The long legal battle won by the two daughters of the late Maharaja of Faridkot has brought properties worth many thousand crores to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, but it is the sense of justice delivered by the court verdict which has really elated the daughter of the Maharaja, who lives in Chandigarh with her family.
“This has been a long battle for 21 years. The court verdict has brought a sense of relief and justice to me personally. In my heart I always knew that the will of my father was made fraudulently and the family was denied whatever was lawfully theirs,” says 79-year-old Amrit Kaur, erstwhile princess of Faridkot and daughter of late Maharaja Harinder Singh.
“The day the judgement came out I became very emotional. It was my moral victory as well. It proved that my father was not against me as the forged will claimed, it was done by scheming servants and employees,” she says.
Amrit Kaur married IPS officer Harpal Singh in 1952. Her father was not happy with her marriage to a commoner. “My father was initially very upset with my marriage. It was after two years of my marriage that things improved. He used to invite us every year to Faridkot on his birthday,” she recalls fondly. She then adds, “After that my kids also used to go, meet him and were really liked by him. My son Jaskaran, who is a banker and settled in London, lived with my father at his house in Delhi, when he was studying in St Stephen’s College and was not able to get a hostel seat.”
However, in her childhood, she was brought up with a lot of discipline and not just pampered as is the general notion about children in royal families. “There was a lot of discipline at home during my childhood. I was taught at home till matriculation by a private tutor as was the trend those days in royal families. Later, I joined St Bede’s College in Shimla and did my graduation. I did my Masters in political science from Punjab University after my marriage. It was my husband who really pampered me and treated me like a princess all my life,” she says proudly.
Interestingly, her husband Harpal Singh, a retired IPS officer, is also from Faridkot. He, too, went to the same college in Lahore, the prestigious Aitchison College where Late Maharaja Harinder Singh went and won a gold medal in essay writing.
“Aitchison College was a very prestigious college in those days, where all the princes used to go for their education. Although my husband was not from a royal family, nevertheless he was from a well-off family,” informs Kaur.
Amrit Kaur has three children — two daughters and a son. One of her daughters is Simran, an IRS officer, the other is Gurveen, a lawyer, and her son Jaskaran is a banker in London. “My children were raised like other kids of service class. We used to be posted to different places during my husband’s service years in various parts of Punjab and Haryana. We were even posted in New York in 1957 and lived there for two years” she says.
“My father was fond of bikes and had many classic cars like Rolls-Royce, Bentley and other luxury cars. The cars were shipped from London, brought to Faridkot and later taken to Mashobra near Shimla to my father’s palace,” she says. The Mashobra palace housed a large number of vintage cars till 2003, after that they were removed from there.