Word: devi
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...trip to India, Jacqueline Kennedy visited one of the few women in the world who might be considered her peer in the pantheon of legendary beauties: Gayatri Devi, who died July 29 at age 90. Like Kennedy, Devi entered public life through marriage, when she became the third wife of the maharaja of Jaipur in 1940. But unlike the First Lady, Devi never left it. Willowy and doe-eyed, she was a thoroughly modern princess who served three terms in Parliament, crusaded for girls' education and adapted her sense of noblesse oblige to India's changing realities...
...Devi, known to her friends as Ayesha, was born into the royal family of tiny Cooch Behar in eastern India. In her autobiography, she recalled an idyllic childhood of English governesses, big-game hunting and finishing school in Switzerland. Her mother, a daring socialite in her own right, disapproved of Devi's joining the orthodox royal house of Jaipur, whose women lived in purdah--hidden from the gaze of men outside their families. But Devi had already fallen in love with the jet-setting, polo-playing maharaja, and she soon made Jaipur her own. She started an élite girls...
...recent years, as India embraced the free-market philosophy she championed, Devi--disillusioned by political corruption and the decay of her beloved city--devoted herself to charitable work. "Jaipur is ruined," she said in a 2006 interview. "Everybody's just making money." The feudal excess of its royal past had been replaced by the excesses of concentrated wealth and power, and the love of a princess wasn't enough to save...
...museums are devoted primarily to antiquities and a handful of acknowledged modern masters such as M.F. Husain and Amrita Sher-Gil. The vast majority of modern Indian art is either in private homes or displayed only when it's for sale in commercial galleries. The Poddar family opened the Devi Art Foundation partly because the collection had overtaken their home, and also because, as Lekha Poddar explains, the artists had a significance beyond her own pleasure. Galleries would "constantly direct people to our home," she says. "If it is important enough, then why don't we think of making...
...worshippers gathered in the city of Jodhpur for the start of a nine-day Hindu religious festival, a sudden panic caused a stampede that killed at least 200 people and injured at least 60 more. An official said a wall had collapsed near the Chamunda Devi temple and alarmed revelers; other reports blamed a bomb scare and a group trying to cut in line...