A little girl is sitting on the floor of a school in Hyderabad. She is four years old, dressed for a traditional dance, her face painted and her feet bare. A princess visiting from Britain notices her, walks over, picks her up and settles her on her knee. Then she notices something ordinary: the child has a cold.
Princess Diana takes out her own handkerchief and wipes the little girl’s nose.
It is such a small gesture that it could easily have disappeared among the photographs and formal greetings of a royal visit. Instead, more than three decades later, it remains at the heart of a story that continues to travel across the internet: Diana’s “Indian daughter.”
The girl was Avanti Reddy. In February 1992, during Diana and Prince Charles’s royal tour of India, four-year-old Avanti performed a traditional Lambadi dance at Lalapet Government High School in Hyderabad. Her mother, Japamala Rani, was a dance teacher who had helped prepare the performance. Avanti was among the children gathered for the royal visit, but something about that brief encounter made her stand out.
According to Avanti’s later recollections, Diana asked her name, her school and her class. She picked her up and kept her beside her for the remainder of the visit. As Diana was leaving, she reportedly told the child, “I don’t have a daughter, so today you are my daughter.” She also said she did not want to leave her.
It is a lovely sentence, but its meaning is easy to distort. Avanti was not Diana’s biological daughter, nor was she legally adopted by the princess. The phrase described a moment of affection, not a hidden family relationship. Headlines may make the story sound like a royal mystery, but the truth is more intimate and, in its own way, more moving.
Diana was one of the most photographed women in the world. Her public life was filled with official visits, carefully arranged appearances and the constant presence of cameras. Yet many of the moments people remember most about her are not grand or ceremonial. They are the small instances in which she seemed to set the formalities aside and respond to another person directly.
For Avanti, that response did not end when the royal party left Hyderabad. Reports say that Diana and Avanti’s family stayed in touch through letters. Diana also sent the child a signed photograph of the two of them together, which Avanti continued to treasure years later. There were hopes of meeting again, but Diana died in a car crash in Paris in August 1997, when Avanti was still a child.
The photograph remained. So did the story.
There is another detail that sometimes gets folded into headlines about Diana’s Indian connection, and it belongs to a completely different story. In 2013, reporting on genealogical DNA research suggested that Diana had a distant maternal ancestor, Eliza Kewark, who had Indian ancestry. The research concerned Diana’s family line and was reported as evidence of a connection reaching back several generations. Through Diana, the same maternal line was also traced to her sons, William and Harry.
But ancestry and affection are not the same thing. The DNA story does not explain Diana’s encounter with Avanti, and Avanti’s story does not depend on a genetic connection to India. One concerns a distant family history; the other concerns a real meeting between a famous woman and a small child who happened to catch her attention.
Perhaps the reason the Hyderabad photograph has endured is that it captures something a headline cannot fully explain. Diana was a princess, surrounded by the machinery of royalty. Avanti was a little girl who had just finished dancing at school. For a few minutes, their positions in the world mattered less than the simple exchange between them.
The handkerchief is the detail that makes the memory feel real. It turns a royal visit into something familiar: an adult noticing that a child is unwell and responding without ceremony. No title was needed for that. No grand promise had to be made.
Avanti was never Diana’s daughter in the literal sense. But for one brief afternoon, Diana called her one, and the little girl grew up carrying that memory.
Sometimes the story behind a headline is not a secret waiting to be uncovered. Sometimes it is a small moment of kindness that people have never quite forgotten.
References:
- The Daily Star. (2017, August 17). The Indian girl who Diana called 'my daughter'. A useful account of Avanti’s recollections, the Lambadi performance, the handkerchief and the correspondence after Diana’s visit.
- India Today. (2013, June 13). Does Prince William carry an Indian gene? Provides contemporary reporting on the separate DNA and ancestry story, including the uncertainty surrounding Eliza Kewark’s background.
- ITV News. (2013, June 14). Prince William has Indian DNA. Explains the reported maternal-line connection and how it was traced through Diana’s family.