By E. Graydon Carter

What has 20 elephants, 27 camels, 120 bullocks, 60 members of India's 61st cavalry and Amy Irving? (No fair peeking.) It's The Far Pavilions, a six-hour cable-TV mini-series now filming in Jaipur, India. Irving, 29, says that her role as an Indian princess has inspired in her "a royal feeling. I notice that my posture has improved." She has also honed her horseback riding. "Now," says Irving, "I can walk like a princess and ride a horse like a cowboy." Much better that than riding like a princess and walking like a cowboy.

Gently but firmly forced into retirement last year by President Reagan after a naval career of a mere 63 years, Admiral Hyman Rickover, 83, is scarcely gone or forgotten. Last week in Washington, Richard Nixon, 70, Gerald Ford, 69, and Jimmy Carter, 58 (another man forced into retirement by Reagan), gathered to salute Rickover, under whom they had all technically served as lower-ranking naval officers. Nixon rumbled through Happy Birthday on the piano (strange, considering it was no one's birthday), Carter saluted the admiral's influence on him as "second only to my father," and Ford, perhaps wistfully, called Rickover "a man who could hold an office far, far longer than any of us."

In an age of youthful, button-down conformity, Teddy Kennedy Jr., 21, seems cut from different cloth. After his leg was amputated in 1973 because of bone cancer, he was walking within days. In the years since, he has pursued his passions for squash, touch football, skating and waterskiing. And last week, at Mount Sunapee, N.H., he took a first place in the New England Regional Handicapped Ski Championship. With his proud father looking on, Kennedy beat a field of 25 men, thereby earning a spot at the National Championships this month in Squaw Valley, Calif.

In the ongoing battle of British royalty vs. the press, Queen Elizabeth II has won a decisive round. After Australian Publisher Rupert Murdoch's splashy London tabloid the Sun (circ. 4.2 million) ran the first installment of confessions by a former palace pantry servant, the Queen took the unprecedented step of suing Murdoch's news organization and her onetime employee for damages. In an out-of-court settlement last week, the Sun agreed to pay the $6,000 it would have given the ex-servant and he ponied up his $150 advance, all of which the Queen donated to a favorite charity--one that assists the needy families of journalists.

In an effort to create a high-brow image that might set it apart from the usual Saturday-morning kiddie fare, the Disney cable-TV channel cast around for a reasonable facsimile of Masterpiece Theater Host Alistair Cooke, 74, to front Mousterpiece Theater, a series of 20 half-hour animated shorts. They found that quintessentially nasal nabob, George Plimpton, 55, already familiar to many a younger viewer not as a writer (Paper Lion) but as the Intellivision pitchman. Beginning next month, Plimpton will settle into a comfy padded chair to lecture his preliterate charges on the finer points of animation in such Disney classics as Steamboat Willie and Goofy's How to Play Baseball.

-- By E. Graydon Carter

On the Record

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 64, exiled Soviet novelist who last week won the $170,000 Templeton Foundation prize for his contribution to progress in religion, on the U.S. Supreme Court's ban on school worship: "When prayers in school are forbidden even in a free country, it is not much more tolerable than in Communist countries, only in that it lacks the hammering-in of atheism." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.