the Maharaja, look, I know you're developing this place, but don't

Please develop this place with an eye to the fact that you can do it in a green way. I mean, as we put it today, you can make money from being green. And he writes in an article, an article which is published, I believe I'm right in saying that 90% of the people who read this article would go away with the impression that our immediate need is the development of industries,

as against the development of agriculture. I most emphatically say the opposite is the case and that a highly developed, prosperous agriculture is essential as the only sound basis upon which a successful industrial development can be built. I'm not sure that the higher income from industries is a

criteria of prosperity and happiness of the people in any country, or is the goal to strive for? To my mind, by no means a mixed blessing, but we do not hear laments on all sides of industrial enslavement of the people, of crowding together in unsanitary tenements, of insufficient earnings to meet the higher cost of living, buying bare necessities of life, of the tragedies of child labour in factories. May Providence protect our beautiful state from such conditions. Again, these are arguments that are being held today that you

You shouldn't just measure in growth the wealth of a place, the wealth of a nation, but the happiness of its people as well. It's also very much in tune with how economic historians would regard the failures of the British in India. I was having a conversation with the economic historian Tirtankar Roy last year, and he thinks that the biggest problem

failure of the British in India was the failure of irrigation south of really the Ganges. There was almost, unlike the Punjab where there was very substantial irrigation work. They transformed it with their canal systems and their irrigation systems are extraordinary, yeah. But nothing of the sort happened in the Deccan, which is why when famines broke out in India, many of them were in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu and the middle of India. And it's one of the things that India does

very well initially after independence and hugely increases the agricultural productivity of India within a decade. It's not a difficult thing to do. So Krambegul was right. His part of India particularly did need was better irrigation and better agriculture. Here he is sort of toiling away trying to win hearts and minds as well as transforming the land. And he's back in favour. The Maharaja may be feeling some kind of

guilt for not being able to stop what happens to him during the First World War. It takes care of his gardener. It takes care of his Man Friday. So, he's there. He's working. He's happy as he can be. The Maharaja is taking care of him. He's trying to put the past behind him, but World War II is on the horizon.

Welcome back. So 1945 will prove to be even worse for Herr Kronbegel because yet again, he's an enemy of the

in India and he is rounded up and he describes being captured beaten and thrown into an internment camp and according to his granddaughter by the way his granddaughter lives just down the road in Surrey just here so there was a local TV company did a short documentary about you know the German Gardner so they got somebody to do some research into him because they wanted to put him back on a pedestal because they're

quite rightly proud of him now, you know, the man who made a huge difference. And so I think they sent researchers around who put a little advert in the local newspaper saying, do you know Gustav Hermann Kronbegel? We've heard somebody might be in this area or region or if you know anyone who knows him. And this woman sort of

of says, well, that's my great-grandfather. But what she does say in this little piece is that the British wanted to deport my great-grandmother as well. And she would have been treated as a spy had she returned to Germany. It would have been an absolute curse of death because she's English, remember, but they want to deport her. And she says the British never forgave her for marrying a German. So this was actually considered and on the cards to deport his wife, Clara,

to Germany and him to Germany as well, where they would have been treated as spies and interned and put in prison there. And she legitimately, because she's British and the enemy. But this too passes. And this time around, the Maharaja to show how sorry he is and how much he cares. And Kronbegel is treated better in this second internment as a precedent was set in the first.

But the Maharaja has a painting commissioned of Krumbagel and he has a lifelike statue crafted. And there's this beautiful story someone tells who knows the palace, the Mysore Palace very, very well. But he says that every morning as the Maharaja left his bedchamber, he would see two images on the wall as he exited his bedchamber. One was of the mother goddess, the other of his German gardener. Isn't that amazing?

Isn't that amazing? Isn't that lovely? The man who had sort of brought him such joy. And can we see the statue today? Is it still in the Mysore Palace? I didn't get to go inside, but somebody who can tell me who knows the insides of the palace, I have seen pictures of the statue. And the statue is just the most darling thing. It's a man in tweed with a rolled up plan in his hand. I love it. And it was made and it's very lifelike. It's like a sort of a little...

oompa loompa version of an already i suspect not very tall crumb bagel anyway

But I suspect it was meant to be displayed in a public square. But that never happened because, you know, he was a German. He's there. He's now getting old. He's getting old, is Kronvigel. And he works for the Tatars. He helps them design the Jubilee Gardens in Jamshedpur. He's still being passed around as a great asset. We should explain what Jamshedpur is. Jamshedpur is this town built by the Parsi industrial dynasty, the Tatars, who now own both British steel and iron.

Jaguar Land Rover. And when the Tatars were trying to found a steel town, they found that many of the biggest Arno deposits were in Jharkhand and Bihar in the northeast of India. And so they build this model city in this sort of jungle area where there is just this steel deposits and not much else.

And it's a model town, rather like Bangalore once was. And Jamshedpur has the Jubilee Gardens, which are Kramp-Begel's part of this plan. So he inadvertently is part of the fabric of Indian history, the Indian story as well, because he's working with the Tartars. It's probably the first time he's working for a not Maharaja, not a royal family.

And India, too, is about to go through a period where it wants to forget its Maharajas because independence will happen after the end of the war. Just in a nutshell, what happened to the princely states after independence? William, just remind us. This strange anomaly whereby between a fifth and a quarter of the Indian landmass is not actually being ruled directly by

but is being hived off to the old feudal families who survive from the disintegration of the Mughal Empire, whether they're Marathas or Mughal governors who've bedded down or ancient Rajput warrior clans in Rajasthan or Bihar. Sada Patel, who is a great icon of the current Hindu nationalist government, the BJP, and whose massive statue has been raised in Gujarat,

He's the man who, in a very short period of time, gets all these different Maharajas through a mixture of charm and threats and appeals to patriotism.

gets all the Maharajas to surrender their princely dominions and to join the Indian Union on the promise that they're going to have a privy purse and all their privileges, but just not be rulers. And that, of course, ends in 1971 with Indira Gandhi who cuts the purse springs. But also, you know, there's the whole race to get the Maharaja of Kashmir to sign, sign, sign. That's a whole different story. Maybe we should do that actually at another time because it's, you know, the new republic is such an interesting story.

But the Republic is very, very keen to forget and put aside

It's Maharaja, so put them in storage. Get them to sign, but just put them in storage. But what they do, interestingly, is they do reward people who do good work. So the new republic, the Indian Republic, appoints Krumbagel Director of Agriculture in Mysore. So suddenly, he's an old man. He's not a young man. And he actually, there's a man who's born in 1865, and we're talking sort of 1947. So he's not a young man anymore.

And what he does is he sort of takes this role. He's also chief architect to the Mysore state for a while. Then something extraordinary happens after independence. An old man is shot in Delhi and India crumbles as he does too. And I'm talking about the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.

So this is just such a seismic shock to the psyche of the new India. And also, since shockwaves through Pakistan as well, and Gandhi had spent a lot of time in what is now Pakistan. In fact, wasn't there the great Ferrari about where he would spend the night in

when independence was actually cemented. It is almost to the day 75 years since his assassination. He was assassinated on the 30th of January 1948. And we're recording this on the 27th. Well, how's that funny that we're talking about this and thinking about this now. But who does India turn to at this time to talk about the way in which he's going to be commemorated? And there are these gardens, the Rajkot gardens.

in Delhi? And can you describe, because you live in Delhi, you'll do this much better than me. Before this point, there are no gardens. This is the area between the Red Fort in North Delhi and the Yamuna. And I think it's about this time that a main road is built to run alongside the Red Fort and beside the Yamuna. Previously, it would be just the river.

And I think it's exactly at this time when the road is built and the land is extended into what had been the banks of the Amun-Nah that Rajgat is built on the riverbank. Just like the Red Fort is the place where the great speeches on Republic Day are made by the Prime Minister, so Rajgat is the equivalent cremation ground. It's next to the ancient Delhi cremation grounds of Nigambodgat, which go back, as it's said, to Vedic times.

And it's where the Vedas are said to have washed up on the banks of the Amalas. So it's a very sacred spot. And this is where the young Indian state decides to lay its father, Mahatma Gandhi, to rest. Yes. Bapu, literally known as Bapu, the father by most Indians. And it is Krumbagal who is in his 80s who's asked to come.

And landscape the gardens of the Rajgat. And it's still a place where every visiting dignitary is taken first. When my friend Malcolm Turnbull, the Prime Minister of Australia, arrived, he was taken literally straight from the airport to Rajgat. Yeah, to pay your respects. And it's where there are memorials for, you know, Rajiv Gandhi's memorial is there, Vajpayee's memorial is there. You know, there are a few memorials.

Gandhi's is the famous and the central one. It's the one that started it. But that's Krumbagel's hand. If you go and you will visit and you'll go and see it, it is impressive. Go and see it. It's a peaceful place. That's the Krumbagel hand at work. And maybe, just maybe, this was some way of India saying, sorry, we didn't look after you better. Or it's just the New Republic being pragmatic, saying this man is a genius.

This man has transformed an entire province. He's created some of the greatest parks we now have. Let's get him to do it. Crumbagel dies.

in Bangalore in 1956. It is, again, the Maharaja of Mysore who takes over the arrangements for his burial. He's buried in the Christian cemetery. He's given a really simple gravestone under an African tulip tree, one of his favorite places. Now, what I told you before is not quite right and I've done a bit more investigation on this.

On the first tombstone, it's pretty simple. It just says, in loving memory, Gustav Urban Begel, 1865 to the 8th of February, 1956. That's all it said.

And over the years, that tombstone had degraded to the point where you couldn't even see what was written on it. And his African tulip tree was sinking into the ground. But it's actually only when the Germans rediscovered Krumbagel, they said, could you just tell us where this man is buried? And the whole thing, you know, this sort of amazing man and this extraordinary story and

And Mysore opened up its archives and said, yeah, this is here. They started collecting all the information from Kew and sort of started getting all of this together. And it's then the new Maharaja,

I think recently, I don't know the year, which is frustrating, but I think it's only in the last five years. And it now constantly has marigold garlands on it. And it's really well looked after. It's on top of the old tombstone. So let me tell you what it says on the new one, because I think it's so beautiful. It's so beautiful. So it's got a sort of an etched on black. It looks like obsidian. I don't know what the stone is, but it's big and lavish. And it's got a picture of that smiling white haired old moustachioed old man on it. And it says, whatever he touched, he...

he adorned, German by birth, but his heart belonged to India. Isn't that beautiful? One sad little addendum to this story is that when he died, the new republic that had asked him to do this great work, even on the Rajgat,

Somehow, his wife finds herself evicted from the grace and favor granite castle that he'd been living in, the only home really that she'd known. The old India that she knew is dead. The Maharaja patrons that they had moved with are gone. So she returns to England, a country she doesn't know. She's 90 years old when she comes back, a country she has never forgotten. And soon after the ship docked, she has a massive stroke and dies. Isn't that awful?

Isn't that awful? The awful end to the crumb bagels. I know. But he is now, obviously there are people making an effort to remember him now. That's how Vinay knew about him. That's how I was able to find out anything about him at all. You know, this stuff was all in dusty archives before, but I think there's just so much more of a story to tell because, you know, it's just these sort of cliff notes of a life are amazing. But yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe I should do something. I think you should. I think it's a very nice book. I love the story so much. So there we are. That is the story of Gustav Hermann Kronbegel, the Maharaja's gardener. Now, we're getting ready. We're going to meet now, aren't we? We are meeting the day after tomorrow. We're going to be recording a whole new series with Jane Olmeier on Ireland and Empire.

I'm really excited for this. Which is going to be our next big series. And we're going to go on from that to the Troubles. Yeah, I'm very, very excited for this because, again, it's a sweep of history crossing continents. And I think it's going to be sort of quite relevant. And you're going to love Jane Allmire. She is my wonderful friend. You don't know what you're saying.

Can't wait to meet her. She's this very, very warm Irish historian of empire who is just a guinea minute. But after that, we've got a very exciting guest, my wonderful friend Patrick Radden Keefe, still in his 40s, but has won not one but two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his work on the Sacklers and the opiate crisis called Empire of Pain.

But he also won another Pulitzer for his book on the Troubles and the IRA, and it is Say Nothing, which is a big new Netflix series now. Anyway, so he is going to be our wonderful guest to take us up to the present in Ireland. So join us. We've got loads of goodies for you coming up.

Lots of surprises. And you know what? If you like binging our stuff, and I know some of you do, and we're very grateful. We love a binger. Just join our club, empirepoduk.com, empirepoduk.com. And also for our club members, apart from the wonderful newsletter, discounts on certain books that we feature, and you get first dibs on any tickets for the live shows that we do. And we're doing so well.

Also, we have to say, it helps keep the show on the road. So if you enjoy what we do, please join up, join the club and become members. Anyway, till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William Durham-Poole.