Gayatri Devi

Personal

Vocation

Notable

Family

Indian royalty, born in London, the granddaughter of the Princess Indira Gaekwar of Baroda. The descendants of two of the best Indian families and from an independent line of Indian women with western tastes, she was educated in Switzerland and England. As a girl, she fell in love with Jai from the Maratha clan when she was 13. He married two sisters from Jodhpur and each had two children. When Devi was almost 21, he took her as his third wife on 5/09/1940. He built a palace, Moti Doongri, for her on a high hill and their son Jai was born October 1949. Jai moved into a difficult financial period. By the late '60s he was down to his last four elephants and five palaces, scraping by on $335,000 a year, the amount that he was accustomed to handling for the expenses of one month. For the benefit of their son, they approved the boy's adoption by wealthy kin, a childless Maharaja who would make Jai the heir to his fortune. The Princess was widowed when her husband died after a polo match 6/24/1970. Devi was elected to Indian parliament, and wrote her book in 1975. Ten days after she was hospitalized with respiratory and stomach ailments, she died at age 90 on July 29, 2009 in Jaipur, India. Link to Wikipedia biography