 "Netflix's 'The Royals': Baroda's Maharani Radhikaraje Gaekwad slams Ishaan Khatter and Bhumi Pednekar's show, calls it 'A Royal Ignore', netizens react")
Ishaan Khatter and Bhumi Pednekar’s show The Royals that streamed on Netflix recently received mixed reactions from users and critics. It has now been renewed for season 2. But a recent post on the show by Baroda’s Maharani Radhikaraje has gone viral.
She didn’t mince words and wrote a rather long note that read- “The Royal Ignore. One would imagine the royals of India, a community abundantly chronicled, photographed, biographed, and today well-positioned in a range of arenas from politics, hospitality, to magazine covers.”
The Maharani added, “Would have a better chance of surviving an on-screen portrayal such as the one in The Royals. Alas, that was not to be and such is our fate, since 1947…What began as a post-independence, politically motivated propaganda of stereotypical Rajas soaked in whiskey and profligacy and Ranis in chiffons and pearls continues to define us.”
Radhikaraje continued, “Indian royalty consists of Brahmins, Rajputs, Marathas, Sikhs and Muslims, truly representative of its diversity. India has also seen some of their finest statesmen, diplomats, wildlife conservationists, bureaucrats, army officers.”
“educationists, sportsmen, hoteliers and entrepreneurs emerge from royalty and today our palaces, forts and museums are perhaps the last few sentinels of India’s undiluted, apolitical patronage and cultural history, all maintained in our personal capacity. Yet after all these decades our own country continues to view us - all 565 families and a few thousand nobility, with an odd mixture of awe, ignorance and distaste,” she noted further.
Netizens react
Here are some comments that dropped:
Very well said, could not have been put better.
Its wonderful that you shed light on this, it really needed to be said
The shoddy TV show should be called out.
But respectfully, despite your eloquence and graciousness, I beg to differ on what the Royal families did for India.
They were united only in their self interest, and divided in any common cause.