During her royal tour of India, Princess Diana visited Lalapet Government High School on February 14, 1992. There was four-year-old Avanti Reddy, dressed in the traditional attire of the Lambadi dance, among the performers for the royal guest. The show was originally intended for the school, but it turned out to be one of the most personal events of the visit and is still enshrined as the memory of the “little girl” that the princess had called her "daughter".
The 4-year-old who caught Diana's attention. Avanti was the daughter of the dance teacher, Japamala Rani, who earlier had choreographed for Diana's visit. Avanti joined in the Lambadi dance, and she was found sitting amongst the children. The princess came up to the little girl, lifted her up and walked back toward the stage, setting her down on her knee.
That day, the photo of Diana holding the child was captured and became one of her most famous photos from the tour in India. According to Getty's archival records, the young dancer in the photo with Diana was named Avanti and was from Lalapet High School on February 14, 1992.
The meeting wasn't just a royal reception. Diana asked Avanti what her name, school, and class were. In Avanti's later memory, Diana asked who she was, what school she was in, and what her class was. She also noticed that the child had a cold, and so she wiped Avanti's nose with her handkerchief. It was just an act of care, in an extraordinary setting, and it seems to have impacted the way the princess was remembered by Avanti.
On the eve of the end of the visit, Diana once again said to the little girl, “I don't want to leave you”, and then, “I don't have a daughter; for this day, Avanti is my daughter.” It was a loving compliment and not a statement of family ties, but the words stuck with Avanti, and his memory of the encounter was forever altered.
A relationship that persisted after the visit. Diana was not the last princess to leave Hyderabad. Presumably Avanti and her family did continue to correspond with the princess, as the report states. Diana also gave Avanti a signed picture of her and Steve, which Avanti still keeps.
It was an unusual post-hungry life for that royal encounter, provided it had been transient rather than a story. To Avanti, Diana was not just the popular princess she knew from school; it was a real person. She was an individual who had demonstrated her love at age four.
Years later, Avanti walked down a path that was closely intertwined with the one in which Diana first met her. She was now a dance and primary school teacher, continuing her link with children and performing arts from her early years. She reportedly went to a meeting with Diana and “stayed in her memory long after her princess died”.
The chance of seeing Diana again was never to happen. Five years after the meeting in Hyderabad, Diana passed away in Paris in August 1997. The picture and letters were real reminders of their bizarre connection, although Avanti was still a child.
But was Avanti really Princess Diana's daughter? Avanti Reddy is NOT Princess Diana's biological daughter or her legally adopted daughter. The description was from Diana in an emotional interaction with the child.
This is important because there are times when the tale has been told on the Internet in a manner that leaves the relationship more obscure than it really is. The accounts available describe a warm interaction between a visiting princess and a 4-year-old girl, with letters of correspondence. It is not known whether Diana ever officially adopted Avanti or whether she saw her as a member of the Royal Family.
The “Indian daughter” label continues to exist because it speaks to the emotional aspects of the encounter, not the legal or biological. However, there's another Indian connection that has nothing to do with Avanti Reddy and is quite different.
In 2013, a team of researchers found genetic evidence that linked Diana's maternal family line to a woman named Eliza Kewark, an early-19th-century Indian woman. In Kewark, Theodore Forbes, a Scottish merchant who had been a trade agent for the EIC in Surat, was his partner. Mitochondrial DNA was passed down through her mother's lineage until it reached Diana and passed on to Diana's sons, Prince William and Prince Harry.
The study was on maternal inheritance of mitochondrial DNA. Kewark had been described before as Armenian, and genetic studies showed she was Indian on her mother's side, researchers said. The findings thus showed that there was an ancestral Indian link in Diana's family and not with Avanti Reddy.
In popular retellings, two very different stories have become bound together, one a tale of a four-year-old dancer from Hyderabad, whom Diana affectionately called her daughter for a day, the other a tale of her own distant ancestry.
But for Avanti, it is not a title or a bloodline that makes this February afternoon special. In essence, she is still the little girl in the lambadi tunic who drew the attention of a princess, was seated on her lap, and carried away a wonderful childhood memory to grow up with.
References:
- The Indian girl who Diana called my daughter
- Princess Diana's Secret Long-Lost 'Daughter'!
- Prince William's Indian heritage revealed