On a 1962 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' school, correctly surmising that it would help end the practice of purdah, and entered politics as a passionate opponent of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's socialist policies.
In 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 The feudal excess of its royal past had been replaced by the excesses of concentrated wealth and power, and the love of a princess wasn't enough to save it.