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The Indian Princes and Their States

Although the princes of India have been caricatured as Oriental despots and
British stooges, Barbara Ramusack’s study argues that the British did not
create the princes. On the contrary, many were consummate politicians
who exercised considerable degrees of autonomy until the integration of
the princely states after independence. Ramusack’s synthesis has a broad
temporal span, tracing the evolution of the Indian kings from their pre-
colonial origins to their roles as clients in the British colonial system. The
book breaks new ground in its integration of political and economic devel-
opments in the major princely states with the shifting relationships between
the princes and the British. It represents a significant contribution, both to
British imperial history in its analysis of the theory and practice of indirect
rule, and to modern South Asian history, as a portrait of the princes as
politicians and patrons of the arts.

BARBARA N. RAMUSACK is Charles Phelps Taft Professor of History
at the University of Cincinnati. Her publications include Women in Asia:
Restoring Women to History (1999), and The Princes of India in the Twilight
of Empire: The Dissolution of a Patron—Client System, 1914-1939 (1978).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE NEW CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF INDIA

General editor GORDON JOHNSON
President of Wolfson College, and Director, Centre of South Asian Studies,
University of Cambridge

Associate editors C. A. BayLy
Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, University of Cambridge,
and Fellow of St Catharine’s College

and JOHN F. RicHaRDS

Professor of History, Duke University

Although the original Cambridge History of India, published between 1922 and
1937, did much to formulate a chronology for Indian history and describe the
administrative structures of government in India, it has inevitably been overtaken
by the mass of new research over the past sixty years.

Designed to take full account of recent scholarship and changing conceptions
of South Asia’s historical development, The New Cambridge History of India is
published as a series of short, self-contained volumes, each dealing with a separate
theme and written by one or two authors. Within an overall four-part structure,
thirty-one complementary volumes in uniform format will be published. Each will
conclude with a substantial bibliographical essay designed to lead non-specialists
further into the literature.

The four parts planned are as follows:

I The Mughals and their Contemporaries
I Indian States and the Transition to Colonialism
UI The Indian Empire and the Beginnings of Modern Society
IV The Evolution of Contemporary South Asia

A list of individual titles in preparation will be found
at the end of the volume.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE NEW
CAMBRIDGE
HISTORY OF

INDIA

Il: 6

The Indian Princes and Their States

BARBARA N. RAMUSACK
University of Cincinnati

= CAMBRIDGE
i) UNIVERSITY PRESS

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For Margaret, Roberta, Jerry and George

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First published 2004
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Ramusack, Barbara N.
The Indian princes and their states.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN 0 521 26727 7.
1. Princes —India. 2. India — History — British
occupation, 1765-1947. 3. India — Kings and rulers.
4. India — Politics and government — 1765-1947. _I. Title.
(Series: New Cambridge history of India ; III, 6).
954.03

ISBN 0 521 26727 7 hardback

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CONTENTS

List of illustrations page vi
General editor’ preface vill
Acknowledgments x
List of abbreviations xii
Map xiv
1 Introduction: Indian princes and British imperialism 1
2 Princely states prior to 1800 12
3 The British construction of indirect rule 48
4 The theory and experience of indirect rule in colonial India 88
5 Princes as men, women, rulers, patrons, and Oriental
stereotypes 132
Princely states: administrative and economic structures 170
Princely states: society and politics 206
8 Federation or integration? 245
Epilogue 275
Bibliographical essay 281
Glossary 294
Index 299
Vv

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Princely States and British Indian Provinces in 1912.
Amber Palace with view toward Jaigarh Fort. © Doranne Jacobson
View of planned city of Jaipur. © Doranne Jacobson
Begum Shah Jahan of Bhopal. Photo 2/3 (1) By Permission
of the British Library

Her Highness the Begum Secunder, India and Princess Shah Jehan,
India. By permission of Joyce and Dr. Kenneth Robbins

Temple of Sri Padmanabha in Trivandrum during Attukal Pongal
Festival. © Doranne Jacobson

British Residency at Hyderabad by Captain Grindlay.
Collection of the author

Lord Wellesley by James Heath. Print 789. By Permission
of the British Library

Maharaja Jaswant Singh of Marwar-Jodhpur with Star of India.
Photo 784/1 (43) By Permission of the British Library

Sir Charles U. Aitchison. Photo 2 (16a) By Permission of the British
Library

Maharaja Madho Rao Scindia II of Gwalior and Lord Curzon
in 1899 after shikar. Photo 430/17 (33) By Permission of the
British Library

Maharaja Sayaji Rao of Baroda in 1899. Photo 430/24 (1)
By Permission of the British Library

Lakshmi Vilas Palace in Baroda. © Doranne Jacobson
Courtyard and City Palace, Jaipur. © Doranne Jacobson

Victoria Diamond Jubilee Hospital, opened on 8" December
1900 by Lord Curzon. Photo 430/41 (80) By Permission of the
British Library

Central Jail at Junagarh, c. 1900. Photo 430/38 (9) By Permission
of the British Library

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page xiv

21
22

116

125
149
150

154

155

ILLUSTRATIONS

Prince George Jivaji Rao and Princess Mary Kamlaraja of Gwalior at

March Past during visit of Prince of Wales, 8-12 February 1922.

Photo 10/2 (38) By Permission of the British Library 159
Maharaja Madho Rao Scindia seated among tigers with Prince

of Wales, 8-12 February 1922. Photo 10/2 (54) By Permission

of the British Library 160
Wrestling match at Patiala, c. 1930. Collection of the author 163
View of famine relief work at Gajner, c. 1900. Photo 430/25 (9) By

Permission of the British Library 178
Plenary session of the first Round Table Conference. Photo 784/1 (83)

By Permission of the British Library 253

Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, Maharaja Jai Singh of Alwar, and Prime Minister
Ramsey MacDonald at the first Round Table Conference. Photo
784/1 (85) By Permission of the British Library 254

vii

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GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

The New Cambridge History of India covers the period from the beginning of
the sixteenth century. In some respects it marks a radical change in the style
of Cambridge Histories, but in others the editors feel that they are working
firmly within an established academic tradition.

During the summer of 1896, E W. Maitland and Lord Acton between them
evolved the idea for a comprehensive modern history. By the end of the year the
Syndics of the University Press had committed themselves to the Cambridge
Modern History, and Lord Acton had been put in charge of it. It was hoped
that publication would begin in 1899 and be completed by 1904, but the first
volume in fact came out in 1902 and the last in 1910, with additional volumes
of tables and maps in 1911 and 1912.

The History was a great success, and it was followed by a whole series of dis-
tinctive Cambridge Histories covering English Literature, the Ancient World,
India, British Foreign Policy, Economic History, Medieval History, the British
Empire, Africa, China and Latin America; and even now other new series
are being prepared. Indeed, the various Histories have given the Press notable
strength in the publication of general reference books in the arts and social
sciences.

What has made the Cambridge Histories so distinctive is that they have never
been simply dictionaries or encyclopaedias. The Histories have, in H. A. L.
Fisher’s words, always been ‘written by an army of specialists concentrating
the latest result of special study’. Yet as Acton agreed with the Syndics in
1896, they have not been mere compilations of existing material but original
works. Undoubtedly many of the Histories are uneven in quality, some have
become out of date very rapidly, but their virtue has been that they have
consistently done more than simply record an existing state of knowledge:
they have tended to focus interest on research and they have provided a massive
stimulus to further work. This has made their publication doubly worthwhile
and has distinguished them intellectually from other sorts of reference book.
The editors of The New Cambridge History of India have acknowledged this in
their work.

The original Cambridge History of India was published between 1922 and
1937. It was planned in six volumes, but of these, volume 2 dealing with the

vill

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GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

period between the first century aD and the Muslim invasion of India, never
appeared. Some of the material is still of value, but in many respects it is now
out of date. The past fifty years have seen a great deal of new research on India,
and a striking feature of recent work has been to cast doubt on the validity of
the quite arbitrary chronological and categorical way in which Indian history
has been conventionally divided.

The editors decided that it would not be academically desirable to prepare
a new History of India using the traditional format. The selective nature of
research on Indian history over the past half-century would doom such a
project from the start and the whole of Indian history could not be covered in
an even or comprehensive manner. They concluded that the best scheme would
be to have a History divided into four overlapping chronological volumes, each
containing short books on individual themes or subjects. Although in extent
the work will therefore be equivalent to a dozen massive tomes of the traditional
sort, in form The New Cambridge History of India will appear as a shelf full of
separate but complementary parts. Accordingly, the main divisions are between
1. The Mughals and their Contemporaries, 11. Indian States and the Transition to
Colonialism, 1. The Indian Empire and the Beginnings of Modern Society, and
1v. The Evolution of Contemporary South Asia.

Just as the books within these volumes are complementary so too do they
intersect with each other, both thematically and chronologically. As the books
appear they are intended to give a view of the subject as it now stands and to
act as a stimulus to further research. We do not expect the New Cambridge
History of India to be the last word on the subject but an essential voice in the
continuing discussion about it.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A fellowship year at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina during
1986-87 (when the earth was young) gave the great gifts of time, intellectual
companionship and a congenial environment for the initial stages of thinking,
organising and writing this book. I greatly appreciate the support of Charles
Blitzer, then the director, whose passion for India was inspiring; and Kent
Mullikin, the ever accommodating and resourceful associate director. All the
Center staff, but especially the bibliographical and electronic expertise of Allan
Tuttle and Rebecca Vargas, were extraordinary and are much appreciated.
My colleagues at the Center, especially in the seminar on “The Other’, and
the Triangle Seminar on South Asia, particularly David Gilmartin and John
Richards, enlarged my interdisciplinary horizons. That year enabled me to
recharge my intellectual batteries and renew my historiographical capital.
The genealogy of this volume begins with the suggestion of John Broomfield
and D. Anthony Low that my dissertation research might focus on the Chamber
of Princes. They launched my continuing interest in the princes, a topic long
on the margins of South Asian historiography. Richard and Donna Park offered
crucial support and friendship while I wrote that dissertation and later revised
it for publication. My debt is great to the directors and staffs of the numerous
archives where I have worked over the past decades. They include the National
Archives of India and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi,
the National Library of India in Calcutta, the Punjab State Archives in Patiala,
the Karnataka State Archives in Bangalore, and the India Office Library in its
many incarnations from King Charles Street to the British Library. My research
was supported by fellowships and grants from the American Institute of Indian
Studies, the Fulbright-Hays program of the US Department of Education, the
Fulbright program of the US Department of State, the National Endowment
for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the Charles Phelps
Taft Memorial Fund, and the University Research Council at the University
of Cincinnati. As will be quickly evident, this volume is shaped by and also
owes substantial debt to the uneven but recently enhanced historiography
on the princes and princely states of India. The path-breaking work of Ian
Copland, Edward Haynes, John Hurd II, Robin Jeffrey, Karen Leonard, James
Manor, John McLeod, Mridula Mukherjee, William Richter, Lloyd Rudolph,

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, and Robert Stern has crucially shaped my synthesis.
The research of newer entrants to the still marginal arena of princely states,
especially that of Manu Bhagavan, Shail Mayaram, Janaki Nair, Mridu Rai,
Satadru Sen, Nandini Sundar, and Chitralekha Zutshi, has stimulated me to
rethink older paradigms. I greatly appreciate the willingness of many scholars
who provided offprints, pre-publication copies of articles, and abstracts of
books. Kenneth and Joyce Robbins have been extraordinarily liberal in sharing
their hospitality, their knowledge and their superb collection of art, artefacts,
books, documents and medals from the princely states of India.

A synthetic overview of the Indian princes and their states emerged as a
much more complex intellectual venture than I had initially thought it would
be. Personal issues and administrative responsibilities further delayed the writ-
ing and revising processes. Marigold Acland was the most patient and en-
couraging editor an author could want, while John Richards, Christopher
Bayly and Gordon Johnson sustained me when I wondered if this project
was feasible. I am most grateful for their trust and gentle prodding. The
generosity of Christopher Bayly, Ian Copland, John McLeod, John Richards,
William Richter and Tanika Sarkar, who read draft chapters or the whole of the
manuscript, substantially improved this book. They urged me to clarify argu-
ments, cautioned me to correct errors, suggested pertinent sources and provided
prompt answers to my queries. Although their research does not focus on the
princes, Sanjam Ahluwalia, Richard Bingle, Judith Brown, Antoinette Burton,
Geraldine Forbes, Doranne Jacobson, Carol Jean and Timothy Johnson, Sanjay
Joshi, Mrinalini Sinha and Sylvia Vatuk tolerated my complaints and urged
me to continue when I was most discouraged. In Cincinnati my colleagues and
friends, but especially Roger Daniels, Katharina Gerstenberger, Sigrun Haude,
Gene Lewis, Zane and Janet Miller, Maura O’Connor, Thomas Sakmyster,
Willard Sunderland and Ann Twinam, sustained me during extended periods
of administrative commitments. At crucial junctures Judith Daniels was an as-
tute and sympathetic editor; John Waldrodt provided computer expertise and
a beautiful map on exceedingly short notice; Doranne Jacobson responded
quickly and generously to my requests for information and permission to use
her photographs, and Venetia Somerset was a most helpful copyeditor whose
eagle eye is much appreciated. I am grateful to the Charles Phelps Taft Memorial
Fund for grants to undertake the research for the illustrations and to support
the costs of their reproduction. This book is dedicated to my brothers and
sisters for their love and support. In the end I, of course, remain responsible
for any misinterpretations or errors in this volume.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

AGG
AISPC
AR

BCAS
BHM
BJP
CSSH
CE
CIS
CR

EPW
F&P
GH
GIPR
GOI
HJFRT
IAR
IBS
ICS
IESHR
ISPC
JAMWI
JAOS
JAS
JASB
JCCH
JCCP
Jpc
JPHS

ABBREVIATIONS

Agent to the Governor-General

All-India States’ People’s Conference

Asian Review

born

Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars

Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Bharatiya Janata Party

Comparative Studies in Society and History
Cincinnati Enquirer

Contributions to Indian Sociology

Crown Representative Records at the Oriental and India Office
Collection

died

Economic and Political Weekly

Foreign and Political Department of the Government of India
Gender and History

Great Indian Peninsular Railway

Government of India

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
Indian Annual Register

Indo-British Review

Indian Civil Service

Indian Economic and Society History Review

Indian States’ People’s Conference

Journal of the Association of Medical Women in India
Journal of the American Oriental Society

Journal of Asian Studies

Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics
Joint Political Congress

Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society

Journal of World History

xii

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KSA
MAO

MAS
NAI
NGSR
NII
NMML
NSR
NSS
OIOC

PA
PEPSU
PSA

RSS
RTC

SA
SALNQ
SGPC
SH
SNDP
TISCO
TSC
VHP

ABBREVIATIONS

Karnataka State Archives, Bangalore
Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, United
Provinces

Modern Asian Studies

National Archives of India, New Delhi

Nizam’s Guaranteed State Railway

National Library of India, Calcutta

Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi
Nizam’s State Railway

Nair Service Society

Oriental and India Office Collections at the British Library,
London

Pacific Affairs

Patiala and East Punjab States Union

Punjab State Archives, Patiala

ruled

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh

Round Table Conference

succeeded to the gaddi

South Asia

South Asia Library Notes & Queries

Shiromani Gurdwara Parbhandhak Committee
Studies in History

Sri Narayana Dharma Paripalana

Tata Iron and Steel Company

Travancore State Congress

Vishwa Hindu Parishad

xill

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British Province
Princely State
Princely State mentioned in text

UNITED ) ASSAM
PROVINCES

4
PROVINCES /2
and BERAR ~~

ARABIAN SEA
BAY OF BENGAL

200 400 600 800km

200 400 miles

INDIAN OCEAN

Princely States and British Indian Provinces in 1912

xiv

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: INDIAN PRINCES AND
BRITISH IMPERIALISM

Air India, the overseas airline of the independent Government of India (GOD),
chose a bowing, smiling, turbaned maharaja or prince as its mascot during the
1950s. Why did a democratic government choose this image as an icon for its
most modern means of transportation when a decade earlier its prime minister
had castigated the princes as rulers whose states were ‘very backward and many
of them. .. still in the feudal age’?! This rotund, red-coated figure epitomises
the profoundly ambivalent attitudes towards the Indian princes among suc-
cessive governments in India. British colonial officials had claimed them as
faithful military allies, denounced them as autocrats, praised them as natural
leaders of their subjects, chided them as profligate playboys, and taken advan-
tage of their lavish hospitality. During the struggle for independence, Indian
nationalists had initially cited the princes as evidence of the ability of Indians to
govern effectively; they had occasionally sought their financial patronage of po-
litical organisations and collaboration during constitutional negotiations, but
ultimately had assailed them as arbitrary autocrats. In independent India and
Pakistan, governments have appointed them to positions ranging from state
governors to ambassadors; political parties have co-opted erstwhile princes as
candidates for the central and state legislatures and appointed them as min-
isters; public corporations and private entrepreneurs have promoted former
princely capitals as destinations for international and domestic tourists; and
popular media have represented them as an integral part of Indian culture.
In the public sphere, princes were and are portrayed in newspapers, maga-
zines, novels, newsreels and feature films as benevolent paternalists, remnants
of feudalism ensconced in romantic forts, sexually ravenous predators, fierce
hunters, audacious sportsmen, especially in cricket and polo, and extravagant
clients of jewellers and luxury hotels in India and Europe. However, in the
historiography of South Asia, the princes and their states have remained on
the margins of the dominant narratives of Indian nationalism and its alter ego
of religious communalism.

The synthetic overview presented in this book joins a growing effort to inte-
grate the princes into the grand sweep of modern Indian history. Its underlying

! What are the Indian States? Foreword by Jawaharlal Nehru (Allahabad, n.d. 19392), p. 5.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

argument is that many princes represented a continuity of traditional state
formation in India and remained autonomous rulers, exercising substantial
authority and power within their states, until 1948. In other words, British
imperialists did not create the princely states as states or reduce them to theatre
states where ritual was dominant and governmental functions relegated to im-
perial surrogates. Indeed, British power gradually restrained sovereign princely
authority, especially in defence, external affairs and communications. Indian
princes nevertheless taxed their subjects, allocated state revenues, had full crim-
inal and civil judicial powers, maintained internal law and order to varying
degrees, patronised traditional and modern cultural activities and institutions,
and synthesised elements of rajadharma or indigenous kingly behaviour with
those of British models.

Much of the muddled tedium in histories of the princely states of India
may be traced to the use of the label of princely states for diverse political en-
tities. The development of an inclusive, reputedly rationalised list of princely
states was a colonial venture. Beginning during the 1820s when the English
East India Company was consolidating its territorial possessions, this endeav-
our was pursued more diligently once the British Crown formally assumed
responsibility for the rule of India in 1858. The British categorisation of indi-
rectly controlled areas as native states may be seen as one aspect of their project
to understand the history, the extent and the present condition of the empire
that they now formally acknowledged. Thus here as in their discussions of caste,
indigenous legal systems and local customs, British administrators and schol-
ars were creating a category of native or Indian states that did not necessarily
correspond to Indian conceptions of what constituted viable political states.
The /mperial Gazetteer of India listed 693 states, including the Shan states in
Burma as well as Nepal, but the Report of the Indian States Committee in
1929 reduced the number to 562.”

During the 1960s Bernard Cohn articulated an influential typology useful
for understanding different levels of statehood. He delineated four levels of
political organisation during the eighteenth century:

1. the imperial, represented by the continuing authority but not power of the
Mughal emperors, whose territory gradually contracted to Delhi;
2. the secondary states ruled by Mughal-appointed governors who extended
their autonomous control over a historically or culturally defined area;
? Imperial Gazetteer of India, The Indian Empire vol. 4, Administrative (Oxford, 1909), pp. 92-103.
East India (Indian States). Report of the Indian States Committee 1928-1929 (London, 1929), pp. 10—

11. The states were divided into three groups: 108 states had rulers in the Chamber of Princes, 127
states had rulers represented in the Chamber; and 327 were estates, jagirs and others.

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INDIAN PRINCES AND BRITISH IMPERIALISM

3. the regional spheres, where leaders were granted the authority to rule from
the imperial or secondary level after they had secured military control; and
finally

4. the local level, which Cohn labelled ‘little kingdoms’.

The founders of little kingdoms frequently started with one or more of three
offices: zamindar, meaning a holder of zamin or land who acquired a right
to a share of the produce of the land for fostering its cultivation; jagirdar,
indicating the possessor of a jagir or the right to collect revenue from a tract
of land granted by a superior power in return for service or acknowledgment
of suzerainty; or taluqdar, the leader of a taluga or area controlled by a male
lineage. As these ambitious men extended their authority into administrative
as well as military spheres, they took the title of raja, which means king in
Sanskrit, even though British sources labelled them chiefs or princes.? Edward
Haynes claims that this translation of raja was part of the British effort to
create Indian rulers as a subordinated category.’ But Indian rajas legitimated
their ruling status by religious and social rituals and symbols of sovereignty,
the latter being granted from any of the three superior levels of authority.

In subsequent scholarship Cohn’s classification has been compressed to three
levels: the imperial, the regional (which incorporates both the secondary and
the regional), and the local or little kingdoms.’ As the power of the Mughal
Empire was dissipated through succession struggles, territorial overextension
and economic limitations during the eighteenth century, the lower two lev-
els augmented their power under the tattered imperial umbrella of Mughal
suzerainty. The proportion of little kingdoms to regional states is impossible
to quantify. Highlighting their regional concentration, Ian Copland pointed
out that 361 out of the 620 claimed by Lee-Warner were located within the
Bombay Presidency and comprised one-third of its territory excluding the area
of Sind.° Several of these ‘princely states’ in western India were less than one
square mile, with a population of fewer than 200 people that could be one
large extended family and servants. A common joke was that houses here were
constructed with the front door opening into one state and the back door

3 Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Political Systems in Eighteenth Century India: The Benares Region’, JAOS 83
(1962), pp. 313-14.

4 Edward Haynes, ‘Rajput Ceremonial Interactions as a Mirror of a Dying Indian State System, 1820-
1947’, MAS 4 (1990), n. 1, p. 459.

> Cohn himself had previously set the pattern of discussing only three levels of political organisation
in his “The Initial British Impact on India: A Case Study of the Benares Region’, JAS 19 (1960),
pp. 418-24.

6 Jan Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes: Paramountcy in Western India 1857-1930
(Bombay, 1982), pp. 1-2.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

into another. The anomaly of including these units in the category of princely
states is put into sharper perspective when one remembers that some zamin-
dars or estate-holders such as the maharaja of Darbhanga, who controlled
2400 square miles in Bihar and had magisterial powers, were excluded. This
book concentrates on those princely states that survived after 1858, possessed
some attributes, both indigenous and colonial, of sovereign status, and had
their superior rank recognised in the twentieth century by their inclusion in
the Chamber of Princes, a British-instituted advisory assembly. Thus most of
the little kingdoms of western India as well as Bengal, Awadh (Oudh) and
Punjab, although major Indian states during the eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries but British provinces by 1858, will receive only brief notice
in this volume.

Chapter 2 traces the evolution of the major princely states before British
officials articulated their goal of creating an imperial state in the early nine-
teenth century. States are grouped into three categories: the antique, the suc-
cessor, and the warrior or conquest. Antique states are mostly Rajput-ruled
entities that predated the Mughal Empire founded in 1526. They generally
entered alliances with the Mughals, continued as internally autonomous units,
began to act independently as Mughal power atrophied, and expanded ter-
ritorially during the eighteenth century. Subadars or governors of Mughal
provinces, principally those of Awadh, Bengal and Hyderabad, created the
second category when they transformed themselves into autonomous rulers.
Their states ‘presided over a redistribution of agrarian resources which favoured
local gentry and magnates . . . [and they] adapted more successfully to the cul-
tural assumptions of their rural and Hindu subjects’ than had the Mughals.’
Although military force was essential to political dominance in most princely
states, conquest states are deemed a third category to designate polities that
warrior groups established by offering military protection to local populations
against other competitors. This category ranges from the Maratha states in
the west, to Travancore and Mysore in the south, to the Sikh-ruled states in
Punjab. The chapter concludes with a delineation of patterns of state forma-
tion by which ambitious leaders asserted their autonomy, expanded their ter-
ritory and legitimated their claims to sovereignty and kingship by performing
rajadharma.

According to Hindu political treatises and religious texts, rajadharma in-
cluded offering protection to prospective subjects; adjudicating disputes among

7 C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: Northern Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion
1770-1870 (Cambridge, 1983), p. 12.

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INDIAN PRINCES AND BRITISH IMPERIALISM

social groups including kinspeople, clans and castes; patronising religious
leaders and institutions; and distributing gifts, or what Pamela Price has la-
belled ‘dharmic largesse’,® to other cultural activities and social groups claiming
kingly support. Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph have elaborated the notion that a
key responsibility of Indian rulers was to preserve and protect social formations
that existed prior to the state, such as ‘the customs, activities, and prerogatives
of communities, castes, sects, status orders, and guilds (craft and commercial)’.?
A king was also to manifest certain personal qualities. The relevance for both
kings and gods of the Hindu concept of darshan (the auspiciousness of seeing
and being seen by a superior being) indicated the overlap between secular and
sacred spheres in Indian society. In a discussion of medieval Hindu kingship,
Ronald Inden declared: ‘A view of the king, handsome, in good health, bathed,
anointed, crowned, decked with ornaments, and seated in state was believed
to be auspicious and to please (rafij) the people.’!°

Many historical empires from Pharaonic Egypt onward have employed in-
direct rule to extend their influence over disparate peoples with a minimum
expenditure in material and human resources. When the English East India
Company secured the diwani right to collect the revenues of Bengal in 1765,
they embarked on a lengthy transformation from trading enterprise to imperial
power. Chapter 3 traces how the British first devised and then sustained a system
of indirect rule that enabled them to emerge by 1858 as the paramount power
in control of approximately three-fifths of the territory and four-fifths of the
population of the Indian subcontinent. The frequently asked questions about
indirect rule are why did the Indian states first ally themselves with the British
and then why did the British maintain these alliances with Indian regional
states and even petty chieftains after British military and political superiority
was clearly established? How much did British policies of indirect rule and
annexation reflect individual agency, contemporary political, economic and
social conditions, or institutional constraints? What motivated Indian rulers
to enter alliances with the British? The answers are that dynamic tensions char-
acterised British policies of indirect rule and annexation, imperial intervention
and non-intervention in Indian state affairs, and princely collaboration and
overt or covert non-cooperation with British policies and advice. The British

8 Pamela G. Price, Kingship and Political Practice in Colonial India (Cambridge, 1996), p. 190.

9 Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, “The Subcontinental Empire and the Regional
Kingdom in Indian State Formation’. In Paul Wallace (ed.), Region and Nation in India (New Delhi,
1985), p. 46.

10 Ronald Inden, ‘Ritual, Authority, and Cyclic Time in Hindu Kingship’. In J. F. Richards (ed.),
Kingship and Authority in South Asia (Madison, 1978), p. 54.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

and the princes used each other to achieve their own objectives with vary-
ing degrees of success. While the British pursued imperial dominance, Indian
princes sought greater control over their internal allies and challengers and a
larger share of local revenues. Although British power could be both arbitrary
and oppressive, shrewd Indian princes centralised their administrations and
enlarged their share of local revenues.

After 1858, when Queen Victoria resolved that the British Empire would
encompass both directly and indirectly ruled areas, British administrators in
India set out to codify policies towards the princely states based on precedents,
labelled political practices, that were reinforced with expediency. Chapter 4
analyses both the construction of British theories and operation of indirect rule
and the diverse experiences of Indian princes as participants in that system.
Officials in the foreign, later the foreign and political, department of the GOI
emerged as authorities on doctrines, regulations and rituals that would govern
British and princely relations into the twentieth century. Although significant
annexation of territory no longer occurred, the British continued to intervene,
most dramatically in the deposition or exile of recalcitrant princes, but more
regularly in relation to succession and minority administrations and conflicts
between a ruler and his kinspeople or nobility. As the nature of challenges to
British imperial power changed, the British and the princes themselves evolved
new roles for the princes in the public spheres both in India and the broader
empire.

In her study of two zamindaris in south India, Pamela Price cogently ar-
gues for the agency ‘of persons meeting historical contingencies with the use of
both indigenous and colonial categories and concepts, with the manipulation of
indigenous and colonial institutions and ideologies to achieve personally con-
structed goals’.!’ After exploring the life cycle of princes, Chapter 5 examines
how many rulers synthesised and adapted the injunctions of rajadharma to
changing British and Indian nationalist conventions of political authority and
political and social reforms. Thus princes continued to patronise holy men
and religious institutions but now sustained colleges that combined indige-
nous religious learning and western science. They extended dharmic largesse
to underprivileged groups ranging from scholarships for untouchables (later
called scheduled castes) to medical relief for Indian women. They nourished
Indian music, dance and the visual arts in their durbars (courts) and in the
public sphere of local museums and all-India festivals. Simultaneously, princes

1] Price, Kingship, p. 6.

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INDIAN PRINCES AND BRITISH IMPERIALISM

assimilated elements of the British gospel of social improvement through
disciplinary institutions such as schools, hospitals and prisons. This creative
synthesis, which evolved in myriad formats, nourished the complex and some-
times conflicting perceptions of the princes mentioned earlier. It also reflects
the fact that many princes were adroit politicians whom both British imperi-
alists and Indian nationalists had to accommodate, and that colonial cultural
forms and power structures did not efface indigenous ones.

Indian princely states were diverse in their administration, economic struc-
ture, social composition and politics. Chapter 6 focuses on three major aspects
of the development of princely states as political and economic entities from
the 1860s to the 1940s. First, the administrative frameworks that existed in the
princely states provided the parameters in which other elements functioned.
Examining the governmental structures first is not meant to imply that they
were the dominant factor but merely reflects the available scholarship. Second,
although the states were autocracies, the rulers had to rely on indigenous and
‘foreign’ collaborators to administer them. A scrutiny of the formation and
activities of these elites underscores the bureaucratisation of the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries in the princely states. This trend shifted
the internal balance of power to princes who had greater control over paid
bureaucrats than nobles with independent incomes and kinship ties. Third,
the economic configuration of the princely states determined the resources
available to the administration, the elites who contended for dominance, and
the people at the base. But economic activities and development highlight
the imperial restrictions on the autonomy of states and their rulers. Enter-
prising rulers and merchants nevertheless crafted opportunities for economic
initiatives.

The ethnic origins, social structures and religious affiliations of the peoples
in the Indian princely states were extraordinarily intricate and have attracted
relatively little scholarly attention. Although much remains to be done, some
historians are now studying popular politics. Chapter 7 begins with an analysis
of how treaties, maps and physical markers constructed the territorial bound-
aries of the states that contained heterogeneous populations and goes on to
delineate the efforts of elite and non-elite subjects to gain material benefits and
legal rights. Simultaneously, princes used their social and religious status as well
as autocratic power to buttress their internal political control as concepts of
nationalism, communalism and political reform challenged their dominance.
Although the borders of princely states were as porous to political ideas as
to smuggled goods, it was local leaders rather than nationalists from British

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

India who actively organised informal campaigns and associations that sought
a greater share of scarce resources such as education and government jobs for
caste, religious and ethnic groups, the exercise of civil rights such as freedom
of assembly, association and speech, and improved economic conditions. In
states where rulers shared their religion with a minority of their subjects and
favoured their co-religionists with generous patronage or protective legislation,
popular political activity could quickly become communal, that is, seeking to
enhance a particular religious or social community, rather than being more
broad-based. However, there has been relatively little consideration of what
constituted nationalist ideology or politics among either princes or their sub-
jects within the internally autonomous states.

By the late 1920s, Indian princes as well as Indian nationalists were seeking
dramatic revisions in their relationships with the British imperial structure.
Chapter 8 examines the constitutional negotiations from 1930 to 1948 that
led to the integration of the princely states into either India or the newly created
state of Pakistan. It argues that their relatively quick and smooth integration
was not foreseen. There have been various answers to the question of when the
demise of the princes as autonomous rulers became inevitable. James Manor,
who argues that ‘the fate of the princely order was sealed long before 1935’,
represents one extreme.!* In my own earlier work, I proposed a later date,
namely the suspension of negotiations over federation in 1939, as the beginning
of the end. However, subsequently opened government records, memoirs of
participants, and research, most notably by Robin Moore, Michael Witmer
and Ian Copland, indicate that until at least mid-1947 both British officials
and Indian politicians were anxious about the future of the Indian princes and
the possible balkanisation of the British Empire in India.

About sixty to ninety of the supposedly 600-odd princes of India exer-
cised significant power in local, regional, all-India and imperial politics dur-
ing the British colonial period. Some remained politically prominent during
the initial decades of independence. The fact that in early 2003 Captain
Amarindar Singh, the scion of the Patiala dynasty, and Virbhadra Singh of
Bashahr are serving as chief ministers of Punjab and Himachal Pradesh illus-
trates the possible residual value of a princely heritage in electoral politics.
Consequently an intellectual and cultural puzzle is why there is a historical
lacuna when the princes themselves and their states, some of which were larger
than many European countries, presented such an enticing array of images,

12 James Manor, ‘The Demise of the Princely Order: A Reassessment’. In Robin Jeffrey (ed.), People,

Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in the Indian Princely States (Delhi, 1978), p. 306.

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INDIAN PRINCES AND BRITISH IMPERIALISM

controlled substantial wealth and power, and survived for so long. The fol-
lowing speculations are meant to stimulate more research and more cogent
interpretations.

First, scholars and the general public frequently, though certainly not al-
ways, are interested in events and personalities, phenomena that seem relevant
to their daily concerns. Before 1947 British historians, who were often off-
cials or associated with imperial institutions, studied aspects of Indian politics
and culture that provided legitimacy and perhaps guidance for British poli-
cies. When they noticed the princes, these scholars extolled them as faithful
allies or castigated them for misgovernment that justified annexation or de-
position. Indian historians produced either hagiographical accounts of the
princes as astute political leaders and social reformers or acerbic censures of
princely oppression. After 1947 British historians concentrated on the dilem-
mas that confronted colonial officials in the governance of India. Many Indian
and some North American historians told the story of a triumphant Indian
National Congress and the selfless ideological commitment of nationalist lead-
ers, most notably Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, to the struggle
for freedom. After the princely states were quickly integrated into the in-
dependent nation-states of India and Pakistan (with the fateful anomaly of
Jammu and Kashmir), there was some interest in why the princely rule had
collapsed so quickly. The usual explanations were princely political ineptness
and personal degeneracy, the political shrewdness of Indian negotiators, and
the lack of viable alternatives for the princes. In other words the princes were
losers, and immediately after a contest winners attract more historians than the
vanquished.

Second, because British administrators had reneged on earlier promises to
protect them from external and internal opponents, their princely clients be-
came an embarrassment to the departing imperialists and a disconcerting topic
for historical analysis. Indian nationalist leaders were equally chagrined by the
princes. Some Indian nationalist and communal leaders had sought princely
patronage, but they directed their political activity and rhetoric against the
British colonial administration. They neglected organising a political base in
the princely states among their rulers or subjects until the final decades of colo-
nial rule. The partition that accompanied independence for India and Pakistan
made their leaders wary of further balkanisation. The reluctance of the rulers,
especially of Hyderabad and more significantly of Jammu and Kashmir, to ac-
cede to India rendered the princes problematic for Indian politicians, who were
now constructing new nation-states under the chaotic conditions of collapsing
colonial structures and unprecedented internal migration marked by death and

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

destruction. Since both imperial officials and South Asian nationalists, who
were initially concentrated in colonial port cities, had struggled largely within
British Indian territory, historians forging the dominant narratives of colonial
benevolence or exploitation and nationalist triumphs or communal challenges
relegated the princes to footnotes.

Third, primary sources, the bricks of historical scholarship, on the princes
and their states were not easily available. The archives of most princely states
were not as well catalogued and well preserved as colonial ones. In some cases
officials in princely states had treated the documents they generated during
their ministerial tenure as personal property and removed them when they
left office.!* What their descendants did not later sell as scrap paper, humidity
and insects destroyed. Many princes were equally reluctant to place documents
that they deemed personal or politically dangerous in any archive. Maharaja
Yadavindra Singh of Patiala was a striking exception. The last Chancellor of
the Chamber of Princes, he preserved the Chamber’s records at his capital and
supported the effort to gather available records from the erstwhile states in
the Patiala and East Punjab States Union (PEPSU) created in 1948.'4 During
the tumultuous years of integrating autonomous units into larger entities,
officials in former princely state territory accorded a low priority to the es-
tablishment of archives. Consequently the records of the princely states were
geographically scattered, often in locations difficult to reach and lacking facil-
ities for researchers, and access could be difficult to obtain. On the imperial
side, some British officials handling relations with the princes destroyed records
that might prove politically or economically injurious to the princes in inde-
pendent India.!> Records deemed sensitive because they dealt with personal
issues, political manipulations or communal politics were transferred to the
India Office Library in London, where a fifty-year rule on when documents
became open precluded early research. In the late 1960s a reduction to thirty
years stimulated more research. Scholars began to portray princes as political
leaders who assessed opportunities and choices; negotiated compromises with
British officials, recalcitrant nobles and popular political leaders; initiated re-
forms; jailed critics; and survived as rulers. A few analysed particular groups
or associations within the states and contributed to the complex mosaic of

13 Daya Kishan Kaul, ‘Care and Preservation of Old Records in Northern Indian States’, Indian
Historical Records Commission, Proceedings, 2 (January 1920).

'4 Barbara Ramusack, ‘The Princely States of Punjab: A Bibliographic Essay’. In W. Eric Gustafson
and Kenneth W. Jones (eds), Sources on Punjab History (New Delhi, 1975), pp. 374-449.

5 Conrad Corfield, The Princely India I Knew: From Reading to Mountbatten (Madras, 1975),
p. 155.

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INDIAN PRINCES AND BRITISH IMPERIALISM

social history in South Asia. Their work undergirds this synthesis and will be
acknowledged in subsequent chapters that plot the indigenous origins of the
princely states, their fluctuating fortunes within the British imperial systems
and the nature of their administrations, economies, societies and politics in
order to restore the princes and their states to the history and the future of
India.

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CHAPTER 2

PRINCELY STATES PRIOR TO 1800

Political chaos disrupts the status of many, but for others it provides opportu-
nities for political advancement, social mobility and economic gain. During
the eighteenth century the Mughal Empire, the largest, most extensive po-
litical organisation to evolve in India, suffered an attenuation of its power
and its territory. Even so, the Mughal emperor continued to be a source of
legitimacy through the bestowal of offices and titles, and Mughal patterns of
administration and elite culture persisted in emerging states. Until the 1980s,
historians taking a bird’s-eye view from European and Mughal sources have
often lamented the political turmoil and economic disruption during the eigh-
teenth century. Only the expanding political power of the British supposedly
created stable conditions. During more recent decades scholars have taken
a worm’s-eye view from the ground of local and regional records in Indian
languages, and the political landscape of eighteenth-century India has been
significantly altered.

Current scholarship indicates that while the Mughals may have been los-
ing their power to accumulate economic resources and control the actions of
subordinate personnel, new political formations emerged and implemented,
with varying success, centralising reforms that would enable them to control
the resources of the countryside more effectively than the Mughals had. These
robust challengers were the successor states to the Mughals, most importantly
Awadh, Bengal and Hyderabad, and warrior states, the creations of military en-
trepreneurs, more specifically Maratha states in the west, Mysore in the south
and the Sikhs in the north. Other beneficiaries were Hindu trading groups
such as Jagat Seths in Bengal and Marwaris from Rajasthan, who were forging
interregional trade networks; and Muslim revenue farmers with contracts to
collect revenue who amassed capital that they lent to aspiring indigenous kings
and encroaching foreign commercial ventures, most notably the English East
India Company. Thus the eighteenth century, once shrouded in the gloom of
Mughal decline and deemed too politically fragmented for coherent historical
analysis, has now become an era of strong states and aggressive indigenous capi-
talists. This revisionism provides a dynamic background for the study of Indian
political entities known as the native (the word ‘native’ meaning Indian) states
during the nineteenth century and as the princely states during the twentieth

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PRINCELY STATES PRIOR TO 1800

century. In this book I will use the term ‘princely’ rather than ‘native’ state ex-
cept where it would be anachronistic. Indian princely states that survived from
1858 to 1947 may be grouped into three categories: antique states, successor
states, and warrior or conquest states.

GENRES OF PRINCELY STATES

Antique states: the Rajputs

Antique, archaic or vintage states originated from the thirteenth century on-
ward and their judicious incorporation into the Mughal administrative and
military system prefigured their subsequent accommodation within the British
Empire. Rajput-ruled states dominated this category. The specific historical
ancestors of the Rajputs (from the Sanskrit rajaputra, which means son of
a raja or king) remain contested. An evolving consensus postulates that the
Rajputs represent an integration of diverse elements ranging from Central
Asian groups who accompanied the Scythians into the Indian subcontinent in
the early centuries of the Christian era to indigenous, pastoral warrior groups.!
A lively scholarly debate has ensued whether ascriptive, genealogical status or
occupational activity as soldiers was the determining factor in constituting
Rajput identity. In western scholarship the emphasis on genealogy begins with
the bardic traditions of the Rajputs, which Lieutenant-Colonel James Tod
(1782-1835), the first British political agent in Mewar and western Rajputana
from 1818 to 1822, encoded in his frequently cited Annals and Antiquities of
Rajasthan (1829-32). It continues in British official records and extends into
modern anthropological analysis. But Dirk Kolff has argued that as pastoral
bands achieved landed status from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries and
acquired a group identity, they took the name Rajput, which indicated warrior
status and association with a king. Thus until at least the seventeenth century
and perhaps into the eighteenth century, Rajput was an open-ended category
based on a military career undertaken in alliance with a regional or impe-
rial power through the agency of a jamadar or military jobber-commandetr.
According to Kolff, it was only during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
that some Rajput rulers and their charans (bards) developed myths of origins
that established their status as Ashatriyas and legitimated their political power
and social status ‘exclusively in the language of descent and kinship’ rather than

1B. D. Chattopadhyaya, ‘The Emergence of the Rajputs as Historical Process in Early Medieval
Rajasthan’, in Karine Schomer et al. (eds), The Idea of Rajasthan: Explorations in Regional Identity,
vol. 2 (New Delhi, 1994), pp. 161-91.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

through occupational activity as warriors.” Under this genealogical formula,
the most basic definition of Rajput is one to whom other Rajputs will give
their sisters or daughters in marriage. My approach uses the typology of Tod
while simultaneously recognising the contested nature of Rajput origins and
hierarchy.

According to their charans, the Rajputs arose after Parashurama, an incar-
nation of the Hindu god Vishnu, and an alternative form of Rama, the hero
of the pan-Indian epic of the Ramayana, nearly exterminated the kshatriya or
warrior-ruler varna (division) of the caste order. After a few surviving kshatriyas
emerged from hiding, brahmans questioned their kshatriya status and labelled
them ‘sons of kings’ rather than ‘kings’. These ‘sons of kings’ became the ances-
tors of the Suryavanshi and Chandravanshi Rajputs, claiming descent from the
sun and the moon gods respectively. When disorder became endemic because
of an absence of kshatriyas, the gods created four supernatural warriors from
a fire-sacrifice. They were the ancestors of the Agnikula (Fire) Rajputs. Thus
three vams or mythological units of inclusiveness for Rajputs emerged. This
classification does not have a direct social function such as defining marriage
boundaries but possibly serves to link the Rajputs to the ancient Vedic gods of
Hinduism.

By the sixth century ap there are historical indications of groups calling
themselves Rajputs settled in the Indo-Gangetic plain. Over the course of
ten centuries they came to control land and people, working the land in an
irregular crescent from Saurashtra on the edge of the Arabian Sea through
the Thar or Great Desert of northwestern India. Skipping across the invasion
route of Muslim armies from the Khyber Pass to Delhi, the Rajputs emerged
again in the foothills of the Himalayas that bordered Punjab and finally curved
down into the present states of eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. By the sixteenth
century Rajput conquests of waste land or underpopulated areas on the borders
of larger political states had evolved into little kingdoms and regional states.
Little kingdoms predominated in the Gangetic Plain, where Muslim conquest
states functioned first as regional kingdoms and then as the Mughal imperial
overlord, and in the Himalayas, where a restricted resource base could not
sustain elaborate political organisations.

The geographically broad sweep of Rajput political and social prominence
was reflected as late as 1931 in census statistics. Rajputs as a social group formed
a higher percentage of the population in four British Indian provinces and the

2 Dirk H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in

Hindustan, 1450-1850 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 72.

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PRINCELY STATES PRIOR TO 1800

princely state of Jammu and Kashmir than in the area known in the British
colonial period as Rajputana.? Deryck Lodrick argues that it was only during
the sixteenth century that the Mughals defined the boundaries of the region
that is the contemporary state of Rajasthan.’ In their efforts to establish their
political legitimacy, the Rajput rulers of Rajputana-Rajasthan, who sprawled
from the Thar Desert across the Arvalli Mountains into the plains drifting into
central India, became the exemplars of genealogical orthodoxy. Consequently
they challenged the claims of rulers of regional states and little kingdoms in
Saurashtra and in central India to Rajput status and became more reluctant
to enter matrimonial alliances with them. The category of Rajput, however,
remained elastic into the twentieth century.

Two broad groups of Rajput rulers existed on the eastern end of the crescent
of Rajput settlement. First, there are those on the Gangetic Plain itself in
eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar. Richard Fox has emphasised the
significance of kinship in the formation of Rajput states on the Gangetic
Plain and has seen the rajas ‘as a hinge linking the local stratified lineage with
state authority’.> Here resilient Rajput zamindars and taluqdars who helped
to populate their lands and acquired rights to a share in its products would
survive as collaborators, first with the Mughal Empire, then with the nawabs
of Awadh, and eventually with the British imperial power.°

The second cluster is situated on the jungly border between present-day
Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh and extends into the Malwa Plateau of
central India. It includes the princely states of Baghelkhand, where Rewa was
most prominent, Bundelkhand, and Malwa. In his analysis of Bundelkhand,
Dirk Kolff contends that the so-called ‘spurious’ Rajputs in the persons of the
Bundela rulers of Orchha, Chanderi and Datia, who combined landowning
status with military entrepreneurship, claimed Rajput identity because of their
occupation as soldiers.’ In the early 1600s Bir Singh Deo, who had displaced
a brother as the ruler of Orchha, received a jagir and eventually the title of

3 Deryck O. Lodrick, ‘Rajasthan as a Region: Myth or Reality?’ In Karine Schomer et al., The Idea
of Rajasthan: Explorations in Regional Identity, vol. 1 (New Delhi, 1994), pp. 6-7 and note 7. Kashmir,
Punjab, the United Provinces, Central India and Bihar had higher percentages of Rajputs than did
Rajputana.

4 Tbid., p. 9. Doris Kling has advised me that ‘Rajasthan’ was first used in “Tarikh-i-Rajasthan,’ a history
of Jaipur, Mewar, Marwar, and Bundi/Kota commissioned by Maharaja Pratap Singh of Jaipur and
written in 1794.

> Richard G. Fox, Kin, Clan, Raja and Rule: State-Hinterland Relations in Preindustrial India (Berkeley
CA, 1971), p. 47.

7 Kolff, Naukar, pp. 117-58.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

maharaja (great king) from the Mughal emperor Jahangir, who also married
one of his daughters. Bir Singh further justified his status as a ruler by the
construction of palace-forts as physical symbols of power and by religious
activities such as pilgrimages to Hindu temple sites located in major recruiting
areas, the building of temples, and generous charitable donations. Despite
these symbols of sovereignty and continuing activity as military labour
contractors, the Orchha Rajput rulers were unable to achieve the transition to
the genealogical orthodoxy linked to descent, and so western Rajputs denied
them matrimonial alliances. The Orchha rulers, however, never ceased to claim
Rajput status.

The Malwa Plateau in central India presented variations of Rajput iden-
tity. Perhaps the best known states in this region are Dewas Senior and Junior
founded in 1730 by Tukoji Rao and Kiwaji Rao, two Maratha brothers who
claimed Rajput ancestry.® Their situation provides evidence of some fluidity
of ethnic categories and kinship ties among Marathas and Rajputs before the
nineteenth century.’ Ratlam and its two breakaway states of Sailana and Sita-
mau, whose rulers traced their descent from a younger branch of the Rathor
ruling family in Jodhpur, illustrate how able men might experience rapid po-
litical mobility and gain symbolic legitimacy. As a young man of 23, Ratan
Singh, the founder of Ratlam, armed only with a dagger, boldly attacked a
mad elephant rampaging in the streets of Delhi. An impressed Shah Jahan, the
Mughal builder of the Taj Mahal, inducted him into the mansabdari (impe-
rial administrative system), where the Rathor Rajput served with distinction.
In 1648 Ratan Singh received a jagir in Malwa, a mansab rank of 3000, the
emblem of the Mahi Maratib (Order of Fish), and settled in Ratlam village as
his capital.

Kolff challenges the intense weight assigned to kinship and descent as the
basis for Rajput identity. Both the Mughals and the British fostered this ge-
nealogical focus since it enhanced the status of their Rajput collaborators and
thereby undergirded their imperial authority.'° The alliances between Mughal
overlords and Rajput rulers waxed and waned according to material circum-
stances. André Wink has labelled this strategy fitna, a combination of concil-
iation and competition which a centralised empire viewed as rebellion, in the

8 Manohar Malgonkar, The Puars of Dewas Senior (Bombay, 1963); E. M. Forster, The Hill of Devi
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1965, first published in 1953).

° Norbert Peabody, in “Tod’s Rajasth’an and the Boundaries of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century
India’, MAS 30 (1996), note 54, pp. 208-9 argues that the ‘precolonial divide between Maratha
and Rajput . . . [was] labile and contextually contingent’.

10 Kolff, Naukar, pp. 72-4.

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PRINCELY STATES PRIOR TO 1800

context of Muslim and later Maratha state formation.'’ Rajput state formation
in central India required military entrepreneurship — activities that reflected
common ideas about rajadharma — and legitimating and mutually beneficial
alliances with superior powers. Kinship was only one among several factors in
this process.

Probably the most long-lived Rajput-ruled states were in the Punjab hills of
the Himalayas.'* Some of these states traced their establishment from either
the sixth and seventh centuries when Rajputs initially reached India or the
eleventh and twelfth centuries when Rajput ruling families fled from Turkish
Muslim invaders. Rajput leaders from the more productive Indo-Gangetic
plains moved into this less desirable area and established conquest states over
the indigenous populations. There are three broad groupings of Rajput-ruled
hill-states according to geographical locations: the western in the doab or land
between the Indus and the Jhelam Rivers and centred on Kashmir, whose
Rajput ruler was displaced by Muslims during the fourteenth century; the
central between the Jhelam and Ravi focused on Jammu; and the eastern
between the Ravi and the Sutlej ranging from the states of Kangra and Guler,
later annexed by the British, to the more remote states such as Chamba, Suket
and Mandi, which managed to retain their autonomy, as did Jammu and
Kashmir, until 1948.

Jammu and Kashmir were the only remnants of once powerful states in
the Himalayas to survive the British onslaught, but to the present day they
remain a tragically contested site. These two entities were linked in 1846 be-
cause of British strategic needs. Kashmir is an ancient state whose history of
Buddhist and Hindu rulers is recorded in the Rajatarangini, a Sanskrit chron-
icle. After 1339 Muslims ruled there as a regional kingdom until Akbar added
Kashmir to the Mughal Empire in 1586. He and his successors used Srina-
gar as their summer capital. Kashmir regained its autonomy, as did Jammu,
in 1762. Kashmir was then effectively under the control of Muslim gover-
nors until the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh conquered it in 1819. Jammu’s history
is less well documented. Petty chiefs called ranas and thakurs are thought
to have ruled it until Dogras, asserting Rajput status that was not acknowl-
edged in the crucial test of marriage, established a regional state. By the early
nineteenth century, the Dogra ruler of Jammu was in the service of Ranjit

Singh.

1 André Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society and Politics Under the Eighteenth-century
Maratha Svarajya (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 23-41 and passim.

12 J, Hutchison and J. P. Vogel, History of the Panjab Hill States, 2 vols (Lahore, 1933) is the basis for
the following narrative.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

Among the eastern Himalayan group of Rajput-ruled states, Chamba
claimed to be founded about ap 550 and enjoyed an unusual historical source.
Its thakurs, exercising rajadharma, supported brahmans and Hindu temples
with land grants recorded on copper plate title deeds dated as early as ap 700.
Suket asserted its descent from the Pandavas of the Mahabharata, the other
pan-Indian epic, but more historically from the Sena dynasty of Bengal, a
branch of which moved into the Himalayan foothills about the eighth century
AD. Mandi state broke off from Suket during the eleventh century, and these
two states fought a see-saw battle in an effort to define borders. Southwest of
Delhi are five major states of Rajasthan deemed the core of Rajput political
culture.

James Tod is probably as responsible as anyone for initiating the compari-
son of the Rajput polity to European feudalism. In the first volume of Annals
and Antiquities of Rajasthan, published in 1829, Tod declared: ‘there is a mar-
tial system peculiar to these Rajpoot states, so extensive in its operation as
to embrace every object of society. This is so analogous to the ancient feudal
system of Europe, that I have not hesitated to hazard a comparison between
them.’!> Tod became required reading for later generations of British politi-
cal agents and for scholars whose research analysed documents produced by
those officers. Some British administrators and later scholars have disputed his
characterisation of Rajputs as feudal;!4 others castigated him for attributing
essential qualities to Rajputs that justified British intervention;)> and Indian
nationalists used his ideas as ‘a call for Indian resistance against the British’.
Tod was also instrumental in propagating the idea that Mewar was the pre-
mier Rajput state, despite declining territory and revenues, because its rulers
followed most assiduously the Rajput chivalric code.

The ruling house of Mewar, which means central region, allegedly gained
possession of the commanding plateau of Chitor by ap 714.!” Beyond their
exalted genealogical origins of descent from the sun god, the Sisodias of Mewar
declared their pre-eminence for maintaining Rajput honour in two key areas.

13 James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajast‘han or, the Central and Western Rajpoot States of India,
2 vols (New Delhi, 1971, reprint of 1914 edition), vol. 1, p. 107.

14 Alfred C. Lyall, ‘The Rajput States of India’, in Asiatic Studies, Religious and Social (London, 1882)
is representative of British officials and Robert W. Stern, The Cat and the Lion: Jaipur State in the
British Raj (Leiden, 1988), pp. 23-62 is a perceptive overview of the scholarly debate on Rajput
feudalism.

15 Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford, 1990).

16 Peabody, “Tod’s Rajast’han’, p. 217. Peabody argues that Tod claimed that their feudal institutions
made the Rajput similar to the English, distinct from other Indian groups such as the Mughals and
Marathas, and served as a basis for Rajput nationality: pp. 185-220.

17 Tod, Annals, vol. 1, p. 188.

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PRINCELY STATES PRIOR TO 1800

First, they had refused to give daughters in marriage to Muslim rulers. Frances
Taft has argued that the Mewar dynasty broadcast their resistance to Mughal
overtures and to Rajput peers who entered marriage alliances with Mughals to
enhance their position in Rajput clan and state rivalries.'®

Second, the Mewar rulers committed jauhar in 1303, 1534 and 1567 when
resisting superior Muslim forces. Jauhar is probably a Rajput custom from
Central Asia that was practised when confronted with certain defeat. To pre-
serve their honour, Rajput women and children were consigned to death by
fire, and then Rajput men purified themselves, donned saffron-coloured robes
symbolising martyrdom, and fought until death. The bravery of the Rajputs
was affirmed, but the material costs were high. The Sisodias saw their terri-
tory shrink and entered the eighteenth century ensconced in their capital of
Udaipur with much reduced resources compared to their two major rivals,
Marwar and Amber, which were more willing to share power and daughters
with the Mughals.

During the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Kachhawaha clan migrated into
an area known as Dhoondar, south of Delhi and north of Mewar.!? Dulha Rai,
a Kachhawaha leader, supposedly granted estates to indigenous Minas in return
for their allegiance, and their symbiotic relationship was acknowledged in two
practices: first, a Mina placed the zi/ak, an auspicious mark, on an incoming
Jaipur ruler during the installation durbar or ceremony, and second, the Minas
were the hereditary guards of the Jaipur treasury.” This is another instance
of the process described by Wink among the Marathas whereby neighbouring
tribal groups are employed as watchmen and plunder specialists and thus ‘the
complementarity of order and disorder . . . made possible the establishment of
sovereignty’.”!

Amber was a relatively minor chieftainship until the Mughals incorporated
itand other Rajput rulers, through marriage ties as well as rank, within the elite
administrative hierarchy.” Bihar Mal of Amber was the first Rajput ruler to
pay tribute to the Mughals, to give his eldest daughter in marriage to Akbar in
1562, and to have his grandson Man Singh! becomea prominent administrator

18 Erances H. Taft, ‘Honor and Alliance: Reconsidering Mughal—Rajput Marriages’, in Schomer, /dea,
vol. 2, pp. 217-41, esp. pp. 230-3.

19 Jadunath Sarkar, A History of Jaipur c. 1503-1938, revised and edited by Raghubir Sinh (Delhi,
1984), pp. 20-7. Highly critical of the negative views of Tod about Jaipur, Sarkar completed his
manuscript in 1940, but according to the dust jacket, ‘Rajput sensitivity towards incidents depicting
Mughal-Rajput relations, and other obstacles, prevented publication’.

20 Tbid., pp. 22-4. 7! Wink, Land, p. 194.

22 Norman P. Ziegler, ‘Some Notes on Rajput Loyalties during the Mughal Period’, in Richards,
Kingship, pp. 229-31; Norman P. Ziegler, Action, Power and Service in Rajasthani Culture: A Social
History of the Rajputs of Middle Period Rajasthan, PhD thesis, University of Chicago (1973).

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

or mansabdar under Akbar. As a Mughal general, Man Singh led the cam-
paign that defeated Maharana Pratap Singh of Mewar-Udaipur at Haldighat
on 18 June 1576 and ended the effective Rajput resistance to the extension of
Mughal control into Rajasthan. These two Rajput rulers illustrated the con-
sequences of two Rajput responses to an expanding imperial system. Amber’s
acceptance of a client relationship with a Mughal patron yielded an increase
in territory, jagirdari rights to collect land revenue around his capital, and
bardic condemnation, while Mewar’s refusal brought loss of territory but poetic
glory.”

Amber reached a peak in the early eighteenth century under Jai Singh II
(1700-43), who used military force to capture it from a rival protégé of the
Mughals. The victorious ruler proceeded to enlarge his territorial base by se-
curing djara or tax-farming rights to parganas or districts surrounding his jagir
from the impotent Mughal emperor.”4 In 1727 the foundation of a new capital
city named Jaipur on the plain below Amber provided ‘a center uniting local
[Rajput] and Mughal organisational and ceremonial features’.

Jai Singh reaffirmed his dual heritage as a Hindu-Rajput ruler and a mem-
ber of the Mughal imperial mansabdari hierarchy. First, he achieved Mughal
recognition of Jaipur as his capital in 1733, and then he consecrated it through
the ancient Hindu ritual of the horse sacrifice, which asserted his sovereignty.
He endowed Jaipur with Mughal-style gardens and palaces for the performance
of Mughal-style celebrations, but also Hindu temples and lively bazaars that
attracted Hindu and Jain merchants as well as jewellers, craftsmen and mu-
sicians from Delhi. Jai Singh made annual processions and occasional tours
through the broad streets of Jaipur that provided, ‘in an era before mass media
and instant communications, a ceremonial relationship to his people parallel
to that created in the darbar and halls for public audience’.”°

Jaipur was not unique among Rajput states in its acceptance of Mughal
suzerainty in return for confirmation of their local control. Three other key
states in western Rajasthan, Marwar-Jodhpur, Bikaner and Jaisalmer, paid their
homage to Akbar in 1570. In the sandy hills of the western Thar Desert known
as Marwar, meaning region of death, a lineage of the Rathor clan founded a

23 Susannne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, ‘The Political Modernization of an Indian Feudal
Order: An Analysis of Rajput Adaption in Rajasthan’, in Essays on Rajputana: Reflections on History,
Culture and Administration (New Delhi, 1984), pp. 41-5.

24 Satya Prakash Gupta, The Agrarian System of Eastern Rajasthan (c. 1650-c. 1750) (Delhi, 1986),

. 12-27.

25 a L. Erdman, Patrons and Performers in Rajasthan: The Subtle Tradition (Delhi, 1985), p. 29;
Sten Ake Nilsson, ‘Jaipur: In the Sign of Leo’, Magasin Tessin 1 (1987), pp. 49-51.

26 Erdman, Patrons, p. 42.

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PRINCELY STATES PRIOR TO 1800

Amber Palace with view towards Jaigarh Fort.

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View of planned city of Jaipur.

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PRINCELY STATES PRIOR TO 1800

state during the thirteenth century. In 1459 Rao Jodh established a new capital
called Jodhpur, the city of Jodh, and its name became an alternative to Marwar.
Until the Mughal period, Marwar was second in importance to Mewar in
Rajasthan and frequently in conflict with Amber-Jaipur, with whom it shared
a shifting border. Norman Ziegler has linked the transformation of Marwar into
a centralised state with a shift from patrimonial domain, where control over
land is inherited through membership ina kinship group, to prebendal domain,
where control is granted in return for service to the state and is not inheritable.
This process began around the mid-sixteenth century and was linked to the
increased use of horses for warfare, which required greater resources but also
enabled rulers to extend their territorial control because of the mobility that
improved breeds of horses provided.’” Eventually Jodhpur grew to be the
largest state in Rajasthan. Although much of its territory was economically
unproductive and its population remained limited, Marwar-Jodhpur was a
valued ally of the Mughals. However, it became less prominent during the
British period as the fortunes of a neighbouring state rose.

Bikaner was an offshoot of Marwar-Jodhpur. Its creation occurred during
the first stage of the cycle outlined by Fox, when the absence of a strong im-
perial state allowed ambitious sons or brothers to take over new territories and
thereby remove one potential threat to a newly established lineage. Rao Bika,
the second and eldest surviving son of Rao Jodh, proclaimed himself king in
1472 in the inhospitable desert area northwest of Marwar. Karni Singh, the last
maharaja of Bikaner and a historian, has argued that Bikaner’s relations with
the Mughals ‘were forged by the needs of the rulers of Bikaner for protection
against the invasion of the sister-State of Jodhpur and brigandage of the in-
digenous elements and the realisation of the Central Powers [Mughals] of the
potential help that Bikaner could afford in consolidating their territories’.”8
Rao Kalyanmal of Bikaner and his son, Rai Singh, entered relations with Akbar
in 1570 and received a mansab rank of 2000. Bikaner fared well until the eigh-
teenth century when the absence of a strong central power intensified strife
among the Rajput states themselves.”? Brigands from the west ravaged Bikaner
and Marwar, and Amber challenged it for dominance. Bikaner’s location in
the barren Thar Desert, however, saved its rulers from having to pay tribute to
the more formidable Marathas.

27 Norman P. Ziegler, “Evolution of the Rathor State of Marvar: Horses, Structural Change and
Warfare’, in Schomer, Idea, vol. 2, pp. 193-201.

28 Karni Singh, The Relations of the House of Bikaner with the Central Powers 1465-1949 (New Delhi,
1974), pp. 41-2.

29 Tbid., pp. 99-120; Fox, Kin, p. 124.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

The last major Rajput state to enter the Mughal system was Jaisalmer, whose
ruling clan claimed descent from Krishna. They are Yadu or Jadon Bhatti
Rajputs and their bardic genealogy makes allusions to a possible retreat into
Central Asia and then re-entrance to India accompanying Scythian invaders.
In 1156 Jaisal, the putative founder, erected a fort on a commanding ridge
situated near a water supply and caravan routes between Afghanistan and the
western coast of India. In frequent conflict with Marwar-Jodhpur, Jaisalmer
entered the Mughal mansabdari system to prevent the encroachment of other
Rajput clients of the Mughals. Ultimately such loyalty to the Mughal Empire
would serve as a prototype for their subsequent alliances with the British.

Successor states

Although Awadh, Bengal and Hyderabad, as former Mughal provinces, are
considered the classic successor states, some antique states, most particularly
Amber-Jaipur, which had been an active participant in the Mughal mansab-
dari/jagirdari administrative system for over a century, had similar characteris-
tics. S. P Gupta has described how closely the Jaipuri revenue administration

conformed to the Mughal model.*°

In many ways the Jaipur state followed
the prototypical successor state in both its structure and the process of its ex-
pansion and illustrates the arbitrary nature of any typology of princely states.
Because of its pre-Mughal origins, however, I have not treated it as a successor
state.

In his pioneering analysis of Awadh, Richard Barnett outlined seven criteria

of autonomy that marked the metamorphosis from province to successor state:

1. The provincial governor or the imperial military officer in a little kingdom
nominates or appoints his own revenue officers.

2. Regional governors appoint their own successors.

3. Revenues are used within the region and only ceremonial remittances are
made to the centre.

4, Governors engage in independent diplomatic and military activity.

5. Ruling families establish their principal residences at their provincial capitals
rather than at the Mughal court.

6. A coinage is minted at least in silver to replace the imperial silver rupees.

7. Delivery of the khutbah, the Friday congregational sermon in the principal

mosque, is in the name of the governor rather than the emperor.*!

30 Gupta, Agrarian System, pp. 1-26, 163-86.
3! Richard B. Barnett, North India Between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals, and the British 1720-1801
(Berkeley CA, 1980), pp. 21-2.

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PRINCELY STATES PRIOR TO 1800

Most successor states appropriated the first five functions in a sequential order,
but only a few minted coins and practically none took the seventh step.

The classic model for the development of a successor state is Awadh. In 1720
Saadat Khan, a relatively late Shi'a immigrant from Nishapur in Iran seeking
his fortune at the Mughal court, was appointed subahdar of Agra but was later
demoted to the less remunerative Awadh. Despite this reduction in income,
he took the first four steps that Barnett outlined. Marriage alliances created a
network of support.** Then Saadat Khan became the first governor of Awadh
to appoint his revenue officers; to nominate his successor, his son-in-law and
nephew, Safdar Jang; to reduce the portion of revenue remitted to Delhi; and
to engage in direct military and diplomatic negotiations with a foreign invader,
Nadir Shah. Safdar Jang and Shujaud-Daula, his son and heir, continued this
transformation of a state.

In 1764 at Buxar, the upstart English East India Company defeated an
alliance of Shujaud-Daula, the Mughal emperor, and Mir Kasim, the deposed
nawab of Bengal. Shujaud-Daula yielded territory, paid an indemnity, and
concluded a treaty with the British but also laid out an impressive capital at
Faizabad complete with palaces, zoo, aviary and marketplaces to demonstrate
his status as the ruler of a regional state.*? Awadh would enjoy a reprieve until
1856. Bengal, the successor state that Alivardi Khan so brilliantly crafted, was
much more short-lived.** After their victory in 1764, the British received the
diwani or revenue-collecting rights in Bengal. Thus the East India Company
emerged as a regional Indian state and the Nawab of Bengal became their
pensioner. One successor state, however, would survive until 1948.

The third and most long-lived successor state was among the last territories
to be incorporated into the Mughal Empire. Mir Kamar-ud-din, who is better
known by his titles of Nizam-ul-Mulk and Asaf Jah I, was appointed subahdar
of the Deccan Plateau province in 1713. After settling at the Mughal capital of
Aurangabad, Asfar Jah campaigned against the Marathas and briefly served as
wazir, the chief Mughal revenue minister. Disgusted with the political infight-
ing in Delhi, Asfa Jah I returned to the Deccan where he eventually exercised
the first four of Barnett’s criteria for autonomy. After his death, rival claimants
allied themselves with the French and English companies during their struggle
over succession. Salabat Jang, with French support, emerged triumphant in

32 Michael H. Fisher, ‘Political Marriage Alliances at the Shi’i Court of Awadh’, CSSH 24 (1983),
pp. 598-601.

33 Barnett, North India, pp. 67-95.

4p J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead Eastern India 1740-1828, The New Cambridge History
of India, II, 2 (Cambridge, 1987).

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

1751 and remained in power for a decade. In 1761 he was deposed by Nizam
Ali Khan, a younger brother, whose reign extended from 1762 to 1803. He
evolved a distinctive political system, reduced hostilities with the Marathas,
defined firmer boundaries, and established a new capital at Hyderabad city,
near the former seat of the Qutb Shahi dynasty of Golconda.

The political system in Hyderabad was relatively complex. While high-
lighting the Mughal pattern of its administrative institutions, Karen Leonard
argues that these Mughal-named institutions operated differently in the Dec-
can.*° More recently, Sunil Chander has asserted that Hyderabad cannot be
considered a successor state since a ‘criss-cross pattern of alliances between
small kings at the local level, “intermediaries” at the supra-local level, and
foreign powers at the inter-regional level’ moulded the central government of
Hyderabad.*° But he contends that Hyderabad became more like a successor
state in the nineteenth century, so I have chosen to treat it as such. The nizam,
as the head of state, controlled the largest territorial base and used revenues
from it to support his personal household, his administration, and his mili-
tary establishment. But the nizam and his nobles were revenue receivers and
expenders since they farmed out revenue collection to intermediaries. Military
campaigns, administrative commitments, the patronage of cultural clients such
as poets, religious men and artisans, and their precarious fiscal base led this
ruling elite to resort to loans from private bankers, frequently outsiders from
northern and western India.*”

Intermittent warfare with the Marathas (to be discussed later) dominated
diplomatic and military affairs in Hyderabad. The nizams held these Deccani
rivals at bay by allowing them to levy taxes in certain districts and by entering
alliances with the English Company. In 1766 Nizam Ali Khan concluded
an initial treaty with the British, on the basis of equality, which promised
tribute from Hyderabad in return for support from Company troops when
that was requested. Although Edward Thompson’s claim that “Hyderabad was
saved only by the coming of the British’** overstated British power, Hyderabad
benefited territorially from a subsidiary alliance in 1798. This treaty marked
the beginning of unequal status. Hyderabad had to agree to disband its foreign
troops and to support a regular, subsidiary force to be used only at the direction

3> Karen Leonard, ‘The Hyderabad Political System and Its Participants’, JAS 30 (1971), pp. 569-82.

36 Sunil Chander, From a Pre-Colonial Order to a Princely State: Hyderabad in Transition, c. 1748—
1865, PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge (1987), p. 5.

37 Leonard, ‘Hyderabad System’, pp. 569-82.

38 Edward Thompson, The Making of the Indian Princes (London, 1978, first published in 1943),
p. 14.

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PRINCELY STATES PRIOR TO 1800

of the Company.*? Hyderabad purchased a century and a half of continued
existence by accepting a new patron. As Peter Wood succinctly stated, the price

of survival was submission.*°

Warrior or conquest states

Although the use of military force to establish political dominance was a key
factor in the formation of most princely states, here conquest states will be
construed as a third category. It designates states established by warrior groups
who contested with an overarching authority to establish new political entities
by offering military protection to local populations. Burton Stein asserts that
Vijayanagara was a warrior state of the old regime that served as a structural
precursor of the Maratha states.*! The founders of conquest states were usually
clan leaders who performed extraordinary services fora dominant ruler. These
military entrepreneurs gained compensation ranging from rights to the produce
of land, to clothing worn by the ruler, to honours such as titles, banners and
other emblems of sovereignty. In south India Nicholas Dirks has described
how the next step to assert one’s legitimacy to rule was for such warrior chiefs
to give gifts, especially of land, to Hindu temples and brahmans.” In north
India, Hindu temples were less central to the political cosmology, but Hindu
and Sikh as well as Muslim rulers also patronised a variety of religious, social
and artistic institutions. At times, rising rulers agreed to nominal incorporation
into the Mughal structure as mansabdars, but generally they did not participate
in the governance of the empire on either provincial or imperial level, as
had the successor states of the subahdars of Awadh, Bengal or Hyderabad.
To validate their conquest or rebellion against their sometime acknowledged
overlord, these emergent kings avowed divine sanction from myths as well as
secular confirmation from a Mughal authority who did not have the power to
refuse.

Conquest states are the most diverse of the three categories of princely states.
Although the victories of the Persians under Nadir Shah and the Afghans under
Ahmad Shah Abdali of the Durrani clan were external signals of the decline
of the Mughal power, these foreign protagonists did not themselves establish

% Sarojini Regani, Nizam—British Relations 1724-1857 (Hyderabad, 1963), pp. 187-213.
40 Peter Wood, Vassal State in the Shadow of Empire: Palmer’s Hyderabad, 1799-1867, PhD thesis,
University of Wisconsin-Madison (1981), p. 39.
41 Burton Stein, Vijayanagara, The New Cambridge History of India, I, 2 (Cambridge, 1989),
. 146.
42 Nicholas B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of a Little Kingdom in South India (Cambridge,
1987), pp. 128-38, 285-90.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

states in India. Rather they served as new arbitrators of regional conflicts and
new sources of legitimation to aspiring rulers who could also be supportive
clients. A few Afghans nevertheless founded states that would remain internally
autonomous until 1948. One was Rampur in western Uttar Pradesh, the sole
remnant of Rohilla Afghan power after the revolt of 1857. A larger one was
Bhopal in central India.

Dost Muhammad Khan, the Afghan founder of Bhopal state, whose capital
is approximately 200 miles south of Delhi, entered Mughal service in 1703.
Four years later he began his career as an independent military entrepreneur
with an ever expanding band of mercenary troops, many of whom were his
relatives. During the 1720s he broadcast his political aspirations by taking
the title of mawab, but Nizam-ul-Mulk, still ostensibly in Mughal service,
defeated him. However, the future founder of Hyderabad state granted a sanad
(letter, decree, contract) to Dost Muhammad Khan that recognised his right
to collect revenues in return for a fort, the payment of Rs 50 000, and the
pledge of 2000 troops. Upon the death of Dost Muhammad in 1728, the
nizam again intervened by designating Yar Muhammad Khan, an elder but
illegitimate son, as heir. Stewart Gordon has labelled this action as the “weak
candidate strategy” in Indian politics’.“4 Someone ambitious for suzerainty
supported a vulnerable nominee who would then be willing to pay tribute
because he could stay on the throne only with external support. A war of
succession erupted after the death of Yar Muhammad Khan and eventually
his widow, Mamola Begum, secured a compromise that gave actual power to
a wazir. By 1763 Mamola Begum emerged as the de facto ruler of this state
and remained so until the 1780s. She was the first of five formidable women
who would be both rewarded with British honours such as the Star of India
and lampooned on cigarette cards as savage rulers along with native American
leaders. *

The Hindu ruling dynasty of Mysore traditionally dates its origin to 1399
and so it might possibly be considered an antique state.*° However, because
its greatest territorial and governmental expansion occurred from the late
seventeenth century onward, Mysore seems more similar to warrior/conquest
states such as Bhopal. Located in peninsular India, the rulers of Mysore were

43 EI. Brodkin, ‘Rampur, Rohilkhand, and Revolt: The Pathan Role in 1857’, JBR 15 (1988),
pp. 15-30.
Stewart Gordon, ‘Legitimacy and Loyalty in Some Successor States of the Eighteenth Century’, in
Richards, Kingship, p. 291.

% Shaharyar M. Khan, The Begums of Bhopal: A Dynasty of Women Rulers in Raj India (London, 2000).

466, Hayavadana Rao, Mysore Gazetteer Compiled for Government, new edn, 5 vols (Bangalore, 1930),
vol. 1.

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PRINCELY STATES PRIOR TO 1800

Begum Shah Jahan of Bhopal, ruled 1868-1901.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

W5:Kimball & Gos

Her Highness the Begum Secunder, India and Princess Shah Jehan, India, cigarette
cards of Savage and Semi-Barbarous Chiefs and Rulers of W. S. Kimball & Co.

petty chieftains in the Vijayanagara state where the ruler held ritual sovereignty
over little kings (known to the British as poligars) who collected the revenue
and maintained law and order.” By 1610 the last agent of the Vijayanagara
king sold the Srirangapatanam fortress to Raja Wadiyar (1578-1617), who
began the transition from petty chief to little king.“

By the mid-eighteenth century, disputes over succession to the Mysore gaddi
(literally a cushion and by extension a throne) had led one claimant, Krishnaraja
I] (1734-65), to seek the assistance of Haidar Ali (c. 1722-82), a Muslim gen-
eral who had fought effectively in wars between rivals for the nawabship of
the Carnatic, the area south of the Gundlekamma and Krishna Rivers that
extended almost to Madras. After a successful coup in 1761, Haidar Ali be-
came the effective ruler of Mysore, though the Wadiyar king remained his
nominal suzerain. Once again an aspirant to autonomy retained a militarily
impotent source of legitimacy, much as the governors of successor states used
the Mughal emperor. Haidar Ali sought to create a centrally controlled military
force that would enable him to subdue the petty chieftains within his state and
to oppose external threats. Although he had to depend on tribute payments and

47 Burton Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (New Delhi, 1980) and ‘State
Formation and Economy Reconsidered: Part One’, MAS 19 (1985), pp. 387-413.
48 Tbid., pp. 400-1.

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PRINCELY STATES PRIOR TO 1800

prebendial obligations, Haider Ali strengthened his military prowess by dom-
inating the market for horses, cannon and foreign military officers — especially
the French, who trained his troops in western techniques.”

When Tipu Sultan (1753-99) succeeded his father in 1782, he bolstered
revenues to support a centralised military machine and intensified state con-
trol downward into local political units. Burton Stein has applied the concept
of military fiscalism to his program while arguing that the same process had
already begun from the local political base of petty chiefs and enterprising
temples.°” The state’s share of the land revenue was maximised with the ap-
pointment of central officials as collectors in place of petty chiefs who had
siphoned off much of the land revenue. To gain new sources of wealth,
commercial crops such as sugar cane were encouraged and state-supported
trade centres were developed that enabled the regional state to penetrate more
deeply into the local economy and to undermine the position of intermediary
chiefs and revenue farmers. Finally, imams (gifts or assignments of revenues
from parcels of land to support notable people or institutions) were carefully
regulated. Tipu Sultan set in motion trends towards military centralisation
and administrative modernisation, which the British and a restored Wadiyar
dynasty would continue.?!

As a Muslim ruler in a predominantly Hindu kingdom and a staunch op-
ponent of the East India Company, Tipu Sultan has multiple personae in
the historical record. Some British depicted him as a cruel, fanatical Muslim
usurper; Pakistani historians claimed him as a defender of Islam; Indian histo-
rians have represented him as a prototypical nationalist; and in the 1980s some
right-wing Hindu populist leaders have castigated him as a temple-destroying
Muslim zealot. Kate Brittlebank has explored his diverse strategies to establish
the legitimacy of his kingship, which was grounded on the material resources
of a strong military force, an expanded tax base, and extended penetration of
local politics. First, Tipu acted as a king, claiming universal kingship authorised
by a farman (decree) from the Ottoman Caliph and minting coins in his own
name. Second, he incorporated former enemies, neighbours and officials into

49 Tbid. and Devadas Moodley, ‘War and the Mysore State: Men and Materials 1760-1800’. Paper
presented at the Ninth European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies, Heidelberg University,
9-12 July 1987 and provided by the author.

°° Martin Wolf first developed the concept of military fiscalism in the context of fifteenth-century
Renaissance France, and Stein is careful to underline the differences between Renaissance France
and eighteenth-century India: Stein, ‘State Formation’, pp. 387-413.

>! Ibid. and Mary Doreen Wainwright, ‘Continuity in Mysore’, in C. H. Philips and Mary Doreen
Wainwright (eds), Indian Society and the Beginnings of Modernisation c. 1830-1850 (London, 1976),
pp. 165-85.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

a hierarchy of subordination through gifts offered as a superior to subordinates
and exchanges of women as marriage partners, concubines and possibly slaves.
Third, although he destroyed some Hindu temples connected to his enemies,
he extended protection and patronage to Hindu as well as Muslim sacred sites.
Tipu Sultan also appealed to both Hindus and Muslims by his use of the tiger
and the sun as royal emblems.” A potent symbol of secular and sacred power,
the tiger appeared in various forms, as a tiger head, as stripes, or in calligraphy,
on buildings, weapons, clothing and thrones.

It took four wars before, in 1799, the British defeated Tipu at Srirangap-
atanam, where he was killed. Subsequently the British appropriated many of
Tipu’s icons and possessions as war trophies to be displayed first in private col-
lections and then in museums as testaments to imperial glory. The best-known
image of Mysore’s formidable challenge, now housed in the Victoria and Albert
Museum, is the mechanical tiger with a British soldier in its mouth which is
equipped with an organ that growled as the tiger opened its mouth. Pursuing
a policy inaugurated in Awadh in 1764, the British concluded a treaty, to be
discussed in Chapter 4, that did not annex Mysore but restored the displaced
Wadiyar dynasty to the gaddi.

Another remnant of the Vijayanagara state was the small principality of
Pudukkottai (meaning new fort) created by the Tondaiman kallars.>4 By the
mid-seventeenth century a Tondaiman chief had developed a military relation-
ship with the Tamil Maravar Sethupati rulers of Ramnad. He then engaged in
marriage politics by marrying a sister to his Sethupati ally and thereby elevating
his status above that of rival kallar clans. In an innovative and elaborate analy-
sis that combines archival research and ethnological fieldwork, Nicholas Dirks
has traced the rise of the Tondaimans from petty chiefs with a reputation for
banditry to little kings. Because of timely military service, in 1801 the British
acknowledged them as an internally autonomous princely state. Eventually
Pudukkottai became a theatre state as hegemonic British colonial officials di-
rected rituals and bestowed honours in a play devoid of actual participation by
the subordinate Pudukkottai prince.

>2 Kate Brittlebank, Tipu Sultan’ Search for Legitimacy: Islam and Kingship in a Hindu Domain (Delhi,
1997).

3 Two major British collections of artefacts associated with Tipu Sultan are at Powis Castle in Wales
and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Mildred Archer, Christopher Rowell and Robert
Skelton, Treasures from India: The Clive Collection at Powis Castle (London, 1987); C. A. Bayly, The
Raj: India and the British 1600-1947 (London, 1990), pp. 152-60.

54 Dirks, Hollow Crown. > Thid., parts 4 and 5.

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PRINCELY STATES PRIOR TO 1800

In the mid-eighteenth century Martanda Varma created Travancore, and
an elaborate foundation myth is held to account for several distinctive cul-
tural features in this state. The god Parasurama was exiled from India, and
Varuna, god of the sea, allowed the homeless god to throw his axe and reclaim
the land from the sea that his axe covered. It went from Cape Comorin at
the tip of the Indian subcontinent to Cochin and covered a narrow strip of
land 70 to 80 miles wide that arose between the Arabian Sea and the western
Ghats. Parasurama created the nambudiris, brahmans who were given owner-
ship of the land and distinctive customs so that they would not migrate back
to India over the Ghats. Then the god provided nayars, who were sudras who
functioned as their servants and bodyguards. The nayars had a matrilineal
system of family organisation and inheritance but no formal marriage, and
their women were to satisfy the sexual desires of nambudiri brahmans. The
historical ancestor of Travancore was the Chera Empire, but after its disso-
lution around 1100, petty chiefs ruling over little kingdoms dominated the
area.

Martanda Varma (r. 1729-58) became the raja of Venad in 1729. Prepared
to ignore traditional modes of warfare and governance, he sought to create a
new type of centralised state. Martanda executed nayar chiefs, sold their wives
and children into slavery, and conquered and absorbed the territories of neigh-
bouring chiefs. He then imported ‘foreign’ Tamil and Maratha brahmans to
administer these newly conquered territories and displaced the local chiefs.
He employed a Belgian soldier, Eustace de Lannoy, to reorganise his military
into a salaried, drilled and dependent army composed of diverse groups in-
cluding Deccani and Pathan Muslims, Tamil Hindu warriors and local Syrian
Christians.

Susan Bayly has pointed out the importance of the Kerala states in linking
traditional warrior lineages and kadari martial training groups to the European-
style military system. The central civil and military administration was largely
paid with revenues from state monopolies in export crops such as pepper, car-
damom and wood products, which made Travancore one of the most commer-
cialised states during the eighteenth century.°” This new structure represented
a diminution of the powers of the local nayars and their dependants, but as
Robin Jeffrey has analysed it, they were not excluded from power as long as

56 A. Sreedhara Menon, A Survey of Kerala History (Kottayam, 1967); K. M. Panikkar, A History of
Kerala 1498-1801 (Annamalainagar, 1960).

7 Susan Bayly, ‘Hindu Kingship and the Origin of Community: Religion, State and Society in Kerala,
1750-1850’, MAS 18 (1984), pp. 186-202.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

they were willing to participate in the government on the terms that Martanda
Varma dictated.*8

Besides the need to maintain armies trained and equipped by Europeans,
religious patronage and leadership in the establishment of states were of the
utmost importance throughout south India in the eighteenth century.” To gain
legitimacy and to conciliate the strongest opposition group, Martanda Varma
dedicated the state to the tutelary deity Sri Padmanabha, an incarnation of
Vishnu, in an act that incorporated all classes in his gift. But as his European-
style military was ecumenical in membership, the aggressive ruler adjudicated
leadership succession disputes among the Syrian Christians within his state
and patronised brahmans.°

By 1758 Travancore included around 7000 square miles of territory. Under
Maharaja Rama Varma (r. 1758-98) it became the focus of unwanted attention
from Mysore. In 1795 the Travancore ruler expediently concluded a treaty of
subsidiary alliance with the Company to secure additional protection from
Tipu Sultan’s aggrandising embrace. By 1800 Travancore had to accept its first
British resident and reconfirmed its commitment to the British with another
treaty in 1805.°!

Cochin, a much smaller state of about 1500 square miles, shared with
Travancore a legendary descent from the Chera Empire and the matrilineal
system of family organisation and inheritance. It was, however, less successful
than its southern neighbour in resisting external and internal challengers. The
Portuguese arrived in the sixteenth century and the Dutch in the next century.
When the latter left in the middle of the eighteenth century, the zamorin of
Calicut invaded the state and was only repulsed with the aid of troops from
Travancore. In 1775 Haidar Ali compelled the raja of Cochin to pay an annual
tribute. Then in 1791 the raja shifted his allegiance and his tribute to the
British.

André Wink has maintained that following the process begun by Rajputs
in the fourteenth century, the Marathas, along with the Jats, Bundelas and
Sikhs, represented the gentrification of India. As the Mughal Empire advanced
southward, Maratha military entrepreneurs were able to expand their political
control through the skilful negotiation of alliances with the contending Muslim

°8 Robin Jeffrey, The Decline of Nayar Dominance: Society and Politics in Travancore, 1847-1908
(London, 1976), pp. 2-5.

59 Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society 1700-1900
(Cambridge, 1989).

6 Susan Bayly, ‘Hindu Kingship.’

61 Susan Bayly’s revisionist arguments in ‘Hindu Kingship’ and Saints are the basis for my interpretation,
along with Jeffrey, Decline.

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PRINCELY STATES PRIOR TO 1800

powers during the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Shivaji (1630—
80), the founder of the Maratha state, came from a deshmukh family. Stewart
Gordon has delineated the obligations and rights of deshmukhs, who as village
headmen gradually achieved financial, military, judicial and ritual rights and
obligations through the process of colonisation in abandoned or waste lands.
As the ‘hinge’ between a king and cultivators, a successful deshmukh needed
administrative and military skills.°? By his death in 1680, Shivaji, a man of
great personal courage, had built up a powerful base through adroit military
campaigning, administrative reforms and ritual innovation. His main sources
of revenue were chauth, a tax of one-fourth of the land revenue, which might be
deemed tribute or fees for military protection, and sardeshmukhi, an assessment
of about 10 per cent of the produce. Payment of the sardeshmukhi implied
recognition of Shivaji as head of the deshmukhs, the dominant families in the
districts.

By the early 1700s, Shivaji’s political association had evolved into what
Indian nationalists have labelled the Maratha Empire and British historians
the Maratha Confederacy. Neither term is fully accurate since one implies a
substantial degree of centralisation and the other signifies some surrender of
power to a central government and a longstanding core of political administra-
tors.°? Maratha power was fragmented among several discrete elements. They
included the raja of Satara, the nominal head and source of legitimacy; the
peshwa, a brahman bureaucrat who became the de facto leader; and five major
military leaders of whom three would survive until 1948. Shinde, who is fre-
quently referred to as Scindia in British sources, was based at the ancient Hindu
sacred site at Ujjain and later at the Rajput-constructed fort of Gwalior, south
of Agra and the Chambal River. Holkar, a leader from a pastoralist background
in the Vindhya Mountains and technically not a member of the Maratha caste
group, eventually established his capital at Indore in central India. The gaekwad
in Baroda remained on the periphery of Maratha politics because of his distant
base in Gujarat. Bhonsle overcame the Gonds of central India and settled at
Nagpur.

Just as the Rajput states had their British chronicler in Tod, the states of
Central India had Sir John Malcolm (1769-1833). His account about the
origin of the Scindia and Holkar families illustrates features common to other
Maratha ruling families. Ranuji, the founder of the political good fortune of
the Scindias, came from cultivators who were sudras and held the hereditary

62 Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600-1818, The New Cambridge History of India, II, 4 (Cambridge,
1993), pp. 22-34.
3 Tbid., pp. 178-9.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

office of patel or headman of a village. Ranuji had supposedly entered the
service of Baji Rao I, peshwa from 1720 to 1740, as slipper-bearer. One night
Baji Rao came out from a long audience and discovered Ranuji asleep with the
peshwa’s slippers clasped tightly to his chest. The peshwa was impressed with his
servant’s faithfulness in small matters and promoted him to his bodyguard. A
similar story is related about the Holkar family. These foundational myths have
common features: their natal or adoptive families had some sign of superior
authority such as a village headman or the maintenance of armed supporters;
despite low-status occupations, the founders performed some extraordinary
act which attracted the attention of a superior political authority anxious to
recruit talented, loyal supporters; and during the decline of a central power
shrewd individuals at the right place at the right time could create their own
political base with great speed.

During the eighteenth century the core of the Maratha political entity was
the peshwas of Poona (now Pune) and the Scindias of Gwalior, the latter
being intermittently challenged by the Holkars of Indore.® As the Mughal
imperial structure lost the support of local elites, the Marathas spread out from
their Deccan stronghold into a broad arc from the fringes of the Portuguese
settlement at Goa across central India to the outskirts of the British enclave
at Calcutta. They did not always seek direct control of land but were often
content with indemnities and the right to collect chauth and sardeshmukhi.©
However, Gordon has emphasised that in much of Malwa and the Khandesh,
the Maratha state at the village and pargana level collected its revenue on the
basis of extensive contracts specifying the amount of revenue in return for
political stability.°”

As the Marathas moved north they encountered the Rajputs, some of whom
initially asked for their assistance as allies in succession struggles, first in Bundi
in 1734 and later in Mewar, Marwar, Amber and Alwar. Wink has described
these forays as ‘conquests on invitation’.°* The Rajput rulers soon discovered
that Maratha demands for tribute to pay their expensive but potent military
units could never be fully satisfied. Yet these princes could not form a successful

64 Sir John Malcolm, A Memoir of Central India including Malwa and Adjoining Provinces, 2 vols (New
Delhi, 2001, first published in 1823), vol. 1, pp. 116-17.

6 Gordon, Marathas, pp. 132-77.

66 Stewart N. Gordon, ‘Scarf and Sword: Thugs, Marauders, and State-formation in 18th Century
Malwa’, JESHR 6 (1969), pp. 403-30.

67 Stewart Gordon, Everyday Resistance and Negotiation in the Eighteenth Century Maratha King-
dom. Unpublished paper presented at the American Historical Association, Washington, D.C.,
December 1987.

68 Wink, Land, p. 75.

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PRINCELY STATES PRIOR TO 1800

alliance against the Marathas, even after the Afghans had defeated them in
1761.° The Rajputs might gain interludes of indifference when the forces
of the Scindias and Holkars fought each other. But they were plundered for
resources when a dynamic, able ruler like Mahadji Scindia concentrated on
collecting tribute from the Rajputs not only on his own behalf but also that
due to his nominal overlord, the Mughal emperor. Here is another instance
of a rebel prince invoking the authority of the Mughal emperor ostensibly
to protect the emperor but in reality to enable the nominal subordinate to
strengthen his own military establishment. Mahadji was using the emperor, as
had Saadat Khan and Safdar Jang of Awadh. Mahadji’s death in 1794 provided
a respite for the Rajputs, but in ten years they would be subjected to attacks by
the pindaris, who were attempting to form their own resource base from the
disarray of the Maratha possessions.’°

By the 1790s the Maratha polity was debilitated by ineffective leadership and
had lost what little internal cohesion it had earlier possessed. Like his nominal
overlord in Satara, the peshwa had been reduced to a political cipher by his
chief minister, Nana Fadrnavis. In Indore, Ahilyabai, the daughter-in-law of
Malhar Rao Holkar, who had thoroughly trained her in administration and
military strategy, assumed the throne in 1765 when her husband became
mentally unbalanced, and kept Indore politically stable. Her executive skills,
her recruitment of a supportive elite, and her kingly dharmic gift-giving to
brahmans and pilgrimage sites from Kedarnath in the Himalayas to Rame-
saram in the south reflected a possible pattern by which a few princely wives,
widows or mothers were politically active in the public sphere.”! Her death in
1795, however, left Indore in a politically weakened condition similar to that
of Nagpur and Baroda. By 1805 the latter was a British-protected state and
disengaged from its Maratha peers by treaty and by geography.

C. A. Bayly has characterised the Sikhs as a social movement like the
Marathas, which derived strength from their ability ‘to incorporate pioneer
peasant castes, miscellaneous military adventurers and groups on the fringes of
settled agriculture’.’” Guru Nanak (1469-1539), the founder of Sikhism as a
religious movement, proclaimed that his followers should approach the One,
Formless God directly and live in the world on the product of their own labours.
Guru Gobind Singh (1666-1708; the tenth guru 1675-1708) instituted the

6 §.C. Misra, Sindhia-Holkar Rivalry in Rajasthan (Delhi, 1981).

70 R.K. Saxena, Maratha Relations with the Major States of Rajputana (1761-1818 A.D.) (New Delhi,
1973), pp. 260-72.

71 Gordon, ‘Legitimacy’, pp. 293-6, and Malcolm, Memoir, vol. 2, pp. 175-95.

7 C. A. Bayly, Rulers, p. 20.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

khalsa as the community of those who were baptised and accepted social prac-
tices such as not cutting their hair. W. H. McLeod has argued that these customs
came from the Jats,’? pastoralists who had moved into settled agriculture and
were attracted to Hinduism and Islam as well as Sikhism. The Sikh community
also acquired a commitment to political domination embodied in the slogan
raj karega khalsa (the khalsa will rule).”4

During the eighteenth century, Sikh jathas, military bands based on varying
degrees of personal, kinship and regional bonds, coalesced into larger units
called mists that extended protection over tracts in central Punjab in return for
a share in the produce from the land. By 1799 Ranjit Singh had incorporated
most of the misls into a kingdom of Punjab based at Lahore, which resisted
British annexation until 1848. A few Sikh misldars or rulers, mainly those
south of the Sutlej, survived as allies of the British for another century. The
principal ones controlled the three Phulkian states of Patiala, Nabha and Jind.
The Phulkian clan traced their ancestry remotely to Jaisal, the Jadon Bhatti
Rajput founder of Jaisalmer state, and would maintain their right to Rajput
status even in the twentieth century.

In return for supporting the Mughal emperor Babur during the battle of
Panipat in 1526, Bariam, a Phulkian Jat, acquired chaudhriyat, or the right to
collect revenue from a wasteland southwest of Delhi. When a descendant, Phul
(d. 1652), was introduced to Har Govind, the sixth Sikh guru, the religious
leader is reputed to have prophesied that Phul, whose name means ‘flower’ in
Hindi, would bear many blossoms and satisfy the hunger of many. Phul had
seven sons by two wives; the two by his first wife were Tilokha, the ancestor
of the rajas of Nabha and Jind, and Rama, who was the ancestor of the Patiala
ruling house. Ala Singh (1691-1765), the third son of Rama, was the first to
take the name of Singh and is considered to be the founder of Patiala state. By
1765 the Afghan king-maker Ahmad Shah Durrani granted Ala Singh the title
of raja, a robe of honour, and the right to coin money in return for an annual
tribute. Indu Banga has emphasised that political expediency was Ala Singh’s
guiding principle in external relations,”° and it is apparent that Sikh sardars or
local leaders generally were profiting from judicious negotiations of alliances in
an area where more powerful opponents were contesting for dominance. Amar
Singh (b. 1748, r. 1765-82), the grandson of Ala Singh, accepted Sikh baptism

73 WH. McLeod, The Evolution of the Sikh Community: Five Essays (Delhi, 1975), pp. 51-2.

4 J. S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab, New Cambridge History of India, II, 3 (Cambridge, 1990),
ch. 5.

> Indu Banga, ‘Ala Singh: The Founder of Patiala State’, in Harbans Singh and N. Gerald Barrier
(eds), Punjab Past and Present: Essays in Honor of Dr. Ganda Singh (Patiala, 1976), p. 155.

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PRINCELY STATES PRIOR TO 1800

and continued the expansion of Patiala state through strategic alliances and
successful military actions. A series of succession disputes after his death left
Patiala vulnerable to better organised rival Sikh misldars and northward-bound
Marathas.

In the 1790s female relatives of Patiala rajas, most notably Rani Rajindar
(d. 1791), a cousin of Amar Singh, and Rani Sahib Kaur (d. 1799), the sister
of Raja Sahib Singh (1773-1813), actively rallied the troops of Patiala against
Maratha incursions. Lepel Griffin, a late-nineteenth-century British official in
Punjab and hardly a feminist, remarked that ‘it would almost appear that the
Phulkian Chiefs excluded, by direct enactment, all women from any share of
power, from the suspicion that they were able to use it far more wisely than
themselves’.”° The Phulkian states were soon to acknowledge the suzerainty
of Ranjit Singh, but in 1809 Patiala, Nabha and Jind entered treaty relations
with the English Company to secure protection from annexation by their
formidable Sikh overlord. Yet again, Patiala would gain from its geographical
position between two expanding states, the British and the kingdom of Punjab.

After Ranjit Singh’s death in 1839, a series of rapid successions weakened the
resistance of the kingdom of Punjab to British encroachment and the loyalty of
petty chieftains of ‘little kingdoms’. During the Anglo-Sikh war of 1845-46,
the responses of the Sikh states varied. Patiala, Jind and Faridkot committed
their resources to the British, willing to come to terms with whoever controlled
Delhi. Nabha and Kapurthala hesitated or joined the Punjab kingdom and
suffered losses but not extinction. The Anglo-Sikh war of 1848 meant the
annexation of Punjab and confirmed the anomalous creation of the kingdom
of Jammu and Kashmir. Since the British felt unable to defend an extended and
remote frontier area in 1846, they transferred Kashmir, which Ranjit Singh
had annexed to Punjab, to Maharaja Gulab Singh of Jammu, a Dogra who
claimed Rajput status, in return for a payment of Rs 75 lakhs.’” Thus a Hindu
military ally of Ranjit Singh was made the ruler of the Muslim majority area
of Kashmir for imperial strategic reasons.

Like their Phulkian counterparts, the Hindu Jat rulers of Bharatpur and
Dholpur claimed Rajput origins. The ruling family of Bharatpur, located south-
east of Delhi, reputedly forfeited its Rajput status when an ancestor Bal Chand,
having no children by a Rajput wife, produced sons with a Jat woman. One

76 Lepel H. Griffin, The Rajas of the Punjab: Being the History of the Principal States in the Punjab and
Their Political Relations with the British Government, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Patiala, 1970, first published
in 1870), vol. 1, p. 67.

77 Bawa Satinder Singh, The Jammu Fox: A Biography of Maharaja Gulab Singh of Kashmir 1792-1857
(Carbondale IL, 1974). A lakh = 100 000.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

of their scions banded together with other Jats and offered protection to lo-
cal populations as Mughals and Marathas fought around Delhi. By 1752 the
Mughal emperor was compelled to recognise Badan Singh as a hereditary raja
controlling a little kingdom near Delhi. As he rose from petty chieftain to
raja, the Bharatpur ruler sought legitimation through his patronage of Vaish-
navite ascetics and acknowledged their power to confer benediction.’® On the
material level Badan Singh constructed palaces, other kingly amenities in his
newly founded capital of Bharatpur, and a fort. After shifting alliances with the
British and the Marathas, in 1805 his descendant, Raja Ranjit Singh (d. 1805),
calculated that his interests would be best served by a treaty with the British,
who were more threatening than the Marathas. Dholpur, the other Hindu
Jat-ruled state, captured the great Rajput fort at Gwalior after the defeat of the
Marathas in 1761. After several exchanges of Gwalior fort among the British,
Scindia and Dholpur, in 1805 the Dholpur ruling family were confirmed in
their possession of the districts of Dholpur, Bari and Rajakhera.

No typology will ever include all examples, and Bahawalpur state followed
perhaps a singular pattern of state formation.”? Situated in barren desert ter-
ritory along the left banks of the Indus and its tributaries between Jaisalmer
in Rajasthan and Multan in Punjab, it was populated largely by Muslim Jats
and had a pastoral-nomadic economy until the eighteenth century. Then war-
rior chieftains known as Daudputra (sons of Daud) and claiming descent
from Abbas, the uncle of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as the Abbasid
caliphs of Baghdad, expanded during the 1730s from a territorial base at the
confluence of the Chenab and Indus Rivers. Soon the Daudputras devoted
themselves to the promotion of agriculture, first by sustaining the construc-
tion of a simple but effective earthen canal network and then by supportive
tax policies. Flourishing food and cash crops stimulated pan-Indian trade and
the development of urban centres. Successfully resisting envious Rajput neigh-
bours at Jaisalmer and Sikh states advancing from the north, Bahawalpur
demonstrated the viability of indigenous forms of irrigation based on appro-
priate levels of technology. At the same time the rulers of Bahawalpur did
not incorporate any imperial Mughal ideologies, administrative patterns, or
cultural habits but rather ‘were simply conducting business as usual, carving
niches for themselves’ and thereby reflecting the multiplicity of models for state

formation.”

78 C. A. Bayly, Rulers, p. 185.

79 Richard B. Barnett, ‘The Greening of Bahawalpur: Ecological Pragmatism and State Formation in
Pre-British Western India, 1730-1870’, JBR, 15 (1988), pp. 5-14.

80 Thid., p. 12.

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PRINCELY STATES PRIOR TO 1800
PATTERNS OF STATE FORMATION

An analysis of the preceding early histories of groups of states reveals some
broad patterns in the processes of state formation in India during the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Aspiring rulers of Indian states had
to undertake three major tasks if they were to achieve political autonomy.
First, they assembled supporters who would assist them in the initial conquest
and the subsequent administration of their newly acquired territory. This elite
generally comprised three elements: kinsmen and others who had participated
in the military triumphs, indigenous elites, and administrators who possessed
the literacy and management skills needed to implement the policies that
ensured the penetration of the state.

Kinsmen of the ruler provided varying levels of support. Rajput rajas gen-
erally conquered their states with the assistance of warbands and kinsmen,
who were rewarded with jagirs or ijaras in the classic Mughal pattern. Among
Rajputs, a ruler was frequently considered the first among equals and faced
continuing competition from his kinsmen. Thus many Rajput rulers sought
emblems of sovereignty from some external source such as the Mughal Empire
and later the English Company to differentiate themselves from their kinsmen.
When a ruler showed signs of weakness, ambitious kinsmen, especially siblings,
either seized power or left to create new states. During the fifteenth century,
when the Lodis of Delhi exerted little control beyond Punjab, Bikaner split
from Jodhpur. Later, during the Mughal decline in the eighteenth century,
Alwar broke off from Jaipur and the states of Patiala, Nabha, Jind and Faridkot
evolved from the Sikh Phulkian misl.

Many rulers of eighteenth-century states had moved into territories where
they shared few cultural bonds such as language, religion, history or extended
residence with those they governed. Consequently, to reduce active opposi-
tion to their new regime, they incorporated local elites who retained symbols
of authority or the loyalty of subordinate social and economic orders. Most
states eventually came to follow the Mughal model of granting or reaffirm-
ing jagirs or the right to collect revenue or receive a certain portion of the
revenue from a specific tract of land to local elites. Some indigenous elites con-
tinued to perform bureaucratic or military services for the new ruler. Others
received pensions that acknowledged past services and tried to ensure present
loyalty. Although these older elites survived physically, their political power
was usually diluted in an expanded pool of elites that included the kinsmen
of the ruler, non-indigenous bureaucrats, and pan-Indian and local merchant
groups.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

Newly emergent rulers also recruited external groups with literacy and ad-
ministrative abilities. These outsiders were sought for two reasons. First, the
ruling elite and local land-controllers often did not possess the requisite skills.
Second, newcomers would be more dependent on the ruler for their power
and authority than kinsmen or locally based elites. Thus the Marathas em-
ployed Chitpavan brahmans; Travancore imported brahmans from Tamilnadu
and north India; the nizams of Hyderabad recruited kayasths (a kshatriya caste
group with a tradition of administrative work in an imperial language such
as Persian) from north India. These non-indigenous administrative elites were
one of many strands that tied princely states to other parts of India. Although
they were limited in number, some of these administrators came to form an
informal, pan-Indian cadre comparable to the Indian Civil Service (ICS) of
British India since they might spend much of their career in one state or region
but could also move to posts throughout India.

Second, whether conquest states that relied heavily on military power to
establish themselves, successor states that avowed imperial appointmentas their
basis, or states evolving from social movements, eighteenth-century states had
to devote significant resources to the maintenance of an effective military force.
Here was a significant change from earlier patterns of state formation. Rulers
now needed more disciplined armies that were uniformed, drilled, equipped
and paid according to European and Ottoman models. From the Seven Years
War in the mid-eighteenth century onward, the French and English trading
companies demonstrated the value of using Indian troops organised according
to more efficient models. The importance of artillery and European techniques
of sapping in waging successful seige warfare also became apparent. Initially
the European mercantile companies themselves offered such military expertise
to a few aspiring states, and then European mercenary officers provided it as
individual consultants.

These new armies required cash for payrolls and the purchase of new
weapons, equipment and uniforms. Rulers needed more revenue. First, they
restricted the percentage that intermediaries claimed as their share of the rev-
enue collected from agricultural production. Second, they penetrated local
agricultural society more deeply by pensioning off some layers of intermedi-
aries and establishing their own collection structures, which procured a larger
percentage of the revenue for the state. Third, they extended their territory to
gain new sources of revenue. Fourth, they provided protection to new client
groups who would supply extraordinary sources of tributes. Fifth, they fostered
expanded economic activities that generated new sources of revenues, such as
the development of cash crops, the production of specialised goods, and the

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PRINCELY STATES PRIOR TO 1800

establishment of markets to facilitate the exchange of such goods and surplus
agricultural produce.

Most states tried these strategies in varying combinations. In Mysore a
Muslim usurper secured more revenue, and in Travancore rulers encouraged
new crops and markets, as did some in north India including Bahawalpur.
Marathas augmented their territories and exacted tribute from client groups
such as the pindaris, mobile bands who accumulated resources through ir-
regular expeditions among unprotected peasants. During the early eighteenth
century Jaipur city attracted wealthy bankers and merchants, and artisans from
Delhi in Jaipuri workshops fashioned luxury products that found a ready mar-
ket beyond state territory.

Those who lacked a strong material resource base such as the western Rajputs
or were unable to unite in order to use their limited resources more effectively
could not create a military force comparable to their more favourably situated
neighbours. Succession disputes and clan feuds fragmented the Rajputs, and
the lack of modernised military forces weakened the Rajput defence against
the Marathas. Consequently the western Rajputs were generally eager to secure
alliances with external powers such as the British.

After aspiring rulers had created a diverse group of collaborators that in-
cluded kinsmen, local elites and competent administrators, and enhanced their
finances to support a modernised military force, they sought ideological legiti-
mation of their power and increasing autonomy. Antique states, basically those
ruled by Rajputs, had long supported bards who elaborated genealogies that
traced descent from pan-Indian epic heroes; they had recorded compromises
with indigenous inhabitants and had reconciled claims to high ritual caste status
with their present positions through stories of marriages, usually undertaken
to secure heirs, that inadvertently lowered ritual or caste status. Moreover,
these antique states as well as successor and conquest states buttressed their
right to rule with grants of legitimation from external sources and by personal
dharmic actions, with patronage and gifts being a crucial link between the two
spheres.

Perhaps the most potent external source of legitimation was a supernatural
injunction to rule. Thus several Hindu rulers declared that they were deputies
of a divinity. As mentioned earlier, Martanda Varma of Travancore gave his
state to its tutelary deity Sri Padmanabha, whose temple was a centrepiece
of the fort in the capital of Trivandrum (now Thiruvananthapuram). In the
distant Himalayan foothills, the Rajput ruler of Mandi declared that he ruled as
the diwan of Vishnu and that Tehri Garhwal was the speaking personification
of the deity of the Hindu temple at Badrinath. Among the Sikh misls, the

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

Phulkian rulers affirmed the blessing of the tenth Guru on their founder.
Muslim rulers might view themselves as shadows of Allah’s authority on earth.

More earthly sources of external legitimation were recognition by the
Mughal emperor, aspirants to imperial power such as Ahmad Shah Abdali,
or the English Company. Most states became adept at using ties to the Mughal
emperor to enhance their legitimacy and their claims to greater autonomy, even
though such demands diminished the authority of the Emperor himself. Thus
the nawabs of Awadh, as wazirs of the emperor, obtained grants of territory
and possessions that reduced the resource base of the Mughal Empire while
enhancing that of Awadh. Other rulers, such as Ala Singh of Patiala, did not
see any incongruity in paying a ransom to Ahmad Shah Abdali and then
accepting symbols of sovereignty from him. Rebel states such as the Marathas,
which arose in opposition to the Mughal Empire, also saw no contradiction
in seeking Mughal titles and eventually becoming protectors of the Mughal
emperor when he had only authority and not power.

Rulers could also achieve legitimacy by acting according to established norms
of kingly conduct. Following models recorded as early as the Arthashastra, they
mediated disputes among castes and other social and religious groups. Here
the work of Nicholas Dirks on Pudukkottai highlights the role of the rulers in
settling caste disputes and thus the priority of political power in determining
caste boundaries. Later the British census would reinforce a hierarchy among
castes and indirectly resolve the claims of caste groups to particular statuses.
Such activity was not limited to Hindu groups. In a discussion of Muslim com-
munities in south India, Susan Bayly has remarked that ‘eighteenth-century
rulers had to use every possible strategy to reconcile disparate interest groups
and associate valuable allies and client communities with their regimes’.°! Even
Martanda Varma of Travancore, a most Hindu ruler, arbitrated disputes over
the leadership of the Syrian Christian community in Travancore.*?

Another aspect of kingly dharma was to give gifts to and generally patronise
religious institutions, whether Hindu temples, Muslim mosques and dargahs
(tombs of Sufi saints), or Sikh gurudwaras (repositories of the Sikh sacred
scripture). Religious scholars and people with the aura of sanctity were also
prime recipients of kingly largesse. As might be expected, rulers nourished
religious institutions and persons within their states and at varying points in
state formation. For example, the Marathas did not begin such patronage until
late in the eighteenth century, while south Indian rulers tended to give major
gifts much earlier.

81 Susan Bayly, Saints, p.173. ® Ibid., pp. 269-70.

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Temple of Sri Padmanabha in Trivandrum during Attukal Pongal Festival.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

What is more striking is how several rulers extended their patronage
across political and sectarian boundaries. During the early nineteenth century
Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Punjab was especially catholic in his endowments to
Hindu and Muslim institutions as well as to Sikh ones; his aid ranged from
gilding the central Sikh gurudwara at Amritsar with gold leaf to generous grants
to Sikh scholars. Moreover, there were other notable patrons on a pan-Indian
scale. Jai Singh I of Jaipur constructed his great astronomical observatories
on the basis of knowledge accumulated from Hindu, Muslim and European
sources (the last generally transmitted by Jesuits) at major Hindu pilgrimage
sites such as Banaras, Ujjain and Mathura and political centres such as Delhi.
Martanda Varma of Travancore made gifts to north Indian Hindu pilgrimage
centres as well as temples in Tamilnadu. The Maratha rulers of Tanjore sup-
ported a Muslim dargah at Nagore. Much research remains to be done on the
extent and impact of such pan-Indian patronage, which continued into the
twentieth century, but it clearly constituted another strand in the web of rela-
tionships among individual regional states and cultural institutions throughout
India.

A third type of personal action affirming legitimacy was for the ruler to live
like a ruler. Thus during the eighteenth century many regional rulers, whether
of antique states such as Jaipur or successor states such as Awadh, constructed
new capital cities or embellished older ones with elaborate palaces, gardens and
walls and erected profit-making markets. These urban sites provided a stage for
enhanced court rituals and the display of consumption that proclaimed one’s
status as ruler. Maratha and Sikh rulers as leaders of peasant bands were slower
to erect complex capitals and to develop enhanced court rituals, but by the
early 1800s Ranjit Singh would impress both his Indian rivals and the English
Company with lavish public rituals such as the use of a gold chair as a gaddi.
C. A. Bayly has pointed out that what western observers viewed as ‘a frivolous
misappropriation of the peasant surplus . . . was the outward mark by which
rulers were recognised — the circulating life-blood of the traditional kingdom
which nourished the princely, commercial and agrarian economies’.*? From
the 1760s to the 1810s, many servants of another regional state, the English
East India Company, imitated this lifestyle of the so-called nawabi culture.
Possibly the most extraordinary was David Ochterlony, the British resident at
Delhi (1803-25), who also oversaw Rajputana. Bishop Heber has described
Ochterlony as a ‘tall and pleasing-looking old man, but was so wrapped up
in shawls, kincob, fur, and a Mogul furred cap, that his face was all that was

83 CLA, Bayly, Rulers, p. 57.

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PRINCELY STATES PRIOR TO 1800

visible’, while others remarked on his reputation for having thirteen elephants
and thirteen wives.*4

Thus the eighteenth century, which witnessed the declining power of the
Mughal Empire and some Mughal elites, was also an era of creative state for-
mation that extended into the early nineteenth century. Successor states, those
formed by appointees of the Mughal Empire, and warrior states such as the
Marathas, Mysore and the Sikhs, formed powerful entities. Their bases were
a synthesis of a collaborative elite that included kinsmen, outside adminis-
trators, and the remnants of indigenous elites; important merchant groups;
a modernised army; and the economic capacity to raise necessary revenue by
penetrating the local society. Political power had been decentralised during
the eighteenth century, but individual states intervened more directly in local
communities than had any Mughal emperor or governor. Gradually the British
Indian regional state, first established in Bengal, evolved a new political struc-
ture to incorporate their other Indian rivals.

84 Reginald Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India, from Calcutta to Bombay,
1824-25, 2 vols (London, 1829), vol. 2, pp. 392-3; Thompson, Making, pp. 182-5.

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CHAPTER 3

THE BRITISH CONSTRUCTION OF
INDIRECT RULE

Many empires, from the Roman to the Soviet Union, have employed indirect
rule in an effort to extend their influence over disparate peoples and regions
with a minimum of expenditure in material and human resources. This chapter
delineates how the British devised and then sustained a system of indirect rule
that reputedly provided a model that was adapted to many other imperial
situations. In his comprehensive study of the British residency system, Michael
Fisher has defined indirect rule in India as ‘the exercise of determinative and
exclusive political control by one corporate body over a nominally sovereign
state, a control recognised by both sides’. The four key elements are that:

1. both sides must recognise the control as effective;

2. only one entity can exercise control;

3. all other rivals must be excluded; and

4, the dominant power must recognise some degree of sovereignty in the local
state.

Debate continues over the degree of the sovereignty or autonomy of the
Indian princes before and after they concluded treaties with the British. Since
its publication in 1943, Edward Thompson's classic work, The Making of
the Indian Princes, about British relations with Mysore and the Marathas from
the 1790s to the 1820s has been the bedrock of arguments that without the
British the princely states would not exist. But this thesis has outlived its
usefulness.

In most cases the British did not create the Indian princes as political lead-
ers. Although many were coerced into subordination, princes usually sought
political and material benefits from their agreements with the British. As dis-
cussed in the preceding chapter, most Indian kings or rulers who would come
to be labelled princes during the nineteenth century had existed before the
advent of the British or had evolved along with the British as regional pow-
ers. Their treaties with the British, however, would acutely affect their political
futures. These agreements defined territorial boundaries, rendering them com-
pact or diffuse but generally more restricted; they regulated relationships with

! Fisher, Indirect Rule, p. 6.

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THE BRITISH CONSTRUCTION OF INDIRECT RULE

both stronger or weaker neighbours, and to varying degrees modified relation-
ships within a state between a ruler and his or her kinspeople, administrators,
merchant groups and peasants. Most importantly, the treaties appropriated
resources of Indian states, including revenues in the form of subsidies or trib-
ute, subjects as soldiers, and commercial goods, for the benefit of the English
East India Company. So while British treaties did not beget Indian princes or
princely states, they did shape their future form and activities by establishing
parameters that increasingly restricted princely options.

Second, the British experimented with various political arrangements.
Anxious to maximise their commercial profits, to limit their political liabili-
ties, and to reduce their operational expenses, they first tried to collect revenues
through the administration of the nawab of Bengal. The Company soon dis-
covered that this system enriched its servants but did not produce the income
needed to meet its expenditures in India or in England. Consequently Warren
Hastings, governor of Bengal (1772-73), and the first governor-general of India
(1773-85), introduced a more direct system of revenue collection through
British officers, which culminated in the Permanent Settlement of 1793. Now
the British acted as did other eighteenth-century Indian rulers such as Tipu
Sultan of Mysore and enlarged their share of revenue from peasants in order
to maintain an efficient army. This military strength would undergird a grow-
ing centralisation of political functions and a corresponding penetration by
the state into local society. With the recognition of zamindars as tax-paying
landlords in Bengal in 1793, the British sought to create a loyal, dependent
intermediary group that would supply an assured revenue. But the British
soon found that they had to protect their expanded territorial base from other
assertive regional powers. Their mercantile corporation was being drawn into
wider relationships by their operational objectives, and they soon sought new
means of extending their political control.

Third, indigenous states had multiple reasons for allying with external in-
vaders as well as other Indian states. They sought to achieve dominance in
succession disputes, to establish a superior position vis-a-vis their kinspeople,
and to gain needed support in military confrontations with other regional
states. Succession disputes occurred before, during and after the entrance of
the British into India. Multiple wives and concubines and the lack of any firm
commitment to primogeniture among both Hindu and Muslim rulers could
precipitate a contest among sons, each allied with mothers, male relatives, and
ambitious job-seekers. Despite or perhaps because of assorted sexual relation-
ships, some rulers and dynasties repeatedly lacked direct male heirs. In those
cases the struggle would be among illegitimate or adopted heirs and cadet

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

branches of the ruling family. For example, during the 1740s the Marathas
were active in Rajput states as allies of one side or the other in succession
disputes.

Fourth, rulers including both Rajputs and Marathas would appeal for signs
of their pre-eminence over their kinspeople from powerful external rulers.
The East India Company would gradually assume this function from the
increasingly bereft Mughal emperor.

Finally, military attacks, such as those by the Marathas on Hyderabad, led
the latter to forge alliances with the British, who would provide badly needed
military assistance. Consequently treaties with the English Company fit into
a pattern of political behaviour that initially did not appear to be particularly
innovative or dangerous for beleaguered regional states and little kings. But the
situation would soon change dramatically. By 1820 the British had created a
monopolistic military despotism funded by resources acquired from peasants
in the most productive areas of India and from Indian commercial groups.”

BUILDING BLOCKS OF INDIRECT RULE

Five elements were fundamental in the creation and maintenance of the British
system of indirect rule from 1764 to 1857: a growing monopoly of expanded
military forces; legal documents ranging from treaties to sanads to proclama-
tions and letters of understanding; maps and surveys; political officers, called
residents, and political agents who translated policies and documents into prac-
tice; and concepts of legitimation that included suzerainty, paramountcy, and
a chain of succession from the Mughal emperor.

Military resources

The War of Austrian Succession (1740—48) and the Seven Years War (1756-63)
transplanted European rivalries to India. The British military presence in
India expanded to counter a European antagonist, namely the French, and
then Indian rivals, most notably Mysore and the Marathas. The English
Company initially maintained its own meagre military units to protect its
coastal settlements, but by the 1740s it had limited use of British royal troops.
From the 1760s, the Company increasingly came to rely on sepoys or Indian
troops trained and officered by Europeans and equipped with European-style
weapons. Each presidency maintained its own army centred on infantry units

2C.A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, New Cambridge History of India,
II, 1 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 103, 110.

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THE BRITISH CONSTRUCTION OF INDIRECT RULE

but also including cavalry, artillery and sappers, the last of which were partic-
ularly effective in siege warfare.

Following the example of Joseph Dupleix, the governor of the French East
India Company in Pondicherry, Robert Clive began to extract support from
Indian rulers for military contingents. Theoretically these units were to protect
the rulers from internal and external threats as well as to safeguard the interests
of the English Company. After the object lesson of the British military victory at
Baksar in 1764 against the forces of Awadh, Indian rulers would pay a subsidy
or tribute to support what became known as subsidiary contingents. During the
late 1700s some rulers mobilised these contingents against external enemies; for
example, Awadh did so against the Rohilla Afghans. Sometimes troops were
used internally to extract revenue payments. By the early 1800s the British
increasingly reserved these contingents for the pursuit of their own strategic
goals in India. Meanwhile the British would curb the power of Indian rulers
to maintain independent military forces through treaty provisions, and their
continuing and inflexible demands for subsidies would restrict the economic
ability of Indian rulers to sustain more than a palace guard. Thus by the 1820s
the British controlled one of the largest standing armies in the world through
the three armies of its presidencies and the subsidiary contingents financed by
Indian rulers. This formidable force defeated major indigenous rivals and then
guaranteed general, though not uniform, compliance with treaty provisions
among most Indian rulers.

Treaties, sanads and letters

Initially Mughal emperors, who did not consider foreign merchants to be their
equals, declined to conclude treaties guaranteeing trading privileges to the
English East India Company. Rather, in 1613 Jahangir granted a farman or
imperial edict that extended permission to trade at Surat to the Company and
thereby incorporated the British within the authority of the Mughal emperor.
Since the farman was unilaterally issued and not a contract in the English
legal sense, in theory it could be unilaterally withdrawn. By the 1730s lesser
Indian rulers began to conclude treaties with the English Company, and from
the 1760s the Mughal emperor and his nominally subordinate subadars or
governors entered treaties on a basis of equality with the Company.
Although British indirect rule is sometimes called the treaty system, no
more than forty Indian states actually signed a treaty with the Company or
its successor, the British Crown.? A few states account for a disproportionate

3 T am grateful to John McLeod for sharing his computations on the states with treaties.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

number of treaties. Rulers of major states such as Awadh and Hyderabad
were compelled to sign new treaties upon their accessions to the gaddi. Each
subsequent treaty conceded more territory or subsidy to the Company. Most
treaties focused on specific concerns related to a particular point in time, but
many issues were not addressed. The interpretation of these treaties became
arenas of manoeuvre and negotiation among British political officers, Indian
rulers and their ministers, and British and Indian lawyers until the demise
of the states in 1948. The attempt to codify treaty provisions and practices
intensified in the late nineteenth century and will be discussed in Chapter 4.

The British actually issued greater numbers of sanads and letters to Indian
states than treaties. Sanads were certificates or testimonials of protection or
recognition that the British unilaterally extended, much as Mughal emperors
had earlier dispensed farmans. The British also bestowed letters of understand-
ing that formulated, again unilaterally, the conditions of relations between
themselves and an Indian state.

Maps and surveys

Simultaneously with their use of military force and legal instruments to extend
their control over Indian states, the British undertook mapping and survey ex-
peditions based on post-Enlightenment techniques of measurement and visual
representation to create a scientific, rational and uniform geographic archive.‘
Although the Great Trigonometrical Survey focused on directly controlled ar-
eas, British maps came to define visually their indirect rule over Indian states
for British and Indian audiences. Ironically, the alleged rationalisation of such
mapping fostered the seemingly irrational intertwining of princely state bound-
aries. As Matthew Edney has argued, ‘boundaries were no longer vague axes of
dispute (frontiers) between core areas of Indian polities but were configured as
the means whereby those core areas were now defined. Political territories were
no longer delineated with respect of the physical features that characterised or
bounded them; nor were they defined by the complex feudal interrelationships
of their rulers’.> Plotting boundaries on paper erased intricate affiliations and
connections.

By 1833 Captain James Sutherland, a retired deputy surveyor-general, striv-
ing for precision, estimated that ‘the area of native states who had signed a treaty
of alliance with the Company amounted to 449 845 square miles, and terri-
tory under direct British rule, including small quasi-autonomous states, made

4 Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843
(Chicago, 1997).
> Ibid., p. 333.

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THE BRITISH CONSTRUCTION OF INDIRECT RULE

up 626 746 square miles’.° According to this calculation, the princely states
constituted slightly more than 41 per cent or two-fifths of the territory of the
British Empire in India, although the boundaries of many frontier states, rang-
ing from western Rajputana to Himalayan hill-states, would not be physically
established until well after 1833. Moreover, Sutherland attempted to divide
princely states into six classes on the basis of their relationship to the British
and then to categorise them by religion and region.’ This British intellectual
exercise served to reify the princely states as political, religious and ethnic en-
tities, with serious implications for popular political activity in the twentieth
century.

Residents

The Mughal emperor, his governors, and autonomous, indigenous rulers such
as those of the Rajput states had conducted relations through vakils. These
agents transmitted communications between rulers and reported to their rulers
daily events at the courts to which they were attached based on official court
akhbars (newspapers), public knowledge, and covert intelligence. The number
of vakils resident at a court was a visible mark of its importance. Initially the
Company sent its officers to conclude treaties with Indian rulers, frequently
after military encounters. Consequently many early British diplomatic agents
were military officers rather than commercial or civil employees. These men
came to be known as political officers and had the title of residents when
posted to major states and political agents when assigned to less important
ones. More intrusive than vakils, since they did not confine themselves to
handling interstate relations or intelligence-gathering, political officers became
involved in the internal administration of states and extended British control
in myriad ways. While serving with the resident to Scindia in 1806, James Tod
began a geographical and mapping survey of western Rajputana, which was
completed in 1815.8 Maps, revenue settlement reports, ethnographic reviews
and genealogical accounts contributed to the colonial intellectual construction
of Indian society in areas of indirect as well as direct rule. Besides being used
by the British to conquer and control Indians and to legitimate their own
policies and actions, these texts influenced Indian intellectuals, administrators
and rulers of Indian states in their constitution of political reality.

6 ‘Computation of the Area of the Kingdoms and Principalities of India’, JASB 20 (August 1833),
pp. 488-91, cited in Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British
India (New York, 2002), p. 81.

7 Tbid., p. 82.

8 Anil Chandra Banerjee, The Rajput States and British Paramountcy (New Delhi, 1980), pp. 5-7.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

Only within recent decades have historians focused on the impact of the
residents themselves. The pioneers include K. N. Panikkar, who analysed the
role of the Delhi Residency from 1803 to 1857 when it handled British relations
with both the Mughal emperor and neighbouring clients such as Rajputana
and cis-Sutlej states.” Robin Jeffrey has defined a typology of the modes of
interaction among maharajas, diwans, and residents based on his research in
Travancore:

(i) the ‘dominant Resident’, in which the Resident controlled the Minister and reduced
the Ruler to a cipher; (ii) the ‘balanced’ system, in which British governments, impressed
by anglicised Rulers and Ministers, instructed Residents to achieve an equitable division of
functions and responsibilities among the three principals; (iii) ‘laissez faire’, in which Rulers
and Ministers were left largely alone, providing that the state remained free of blatant
disturbances or misrule; (iv) the ‘imposed Minister’, in which an anglicised, trustworthy
‘native’ from outside the state — or sometimes a European — was established as Minister.'°

In this last scheme a resident participated indirectly through control of a chief
minister or the appointment of an imposed minister. There were, moreover,
cases elsewhere in which a political officer might share directly in the adminis-
tration of an Indian state as a minister or as a member of a council of regency
for a ruler during his or her minority.

In his study of the residency system in India from 1764 to 1857, Michael
Fisher explores its institutional origins, its British personnel and their varying
goals, and, most innovatively, the Indian employees of the residents who were
the principal means of contact with their counterparts within the princely
administration and other elements of local society.'! When Warren Hastings
appointed the first residents in the 1770s, he sought direct control of residents
and faced challenges from his own Council and the governors of Bombay and
Madras. Although governors-general were ultimately successful in achieving
jurisdiction over the major residents, the Indian political service continued to
be fragmented between the central and the provincial levels until the eve of in-
dependence. Besides these organisational divisions, Fisher’s analysis emphasises
how the variations between policy and practice illustrate the differing attitudes

and objectives of the men who created and operated the British Empire in
India.”

°K. N. Panikkar, British Diplomacy in North India: A Study of the Delhi Residency 1803-1857
(New Delhi, 1968).

10 Robin Jeffrey, ‘The Politics of “Indirect Rule”: Types of Relationship among Rulers, Ministers and
Residents in a “Native State”’, CCP 13 (1975), p. 262.

1] Fisher, Indirect Rule.

12 Michael H. Fisher, ‘Indirect Rule in the British Empire: The Foundations of the Residency System
in India (1764-1858)’, MAS 18 (1984), pp. 393-428.

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THE BRITISH CONSTRUCTION OF INDIRECT RULE

Concepts of legitimation

In a system of indirect rule, the superior power must concede some degree
of sovereignty to the dependent ally. To provide a theoretical justification
for this anomalous legal and constitutional situation, the British evolved two
key concepts of suzerainty and paramountcy. A suzerain power had superior
sovereignty or control over states that possessed limited sovereign rights. In
the context of indirect rule in India, the sovereign rights that each Indian ruler
possessed were partially defined by treaty but were more generally in a state of
flux.

As the first British governor-general who sought to implement an overt
imperial policy in India, Lord Wellesley and his extraordinary subordinates
acted as if they were the acknowledged dominant power of India.!* During
the 1810s his successor, Lord Hastings, and some of the British officials who
had served under Wellesley began to use the word ‘paramount to describe their
perceived position in India. Hastings also encouraged several Indian regional
states including Hyderabad and Baroda to declare themselves independent of
the Mughal Empire so that they then might enter a new and more direct ‘feudal’
relationship with the British. Nawab-Wazir Ghazi al-Din Haydar of Awadh
was the only Indian ruler to respond by having himself crowned padshah or
emperor on 9 October 1819, but his action did not significantly improve
his position with the British.!4 Edward Thompson has claimed that the first
formal articulation of paramountcy as a doctrine occurred in a letter from
David Ochterlony, the nawabi-style resident at Delhi, to Charles Metcalfe in
1820 and that the latter was the first to use it to justify intervention during a
succession dispute at Bharatpur in 1825.!> Metcalfe claimed:

We have by degrees become the paramount State of India. Although we exercised the
powers of this supremacy in many instances before 1817, we have used and asserted them
more generally since the extension of our influence by the events of that and the following
years... [OJur duty requires that we should support the legitimate succession of the Prince,
while policy seems to dictate that we should as much as possible abstain from any further
interference in their affairs.'©

Metcalfe’s caution about intervention in the internal affairs of so-called pro-
tected states would be increasingly abandoned as British officials invoked

13 Thompson, Making, pp. 27-30; C. A. Bayly, Indian Society, ch. 3.

14 Michael H. Fisher, A Clash of Cultures: Awadh, the British and the Mughals (Riverdale MD, 1987),
pp. 120-41.

5 Thompson, Making, pp. 283-4.

16 Minute by Sir Charles Metcalfe, 1825, Document 28 in Adrian Sever (ed.), Documents and Speeches
on the Indian Princely States, 2 vols. (Delhi, 1985), vol. 1, pp. 145-6.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

paramountcy to justify whatever course of action they judged expedient for
British interests. The definition of paramountcy and what it entitled the British
to do remained contentious until 1947.

THE CREATION OF INDIRECT RULE

The tyranny of periodisation

British apologists and historians from many nations have long sought to discern
distinct phases in the evolution of the relationships between the British and
Indian rulers. I argue that the British policies of indirect rule and annexation
existed ina dynamic tension with one or the other strategy in greater ascendancy
but that neither was ever fully dominant. C. A. Bayly has pointed out how
the inflexible demands of the British subsidiary alliance system frequently
created conditions that then led to British annexations of indirectly ruled
Indian territory as a solution to a problem initially created by the British.!7
Most annexations incorporated specific strategic or economic objectives, but
at no point did the British have the resources to administer all of India directly.
Even in Saran district of Bihar, part of the Bengal province under direct British
rule since 1765, Anand Yang has revealed the limited nature of the British
raj, which collaborated with the maharaja of Hathwa, a zamindar. In this
case the British were willing to enhance the resources of this landholder, who
maintained local control over the peasantry that produced the revenue on which
both the zamindar and the British existed.'® At the same time the British felt
they had the right to intervene in the administration of both zamindari estates
and princely states when it suited their interests.

My second premise is that intervention and non-intervention as British
policies also persisted in close association. British officials interfered or did
not interfere because of particular political imperatives, intellectual constructs,
economic needs and Indian responses. Thus while a scheme of periodisation is
useful for the purpose of justifying an imperial policy or organising a historical
narrative, it should not obscure the persistent, underlying juxtaposition of
indirect rule and annexation and British non-intervention and intervention in
the internal structure and policies of Indian states.

Once Queen Victoria renounced annexation as a policy in 1858, some
British officials sought to legitimate the system of indirect rule and to cod-
ify British practices towards the princely states. They forged an intellectual
TCA. Bayly, Indian Society, pp. 104-5.

18 Anand A. Yang, The Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India, Saran District, 1793-1920
(Berkeley CA, 1989), pp. 67-97.

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THE BRITISH CONSTRUCTION OF INDIRECT RULE

framework that many historians of the Indian princes used. Before present-
ing an alternative periodisation, I will examine the formulations of William
Lee-Warner (1846-1914), one of the most influential systematisers of the
history of princely states. A member of the Indian Civil Service from 1869
to 1895, Lee-Warner served mainly in the Bombay secretariat with brief as-
signments in Kolhapur and Mysore. This consummate bureaucrat concluded
his career in London at the India Office and then with membership on the
Council of India from 1902 to 1912. He wrote the widely cited constitutional
history first entitled Protected Princes of India when published in 1893 and
then retitled, more ‘neutrally’, The Native States of India in a second edition of
1910. He differentiated ‘[t]hree distinct periods in filling in the Treaty map’
created by the British in India. The first one began when Warren Hastings
inaugurated the ‘ring fence’ policy of non-intervention by the British in the
internal affairs of Indian states, which supposedly prevailed until the exit of
Lord Minto as governor-general in 1813. During this phase allied states were
few and supposedly ‘[w]ithin the Company’s ring-fence or on its borders’. The
key phrases in treaties were ‘mutual alliance’ and ‘reciprocal agreement’.

The second stage commenced in 1813 when these expressions of interde-
pendence were exchanged for those of dependence, for example ‘subordinate
alliance or co-operation’ and ‘protection’.!? Lee-Warner labelled the governor-
generalship of Lord Hastings from 1813 to 1823 as one of ‘subordinate iso-
lation when ‘[t]he large, indefinite blocks of Foreign Territory left by Lord
Minto, with no external frontiers delimited and no internal divisons fixed, were
now brought under elaborate settlement; and the multitude of principalities,
which still claim separate and direct relations with the British Government,
were classified and protected’.”? Subsequently the British allegedly pursued
a policy of non-intervention in the affairs of its dependent allies, which al-
lowed the princes to exploit their subjects. According to this interpretation,
because of British reluctance to intervene at earlier stages of misgovernment,
Lord Dalhousie, governor-general from 1848 to 1856, was forced to annex
delinquent states. The third era was one of union and stability after 1858.

Other British officials and assorted scholars have proposed more finely
detailed chronologies that continue to associate vacillation between indirect
rule and annexation with specific governors-general. Thus we have the ‘ring
fence’ policy associated with Warren Hastings from 1772 to 1785; the sub-
sidiary alliance with Lord Wellesley from 1798 to 1805; the achievement of

19 Sir William Lee-Warner, The Native States of India (New Delhi, 1979, first published as a second
edition in 1910), pp. 43-5.
20 Tbid., p. 96.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

paramountcy with Lord Hastings and his immediate successors from 1813 to
1828; and the triumph of annexation with Lord Dalhousie from 1848 to 1856.
Aggressive use of both indirect and direct rule was punctuated with eras of re-
treat, consolidation or non-involvement, with Lord Cornwallis (1786-93),
Sir John Shore (1793-98) and Lord Minto (1807-13) being the leading non-
interventionist governors-general.

These periodisations are important since they have influenced British of-
ficials in their relations with Indian princes as well as the historiography on
the princely states. But they obscure the overall continuities in British poli-
cies, which balanced direct and indirect rule to serve an expanding empire.
From the Company’s acquisition of the rights to collect revenue in Bengal un-
til 1858 when the Crown assumed formal control in India, British governors-
general used the strategies of indirect rule and of direct rule through annexation
with varying frequency and effectiveness. For example, the non-interventionist
Minto offered protection to the cis-Sutlej Sikh states. Labels can obscure the
longue durée as well as highlight briefer trends.

British officials divided states into various categories based on their treaty-
cum-legal relationships with the Company. Lord Hastings had separated them
into feudatories and allied states.?! Sir Richard Jenkins, who had extensive
experience with Maratha rulers, first as acting resident with Scindia and then
as resident at Nagpur from 1807 to 1827, drew the line between the sub-
sidiary states who entered treaty relations as equals and the subordinates who
accepted British protection through a sanad or unilateral proclamation. By the
late 1840s Lord Dalhousie designated as independent states those that existed
before the coming of the British, as tributary or dependent those that survived
through British protection, and as subordinate those that the Company sup-
posedly created or revived by sanads. But later Lee-Warner argued that the
‘[d]ifferentiation of states as allied, tributary, created, or protected is illusory.
All are alike respected and protected’.?* Contemporary scholars such as Urmila
Walia have also pointed out that many states do not fit into these categories
with any consistency.”? Consequently I will not use these terms in my narrative
to signify categories.

A provisional scheme

Starting with my premise that indirect rule through Indian princes and direct
rule by Company officers consequent upon annexation coexisted in dynamic

21 M.S. Mehta, Lord Hastings and the Indian States (Bombay, 1930).
22 Lee-Warner, Native States, p. 51.
23 Urmila Walia, Changing British Attitudes Towards the Indian States, 1823-1835 (New Delhi, 1985).

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THE BRITISH CONSTRUCTION OF INDIRECT RULE

tension from 1765 until 1858, I propose a scheme of three major periods when
client states were incorporated into the British system of indirect rule: 1765-85,
years dominated by Robert Clive and Warren Hastings; 1798-1805, the era of
Lord Wellesley as governor-general; and 1813-23, when Lord Hastings pre-
vailed. But annexations occurred simultaneously with the expansion of indirect
rule and extended into a fourth period under Lord Dalhousie. From 1848 to
1856 no new states were brought into the system of indirect rule, and non-
intervention continued to be practised along with the extensive annexations
of Dalhousie.

Before embarking on a survey of the transformation of Indian kings into
Indian princes and clients in a system of indirect rule, readers must be fore-
warned that the existing scholarly charts for the journey supply many details
and few sweeping vistas. Charles Lewis Tupper, one of most cited British of-
ficers writing on the evolution of British indirect rule in India, remarked that
‘the tediousness of Indian history is proverbial’.*4 The dullness is not in the
history but in the telling of it. To try to reduce the tedium, I will not trace the
evolution of relationships between the British and individual states but will
rather use specific examples to illustrate general patterns.

EUROPEAN AND INDIAN ORIGINS OF THE
SUBSIDIARY ALLIANCE SYSTEM

From the 1740s, the French and then the English East India Companies
began to ally themselves with Indian regional states when the latter sought
their assistance during succession disputes, internal confrontations between
rulers and elites, and external attacks. The French and British were differ-
ent, however, from possible indigenous allies in that they operated from
very limited territorial and revenue bases in India but had potential access
to much larger resources beyond India. In addition, events in Europe and
throughout the world impacted on the policies of the French and the British
more forcefully than on those of Indian regional powers. For example, the
advent of Napoleon stimulated French interest in India and his defeat in-
creased the number of unemployed French mercenaries seeking employment in
India.

Following the French example of Joseph Dupleix, the English Company
offered military support to Indian contenders in succession disputes and to

24 Charles Lewis Tupper, Our Indian Protectorate: An Introduction to the Study of the Relations between
the British Government and Its Indian Feudatories (London, 1893), p. 25.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

other allies threatened by rival regional powers. Treaties, usually but not al-
ways, stipulated the extent of and conditions under which such aid was ex-
tended. In a manner that reflects the imbricated relationship between power
and knowledge, which Edward Said and Michel Foucault have so forcefully
explicated, British treaty relations with Indian states have been extensively
described. British political officials such as Charles Aitchison, William Lee-
Warner and Charles Tupper during the nineteenth century, British historians,
most notably Edward Thompson during the 1940s, and Indian historians such
as A. C. Banerjee, Sukumar Bhattacharyya, M. S. Mehta and Urmila Walia all
participated in this project.?> While officials codified British practices, histo-
rians evinced disciplinary biases for the analysis of wars and treaties and for
working with accessible primary sources.

Initially the British sought to restrict relations, first between Indian rulers
and the French and then among Indian rulers. Gradually their influence per-
meated the internal administrations of the princely states. To illustrate how
the treaty system evolved, I will trace the British relationship with Hyderabad
over five crucial decades.

The British treaty system with one successor state: Hyderabad

During the War of Austrian Succession, first the French and then the English
Companies allied themselves with rival candidates in a dispute over the succes-
sion to the nawabship of the Carnatic, a little kingdom north of their respective
enclaves at Pondicherry and Madras. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748)
brought a brief hiatus in overt European hostilities in India, but eventually
the British-backed candidate, Muhammad Ali, was victorious in 1751 over the
French-supported Nawab Chanda Sahib. The British had acquired their first
political ally in India. Meanwhile, in 1748 the death of Nizam ul-Mulk Asaf
Jah I, the nawab of the Carnatic’s nominal overlord, launched a succession
dispute with higher stakes, which tempted the Marathas as well as the French
and the British to intervene.7°

Renewed military engagements during the Seven Years War culminated in
the British defeat of the French and the first treaty between the British and
Salabat Jang, the nizam of Hyderabad, who had been an ally of the French.
Concluded on 14 May 1759, this treaty was one between equals. Although

25 Thompson, Making; Banerjee, Rajput States; Sukumar Bhattacharyya, The Rajput States and the East
India Company from the Close of the 18th Century to 1820 (New Delhi, 1972); Mehta, Lord Hastings;
Walia, Changing British Attitudes.

26 Much of the following account is based on Regani, Nizam-British Relations and Zubaida Yazdani,
Hyderabad during the Residency of Henry Russell, 1811-1820 (Oxford, 1976).

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THE BRITISH CONSTRUCTION OF INDIRECT RULE

the nizam was a major regional power and the British were petty chieftains,
the latter had the more formidable military force. Thus the nizam had little
choice but to cede certain districts to the British, to employ no French, and
to prohibit them from settling in the districts transferred to the British. The
British in turn pledged not to assist or protect any of his enemies. The European
orientation of the British is apparent. The Indian perspective of the nizam led
to the isolation of his principal Indian rival, the Marathas.

Nizam Ali Khan, the diwan of Hyderabad who deposed his brother Salabat
Jang to become nizam from 1762 to 1803, sought British aid against the
Marathas. Despite having been bested by the Afghan forces in 1761, the
Marathas could still inflict two major defeats on Hyderabad forces in 1760 and
1763, winning the right to collect chauth and sardeshmukhi from Hyderabad.
Nizam Ali Khan thus agreed to a new treaty with the British in 1766 that
confirmed the Company in possession of the Northern Circars (Sarkars), a
string of districts on the eastern coast of India, which provided a key link
between the British base in Bengal and their outpost at Madras. In return,
the Company consented to assist the nizam with troops in ventures that were
not in conflict with their pre-existing commitments in the Carnatic and to an
annual rent of Rs 9 lakhs, which could be used to pay for troops supplied to the
nizam. The Company further pledged to place troops at his disposal. When the
nizam attacked the Marathas at Kharda in 1795, the British governor-general
refused any support since the peshwa was an ally of the British. After having
to surrender territories and pay tribute to the victorious peshwa, the nizam
decided to solicit the assistance of French officers in forming European-style
contingents.

Arriving in 1798, Lord Wellesley (1760-1842) was the first governor-general
to aspire to imperial power in India. To augment his limited resources for
military expeditions, Wellesley concluded another treaty with Hyderabad in
1798 that became a template for subsequent subsidiary alliances. The treaty
required that the nizam dismiss all French officers and pay Rs 24 lakhs for a
subsidiary force or contingent of six battalions that would be integrated with
the British military. The British were to arbitrate between the nizam and the
Marathas at Poona. The British ability to exact cash from Hyderabad and other
Indian states for military forces has led Sunil Chander to argue that military
fiscalism was the main impetus to foreign intervention in India during the
eighteenth century.”” Moreover, Fisher’s criterion of exclusive control by one
corporate body over another was met.

27 Chander, ‘Pre-Colonial Order to State’.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

After the British defeated Tipu Sultan in 1799, they concluded another treaty
with Hyderabad in 1800 that more clearly registered the latter’s subordinate
status. The nizam’s subsidiary force was increased by two battalions of infantry
and one regiment of cavalry, and the British agreed to protect the nizam from
enemies such as the Marathas, their erstwhile allies. The nizam also had to
cede more territory, to abstain from open warfare, and to submit any disputes
with other princes to British arbitration. He thus could not exercise one of
the prime functions of external sovereignty, the conduct of foreign affairs.
Moreover, he had accepted a major constraint on his internal sovereignty since
the subsidiary force was to be a constant, inflexible drain on his revenues.
The objectives of the Company and their attitudes towards their princely ally
are reflected in Wellesley’s despatch dated 4 February 1804 to his Resident at
Hyderabad:

The fundamental principle of His Excellency the Governor-General’ policy in establishing
subsidiary alliances with the principal states of India is to place those states in such a degree
of dependence on the British power as may deprive them of the means of prosecuting any
measures or of forming any confederacy hazardous to the security of the British empire,
and may enable us to preserve the tranquillity of India by exercising a general control
over those states, calculated to prevent the operation of that restless spirit of ambition and
violence which is the characteristic of every Asiatic government, and which from the earliest
period of Eastern history has rendered the peninsula of India the scene of perpetual warfare,
turbulence and disorder. The irremediable principles of Asiatic policy, and the varieties
and oppositions of character, habits and religions which distinguish the inhabitants of this
quarter of the globe, are adverse to the establishment of such a balance of power among
the several states of India as would effectually restrain the views of aggrandisement and
ambition and promote general tranquillity. This object can alone be accomplished by the
operation of a general control over the principal states of India established in the hands of a
superior power, and exercised with equity and moderation through the medium of alliances
contracted with those states on the basis of the security and protection of their respective
rights.78

The restless ambition and violence that had characterised British policy
since the mid-1750s were ascribed solely to Asian governments. Furthermore,
unspecified characters, habits and religions foreclosed the possibility of the bal-
ance of power that supposedly regulated interstate relations in Europe. Based on
this racist construction of Indian politics, Wellesley claimed moral justification
for the British assumption of superior controlling authority in India.

Once the British assumed control of Hyderabadi foreign relations, they be-
gan to penetrate the internal administration of Hyderabad in 1803 through the

28 Despatch of 4 February 1804 quoted in Tupper, Indian Protectorate, pp. 40-1.

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THE BRITISH CONSTRUCTION OF INDIRECT RULE

appointment of a sympathetic diwan. After the British rewarded Hyderabad
with the fertile Berar province they had appropriated from Nagpur and other
Maratha districts, Nizam Sikander Jah had to accept the British-suggested ap-
pointment of Mir Alam as diwan. As their external and internal sovereignty was
being curtailed, Sikander Jah and his successors retreated to their inner palace
or zenana, where they exerted influence through the manipulation of factions
at their courts.”? The British came to view the nizams as indifferent to affairs
of state that diwans controlled through alliances with domineering residents
such as Henry Russell (1811-20), Charles Theophilus Metcalfe (1820-25)
and James Stewart Fraser (1838-53). Here is an early instance of a continu-
ing phenomenon where an Indian ruler withdraws from active involvement
in administrative affairs when a British-sponsored diwan, or later a coterie of
skilled bureaucrats, monopolises power within a state administration. A later
example of an eclipsed ruler in Hyderabad occurred when Salar Jung served
from 1853 to 1883 as chief minister of Hyderabad. He enjoyed such firm
British support that they permitted his son, even though he was a minor, to
succeed him as diwan.*° Similar arrangements materialised in other states and
will be discussed in subsequent chapters.

Further treaties refined the relationship between Hyderabad and the Com-
pany. In 1822 a treaty ended the obligation to pay to the British the chauth that
Hyderabad theoretically owed to the Marathas, and it established well-defined
boundaries for Hyderabad through an exchange of territories. One in 1829
guaranteed British non-intervention, but another in 1853 leased the revenue
of Berar to the British as payment for the Hyderabad Contingent and gained
them access to the raw cotton of Berar sought by both Chinese markets and
Manchester textiles mills.>!

From 1759 to 1853 the British concluded numerous treaties with Hyderabad
that extended British control and reduced the nizam’s autonomy. The four
criteria of indirect rule were clearly met. Both sides acknowledged British con-
trol as effective; the British were undoubtedly the dominant power; all rivals,
both foreign (French) and domestic (Mysore and Marathas), were excluded;
but the Hyderabad administration still exercised significant sovereign rights
such as the collection of revenues and legal jurisdiction over its subjects within
its territories. Although Hyderabad had to concede substantial resources in

29 Peter Wood, ‘Vassal State’, pp. 40, 64.

30 Vasant K. Bawa, ‘The Interregnum in Hyderabad after the Death of Salar Jung I: 1883-1884, JBR
15 (1988), pp. 79-89.

3! Tara Sethia, ‘Berar and the Nizam’s State Railway: Politics of British Interests in Hyderabad State,
1853-1883,’ IBR 15 (1988), pp. 59-61.

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British Residency at Hyderabad by Captain Grindlay, from Views in India, China and on the shores of the Red Sea.

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THE BRITISH CONSTRUCTION OF INDIRECT RULE

men, revenue and commercial products to its British suzerain, the state and
particular subjects gained some benefits.

Several of the early treaties increased and then consolidated the territory
of Hyderabad. Even the controversial lease of 1853 might have reduced the
likelihood of full annexation by Dalhousie. Many Hyderabadi military offi-
cers, revenue farmers and peasants suffered, but other groups profited from
the British-induced reforms. Sunil Chander has described how the British pro-
motion of military fiscalism in Hyderabad extended centralised state control
over many intermediaries and benefited those willing to serve as collectors
and officials for British-inspired land settlements that raised funds to pay for
British-imposed military forces.*” The system of indirect rule extended and
reinforced British power, but Hyderabad continued to exist as a state.

From treaties to subsidiary alliances to indirect rule

Ring fence or first phase of treaties among equals, 1759-85

The earliest treaties that the Company negotiated with Indian states during
the 1730s — two with the small coastal states of Sawantwadi and Janjira and
one with the peshwa — regulated maritime and commercial affairs, especially
the suppression of piracy. However, the first major phase of the treaty system
is more appropriately dated to the turbulent years 1759-65. Then treaties
did not include any formal mechanisms of intervention in internal affairs or
restrictions on the external sovereignty of the Indian states. The earliest treaty
of friendship and alliance, with vague promises of military assistance, was the
one concluded with Hyderabad in 1759, described above.

In 1765 Robert Clive allied with Shuja ud-Daula of Awadh to maintain a
buffer state between the Company’s new base in Bengal and the Marathas. He
laid the foundation for what Lee-Warner labelled the ring fence policy of using
a barrier of Indian allies to insulate the trading and territorial frontiers of the
Company from potentially hostile groups. Warren Hastings elaborated this
policy in 1773 when he rented a subsidiary force to Shujaud-Daula of Awadh.
Subsequently the nawab attacked the Afghan Rohillas, who had not paid their
tribute to him, since as Richard Barnett has pointed out, “The Rohillas thus
became to Awadh what Awadh was to the Company, and when they failed
to pay their installments on time, they provided a ready-made justification
for annexation’.** Hastings’ acquiescence would be one issue leading to his
impeachment. Responding to contemporary critics who claimed that he loaned

32 Chander, ‘Pre-colonial Order to State,’ pp. 89-140. 33 Barnett, North India, p- 93.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

troops to Awadh solely to obtain the rental payment, the governor-general
asserted that he

engaged to assist the Vizier [Shuja-ud-Daula] in reducing the Rohilla country under his
dominion, that the boundary of his possessions might be completed by the Ganges forming
a barrier to cover them from the attacks and insults to which they are exposed by his enemies
either possessing or having access to the Rohilla country. Thus our alliance with him, and
the necessity for maintaining this alliance, so long as he or his successor shall deserve our

protection, was rendered advantageous to the Company’s interest, because the security of

his possessions from invasion in that quarter is in fact the security of ours.*4

In other words, Hastings assisted the nawab of Awadh in order to allow this
faithful ally to expand at the expense of a mutual enemy. Strategic interests,
clearly not moral superiority, informed British policy.

After his governor in Bombay undertook inconclusive military action against
the Marathas, Hastings concluded treaties of friendship and military alliance
with two Maratha rivals, Bhonsle and Scindia, in 1781. Madhaji Scindia agreed
to intercede in negotiating peace with Haider Ali of Mysore and the peshwa at
Poona, and the British pledged to remain neutral in the face of Scindia’s expan-
sion north and westward that would gain Gwalior as his capital.*° The next
year Scindia served as a guarantor for the Treaty of Salbai between the British
and the peshwa, which established a status quo between those two powers. At
the same time the British repudiated earlier treaties with the gaekwad of Baroda
(1780) and with the Jat ruler of Dholpur which offered ‘perpetual’ friendship
(1779). These reversals clearly revealed that the Company would sacrifice lesser
allies to achieve accommodation with more powerful rivals. While the treaties
with Bhonsle, Scindia, and the peshwa were made between equals for ostensi-
bly strategic objectives, the British were influencing internal Maratha politics.
For example, their treaties of 1781 and 1782 provided legitimation for Scindia
as an autonomous power.

Lord Cornwallis, an aristocratic general whose political and military rep-
utation survived the surrender of the British force at Yorktown in 1783 to
the victorious American colonists, succeeded Hastings as governor-general in
1786. He had specific instructions to avoid costly military expeditions and
annexations and to pursue a policy of non-intervention. Most sources view
him as following instructions explicitly. Cornwallis nevertheless concluded a

34 GW. Forrest (ed.), Selections from the State Papers of the Governors-General of India, 4 vols (Oxford,
1910), vol. 1, p. 50.

35 A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads relating to India and Neighbouring Countries, com-
piled by C. U. Aitchison, vol. 5; The Treaties, &c., Relating to Central India (Part II — Bundelkhand
and Baghelkhand) and Gwalior, rev. edn of 1929 (Delhi, 1933), p. 379.

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THE BRITISH CONSTRUCTION OF INDIRECT RULE

Triple Alliance with the peshwa and the nizam against Tipu Sultan in July
1790 and embarked on the Third Anglo-Mysore War from 1790 to 1792,
personally taking command on the battlefield. He also concluded treaties of
friendship and alliance with Coorg in 1790, which was annexed in 1834, and
with Cochin in 1791 to secure his flanks against Mysore. Thus a desire to
isolate Mysore, arguably the strongest antagonist of the British, spawned new
treaties, commitments, and even military confrontations.

The record of Sir John Shore, the Company servant who succeeded Corn-
wallis as governor-general (1793-98), reveals that strategic opportunities could
tempt another non-interventionist to expand the Company’s political commit-
ments. B. B. Srivastava admits that Shore ‘did not possess the boldness of Lord
Cornwallis or the initiative and aggressiveness of Lord Wellesley’ but that his
‘cautious non-intervention’ did not preclude assertive actions.*° In one in-
stance, territorial considerations, namely the need to protect the districts on
the Malabar coast recently acquired from Mysore, and the desire to counter
the French, led Shore to accept the proposal of the raja of Travancore for a
permanent treaty of friendship and defensive alliance in 1795.

In another case Shore deposed Wazir Ali, the adopted son and proclaimed
heir of Nawab Asaf ud-Daula of Awadh, only four months after he had suc-
ceeded his putative father in 1798. The British masked their suspicions that
Wazir Ali was engaged in anti-British activities by allegations regarding his
legitimacy. Shore himself went to Lucknow and placed Sa’adat Ali Khan, the
brother of Asaf, who had been living in Banaras under Company protection, on
the gaddi. The grateful victor in this succession dispute entered a treaty with the
Company in 1798 that accelerated Company penetration into Awadh affairs,
granted the key fort at Allahabad to the British, and enhanced the annual sub-
sidy of Awadh to Rs 76 lakhs.*” These two incidents indicate that even under
a reticent governor-general, the policies of intervention and non-intervention
in the internal affairs of Indian states were not mutually exclusive. Rather, they
were deployed with differing emphases or frequencies in response to politi-
cal circumstances in Europe, to political visions of governors-general, and to
strategic and financial imperatives of British power in India.

Lord Wellesley and subsidiary alliances, 1798-1805
The arrival of Lord Wellesley in 1798 inaugurated the second major phase of
the evolution of the treaty system. The significance that he ascribed to this

36 B. B. Srivastava, Sir John Shore’ Policy Towards the Indian States (Allahabad, 1981), pp. 244, 234,
239; Barnett, North India, pp. 230-2.
37 Fisher, Clash, pp. 90-3.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

policy is represented in a print of 1807 where Wellesley stands before copies
of subsidiary treaties with Hyderabad and Mysore on a nearby table.*8

The subsidiary alliance system entrenched the superior position of the Com-
pany and the subordinate one of the princes by restricting their exercise of key
sovereign powers, especially the waging of war and direct communication with
other rulers. Wellesley had imperial ambitions for the Company and followed
different policies towards the Marathas and Mysore, whom he deemed his two
principal protagonists.

To defeat Mysore militarily and to contain the Marathas by treaties, Wellesley
sought to isolate both from possible allies and then to acquire the military assis-
tance needed to achieve his objectives.*? Since the Court of Directors in London
wanted to minimise expenses and maximise profits, this ambitious governor-
general sought aid from the two Mughal successor states, with differing con-
sequences for Hyderabad and Awadh. The treaty of 1798 with Hyderabad
described earlier produced military support through a subsidiary force. Because
the nizam became in arrears of payment for the so-called Hyderabad Contin-
gent, the state contracted extensive debts to the Palmer & Sons Bank. Michael
Fisher has emphasised that these obligations to the British bank and to British
officials operating in their private capacity ultimately reduced the possibility of
an annexation of Hyderabad.*° Such action would kill a goose that laid golden
eggs. Asa result, Hyderabad would survive as a princely state but Awadh would
not. Although the 1798 treaty, as discussed earlier, had obtained an increased
subsidy from Awadh, Wellesley made new demands. After threatening to an-
nex the entire Awadh state, in 1801 he concluded a treaty with Sa’adat Ali
Khan that effectively ended the independent Awadhi army, imposed an en-
larged subsidiary force, and annexed the districts of Rohilkhand, Gorakhpur
and the Doab (the territory between the Ganges and the Jumna) as payment
for the subsidiary force even though the nawab had been current in his tribute
payments.*! Although Sa’adat Ali Khan was able to consolidate his control
over his one remaining province of Awadh and to develop a new capital at
Lucknow, the British annexed Awadh in 1856.

After the defeat of Mysore in 1799, the British treaty added some
Mysorean districts to their expanding Madras Presidency and rewarded their
ally Hyderabad with other districts. As noted earlier, the British then returned a

38 Robert Home (1752-1834) painted several portraits of Wellesley during his tenure in India, most
of which included copies of the treaties with Hyderabad and Mysore: Mildred Archer, India and
British Portraiture 1770-1825 (London, 1979), pp. 314-17.

39 This section relies heavily on Thompson, Making.

40 Fisher, Indirect Rule, pp. 388-90; Peter Wood, ‘Vassal State’.

41 Barnett, North India, pp. 235-7; Fisher, Clash, pp. 90-107.

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Lord Wellesley by James Heath after portrait by Robert Home,
London 1807.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

truncated but geographically compact Mysore to the Wadiyars, the Hindu
dynasty that had been usurped in 1761 by its Muslim military ally, Haider
Ali. They emphatically proclaimed the subordinate position of the restored
infant ruler, Krishnaraja Wadiyar, by mandating the exclusion of all French
influence and the stipulation that Mysore could not communicate with
any foreign power without the prior knowledge and sanction of the British. A
more onerous sign of Mysore’s subordination was the imposition of an annual
subsidy of Rs 24.5 lakhs, which represented 57 per cent of the presumed
state revenue. This sum came to constitute 50 per cent of the British tribute
collected from 198 princely states. Burton Stein has argued that the need to
secure revenues to pay this subsidy was one of the factors that led the durbar to
reform its tax-farming system. Subsequently this extension of central control
into previously semi-autonomous local areas in Mysore provoked the Nagar
1.” The British then used their suppression of this
disorder to legitimate their direct management of Mysore state for the next
fifty years.

With Mysore subdued with golden cords, Wellesley confronted the
Marathas. Although entitled as a member of the Triple Alliance to a share of
the territory taken from Mysore by the British in 1799, the peshwa refused in
order to avoid the imposition of a subsidiary alliance. Wellesley then proceeded

insurrection in 1830—3

to deal separately with the individual members of the Maratha confederacy.
His action reflected an imperial strategy of divide and rule. It was, however,
facilitated by the longstanding rivalries among the Maratha states, the lack
of astute Maratha leaders after the deaths of Mahadji Scindia and Ahilyabai
of Indore, their geographical dispersion, and the diminished authority of the
peshwa.

In Gujarat, where the gaeckwad was geographically isolated from the Maratha
home base in Poona, asuccession dispute after 1800 gave Wellesley an easy entry
into Baroda state. The governor of Bombay sent a force of 2000 troops under
Major Alexander Walker (1764-1831) to arbitrate between two contenders for
the Baroda gaddi, and this veteran of the Mysore campaigns decided in favour
of Anandrao and his diwan, Raoji Appaji. After crushing the other rivals and
replacing Arab mercenaries as guarantors of government measures and loans,
Walker and his superior concluded a subsidiary alliance in 1802 with the newly
enthroned gaekwad that imposed a subsidiary force in return for a cession of
territories. Additional fertile districts were ceded in 1803 and 1805. A novel

42 Burton Stein, ‘Notes on “Peasant Insurgency” in Colonial Mysore; Event and Process’, SAR 5
(1985), p. 22 and note 8 on page 25 based on work of Sebastian Joseph, ‘Mysore’s Tribute to the
Imperial Treasury: A Classic Example of Economic Exploitation’, Q /MS 70 (1979), pp. 154-63.

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THE BRITISH CONSTRUCTION OF INDIRECT RULE

feature at this stage was a British guarantee to Raoji Appaji that his heirs would
be diwans of Baroda. They would later regret this promise, but it gave the
British useful leverage in the internal administration of Baroda. Walker, the
first British resident in Baroda, reorganised its revenue collection and military
organisation, disbanding the disruptive Arab mercenaries and re-forming the
subsidiary force into an efficient unit.”

Meanwhile the peshwa himself became more amenable to a subsidiary al-
liance after Holkar had defeated the combined forces of his nominal overlord
and Scindia. The Treaty of Bassein in 1802 imposed a subsidiary force of six
battalions, the obligation to submit disputes with the nizam and the gaekwad
to the British, and the need to consult with the British before negotiating
with any other powers. A few months later, the British confronted Scindia
and the bhonsle of Nagpur in the Second Maratha War. The British victory
at Assaye, where Arthur Wellesley, brother of the governor-general and the
future Duke of Wellington, was in command, led to the treaties of 1803
with both Scindia and Holkar. The former was removed from his position
in the Ganges-Jumna doab in the north and from the Deccan to the south
and accepted a subsidiary force that was stationed in British territory near his
frontier. Here again, these treaties confirmed the independent status of Scindia
and Bhonsle from their Maratha overlord while not yet making them tributary
to the British since cession of territory paid for the subsidiary force. As a conse-
quence of the campaign against Holkar, who had expanded northward beyond
Delhi, Wellesley as a matter of expediency offered an offensive and defensive
alliance to the relatively new Rajput state of Alwar, recently separated from
Jaipur, and of perpetual friendship to the vacillating Jat ruler of Bharatpur in
1803. The other major Jat-ruled state of Dholpur entered the treaty map in
1806. These three allies would provide a friendly frontier on the western side of
Awadh.“

Far to the south, 1803 witnessed an example of how timely assistance to
the British created anomalies in the treaty map. When the British assumed the
administrative powers of its longstanding ally, the nawab of Carnatic at Arcot
in 1801, it claimed the overlordship of his petty tributaries, the poligars or
palaiyakkarars. The Permanent Settlement of 1803 in the Madras Presidency
transformed these poligars into zamindars with extensive rights over the pro-
duce of the land but also regular revenue obligations to the British. The one
Tamil poligar to escape this process was in Pudukkottai. He had rendered both

43 John Edmond McLeod, The Western India States Agency 1916-1947, PhD thesis, University of
Toronto (1993), pp. 16-24.
44 Thompson, Making, pp. 43-124.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

military assistance and badly needed supplies to the British from 1751 to their
last campaigns against Mysore.*? The lack of any treaty or sanad defining the
status of Pudukkottai illustrates the haphazard process of incorporation of In-
dian political entities into the British treaty map. When Pudukkottai asked for
certain honours that the nawab had granted, the British allowed him to have a
white umbrella and gold chubdar sticks, Hindu symbols of sovereignty, carried
before him as well as a fort and a district that the raja of Tanjore had seized
some years before. The British demanded one elephant a year ““as a mark of
homage for the tenure”’, but the Tondaiman ruler avoided paying this tribute
until it was excused in 1839.*° Thus the British revealed a willingness to deal
in the indigenous coin of honours as well as their imported specie of treaties,
especially when stakes were deemed negligible.
Continuing British extension during an era of
non-intervention, 1805-13

Lord Minto, the governor-general from 1807 to 1813, is usually characterised as
a pacific interlude between two expansionists. Thompson has described Minto
as ‘quiet and friendly’ and a writer of letters that were ‘witty and observant,
strangely modern in tone’.4” While Minto remained steadfast in not extending
Company protection to the Rajput states, he transplanted several clumps of
smaller chiefs into the soil of British indirect rule. Perhaps other historians
have played down this intervention since few treaties were concluded. Bonds,
proclamations and sanads were the usual instruments. In the interregnum
between Wellesley and Minto, the Company had first extended its protection
and then recognition of their internal autonomy to little kings in Bundelkhand
such as Baoni, Chhatarpur, Maihar in 1806, and Ajaigarh, Datia, Panna, Sarila
in 1807. These client states barred any advances by Holkar against recently
acquired British territory on the Jumna.

Another example of British aggrandisement during a supposedly non-
interventionist era occurred in Gujarat, particularly in Saurashtra, the penin-
sula known as Kathiawar (from its Kathi rulers) during the British period.“*
Analysing the Bombay Presidency, Ian Copland has applied Cohn’s structural
model. Until 1756 the imperial authority was the Mughal emperor, whom
the peshwa then replaced. At the secondary level the provincial governors

45 Dirks, Hollow Crown, pp. 192-9, 385-9.

46 Thid., p. 387. 47 Thompson, Making, p. 150.

48 Saurashtra was the ancient name and after 1947 was again used for this peninsula. Major sources are
Copland, British Raj; John E. McLeod, Sovereignty, Power, Control: Rulers, Politicians, and Paramount
Power in the States of Western India, 1916-1947 (Leiden, 1999); Harald Tambs-Lyche, Power, Profit
and Poetry: Traditional Society in Kathiawar, Western India (New Delhi, 1997).

49 Copland, British Raj, pp. 19-25.

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THE BRITISH CONSTRUCTION OF INDIRECT RULE

deriving their authority from the imperial level were the gaekwads of Baroda
in the north and the rajas of Satara and Kolhapur in the south. The regional
level in Gujarat consisted mainly of Rajput-ruled states such as the Jhala in
Dhrangadhara, Limbdi, Wankaner and Wadhwan; the Jadeja ones of Kutch,
Nawanagar, Rajkot, Dhrol, Gondal and Morvi; the Jethwa at Porbandar; and
the Gohels of Bhavnagar and Palitana. Some Kathi-ruled states, such as Jasdan
as well as Jungadh, a successor state founded by a Mughal official, also belong
in this category. Bhayad (the brotherhood) and girassia (petty chiefs) consti-
tuted the fourth level of petty chiefs and landholders and were overlapping
categories. Girassia were those to whom a ruler granted land, in return for
which the recipients had obligations of military or religious service. Bhayad
were younger sons to whom Rajput, and sometimes Kathi, rulers granted the
right to collect revenue from a group of villages and to dispense criminal justice.
Thus bhayad were a subset of girassia and distinguished by their hereditary ties
to rulers. As provincial and regional rulers confronted aggressive challenges in
the late 1700s, some bhayad and girassia developed little kingdoms.

After their 1802 treaty with Baroda, the British sought to stabilise condi-
tions in western Gujarat. Recognising the inefficiency and destructiveness of the
mulkgiri or yearly military expedition that the gaekwad used to extract tribute
from subordinate rulers, Walker, the British resident, attempted to rationalise
the system with two kinds of bonds. One pledged the regional or petty
chief to promote peace, to protect the possessions of the British, the peshwa
and the gaekwad, including their merchants, and not to give sanctuary to
thieves. The other required fixed annual tributes in return for abolition of the
mulkgiri. Bards were to be the guarantors of the payment since they could
enforce payment by threatening to kill themselves, and Rajputs considered
causing the death of a bard a grievous sin.°’ Most of the regional states signed
such bonds in 1807. Further agreements pledged the Rajput chiefs to prohibit
female infanticide within their realms and piracy on their coasts.

Although the Walker Settlement re-established order, it also provided the
basis for extensive fragmentation of political authority in western India. Walker
initially invited twenty-nine regional rulers to sign the bonds. But to secure all
previous sources of revenue, he then concluded bonds with whoever was pay-
ing tribute, whether they paid directly to a regional ruler or to the higher levels
of gaekwad or peshwa. John McLeod has argued that Walker and the bhayads
had thought that the bonds maintained the status quo of the latter as petty
landlords. However, later British officials, unaware of the diffused nature of

50 McLeod, Sovereignty, pp. 17-18.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

power in Rajput states, either consciously or unconsciously, misinterpreted the
bonds and created 153 supposedly sovereign rulers from subordinate bhayad
and girassia.*! Despite the absorption of eighty of these little kingdoms into
other estates, according to various authorities their number expanded during
the nineteenth century from around 350 to 418. Rajput ruling families fol-
lowed primogeniture, with younger sons receiving a small number of villages
in giras, but Kathi ruling families divided states equally among all sons. In
1903 and 1904 the British attempted to impose the practice of primogeni-
ture on Kathi-ruled states, but because of Indian resistance, they compromised
in 1908 and agreed to consider each instance of succession on its merits.”
Western India had the largest numerical concentration of princely states, but
only a small percentage exercised internal sovereignty. The significance of this
blurring of the broad category of princely states will figure in subsequent
chapters.

To maintain law and order and to ensure a fixed amount of revenue that
would allow for both a reduced military force and a more rationalised adminis-
tration since the Baroda durbar would now be able to plan expenditures — one
should not use the word budget — with greater regularity, Alexander Walker
presaged the later British emphasis on the establishment of efficient adminis-
tration within the princely states. At the same time he undercut the authority
of the gaekwad by introducing the British as an alternative source of authority
for the regional powers who paid tribute to the gaekwad.

As the British now allowed the gaekwad to collect his tribute independently
of the peshwa, so now regional rulers could appeal to the British, thereby
affirming their autonomy from their tributary lord, Baroda. Mani Kamerkar
highlights the example of Morvi, a Jadeja Rajput-ruled state, which appealed to
the British for remission of tribute in 1817 because of alleged natural disasters
and lack of law and order. After extended deliberations, Captain Barnwell, the
British resident, urged that Morvi make full payment to Baroda. His superior,
the Government of Bombay, however, granted Morvi the concession of paying
only a third of the arrears and decreed that in the future Baroda would continue
to receive only one-third while the other two-thirds should go to the Company
to whom the peshwa had yielded his claim.*? Yet again, Indian rulers learned to
appeal to differing levels of the British hierarchy to achieve a favourable decision

51 McLeod, ‘Western India’, ch. 2.

>2 C. U. Aitchison (comp.), A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads relating to India and
Neighbouring Countries (Calcutta, 1932), vol. 6, pp. 1-30.

>3 Mani Kamerkar, British Paramountcy: British-Baroda Relations 1818-1848 (Bombay, 1980),
pp. 35-6.

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THE BRITISH CONSTRUCTION OF INDIRECT RULE

ona request. Simultaneously, British residents undercut the authority of their
subsidiary allies by supporting claims of subordinates against the prerogatives
of their allies.

Ultimately the British affirmed their political sovereignty in Gujarat by an
agreement in 1820 with Baroda. Although it made no treaties with other states
in Saurashtra, the Company further extended its political authority with the
establishment of a Criminal Court of Justice at Rajkot in 1831. The political
agent presided and three or four chiefs served as assessors to try capital cases
and crimes by one chief against another.

Further to the north, Charles Theophilus Metcalfe (1785-1846), a seri-
ous, circumspect young man of 23, was sent by Minto in June 1808 to the
Lahore court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the 28-year-old ruler of Punjab.
Metcalfe’s instructions were to negotiate a treaty of offensive and defensive
alliance to create a barrier against a British-imagined French advance towards
India through Persia and Afghanistan. When the wily Ranjit Singh scoffed at a
French threat and marched to Faridkot to demonstrate his dominance with an
uncomfortable Metcalfe in tow, Minto and his envoy decided to stand forth
as the protector of the cis-Sutlej, Sikh-ruled states which had earlier received
a noncommittal reply to their plea for protection from their ambitious Sikh
neighbour. Thus on 25 April 1809, Metcalfe and Ranjit Singh signed a treaty
affirming a British attitude of laissez-faire towards any expansion by Ranjit
north of the Sutlej. The Sikh ruler was therefore free to advance northward to
Himalayan hill-states such as Kashmir and westward to Multan and Peshawar
near the Khyber Pass. In return he agreed not to encroach southward. Eight
days later the British proclaimed to the chiefs south of the Sutlej:

It is clearer than the sun, and better proved than the existence of yesterday, that the de-
tachment of British Troops to this side of the Sutlege was entirely in acquiescence to the

application and earnest entreaty of the Chiefs, and originated solely through friendly con-

siderations in the British to preserve the Chiefs in their possessions and independence.”

Besides obtaining British protection, the cis-Sutlej rulers were exempted
from the payment of tribute but obliged to provide military assistance to
the British when requested. Lee-Warner contended that ‘[t]his treaty, which
was practically forced upon Lord Minto, as much by the old scare of French
aggression as by the bold policy of the ruler of the Punjab, fitly closed the

54 Edward Thompson, Life of Lord Metcalfe (London, 1937) in Metcalfe and Grewal, Sikhs of Punjab,
ch. 6.

°C. U. Aitchson (comp.), A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads Relating to India and
Neighbouring Countries, vol. 1 (Nendlem, Lichtenstein, 1973, reprint of edition published in 1931),
p- 156.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

first period of the policy of non-intervention’.*° Although Edward Thompson
also emphasised the motivating factor of the French threat,”” the cis-Sutlej
states gained British protection because of political expediency. They were a
functional buffer between British-controlled territory near Delhi and Agra and
an astute, energetic Indian ruler who had demonstrated the power of troops
officered, trained and equipped by Europeans and supported by solid revenues
from agriculture and commerce.

In the same year Minto signed a vague treaty of eternal friendship with the
Amirs along the Indus River, who pledged not to ‘allow the Establishment
of the tribe of the French in Sind’.°® In 1812 the governor-general concluded
treaties of alliance with Nawanagar in Kathiawar and the Rajput-ruled states of
Orchha and Rewa in Bundelkhand. Minto probably acquired his reputation for
non-intervention because his treaties did not follow military expeditions except
for an invasion of Nawanagar. His actions, nonetheless, demonstrate that any
British governor-general was prepared to risk criticism from the authorities in
England to buttress the expanding Company state against Indian rivals.

The triumph of paramountcy, 1813-23

The arrival of Lord Moira, later to become Lord Hastings, as governor-general
in 1813 accelerated the incorporation of the Indian states onto the treaty map of
India and inaugurated the era of subordinate isolation for Indian princes. Lee-
Warner portrayed Hastings as lacking Cornwallis’ faith that stronger Indian
states would encompass weaker ones and become good neighbours, on the
model of Ranjit Singh, but also not believing as Lord Dalhousie would ‘that
the good of the people required annexations’.°? Although most commenta-
tors mention that Hastings concluded more treaties than any other governor-
general, they are less apt to point out that despite his alleged lack of interest in
annexation, he was a major participant in rounding out the Company’s directly
controlled territories.

Hastings first had to confront the expansionist Gurkha rulers of Nepal.
After the short but costly Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814—16, both sides accepted
the need to compromise.® A treaty in 1816 allowed the British to recruit
Gurkha soldiers for its military, but Nepal remained an internally au-
tonomous state able to pursue independent relations with bordering states.°!
Neighbouring Bhutan and Sikkim were more clearly subordinated to Company

> Lee-Warner, Native States, p. 88. °7 Thompson, Making, pp. 157-66.

8 Tbid., p. 156. >) Lee-Warner, Native States, pp. 102-3.

60 J. Premble, The Invasion of Nepal: John Company at War (Oxford, 1971); C. A. Bayly, Empire and
Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge,
1996), pp. 97-113.

61 Thompson, Making, pp. 188-200.

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control. Further west in the Himalayan foothills, the British made several small
political units south of the Sutlej independent of their larger neighbours, cre-
ating several minuscule states. Finally the British fed tidbits of the Himalayan
foothills to newly acquired allies including the raja of Patiala.

After this curtain-raiser on the Company’s northern frontier, Hastings per-
formed his main act in the Maratha-dominated heartland of central India. His
immediate antagonists were the pindari bands who accumulated the produce of
the cultivating peasants through irregular marauding rather than bureaucratic
land revenue settlements. Characterising state formation in Malwa, Stewart
Gordon stresses that “states” and “marauders” were not different in kind,
but only in relative degrees of success in conquest, revenue collection, and
infrastructure-building. All were involved in the same process, with the same
ends, using the same sources of legitimatization’.© The British would even be
willing to assist at least two pindari leaders, Tonk and Jaora, in the process of
state formation.

Pindari raids into the British presidency of Madras in 1816 and 1817 hard-
ened British resolve to terminate this recurring threat. The British invited its
Maratha allies, who functioned as protectors to various pindari leaders, to join
their efforts, which involved an army of over 100 000 including 13 000 Euro-
peans.® This British force was divided into two units, a northern one under
the personal command of Hastings and a southern one under the commander-
in-chief of Madras, who was accompanied by John Malcolm as a military and
political officer. Malcolm, whom Thompson judged the most popular man
in India,“ had an unusually wide range of experiences, from military service
in Mysore to a diplomatic mission to Persia. He had eagerly sought this joint
appointment, which reflected a continuing link between military and political
service by Company officers who dealt with Indian states.

As Hastings advanced against the pindaris, he was able to invest much
of Scindia’s territory and so the most powerful Maratha leader agreed to a
subsidiary alliance. This treaty of 5 November 1817 allowed Scindia to retain
the tribute from his subordinate states after giving it up for three years to
the British; it required him to fight in a coordinated manner with the British
against the pindaris, not to shelter any of the pindaris, and to give two forts as
security for lines of communications. The British obtained the right to make
treaties with the Rajput states who had been tributary to Scindia. Afterwards
the peshwa sarcastically advised Scindia that ‘it is befitting you to put bangles

62 Stewart Gordon, ‘Scarf and Sword: Things, Maranders, and State-formation in 18th Century
Malwa’, JESHR 6 (1969), p. 425.
63 Thompson, Making, pp. 208-23; S. Sen, Distant Sovereignty, pp. 52-4. 64 Tbid., p. 167.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

on your arms, and sit down like a woman’.© The bhonsle raja at Nagpur
and belatedly Holkar at Indore tried to strengthen their position by ill-timed
attacks on British stations; they paid for their ineffective resistance.

Four days later, the British formally invested Amir Khan, a prominent pin-
dari leader, as the nawab of Tonk and confirmed his possession of the districts
he had detached from Indore state. In their generosity to Tonk with Indore’s
territory, the British added the fort and district of Rampura. On 6 January 1818
two key political officers concluded treaties with the two remaining principal
Maratha military rulers. Richard Jenkins negotiated with the bhonsle raja of
Nagpur. Territory yielding Rs 24 lakhs was divided with the nizam, but Bhonsle
Appa Sahib remained on his gaddi. Hastings had intended to dethrone Appa
Sahib, but the political officer in the field exercised formidable authority. The
governor-general soon had his way as Appa Sahib continued to intrigue against
the British, and by March 1818 he was deposed and replaced by Raghuji I, a
maternal grandson of his predecessor and brother. Malcolm dealt with the boy
ruler of Indore. He had to accept the creation of Tonk, to cede further territo-
ries to the British, to discharge his army, to agree not to employ any Europeans
or Americans, and to transfer his tributary Rajput states to the Company.

Malcolm then negotiated with Peshwa Baji Rao II, who was the last to
surrender. The peshwa lost his title and his right to live in the Deccan, being
asked to move to a sacred Hindu site on the Ganges. He eventually selected
Bithur near Kanpur. A sympathetic Malcolm granted him a pension of Rs 8
lakhs, earning the censure of Hastings for this generosity. After the death of
Baji Rao in 1851 his adopted son, Dhondo Pant, better known as Nana Sahib,
was denied this pension and became one of the leaders of the revolt of 1857.
Hastings in turn confirmed the descendants of the elder son of Shivaji as the
rulers of Satara and is usually lauded as a king-maker for this action.

With Maratha power circumscribed by their treaty system and superior
military force, the British extended their protection to many states tributary
to the Marathas. Charles Metcalfe invited the Rajput chiefs, who had long
sought protection, to become British feudatories and thereby transfer payment
of any tribute owed to the Marathas to the Company. Karauli, Kotah, Marwar-
Jodhpur, Mewar-Udaipur and Bundi joined in January 1818; Jaipur agreed in
April 1818; Partabgarh, Dungarpur and Jaisalmer closed the circle by the end
of 1818.

In central India the British concluded a treaty with Nawab Nazar Muham-
mad of Bhopal, who had been an informal ally of the British against the

6 Surendra Nath Roy, A History of the Native States of India (Calcutta, 1888), vol. 1, p. 325.

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THE BRITISH CONSTRUCTION OF INDIRECT RULE

pindaris. He agreed to furnish a military contingent and received five districts
in Malwa. Bhopal now became the third most populous Muslim-ruled state in
India. Finally Malcolm recognised 143 chieftainships by sanads, and thus the
second major concentration (after that in western India) of little kings became
allies of the Company. Malcolm’s assessment of the British work in central
India was optimistic.

With the means we had at our command, the work of force was comparatively easy: the
liberality of our Government gave grace to conquest, and men were for the moment satisfied
to be at the feet of generous and humane conquerors. Wearied with a state of continued
warfare and anarchy, they hardly regretted even the loss of power: halcyon days were antic-
ipated, and men prostrated themselves in hopes of elevation. All these impressions, made

by the combined effects of power, humanity, and fortune, were improved to the utmost by

the character of our first measures.

What Malcolm viewed as anarchy were conditions that the British partially
spawned when they reduced indigenous military forces and left many armed
men underemployed. Furthermore, the inflexible British demands for tributes
and subsidies to fund their military machine led many Indian rulers to in-
crease their demands on hard-pressed peasants, whose resistance contributed
to disorder in the countryside.

When Lord Hastings left India in 1823, the broad outline of what came to be
known as princely or Indian India, in contrast to British India, had been defined
on British maps. There were three great blocks of what were called native state
territories. The largest one was the massive conglomeration of Rajput- and
Maratha-ruled states, which spread from Gujarat in the west through Rajasthan
to Malwa and Rewa in central India. This broad band included the states and
estates of Saurashtra; the deserts of Rajasthan with Rajput rulers and large
populations of aboriginal tribal groups; northern central India with the small
states of Bundelkhand and Baghelkhand; and the Maratha holdings of the
northern Deccan. In the east there was Maratha-ruled Nagpur and the Orissan
states, constituting the Tributary Mahals of Chota Nagpur. With significant
tribal populations, petty chieftains ruled in the latter states and came under
British jurisdiction from 1817 to 1825. In the south, Hyderabad and Mysore
dominated the interior, with Travancore and Cochin on the southwestern
coast. There was also the outlying group of smaller states north of Delhi:
the cis-Sutlej states of Punjab and some Rajput-ruled states in the Himalayan
foothills. Historical contingencies were partly responsible for which areas were
annexed and which remained under princes. The British were nevertheless

66 Malcolm, Memoir, vol. 2, pp. 264-5.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

anxious to control most coastal tracts, the hinterland of their major entrepdts,
and economically productive areas such as the Gangetic Plain.

Not only had Hastings concluded more treaties than any other governor-
general, but the relationships inscribed in the treaties had changed. The British
now aggressively declared themselves the superior power. Lee-Warner high-
lighted this transition with a comparison between the 1803 treaty with the
relatively new Rajput state of Alwar and the 1818 treaty with Mewar-Udaipur,
which enjoyed ritual superiority among many Rajput groups and some British
officers. The British specifically engaged to protect Udaipur but plainly enunci-
ated its subordination in article 3, which demanded that the Udaipur ruler
‘will always act in subordinate co-operation with the British Government and
acknowledge its supremacy, and will not have any connexion with other Chiefs
or States’.°” The next article imposed isolation and prohibited any negotiation
with other states without British sanction. Hastings, however, legally guaran-
teed British non-intervention in the internal affairs of the state, but opportu-
nities for British interference abounded. The imposition of a subsidiary force
and the transfer of tribute owed by the Marathas to the British made the irreg-
ular payment of such dues a pretext for intervention. The posting of British
residents and political agents provided a channel for observation, and both
overt and covert intervention. This topic will be explored in the next chapter.

An era ended in 1823. Afterwards governors-general would not take com-
mand on the battlefield, as Cornwallis and Hastings had done, and then sign
treaties the day after they were concluded. Since the major Indian states, with
the exception of Punjab, were now in treaty relations with the British, political
officers would no longer participate in battles or negotiate treaties. The extraor-
dinary galaxy of distinctive stars in the political firmament such as Malcolm,
Jenkins and Metcalfe would not recur. Circumspect bureaucrats superseded the
flamboyant David Ochterlony and the adventurous and empathic Malcolm.

Consolidation and rounding out borders, 1823-56
Although administrative rationalisation and social reforms were dominant
British concerns after 1823, annexations continued, especially on the bor-
ders of the Company domains, with provinces of lower Burma in 1826 and
Sind on the lower Indus in 1843 being the major acquisitions. Moving into
the heartland of Punjab, in 1846 the British fought a short but successful war
with the heirs of Ranjit Singh. As a result they acquired the districts between
the Beas and the Indus including Kashmir, the hill areas east of the Beas, and

67 Lee-Warner, Native States, p. 125.

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THE BRITISH CONSTRUCTION OF INDIRECT RULE

control over traffic on the Beas and the Sutlej to the Indus and then the Indus
to Baluchistan.

The arrival of Lord Dalhousie (1812-60), at 36 the youngest man to be
appointed governor-general (1848-56), did not reintroduce a policy of annex-
ation but rather intensified it.° Lee-Warner argued that by 1848 annexation
was the only possible response to ‘a scrupulous avoidance of interference in
the internal affairs of a multitude of isolated principalities’.”° In other words,
British restraint had allowed such princely misrule that annexation was the only
means of improvement. However, the British protection of their allies from
internal challengers was surely a form of intervention in the internal politics
of states, where tensions between rulers and their relatives or nobility were a
critical aspect of a dynamic political process. Dalhousie’s policy of annexation
was informed by strategic concerns and ‘revenue maximisation’.’!

Pragmatic, autocratic, hard-working, Dalhousie used military victories, the
denial of the right to adopt heirs to rulers whose states he classified as British
creations, and allegations of misgovernment as the bases for annexation.’
Economic and strategic concerns are reflected in his support for a second war
against the now dependent kingdom of Punjab in 1848, even supervising the
military operations to the dismay of his commander-in-chief in the field, and
his decision to annex the remainder of Punjab in 1849. In contrast to his
predecessors, Dalhousie tended to consume all the territory of a defeated state
rather than nibbling morsels. In 1852 he returned to the piecemeal approach
after the defeat of the Burmese in 1852 with the informal acquisition of Pegu
province. Upper Burma would be annexed in 1885.

Dalhousie’s other acquisitions of Indian territory were more controversial
because of their justifications and because they were later deemed to be imme-
diate causes of the revolt of 1857. They began three months after he arrived in
India. The first state was small but symbolically significant. The Maratha ruling
house of Satara, which descended from the elder son of Shivaji, had adopted
several times to maintain the dynastic line, as did many Hindu families. When
Raja Appa Sahib of Satara adopted a son a few hours before he died on 5 April
1848, Dalhousie recommended against recognition of the adopted heir and
for annexation. His argument was that the British had essentially created the
Satara state in 1818 when they reconstituted it with territory captured from the

68 Aitchison, Collection of Treaties, vol. 1, pp. 50-4.

6 William Lee-Warner, The Life of the Marquis of Dalhousie K. T., 2 vols (Shannon, Ireland, 1972,
first published 1904).

70 Lee-Warner, Native States, p. 129. 71 C. A. Bayly, Indian Society, p. 134.

72S. N. Prasad, Paramountcy under Dalhousie (Delhi, 1963); Muhammad Abdur Rahim, Lord
Dathousies Administration of the Conquered and Annexed States (Delhi, 1963).

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

peshwa. However, arrogant imperialism is clearly reflected in the often quoted
minute of 30 August 1848:

I cannot conceive it possible for anyone to dispute the policy of taking advantage of every
just opportunity which presents itself for consolidationg the territories that already belong
to us, by taking possession of states which may lapse in the midst of them; for thus getting
rid of these petty intervening principalities, which may be made a means of annoyance, but
which can never, I venture to think, be a source of strength, for adding to the resources of
the public treasury, and for extending the uniform application of our system of government
to those whose best interests, we sincerely believe, will be promoted thereby.

Strategic and revenue gains are more sharply articulated in the less well known
article 32, which noted that the territories of Satara

are interposed between the two principal military stations in the presidency of Bombay; and
are at least calculated, in the hands of an independent sovereign, to form an obstacle to safe
communication and combined military movement. The district is fertile, and the revenue
productive; the population, accustomed for some time to regular and peaceful government,
are tranquil themselves, and prepared for the regular government our possession of the
territory would involve.”

In defending the lapse or annexation of three other states when they sought
British recognition of an adopted heir, Dalhousie cited both pragmatic and
political reasons. Sambalpur, now a district on the western border of Orissa state
and then a little chieftainship astride the Mahanadi River on the road between
Bombay and Calcutta, was swallowed up in 1849. With a brahman ruling
family from Maharashtra, Jhansi had been carved from Orchha, southwest of
the British Northwestern Provinces. A buffer between the territories of Scindia
of Gwalior and the Rajput-ruled states of Bundelkhand, Jhansi had first entered
treaty relations with the British in 1804, and had assisted them against the
Marathas and Burmese. Such support did not prevent extinction to secure the
border of a British province.”4

The 1854 annexation of Nagpur was the most substantial and most con-
tentious one justified by the doctrine of lapse. Since it encompassed 80 000
square miles with an annual revenue exceeding Rs 40 lakhs and a population
of more than 4 million, Nagpur could not be classified as a ‘petty intervening
principality’. Dalhousie, perhaps feeling the need for legitimation, cited three
additional reasons. First and foremost, he argued that ‘the prosperity and hap-
piness of its [Nagpur] inhabitants would be promoted by their being placed

73 As cited in Sever, Documents, vol. 1, p. 200 from Minute by Lord Dalhousie dated 30 August 1848
in House of Commons (Sessional Papers), 1849, vol. 39, pp. 224-8. ‘Papers Relative to the Raja of
Sattara’.

74 Rahim, Dathousie’s Administration, ch. 7, especially pp. 206-14.

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THE BRITISH CONSTRUCTION OF INDIRECT RULE

permanently under British rule’. Second, the essential interests of England
would be served by ready access to ‘the best and cheapest cotton grown in
India . . . in the valley of Berar’. Third, the general interests of India — by
which he obviously meant the British establishment in India — would benefit
territorially by making British possessions contiguous by providing a direct
line of communication between Calcutta and Bombay and by surrounding
the nizam’s state with British territory; economically by adding a large and
wealthy province; and militarily since ‘the present army of Nagpore was or-
ganised by ourselves, and still retains much of the form and of the feelings
it received under British command’.”” Despite all these supposedly positive
outcomes, Dalhousie faced opposition from British as well as Indian sources.
Colonel Sir John Low, a distinguished political officer who after extensive ser-
vice in Rajputana and as a resident in Hyderabad had risen to membership
on the Council of the Governor-General (1853-58), thought that additional
annexations were inappropriate. He stressed that British rule would not be
safe and prosperous ‘till there shall be among its native subjects a much more
general attachment to the ruling powers than there is at present among the
inhabitants of British India’ and that the British should seek ‘to remove from
the minds of those princes their present feelings of uncertainty and distrust’,
which had arisen because of the conquest of Sind, an attack on Gwalior, and
the annexation of Satara.”°

Dalhousie, possibly in response to such critics, elaborated on the principles
guiding his exercise of the doctrine of lapse. He categorised the Hindu-ruled
states into independent, dependent and subordinate. Independent states had
never been subordinate to a paramount power and were not tributary. Here he
placed the Rajput states and ignored their incorporation into the Mughal struc-
ture, their payments of tribute to the Marathas, and sometimes to the British.
Dependent states were subordinate to the British as the paramount power in
its role as successor to the Mughal emperor or the peshwa. The payment of
tribute or a subsidy was a sign of their dependency. Subordinate states were
those which the British created or revived through its treaties or sanads. Over
the first category the British had no right to refuse adoptions; over the second
they had a right to refuse but usually agreed; and over the third they should
never allow succession by adoption.’” He classified Nagpur as both dependent
and subordinate and so any adoption required British ratification. Dalhousie

75 As cited in Sever, Documents, vol. 1, p. 213 from House of Commons (Sessional Papers), 1854,
vol. 48, pp. 337-52. ‘Papers relating to the Rajah of Berar’.

76 As cited in ibid., Minute dated 10 February 1854, pp. 216-18 and HC Rajah of Berar, pp. 355-9.

77 Lee-Warner, Life, vol. 2, pp. 115, 155-6; Rahim, Dalhousies Administration, pp. 372-3.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

therefore decided not to sanction the adoption and to annex the state.’® It
became the basis for the sprawling Central Provinces, now conveniently linked
to the Northwestern Provinces through the corridor of the recently annexed
Jhansi.

Maladministration had been cited in the decision on Jhansi along with
lapse, but it was the only rationale for the annexation of Awadh in 1856. The
British had long pursued contradictory policies towards one of their oldest
allies. On the one hand the British had encouraged the nawab to establish
his independence of his suzerain, the Mughal emperor. Thus they abetted
Nawab Ghazi al-Din Haydar’s efforts to declare his independence, first by
minting coins in his own name in 1818 and then by crowning himself king
of Awadh in 1819.’? On the other hand the British resident extended his
protection over groups at court and society at large. These British clients
included Europeans employed by the nawab; ‘natives’ of Awadh who were
employed by the Company, especially the soldiers or sepoys in its armies;
and Awadh officials whose pensions were to be paid from the interest the
British owed on loans extorted from nawabs. Michael Fisher has pointed out
that the Company had already gained crucial political adherents in Awadh
before the actual annexation occurred in 1856.°° Earlier historians writing on
the events of 1857 would castigate Dalhousie for pursuing a reckless policy
of annexation, while subsequent apologists such as Lee-Warner viewed him
as a great humanitarian for extending the benefits of British rule to India —
including the misgoverned masses of Awadh.*!

A searing shock to the British in both India and at home, the events of
1857 provoked an extensive and ongoing literature. The precipitating action
of sepoys at Meerut meant that for many British historians, 1857 was a mutiny.
Other historians have focused on civilian involvement, especially of peasants,°”
landlords®? and a few Indian princes, and their work labelled 1857 as the first
war of Indian independence, a rebellion, or a revolt. Nana Sahib of Satara and
Rani Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi were highly visible leaders whom both British and

78 Tbid., pp. 229-34; Lee-Warner, Life, vol. 2, pp. 176-81.

79 Michael H. Fisher, ‘The Imperial Coronation of 1819: Awadh, the British and the Mughals’, MAS
19 (1985), pp. 254-5, 258-75.

80 Michael H. Fisher, ‘British Expansion in North India: The Role of the Resident in Awadh,’ JESHR
18 (1981), pp. 69-82, esp. pp. 81-2.

81 Lee-Warner, Life, vol. 2, pp. 363-73, 381.

82 Eric Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial
India (Cambridge, 1978); Gautam Bhadra, ‘Four Rebels of Eighteen-Fifty-Seven’, in Ranajit Guha
(ed.), Subaltern Studies IV (Delhi, 1985), pp. 229-75.

83 Metcalf, Land.

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THE BRITISH CONSTRUCTION OF INDIRECT RULE

Indian historians have constructed as heroes of Indian resistance to colonial
rule.®4

Although some troops from princely states, notably Gwalior and Indore,
joined rebel contingents, the loyalty of Hyderabad, most Maratha and Rajput
rulers, and especially the cis-Sutlej princes, confined military resistance to the
Gangetic Plain. Some princes aided the British more directly. Besides pro-
viding supplies and protecting Europeans, the rulers of Patiala, Nabha, Jind,
Kapurthala and Faridkot personally led their troops to maintain civil order in
Punjab or in military engagements further afield.®* Moreover, a newswriter for
Jind at the Delhi court became a key source for British intelligence.®° Once
the military revolt was suppressed in 1858, British officials and apologists reaf-
firmed the strategic value of indirect rule. Indian princes were deemed natural
leaders of their Indian subjects and valuable British allies. A grateful impe-
rial government fed them morsels of territory, new honours, and occasionally
monetary rewards.*”

CONCLUSION

The British did not create the Indian princes. Before and during the European
penetration of India, indigenous rulers achieved dominance through the mil-
itary protection they provided to dependants and their skill in acquiring rev-
enues to maintain their military and administrative organisations. Major Indian
rulers exercised varying degrees and types of sovereign powers before they en-
tered treaty relations with the British. What changed during the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries is that the British increasingly restricted
the sovereignty of Indian rulers. The Company set boundaries; it extracted
resources in the forms of military personnel, subsidies or tribute payments,
and the purchase of commercial goods at favourable prices, and limited oppor-
tunities for other alliances. From the 1810s onward as the British expanded
and consolidated their power, their centralised military despotism dramatically
reduced the political options of Indian rulers. The latter could not easily ma-
nipulate the corporate British Government of India, which did not experience
the succession struggles or division of resources among heirs that had plagued

84 Joyce Lebra-Chapman, The Rani of Jhansi: A Study in Female Heroism in India (Honolulu, 1986).

85 Lepel H. Griffin, The Rajas of the Punjab (Patiala, 1970, reprint of 1873 2nd edn), pp. 213-18 on
Patiala, pp. 355-8 on Jind, pp. 422-4 on Nabha, pp. 526-8 on Kapurthala, and p. 526 on Faridkot.

86 C. A. Bayly, Empire, pp. 327-8.

87 Thomas R. Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt: India, 1857-1879 (Berkeley CA, 1964); Bhupen
Qanungo, ‘A Study of British Relations with the Native States of India, 1858-62,’ JAS 26 (1967),
pp. 251-65.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

earlier overlords such as the Mughals and the Marathas and which offered
attractive possibilities for ‘conquest by invitation’. Indian rulers had to learn
how to exploit the interstices of the increasingly bureaucratic British structure
in order to gain political, ritual and economic advantages. Thus they might
appeal to a sympathetic resident for concessions that a more distant governor-
general in Calcutta or Company directors in London might not grant, or vice
versa to the remote official over the objections of a hostile man on the spot.

British policies towards Indian rulers are an excellent prism for viewing the
complex interaction of varying views, priorities and resources of the multiple
levels of the British hierarchy in India, which portrayed itself as a monolith
to outsiders. In reality the British never were able to enforce a tight chain
of command from the metropolitan authority in London to local officials
in India. Further, the scholarly debate over British annexation is an example
of the British efforts to categorise Indian political phenomena in order to
conquer, to control, and to justify. Wellesley and Hastings uninhibitedly used
imperialist and strategic explanations. Dalhousie’s particular contribution was
to combine economic, political, moral and legal arguments in an age when
reform was a prominent motif in British domestic political discourse. In the
face of increasing Indian challenges to the British right to rule in India, later
nineteenth-century commentators such as Tupper and Lee-Warner shifted the
emphasis from material causes such as desirable access to superior cotton to
moral and legal rationales. Twentieth-century scholars underscore economic
and political arguments and do not allow moral and legal principles to have any
role in the decision-making of nineteenth-century British administrators. This
purely materialist approach simplifies the decision-making process of these
men in an ahistoric mannet.

A recent trend to an institutional approach promises a more balanced expla-
nation. Thus a good start would be more exploration of the growing central-
isation of decision-making within the Government of India, which allowed
a confident, strong-willed governor-general such as Dalhousie to ignore the
advice of experienced men on the spot such as Low. While the British GOI
was becoming more centralised, its growing bureaucratisation rewarded those
who implemented policy and frequently penalised those who challenged it.
Dalhousie was possibly no more of an imperialist than Wellesley or Hastings.
But he was not balanced as they were by brilliant, independent-minded political
officers such as Mountstuart Elphinstone, John Malcolm and Charles Metcalfe,
who were sympathetic to Indian rulers, willing and able to suggest alternative
policies, and even to make commitments to Indian rulers that would be hon-
oured even though a governor-general might disagree with them.

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THE BRITISH CONSTRUCTION OF INDIRECT RULE

The British treaty system created a structure in which the British directly
ruled a combination of those parts of India held by any major aspirant to a
centralised imperial status, from the Mauryan Empire to the Congress Party,
with those parts of India prized by seaborne traders, whether foreigners such as
Arabs or indigenous south Indian kings. Thus British India was an innovator
in its administrative integration of the Indo-Gangetic Plain with the ports and
coastal plains of the triangular subcontinent, from the mouth of the Indus to
the mouth of the Ganges. But no state at Delhi ever sought to govern directly
the Thar desert area of Rajasthan, the remote salt flats of Cutch, or the jungly
tracts of central India and Orissa. The British system of indirect rule over
Indian states and a limited raj even in directly ruled areas such as Bihar and the
United Provinces provided a model for the efficient use of scarce monetary and
personnel resources that could be adopted to imperial acquisitions in Malaya
and Africa. Thus there were multiple reasons why the British continued a
system of indirect rule after they were clearly the dominant power in India.
Moreover, the dialectic between British intervention and non-intervention in
princely states continued to exist until 1947.

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CHAPTER 4

THE THEORY AND EXPERIENCE OF
INDIRECT RULE IN COLONIAL INDIA

COLONIAL SOCIOLOGY, CLASSIFICATION
AND HIERARCHY

Throughout their imperial tenure in India, British administrators described
and categorised Indian legal practices, religious beliefs and rituals, social struc-
tures and customs, and languages and literatures. British officials in India and
in the metropole used these data to construct a static, underdeveloped India
that legitimated British political dominance. This knowledge was not disin-
terested or objective but imbricated with political power. Analysed by Edward
Said as Orientalism, this information has also been termed colonial sociology
or, more broadly, colonial knowledge.’ More recently, C. A. Bayly has argued
that Indians participated significantly in the creation of the British information
order, which remained contested and incomplete.” Although these intellectual
constructions and scholarship have focused on the directly ruled territory and
peoples of British India, several subsumed the indirectly ruled domains and
peoples of princely states. They included gazetteers that were compendia of
geographical, historical and statistical data; the Great Trigonometrical Survey
that supposedly provided a scientific skeleton for surveys, mapping and a spa-
tial conception of India; and decennial censuses issued from 1871.3 After 1858
colonial knowledge specifically targeted the princes and their states.

Initially British officials discovered that there were relatively few documen-
tary bricks with which to erect the intellectual framework of indirect rule.
Treaties had been concluded depending on the exigencies of war, financial need,
personal inclinations of men on the spot, internal politics of the Company, and
a state’s relationship to the Mughal Empire or other indigenous political enti-
ties. There were few documents of explication and no comprehensive collection
of treaties or other legal documents such as sanads and letters of understanding.
There was no accepted definition of an Indian prince and no authoritative list
of those recognised as princes. Using data from archives, surveys, maps and

! Two influential sources are Bernard S$. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in
India (Princeton NJ, 1996) and Inden, /magining India.

2 C. A. Bayly, Empire, ch. 2 and conclusion.

3 Edney, Mapping, pp. 318-40; Bernard S. Cohn, ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification
in South Asia’, Folk 26 (1986), pp. 30-8.

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INDIRECT RULE IN COLONIAL INDIA

censuses, British officials defined and enumerated Indian princes; naturalised
princely associations with their British sovereign in London and her represen-
tatives in India; and demarcated appropriate relationships between princes and
their subjects.

During the second half of the nineteenth century the number of Indian
princes multiplied, and it remains difficult to trace the chronology of this
inflation and the reasons for it. As mentioned in Chapter 3, the British had
concluded treaties with about forty princes. When Lord Canning, governor-
general and the first viceroy from 1856 to 1862, extended sanads guaranteeing
the right of princes to adopt heirs subject to British confirmation, the need
to limit them to ruling princes was widely discussed. Approximately 140 such
sanads were granted on 11 March 1862.‘ Later another twenty were tendered,
mainly in Kathiawar. However, by the last decades of the nineteenth century,
references to 500-600 Indian princes began to appear in both official and
popular publications. The largest concentrations were in western and central
India where the British policy to treat petty chieftains as rulers created many
princes lacking much internal autonomy. Like the diverse and supposedly
divisive caste and religious groups of India, this large number of disparate,
dependent rulers was one more justification for a strong, impartial overlord,
namely the British GOI, to maintain order.

The British also tallied the population of the princely states. By 1881 the
largest had their own census commissioners, initially someone loaned from the
Indian Civil Service and increasingly an Indian officer; census officials from
neighbouring British Indian provinces counted the smaller ones. The princes
now had extensive data on their subjects. But there is little research on how
the princes used this newly acquired information to enhance their control
within their states or their relationship to their British overlord. There is one
exception to this: Robin Jeffrey, who has illuminated how the subjects of one
prince employed such data. In Travancore the first ‘scientific’ census of 1875
disclosed that nayars constituted about 20 per cent of the population instead
of the 30 per cent that earlier censuses had estimated. Subsequently Syrian
Christians and lower-caste groups used census data to claim their civil rights
and a greater share of government positions.°

Besides formulating a hierarchy of numbers, the British regularised a salute
table that ranked both Britons and Indians, including princes, by gun salutes
in relation to their common suzerain, the British Crown. At the pinnacle,
Queen Victoria had a salute that rose to 101 guns when she acquired the title

4 Quanungo, ‘Study,’ pp. 264. 5 Jeffrey, Decline, passim but esp. p. 14.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

of Empress of India in 1877. The governor-general, who assumed the title of
viceroy in 1858 as the representative of the monarch within the GOI, came
next, along with other members of the British royal family, with a more modest
salute of thirty-one guns. The rank of twenty-one guns eventually included five
princes: the rulers of Hyderabad, the most populous state; Kashmir, the largest
in territory; Mysore, third in size and population; and Baroda and Gwalior,
the principal remnants of the Maratha polity. Nine was the lowest level. Each
succeeding category included more princes, so the salute table resembled a
pyramid with 9-gun princes at the base. (Interestingly, the governors of the
three British presidencies were assigned seventeen guns, lieutenant-governors
of the other British provinces fifteen until the 1920s when they were granted
the title of governor and elevated to seventeen, and residents had thirteen
guns.) Rulers and states were assigned salutes according to diverse criteria:
historical importance such as relationship to the Mughal Empire; regional
status; extent of territory; size of population; conspicuous service to the British;
and later modernising reforms. There were anomalies at all levels that neither
the British nor the princes, despite their shared aptitude for classification, could
ever resolve. Gradually the British resorted to a system of local salutes enjoyed
within a state and personal salutes that were granted to a ruler for his or her life
as a reward or possibly a sop to silence a clamorous petitioner. Salutes became
particularly contentious as princes and the British met more often in formal
settings where salutes would be fired.

CEREMONY AS MANIFESTATION OF
THEORY AND HIERARCHY

Durbars, the formal occasions when the princes met with British represen-
tatives — either local political agents, the viceroy, or more rarely members of
the royal family — encoded British ideas about their relationships with Indian
princes. As durbars became more frequent with easier transportation by rail-
way, their protocol became more precise. Regulations evolved about where a
prince greeted the British official upon arrival, how many officials accompa-
nied the British official and the prince, seating arrangements, and appropriate
dress. These rituals were most elaborate for the highly coveted status symbol
of a visit by a viceroy or a member of the British royal family to an individ-
ual princely state. Earlier governors-general such as Lord Amherst (1823-28)
had made extended tours, but Lord Canning (1856-62) was the first to visit
systematically the princely states after 1858 in order to distribute rewards for
faithful service during the revolt. In 1869 the Duke of Edinburgh was the

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INDIRECT RULE IN COLONIAL INDIA

first member of the royal family to tour India, and in 1875-76 the Prince
of Wales undertook a highly publicised tour that stopped in several princely
states.° States developed distinctive attractions to entertain visitors, such as the
keddah or elephant round-ups in Mysore and sand grouse shoots in Bikaner.
Although these staged events were financially burdensome for their subjects,
princes esteemed them as signs of imperial favour. The British in turn used
such excursions as rewards and withheld them in retaliation for alleged misbe-
haviour. Moreover, these meetings could serve British political purposes, as in
1920-21 when the Prince of Wales gained a respite from nationalist protests in
British India in the princely states, where he could also display his masculinity
in pig-sticking, polo and tiger-shooting.’ But the most significant ritual arenas
for the articulation of British ideas about their relationship to the princes were
the Imperial Assemblage of 1877 and the Imperial Durbars of 1903 and 1911
at Delhi.
Bernard Cohn has argued that after 1858 the British enunciated

two divergent or even contradictory theories of rule: one which sought to maintain India
as a feudal order, and the other looking towards changes which would inevitably lead to
the destruction of this feudal order . . . If India were to be ruled in a feudal mode, then an
Indian aristocracy had to be recognized and/or created, which could play the part of ‘loyal
feudatories’ to their British queen.®

For Cohn, the Imperial Assemblage at Delhi on 1 January 1877, when Queen
Victoria was declared Kaiser-i-Hind or Empress of India in a carefully orches-
trated gathering of British and Indians that prominently displayed sixty-three
ruling princes, was the cynosure of this feudal mode. Disraeli as prime minister,
Lord Salisbury as secretary of state for India, and Lord Lytton, the recently ar-
rived viceroy, were the principal architects of this spectacle. Specialists designed
the site, its structure, uniforms for the participants, and even created banners
with coats of arms for the princes. These banners, with both British and Indian
iconography, replaced the earlier Mughal exchange of nazar (gold coins) and
peshkash (valued objects) with clients for khilats (robes of honour that had
been touched to the superior’s body). The Mughal practice had symbolised
the incorporation of the recipient into the person of the ruler, but the British

© Two eyewitness accounts are J. Drew Gay, The Prince of Wales in India: From Pall Mall to the Punjaub
(New York, 1877) and Val. C. Prinsep, /mperial India: An Artist’ Journal (London [1877?]). Gay was
a correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph, and Prinsep, from an old Anglo-Indian family, was
commissioned to paint a portrait of the Imperial Assemblage for Queen Victoria.

7 L. E Rushbrook Williams, The History of the Indian Tour of H. R. H. the Prince of Wales 1921-22
(Calcutta, 1922); Bernard C. Ellison, H. R. H. The Prince of Wales’ Sport in India (London, 1925).

8 Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger
(eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), p. 166.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

one indicated a linear hierarchic order in which princes now owed fealty and
obedience to their liege lord, the empress, from whose representative they had
received their banners.?

A third arena that reinforced the notion of a feudal hierarchy was the new
orders of royal knighthoods that the British had instituted in the aftermath of
1857 to reward loyal Indian allies as well as status-conscious British officials.
The Order of the Star of India, which included both princes and British military
and civilian officers, was established in 1861 with twenty-five members. The
maharajas of Gwalior and Patiala, who remained loyal in 1857, were its first
princely initiates. The insignia included a necklace with alternating Tudor roses
and Indian lotuses with the image of the Queen on a pendant.

Some rulers, such as the nizam of Hyderabad, refused to wear the insignia
because of Muslim injunctions against any representation of the human form.!°
But many other princes as well as British officials sought inclusion in the
Order, and after 1865 the Star of India Order was expanded to three levels
to accommodate hundreds of knighthoods. Subsequently more orders were
instituted to recognise other categories of aspiring Britons and Indians.

Salute tables, imperial orders, and imperial rituals such as the Imperial
Assemblage of 1877 and visits of British officials to the states are key evidence
for David Cannadine’s argument that bonds of class and status linked the
empire to the metropole. However, his description of imperialism as ornamen-
talism, which he defines as ‘hierarchy made visible, immanent and actual’,'!
ironed flat the wrinkled texture of the cloth of British perceptions and poli-
cies towards the princes of India and how these changed over time and place.
Imperial officials attempted to constitute the princes into a feudal hierarchy
and promoted them as natural leaders; they also constrained, pressured, re-
stricted and deposed them when it was expedient to strengthen or maintain
their political power and to gain economic benefits.

CONSTRUCTING A THEORY FORA
PATRON—-CLIENT SYSTEM

Bureaucratic codifications

Although the salute table, durbar rituals and honours provoked reams of cor-
respondence requesting higher positions from disgruntled princes and British

? Ibid., pp. 185-96.
10 Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Cloth, Clothes and Colonialism: India in the Nineteenth Century,’ in Colonialism,
pp. 119-20.
11 David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (New York, 2001), p. 122.

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INDIRECT RULE IN COLONIAL INDIA

= ~ . Po

Maharaja Jaswant Singh of Marwar/Jodhpur with Star of India.

officials, they were a concrete, multifaceted ranking system, as Cannadine has
asserted, that both British and princely participants understood. It was far more
difficult to achieve agreement on the codification of the theory and the prece-
dents that reputedly guided British policies. When some foreign department
officials confronted this task after 1858, they found little besides a survey of the

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

Company’s relations with selected states that John Sutherland, who had served
in the major posts of Hyderabad, Delhi, Gwalior and Rajasthan, had compiled
in 1833; a few departmental memoranda; letters from governors-general and
British political agents to individual princes which enunciated principles that
became precedents for other cases; speeches by governors-general; and scattered
treaties. To provide a basic reference, Sir Charles U. Aitchison (1832-96), the
foreign secretary from 1870 to 1877 and lieutenant-governor of Punjab from
1882 to 1888, edited a Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads Relating
to India.

It first appeared in 1862, was continually updated, and eventually reached
fourteen volumes by the fifth edition published from 1929 to 1933. Each
volume focused on particular states or regions including frontier and border
areas extending from Siam in the east to Aden in the west. Besides including
legal documents, each section began with a narrative of British relations with
that particular state which appeared as potted histories in other reference works
such as the Memorandum on Indian States issued periodically as a handbook
for political officers. As a complement to Aitchison, Sir H. Mortimer Durand
(1850-1924), another foreign secretary (1885-93) best known for his service
in Afghanistan and Persia and as a boundary-maker, compiled Leading Cases, a
selection of past decisions in disputes between the British and individual states.
His collection yielded precedents that the British had introduced as concepts
into Indian law in areas where treaties were silent.

Other British officials developed theoretical justifications for both past and
future British policies. In an 1864 minute on the Kathiawar states, Sir Henry
Maine (1822-88), the noted legal scholar and law member of the governor-
general’s Executive Council (1862-69), argued that sovereignty was divisible.

Sovereignty is a term which, in international law, indicates a well-ascertained assemblage of
separate powers or privileges. The rights which form part of the aggregate are specifically
named by the publicists, who distinguish them as the right to make war and peace, the
right to administer civil and criminal justice, the right to legislate, and so forth. A sovereign
who possesses the whole of this aggregate of rights is called an independent sovereign, but
there is not, nor has there ever been, anything in international law to prevent some of those
rights being lodged with one possessor and some with another. Sovereignty has always been
regarded as divisible.'?

This interpretation of sovereignty meant that the British, as the only ‘indepen-
dent’ sovereign, suzerain or paramount power, had exclusive control over such

12 Minute by Sir Henry Maine dated 22 March 1864 in Sever, Documents, vol. 1, p. 251. Emphasis in

the original.

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Sir Charles U. Aitchison

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

sovereign rights as war and foreign relations, while Indian princes could collect
revenues and administer justice within their states. If sovereignty were indivis-
ible, then the British would not have any legal ground to maintain alliances
with the princely states. !

The convenient concept of usage was elaborated in 1877. T. H. Thornton,
briefly the acting foreign secretary but without any service in a princely state,

declared:

For a proper understanding of the relationship between the British Government and the
Natives States regard must be had to the incidents of the de facto supremacy as well as to the
treaties and charters in which the reciprocal rights and obligations have been recorded... A
uniform and and long-continued course of practice acquiesced in by the party against whom
it tells. . . must be held to exhibit the relations which in fact subsist between them.'4

Princely toleration of practices implied consent, and thus the precedent
of usage was created. According to Lee-Warner, usage ‘amends and adapts
to circumstances duties that are embodied in treaties of ancient date, and
it supplies numerous omissions from the category of duties so recorded’.'*
Besides providing flexibility in a haphazard collection of treaties that had been
concluded in particular times and circumstances, usage enabled the British to
reinterpret inconvenient clauses and promises to serve current strategic needs.
In short, usage could rationalise breaking promises made in treaties and sanads.

Discussed in Chapter 3 with regard to their periodisation of the relations
between the British and the princely states, William Lee-Warner and Charles
Lewis Tupper worked ‘to bring system and uniformity into the disordered world
of Indian feudatory policy’.!° Competitors for official favour, both men had
limited service in the princely states and worked mainly at provincial capitals —
Tupper in Punjab and Lee-Warner in Bombay. So their theories tended to be
based on documentary evidence and not direct field experience. Asserting that
the ties between the British and the princes were constitutional, Lee-Warner
based much of his argument on Durand and sought the assignment to revise
Durand’s compilation.

In Our Indian Protectorate, published in 1893, Tupper contended that the
relationship between the states and the British Raj was essentially a feudal
one since ‘the Indian Protectorate rests on ideas which are fundamentally
indigenous ... There were many tendencies making for feudalism in the India
of our predecessors; and... our protection has been sought in India as vassals

13 | am grateful to an anonymous reviewer who pointed out the significance of this distinction.
18 Quoted in Copland, British Raj, pp. 214-15.
5 Lee-Warner, Native States, p. 204. 16 Copland, British Raj, p. 217.

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INDIRECT RULE IN COLONIAL INDIA

sought the protection of their lords’. Tupper cited Charles Metcalfe, who wrote
of the requests of Rajput princes for treaties in 1816 that Rajputs ‘say that there
has always existed some power in India to which peaceable states submitted,
and in return, obtained its protection’.!” Since the vision of princes as feudal
vassals was congenial to many officials, Tupper was chosen to update Durand.
He eventually produced the three volumes, plus an index, of Indian Political
Practice, printed privately in 1895 for the use of British political officers.'®

Tupper’s work was to remain the classic reference, but later documents and
manuals reflected evolving British theories and practices. Sir Harcourt Butler,
the foreign secretary from 1907 to 1910, who had never been in the political
service before being appointed its head, issued an influential handing-over note
for his successor that strongly advocated less interference in princely affairs. In
1917 anew edition of the Manual of Instructions for Political Officers attempted
to regularise procedures. These documents were particularly important in the
absence of any formal training for political officers.

Definitions of paramountcy and usage

During the late nineteenth century, British officials invoked paramountcy and
usage to justify diverse policies. In 1877 Lytton advised Lord Salisbury, his su-
perior in London, that “[t]he paramount supremacy of the British Government
is a thing of gradual growth; it has been established partly by conquest; partly
by treaty; partly by usage’.!? Thus paramountcy would buttress the British
right to confirm all successions to the gaddi in princely states; the extension
of British jurisdiction over railway lines that crossed the borders of states; in-
tervention in struggles between princes and their nobles; and the extension of
advice to princes about the need to improve or reform their administrations.
Although many Indian princes had complained individually throughout the
nineteenth century against British encroachment in their internal affairs, by
the beginning of the twentieth century some began to protest collectively in
new sites of constitutional debate and legal inquiry. The Chamber of Princes
(to be discussed below) was the primary locus of this challenge. Another was
the Indian States Committee that Lord Irwin, viceroy from 1926 to 1931,
appointed in 1928 to investigate princely grievances. Chaired by Harcourt
Butler, an advocate of minimal interference in princely state affairs, with
W. H. Holdsworth, a distinguished jurist, and Sidney Peel, a financier with

7 Tupper, Indian Protectorate, p. 240.

18.6. L, Tupper (comp.), Indian Political Practice: A Collection of the Decisions of the Government of
India in Political Cases, 4 vols. (Delhi, 1974 reprint of 1895 edn.)

9 Despatch dated 11 June 1877, in Tupper, Practice, vol. 1, p. 7.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

experience in the City and in Parliament, as the other members, this Com-
mittee refused to define paramountcy. It concluded that ‘[p]aramountcy must
remain paramount; it must fulfil its obligations, defining or adapting itself
according to the shifting necessities of time and the progressive development
of the States’.”° It rejected the contractual basis for the British relationship
with the princes that Lee-Warner had advanced and that the princes and Leslie
Scott, their expensive King’s Counsel, had revived. The British made their
last effort to resolve the constitutional relationship between themselves and
the princes and the princely states and British Indian provinces in a federal
structure enshrined in the Government of India Act of 1935 that promised re-
sponsible government with fully elected ministries in British Indian provinces.
This aborted solution will be discussed in Chapter 8.

British officials were not the only group constructing images and theories
of the native states. Indians produced histories and reference works on the
Indian princes and their states. Surendra Nath Roy, a vakil at the high court in
Calcutta, published one volume on Gwalior of an incomplete multi-volume
project entitled History of the Native States of India. Roy sought ‘to let war-
like nations know that among our “imbecile” princes and chiefs could yet be
found brave and patriotic men who would prove matches for any warriors
of ancient and modern times who could be named’.*! In some cases the au-
thors or editors appear to be oriented to profit rather than policy. A. Vadivelu
produced The Ruling Chiefs, Nobles and Zamindars of India, a compendium
whose uneven quality might be related to subventions from individuals listed
or to possibly unacknowledged collaborators. His inclusion of large landlords
and zamindars blurred the category of what constituted an Indian prince. His
volume, however, provided a counterpoint to such British references as G. R.
Aberigh-Mackay’s The Native Chiefs and Their States in 1877.”

THE INDIAN POLITICAL SERVICE

Structure

Although Company servants called political officers negotiated with Indian
rulers from the 1760s onward, they were only organised into a formal Indian

20 Report of the Indian States Committee, p. 31.

21 Surendra Nath Roy, A History of the Native States of India, vol. 1, Gwalior (Calcutta, 1888), p. ii.

22 A Vadivelu, The Ruling Chiefs, Nobles & Zamindars of India, vol. 1 (Madras, 1915); G. R. Aberigh—
Mackay (comp.), The Native Chiefs and Their States in 1877: A Manual of Reference, 2nd edn with
index (Bombay, 1878).

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INDIRECT RULE IN COLONIAL INDIA

Political Service in 1937 on the eve of their demise.?> Cornwallis initiated
bureaucratic specialisation to eliminate corruption and to increase efficiency.
Company officers had to choose between the commercial and the adminis-
trative branches, the latter including revenue collection, judicial work, and
relations with Indian states. Those who negotiated with Indian states were
called foreign or political officers and the three presidencies appointed them
as needed. Michael Fisher has outlined three broad phases in the development
of the political service under Company rule. From 1764 to 1797 residents and
political agents were diplomatic agents negotiating between equals. By 1840
there were 116 political officers who exercised increasing hegemony vis-a-vis
the princes. From 1841 to 1856 their number contracted to fifty-one as fewer
political officers were posted to Indian states.”4 In 1843 the GOI organised
a foreign department that oversaw relations with frontier areas and external
states such as those in the Persian Gulf as well as the princes. In 1914 this
entity was renamed the foreign and political department.

Despite the efforts of governors-general to consolidate political officers un-
der central control, the Bombay Political Service was only the most prominent
of the continuing provincial cadres of political officers.” A major confrontation
between the GOI at Calcutta and the Bombay Government during the 1870s
over affairs in Baroda epitomised the ongoing tensions within the imperial
structure over policy and its implementation.”° When the Bombay Govern-
ment appointed Colonel Robert Phayre as resident in Baroda in 1873, he
embodied the Bombay orientation to a mission civilisatrice and tactlessly in-
tervened in internal affairs of the Baroda durbar, even seeking the dismissal
of the eminent Indian nationalist Dadabhai Naoroji from the post of diwan.
Gaekwad Malhar Rao vigorously opposed the resident's activities, and the
GOI’s commitment to non-intervention led them to demand that Bombay
dismiss Phayre. After an alleged attempt by the Baroda durbar to poison the
resident with diamond dust, the GOI secured Phayre’s removal, took over
control of Baroda from Bombay, and eventually deposed Malhar Rao. This
episode highlights the inconsistencies between theory and practice as well as

23 Terence Creagh Coen, The Indian Political Service: A Study in Indirect Rule (London, 1971), a general
overview by a former political officer; W. Murray Hogben, The Foreign and Political Department
of India, 1876-1919: A Study in Imperial Careers and Attitudes, PhD thesis, University of Toronto
(1973).

24 Fisher, Indirect Rule, pp. 54-9, 72-7.

25 Tan Copland, The Bombay Political Service, 1863-1924, PhD thesis, Oxford University (1969);
Copland, British Raj, chs 2, 4.

26 LES. Copland, ‘The Baroda Crisis of 1873-77: A Study in Governmental Rivalry’, MAS 2 (1968),
pp. 97-123.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

the existence of continuing bureaucratic rivalries within the British imperial
structure.

The final act in this bureaucratic drama occurred four decades later. In
1919 when the Indian Councils Act introduced some elected Indian minis-
ters into provincial governments, Edwin S. Montagu, the secretary of state
for India (1917-22), and Lord Chelmsford, the governor-general (1916-21),
recommended that states in direct relationship with provincial governors be
transferred to the central government. Ostensibly this change would consoli-
date lines of communication, but there was growing concern within the GOI
about the impact of elected, responsible Indian ministers in the provincial gov-
ernments on relations with the Indian princes. Two governors argued strongly
against the transfer: Sir George Lloyd of Bombay (1918-23), who conducted
relations with numerous states, estates and shareholders of western India and
the Deccan, and Sir Michael O’ Dwyer of Punjab (1913-19), who had served
in several states before his greater notoriety as the civilian authority condoning
the firing at Amritsar in 1919. They countered that the GOI would be too
distant from the smaller states, whose territories were often dispersed within
their respective provinces, and that governers feared the loss of status for their
governorships if the princes were transferred, of control over these safe havens
from nationalist agitators, and of patronage over the political appointments in
these states. After some vacillation, the princes generally endorsed direct rela-
tions. Upon the departure of O’ Dwyer and Lloyd from India, the bureaucratic
continuity of the GOI effected the transfer of the Punjab states in 1921 and
the western Indian states in 1924.7

Because of the special relationship between the British Crown and the
princes, the governor-general headed the foreign department, with a secre-
tary supervising its daily operation. Usually the foreign or, after 1914, the
political secretary had had a career in the provincial and central secretariats
of British India, such as Lee-Warner, rather than service in princely states.
Personal contact paved the way to such promotions, and extensive field ex-
perience might make it difficult to formulate a supposedly rational code for
universal application. The influence of political secretaries varied. Under an
authoritarian viceroy such as Lord Curzon, they were faceless bureaucrats. But
Harcourt Butler, who had no experience in the princely states, was a forceful
foreign secretary from 1907 to 1910 since Lord Minto (1905-10) was more
willing than Curzon to delegate authority and responsibility. Finally, the post

27 Barbara N. Ramusack, The Princes in the Twilight of Empire: Dissolution of a Patron—Client System,

1914-1939 (Columbus OH, 1978), pp. 85-8; Copland, British Raj, pp. 250-62.

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could also serve as a dumping ground for controversial officials such as J. P.
Thompson (1873-1935), the chief secretary of the Punjab Government dur-
ing the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, who was political secretary from
1922 to 1927.

The hierarchy within the political service mirrored the British ranking of
their princely allies. At the apex, four to eight first-class residencies were re-
sponsible for major states (those with a 21-gun salute) or large clusters of
states such as those in Rajputana or Central India. The titles of these offi-
cers changed over time; those who were responsible for one large state were
termed residents and those overseeing several states were known as agents to
the governor-general (AGGs). In 1937 the title of AGG was abolished and
usually replaced by resident. With overall responsibility for as many as thirty
states, AGGs were assisted by political agents in charge of smaller groups of
states. On the next level were second-class residents, and on the third was the
pool that supplied political agents and assistants to the residents. Recruits to
the political service came from both the military and the ICS cadres. They had
no formal training in either administration or the conduct of relations with
the princes beyond a rudimentary examination on some departmental refer-
ences such as Butler's Manual of Instructions*® and historical works, chiefly
the ubiquitous Tod and Malcolm. The political service trusted to on-the-job
training.

Recruitment and personnel

From the late eighteenth century there was an ongoing debate over the ap-
propriate ratio of military and civilian officers in the political service.”? The
Company's Court of Directors in London and many governors-general pre-
ferred civilians to be dominant, as they were during the first phase of the
Company’s expansion. However, as the newly annexed provinces under di-
rect rule absorbed civilian officers, the military element in the political service
climbed to 80 per cent during the 1830s before levelling off to 55 per cent
during the 1850s. Both ICS and military officers frequently owed their ap-
pointments more to patronage, either from a relative who had been a political
officer or a mentoring senior officer at the provincial or central secretariat, than
to any personal combination of talents.

For military personnel accustomed to regimental duties, a transfer to the
political service was a more crucial career change than for their civilian

28 Manual of Instructions to Officers of Political Department, 2nd edn (Simla, 1924).
29 Tan Copland, “The Other Guardians: Ideology and Performance in the Indian Political Service’, in
Jeffrey, People, pp. 275-305.

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counterparts, for whom the administrative work in a British Indian district
had many similarities to political service, particularly if one were acting as re-
gent for a minor ruler. Thus military men tended to stay in the political service
while civilians moved more easily back into administration in British India.
Although they were frequently denigrated by their civilian counterparts and
their military brethren as either narrow or soft respectively, military men could
be effective. Those with strong personalities and initiative could shape institu-
tional relationships both within and between states and the British Raj. Others
such as James Tod, who entered the Company’s army as a cadet in 1798 before
he chronicled the Rajputs, produced regional histories and ethnographies that
influenced generations of officials and historians.

After the reorganisation of the GOI in 1858, military men remained domi-
nant within the political service despite renewed pleas for more civilians. Lepel
Griffin, author of The Rajahs of the Punjab (1873), argued for dividing the
appointments equally after all had served a probation of two years in a British
district. He emphasised the importance of selecting ‘patient, intelligent, self-
reliant and discreet’ officers since they had a special influence in forming Indian
opinions of the virtues of the British Government in princely states, ‘where
the political agent is often the only Englishman with whom chief and people
come in contact’.*” Based on his experience as AGG for the central Indian
states (1881-88), Griffin also declared that the people there looked ‘to the
English officer as their last and surest refuge against oppression, with the result
that the people in India most attached to the Government, and most ready to
obey its slightest wish, are often to be found among the population of native
States’.3!

Such appeals were futile, and the basic ratio within the political service sta-
bilised at 70 per cent officers from the Indian Army and 30 per cent civilian
officers from the ICS.*” Copland has argued persuasively that the Bombay
Government preferred military men because they were cheaper. Moreover,
British officials alleged that men with military bearing, good character and
athletic ability were needed to impress and influence the princes under their
control.*? Expense, however, remained a significant factor. First, military offi-
cers were carried on the army budget and not that of the GOI. Second, ICS
officers received a higher pay equal to their level in the ICS, until 1925 when
both military and civilian officers received equal pay for equal work but not

3° Lepel Griffin, ‘Native India, AR 1 (April 1886), pp. 454-5. 3! Ibid., p. 452.

32 W7, Murray Hogben, ‘An Imperial Dilemma: The Reluctant Indianization of the Indian Political
Service,’ MAS 15 (1981), p. 752.

33 Copland, British Raj, pp. 70-5.

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equal pensions because of the differing formulae of the ICS and the Indian
Army.

An even more vexatious question was the recruitment of Indians for the
Indian political service. With limited personnel and little knowledge of the
Persianised court ritual that governed relations with the Mughal Empire and
the major princely states, the early British residents relied heavily on Indian
employees for their language and literary skills and knowledge of court rituals.
During the 1770s and 1780s Indians were occasionally allowed to function
independently as vakils or agents for the British in negotiations with individual
princes, but by the 1790s the British generally excluded Indians from the
political service.*4

Although Indians in the ICS only gradually increased from two in 1869 to
367 (with 894 Europeans) in 1929, they were practically invisible in the politi-
cal service. Despite the prodding of Indian members of the Central Legislative
Assembly and supportive British members of the British Parliament, in 1921
it was noted in the Legislative Assembly that Indians held less than 1 per cent
of the posts above the Rs 1000 salary level in the foreign and political service.
These few appointments were exclusively in the Northwest Frontier Province.
Privately, British officials argued that the Indian princes objected to their re-
lations being handled by Indians rather than British officials.*° In postings
abroad, the British Foreign Office were concerned about the trustworthiness
of Indian officers with access to cipher files and codes. Many British officials
also held racial assumptions that Indian candidates lacked the decisiveness
needed for success. The Lee Commission recommended that Indians should
gradually constitute 25 per cent of the political service. By July 1947 there were
124 political officers out of a cadre with an authorised strength of 180, and
Indians held only seventeen posts, all on the northwest frontier or in the newly
created external affairs ministry. W. Murray Hogben has analysed this phe-
nomenon and concluded that the British political officers allowed their sense
of racial-cum-moral superiority and their conservative departmental ethos to
influence their policy decisions.*©

This analysis overlooks two additional issues. First, during the twentieth cen-
tury British ICS officers who disliked the growing democratisation in Britain
and in India were attracted to the political service, where such democrati-
sation was less evident.*” For example, Edward Wakefield (1903-69) trans-
ferred from Punjab to the princely states because political service ‘opened up

34 Fisher, Indirect Rule, chs 7, 8. 35 Hogben, ‘Imperial Dilemma’, pp. 757-8.

36 Tbid., pp. 755-6, 766-8. 37 Ramusack, Princes, pp. 238-40.

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a pleasing vista of possibilities and uncertainties’ and in the princely states
he ‘would be out of range of irresponsible criticism from a hostile Legislative
Assembly’.°8 The Jewel in the Crown, Paul Scott’s epic portrayal of the last years
of the British rule in India, maintains a post-colonial fascination with the
princely states as a refuge for many Britons and some Indians. Through the
patronage of a well-connected aunt in Britain, Nigel Rowan gained an ap-
pointment to the political service and worked to secure the accession of the
Nawab of Mirat to independent India. Ronald Merrick, the anti-hero, sought
refuge in the police service of the states where, as an authoritative father, he
could treat Indians as children. Guy Perron, the sceptical observer, later wrote
a dissertation on the princely states from 1830 to 1857; he was enchanted
with hawking, a princely pastime, as was Sarah Layton. As independence ap-
proached, Layton retreated to life in the princely state of Mirat and a relation-
ship with one of its officials, Ahmad Kasim. Although his father was a promi-
nent Congress Muslim politician and his brother joined the Indian National
Army organised by Subhas Chandra Bose, Ahmad Kasim had remained in the
political backwater of Mirat rather than becoming involved in British Indian
politics.

Second, superior British officials who professed support of the demands for
Indianisation acquiesced in the foot-dragging of conservative political officers
and the sensitivities of the princes. Secretaries of state and viceroys were pos-
sibly ready to accede to such requests when they deemed such concessions
would not have major repercussions in British India. Thus Indianisation of
the political service was a symbolic issue on which the British were willing to
concede to their princely clients since they could respond to critics by saying
that there was increasing Indianisation in the cadre serving in British Indian
provinces.

The viceroy, advised by his political secretary, had primary responsibil-
ity for assignments in the political service. After 1858 many British offi-
cials felt that political service was not the avenue to achieving administrative
plums, although O’Dwyer and Bertrand J. Glancy (1941-47), who were gov-
ernors in Punjab, and Francis Wylie, who served as governor in the Central
Provinces (1938-40) and the United Provinces (1945-47), indicated that such
mobility was possible. Within the political service, it was patronage, men-
tors and seniority rather than initiative that facilitated promotions. Princes
also influenced the placement and sometimes the appointment of political
officers.

38 Edward Wakefield, Past Imperative: My Life in India, 1927-1947 (London, 1966), p. 81.

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Functions

Political officers were, first and foremost, representatives of the Company and
later the British Crown. Yet they were janus-faced functionaries. On the one
hand they implemented policies decided in London, Calcutta and, after 1911
Delhi, and practices codified in Calcutta and Delhi designed to enhance and
protect British prerogatives. On the other hand they represented the princes
within their jurisdicions to the GOI. During the Mughal period, nobles and
allied princes maintained vakils as intermediaries and intelligence-gatherers
at the imperial and provincial courts. Initially the British had allowed Indian
rulers, especially pre-eminent ones such as Hyderabad, Mysore and Gwalior,
to maintain vakils in Calcutta. During the 1790s restrictions were placed on
this practice, until by the 1820s British political officers were to handle all
relations between a ruler and the Company.

These dual functions spawned continual disagreements within the British
hierarchy. Political officers might judge policy formulated in distant capitals
to be unworkable or destructive of British hegemony in the field. Extended
service in a particular state might create sympathy for a ruler, his subjects
and his culture that made it difficult to implement harsh policies. During the
early nineteenth century some political officers such as John Malcolm were
noted for their clement attitude towards their charges; James Tod retired from
his post in Rajputana in 1822 because of growing criticism of his pro-Rajput
orientation.*? Others such as Colonel Phayre in Baroda supervised state af-
fairs more rigorously than the GOI thought expedient. During the twentieth
century some political officers would prejudice princes against proposed con-
stitutional reforms, especially federation during the 1930s. But such dissidents
became less influential as the avenue to promotion lay through the secretariat
and conformity to policy from above.

TENSIONS BETWEEN INTERVENTION AND
LAISSEZ-FAIRE

Queen Victoria’s proclamation in November 1858 that there would be no
further annexations and that indirect and direct rule would coexist has been
considered a major shift in British policy towards the princes. In practice,
however, elements of continuity persisted since transfers of territory did oc-
cur. First, Lord Canning rewarded some princes who had actively assisted the
British during 1857 with grants of territory. Jind, Patiala, Rampur, Gwalior,

39 Banerjee, Rajput States, pp. 226-37.

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Hyderabad and Bhopal received districts adjacent or near their states and
Kapurthala gained two confiscated estates in Awadh.‘° New princely entities
emerged with the formal recognition of Cooch Behar as a state in 1873, the
designation of the maharaja of Banaras as an internally autonomous prince in
1911, and the creation of Swat from tribal territory on the Afghan frontier
between 1916 and 1926. The Wadiyar ruling family was reinstalled in Mysore
in 1881. There were realignments of Kathi states in Saurashtra and lapses of
estates such as Peint in Maharashtra to direct British rule.*!

Although no major shifts in territory occurred, the territorial basis for state-
hood was reaffirmed as boundaries were frozen and made more precise. Anoma-
lous situations were created where districts of princely states swam in the sea of
British India, chiefly in western and central India and in eastern Punjab. The
often heard remark is that some princely states were so intertwined that they
shared two sides of a street. But while the British would no longer use annex-
ations or fear of annexations to intimidate princes, they had no intention of
relinquishing their right to intervene in princely states to secure their imperial
interests.

British policies about when and how to intervene in the princely states
had long vacillated. In the early 1800s the Court of Directors in London,
desiring cheap administration, enjoined its servants ‘not to interfere in the
internal affairs of other states’. Its officers in India often thought otherwise.
In 1825 Charles Metcalfe, then resident at Delhi and proposing intervention
in a disputed succession at Bharatpur, claimed ‘we are continually compelled
to deviate from this rule, which is found untenable in practice’.4* During
the 1830s and 1840s the British remained ambivalent. In Rajputana the
British, alarmed by the influence of militant Nath ascetics over Maharaja Man
Singh II of Jodhpur, actively pursued the expulsion of the Naths.*? However,
they refused to mediate in the more isolated states of Jaisalmer and Bikaner.
This oscillation between intervention and laissez-faire continued after 1857.
While they assumed a less overt profile in princely states affairs, the British
argued that they retained the right and responsibility to mediate to ensure
good government. The occasions for such interference form three clusters:
succession, especially when adoption or minor rulers were involved; disputes

40 Quanungo, ‘Study’, p. 262; Metcalf, Aftermath, pp. 222-3.

4l Tam grateful to John McLeod for pointing out several of these transfers to me.

42 Minute by Sir Charles Metcalfe, 1825, in Sever, Documents, vol. 1, p. 145.

43 Daniel Gold, ‘The Instability of the King: Magical Insanity and the Yogis’ Power in the Politics
of Jodhpur, 1803-1843’, in David N. Lorenzen (ed.) Bhakti Religion in North India: Community
Identity and Political Action (Albany NY, 1995) pp. 120-32.

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between princes and their nobility; and rationalisation of a state’s admin-
istration. The British methods of intervention included ‘advice’ to a ruler,
participation in a minority administration, the education of young princes,
and ‘suggestions’ about the appointment of ministers. In practice there was
considerable overlap among causes for interventions as well as the means of
doing so.

The politics of succession, adoption, and minority administrations

The princes eagerly received the sanads of 1862, which permitted the adop-
tion of children in accord with Hindu and Muslim customs and laws. But
adoption sanads were a double-edged boon. While they assured the preserva-
tion of princely dynasties, they also proclaimed that ‘[t]he British Government
will recognise and confirm any adoption of a successor made by yourself or
by any future Chief of your state’.“4 Invoking the authority of paramountcy
and usage, the British gradually claimed that no succession, whether or not
adoption was involved, would be valid without their assent. A state might not
lapse, but the British could exert significant influence at the crucial transfer
of power from one generation to another. Critical issues were the timing of
adoptions, the appropriate role of widows, nobility (jagirdars and thakurs),
and state officials in selecting heirs when there was no natural or adopted heir,
and the principles on which the British approved adoptions and posthumous
selections.

One of the most famous adoption cases occurred in Baroda. While a com-
mission of inquiry was investigating charges of misgovernment and attempted
assassination against Gaekwad Malhar Rao, Maharani Jamnabai, the widow
of Malhar Rao’s predecessor, was ‘allowed to adopt... [anyone] whom the
Government of India “may select” as the most suitable person’.*° The British,
desiring to rationalise the administration, and the maharani, wanting to delay
any challenge to her authority, both preferred to have a minor adopted. They
agreed on a young village boy from the Kavlana branch of the Gaekwads who
was renamed Sayaji Rao (b. 1863, r. 1881-1939) upon his adoption in 1875.
Other adoptions that would set precedents included those at Kolhapur in 1871;
Udaipur in 1874 where the maharani and the state council selected the heir
(Sajjan Singh), the Maharana Sambhu Singh having died without adopting
an heir; Alwar in 1874-75 where an election was held among female relatives

44 Canning to Hindu Rulers, Sever, Documents, vol. 1, p. 245.

45 Tupper, Practice, vol. 2, pp. 81-116.

48 Fatesinghrao P. Gaekwad, Sayajirao of Baroda: The Prince and the Man (Bombay, 1989), p. 41.
Emphasis in the original.

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and jagirdars of the late ruler;#” Dhar in 1890; and Jhabua in 1893. At the
other end of the political spectrum, in Mysore the British reluctantly agreed
to recognise the adoption of an heir (Chamarajendra Wadiyar [d. 1894]) in
1865 even though the maharaja had not received a sanad granting the right
to adopt in 1862 since he was not then a ruling prince. Eventually the British
returned control of Mysore state in 1881 to the adopted heir after an extended
period of minority administration.

K. M. Panikkar credits Lord Mayo, governor-general from 1869 to 1872,
with establishing the practice of forceful intervention during minority admin-
istrations.”? British officials frequently denigrated local appointees to councils
of regencies as motivated by self-interest.°° Their most caustic criticism was
directed at the minor ruler’s female relatives. Since the British did not have
direct access to the zenana or women’s quarters, they were particularly anxious
to reduce the influence of Indian women, whom they stereotyped as super-
stitious and of doubtful morality. Here the British conflated their Orientalist
concepts of the exoticism of Asian women, especially an uncontrolled sexuality
and lack of intelligence, with British disdain for alternative sources of identity
for young princes.

Ostensibly to counter the zenana’s impact in the public sphere and to pre-
serve the patrimony of young princes, British policy was to appoint a local
political agent to the council of regency or to approve its membership. Such
councils frequently rationalised princely administrations according to British
models that furthered British economic and political interests. Their measures
included reorganised administrative structures and judiciaries, state-managed
forests and, most importantly, land revenue settlements. These settlements
measured land, defined who was responsible for land taxes, the major source of
state income, and set rates. They were crucial in shaping economic and social
hierarchies in the princely states where agriculture was even more dominant
than in British India, as well as in enhancing state revenues at the expense of
both nobles and peasants.

In western India during the peak year of 1876-77, almost half of the to-
tal princely area, twenty-eight states with a combined area of 24000 square

47 Edward S. Haynes, “The British Alteration of the Political System of Alwar State: Lineage Patrimo-
nialism, Indirect Rule, and the Rajput Jagir System in an Indian “Princely” State, 1775-1920’, SH
5, n.s. (1989), pp. 27-71.

8, Hayavadana Rao (ed.), Mysore Gazetteer, 5 vols., new edn (Bangalore, 1930), vol. 2, part 4,
pp. 2923-60.

49 K_M. Panikkar, Indian States and the Government of India (London, 1930), p. 56.

30 Ajit K. Neogy, The Paramount Power and the Princely States of India, 1858-1881 (Calcutta, 1979),
pp. 76-7.

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miles, was under minority administration.*! During the Baroda minority from
1875 to 1881, the late Maharaja Fateh Singh Rao lamented that the British-
sponsored diwan, T. Madhava Rao, was unnecessarily responsive to British
requests for concessions in such areas as the manufacture of arms, opium,
1°? For example, in 1880 the British secured Baroda’s
agreement to implement a tax on toddy trees. Raising the price of toddy in

salt, and even alcoho

Baroda was designed to discourage smuggling from Baroda districts into south
Gujarat, where the British were attempting to limit the consumption of alcohol
through economic disincentives.”

In Hyderabad, Mir Mahbub Ali Khan succeeded to the gaddi in 1869
at the age of 2 and was only invested with full powers in 1884. Although
Salar Jung, the diwan, and Nawab Shams-ul-Umra Amir-i-Kabir, a prominent
noble, were to be co-administrators, the diwan recognised the British right
‘to associate themselves with the education of the Nizam and the mode of
administration of the state during his minority’.°4 Indeed the British secured
substantial economic concessions during this period. One of the most con-
sequential was to have Hyderabad underwrite at ruinous financial terms the
construction of a broad-gauge railway connecting it with the Great Indian
Peninsula Railway along a route that served British military strategy and not
the economic growth of the state.*” Hyderabad also consented to prohibit the
export of salt to British India, tightening the British monopoly on salt and
increasing British revenues from this regressive tax.

Frequent minority administrations in Rajputana and in the Punjab states
and extensive British involvement raised other issues. During the minority
of Mangal Singh in Alwar from 1874 to 1877, Alfred Lyall, the AGG for
Rajputana, cautioned his superiors in Calcutta:

The natural tendency of a system which makes the Political Agent necessarily responsible
for good government during a minority is, I think, to draw the whole conduct of affairs
more and more within his personal control... This tendency should, if possible, be to a

certain degree guarded against, in order that the transfer of power at the end of the minority,

should not involve a radical change of system.”

31 Copland, British Raj, pp. 138, 300, 316. >2 Gaekwad, Sayajirao, pp. 67-73.

>3 David Hardiman, ‘From Custom to Crime: Politics of Drinking in Colonial South Gujarat’, in
Guha, Subaltern Studies IV, p. 126.

>4 Vasant Kumar Bawa, The Nizam between Mughals and British: Hyderabad under Salar Jang 1
(New Delhi, 1986), p. 52.

>> Bharati Ray, ‘The Genesis of Railway Development in Hyderabad State: A Case Study in Nineteenth
Century British Imperialism’, JESHR 21 (1984), pp. 45-59; Sethia, ‘Berar’, pp. 59-78.

°6 AGGR to FSGOI, Camp Ajmer, 24 December 1874, Pol. A Progs, February 1875, 133, quoted in
Haynes, ‘British Alteration’, p. 66.

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To prevent a sharp break, Colonel P. W. Powlett, the political agent on the
spot, interpreted this warning as a good reason for developing a state bureau-
cracy that would continue the British-influenced system inaugurated during a
minority. Thus he accelerated the trend towards the employment of western-
educated Indian administrators from outside the state who grew in power at the
expense of local jagirdars. This course was accelerated during the minority of
Maharaja Jai Singh from 1892 to 1903 and widened the gulf between nobles
and prince.

Patiala state had minority administrations for thirty of the fifty years from
1860 to 1910. Ajit Neogy discusses how the British felt that Indian members of
the Regency Council during the minority of Mohinder Singh during the 1860s
had ruined the character of the ruler and the quality of the administration.*”
The British kept a tighter control over subsequent councils of regency, and
under Curzon, loaned British officers effected changes that enhanced state
control in Patiala. During the minority of Maharaja Bhupinder Singh (b. 1891,
s. 1895, r. 1910-38), Major F Popham Young revised the land settlement in
1901 and J. O. Warburton reorganised the police department. Although the
British were not directly responsible for princes being unable to produce male
heirs or being short-lived, they readily seized the opportunities offered.

While ministers constructed centralised administrative and economic insti-
tutions during minority regimes, British officials debated how best to prepare
young princes to rule. Education that synthesised a British-style curriculum
with indigenous elements so as not to estrange princes from their cultural her-
itage and subjects became a panacea. It would reduce the zenana influence,
broaden the horizons of the princes, and most importantly motivate rulers to
continue the reforms and practices once the regency ended. The British tried
two methods. One was the approval of British tutors for the princes if education
within the state was deemed most appropriate. There was particular concern
regarding the heirs of major states such as Nizam Mahbub Ali of Hyderabad,
whose education was a contentious issue between Salar Jung, residents, and
viceroys. The British desired a rigorous, western education while Salar Jung
wanted instruction in Arabic as well as Urdu and English, in Muslim religious
subjects, and control over the appointment of the British tutor.°® An alterna-
tive occurred in Baroda when F. A. H. Elliot, an ICS officer, set up a small
school in which the newly adopted, non-literate Sayaji Rao would be educated
with eight to ten carefully selected pupils.”

57 Neogy, Paramount Power, p. 76. 8 Bawa, Nizam, pp. 107-11.
59 Stanley Rice, Life of Sayaji Rao III Maharaja of Baroda, 2 vol. (London, 1931), vol. 1, pp. 33-5.

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By the 1870s the British decided that princes might be better educated as
‘traditional’ rulers and partners in the imperial enterprise in the Indian equiv-
alent of a British public school. The activist Mayo inaugurated the policy
with the founding of Rajkumar College at Rajkot in 1870 for the education of
princely sons from Kathiawar. The princes and gentry of Rajputana established
Mayo College at Ajmer two years later. Its Indo-Saracenic campus was a synthe-
sis of architectural elements from Dig, the eighteenth-century Jat capital near
Agra that combined indigenous Hindu, Bengali and Mughal elements with
British ones. The distinctive modern element was a prominent clock tower
whose height symbolised British dominance, as the Qutb Minar in Delhi did
the Muslim conquest. The clock’s hourly tolling would supposedly promote
punctuality, discipline and order and a desirable modernity.©° Subsequently
Aitchison College (1886) was erected at Lahore for princes from Punjab, Daly
College (1898) at Indore for those from central India, and Rajkumar College
at Raipur. Both British and Indians were critical of their graduates. Many felt
that the young princes acquired the veneer of a public school education with
its addiction to sports, some unfortunate vices, and little of the substance of a
classical education or commitment to duty. In 1913 Lord Hardinge, viceroy
from 1911 to 1916, called the first of two conferences of princes to discuss
the establishment of a Higher Chiefs’ College in the new imperial capital of
Delhi. Although this institution, intended to provide an all-India perspective
for princes, never came into being, these conferences served as a stepping stone
towards the Chamber of Princes.

Balancing princes and nobles
During the eighteenth century the relationship between a prince and his aris-
tocracy was dynamic. A prince required military and civil support, but a fol-
lower skilful in forming alliances, military leadership and the acquisition of
material resources could become a ruler himself. Expanding British power
reduced opportunities to create new states and restricted the latitude for no-
bles to augment their political and material resources at the expense of their
rulers. Many British officials who saw their relationship with the princes as a
feudal one between lord and vassal inherited from the Mughal Empire were
reluctant to interfere on behalf of vassals of their vassals. Others, using the
analogy of the feudal barons and the Magna Carta, characterised the nobility

60 Thomas R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (Berkeley CA, 1989),
pp. 66-80.

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within a state as rightful co-sharers of power and a check on the autocracy
of the princes. Once committed to the maintenence of the princes as al-
lies after 1858, the British did not want civil war or brigandage threatening
the survival of client princes. The imperial suzerain tried to mediate internal
power struggles while it simultaneously pursued policies that exacerbated such
relationships.

Appealing to their role in the establishment of the state, nobles resented their
loss of political clout, economic privileges and ritual status. As princes sought
to rationalise their administrations, to extend control over their subjects and
to enhance revenues, nobles became increasingly restive. They attempted to
protect their interests by participating in the adoption of heirs, the education
of minor heirs and the appointment of officials. Sometimes they resorted to
poison for the quiet despatch of a ruler or to armed insurrections that could
degenerate into outlawry, especially in more remote areas such as Saurasthra,
the deserts of Rajputana and the rugged ravines of central India. The British de-
risively labelled these processes court intrigues, perhaps because they reminded
them of their own domestic politics in earlier eras or seemingly substanti-
ated their Orientalist construction of Indian politics as the incoherent Other
demonstrating the superiority of British institutions.

But the British efforts to rationalise administrations heightened friction be-
tween rulers and nobles. Centralised administrations employed an educated
elite and required a secure financial base to pay for railways, telegraph sys-
tems, roads, irrigation projects and disciplinary institutions such as schools,
hospitals and prisons. The older aristocracy was affected in two ways. First,
they frequently lacked the educational qualifications required for bureaucratic
positions. By the 1870s Travancore and Hyderabad began to replace minis-
ters drawn from a local nobility, who had an independent power base in their
landholdings and networks of relatives, with western-educated Indians.°! In
other states British as well as Indian officers were used. Second, the incomes of
nobles were largely derived from lands that the ruler had alienated to them. As
princes bolstered their income by restricting and if possible resuming jagirdari
or zamindari rights and increasing rates of land revenue, the incomes of nobles
as well as peasants were reduced. Scholarship has so far uncovered more op-
position from nobles than from peasants — until the rise of popular agitations
during the 1930s and 1940s.

Gl Jeffrey, Decline; Karen Leonard, ‘Hyderabad: The Mulki-Non-Mulki Conflict’, in Jeffrey, People,
pp. 65-106.

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Different levels of the British hierarchy had conflicting ideas about how to
handle disputes between rulers and their nobles. In Alwar bureaucrats from
British India exacerbated the relationship between the ruler and his jagirdars.©
In 1858 there was a jagirdari uprising against the so-called ‘Delhi diwans’ (two
Muslim brothers), who were assuming significant control as officials within the
state and allegedly attempting to convert to Islam Sheodan Singh, a minor who
had succeeded as raja in 1857. After stifling the dispute, the British appointed
a ruling council of jagirdars, but these lacked education, experience, and the
required commitment to a modern-style administration. By 1870 brigandage
and the possibility of open warfare intensified as some senior jagirdars protested
their deteriorating status as marked in durbar ceremonies, the recruitment of
non-Rajputs for a state military force in place of their jagirdari levies, and an
alleged anti-Hindu stance of the prince as well as the growing authority of
bureaucrats. Posted as political agent to Alwar to prevent civil war, Thomas
Cadell advocated the removal of Sheodan Singh, who was imputed to have
serious personal flaws:

His removal would, I think, be a step toward the solution of the great ‘Chief versus Thakoor’
question. It would show that we are ready and able to punish a Chief, who, after repeated
warnings, drives his nobles into rebellion... and it would be a lesson which, I am sure, is
needed in many parts of Central India and Rajpootan.®

The more distant Lord Mayo, while admitting that the raja’s acts were
‘contemptible, spiteful and discreditable’, declared that Cadell ‘must make
up his mind to put up with his [Sheodan Singh’s] petty annoyances, for I am
determined to carry forbearance to its utmost limit’.4 Even an aborted assas-
sination attempt on Cadell did not evict Sheodan Singh from remaining on
the Alwar gaddi until his death in 1874. In contrast, Malhar Rao of Baroda
was deposed the following year, partly because of a similar assault on a politi-
cal officer. Not only did assorted levels of the British hierarchy have differing
attitudes towards intervention, but the incidence of deposition varied.
Meanwhile the jagirdars of Alwar would suffer further diminution of
their prerogatives as ‘foreign’ administrators extended state authority through
reformed land revenue settlements that ended jagirdari exemption from such

62 Edward S. Haynes, ‘Alwar: Bureaucracy versus Traditional Rulership: Raja, Jagirdars and New
Administrators, 1892-1910’, in ibid., pp. 32-64.

63 Demi-official (confidential letter), PAA (Cadell) to AGGR (Keatinge), 1 September 1870, Pol. A
Progs., October 1870, 167, quoted in Haynes, ‘British Alteration’, p. 55.

64 Note which was a ‘Keep-with’ (KW) by Viceroy, 18 May 1871, Pol. A Progs., June 1871, quoted
in ibid., p. 56.

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taxes and forest policies brought grazing and common lands under state juris-
diction. The British argument that these measures were a boon rather than
a deliberate extension of state control is reflected in the memoirs of Sir
Michael O’Dwyer, who revised the land settlements in Alwar and Bharat-
pur from 1897 to 1901. Claiming that he ‘had experienced some difficulty
in getting the State authorities to agree to my limiting the State share to
two-thirds or three-fourths of the estimated rental’, O’Dwyer related that
he ‘imposed an assessment about double of what I should have imposed on
them if they had been British districts’. He asserted that ‘my assessments were
welcomed by the people, and were regarded as decidedly moderate in com-
parison with other Native States’.©° In contrast, Shail Mayaram criticises the
British for their land and forest settlements, which created oppressive condi-
tions for jagirdars and peasants alike and eventually precipitated Meo peasant
revolts and British charges of financial mismanagement against Maharaja Jai
Singh in Alwar.°°

Support for social reform and rational administration

Britain’s ambivalence about intervention or laissez-faire pervaded its promotion
of social reform and efficient administration in the princely states. Although
British officials claimed that after 1858 Indians themselves would have to in-
augurate social reforms, the imperialists continued to exhort princes to take
action on certain issues. In 1861 the GOI warned its AGG in Rajputana that
the durbars under its jurisdiction should more vigorously prohibit sati, still
practised in Rajputana. If a prince neglected his duty, the GOI threatened
to ‘consider the propriety of reducing the number of guns with which the
Chief of the State is saluted’, to demonstrate the displeasure of the Queen’s
Government.” These instructions indicate the continuing British obsession
with sati, which afflicted far fewer women than the less public practice of fe-
male infanticide. The proposed punishment also indicates how the threat of
a demotion subtly inculcated among the princes the value the British over-
lord placed on salutes and titles as a system of rank. Rudyard Kipling satirised
the fetishisation of honours and disparaged Indian indifference or opposi-
tion to modernising, disciplinary institutions in ‘A Legend of the Foreign

Office’:

65 Sir Michael O'Dwyer, India as I Knew It 1885-1925, 3rd edn (London, 1926), p. 97.

66 Shail Mayaram, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (Delhi, 1997),
pp. 75-82.

67 GOI to AGG in Rajputana, 20 December 1861 as quoted in Tupper, Practice, vol. 1, p. 78. These
directives were also sent to the AGG in Central India.

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Rustum Beg of Kolazai
slightly backward Native State
Lusted for a C.S.I.

so he began to sanitate.

Built a Gaol and Hospital
nearly built a City drain

Till his faithful subjects all

thought their ruler was insane.°8

Although Canning had hesitated to preach the doctrine of ‘good govern-
ment’ to the princes, some of his successors did not. Both John Lawrence,
governor-general from 1864 to 1869, who energetically proclaimed the gospel
of public works, and Lord Mayo, his successor, fostered greater state con-
trol through modernising institutions. The desired reforms included metalled
roads and railways; public health measures, especially piped water, vaccina-
tion campaigns and medical dispensaries; and elementary schools. Although
some subsequent viceroys were more low-key, Lord Curzon, viceroy from 1899
to 1905, epitomised British intrusion in princely administrative affairs and
personal lives.

Curzon’s ambivalent attitudes towards them indicate some of the problems
created by the contradictory aims of British policy for the Indian princes.
On the one hand this ambitious viceroy glorified the feudal image of the
princes during the great imperial durbar held in 1903 to commemorate the
coronation of Edward VII and considered the conservative Madho Singh II of
Jaipur to be the ideal prince. On the other hand he wanted princes to be hard-
working administrators but not too efficient. His personal favourite among
the princes was Maharaja Madho Rao Scindia of Gwalior (b. 1876, s. 1886,
r. 1894-1925) since, as he commented to the secretary of state in London, ‘In
his (Scindia’s) remorseless propensity for looking into everything and probing
it to the bottom, he rather reminds me of your humble servant’.”? David
Cannadine uses an iconic photograph of Curzon and Madho Rao Scindia as a
frontispiece in Ornamentalism to represent the ways in which Britons accepted
the princes as their social equals and both sought to broadcast their hierarchical
superiority through spectacular public rituals and buildings.”!

68 T am indebted to Edward Haynes for this reference, Rudyard Kipling, ‘A Legend of the Foreign
Office’, in Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition (Garden City NJ [1940]), p. 8. Originally
published in Departmental Ditties, 1885.

69 §.R. Ashton, British Policy towards the Indian States 1905-1939 (London, 1982), pp. 23-5, 45-7.

7° Curzon to Lord George Hamilton, 26 November 1899, OIOC, MSS Eur F111/159 as quoted in
ibid., p. 16.

71 Cannadine, Ornamentalism, pp. 45-57. Despite the visual prominence given to Madho Rao of
Gwalior, Cannadine later confuses him with Sayaji Rao of Baroda on p. 147.

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Maharaja Madho Rao Scindia II of Gwalior and Lord Curzon in 1899 after shikar.

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INDIRECT RULE IN COLONIAL INDIA

Although Sayaji Rao of Baroda was hailed for his progressive administration
and social services, which included universal compulsory primary education,
by Curzon’s standards the latter prince indulged in too frequent, extended
stays in Europe at spas and first-class hotels. Some princes apparently retreated
to Europe to avoid having to respond to British demands, much as Nawab
Sa’adat Ali Khan of Awadh went on hunting trips in the 1810s to avoid
such confrontations. Curzon responded as had the British resident in Awadh
by requiring his personal permission before princes journeyed to Europe.’”
Curzon and many British officials were racist in their desire to have the princes
conform to British constructions of paternalistic and hard-working rulers and
in their disdain for princes who challenged the self-image of the British as the
only progressive administrators in India.”

Under Curzon’s successor, there was a perceived shift to a policy of laissez-
faire regarding governmental reforms. In an often quoted speech at a durbar
in Udaipur on 3 November 1909, Lord Minto (1905-10) announced that
he was ‘opposed to anything like pressure on Durbars with a view to intro-
ducing British methods of administration’ and ‘preferred that reforms should
emanate from Durbars themselves and grow up in harmony with the tra-
ditions of the State’. Curzon and generations of political officers must have
turned red with rage when Minto asserted that ‘[i]t is easy to overestimate
the value of administrative efficiency’ and then added that ‘administrative ef-
ficiency, if carried out on lines unsuited to local conditions, would lessen or
impair the personal loyalty of the people to his rulers’. The viceroy tried to
assuage wounded egos by claiming that he spoke ‘in no spirit of criticism’ but
wanted to remind political officers ‘that they are not only the mouthpiece of
Government and the custodians of Imperial policy’ but they are ‘to interpret
the sentiments and aspirations of the Durbars’.”4 This speech reflected Minto’s
aristocratic sentiments and those of his foreign secretary, Harcourt Butler, who
had strongly supported the taluqdars of Awadh when governor of the United
Provinces.”°

Many princes considered Minto’s speech to be their Magna Carta setting lim-
its on their British suzerain. Most political officers committed to the promotion

72 Fisher, Clash, p. 105.

73 Manu Bhagavan, ‘Demystifying the “Ideal Progressive”: Resistance through Mimicked Modernity
in Princely Baroda 1900-13’, MAS 35 (2001), pp. 385-409; Ian Copland, ‘Sayaji Rao Gaekwar
and “Sedition”: The Dilemmas of an Indian Prince’, in Peter Robb and David Taylor (eds), Rule,
Protest, Identity: Aspects of Modern South Asia (London, 1978), pp. 28-48.

ie Quoted from Speeches by the Earl of Minto (Calcutta, 1911), pp. 321-6 in Sever, Documents,
vol. 1, pp. 376-7.

7> Ashton, British Policy, pp. 42-5; Copland, ‘Sayaji Rao Gaekwar’, pp. 30-1.

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of reforms within the states saw it as an unwise constraint. S. R. Ashton agrees,
arguing that non-interference permitted ‘a rapid deterioration of administra-
tive standards in the states’ and made them ‘wholly unreliable allies’ since they
no longer had the support of their subjects.”° But he ignores the fact that popu-
lar expectations of governments changed dramatically from 1910 to the 1940s
and that in 1947 many state subjects still respected and supported their rulers.
Morever, Minto was responding to the immediate, strategic need to renew
bonds between the British and the princes in the face of nationalist challenges
that erupted dramatically in the agitation over the partition of Bengal in 1905
and would escalate with Gandhian civil disobedience and peasant protests over
economic hardship. By the late 1920s, Lord Irwin, the Conservative viceroy
(1926-31) who was sympathetic to the princes, acknowledged the disadvan-
tages of the ‘sledge-hammer’ policy of intervention and tried to persuade the
princes to undertake significant internal reforms, particularly the establish-
ment of an independent judiciary and a designated portion of state revenues
as a privy purse, to head off political protests. Irwin met with the princes in
Simla in 1927, circulated a note on the basics of good government, and tried to
achieve through persuasion what Curzon sought through harangue.’” Laissez-
faire remained a dominant motif in British policy but more subtle forms of
intervention stayed in the British arsenal.

Alternatives to annexation for trangressive princes

Despite their overwhelming military power and the pervasiveness of their in-
formal instruments of intimidation, the British still had to confront princely
refusals to perform their expected roles on the imperial stage. There were two
major issues. One was to delimit the boundaries between appropriate, inap-
propriate and unacceptable princely behaviour. While arguing that ‘to draw a
hard-and-fast line between cases for punishment and cases to be ignored would
be impolitic in a high degree’, in 1895 Tupper declared:

fost, that the British Government holds Ruling Chiefs responsible for the prevention and
punishment of such barbarous practices as mutilation, torture, sati, samadh, impalement
and the like; and secondly, that the British Government will not recognise the right of a
Ruling Chief to order or secretly compass without trial the death of any person in his
territories who has committed no offence, but has simply become obnoxious to him.’8

76 Ashton, British Policy, pp. 197-8.

77 Minutes of Conference at Simla on 6 May 1927, NAI, GOI, F&P, 1928, Pol, File No. 201—R and
Note by Lord Irwin dated 14 June 1927, NAI, GOI, F&P, 1927, Pol, File No. 727.

78 Tupper, Practice, vol. 1, p. 74. Emphasis in the original.

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As with paramountcy, it was inexpedient to define and thereby limit what
might be considered princely misconduct. At times political officers and some
viceroys were prepared to tolerate behaviour unacceptable by British standards
but bearable in Indian clients who, according to racist ideas, could not be
expected to measure up to such lofty models. During the twentieth century
the British would expand misconduct to include financial malfeasance and
oppressive treatment of state subjects, particularly when it triggered popular
protests that threatened neighbouring British Indian provinces. Even so, such
misconduct might be overlooked if the prince had political value for the British
or had forged a supportive network among political officers and viceroys in
India or members of Parliament in London.

The second concern was to develop effective deterrents once annexation
was no longer a viable threat. Low-level sanctions ranged from the posting of
a political agent to the denial of a viceregal visit, the demotion of a prince
in the salute table, or the refusal of permission for a prince to travel outside
his state. The next level was to require the appointment of an external official,
either an Indian trained in British India or a British ICS officer, to a major post
such as diwan or finance minister in the state administration. Some prominent
examples were the British support initially for Salar Jung (diwan from 1853 to
1883) and for his son in Hyderabad and for T: Madhava Rao (1828-91), an
astute, western-educated Maratha from Thanjaur (Tanjore), in Baroda in 1875.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the British frequently
used Indian surrogates in princely administrations with only an occasional
British political officer. By the 1930s and 1940s, the number of British officers
serving as prime minister in princely states had increased. They included M.
Frederick Gauntlett as financial minister in Patiala during the 1930s, Francis
Wylie as prime minister in Alwar in 1933, and Edward Wakefield as minister
in charge in Rewa in 1943. Once again, Paul Scott reflects that reality in the
person of Tusker Smalley, an unambitious, efficient army officer, who was
deputed to Mudpore state, which his wife proclaimed as ‘the real India’.””

The appointment of a British prime minister could presage the more dras-
tic measure of a commission of inquiry to investigate grievances against a
ruler. The threat of such a commission sometimes impelled a ruler to relin-
quish his powers temporarily or to abdicate permanently. Ashton has docu-
mented fifteen princes who so reacted during the viceroyalty of Lord Curzon.®°
Accusations of either public or private misbehaviour continued to trigger such

79 Paul Scott, Staying On (London, 1978), p. 86. Emphasis in the original.

80 Ashton, British Policy, p. 24.

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responses until 1947. Maharaja Ripudaman Singh of Nabha (b. 1883, r. 1911-
23), who was charged with abduction and illegal detention of prisoners from
Patiala and British India, first moved outside his state and then abdicated
in 1928.°! Maharaja Tukoji Rao III of Indore (b. 1890, r. 1911-1926, d. 1978)
abdicated in 1926 rather than face a commission investigating his alleged in-
volvement in the murder of the husband of a woman rumoured to be his
mistress.°”

Several princes were scrutinised by such commissions, and the varied conse-
quences indicate how theory and practice diverged. A few survived after agree-
ing to internal changes in government or spending patterns. Two prominent
examples are Bhupinder Singh of Patiala and Hari Singh (b. 1895, r. 1925—
48, d. 1961) of Jammu and Kashmir, who benefited from British and Indian
advocates. After they advised Bhupinder Singh to curb his financial commit-
ments and to appoint a finance minister who would oversee the payment of
state debts, the British launched an official inquiry in 1930 in response to a
highly critical report from the All-India States’ People’s Conference (AISPC)
entitled Indictment of Patiala.®> They selected J. A. O. Fitzpatrick, the AGG
for Punjab, who was certainly familiar with the state but someone the ma-
haraja had suggested. Although his report exonerated the ruler, Fitzpatrick
urged reforms in the judiciary and police. Despite vociferous campaigns by the
AISPC and the Punjab Riyasti Praja Mandal (the local states’ people’s group),
Bhupinder Singh retained his gaddi because of sympathetic British support-
ers, his prominence in constitutional negotiations regarding the princes, and
his shrewd participation in Sikh politics, where he divided his attackers.** As
Harold Wilberforce-Bell, then officiating deputy-secretary in the political de-
partment, noted, “We cannot afford to see a state of importance & position of
Patiala crack’.®°

In July 1931 Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir confronted
demonstrations protesting at discriminatory measures towards the Muslim
majority. The opposition escalated as the Ahmadiyyas, a heterodox Muslim

81 Barbara N. Ramusack, ‘Incident at Nabha: Interaction between Indian States and British Indian
Politics, JAS 28 (1969), pp. 563-77.

82 Lord Reading, the governor-general, proposed an inquiry to Lord Birkenhead, secretary of state for
India, 4 December 1925, OIOC, MSS Eur E 238/14.

83 Indictment of Patiala: Being a Report of the Patiala Enquiry Committee Appointed by the Indian States’
People’s Conference (Bombay, 1930).

84 Barbara N. Ramusack, ‘Punjab States: Maharajas and Gurdwaras: Patiala and the Sikh Community’,
in Jeffrey, People, pp. 188-90; Ian Copland, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire 1917-1947
(Cambridge, 1997), pp. 81-2.

85 Note by Wilberforce-Bell, 31 December 1929, OIOC, CR, R/1/19/509.

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sect based in Punjab, and the Ahrars, an urban political party in Lahore, sent
jathas to join Muslim comrades in Kashmir.*° B. J. Glancy, a senior political
officer, chaired a commission of inquiry that included two Muslim and two
Hindu members.*” Their report satisfied neither the Hindus nor the Muslims.
Initially the GOI appeared ready to appoint a British administrator for the
state, but lobbying by Nawab Hamidullah of Bhopal and two Kashmiri brah-
mans, Tej Bahadur Sapru, a leading Liberal lawyer based in Allahabad, and K.
N. Haksar, his relative through marriage, persuaded Hari Singh to dismiss key
officials and Lord Willingdon, the viceroy (1931-37), to agree to the milder
but still significant alternative of the appointment of E. J. Colvin as prime
minister of Kashmir.8® Hari Singh faced an even more tumultuous future and
would eventually be forced to live outside Kashmir in 1949 and to accept his
son, Karan Singh (b. 1931), acting as his regent and then as head of state from
1952.®° A third ruler, Maharaja Jai Singh (b. 1882, r. 1903-33, d. 1937) of
Alwar, confronted popular resistance by the sizeable Meo Muslim minority
beginning in 1932 over the state imposition of Hindi, the lack of educa-
tional facilities for Muslims, and most importantly, oppressive taxation. After
he refused to implement recommendations from a British commission and
A. C. Lothian, the local political officer, the maharaja was deposed and exiled
in 1933 and died in Paris in 1937.”° Having developed a reputation for cruelty
to animals and people as well as irrational demands for deference, Jai Singh
could expect little indulgence.

The ultimate British sanction of recalcitrant princes was deposition. The
most prominent deposition was that of Gaekwad Malhar Rao of Baroda. As
discussed earlier, this ruler had been caught in bureaucratic crossfire between
differing British policies towards the princely states. Lord Salisbury, the secre-
tary of state in London, even proposed to make an example of Malhar Rao’s
misgovernment by transferring some of Baroda’s territory to a prince ‘who had
behaved well’.?! Despite opposition from Bombay and London, Lord North-
brook, a liberal viceroy (1872-76), appointed a commission of three British
officials and three Indians, the rulers of Jaipur and Gwalior and Sir Dinkar Rao,

86 Ramusack, Princes, pp. 171-4; Ian Copland, ‘Islam and Political Mobilization in Kashmir, 1931-34’,
PA 54 (1981), pp. 228-59.

87 Prem Nath Bazaz, The History of Struggle for Freedom in Kashmir (New Delhi, 1954), pp. 151-71.

88 KN. Haksar to T. B. Sapru, 7 February 1932, NLI, Sapru MSS, I, H 51.

89 Karan Singh, Heir Apparent: An Autobiography (Delhi, 1982), pp. 77-102.

9° Arthur Lothian, Kingdoms of Yesterday (London, 1951), pp. 124-6; Mayaram, Resisting Regimes, ch.
4; Ramusack, Princes, pp. 179-80.

°1 Salisbury to Northbrook, 22 January 1875, as quoted in Copland, British Raj, p. 148.

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the former prime minister of Gwalior, to investigate the charges of misgov-
ernment. After the commission split on racial lines, with the Indian members
declaring the gaekwad not guilty, the GOI deposed Malhar Rao on grounds
of ‘gross misrule’ in 1875.” This action probably prompted other princes to
take evasive action rather than risk an inquiry and to decline to serve on such
commissions.

Although not frequent, depositions occurred until the British departure.
In 1867 Nawab Muhammad Ali Khan (d. 1895) of Tonk was deposed for
his collusion in an attack on the uncle of a tributary. In 1891 the ruling
family of Manipur was debarred from the gaddi after an attack in which five
British officers were killed, and the state was regranted to a collateral branch.
The last major deposition reflects that the fluctuations in British attitudes
between laissez-faire and intervention continued into the 1940s. In the difficult
atmosphere of early 1942, the British appointed a commission of inquiry to
investigate charges including fraud, bribery, the obstruction of justice and
being an accessory to murder against Maharaja Gulab Singh of Rewa (b. 1903,
s. 1918, r. 1922-45, d. 1950). Their verdict was not guilty and the prince
remained in power while the British dealt with the Quit India movement
and peasant demonstrations as well as the war effort. But in 1945 Francis
Wylie (1891-1970), amore determined and aggressive political officer, deposed
Gulab Singh as an example to other princes of the need for reform.?? Long
before 1945, however, the British were devising new roles for ambitious princes
on the broader stages of all-Indian and imperial politics.

NEW FUNCTIONS FOR PRINCELY CLIENTS

Manly military allies

Initially the princes had concluded treaties as military allies and supplied troops
and funds during the Company’s expansionist wars. After 1857 British military
power precluded further internal military challenges, so the British fashioned
new duties for these military allies. Since the British viewed India as the centre,
the reputed jewel in the crown, of their far-flung empire, they commandeered
Indian resources to defend this empire. When a Russian contingent defeated an
Afghan army near Panjdeh in 1885 and reignited smouldering British concern
about the security of its frontiers, the GOI launched the Imperial Service
Troops scheme to upgrade the military capability of the princes’ troops. Selected
princely states would be given the ‘honour of maintaining a contingent of state

92 Tbid., pp. 141-53; Copland, ‘Baroda Crisis’. 93 Copland, Princes, pp. 187-8, 198.

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subjects trained and inspected by British officers and supplied with British
equipment. Paid from state revenues, these units could be used only for the
defence of British imperial interests. The objective was to have units that could
efficiently coordinate with British Indian units in battle. First employed along
Indian borders in military expeditions to sites such as Chitral and Tirah, the
Imperial Service Troops would fight in the Boer War, the Boxer Rebellion and
the two world wars. Some princes such as Madho Singh of Jaipur would parlay
his support for Imperial Service Troops into British backing in his struggles
with his thakurs.”4

Extending the commitment of their ancestors, some princes crossed the
kala pani or black waters to safeguard the empire. The 19-year-old Maharaja
Ganga Singh (b. 1880, r. 1898-1943) of Bikaner went to China during the
Boxer Rebellion, along with Maharaja Madho Rao Scindia of Gwalior and
Maharaja Pratap Singh (1845-1922), first a minister in Jodhpur, then ruler
of Idar from 1902 to 1911, and twice regent of Jodhpur. Numerous princes
including Ganga Singh, Pratap Singh and Maharaja Ranjitsinhji (b. 1872,
r. 1907-33) of Nawanagar, who was most renowned for his exploits on the
cricket field, enthusiastically volunteered during the First World War. However,
these princes served for only brief periods as they lacked modern military
training and were fairly ineffective in the field.

Consequently the British sought to transmute personal services from the
princes into financial contributions and recruiting activities. Nizam Osman
Ali Khan (b. 1886, r. 1911-48, d. 1967) of Hyderabad donated over Rs 35
lakhs to the war effort. Others funded aeroplanes and hospital ships, and
some provided buildings for convalescing soldiers.”> Equally important were
recruiting efforts. Maharaja Bhupinder Singh, whose state contained so many
of the Punjabi Sikhs and Muslims characterised by the British as martial races,
was a zealous recruiter. In one speech he proclaimed that it was far better to die
a manly death on the field of battle than to remain at home and meet the angel
of death through the unmanly diseases of cholera and plague.?° Some princes
also served during the brief third Afghan war in 1919. But by the Second
World War few princes were on active duty, although some such as Maharaja
Yadavindra Singh (b. 1913, r. 1938-48, d. 1974) of Patiala made inspection
tours of units from Patiala that were serving in North Africa.”

94 Stern, Cat, pp. 198-203. 95 Ramusack, Princes, pp. 38-40.

96 Khalsa Advocate, 28 October 1916, p. 4.

97 John McLeod has pointed out that Maharao Raja Bahadur Singh of Bundi (b. 1920, r. 1945-48,
d. 1977) fought and was wounded in the Burma campaign a few months before his ascension to

the gaddi.

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Faithful feudatories

After 1857 British officials extolled the princes as ‘natural leaders’ and as faith-
ful feudatories. The Imperial Assemblage at Delhi in 1877 inaugurated a series
of ritual representations in which the British proclaimed the breadth of their
imperial enterprise and sought to reaffirm ties with loyal clients through the dis-
pensation of honours. Subsequently, princes provided opulence characterised
as native at the even more elaborate Imperial Durbars held in India in 1903 and
1911 to mark the coronations of British sovereigns. King George V and Queen
Mary were the first British monarchs to visit India for the 1911 Durbar, where
most but not all princes competed in the lavishness of their dress, jewels and
accommodations. It was here that Maharaja Sayaji Rao of Baroda achieved
notoriety by allegedly challenging the British ritual order. His sartorial sins
were to wear a simple white Maratha dress without the jewellery the British
deemed appropriate for a prince, not to don his sash of the Order of the Star
of India, and to carry a walking stick rather than a sword. Even more egre-
gious was his perceived insult when he turned his back on his suzerain in less
than the designated distance after performing a bow.?® Charles Nuckolls says
that this incident, which was initially labelled seditious, was transformed into
‘bad manners’ as then it could remain in the feudal context which the British
felt able to control.?? However, in an analysis of the newsreels of the Durbar,
Stephen Bottomore shows that several rulers, including Begam Sultan Jahan
of Bhopal, turned their back after bowing to their suzerain.!”

Many scholars assert that the British fabricated their Indian feudal order
by appropriating elements of both European and Indian traditions in order
to appeal to the Indian mind — a mind that the British themselves had con-
structed.!°! The British also incorporated the princes (as well as Canadian
and Antipodean politicians and African chiefs) into ceremonies held in Britain
that were designed to affirm British superiority when Germany and the United
States began to challenge it. Some princes travelled to the metropole to attend
the Jubilee Celebrations of Queen Victoria in 1887 and 1897, where they
would meet their suzerain in person and could appeal to her over the heads
of her officials in India. These visits also helped the princes to predicate a

98 Charles W. Nuckolls, ‘The Durbar Incident,’ MAS 24 (1990), pp. 529-59. In an authorised
biography, the maharaja’s action is described as an accident: Rice, Sayaji Rao IIL, vol. 2, pp. 16-18.
°9 Nuckolls, ‘Durbar Incident’, p. 559.

100 Stephen Bottomore, ‘ “Have You Seen the Gaekwar Bob?”: Filming the 1911 Delhi Durbar’, HJFRT
17 (1997), pp. 330-5. On 24 November 1998 Queen Elizabeth II agreed that the Lord Chancellor,
after handing her the government’s speech at the opening of Parliament, could turn his back when
walking away instead of walking backward: CE, 25 November 1998, p. A4.

101 Cohn, ‘Representing Authority’, pp. 165-209: Nuckolls, ‘Durbar Incident’.

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Maharaja Sayaji Rao of Baroda in 1899.

special relationship with the British Crown. Several were present at the coro-
nations in 1902, 1911 and 1937. They ranged from the youthful Ganga Singh
of Bikaner, educated at Mayo College, who aspired to a broader role in the
imperial political arena and attended both the 1902 and 1911 ceremonies, to
Madho Singh of Jaipur who took two huge brass containers of Ganges water to

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London for purification rituals in 1902. In Westminister Abbey and Bucking-
ham Palace, Indian and African clients were prized tokens of the submission
of exotic peoples to British rule.

Constitutional counterweights

After 1857 the British attempted to include the princes as least peripherally in
the constitutional structure they evolved for British India.!°? In 1861 Maharaja
Narinder Singh (r. 1845-62) of Patiala had been appointed to the Imperial
Legislative Council, and from 1906 to 1908 Ripudaman Singh, then heir of
Nabha state, also served on the Council. Neither prince distinguished himself
in this forum. In 1876 Lord Lytton had proposed a privy council of princes, but
the India Office in London feared that it would not be possible to secure par-
liamentary approval for the enabling legislation. In 1905 Lord Curzon revived
the proposal, linking it to princely contributions as military allies since the
twenty-five members were to be princes who had maintained Imperial Service
Troops. Lord Minto suggested a council of nobles as a possible counterweight
to Congress activities during the agitation over the Partition of Bengal in 1905.
Although some princes, most notably Madho Rao Scindia of Gwalior, lobbied
for such a council, the resistance of leading rulers such as those of Hyderabad
and Mysore, as well as political turmoil in British India, led Minto to drop this
scheme.

As mentioned earlier, Lord Hardinge had twice assembled some princes to
discuss a Higher Chiefs College. Lord Chelmsford, his successor from 1916 to
1921, continued to hold conferences of princes but broadened the topics of
discussions. Princes began to meet informally with British Indian politicians
and some British officials argued that these gatherings constituted a major and
ill-fated shift in the policy of ‘subordinate isolation’. Michael O’Dwyer even
characterised them as ‘encouraging them [the princes] to form themselves into
a sort of trade union’ and asserted that ‘it is bound to lead to intrigue between
the Chiefs and the political leaders of British India’.!°? In fact the isolation
of the princes had long been breached informally both by British-sponsored
rituals such as the imperial assemblage and coronation durbars and by private
princely ceremonies such as marriage celebrations and religious pilgrimages.

102 This section is based largely on Ashton, British Policy, chs 1-2; Copland, Princes, ch. 1; Gerard
Douds, Government of Princely India, 1918-39, PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh (1979),
chs 1-2; Ramusack, Princes, chs 1-3.

103 J.P Thompson, Chief Secretary, Punjab Govt, to J. B. Wood, Political Secretary, GOI, 28 December
1917, Pro. No. 28, NAI, GOI, F&P, S-I, February 1918, Pro. Nos 28-34.

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In a fascinating study of marriage patterns in Rajasthan, Frances Taft Plunkett
has called attention to the importance of marriage alliances among the polygy-
nous Rajput princes in maintaining ties with other states, not only in Rajasthan
but elsewhere in Gujarat.!°4 More recently, Indira Peterson has analysed how
Serfoji II (x. 1798-1832) of Thanjaur used the private act of pilgrimage to
Banaras from 1820 to 1822 to reaffirm his status within the framework of
British colonial authority and among other princes as well as to collect reli-
gious and scientific manuscripts.!

There was renewed princely lobbying for a forum to discuss common prob-
lems during the negotiations preceding the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms of
1919. In response, the British inaugurated the Chamber of Princes, a con-
sultative, advisory body, in 1921. Composed of 108 princes with salute of
eleven guns or more and twelve princes who were selected to represent 127
other states, the Chamber did not fulfil most British or princely expectations.
There were structural weaknesses. The viceroy was the presiding officer and
set the agenda, so the princes rarely discussed what they considered difficult
and sensitive issues such as minority administrations. Their resolutions were
only advisory to the GOI and were subject to endless circulation within its
bureaucracy.

Among the princes there were debilitating differences. Once again promi-
nent princes, especially those from southern regions such as Hyderabad, Mysore
and Travancore, disdained to participate in a group venture that they viewed
as an encroachment on their sovereignty. Subsequently a coalition of western-
educated princes from medium-sized states in Rajputana, western India and
Punjab, most notably Ganga Singh of Bikaner, Bhupinder Singh of Patiala,
Jai Singh of Alwar, Ranjitsinhji of Nawanagar, and later Nawab Hamidullah
(b. 1894, r. 1926-49, d. 1960) of Bhopal, dominated the deliberations of the
Chamber and its standing committee. British officials and others soon ques-
tioned the representativeness of the Chamber, some claiming it was a preserve of
Rajput princes. Princely factions and personal jealousies, particularly between
Ganga Singh and Bhupinder Singh, the first two chancellors of the Chamber,
meant that the princes rarely spoke with a unified voice on controversial issues
such as the need for a codification of British political practices to preclude what
the princes perceived as excessive British intervention.

104 Frances Taft Plunkett, ‘Royal Marriages in Rajasthan’, CJS, n.s. 6 (1972), pp. 64-80.

105 Indira Viswanathan Peterson, ‘Subversive Journeys? Travel as Empowerment in King Serfoji II of
Tanjore’s 1820-22 Pilgrimage to Benares’, New England Conference of the Association for Asian
Studies, Brown University, 30 September 2000.

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Throughout the 1920s some assertive princes laboured to achieve a defi-
nition of paramountcy and greater security in an era of political challenges.
In 1926 Lord Reading alarmed the princes with his reply to the nizam’s re-
quest for the reincorporation of Berar into Hyderabad when he claimed that
‘where Imperial interests are concerned or the general welfare of the people of
a State is seriously and grievously affected by the action of its Government,
it is with the Paramount Power that the ultimate responsibility of taking re-
medial action must lie’.!°° Princes feared that the welfare of state subjects
opened endless opportunities for intervention. Simultaneously, some Cham-
ber stalwarts raised economic issues. One was the impact of increased cus-
toms duties because of the institution of a protective tariff in 1922 on goods
imported through British Indian ports but destined for princely states. An-
other was a more equitable distribution of the salt revenues collected by
the GOI.

The report of the Indian States Committee appointed in 1928 by Irwin
to assuage princely grievances shocked both princes and Indian nationalists,
though for different reasons. Disappointed by the committee’s refusal to define
paramountcy, the princes were even more startled by the claim that interven-
tion might be justified if there was a widespread popular demand within the
states for changes. Although the Butler Report, so named after its chair, reaf-
firmed the treaty relationship of the states with the British Crown and therefore
recommended that the states should not be transferred without their agreement
to a responsible GOI (thereby frustrating Indian nationalists), the princes were
dejected at what they saw as increased opportunities for British encroachment
on their rights and prerogatives.'°” The princes had contradictory aims: want-
ing the benefits of closer economic ties with British India but safeguards from
British interference in their internal affairs. For varying reasons the princes and
the British soon viewed federation as a viable arrangement for resolving these
longstanding constitutional debates.

Political partners
As Indian nationalists intensified their challenge to the British, the imperialists
exploited the princes as political collaborators in all-India politics. Some princes
had aroused British apprehensions because of their support for Indian national-
ist leaders. The most notable example was Sayaji Rao of Baroda, who employed

106 Reading to Nizam, 27 March 1926, NAI, GOI, F&P, No. 13-Political (Secret), 1924-26,
Nos 1-49.
107 Copland, Princes, pp. 65-71; Ramusack, Princes, pp. 143-52.

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Indian nationalists ranging from Romesh Chandra Dutt, the moderate Bengali
economist, to Aurobindo Ghose, the Bengali political philosopher who was
vice-principal at Baroda College, and lesser-known Maratha activists.'°% In
1909 Minto asked residents to consult the princes on cooperative measures to
contain seditious activities within their states. Several princes replied that they
had strengthened their police and intelligence services and tightened control
over the circulation of literature deemed seditious. They also requested the
exchange of intelligence information, protection from negative press attacks
on themselves and their administrations, and restrictions on religious aspects
of political activities.!

During the 1910s the princes emerged overtly as political allies of the British,
especially in the arena labelled communal politics.!!° As the British were not
Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, they lacked the legitimacy that princes possessed as
religious spokespersons. Thus the nizam of Hyderabad could issue a farman
declaring that since the First World War was not a jihad, it was religiously
permissible for Muslims to fight for the Allies against the Central Powers,
who included the Ottoman Empire headed by the Muslim Caliph. When
orthodox Hindus in 1917 protested against the construction of an irrigation
channel at Hardwar where the sacred Ganges emerges from the Himalayas
onto the north Indian plain, the British invited princes from Alwar, Banaras,
Bikaner, Gwalior, Jaipur and Patiala to participate in the resolution of the
dispute. All of them, except Alwar, who quoted Sanskrit legal texts that Banaras
claimed were irrelevant, eventually supported a compromise that allowed a
channel of free-flowing water past the bathing ghais, while a parallel channel
serviced the irrigation system. During the early years of the war, the Punjab
princes, especially Bhupinder Singh, implemented various measures to control
disturbances related to the Ghadr movement, a Punjabi effort to secure German
support for the overthrow of the British Government. After 1919 the Patiala
ruler would increasingly collaborate with the British as Sikhs who followed
the prescriptions of Guru Gobind Singh sought to wrest control over Sikh
gurudwaras from Hindu mahants. Bhupinder Singh frequently functioned as
an intermediary between the British and the leaders of the Shiromani Gurdwara
Prabhandhak Committee, which achieved legal recognition and control in
1925 of Sikh gurudwaras in Punjab.'!’ Not all princes participating in British
Indian associations and politics served British strategies, but some continued
as political collaborators until 1947.

108 Copland, ‘Sayaji Rao’, pp. 33-40. 1°? NAI, GOI, F&P, S-I, March 1910, Pro. Nos 42-45.
110 Ramusack, Princes, ch. 4. 11 Ramusack, ‘Punjab States’, in Jeffrey, People, pp. 183-7.

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CONCLUSION

From 1858 to the 1920s, the British developed a theory of indirect rule that
helped to maintain hegemony in India without any further annexation and
with the least possible expenditure of personnel and economic resources. Key
elements included a hierarchy with the British at the apex and the princes as
vassals, a system of honours, most notably the Order of the Star of India, and
the salute table, which established one’s rank in the hierarchy. Although the
British frequently argued that such honours had particular appeal to Indians,
they themselves devoted much attention to their own position in these ranking
systems, which affirmed their superior status in India during a period of growing
democratisation at home. Next, British officials constructed legal arguments
to legitimate and to provide precedents for policy decisions regarding their
princely clients. Major components were the semi-official histories by Tupper
and Lee-Warner, the collections of treaties by Aitchison, the political manual
by Butler, and finally the Indian States Committee Report of 1928-29. These
documents would be adapted to changing imperial interests through concepts
such as usage.

Although they eschewed annexation, the British continued to intervene in
the internal politics of the princely states for political or economic advantage.
Such intrusion ranged from advice about policies and appointments of state
officials, to control over minority administrations, to the deposition of a ruler.
The education of princely heirs according to British models was a more subtle
means of influencing the future. Official support for intervention varied and
reflected evolving British priorities and the complex interactions within the
imperial chain of command.

The British corporate structure had eliminated succession struggles and
enjoyed an unprecedented monopoly of military power, but that government
was more factious than was generally admitted. The British theories about and
policies towards the princes are an excellent prism for seeing how these differing
levels of authorities actually operated. There were conflicts between Parliament
and the India Office at the metropole and between the viceroy and his political
secretary in the colony. Since viceroys had immediate responsibility for policies
towards the princes, a succession in viceroys could mean varying magnitudes of
change in policies. The most dramatic was the shift between the interventionist
Curzon to the laissez-faire Minto. At the next level there were tensions between
the viceroy at the centre and provincial governors, who were closer to the local
situation and concerned about bureaucratic prerogatives, as in the long-term
disputes between the GOI and the Bombay presidency. Finally, at the bottom

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there were political officers serving as political agents, AGGs, and residents
who were expected to compartmentalise their professional selves into a British
representative to the princes and an advocate of the princes to their overlord.
They did so with differing degrees of success.

As the challenges to British power evolved, their princely clients accepted
new tasks. First and foremost, the princes remained an inexpensive means of
providing for the administration of large tracts of economically unproductive
or geographically inaccessible areas. For an imperial power with limited mon-
etary and personnel resources, the princes provided a key link to local levels
of society. Second, the princes continued to be substantial contributors to the
British imperial military establishment through the Imperial Service contin-
gents, monetary contributions, and recruiting activities. Third, the symbolic
role of the princes was enhanced. Besides their participation in ritual encoun-
ters ranging from lavish coronation durbars, the princes supplied a stage for
viceregal visits and tours of the royal family that affirmed the British imperial
order. Fourth, the princes could be useful allies in all-Indian and communal
politics, to which their hereditary status and their financial patronage accorded
access that the British lacked. So the princes continued as valued imperial clients
until 1947.

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CHAPTER 5

PRINCES AS MEN, WOMEN, RULERS,
PATRONS, AND ORIENTAL STEREOTYPES

Indian princes played multiple roles on diverse stages. Thus their actions trig-
gered complex and sometimes conflicting perceptions among various audi-
ences. The last chapter documented shifting British official images of the
princes from natural Indian leaders to loyal allies to naughty schoolboys. But
just as British policies did not create the Indian princes as rulers, they influ-
enced but did not circumscribe princely lives and political functions. This
chapter explores what it meant to be a ruling prince in India, with particular
emphasis on the period from 1870 to 1947. There are four main themes. First,
the life cycle of a prince from birth through education to marriage to succession
to rulership will exemplify their interlocking private and public lives. Second,
an analysis of the sources of legitimacy for Indian rulers and the inconstancy
of British policies will disclose opportunities for princes to manoeuvre in the
interstices of indirect rule. Third, princely patronage of religious specialists and
institutions, visual and performing arts, luxury crafts, secular scholarship, and
sports will reveal how princes fostered cultural nationalism while fulfilling their
princely dharma. Fourth, an examination of the construction of the princes
as concerned, indulgent or decadent rulers, as benevolent fathers and as cun-
ning, inept or naive politicians will detail the shifting perceptions of their dis-
parate audiences as well as the unequal abilities, ambitions and achievements of
Indian princes. These images reflect the ambiguous sources of political author-
ity, the tangled ritual and social status of princes, and a mixture of fact and
fantasy in public consciousness.

LIFE CYCLE OF A PRINCE

In princely as in most Indian families, the birth of a first son was exuberantly
greeted.’ A son was an heir to the family fortune, a supporter of his parents
in old age, and in Hindu families, a crucial perfomer of rituals at the death
ceremonies of parents. Since sons in princely families ensured succession that
brought control of extraordinary resources, elaborate ceremonies heralded the

! Charles Allen and Sharada Dwivedi, Lives of the Indian Princes (London, 1984), chs 1-6 provides
many examples of the patterns outlined.

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birth of a first son. The beating of drums, an Indian insignia of sovereignty,
and the firing of gun salutes, a British symbol of rank, accompanied public
announcements to largely non-literate audiences. Other customs reflected
the role of a ruler as a provider of material benefits and a fount of justice.
Distributions of sweets indicated benevolence, and the release of prisoners
from jails expressed justice tempered with mercy. As British power became
dominant, news of a birth was communicated quickly to the colonial hierar-
chy. A letter or telegram of congratulations from the British sovereign and her
or his representative in India authenticated legitimacy — a crucial factor since
many princes had multiple wives and concubines. Subsequently there would
be private ceremonies of purification and naming.

When a daughter was born, these elaborate festivities were conspicuous by
their absence. Travancore and Cochin, where descent was matrilineal, were
notable exceptions. There 18-gun salutes were fired for girls although boys
received 21-gun salutes.” Another anomaly occurred in Bhopal. Upon the birth
of her granddaughter, the formidable Begum Qudsia (r. 1819-37) was quick
to petition British officials about the legitimacy of her succession to rule.?
Otherwise daughters were more likely to be prized when sons had already
appeared or there had been no daughters for an extended period. Female
infanticide was a possibility in princely families as well as in non-ruling families,
but hearsay is the most often cited evidence of this practice.

Young children in princely families resided with their mothers in the palace
zenana. Many princes and princesses remember the women of the zenana
and their servants as being indulgent and even fawning. When they were
judged ready to become apprentices to power, sons, particularly heirs, were
allocated semi-independent establishments replete with family servants. By
the end of the nineteenth and especially in the twentieth century, many
princely fathers followed the pattern of elite, westernised Indians and em-
ployed European, usually British, nannies, governesses and tutors. These for-
eigners were recruited primarily to teach English and to socialise their young
charges into a western lifestyle and perhaps to offset more indulgent Indian
caretakers.

Technical or applied training for ruling was unstructured. Indian tutors were
mainly responsible for transmitting the history of the state and the princely
dynasty and the sources of dynastic legitimacy. They were also to teach lit-
eracy and some mathematics. Then, much as a medical intern does in the
early twenty-first century, heirs to princely gaddis who were titled yuvrajs or

2 Tbid., p. 25. 3 Khan, Begums, p. 83.

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tikka sahibs might spend a few years in various state departments learning
administrative routines. More important was touring within the state, some-
times done in conjunction with hunting excursions, a traditional means of
developing appropriate masculine and royal skills in deploying weapons and
conspicuously displaying physical courage.

After 1858 when the British began to endorse the princes as natural leaders
of their peoples, they evinced more concern over their education. Other factors
were also influential. One was the debate in Britain over the proper education
for elite British men who were to rule at home and in an empire abroad. The
other was the growing British disdain for the western-educated Bengalis, whom
the British deemed effeminate and alienated from other Indians because of
inappropriate education. Although British anxiety to mould princes as clients
responsive to their political needs is evident, it is less apparent why Indian
princes responded to British initiatives. Possibly these allies wanted to ensure
that their heirs learned how to function effectively within the British system
of indirect rule.

Many princes who played significant political roles in the twentieth cen-
tury were educated at chiefs’ colleges, such as Bhupinder Singh of Patiala at
Aitchison College. But several princely families continued to educate their
sons at home with Indian and western tutors, such as Ganga Singh of Bikaner
who had a British tutor, Sir Brian Egerton, for three years after a five-year
stint at Mayo College in Ajmer.‘ By the 1930s and 1940s, new patterns
emerged. Some princes went to the Doon School, which had been established
in 1935 as a boarding school for elite Indians from British Indian provinces. In
1942 Maharaja Karan Singh of Kashmir started a four-year stay at the Doon
School that left him with vivid memories of inedible food, high academic stan-
dards and a rigorous regime of sports.> Some Indian princes went to England
for their education with mixed results. Maharaja Mayurdhwajsinhji (later
Meghrajji III) of Dhrangadhara enrolled in Haileybury ‘on the theory that
“since the Indian public schools were imitations of the schools in England,
why go to an imitation and not to the original?” ”°

Although princes received ruling powers at younger ages in the early nine-
teenth century, the British gradually established 18 to 21 as the age of in-
vestiture for princes who had succeeded as minors. They maintained that the
higher age allowed for the training and personal maturity essential to fulfil
the responsibilities of a ruler. But the appropriate age for investiture remained

4 KM. Panikkar, His Highness The Maharaja of Bikaner: A Biography (London, 1937), note by Egerton,
pp. 46-9.
5 Singh, Heir Apparent, pp. 24-7. 6 Allen and Dwivedi, Lives, p. 121.

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a hotly debated topic among the princes, their advisers, and British political
officers.

First marriages for princes occurred from around 12 onward. As was com-
mon practice throughout Indian society, marriages were alliances of families
and were carefully arranged to reinforce or enhance political, ritual, social and
economic status. Some marriages maintained longstanding ties between fam-
ilies. Maharaja Man Singh II of Jaipur was married at 12 to an older princess
from Jodhpur and then at 21 to her niece, continuing traditional matrimo-
nial liaisons between Jaipur and Jodhpur.” Modern political objectives were
also influential. Maharaja Yadavindra Singh of Patiala was married in 1931
at the age of 20 to a princess of Seraikella. Then in 1938, after succeeding
his father, he married Mohinder Kaur, the daughter of a popular political
leader.’ Some princes, such as Nizam Osman Ali Khan of Hyderabad, went
much further afield. In 1931, to enhance his credentials as a Muslim ruler, he
married his first son to the daughter of the last Caliph of Islam and his sec-
ond son to the great-great-granddaughter of Sultan Murad V of the Ottoman
Empire.

Some princes and princesses chose not to enter arranged marriages, and these
exceptions precipitated social or political crises. Princess Indira of Baroda, the
daughter of the reputedly progressive Sayaji Rao, rejected the alliance proposed
by her parents with Maharaja Madho Rao Scindia of Gwalior, who was many
years her senior. Such a union of the two most powerful Maratha ruling families
would have made the headstrong Indira a second wife expected to maintain
purdah. She chose instead to marry the heir to the gaddi of Cooch Behar
and become a highly publicised hostess in London and Calcutta. Ironically
her daughter, Gayatri Devi, accepted the proposal of Man Singh of Jaipur to
become his third wife and to observe purdah within Jaipur state.”

Even more problematic were those princes who chose to marry European,
American or Australian women. Both Britons and Indians censured miscegena-
tion. British society in India viewed white women who were sexually attracted
to Indian men, and thus subverting the colonial hierarchy, as overtly betraying
the imperial mission and covertly undermining claims of British masculinity
and Indian male effeminacy. During the nineteenth century miscegenation was
disparaged in official discourse and literature and during the twentieth cen-
tury in novels translated into films and video series such as The Rains Came,

7 Joshi, Polygamy, p. 46.

8 Christiane Hurtig, Les Maharajahs et la politique dans I’Inde contemporaine (Paris, 1988), pp. 284—5.

° Gayati Devi of Jaipur and Santha Rama Rao, A Princess Remembers: The Memoirs of the Maharani of
Jaipur (Philadelphia, 1976), chs 8-10.

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Heat and Dust, and The Jewel in the Crown, where the fate of the transgressing
woman was usually death.!° For Indian princes, there was the question of the
legality of marriages between Hindu men and non-Hindu women and the le-
gitimacy of children born in such relationships. Both state officials and British
political officers opposed these unions as straining bonds between a ruler and
his subjects.

Despite and perhaps partly because of such objections, a few ruling princes
married non-Indian women. The most prominent examples were the rulers
of Kapurthala, Pudukkottai and Indore. In 1910 Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of
Kapurthala married Anita Delgrada, a Spanish dancer, whom some of his
relatives as well as the British never recognised as a legal wife or a maha-
rani. Jagatjit Singh’s heir and his European-educated Rajput daughter-in-law
refused to meet or attend functions with Delgrada,'! while in 1921, at an offi-
cial reception, a British political officer took care to direct the Spanish woman
to an alcove carefully screened with palms from the British gaze. Beyond
these social snubs, the maharaja of Kapurthala was not affected politically
by this relationship, though Delgrada’s sentiments are unknown. Two other
Indian princes experienced political repercussions. Like Jagatjit Singh, Raja
Martanda Bhairava Tondaiman (b. 1875, r. 1894-1928) travelled extensively
in Europe and decided to marry an Australian woman, Molly Fink. Although
British and local Indian opinion agreed that such a marriage would not be
considered orthodox and children from it could not succeed to the throne,
Martanda Tondaiman married Molly in 1915. After an alleged attempt to
poison her in Pudukkottai and extended stays in Australia, Martanda asked
to abdicate in return for a pension. Nicholas Dirks has highlighted the ulti-
mate irony in this situation since the British had sought to remove the raja
from the influence of the zenana by education in Europe, preparing the stage
for the marriage that separated the ruler from his state.'* Maharaja Yeshwant
Rao Holkar (b. 1908, r. 1926-48) of Indore had two American wives se-
quentially. The second one, whom he had married in 1943, produced a son,
Richard Shivaji Rao Holkar, whom the GOI recognised as legitimate in 1950."
But Richard did not succeed to the title of maharaja when his father died
in 1961.

10 Prem Chowdhry, Colonial India and the Making of Empire Cinema: Image, Ideology and Identity
(Manchester, 2000), pp. 205-10.

1] Brinda, Maharani of Kapurthala, Maharani: The Story of an Indian Princess, As Told to Elaine
Williams (New York, 1953), pp. 112-13.

12 Conrad Corfield, The Princely India I Knew: From Reading to Mountbatten (Madras, 1975), p. 17.

13 Dirks, Hollow Crown, pp. 391-6. 4 Copland, Princes, pp. 93-4, 267.

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RULERSHIP

Two ceremonies that solemnised succession illuminate the multiple sources
of princely authority and legitimacy. Upon the death of a ruler, his heir was
installed on the gaddi. Subsequently there was a separate ceremony when the
successor was invested with full ruling powers. Using over twenty-five oral
interviews with former ruling Maratha princes in central India and Rajputs in
Rajasthan and central India, Adrian Mayer has analysed installation protocols
and princely perceptions of the nature of their authority. In their ceremonies
and symbols of sovereignty, there were similiarites and differences between
Maratha and Rajput princes.!* Since there is no comparable analysis of the
succession ceremonies of Sikh and Muslim rulers, the following discussion is
mainly about Hindu princes.

Shortly after the death of a ruling Hindu prince and before his body was
removed for the funeral procession, an accession ceremony confirmed the heir
as successor. This rite involved the placing of a tilak, a vertical line sweeping up
the centre of the forehead from the eyebrows to the hairline, made by a thumb
usually with kumkum, a red powder. Generally the new ruler remained seated
on the gaddi in the palace during the funeral procession.!© Since the accession
ceremony was held quickly and privately, there is little evidence that a British
representative attended. Upon completion of a 12-day period of mourning,
the new ruler would be publicly installed in a ceremony with an affusion
(abhisheka) and enthronement. The affusion, a sprinkling of the new prince
with consecrated substances ranging from clarified butter, milk, curds and
honey to sanctified water, represents an element of continuity with a practice
recorded in classic texts marking the installation of Hindu kings.'” The affusion
had an important place in Maratha installation ceremonies, possibly because
of an association with Shivaji, but it was also performed in an abbreviated
version for Rajput princes. This ritual is said to give the ruler some degree of
sacredness but not to transform him into a deity.'8

The enthronement had two crucial aspects. The first one was the application
of a rajatilaka, which was possibly more significant for Rajput rulers than for
Marathas. In several Rajput states, such as Jaipur and Dungarpur, an adivasi, or

'5 Adrian C. Mayer, ‘Rulership and Divinity: The Case of the Modern Hindu Prince and Beyond’,
MAS 25 (1991), pp. 765-90.

16 Adrian C. Mayer, ‘The King’s Two Thrones’, Man (n.s.) 20 (1985), p. 215.

17 J. Gonda, Ancient Indian Kingship from the Religious Point of View (Leiden, 1969); J. C. Heesterman,
The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society (Chicago, 1985);
Ronald Inden, ‘Ritual, Authority, and Cyclic Time in Hindu Kingship’, in Richards, Kingship,
pp. 47-52.

ue Mayer, ‘Rulership’, pp. 767-73.

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representative of another indigenous group antecedent to the formation of the
state, inscribed the rajatilaka to symbolise their acceptance of the sovereignty
of the prince. These men traditionally applied blood from a cut in their thumb,
but kumkum was the more usual substance. In Gwalior, perhaps appropriately
considering Maharaja Madho Rao Scindia’s success in investing in Indian
stocks, the rajatilaka was made with a gold coin, a symbol of Lakhsmi, the
goddess of wealth.

The second element of an installation was the ascension of the gaddi. Al-
though a gaddi can mean either a cotton stuffed cushion or a family home, it
has been used in this book to indicate a rajgaddi, an ensemble of cushion with
cotton or silk coverings that was the Hindu equivalent of a European throne.
Usually a rajgaddi was on the floor, but sometimes it was placed on a chair
of wood, silver or stone. Mayer has described how in most Hindu states the
rajgaddi was viewed as a female deity who imbued the rajgaddi with her sakti
or life force. When a prince was enthroned on the rajgaddi and his body was in
direct contact with it, sanctified royal qualities were transmitted to him. The
rajgaddi was the key symbol of the state, the ground of the guardian deities
of the state. Mayer claimed that the rajgaddhi ‘was believed to maintain and
protect the kingdom and to carry the kingship over [an] interregnum, as well
as to give the ruler his royal divinity’.!? Being seated on it was therefore the
defining moment in the installation ceremony for both Rajput and Maratha
rulers.

As their system of indirect rule evolved, the British proclaimed their author-
ity over succession in the installation and investiture ceremonies. The first step
was to arrogate to themselves the right to determine who was the legitimate
heir. Debates over succession were frequent when rulers had several wives and
concubines or did not have a legitimate son. Dalhousie’s doctrine of lapse tried
to deny the right to adopt those princes whose states the British claimed to
have created, but after the revolt of 1857 the British allowed adoptions if they
had imperial sanction. At the same time they staked a claim to jurisdiction
over all successions. In 1916 the GOI evoked a sharp retort from the princes
when they reaffirmed that

Every succession required the approval and sanction of government.
It is essential that such approval and sanction should be announced ina formal installation
durbar by a representative of the British Government.”

9 Mayer, ‘King’s Two Thrones’, p. 217.
20. Proceedings of the Conference of Ruling Princes and Chiefs: Held at Delhi on the 30th October 1916
and Following Days (Delhi, 1916), p. 7.

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In response to vociferous protests from the princes, the British conceded
that installation and investiture durbars should be held in the name of the
princes and that the British representative should be seated as the chief guest
at the right hand of the presiding prince.”! Although this dispute might ap-
pear as one over symbols, it revealed princely fears of imperial encroachment
on their autonomy just when they confronted new challenges from political
activists.

Princely families, as do most Hindu families, have tutelary deities whose
blessings are sought daily and during crucial life cycle ceremonies.”” But many
Hindu princes had intense relationships with pan-Indian and regional deities
and divine qualities that were important sources of legitimacy. Some Rajput
princes claimed descent from the gods of sun (Surya) and moon (Chandra).
Sages ina fire-sacrifice allegedly created the Agnikul Rajput clans. Many Hindu
rulers were associated with Vishnu or Siva. Because of Martanda Varma’s ded-
ication of Travancore state to Lord Padmanabha, an incarnation of Vishnu,
his successors conceived of themselves as the dasa or servants, constitutionally
and symbolically, of Lord Padmanabha.”* The maharaja of Bikaner declared
himself to be the prime minister of Lord Lakshminarayan, an avatar of Krishna,
while the Rajput ruler of Mandi in the Himalayas considered himself the diwan
of Vishnu. The maharana of Udaipur was the servant of Siva in his manifesta-
tion as Eklinga, where Siva’s linga has one face. The maharaja of Banaras, an
eighteenth-century little king whom the British declared to be a ruling prince
in 1911, is viewed as the representative of Siva, the lord of the ancient city
of Kasi now known as Banaras or Varanasi. But these divine commitments
were not restrictive. While they retained their commitment to Siva, the ma-
harajas of Banaras became the dominant patron of the public recitation of the
Ramayana and the dramatic performance of the Ramlila that honour Rama,
an incarnation of Vishnu.4

Reflecting the complex network of divinity within the Hindu tradition,
Hindu rulers might call upon more than one divine source for legitimacy and
as arole model. Maharaja Vikramsinhrao of Dewas Senior (b. 1910, r. 1937-47,
adopted as the maharaja of Kolhapur, 1947 and ruled as Chhatrapati Shahaji II

21 Ramusack, Princes, pp. 69-77.

22 Lindsey Harlan analysed the relationship between women and these tutelary deities in Religion and
Rajput Women: The Ethic of Protection in Contemporary Narratives (Berkeley CA, 1992).

23 Koji Kawashima, Missionaries and a Hindu State, Travancore 1858-1936 (Delhi, 1998), pp. 18-23.

24 Philip Lutgendorf, ‘Ram’s Story in Shiva’s City: Public Arenas and Private Patronage’, in Sandria
B. Freitag (ed.), Culture and Power in Banaras: Community, Performance, and Environment, 1899-
1980 (Berkeley CA, 1989), pp. 34-61.

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until 1949) reflected on his appropriation of Rama in an extended series of
interviews with Adrian Mayer. Vikramsinhrao argued that Rama embodied a
utopian world where a ruler could be passive and simply follow rules. This world
did not exist during the dark age of the kaliyuga. Now Krishna, the shrewd
manipulator for his allies in the Mahabharata, was a better model. Krishna and
Indian princes had to use danda, literally a stick but metaphorically power, to
achieve equity for their subjects. Thus Vikramsinhrao offered an explanation
for the legitimacy of overriding laws and regulations, ostensibly to achieve the
greater good of the people. The model of sensual Krishna also permitted rulers
considerable latitude in their personal sexual lives as long as they fulfilled their
duties as a righteous ruler.”> However, as clients of the British imperial patron,
the princes had to live with significant constraints on their use of danda and
on some aspects of their personal lives. Late Victorian British officials were not
sympathetic to Krishna as a sexual role model for Indian princes.

Because of their concepts of one, indivisible god, Sikh and Muslim princes
differed from their Hindu counterparts in their claims to divinity. The Sikh
rulers of the Phulkian states asserted the blessings of Guru Gobind Singh, the
tenth and last guru of Sikhism. A few Muslim rulers such as the nizams of
Hyderabad and the nawabs of Pataudi and Malerkotla traced their descent
to Sufi shaikhs or mystical holy men. Muslim princes also evoked religious
legitimacy through the protection and patronage of indigenous and pan-Indian
Muslim religious institutions.

PRINCES AS PATRONS

A prime component of rajadharma was to bestow gifts. Even though the princes
might be political clients in relationship to a British patron, they continued
to act as patrons to multiple constituencies. These groups include religious
specialists and institutions such as temples, mosques, schools and pilgrimage
sites; visual artists, especially painters and architects; secular scholars in litera-
ture, language, history and archaeology; musicians and dancers; artisans who
produced luxury crafts; and sportsmen. Through their patronage the princes
were active, if unconscious, creators of cultural idioms that shaped regional and
national identities and of public arenas for popular imagination of a national
community.

25 Adrian C. Mayer, ‘Perceptions of Princely Rule: Perspectives from a Biography’, in T. N. Madan
(ed.), Way of Life: King, Householder, Renouncer: Essays in Honour of Louis Dumont (New Delhi,
1982), pp. 127-54; Mayer, ‘Rulership’, pp. 783-7.

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Religious practices and institutions

Princes nourished religious activities within and beyond their states, further
evidence that the British policy of isolating the princes was never as rigorous
as represented. Pan-Indian endowments included those of Hindu rulers to
sacred pilgrimage sites such as Banaras where they built bathing ghats on the
banks of the Ganges for the use of pilgrims and those that the Sikh princes
distributed to sites associated with the ten gurus such as the Golden Temple
in Amritsar. Besides supporting Muslim mosques and their attached madrasas,
Indian Muslim rulers, most notably those of Hyderabad and Bhopal, bestowed
grants to holy places in Mecca and Medina.

In the late nineteenth century, princely patrons were quick to respond
to fresh opportunities such as educational institutions established to reform
and revitalise religious learning. The rulers of Hyderabad, Bhopal, Rampur
and Patiala endowed the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh
(founded 1875) to synthesise religious instruction with western secular educa-
tion.”° During the 1910s Bhupinder Singh of Patiala contributed Rs 5 lakhs
to the new Banaras Hindu University, while the maharajas of Alwar, Jodhpur,
Kashmir and Mysore each initially gave 1 lakh.?” With their contributions
to Sikh, Hindu and Muslim institutions, the princes of Patiala were notable
examples of the cultural pluralism of royal patronage, but rulers tended to
bolster their own religious and ethnic communities. Hyderabad, Bhopal and
Rampur subsidised the Muslim seminary at Deoband in the United Provinces,
which imparted rigorous instruction in Muslim religious texts and socialised
its graduates to foster a reformed Indian Islam among all classes of Muslims.78
Princes in western India, especially the brahman chiefs of Jamkhandi, Ichalka-
ranji and Miraj Senior, the Maratha rulers of Baroda, Kolhapur and Mudhol,
and the Rajput prince of Gondal accounted for over half of the contributions
to the Deccan Education Society between 1884 and 1910. Maharaja Shahu
Chhatrapati I of Kolhapur fostered education among Maratha non-brahmans
and provided job quotas for them in his bureaucracy.”? Size of state was no in-
dication of generosity since the chief of Ichalkaranji gave Rs 44 640, while the
gaekwad of Baroda gave Rs 1000 to the Deccan Education Society.*° All the

26 David Lelyveld, Aligarh’ First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton NJ, 1978),
pp. 139-41, 156, 184, 315.

27 Ramusack, Princes, pp. 49-50.

28 Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 (Princeton NJ, 1982),
pp. 96, 116, 299.

29 Richard I. Cashman, The Myth of the Lokamanya: Tilak and Mass Politics in Maharashtra (Berkeley
CA, 1975), pp. 115-17.

3° Tbid., pp. 100-2.

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Sikh states, but especially Patiala and Nabha, donated to the Khalsa College in
Amritsar, an institution designed to synthesise Sikh religious instruction and
western learning. On the one hand these princely donations cultivated religious
specialists and competent administrators. On the other hand princes strove to
keep these institutions and their students away from anti-British demonstra-
tions. Several princes tried to persuade the trustees of the Aligarh college to
reject Gandhi's pleas to practise non-cooperation in 1920; the nizam tried to
remove the director of the Deoband seminary, who was sympathetic to the
civil disobedience movement in 1930; and Bhupinder Singh of Patiala urged
students at Khalsa College to avoid political agitation.*!

Printing presented a modern alternative to past patronage of copying and
translations of sacred and literary works. With the possibility of mass produc-
tion, princes now sponsored the publication of sacred works ranging from the
Qur’an to the Guru Granth. Some rulers such as the nawabs of Tonk and
Rampur amassed substantial collections of manuscripts, which are of great
value to contemporary scholars.*”

Princes were also attracted to communal associations. Some support was
symbolic. Maharaja Sayaji Rao of Baroda chaired a session of the Arya Samaj,
a Hindi revivalist reform organisation, at Ranoli on 26 February 1911 and
declared that he welcomed ‘the work of social enlightenment of the masses
which the missionary zeal of the Arya Samaj has undertaken’.?* The maharajas
of Alwar, Bikaner, Kashmir and Patiala endorsed the Kshatriya Mahasabha,
which fostered a militant image of Hinduism, as well as the interests of kshatriya
caste groups, of which these princes consider themselves exemplary members.
For example, in November 1924 Jai Singh chaired a session of the Kshatriya
Mahasabha in Delhi and reminded his audience of their religious duties to
protect the weak and to preserve the Hindu tradition. Later Jai Singh and Tej
Singh of Alwar and Kishan Singh of Bharatpur actively cultivated the Hindu
Mahasahba and the Sanatan Dharma Sabha outside and within their states. In
January 1927 Jai Singh presided over the Fourth Provincial Sanatan Dharma
Conference at Multan and buttressed his words with a donation of Rs 40 000.*4
Within Alwar he used these Hindu associations to legitimate a strong monarchy
and to nurture a Hindu nationalism that represented Meos, a liminal group who
drew from both Hindu and Muslim traditions, as Muslims and outsiders.”
Eventually Tej Singh, his successor, appointed N. B. Khare, a former president

31 Ramusack, Princes, pp. 107-8 on Aligarh, ibid., p. 163 on Hyderabad, and Ramusack, ‘Punjab
States’, pp. 182-83 on Patiala.

32 Metcalf, Islamic Revival, pp. 53-4. 33 Quoted in Rice, Sayaji Rao Ml, vol. 2, p. 138.

34 Ramusack, Princes, pp. 158-60. 35 Mayaram, Resisting Regimes, passim.

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of the Hindu Mahasahba, as prime minister. In 1947 there were rumours that
Alwar provided facilities for the training of members of the militant Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and a refuge for the assassins of Gandhi. Although
the maharaja and Khare were subsequently exonerated of this charge,*° the
rulers of Alwar and Bharatpur supported the Hindu Mahasahba and the RSS
during the trauma of partition.*”

My own research has explored the considerable role of Maharaja Bhupinder
Singh in the formation and subsequent activities of the Shiromani Gurdwara
Parbhandhak Committee (SGPC). Initiated in 1920 and legally recognised
in 1925, the SGPC was a committee of 175 men who controlled the gu-
rudwaras in Punjab. Although he was never dominant, Bhupinder Singh, his
son (Yadavindra Singh) and a grandson (Amarindar Singh) would function
as intermediaries between colonial and independent central governments in
New Delhi and this powerful communication and patronage network.*®

Princely support for Muslim anjumans, which could be cultural, educational
or political associations, and the Muslim League is not well researched. Lucien
Benichou has emphasised that the nizams of Hyderabad had promoted religious
toleration and until the mid-1940s avoided cultivating distinctly communal

Muslim organisations.°?

Education and medical aid for women

Princes and their consorts aided institutions for women. Foremost among the
beneficiaries was the National Association for Supplying Female Medical Aid
to the Women of India or the Dufferin Fund, as it came to be called after
the vicereine Lady Dufferin, its founder. Established in 1885, this institu-
tion provided medical training for women, medical assistance for women in
institutional settings, and trained nurses and midwives. About Rs 70 000, al-
most half of its initial endowment of Rs 148 344, came from princes who
contributed at least Rs 500 each to become life councillors. By 1886 Mysore
had the first branch of the Dufferin Fund in a princely state,“? and Dufferin
hospitals were built in other princely states. Maharaja Madho Singh of Jaipur
gave Rs 135000 to the Dufferin Fund from 1885 to 1902, with the stipu-
lation that it be used for women in purdah, and Rs 10000 to Lady Minto’s

36 V. P Menon, The Story of the Integration of the Indian States (London, 1956), pp. 253-4.

37 Mayaram, Resisting Regimes, ch. 6. 38 Ramusack, ‘Punjab States’.

39 Lucien D. Benichou, From Autocracy to Integration: Political Developments in Hyderabad State (1938-
1948) (Chennai, 2000).

40 Maneesha Lal, ‘The Politics of Gender and Medicine in Colonial India: The Countess of Dufferin
Fund, 1885-1888’, BHM 68 (1994), pp. 35-6.

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Nursing Fund in 1918.41 When vicereine Hardinge appealed to ‘her friends
amongst the Ruling Chiefs’ for funds to establish a women’s medical college
in New Delhi to attract ‘women of the right type’, Jaipur granted Rs 3 lakhs,
the largest donation. As the major princely donors, including Jaipur, Gwalior,
Patiala, Hyderabad, Udaipur, Jodhpur and Kotah, did not havea reputation for
being socially progressive, it seems the concept of an institution that could be
feminist in its support for women’s professional education appealed to princes
whose female relatives lived in various forms of purdah. It also might be polit-
ically inexpedient to deny a vicereine.” Evincing regional variations, the ruler
of Travancore, where purdah was not observed, established a scholarship for
women at the co-educational Madras Medical College.*?

The patronage of women in princely families focused on medicine and edu-
cation. Jadonji Maharani, a wife of Madho Singh of Jaipur, gave Rs 1 lakh to the
Lady Minto’s Nursing Fund in 1907. It is noteworthy that her gift occurred
shortly after the fund was started and over a decade before that of her husband.
The begum of Bhopal and maharanis of Gwalior provided small contributions
to the Lady Hardinge Medical College.*° Schools for girls were early recipients
of princely largess. Maharani Suniti Devi of Cooch Behar and her sister, both
daughters of Keshub Chandra Sen, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, financed the
Maharani School, established in 1908 in Darjeeling. Begum Sultan Jahan of
Bhopal was variously president of the All-India Muslim Ladies Conference and

the All-India Women’s Conference, which promoted education for women.“°

The first chancellor of the MAO College at Aligarh, in 1916 she chided her

audience:

No less important than the education of the male members of your community is the
education of the weaker sex . . . Female education has been a part of your programme from
the very outset and there had been a deal of talk about it for more than a quarter ofa century.
But these efforts have been too spasmodic to produce any appreciable good.*”

Princesses from Bharatpur, Dharampur, Indore, Limbdi, Nawanagar, Phaltan,
Porbandar and Wadhwan each contributed Rs 1000 to the Shreemati Nathibai
Damodar Thackersey Indian Women’s University that D. K. Karve had

41 Sarkar, History, p. 376. ® Tady Harding Hospital’, JAMWT5 (February 1916), pp. 33-4.

43 Countess of Dufferin Fund, Twenty-eighth Report of the Madras Branch (Madras, 1914), p. 53,
OIOC, ST/84.

44 Sarkar, History, p. 376. 5 ‘Lady Hardinge’, p. 34.

46 Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Contesting Seclusion: The Political Emergence of Muslim Women in
Bhopal, 1901-1930, PhD thesis, University of London (1998); Khan, Begums, pp. 179-80.

47 Speech delivered in March 1916 at Aligarh, Speeches of Indian Princes (Allahabad, n.d.), p. 45.

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established in 1916, first in Poona and then in Bombay.** It is difficult to
determine how autonomous princely women were as patrons or what were the
sources of their funds. Their male relatives might have promoted such philan-
thropic activities to acquire prestige in the colonial hierarchy through honours
and titles for themselves or their female relatives. But there was a longstand-
ing pan-Indian custom that one aspect of queenly dharma was to patronise

religious and social service institutions.”

Literature and history

In literary studies and historical research, the sacred and the secular are closely
intertwined. In south India the maharajas of Mysore and Travancore accu-
mulated substantial collections of Sanskrit manuscripts, while in north India
the maharajas of Baroda, Bikaner, Kashmir, Jaisalmer and Jodhpur and their
subjects (especially Jains and other mercantile communities) gathered signif
icant libraries.°? By 1874 the Bikaner Library held 1400 manuscripts that
Dr G. Buhler, then an education inspector on special duty in Rajputana, char-
acterised as ‘a good deal of trash, a few nearly unique, anda dozen or two of rare
works. Its strongest points are the Vedas, Dharmasastra or sacred law, Samgita,
or the art of singing and dancing, and Mantra’.?! During the 1910s Sayaji
Rao of Baroda began to assemble Sanskrit manuscripts that became the core
of the Oriental Institute of Baroda. To extend access, Benoytosh Bhattacharya
began to edit, annotate and publish selected Sanskrit works in the Gaekwad’s
Oriental Series.”

A relatively unexplored area is the princely role in the construction of Indian
history. The analysis of Indian historiography that sought to forge a nationalist
identity has paid little attention to the princely states, or to whether a similar
construction of Indian or nationalist identity was occurring where colonial
power was one level removed.”? Once again we have only stray bits of infor-
mation. First, some princes such as those in Baroda and Patiala patronised

48 SNDT Indian Women’s University, Silver Jubilee Souvenir (1942), pp. 57-8.

49 Joshi, Polygamy, pp. 131-2.

°° Donald Clay Johnson, ‘German Influences on the Development of Research Libraries in Nineteenth
Century Bombay, SALNQ 19-20 (Fall 1985/Spring 1986), pp. 25-6.

>! Memorandum by Dr G. Buhler, NAI, GOI, Home-Public A, June 1876, nos. 143-4. Buhler would
later produce an influential translation of the Laws of Manu.

52 Rice, Sayaji Rao Ill, vol. 2, pp. 153-6; Gaekwad, Sayajirao, pp. 302-4.

3 "Two examples are Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative
Discourse? (London, 1986) and Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial
North India (Delhi, 1990).

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scholars who wrote on the history of their regions, their dynasties and their
religions. Second, a few princes joined nationalist efforts to shape icons for an
Indian nation. Maharaja Sayaji Rao of Baroda and the chiefs of Ichalkaranji
and Vishalgad, two feudatories of Kolhapur state, contributed to memori-
alise Shivaji, the Maratha hero, but many princes, such as Maharaja Shahu
Chhatrapati of Kolhapur, refused support for the projection of a militant
Shivaji.** More Maratha princes donated to commemorate M. G. Ranade,
a mid-nineteenth-century moderate Maratha reformer and nationalist, rather
than giving to the Shivaji Fund.°® Their generosity might reflect that Ranade
allegedly said that ‘what is happening in the States is of even greater sociological
interest than [what is] happening in British India. For the heart of India...
beats in the Indian States’.*°

Besides histories and heroes, museums and archaeological sites shaped In-
dian identity. Princes erected museums that housed disparate exhibits includ-
ing indigenous flora and fauna, Indian painting and sculpture, European
visual arts and industrial gadgets. In 1886 Maharaja Madho Singh opened
the Jaipur Museum in Albert Hall, an Indo-Saracenic structure built specifi-
cally to be a museum. It contained Indian industrial exhibits as well as arts and
antiquities.” In 1922 Maharaja Sayaji Rao of Baroda inaugurated a museum
although his private collection of mainly modern Indian art had been avail-
able for public viewing since 1912.°8 Support for archaeology came in various
forms. In September 1887 in his opening speech to the Mysore Representative
Assembly, the diwan reported on the state-funded collection of inscriptions
and proposed a ‘complete’ archaeological survey that would include illustra-
tions but also conservation and restoration of buildings and monuments. He
concluded that ‘these undertakings cannot, it is hoped, fail to give life to the
national history and lead to a great appreciation of Jocal interests’? A few
princes subsidised the publication of opulent volumes on major archaeological
and historical sites located within their states. The rulers of Bhopal supported
volumes on Sanchi, a major Buddhist stupa and pilgrimage site within its
territory, and the nizam of Hyderabad financially underwrote some volumes

>4 Cashman, Myth, pp. 106-15. > Thid., p. 112.

56 Quoted by K. Natarajan, editor of Indian Social Reformer, when he presided over the Indian
States’ People’s Conference at Delhi on 3 February 1934: N. Mitra, JAR, vol. I, January—June
1934 (Calcutta, 1934), p. 356.

°7 Metcalf Imperial Vision, pp. 133-5; Barbara N. Ramusack, “Tourism and Icons: The Packaging of
the Princely States of Rajasthan’, in Catherine B. Asher and Thomas R. Metcalf (eds), Perceptions of
South Asia’s Visual Past (New Delhi, 1994), pp. 238-9.

°8 Gaekwad, Sayajirao, pp. 326-31.

>) Printed Address, 30 September 1887, included in volume entitled Proceedings of the Mysore Repre-
sentative Assembly, 1881-1886, KSA, B 20,451. Emphasis added.

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on Ajanta and Ellora.® Since all three sites were either Buddhist, Hindu or
Jain, the patronage of these Muslim rulers implied a pluralist, Indian cultural
heritage. In the context of Southeast Asia, Benedict Anderson has argued that
‘monumental archaeology, increasingly linked to tourism, allowed the state to
appear as the guardian of a generalised, but also local, Tradition’. Then print
capitalism disseminated archaeological reports and lavishly illustrated books
that provided a ‘pictorial census of the state’s patrimony’.°! Anderson claims
that the colonial state used museums and archaeological sites to legitimate
its exercise of power and that post-colonial states continued this practice. In
India princes patronised museums and lavishly printed books on cultural sites
as modern means of legitimating their authority and demonstrating princely
dharma in a rapidly changing political context.

Visual and performing arts

For many centuries Indian rulers were generous patrons of architecture, sculp-
ture and painting. Such support was a crucial aspect of kingly dharma and
affirmed izgzat (honour) and legitimacy. Moreover, Hindu rulers, the Delhi
Sultans and the Mughals, particularly Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, used
architecture and painting to publicise their claims to absolute authority legit-
imated by semi-divine status. Mughal forts, palaces, gardens and tombs were
physical representations of Mughal power strategically placed throughout con-
quered and incorporated territories. In painting, portraits depicted Mughal
emperors with halos indicating semi-divine status, as sources of light, and even
standing on an hourglass and thus controlling time. Illustrations to imperial
histories such as the Akbarnama showed emperors victorious in battle and
supervising the construction of impressive forts and gardens. From the seven-
teenth century onward, Rajput rulers and successor princes blended Mughal
and Hindu symbols of authority in architecture and painting.

Recent scholarship has reversed earlier judgements that Rajput patrons
rather ineptly imitated imperial, whether Mughal or British, models in the

60 John Marshall and Alfred Foucher, The Monuments of Sanchi, 3 vols (Calcutta, 1940-41); Vasudev
Vishnu Mirashi (ed.), Vakataka Inscription in Cave XVI at Ajanta, Hyderabad Archaeological Series,
no. 14 (Calcutta, 1941); Ghulam Yazdani, Ajanta: The Colour and Monochrome Reproductions of the
Ajanta Frescoes Based on Photography, 4 vols (London, 1930-55).

6! Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev.
edn (London, 1991), pp. 181-2.

62 Edward S. Haynes, ‘Patronage for the Arts and the Rise of Alwar State’, in Schomer, /dea, vol. 2,

. 265-89.

63 Cicneaie B. Asher, The New Cambridge History of India, I: 4 Architecture of Mughal India

(Cambridge, 1992).

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visual arts. In architecture Catherine Asher and G. H. R. Tillotson have em-
phasised that Mughal elements were incorporated within a Rajput frame of
reference. Thus the great Rajput forts at Amber, Jodhpur, Bundi and Gwalior
are creative syntheses of imperial and local forms. During the late nineteenth
century Rajput princes responded yet again to the architectural models of an
imperial overlord. Although the British initially favoured classical styles recall-
ing the imperial legacy of Rome, by the 1870s British engineers and architects
had. developed the Indo-Saracenic style as more suitable for public buildings
serving Indians. Thomas Metcalf has documented this style, which combined
Indic-Hindu elements such as lavish ornamentation and Muslim-Saracenic
ones, especially arches and domes. He argues that the British believed that ap-
propriate architecture influenced character and that the Indo-Saracenic style
was particularly fitting for princely palaces and museums. The former would
be the setting for British imperial rituals, especially viceregal and imperial visits
where banquets required new kinds of spaces, and the latter would display a
reconstruction of the historical past of the state and the collecting habits of a
ruler. On the one hand Sayaji Rao and Ganga Singh, princes eager to display
their commitment to their imperial patron, used the Indo-Saracenic style when
building Lakshmi Vilas Palace in Baroda and Lallgarh Palace at Bikaner. On
the other hand Maharajas Ram Singh II and Madho Singh of Jaipur, generous
patrons of Swinton Jacob, the high priest of Indo-Saracenic architecture, were
careful to exclude this imposition of imperial cultural hegemony from their
personal world of the City Palace. They confined the Indo-Saracenic style to
public buildings such as Albert Hall for the Jaipur Museum and Rambagh
Palace, their guest house for European visitors.

Other princes were more overt in their rejection of British prescriptions and
built new palaces dominated by European references.°° Maharaja Jayaji Rao
Scindia of Gwalior used Doric and Corinthian columns and Palladian windows
in Jai Vilas Palace and had a durbar hall with the most massive glass chandeliers
in the world. This palace was finished in less than two years to provide a stage
for the reception of the Prince of Wales in 1875. In the 1920s another Maratha
prince, the holkar of Indore, built a Palladian-inspired palace whose location
on the outskirts of the capital city seemed to indicate the ruler’s retreat from
active engagement in his state. British ideas about what was suitable for the
princes also changed. In Marwar-Jodhpur, H. V. Lancaster, the architect of

64 Ibid. and G. H. R. Tillotson, The Rajput Palaces: The Development of an Architectural Style,
1450-1750 (New Haven CN, 1987).

6 Metcalf, Imperial Vision, pp. 105-40.

66 Maharaja of Baroda [Fateh Singh Rao Gaekwad], Palaces of India (New York, 1980).

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Umaid Bhavan Palace, built between 1929 and 1944 partly to provide work
during a famine, firmly rejected Indo-Saracenic features as inappropriate in
Jodhpur since the area had been under only limited Muslim control.°” Thus
princely patronage of architecture reflected ambiguous political and aesthetic
engagement with an imperial cultural hegmony. In independent India erstwhile
rulers would recycle both Indo-Saracenic and European-inspired palaces as
hotels to provide fantasy for international and domestic tourists.

In painting, rulers of states such as Bikaner, Bundi and Marwar, who
were early allies of the Mughals, were the first to borrow selectively from
the Mughal style of imperial portraiture, but Mewar and others eventually fol-
lowed. Vishakha Desai has analysed how Rajput princely portraits became more
representative of physical characteristics of individual rulers and incorporated
Mughal symbols such as the halo while they continued to emphasise indige-
nous conceptual aspects of idealised kingship. Thus painters at Rajput courts,
whether Hindu or Muslims, were not trying to produce Mughal-style, psycho-
logically sensitive images but rather were manipulating Mughal elements to
enhance the visual representation of physical attributes of Rajput kingly ideals
such as elephant-shaped legs and lotus-style ears. Moreover, by the eighteenth
century Rajput princes in Rajasthan were more frequently painted in the con-
text of their durbars, festivals, and kingly activities such as hunting than in the
single, isolated portraits common in Mughal painting. Thus rulers acknowl-
edged iconographically their position as first among equals and as protectors of
their subjects, but in their bountiful patronage of painters they also advertised
their legitimacy.

Large-scale paintings from Mewar vividly indicate changing durbar scenes
from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Now housed in the City
Palace Museum in Udaipur, these paintings depict elephant fights, festival
celebrations such as Holi and Dussehra, hunting scenes, and receptions of
British agents. They provide visual evidence of changing power relations.”°
In 1818 James Tod, the first British agent to Udaipur, was received accord-
ing to Indian protocols in the open air and seated on the ground. By 1930
L. W. Reynolds, the AGG for Rajputana and chief guest at the enthrone-
ment durbar of Maharana Bhupal Singh, participated in a British-approved

67 Tbid., p. 48. 68 Ramusack, ‘Tourism’, pp. 242-5.

BLN. Goswamy, ‘Of Devotées and Elephants Fights: Some Notes on the Subject Matter of Mughal
and Rajput Painting’, in Vishakha N. Desai, Life at Court: Art for India’s Rulers, 16th-19th Centuries
(Boston, 1985), pp. xix—xxiii and passim; Vishakha N. Desai, “Timeless Symbols: Royal Portraits
from Rajasthan 17th-19th Centuries’, in Schomer, /dea, vol. 1, pp. 313-42.

70 Andrew Topsfield, The City Palace Museum Udaipur: Paintings of Mewar Court Life (Ahmedabad,
1990).

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ceremony complete with armchairs. From the late nineteenth century onward,
painters selectively borrowed European techniques such as a more naturalistic
depiction of landscape and the use of photographs to paint more individu-
alised faces for princely portraits. The impact of the camera is recorded in
another way. A painting of Maharana Bhupal Singh celebrating the Gangaur
festival, a women’s celebration devoted to Gauri, the goddess of abundance,
includes a British woman with a camera.’! She was one in a long proces-
sion of camera-carrying foreign visitors to Rajput princely states, ranging
from Lady Dufferin, who enthusiastically photographed Udaipur’s Pichola
Lake in 1885, to contemporary tourists in search of fantasy.’* But court
painters and tourists were not alone in bringing photography to the princely
states.

By the 1860s photography was a popular means of representation in
the princely states. Many princes relied on British firms such as Bourne &
Shepherd or Johnston & Hoffman to take their portraits whenever they visited
Calcutta,’? but a few chose Indians as their official photographers. Around
1869 Maharaja Malhar Rao of Baroda selected Hurrychund Chintamon as his
official photographer, while the holkar of Indore subsidised Lala Deen Dayal,
who was employed first as an estimator and draftsman in the Indore Public
Works Department.”4 In 1884 Nizam Mahbub Ali Khan of Hyderabad ap-
pointed Dayal as his official photographer and later conferred the title of raja on
him. While in the nizam’s service, Dayal oversaw commercial studios in Indore,
Bombay and Secunderabad. The last one even had a zenana studio where a
British woman photographed Indian women. Dayal also secured commissions
from viceroys and other prominent Britons and was the official photographer
for Lord Curzon on his visits to the princely states and for the Imperial Durbar
of 1903. Selections of the photographs of Raja Lala Deen Dayal are widely
published, but there has not been an in-depth analysis of how this ubiquitous
photographer-entrepreneur influenced the representation of Indian princes by
both British and other Indian photographers.

Princes made other uses of photography. They documented viceregal visits
and princely reform projects with albums elaborately bound in leather or
velvet, ornamented with semi-precious jewels and closed with brass or silver

71 Thid., p. 146.

72 Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, Our Viceregal Life in India: Selections from my Journal 1884-1888,
vol. I (London, 1890), p. 228.

73 The Last Empire: Photography in British India, 1855-1911 with texts by Clark Worswick and Ainslie
Embree (New York, 1976).

74 Clark Worswick (ed.), Princely India: Photographs by Raja Deen Dayal 1884-1911 (New York, 1980)
and Judith Mara Gutman, Through Indian Eyes (New York, 1982), pp. 28, 108-9.

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clasps.’? These collections visually chronicled their relationship with British
patrons and princely administrative innovations. Their pages held views of
clean, airy, spacious hospitals, schools and jails. These images chart Michel
Foucault’s provocative analysis of how modern states used such institutions to
extend their control over the lives of individuals.

Other aspects of modernisation featured in photographs included a water-
pumping station in Mysore; a town hall, a school of industrial crafts and arts
and a golf pavilion in Travancore; and a state library, a college, a museum and
a clock tower in Baroda.”° These views do not appear in the continuing stream
of coffee table books of Indian photographs published for mass consumption.
Their emphasis on princely portraits and palaces reflect a nostalgia for Oriental
exoticism embodied in opulent dress and fantastic architecture and sites of
colonial performances, especially viceregal visits, dinner parties and sporting
events.

Princes also exploited photography to publicise their efforts as benevolent
protectors of their subjects. Two notable examples are the series of Nizam
Mahbub Ali Khan of Hyderabad’s Good Works Project — Famine Relief in
1895-1902 and of Maharaja Ganga Singh of Bikaner’s famine relief programs
in 1899.’” One prince mimicked the British effort to classify Indian society
and thereby employ knowledge as a means of control. In 1891 the maharaja
of Marwar commissioned a three-volume census of the people of Marwar.
One volume had photographs of individuals posed against studio backdrops
as well as in outdoor settings, accompanied by descriptive texts. Firmly in
the tradition of ethnographic photography in British India that documented
and classified the varied ‘racial’ types and occupations of Indians — especially
those characterised as primitive, such as Nagas and the Andaman Islanders —
this census reflects another selective borrowing by Indian princes of imperial
cultural forms.”®

Some princes became enthusiastic photographers. The most noted were
the rulers of Jaipur, Travancore and Tripura, the last joined by his wife in this

75 Lord Curzon, OIOC, Photo 430, collected at least thirty-one albums recording his visits. On a
more modest level, British political officers made similar collections, several of which are held at the
British Library.

76 Mysore, Curzon, OIOC, Photo 430/41; Travancore, ibid., Photo 430/45; Baroda ibid., Photo
430/24.

7 Examples from Hyderabad are in Gutman, /ndian Eyes, and the Bikaner’s series is in Curzon, OIOC,
Photo 430/25 with selected views in Naveen Patnaik, A Desert Kingdom: The Rajputs of Bikaner
(New York, 1990), p. 34.

78 John Falconer, ‘Photography in Nineteenth-Century India,’ pp. 264—77, and ‘Anthropology and the
Colonial Image’, in C. A. Bayly (ed.), The Raj: India and the British 1600-1947 (London, 1990),
pp. 278-304; Gutman, Jndian Eyes, pp. 141-3.

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Central Jail at Junagarh, c. 1900.

avocation. Maharaja Ram Singh of Jaipur established a department of pho-
tography that documented nobles over whom he was tightening control.”?
The interest in photography was not confined to states in geographical areas
readily accessible to the outside world. In northeastern India the maharaja and
maharani of Tripura not only took pictures but developed their own prints.
Their second son invented a chemical process for coating his own printing
paper.®? In 1864 the raja of Chamba showed Samuel Bourne, then touring
the Himalayas, his collection of cameras, lenses and chemicals.8! The princely
interest in photography reveals that these Indian rulers were willing to experi-
ment with new artistic forms to enhance the representation of their authority

79 Tbid., pp. 91-2. B. N. Goswami also reports a cache of photographs of Ram Singh in erotic poses
with his favourite mistress at the City Palace Museum in Jaipur: Goswami, ‘Devotees’, pp. xix and
xxiii.

80 Vidya Dehejia, ‘Maharajas as Photographers’, pp. 227-9, in Vidya Dehejia, India Through the Lens:
Photography 1840-1911 (Washington DC, 2000).

81 Ray Desmond, Victorian India In Focus: A Selection of Early Photographs from the Collection in the
India Office Library and Records (London, 1982), p. 5.

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as well as to satisfy their intellectual curiosity. Bourne might marvel that the
Chamba prince was interested in such a modern invention, but he shared
his cultural condescension with scholars who deplore the erosion of princely
patronage of painting under British cultural hegemony without acknowledg-
ing that new political, economic and cultural factors might direct princely
benefaction to emerging art forms such as photography or to new arenas for
older ones such as music.

Both Hindu and Muslim rulers throughout India nurtured musicians,
singers, instrumentalists and dancers. Joan Erdman has analysed the changing
patterns of patronage in Jaipur from the early eighteenth century to the 1980s.
Since the founding of Jaipur city, the Jaipur state maintained a gunijankhana,
a royal department of virtuosos who were state employees providing music
for official occasions as well as leisure activities. Jaipur rulers patronised both
folk or non-classical as well as classical musicians. Maharaja Ram Singh II,
who died in 1880, was the last ruler to be both patron and musical per-
former. His successors continued to maintain the gunijankhana, but Madho
Singh mainly provided for orthodox religious activities and Man Singh was
famous for his promotion of sports. Moreover, the gunijankhana was increas-
ingly bureaucratised, with non-musicians becoming the chief administrators
as the rulers changed from being connoisseurs of the arts to employers of
artists and European manners became the preferred sign of status rather than
the quality of the artists.8* Other states were substantial supporters of the
performing arts: Mysore for classical bharatnatayam dance and the Maratha-
ruled states of Gwalior, Baroda and Indore for musicians. Even smaller states
with limited resources, most notably Rampur in the United Provinces, were
significant benefactors. One musician said he left a theatre company when ap-
proached by Rampur ‘because it was a court service, and a respectable one’.°?
At Rampur the musicians played for the prince and his friends after dinner,
reflecting how princes had adopted western-style dinner parties and times for
entertainment.

Princely patronage was also involved in changing institutional structures
for the performance of music and dance. Several gharanas that provide
‘a repertoire of stylistic elements’ and ‘rules of appropriateness for performance
practices in Hindustani music’ are associated with princely capitals. Evolving
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the gharanas

82 Erdman, Patrons, ch. 3, and pp. 110-13.
83 Daniel M. Neuman, The Life of Music in North India: The Organization of an Artistic Tradition
(Detroit, 1980), p. 170.

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encompass ‘a lineage of musicians, the disciples, and the particular musical
style they represent’.*4 The oldest of the gharanas is associated with Gwalior,
and others with states such as Indore, Kolhapur, Rampur, Jaipur and Patiala. In
his comprehensive analysis of the changing organisation of music performance
in north India, Daniel Neuman mentions princely patronage but has not ex-
amined in depth the relationship of rulers to the families who constituted the
gharanas.

In 1916 the first All-India Music Conference convened in Baroda to define a
nationalist agenda and an educational program for Indian music. Fatesinghrao
Gaekwad characterised this event as ‘a fest for lovers of music’ where the perfor-
mances by musicians from rival schools ‘were in the nature of a competition’.®°
Several other maharajas contributed funds for the second All-India Music Con-
ference held two years later, which also solicited public subscriptions.*° Subse-
quently Sayaji Rao held annual musical conferences in Baroda and attempted
to change the nature of Holi celebrations so that ‘the rowdiness, obscenity
and vulgarity that were traditionally associated with Holi were replaced by
a running feast of wholesome and skilled artistic performance’.®’ Although
more research is needed on princely patronage of musicians, there is clear ev-
idence that princes were key figures during the transition of patronage from
the personal, intimate world of the royal court to the bureaucratic, populist
organisations of post-colonial India such as All-India Radio and the Sangeet

Akademi.

Sports

Some commentators condemn the princes for shifting their patronage from
elite activities such as the fine arts of painting and music to more vulgar ac-
tivities such as sports. But participation in certain sports had long been part
of kingly dharma in both the indigenous Hindu and the incoming Turkic and
Persian traditions. Hunting was a form of preparation for battle, a display of
physical courage, and occasionally an effort to protect one’s subjects from de-
structive animals, particularly tigers. Mughal emperors and Hindu kings, most
notably the maharajas of Kotah, immortalised their involvement with hunt-
ing in vibrant paintings.°* During the late nineteenth and into the twentieth

84 Ibid. p. 146. 85 Gaekwad, Sayajirao, p. 291.

86 Daniel M. Neuman, ‘Patronage and Performance of Indian Music’, in Barbara Stoler Miller (ed.),
The Powers of Art: Patronage in Indian Culture (Delhi, 1992), pp. 247-58.

87 Gaekwad, Sayajirao, p. 292.

88 William G. Archer, Indian Painting in Bundi and Kotah (London, 1959), pp. 47-52; Stuart Cary
Welch (ed.), Gods, Kings, and Tigers (Munich, 1997).

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centuries, hunting continued to be a prominent emblem of princely dharma.
It also developed into a ubiquitous cultural activity for British colonists in Asia
and Africa. Comparing lion-hunting in Africa with tiger-hunting in north-
ern India, William Storey argues that colonial big-game hunting ‘articulated
a language of power over “restless natives” ’ and implies that it displayed the
dominance of western culture over nature and of colonists over colonised.®?
John MacKenzie adds that ‘hunting represented a historic cultural interaction
which the British were able to use to build social bridges with Indians, particu-
larly the Indian aristocracy’.”° However, no scholars have analysed the British
imperial cult of hunting that evolved in the late nineteenth century, which
“represented an increasing concern with the external appearance of authority’
from the perspective of the Indian princes.”!

First, princes as protectors of their people were supposed to be courageous.
Charles Allen recounts that Rajput princes including Dungarpur and Kotah
and Muslim ones such as Palanpur and Pataudi recalled shooting their first
panther or tiger, generally around the age of 11 or 12, as a rite of passage to
adulthood. Although hunting is usually deemed a masculine activity in both
British and Indian cultures, women in princely families also participated both
in the Mughal period and in the twentieth century. In 1925 Madho Rao Scindia
of Gwalior dictated that ‘[c]hildren of both sexes should be taken out shooting
once a week, and when they have advanced in years they should, as a rule be
made to spend not less than a couple of weeks annually on tiger-shooting’.””
Later Gayatri Devi, the maharani of Jaipur, remembered shooting her first
panther at the age of 12 in Cooch Behar.”

Second, the organisation of hunting expeditions indicated control of sub-
stantial material, animal and human resources. Thus the elaborate shikars or
hunting expeditions of princes were one possible arena for displaying their
assets to their subjects and their imperial overlord. Some princes liked to por-
tray how they were more accessible to their subjects when they were hunting,
especially in remote areas, than they were in their capitals. But the limited
evidence for such encounters is mainly hearsay. More lavishly documented are
the opulent hunting expeditions that the princes arranged for their imperial

89 William K. Storey, ‘Big Cats and Imperialism: Lion and Tiger Hunting in Kenya and Northern
India, 1898-1930’, JWH 2, 2 (Fall 1991), p. 137.

90 John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism
(Manchester, 1988), p. 169.

1 Thid., p. 171.

° Quoted from Gwalior’s General Policy Durbar, 1925 in Allen and Dwivedi, Lives, p. 127.

93 Gayatri Devi, Princess, pp. 65-6.

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Prince George Jivaji Rao and Princess Mary Kamlaraja of Gwalior at March Past
during visit of Prince of Wales, 8-12 February 1922.

suzerains. The most famous hunts were for tigers in Gwalior, Jaipur and Alwar,
for sand grouse on Gajner Lake in Bikaner, for various birds in Bharatpur, and
using cheetahs to hunt wild buck in Baroda.

British overlords ranging from princes of Wales to viceroys and political
officers expected to participate in extravagant shikars, to bag spectacular
trophies, and to be surrounded by luxury while they were living in the
‘wild’. Three princes of Wales (Edward VII [1875-76], George V [1905] and
Edward VIII [1921-22]) hunted extensively in the princely states. In the
midst of Gandhi's first major non-cooperation movement in late 1921, the
prince of Wales found refuge from the massive public protests against his visit
in hunting in the princely states and Nepal.°4 At Gwalior he would be greeted
by the children of the anglophile Madho Rao, who were named George and
Mary.

°4 Bernard C. Ellison, H. R. H. The Prince of Wales’ Sport in India, edited by H. Perry Robinson
(London, 1925).

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Maharaja Madho Rao Scindia of Gwalior seated among tigers with Prince of Wales standing, 8-12 February 1922.

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Viceroys participated and even Edwin S. Montagu, the Liberal secretary of
state, sought relief from the political negotiations during his tour of 1917-18
in shikar.?° In describing a hunt in Alwar, Montagu revealed his attraction
to and ambivalence about hunting as well as his equivocal attitudes toward
non-elites, such as villagers and beaters.

Nothing thrills me so much as these shoots. The excitement and the arrangements make
the day pass like lightning, but what I hate about them, which destroys the happiness, is
that I am expected to shoot the tiger . . . I agree that it is essential to shoot them, for
the damage that they do to the villagers’ cattle, and sometimes to the villagers themselves,
is infinite, but I would prefer that somebody else took the responsibility of the climax
of a shoot, upon which so much depends, and upon which so much trouble has been
taken.°

During that beat he eventually shot a tigress who had wounded a beater and
concluded ‘we would have been very happy except for the mauling of a man,
which I am assured is incidental to this ritual. I cannot ascertain news of his
health’.””

Shikar within princely states served multiple functions. Princes could ex-
hibit their wealth and their managerial ability in overseeing such large-scale
undertakings. They provided opportunities to lobby informally British offi-
cials on sensitive issues. For both princes and British, shikar was a substitute
for warfare and an activity deemed appropriately masculine when gender roles
and behaviours were being intensely questioned.?® Subsequently some princes
changed their attitudes and became leaders in game preservation and conser-
vation. The rulers of Kashmir, Mysore and Bharatpur developed game sanctu-
aries before 1947, and their refuges and those in other princely states would
be transformed into national wildlife parks during the 1950s.”

Another sport closely associated with kingship in India was wrestling. The
connection between kings and wrestlers has been traced to the epic Ramayana
where Hanuman, the monkey god devoted to Rama, was portrayed wrestling.
Joseph Alter asserts that ‘[k]ings have kept wrestlers because the physical
strength of the wrestler symbolises the political might of the King’.!°° The

95 Edwin S. Montagu, An Indian Diary, edited by Venetia Montagu (London, 1930) hunted in
Bikaner, pp. 52-5; Patiala, pp. 203-6; Dholpur, pp. 238-42; Bharatpur, pp. 280-1; Alwar,
pp. 290-3; Jaipur, pp: 314-18; and Bhopal, pp. 327-9.

°6 Tbid., p. 290. Ibid., p. 293.

°8 Satadru Sen, ‘Chameleon Games: Ranjitsinhji’s Politics of Race and Gender,’ JCCH 2, 3 (2001),

. 23-4.

2% Macesaae The Empire of Nature, pp. 283-91. Major parks in formerly princely territory are
Bandipur in Mysore, Siraska in Alwar, the Gir Forest in Saurashtra, Periyar in Travancore.

100 Joseph S. Alter, The Wrestlers Body: Identity and Ideology in North India (Berkeley CA, 1992),
p. 72.

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dedication to his calling, the valour, the diet and the exercise regime of a
wrestler reflected the political power and the moral virtue of his royal patron.
In turn, the status of a prince enhanced the esteem of his wrestlers.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rulers of
Aundh, Baroda, Datia, Indore, Jodhpur, Kolhapur and Patiala were prominent
patrons of wrestling. One wrestler exemplifies this relationship. First nurtured
by the maharaja of Jodhpur, Gama successfully captured the John Bull World
Championship Competition in 1910. Indian newspapers widely celebrated
his defeat of the best British wrestlers in the metropole. Two years later the
maharaja of Patiala became his patron. In 1928 the Sikh prince sponsored
a major bout in Patiala that attracted 40 000 spectators. After Gama once
again defeated the opponent he had bested in 1910, Bhupinder Singh placed
his own pearl necklace on the champion, had him ride the prince’s elephant,
and awarded a village and an annual stipend to him. Gama’s victory certainly
entertained people, but Alter stresses that it had political implications since
“Gama and his patron the maharaja came to symbolise the possibility of self-
determination and independence’.!°! But Indian wrestlers have not viewed the
independent GOI kindly. They lament the passing of princely patrons who
preserved wrestling as a way of life during the British period and transferred
the wrestler from the private world of the akhara or training pit to the public
sphere of popular acclaim. The contemporary employment of wrestlers in gov-
ernment services does not promote public esteem or private self-respect and
provides no pearl necklaces or villages. Princely patronage of Indian wrestlers
was yet another way of performing kingly dharma.

The princes sponsored and participated in other sports embodying military
and masculine values. Pig-sticking and polo were indigenous sports that the
British appropriated as displays of manly daring, courage and horsemanship.
Some princely clients joined them in these ventures, most notably Man Singh of
Jaipur, who died ofa heart attack while playing polo in England in 1970. Other
princes such as Rajendra Singh of Patiala (1872-1900), who had achieved fame
in pig-sticking and polo,'® became enthusiastic participants and patrons of
an imported aristocratic sport, cricket.

Although Rajendra was a vigorous batsman, he was more significant for
recruiting a cosmopolitan team to play for Patiala. His son, Bhupinder Singh,
expanded state patronage of cricket to the national level, and his grandson

101 Tbid., p. 77.
102 Rajendra’s reputation in polo was acknowledged by a caricature in Vanity Fair on 4 January 1900
in Roy T. Matthews and Peter Mellini, Zn ‘Vanity Fair’ (London, 1982), p. 182.

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T r
bythe

behest (4
7
4a Lae ee

Wrestling match at Patiala, c. 1930.

played, supported local and national teams, and organised the National In-
stitute of Sports in Patiala.!°? Other princes overshadowed Patiala’s fame for
cricketers. In 1894 Ranjitsinhji of Nawanagar became the first Indian playing
for an English county team.!°4 According to Arjun Appadurai, he acquired an
Orientalist glow in which ‘wile became guile, trickery became magic, weakness
became suppleness, effeminacy was transformed into grace’ and thus came to
represent the obverse of British stereotypes of Indian effeminacy.! Satadru
Sen has elaborated on how Ranjitsinhji used his persona as a cricketer acclaimed
in England to cultivate friendships with senior Rajput princes, especially Partap

103 Richard Cashman, Patrons, Players and the Crowd: The Phenomenon of Indian Cricket (New Delhi,
1980), pp. 27-35.

104 Thid., pp. 35-9; Satadru Sen, ‘Chameleon Games’; Ranjitsinhji’s caricature appeared in Vanity Fair
on 26 August 1897; Matthews and Mellini, ‘Vanity Fair’, p. 183; Ian Buruma, Playing the Game
(New York, 1991) is a novel that examines his life and the ambiguities of cultural identity.

105 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Playing with Modernity: The Decolonization of Indian Cricket’, in Carol
A. Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World (Minneapolis,
1995), p. 30.

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Singh, who would support his claims to status as a Rajput and to the gaddi
of Nawanagar.!°° Defining the 1920s and 1930s as the golden age of princely
involvement, Richard Cashman speculates that through cricket the princes
gained advantageous contacts with British officials and popularity among In-
dian audiences during a period of political change. Princely patronage of cricket
ironically contributed to the eventual decolonisation of cricket and its present
status as perhaps the most popular Indian spectator sport. After independence,
the nawabs of Pataudi and Loharu continued the tradition of celebrity prince-
players.

NATURAL LEADERS OR ORIENTAL AUTOCRATS

From 1858 to 1947 when the British Parliament exerted direct control in
India, British officials projected multiple and contradictory images of the
Indian princes on the screen of public discourse. After proclaiming that the
British desired ‘no extension of our present territorial possessions, Queen
Victoria promised to ‘respect the rights, dignity and honour of the native
princes as our own’.!°7 Indian princes were to be preserved, glorified and re-
warded for services rendered in time of imperial need during the revolt of 1857.
As outlined in Chapter 4, British officials in the colony and the metropole long
debated over how to relate to Indian princes legally, ritually and personally.
After almost twenty years of experimentation, Lord Lytton incorporated the
Indian princes into an imperial ceremonial hierarchy with Victoria at the apex
as Empress of India. Declaring that ‘[p]olitically speaking, the Indian peasantry
is an inert mass. If it ever moves at all it will move in obedience, not to its
British benefactors, but to its native chiefs and princes, however tyrannical they
may be’, Lytton characterised the princes as a ‘ “powerful aristocracy” whose
complicity could be secured and efficiently utilized by the British in India’.1°
The Indian princes were to be subordinated to their imperial British suzerain
while remaining influential, legitimate, even if despotic, rulers vis-a-vis their
Indian subjects.

The public pronouncements and private views of British officials towards
the Indian princes continued to show striking ambiguity. Lord Curzon, the
epitome of British paternal imperialism, and Sir Walter Lawrence, his private

106 Satadru Sen, ‘Becoming Rajput: The Politics of Race in Ranjitsinhji’s Empire’, paper delivered at
annual meeting of the American Historical Association, 4 January 2003. I am grateful to the author
for permission to cite this paper.

107 Proclamation by Queen Victoria, 1 November 1858, in Sever, Documents, vol. 1, p. 233.

108 Lytton to Lord Salisbury, secretary of state for India, 11 May 1876, OIOC, E 218/518/1, pp. 147,
150 and quoted in Cohn, ‘Representing Authority’, pp. 191-2.

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secretary, reflect these enigmatic images, which indicate conflicting and at times
uncertain conceptions of British rule in India. An ICS officer who had served
in both British India and the princely states, Lawrence celebrated the personal
qualities and administrative effectiveness of the Indian princes. In his memoirs
he wrote:

As a boy he [the prince] has listened to his father, and even to his grandfather, telling of the
problems and incidents of past generations. The Raja is proud of his stored-up knowledge of
customs, precedents, proverbs; he has a memory for faces and names, and knows the value
of prompt and laconic decisions. Legends grow up of his wise and pithy judgements . . .
Durbar justice is prompter and less ruinously expensive than it is in [British] India, and
in the long run just as fair; for the Raja knows the facts, and understands the people. The

Rajas — and I have known many of them — are men of great courtesy and dignity, and these

qualities appeal to all Indian hearts.!°

Lawrence cited personal experience including informal conversations and visits
as well as official assignments as the basis of his assessment.

Lacking casual, personal rapport with Indian princes, Curzon thought in
terms of imperial policy on a grand scale. Shortly after his arrival in India,
he declared: “The Native Chief has become, by our policy, an integral fac-
tor in the Imperial Organisation of India. He is concerned not less than the
Viceroy or the Lieutenant-Governor in the administration of the country.
I claim him as my colleague and partner.’!!® But like Lytton, Curzon did not
view princes as equals of the British. Subsequently Curzon wrote privately to
Lord George Hamilton, the secretary of state for India in London, that he
accepted that the British acted as schoolmasters to the princes — ‘For what are
they, for the most part, but a set of unruly and ignorant and rather undisciplined
school-boys?’!!

Acombination of concern for protocol and possibly racist and sexist attitudes
colour Curzon’s characterisations of social relations with Indian princes. He
once complained of being nauseated by the sight of ‘““English ladies . . . of the
highest rank” curtseying before the most insignificant princes . . . as if they
were royalty’.!!? A stickler for observing tables of precedence, Curzon’s nausea
might have been occasioned by the women’s ignorance of precedence. Even so,
Curzon like other British men might also have been anxious over the perceived
challenge presented to British masculinity when British women of any class

109 Walter Roper Lawrence, The India We Served (London, 1928), pp. 180-1.

10 Speech by Curzon at Gwalior, 20 November 1899, in Sever, Documents, vol. 1, p. 343.

ll Curzon to Hamilton, 29 August 1900, in ibid., p. 346.

"2 Curzon’s minute, 29 February 1904, PSCI, 1875-1911, vol. 163, No. 694/1904 quoted in Ashton,
British Policy, p. 24.

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publicly deferred to or were sexually attracted to Indian men. When asked for
the participation of Indian orderlies in ceremonies related to the coronation of
Edward VII, Curzon remarked: “The “woman” aspect of the question is rather
a difficulty, since, strange as it may seem, Englishwomen of the housemaid
class, and even higher, do offer themselves to these Indian soldiers, attracted
by their uniform, enamoured by their physique, and with a sort of idea that
the warrior is also an Oriental prince.’!!

Although the princes might be administrative partners, they were not to
be treated as social or sexual equals. In the twentieth century, British officials
continued to be ambivalent about the image of the Indian princes even as they
instituted constitutional innovations such as the Chamber of Princes, which
accorded the princes a defined but circumscribed political forum. But the
ambiguity of imperial images was matched by an array of images of the princes
that Indian nationalist leaders epoused. Romesh Chunder Dutt, best known
for his theory that the British drained India of its economic resources but also
a former ICS officer and minister in Baroda state, was an early nationalist
apologist for the princes. When referring to Mysore and Baroda in the closing
decades of the nineteenth century, he claimed that ‘[n]Jo part of India is better
governed today than these States, ruled by their own Princes’.!!4 Furthermore,
he asserted that the princes as well as leaders of the Indian National Congress
should represent and govern India. For many nationalists the princes, especially
those acclaimed as progressive, were living examples of the Indian ability to
govern themselves and to do so with wisdom and innovation. Like the British
officials they sought to replace, some nationalists also lauded the personal
relationship between a prince and his or her subjects, as opposed to the aloof
one between British bureaucrats and Indian subjects.

During the twentieth century, Indian nationalists projected other images
of Indian princes. Born in a princely state, Mahatma Gandhi regarded the
princes as trustees for their people and consequently advocated that the Indian
National Congress should not intervene in princely states. Other Congress
leaders, especially those such as Jawaharlal Nehru who were affiliated with the
left wing of the Congress, were critical of princely autocracy and promoted
Congress support for popular political activists in the states. In his presidential
address at the Lucknow Congress in 1936, Nehru claimed that ‘Indian rulers

"13 Curzon to Lord Hamilton, 1 October 1900, MSS EUR F 111/159 as quoted in Rozina Visram,
Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700-1947 (London, 1986), p. 176.

114 Romesh Dutt, The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age: From the Accession of Queen
Victoria in 1837 to the Commencement of the Twentieth Century, 4th edn (London, 1916),
p. 32.

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and their ministers have spoken and acted increasingly in the approved fascist
manner’.!!> Two years later Nehru characterised princes as puppets but then
conceded that ‘[o]ur fight is not against any individual but against autocracy
and oppression itself. Some rulers of the native states may be good people, but
when they get power in their hands, they become inhuman’.!!° In other words
Nehru opposed the sin of autocracy and the imperial patron—client system
that protected the sinner but did not condemn the erring prince if he would
repent. In 1935 when urging greater Congress intervention in princely state
politics, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, like Nehru a socialist, had characterised
the princes as slaves (in their relationship with the British) when she referred to
the subjects of Indian states as slaves of slaves.'!” In contrast, Sarojini Naidu,
Kamaladevi’s sister-in-law by marriage and another Congress leader born in a
princely state (Hyderabad), opposed intervention by the Congress and accused
Nehru of ‘picking’ on the Muslim rulers of Bhopal and Hyderabad with ‘unjus-
tified’ criticisms.''® These conflicting attitudes among the Congress hierarchy
towards the Indian princes reflected ambivalent relationships both before and

after 1947.

CONCLUSION

Despite British dominance in India, the princes remained significant protag-
onists in multiple public and private spheres. Relatives, subjects and British
officials participated in their personal life cycle ceremonies. Princely educa-
tion, marriages and succession disputes involved factions contending for con-
trol over or access to the current or future occupant of a gaddi. Shrewd and
ambitious princes manipulated these competing groups to achieve their goals.
British officials, who might wish that the princes would behave in officially de-
fined, appropriate ways, had to overlook personal and administrative transgres-
sions if the political consequences of deposition or abdication were judged too
costly.

115 Presidential Address at Lucknow Congress, 12 April 1936, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol.
7 (New Delhi, 1975), p. 189.

N6 Article in The Hindu, 23 October 1938, and then speech at Bombay, 18 November 1938, in
Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. 9 (New Delhi, 1976), pp. 405-7.

17 Speech at meeting of the All India Congress Committee at Madras, 18 October 1935, in N. N.
Mitra (ed.) ZAR, vol. 2, July-December 1935 (Calcutta, 1936), p. 279.

118 Sarojini Naidu to Padmaja Naidu, 16 January 1938, Padmaja Naidu Papers, NMML, quoted in Jan
Copland, ‘Congress Paternalism: The “High Command” and the Struggle for Freedom in Princely
India, c. 1920-1940’, SA, n.s. 8, 1 & 2 (1985), p. 81.

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In the cultural arena, princes were not the only patrons of religious special-
ists, activities, and association, of visual and performing arts and of sports, but
their resources were widely sought in other arenas. Because of the tangled rela-
tionships between religious associations, communalism and political violence
(shown, for example, by the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi), the role of
Indian rulers and their families in religious communalism and nationalism has
not been fully researched. My own work on the maharajas of Patiala and the
Sikh community outlines some continuity of participation from the colonial
to the post-colonial era. The activities of Rajmata Vijayraje Scindia of Gwalior
(1919-2001) in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), an electoral party, and the
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a worldwide organisation promoting Hindu
culture, during the 1980s and 1990s and of Dilip Singh Ju Deo, son of the
last raja of Jashpur who is a major BJP leader in Chhattisgarh, indicate that
the mutual attraction of erstwhile princely families and religiously oriented
associations has not ended.!!° If the princes were without political or cultural
resonance, their appearances at public meetings would not be featured in the
news media. But it must be emphasised that only a limited number of erstwhile
princes are prominent in such organisations.

Common wisdom is that princes helped to maintain cultural forms such
as Indian dance and music during the colonial period. The evidence supports
these assumptions. The independent GOI established a bureaucratic infras-
tructure that assumed responsibility from the princes and distributed public
resources to promote indigenous art forms. However, princely activity as cul-
tural innovators in establishing museums, promoting photography, developing
a national structure for music festivals, and providing the transitional stage in
the evolution of some sports, especially cricket, as mass entertainment has often
been ignored.

Finally, the diverse images that both British officials and Indian nationalists
projected of the Indian princes manifest complex assessments of the Indian
princes. Even if they were publicly and privately caricatured or disdained, the
princes had to be accommodated. Most importantly, the princes remained in-
ternally autonomous rulers within their own territorial units and were seen as
embodying their states. One example is the manner in which many British and
Indians referred to princes by the name of their state as if they were synony-
mous with the states they ruled. Another is the many histories of states that
chronicle succession struggles, the activities of rulers, and their relations with

a Vijayaraje Scindia with Manohar Malgonkar, Princess: The Autobiography of the Dowager Maharani
of Gwalior (London, 1985) and Amrita Basu, ‘Feminism Inverted: The Real Women and Gendered
Imagery of Hindu Nationalism,’ BCAS 25, 4 (1993), pp. 25-36.

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the British. In them administrative elites, merchants and peasants constituted
a dim background. Scholarship on the princely states as political entities with
elites and subalterns, with varying levels of economic development, and with
religious and cultural associations and activities has emerged only in the 1970s.
Moreover, it generally focuses on the largest states, especially Hyderabad and
Mysore, and certain clusters such as those in Rajasthan and western India.

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CHAPTER 6

PRINCELY STATES: ADMINISTRATIVE
AND ECONOMIC STRUCTURES

Among the slightly more than one hundred states that were ensconced in the
British salute table, the antique, the successor and the rebel-warrior categories,
as outlined in Chapter 2, all survived into the twentieth century. The inter-
nal evolution of these princely states as political and economic units has not
been as extensively studied as their relationships with the British suzerain. The
importance of the British renunciation of an aggressive policy of direct annex-
ation can be overemphasised since some changes in territory continued. After
1858, however, the number of princely states and their boundaries remain
relatively constant until 1947 and it is useful to observe their evolution over
the longue durée, even though much of the scholarship on individual princely
states is usually limited to a few decades or the reign of an individual prince.
This chapter will focus on government structures within the princely states;
their indigenous and ‘foreign’ administrators; the expanding bureaucratisation;
and princely efforts to modernise their economies under the constraints of the
ambivalent economic policies and restrictions of their imperial suzerain from

the 1860s to the 1940s.

GOVERNMENT STRUCTURE

In most states rulers remained in power as long as they successfully manip-
ulated alliances with external allies and internal supporters, mainly relatives,
military entrepreneurs and land-controllers. Although relations with their ex-
ternal competitor, the East India Company and its successor the British Crown,
involved continual negotiation, princes also confronted crucial challenges from
internal co-partners. Coalitions ofa clan, groups of clans, or military allies had
created many states. Leaders of such ventures might initially differentiate them-
selves from their allies by seeking recognition from an outside power, as had
the Tondaiman Kallars in Pudukkottai. If the newly ascendant ruler were to
achieve internal stability, he or she also had to accommodate cohorts. The clas-
sic means was to provide internal allies with grants to collect land revenue from
tracts within the conquered areas and thereby create a landed nobility or gentry.
This practice alienated substantial sources of revenue from the central govern-
ment, but without the collaboration of the nobility there would be no state.

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The ruler, as the most powerful of the elite, generated the income to maintain
an administration from land that was designated as khalsa or crown lands and
from indirect levies such as customs, salt and stamp taxes. Occasionally there
would be a separation between the private holdings of a ruler that supported
his or her household and the khalsa tracts that funded the state administration.
Usually this division was not explicit.

Indian rulers tended to replicate more powerful models, and so the Mughal
administration served as an archetype for successor states, and to some extent for
rebel and antique Rajput states. When government functions were limited, an
Indian prince had a minimal administration led by a diwan or chief minister to
supervise the collection of taxes. Other officers headed departments of finance,
military affairs, the judiciary, and household affairs. From the mid-nineteenth
century onward, a few states such as Travancore, Mysore and Baroda established
departments of public works and education.

The revenue department had immediate jurisdiction over khalsa lands,
which paid land revenues directly to the ruler, while jagirdars, mainly early
military allies, relatives of the rulers, state officials, and religious establish-
ments, collected the land revenue from tracts beyond the control of the state
administration. States with sizeable numbers of jagirdars included Hyderabad,
where only half the land was khalsa, and several in Rajasthan such as Alwar and
Jaipur.! Views on the origins of the jagirs differed. Rulers asserted that they
granted jagirs, retained control over succession to them, and had their supe-
rior position acknowledged by the payment of tribute from jagirdars. Jagirdars
often challenged this interpretation. In the case of Sirohi state in Rajasthan,
Denis Vidal has documented how nobles argued that their ancestors had ob-
tained their lands when the kingdom was in the process of formation and thus
had autonomous rights in the land.”

Larger states were divided into divisions and then districts, but as in British
India, the state structure often did not penetrate into local society below the dis-
trict level. Village headmen (pazels), accountants (patwaris), and councils were
responsible for the collection and payment of revenues to state-appointed dis-
trict officers or revenue contractors. In Mysore, patwaris presented their records
and collections to district officers at an annual collection day (jamabandi).
Accompanied by festivities celebrating the end of the harvest, the proceed-
ings confirmed the local autonomy, which the ruler tolerated as long as order

' Rudolph and Rudolph, Essays contains their influential essays on Jaipur.
2 Denis Vidal, Violence and Truth: A Rajasthani Kingdom Confronts Colonial Authority (Delhi, 1997),
pp. 56-7.

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was maintained and revenue transmitted.? State revenue records often did not
itemise the amount collected but only the amount forwarded. Larger jagirdars
had their own revenue officers, but, like the British and the princes, they usu-
ally did not collect revenue directly from peasant cultivators or tenants but
from local intermediaries.

A central treasury to hold state funds and a finance department to dispense
them were rare during the nineteenth century. Karen Leonard has described
how banking firms controlled by Gujaratis, Marwaris and local families func-
tioned as state treasurers and accountants in Hyderabad by giving loans to the
nizam’s government and paying salaries of state officials against the collection
of revenues. The state finance department negotiated these loans and paid
them off when revenues were received. Diwans therefore needed the support
of these creditors to survive politically. Although they solved a short-term prob-
lem, many of the bankers in Hyderabad became jagirdars and thus alienated
more income from the state. Long-term solutions included the modernising
reforms of Salar Jung, the cession of Berar to the British for payment of the
salaries of the Hyderabad Contingent, and the establishment of a state bank in
1868.4 G. S. L. Devra analysed the social mobility of Marwaris, especially in
Bikaner. As privileged land-controllers in the eighteenth century, they moved
into revenue farming, long-distance trade, and merchant banking for Rajput
princes and the Muslim rulers of Hyderabad.’ Although there are occasional
references to princes such as those in Jaipur being heavily indebted to bankers
for the payment of tribute to the British, the role of private bankers awaits
further research, as does the establishment of state banks.

Many states, with a few exceptions such as Mysore, were dependent on mil-
itary contingents that jagirdars supplied. Consequently, Indian rulers initially
found the British-trained and equipped subsidiary forces attractive. They were
more capable than local levies of repelling external enemies, suppressing
internal challenges, and coercing recalcitrant taxpayers. However, princes were
increasingly disappointed by their lack of control over forces for which they paid
but could not command. By the mid-nineteenth century, reforming diwans
sought to replace poorly disciplined jagirdari forces and British-dominated
subsidiary contingents with centrally controlled military units. In 1854 Salar

3 James Manor, Political Change in an Indian State: Mysore 1917-1955 (New Delhi, 1977), pp. 16-17.

4 Karen Leonard, ‘Banking Firms in Nineteenth-Century Hyderabad Politics, MAS 15 (1981),
pp. 177-201.

> G.S.L. Devra, ‘A Rethinking on the Politics of Commercial Society in Pre-Colonial India: Transition
from Mutsaddi to Marwari’, Occasional Papers on History and Society, No. 38, NMML (New Delhi,
1987).

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Jung I (1829-83) initiated such a reform in Hyderabad. By 1862 he had dele-
gated the task to Raja Girdhari Pershad, a Saksena kayasth whose family came to
Hyderabad as record-keepers but gradually moved into military service, which
provided more remunerative opportunities.° Alwar also created reformed state
forces that became the core of Imperial Service Troops. In the twentieth century
some rulers such as the maharaja of Patiala reorganised their police departments
as educated elites, jagirdars and peasants challenged princely autocracy. Com-
pared to the extensive research on the police and definitions of crime in British
Indian provinces, there is a paucity of such research on those topics in the
princely states.’

The judicial system reflected both the autocratic nature of states and their
narrow infiltration into local society. Caste panchayats, village headmen and
religious leaders settled most civil and some criminal disputes at the local
level. In larger states the lowest-level revenue collector, either a state-appointed
officer, variously named a tahsildar or amildar, or a relatively autonomous
jagirdar, decided revenue claims and other civil disputes. By the early twentieth
century appeals went to district courts and then to a high court of the state
located in the capital, or in smaller states to a consolidated regional court.
High courts might have some original jurisdiction. In many states the ruler
was the highest court of appeal in both civil and criminal cases and frequently
approved death sentences. Thus intervention of the ruler at the highest level
and revenue authorities at the lowest sharply reduced the independence of the
judiciary.

Since household establishments were the crucible of succession to leadership
and ritual ceremonies that symbolised the distinctive position of the ruler,
most state administrations had a formal or informal department of household
affairs. Its multiple responsibilities ranged from management and construction
of forts, palaces and hunting lodges, to oversight of the zenana of the ruler’s
female relatives, the staging of private ceremonies such as the life cycle rituals
at birth, marriage and death, and the negotiation and management of public
ones, especially visits of imperial patrons. British officials usually regarded this
department as a wellspring of intrigue and corruption. Considering how much
attention and expense the British lavished on the Imperial Assemblage in 1876
and their expectations of princely largess during British official visits, it is
ironic that the colonial government was so critical of princely expenditures on

© Karen Leonard, Social History of an Indian Caste: The Kayasths of Hyderabad (Berkeley CA, 1978),
pp. 104-6.
7 Two notable exceptions are Vidal, Violence, and Nandini Sundar, Subalterns and Sovereigns: An

Anthropological History of Bastar, 1854-1996 (Delhi, 1997).

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public and private life cycle ceremonies. Since they reinforced and extended
princely claims to authority within their states, among their clan members
and their fellow princes, these rituals were vital in the maintenance of princely
authority. Joanne Waghorne has carefully documented British ambivalence in
the specific case of Raja Ramachandra of Pudukkottai, whose expenditures had
to be sanctioned by the local British authorities. Among many examples, they
denied a ‘request for Rs 10 000 for his daughter’s puberty rites’ in 1867 but
allowed Rs 20 000 in 1870 for the ruler to attend a reception for the Duke of
Edinburgh.§

Progressive’ princely states

Mirroring the diversity among princely states, there were numerous varia-
tions on the model outlined. One category was that of ‘progressive’ states
that included Baroda, Mysore, Travancore and Cochin. Here progress meant
administrative modernisation with some introduction of representative institu-
tions. But most princes remained autocrats and allowed little popular political
participation until the 1940s. Other reforms included state support for so-
cial services, chiefly education and public health measures based on western
medicine. Education supplied employees for an expanding bureaucracy and
enhanced the productive capacity of the state, but there was little concern for
the promotion of equality among state subjects. If medical programs improved
the health of subjects, there were economic benefits for the state.

In Travancore the conjunction of a sympathetic young ruler (Ayilyam
Tirunal), an able young diwan (T. Madhava Rao), and a new British resi-
dent (F N. Maltby) led to major reforms during the 1860s and 1870s. Robin
Jeffrey has outlined the modernisation that took place: in the collection of
land revenue that enabled the state to pay off its debts; in the establishment
of a public works department which built roads that promoted internal trade,
provided alternative wage labour for lower castes, and broadened the social
horizons of many groups; and in the bureaucratisation of the administration.”
Most importantly, the diwan fostered the establishment of state-supported
schools that linked government service to educational qualifications.!° Until
the 1890s this Hindu state helped Christian missionary schools with grants-
in-aid since the foreigners mainly nurtured lower castes and girls, who were
not the focus of state efforts.'’ As high-status Nayars and Syrian Christians

8 Joanne Punzo Waghorne, The Raja’s Magic Clothes: Re-Visioning Kingship and Divinity in England’
India (University Park PA, 1994), p. 48.
9 Jeffrey, Decline, ch. 3. 10 Thid., ch. 2. 1l Kawashima, Missionaries, ch. 3.

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and low-caste ezhavas became educated, their rising expectations of govern-
ment employment and awareness of civil disability aroused social and poli-
tical tensions and strained relations between the administration and the
missionaries.'? Although neighbouring Cochin, with a fifth of the area and a
quarter of the population of Travancore, was slower to implement adminis-
trative reforms, it achieved rates of literacy comparable to those in Travancore
by 1931.19

When explaining the ‘advanced’ government of Mysore, some historians
attributed much of its administrative modernisation to the extended period of
British management from 1831 to 1881 when colonial officers instituted an ad-
ministrative structure similar to that in Madras. On the one hand, the research
of Donald Gustafson emphasises that Indian ministers were active agents in
implementing reforms.'4 On the other hand, James Manor argues that many
reforms in Mysore were designed to cultivate a positive image with the British
suzerain and Indian nationalists.!> Expenditures were channelled to urban-
based or state-level projects such as industrial enterprises and the provision
of electric lighting in Bangalore, before it was available in British presidency
capitals. Despite limited funds, these efforts gained favourable publicity and
did not trespass on local power arenas. Manor asserts persuasively that the
Mysore ruling family with a tiny social base tried to maintain internal order by
allowing considerable local autonomy while retaining autocratic control at the
state level.!° Even so, the powers of local government boards were restricted,
while their fiscal responsibilities for roads, compulsory education and health
services were extensive.

The Mysore state also ventured into the contested terrain of social reform.
Despite the opposition of a majority in the new Mysore Assembly, in 1894
Diwan Seshadri Iyer (1845-1901) pushed through a regulation that prohibited
marriage for all Hindu girls below 8 and of girls below 16 to men over 50.
The latter provision was designed to promote companionate marriages. The
administration implemented this legislation through prosecutions, generally
of lower-caste individuals, that disseminated its provisions at the very least
by rumour.'’ Thus Mysore was in sharp contrast to the GOI, which did not
vigorously enforce the controversial Age of Consent Act of 1891 that made illegal

12 Thid., chapter 6; Jeffrey, Decline, chs 3-5. 13 Kawashima, Missionaries, ch. 6.

14 Donald R. Gustafson, Mysore 1881-1902: The Making of a Model State, PhD thesis, University
of Wisconsin at Madison (1968).

15 Manor, Political Change, chs 1, 3. 16 Tbid., pp. 11-13.

17 Janaki Nair, ‘Prohibited Marriage: State Protection and the Child Wife’, in Patricia Uberoi (ed.),
Social Reform, Sexuality and the State (New Delhi, 1996), pp. 157-86.

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sexual relations with girls under the age of 12. Janaki Nair argues that Mysore
was not primarily concerned with the condition of women but rather sought
‘[t]o encompass and absorb those aspects of civil and social life that had long
lain outside its reach, thereby producing a civil society which recognised the
overarching authority of the state’.'8 By the 1920s the administration decided
that its objectives had been achieved. Thus it was not worth the cost to override
local opposition to raising the age of marriage to match the provisions of the
Sarda Act in British India that legislated 18 as the minimum age for men and
14 for women.!?

For Baroda, David Hardiman has described how Sayaji Rao and his diwans,
T. Madhava Rao (served 1875-81), Manubhai Mehta (served 1916-26) and
V. T. Krishnamachariar (served 1926-44), achieved political stability and a
‘progressive’ reputation. Because Baroda’s rich plains lacked natural defences,
large landlords and jagirdars had not survived and thus did not constrain
its ruler. Rather, landowning peasant cultivators, among whom patidars were
dominant, were the most significant class. The diwans, allied with village
shareholders, instituted a modern bureaucracy and promoted trade and indus-
trialisation. The bureaucracy countered the power of local notables and was
responsive to the interests of the village shareholders and open to their sons be-
cause of an extensive educational system. The state-sponsored construction of
railways fostered trade and contributed to state income. Because of the growth
of textile and chemical industries during the 1930s and 1940s respectively, the
state was able to reduce the proportion of revenue that the rural sector paid
and defuse peasant grievances. In 1938 the rate of land revenue was lowered
by 20 per cent, while income and super tax rates that affected relatively few
urban dwellers were raised.”°

In general, the antique states of Rajputana did not have a reputation for be-
ing progressive, but some undertook administrative reforms that significantly
influenced the lives of their peasant subjects.”) During the late nineteenth cen-
tury Maharaja Ram Singh of Jaipur implemented major public works programs
and extended railways. Robert Stern has described how during the twentieth
century British administrators in Jaipur followed a strategy similar to that in
Baroda to achieve peasant support and political stability. When Man Singh
was a minor during the 1920s and 1930s, a ryotwari settlement began to bring
peasants into direct relations with the central administration. Simultaneously

18 Tbid., pp. 168-9. 9 Ibid., pp. 178-83.

20 Hardiman, ‘Baroda’, in Jeffrey, People, pp. 122-3.

Al Rudolph and Rudolph, ‘Rajputana under British Paramountcy: The Failure of Indirect Rule’, Essays,
pp. 7-17.

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there was an effort to complement income from land revenue with that from
the state’s investment portfolio, which was in GOI securities, interest-bearing
loans to states such as Bikaner, and state railways.”

In an ecologically precarious position in the western Rajasthani desert,
Ganga Singh in Bikaner developed an extensive famine relief program during
the 1890s and then undertook more permanent solutions. The Gang Canal,
opened in 1927, brought water from the Sutlej River to the northwestern area
of this fertile but rain-deficient state. Subsequently the maharaja and his suc-
cessor pushed through a land settlement on both khalsa and jagirdari lands that
regularised the relations of peasants to the land they cultivated. Furthermore,
from 1900 to 1931 the state expended 44 per cent of its revenue on social
overhead capital, which represents 5.04 in constant rupees per capita. Thus
Bikaner was second only to Cochin, which allocated 47 per cent of its revenues
to social overhead, but ahead of Mysore and Baroda.”* These expenditures on
irrigation canals and social overhead retarded the evolution of popular political
associations in Bikaner.”

Rulers could implement extensive programs of public works and administra-
tive reforms but not achieve the reputation of being progressive. Thakore Saheb
Lakhaji Raj (b. 1885, r. 1907-30) of Rajkot in western India established a rep-
resentative assembly in 1923 that was unique in being fully elected. Although
Rajkot joined a small group of states that took this ultimately abortive advance
towards popular government, it has not gained the epithet of progressive or
modern.

Mysore was the first princely state to inaugurate a representative assembly
in 1881; it added a legislative council or upper house in 1907. Travancore
launched an appointive legislative council in 1888 and created an elective
consultative assembly in 1904. Other states with such bodies ranged from
Baroda, Bhopal, Gwalior and Hyderabad, to much smaller units such as Bhor,
Cochin, Datia and Pudukkottai. These assemblies began as appointed bodies
with a majority of official members and were initially advisory in function.
In the states with a reputation for being modern, the diwan was the chair.
In others the ruler moderated, as occurred in 1929 in Datia or in Gwalior where

22 Stern, Cat, pp. 250-1.

23 John Hurd II, ‘The Economic Consequences of Indirect Rule in India’, JESHR 12 (1975), p. 175.
Mysore spent 37 per cent and Baroda spent 25 per cent of their revenues and 1.80 rupees
per capita and 2.16 rupees per capita respectively on social overhead: John Hurd II, Some Economic
Characteristics of the Princely States of India, 1901-1931, PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania
(1969), p. 242.

24 Richard Sisson, The Congress Party in Rajasthan: Political Integration and Institution-building in an
Indian State (Berkeley CA, 1972), pp. 91-2.

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the senior maharani, a regent for the minor heir, assumed control. Where the
prince presided, the assembly was similar to a Mughal durbar in which elites
presented their grievances but had no legal authority to influence policy. Some
states introduced a restricted franchise. During the 1930s in Travancore and
Cochin, about 5 per cent of the population could vote in regular elections.
Most of these assemblies did not control the budgets or have the right to
initiate legislation. When they did have such powers as in Mysore, the ruler
could authorise expenditures or legislation in ‘emergencies’. As the resources
they managed were so restricted, these assemblies rarely became the focus for
popular political activity.

Princely women as mothers, wives and power-brokers

Although neither British officials nor earlier historians considered the zenana as
a component in the administrative structure of a princely state, the women who
resided there had three significant political functions. First, they were respon-
sible for producing sons. Varsha Joshi has stressed that Rajput rulers practised
polygyny to obtain heirs as well as younger sons who could serve in their armies
or extend Rajput control through the creation of new states.7” When Mughal
and British dominance eliminated the possibility of expansion, polygyny con-
tinued to strengthen clan and kinship networks and to maintain status. Such
marriages simultaneously triggered succession disputes when princely wives
supported candidates through strategies that ranged from alliances with no-
bles to murder and false pregnancies.*° Despite polygyny, many princes lacked
natural heirs. Surviving wives and mothers of ruler often claimed a role in the
adoption of heirs. In Alwar in 1874, the British political agent sought opinions
about two contestants for the gaddi from the Rathor widow and the mother
of the late Raja Sheodan Singh and also from jagirdars.7” The mothers of
natural or adoptive heirs frequently had an even more crucial role as regents
when their sons had succeeded as minors. Rani Lakshmibai (c. 1835—58) of
Jhansi is the most famous example of an activist regent who literally fought
and died in 1858 to protect the interests of her adopted son. Numerous less
well known queen mothers served as regents.

During the nineteenth century the British tended to reduce the influence
of these women despite their professed intention to follow custom and avoid
unwarranted intervention. Perturbed by the hostility of two queen mothers in
Jaipur and the state’s delinquency in forwarding its tribute payments during

25 Joshi, Polygamy, ch. 2. 26 Thid., ch. 3. 27 Haynes, ‘British Modification’, pp. 60-1.

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extended regencies, the British assumed more direct control in 1839, with the
justification that

[w]e had had sufficient experience of the bad effects of yielding to the caprices of females
claiming a right to interfere in the government of Jaipur, and the present was the time to
decide whether it was consonant with the prosperity of the country that a zenana influence
shall for many years be exercised over all the affairs of the state, or whether it has not become
the duty of the paramount power to free the ministry from all such thralldom.”8

This misogyny was not limited to British officials since Jadunath Sarkar, when
describing these regencies, claimed that ‘[t]o the two evils of womans rule on
behalf of a child on the throne and faction among the nobility, was now added
financial collapse’.”?

The second crucial responsibility of queen mothers was the education of
heirs to the gaddi. Since most princely women had marginal exposure to west-
ern education in English, British officials viewed them as the repositories and
promoters of all that was ‘traditional’ and increasingly ‘decadent’. From the
1870s onward, therefore, the paramount power prodded their partners in em-
pire to remove young princely heirs from the zenana. During the late nineteenth
century Indian nationalists, particularly in Bengal, were exhorting women to
raise heroic sons to combat the British and to remain as guardians of the spir-
itual essence of India in the home,*° but they seem to ignore the mothers of
princes as nurturers of potential leaders. Gradually princes began to appoint
British nannies and tutors for their children and to send their sons to British-
established schools for princes. This practice could produce a backlash. In 1934
the maharani of Faridkot, a small Sikh state in Punjab, was commended for
‘sparing no pains in the upbringing of her worthy son and in making her sons
perfect gentlemen and perfect Princes’ and even moving to Lahore when her el-
dest son went to school there. She supposedly pitied ‘those society woman [sic]
who leave the care of her sons to nurses and governesses thereby surrendering
to them the exercise and potent influence of a mother’s love and counsel’.*!

28 GOI, F&P Procs, 26 June 1839, No. 30 quoted in Stern, Cat, pp. 82-3.

29 Sarkar, History, p. 332. Italics added.

30 Influential articles include Tanika Sarkar, ‘Nationalist Iconography: Image of Women in Nineteenth
Century Bengali Literature’, EPW 22 (21 November 1987), pp. 2011-15; Partha Chatterjee, “The
Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds),
Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi, 1989), pp. 233-53; Jasodhara Bagchi,
‘Representing Nationalism: Ideology of Motherhood in Colonial Bengal’, EPW 25 (20-27 October
1990), WS-65—WS-71; Samita Sen, ‘Motherhood and Mothercraft: Gender and Nationalism in
Bengal’, GH 5 (1993), pp. 231-43.

Makhan Singh, Investiture Ceremony. Of His Highness Farzand-i-Saadat Nishan-i-Hazrat-i-Kaisar-
i-Hind Brar Bans Raja Harindar Singh Sahib Bahadur Ruler of Faridkot State (Lahore [1934?]),
pp. 37-8.

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In official documents and scholarly literature, women in princely families are
usually characterised as manipulative when they functioned as power-brokers.
The stronger the ruler, the more desirable was, and is, direct access to him.
Wives, mothers and concubines enjoyed such access. In a system of personal
government they might secure official appointments, the ouster of rivals, or
lucrative boons.*” The British and rival factions of Indian officials were critical
of this channel of influence that was outside their control.

Women of the zenana irritated British sensibilities in the sphere of sexuality.
As Victorian ideas linking uncontrolled sexuality and the ‘other’ became perva-
sive, the British constructed the Indian princes as addicted to the satisfaction
of their sensual appetites, especially sexual ones. Consequently zenana women,
because they could gratify such passions, became convenient scapegoats for
the refusals of Indian males to conform to Victorian constructs of appropri-
ate sexuality and rulership. Robert Stern has pointed out how the retreat of
Maharaja Madho Singh of Jaipur to his zenana and his deference to Rup Rai, a
concubine, and her male patron influenced the British to exert strong control
over his adopted heir, Man Singh.**

Mothers were also castigated for wielding too much influence over princely
sons. In 1938 the British resident described the junior maharani, Setu
Parvathi Bai (1896-1983), of Travancore as ‘arrogant, uncharitable, egotisti-
cal, bad-tempered, insular and vindictive’. He also claimed that the diwan, Sir
C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar (1879-1966), was so loyal to her that the Briton was
‘[a]bsolutely certain that some of his [Ramaswami Aiyer’s] most unpopular
and... mistaken ideas have emanated from the Junior Maharani’.*4 Setu
Parvathi Bai may have been a forceful influence on both her adult son and a
Tamil brahman lawyer whose career included service on the Madras Executive
Council, but the evidence so far comes mainly from British sources. Robin
Jeffrey argues that the junior maharani’s ascendancy persisted and was be-
hind Ramaswami Aiyar’s declaration that Travancore would assert its inde-
pendence.*> But V. P. Menon, the perceptive collaborator of Sardar Patel in
achieving the integration of the princely states at independence, claimed that
‘[i]n view particularly of his [Aiyar’s] position in the public life of the country,
this statement [advocating the independence of Travancore] had deleterious

32 Joshi, Polygamy, ch. 4. 33 Stern, Cat, pp. 238-40.

34 C. P Skrine, resident for Madras States, to Bernard Glancy, secretary to viceroy as crown repre-
sentative, Political Dept, 11 October 1938, OIOC, CR, R/1/29/1849, quoted in Robin Jeffrey,
‘A Sanctified Label - “Congress” in Travancore Politics, 1938-48’, in D. A. Low (ed.) Congress and
the Raj: Facets of the Indian Struggle 1917-47 (London, 1977), p. 444.

35 Tbid., p. 461.

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repercussions and encouraged the rulers who were not favourably disposed
towards the Indian Dominion’.*° Menon may be more discreet than was the
British resident in not mentioning the maharani, but the evidence is still in-
adequate for a full assessment of the political clout of Setu Parvathi Bai and
other princely women.

British frustration with any constraints on their exercise of power and their
Orientalist stereotypes of Asian women as sexual objects fostered their con-
demnation of women in princely families. In some cases Indian rulers might
have concurred with this negative stereotype of the zenana since it could be a
convenient excuse for not responding positively to British advice or demands.
A few more nuanced assessments are available. Besides the work of Varsha Joshi,
which concentrates on Rajputana from the thirteenth to the early nineteenth
century, Uma Chakravarti and Kumkum Roy have analysed the historical char-
acterisations of such women during the pre-colonial era, and Gita Mehta has
placed a sharp-witted woman from a princely family at the centre of her his-
torical novel, Raj.>” The agency of elite and non-elite women in princely states
during the colonial era begs for further analysis.

INDIGENOUS AND ‘FOREIGN’ POLITICAL
COLLABORATORS

The diwan or chief minister was potentially the dominant state official. Rulers
such as those in Travancore had employed non-Malayali brahmans as diwans
from the mid-eighteenth century to create an administration personally loyal
to them. From the early nineteenth century the British adapted this practice to
their own ends. They expanded the category of ‘outside’ or ‘foreign’ administra-
tors to include both British political officers and Indians from a British Indian
province who were educated in British political and bureaucratic techniques
and rituals. Although the British preferred that British officers not be employed
as the diwans, they occasionally sanctioned such a practice. Examples range
from Colonel John Munro (c. 1770-1858), diwan in Travancore from 1811
to 1814, to Jaipur, where a series of British ministers from 1922 to 1939 used
administrative reforms to contain peasant unrest.

The more common British policy was to support the appointment of Indian
collaborators who had demonstrated support and loyalty to British interests.

36 Ibid. and Menon, Story, p. 114.

37 Joshi, Polygamy, Uma Chakravarti and Kumkum Roy, ‘In Search of Our Past: A Review of the
Limitations and Possibilities of the Historiography of Women in Early India, EPW 23 (30 April
1988), WS-2-WS-10; Gita Mehta, Raj (New York, 1989).

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In south India Maratha and Tamil brahmans who had served in the Madras
presidency were employed as diwans in Travancore, Cochin and Mysore and
often favoured the appointment of caste fellows or regional associates. With
backing from the British resident in Travancore, T. Madhava Rao, whose father
and uncle had both been diwans in this state, was appointed a district officer
there in 1855 and confirmed as diwan in 1858. During his tenure, which
ended in 1872, Madhava Rao acquired wide renown as the administrator
who modernised Travancore and favoured non-Malayali brahmans. Later he
migrated north as diwan first to Indore from 1873 to 1875 and then to Baroda
from 1875 to 1882. Similarly, in Mysore Seshadri Iyer, a Tamil brahman who
was diwan from 1883 to 1896, was reputedly responsible for inducting over a
hundred men from Madras into the gazetted service of Mysore.°®

Two groups in north India were conspicuous in princely state administra-
tions. Western-educated Bengalis, generally bhadralok or respectable people
and more particularly kayasths, had followed British armies and administra-
tors into newly annexed areas of Punjab, Awadh and Rajput states. In Jaipur
one British resident noted that ‘the employment of Bengali ministers in the
state has become almost traditional’.*? Around 1873, Maharaja Ram Singh of
Jaipur had recruited Babu Kanti Chander, an energetic, shrewd Bengali, who
used his knowledge of the English language and culture to enhance Jaipuri re-
lations with the paramount power and foster a more professional bureaucracy
but also to check the powerful Champawat Rajput bureaucratic lineage within
the Jaipur administration. *°

Kashmiri brahman pandits who, like the Bengali kayasths, had a long tra-
dition of administrative service based on fluency in a link language — initially
Persian under the Mughals and then English under the British — had migrated
to Delhi, Lucknow and Lahore from the late eighteenth century onward. By
the 1820s they had entered princely states as educators and administrators. The
Haksar family was prominent in Indore and Gwalior, the Kak family in Jodh-
pur, and others in Bharatpur. Henny Sender has pointed out how the British
were ready to use this community as needed but that ‘the indispensability of the
Kashmiris had its limits’ and they would be sacrificed to British interests.4! But

38 Vanaja Rangaswami, The Story of Integration: A New Interpretation in the Context of the Democratic
Movements in the Princely States of Mysore, Travancore and Cochin 1900-1947 (Delhi, 1981), p. 30.

39 Quoted in Stern, Cat, p. 182.

40 Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph with Mohan Singh, ‘A Bureaucratic Lineage in
Princely India: Elite Formation and Conflict in a Patrimonial System’, in Rudolph and Rudolph,
Essays, pp. 96-106.

a1 Henny Sender, The Kashmiri Pandits: A Study of Cultural Choice in North India (Delhi, 1988),
p. 112.

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Kashmiri pandits remained active in princely states until 1947. Daya Kishen
Kaul served in Patiala during the 1910s despite British opposition, and
Kailas N. Haksar was a prominent figure in Gwalior during an extended
minority in the 1920s, then in the Chamber of Princes during the 1930s,
and eventually as diwan from 1943 to 1944 in his ancestral state of
Kashmir.

Indians and Britons were attracted to employment in princely states for
differing and even conflicting reasons. In the late 1830s Raja Banni Singh
of Alwar recruited the so-called Delhi diwans, Aminullah Khan and his two
brothers, but the British, who then favoured the local nobility, forced out these
Muslim administrators in 1858. Here a Hindu ruler preferred officials who did
not share religious or ethnic ties with his local challengers, and the Delhi diwans
remained influential in Alwar politics through the 1860s.42 Other rulers used
outsiders to reduce the power of their nobles. During the 1860s and 1870s
Maharaja Ram Singh of Jaipur appointed non-official Europeans along with
Bengalis since they combined professional competence with personal loyalty —
they owed their positions entirely to him.

For a few decades some princes recruited Western-educated Indians with na-
tionalist credentials. In response to British demands for administrative reforms,
Maharaja Malhar Rao of Baroda appointed Dadabhai Naoroji, the eminent
Parsi from Bombay and later the first Indian member of Parliament, to be
diwan in 1874. Occasionally a ruler retained Indians of whom the British dis-
approved. Sayaji Rao of Baroda employed Bengali nationalists, most notably
Romesh Chandra Dutt and Aurobindo Ghose. When opportunities for Indians
were limited in the ICS, some Indian nationalists joined the administrations
of princely states where they could demonstrate their administrative compe-
tence and exercise significant executive power. By the early twentieth century,
however, relatively few nationalists sought such experience. The example of
Mahatma Gandhi is idiosyncratic but illustrative. Although his grandfather
and father had served in the administrations of Kathiawadi states, Gandhi felt
compelled for personal and ideological reasons to seek a legal career in British
India.

Employment in the princely states nevertheless continued to lure educated
Indians who did not aspire to electoral or agitational political activity but pre-
ferred administrative authority. The most prominent among them formed an
all-India cadre that circulated through several Indian states. One such person
was Sir Mirza Ismail (1883-1959), who began his career as a ‘native’ diwan in

42 Haynes, ‘British Alteration’, pp. 43-8.

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Mysore, serving from 1928 to 1940, but went as a ‘foreign’ diwan to Jaipur
in 1942 and then to Hyderabad in 1945.43 Other examples exist. Patiala state
retained both Hindustani Muslims such as the Sayyid brothers during the nine-
teenth century and Punjabi Muslims such as Liaqat Hayat Khan (1887-1952),
the brother of Sikandar Hayat Khan (the Unionist Chief Minister of Punjab
1937-42), and Mir Maqbool Mahmud (d. 1948), a sometime elected member
of the Punjab legislature, during the twentieth century. Unfortunately there is
no study of this all-Indian bureaucracy and whether they functioned as a ho-
mogenising or reforming force within princely administrations. Furthermore,
there is little analysis of their mediation between their princely employers and
the British and between British Indian and princely state popular politics.

Although the British and the princes found ‘foreign’ diwans and middle-level
administrators to be functionally useful, two groups within the states were vocal
critics of them. Local aristocracies disliked the ready access of the diwans to the
ruler and their influence in securing the appointment of other outsiders. By
1900 newly emerging, educated elites within the states resented the dominance
of these outsiders and their recruits. Outsiders who peopled the second level
of the administration in princely states were even more disliked than ‘foreign’
diwans. Their importation accelerated with growing bureaucratisation. Initially
elites within the princely states who owed their position to land control, military
skills or blood ties did not possess or seek the kind of education that would
equip them for bureaucratic employment. Thus western-educated outsiders
were the most readily available pool. Gradually, however, groups of individuals
in some states secured such education either in British India or within the
state. They resented what they perceived as monopolies by foreigners, whether
Indian or British. Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph have incisively analysed the
extended struggle of the Champawat thikanadars against Bengali and British
administrators to regain control of both lands and bureaucratic appointments
in Jaipur.

In Travancore animosity was tempered with ambivalence against both
‘foreign’ diwans and middle-level administrators. T. Rama Rao (1830-95),
a Maratha brahman who had been born in Trivandrum, was always considered
a foreign diwan (1887-92) because of his ancestry, although S. Shungara-
soobyer (1836-1904), a Tamil brahman who was also born in the capital, was
considered a native when he succeeded Rama Rao as diwan (1892-98). Robin
Jeffrey has traced how the hostility to middle-level foreigners in Travancore

43 Mirza Mahomed Ismail, My Public Life (London, 1954).

44 Rudolph and Rudolph with Singh, ‘Bureaucratic Lineage’.

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state service was a key factor in the efforts of first indigenous nayars, then
Syrian Christians, and eventually low-caste ezhavas to organise to demand
greater representation in government services.”

In Hyderabad and Kashmir, associational activity among their subjects to
secure government jobs raised especially complex issues as the rulers were
from a minority religious community. Salar Jung had created a modern diwani
administration in Hyderabad that was staffed largely with Muslims from north
India who were labelled non-mulkis (not of the soil). As education spread
among indigenous Hyderabadis known as mulkis, they grew increasingly hostile
towards the non-mulkis and demanded more government posts. Coupled with
the usual problems of how a previously disadvantaged group catches up with
one entrenched in a limited number of powerful positions was the issue of
when an individual passed from non-mulki to mulki status. During the 1880s
a legal definition evolved of a mulki ‘as a person who had permanently resided
in Hyderabad state for fifteen years or who had continuously served under
the government for at least twelve years’,“° but the social usage of the term
broadened as new categories appeared such as first-generation mulki or son of
the soil.

In Kashmir, the largest princely state in territory, the Hereditary State Sub-
jects movement around 1894 began calling for preferential employment of state
subjects and culminated with the legal definition of Hereditary State Subjects
in 1927. The situation was complicated as Kashmiri brahman pandits, who
were a small minority, would be the immediate beneficiaries because of their
acquisition of Persian and English language education rather than the majority
Muslim community, who had been seeking proportional representation for
Muslims in state service from 1907.4”

ECONOMIC STRUCTURE AND DEVELOPMENT

As the English Company extended its political control throughout India, it
annexed the most economically productive areas, both agriculturally and com-
mercially. Thus it began in Bengal, long fabled as one of the richest Indian
provinces; it quickly gobbled up most coastal areas to facilitate commercial
enterprises and gradually engorged the fertile Gangetic plain to Punjab. When
Queen Victoria renounced any further British annexation, the princely states
were located mainly in less economically productive areas. Jammu and Kashmir

45 Jeffrey, Decline, ch. 6. 46 Leonard, ‘Hyderabad’, p. 76.
47 U.K. Zutshi, Emergence of Political Awakening in Kashmir (New Delhi, 1986), pp. 206-14; Bazaz,
History, pp. 135-63.

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encompassed majestic but desolate mountains; Rajputana was a rain-deficit
area; some Rajput-ruled states of Gujarat had unhealthy and unproductive
tracts such as the salt marshes of the Rann of Kutch; the Orissan states stretched
across the inaccessible jungly hills behind the Coromandel coast; and the large
block of central Indian states was riven by the deep defiles of the Vindhya
Range.

Notable exceptions with extensive natural resources included the coastal
states of Travancore and Cochin with a small but lush agricultural base in
both food and cash crops, the cis-Sutlej Punjab states possessing fertile soils
and early access to canal irrigation, and Hyderabad and Mysore with diverse
economies. However, even the latter were not immune to predatory British
economic interests. Hyderabad was coerced into giving up control over Berar,
its rich cotton-producing northern province, to the Company in 1853. In
Mysore private British enterprise controlled the mines of Kolar, the main gold-
producing area in India.

Unfortunately the economic landscape of the princely states remains clouded
by a lack of scholarly research. Many works on the economic history of India
ignore the princely states or make occasional remarks on their similarity or
difference from British India. In over a thousand pages of text, the second
volume of The Cambridge Economic History of India, c. 1757—c. 1970 has less
than twenty references to the princely states.“® Many are a single sentence.
Thus much of the following overview is impressionistic and calls attention to
the need for intensive research on the economic structure and development of
the princely states.

Agriculture

As in British Indian provinces, the economies of most princely states were
mainly agricultural with widely differing patterns of land control, land revenue
assessment and tax collection. Many rulers monopolised a significant portion
of their states as khalsa or crown lands but frequently more would be under
the jurisdiction of jagirdars, as in Rajputana states such as Alwar and Jaipur.
In some, such as Baroda and Patiala, there were powerful cultivators-owners.
Many observers claimed that princes extracted more from their peasants than
did the British Indian Government, but that the peasants in princely states were
‘happier’ than those under colonial rule. However, little rigorous research on
the agricultural economies in the princely states supports these opinions. The
major exception is Amber/Jaipur in eastern Rajputana during the eighteenth

48 Dharma Kumar (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1982).

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century. Here Indian scholars have used an abundance of records to present
a finely grained picture of state finances, grain production and marketing,
increasing economic stratification in villages, and the growing importance of
merchants or mahajans in providing credit to villages, facilitating the sale of
the state’s revenue grain, and entering tax-farming contracts with the state.

For Jaipur during the first half of the eighteenth century, S. P. Gupta has
calculated that on khalsa lands the total taxation was around 44 per cent with
about 335 per cent in direct taxation of produce and another 10 per cent in
direct and indirect cesses. This burden was shared unequally in villages. The
upper levels, such as the patels and patwaris who had high-caste status and a
role in the land revenue administration, paid at concessional rates. The lower
levels, of either middle and low-caste status, carried a disproportionate share
of the tax burden.” When the state collected its taxes in kind, it evolved into
the dominant force in local grain markets. Mahajans became increasingly im-
portant to the efficient functioning of the state. Madhavi Bajekal has analysed
how the state maintained careful records that enabled it to control the price of
grain. The state coerced merchants to purchase its grain stocks either directly
through forced sales or indirectly by restricting commercial transactions and
inter-regional grain movements.” It also allowed a margin of profit to traders
through the mechanism of deferred payments, which enabled the merchants
to pay off their contracts as prices rose during the months after the harvest
sales when prices had been lower.

For the second half of the eighteenth century, Dilbagh Singh has argued that
repeated Maratha incursions had disastrous effects on agricultural production
and the internal grain trade in eastern Rajputana. There was a qualitative shift
in agriculture from cash crops and inferior food crops to superior food crops
that could be sold for better prices. A quantitative decline in total produc-
tion also ensued as cultivators migrated to the more secure areas of Malwa
and Harauti. Gradually the state administration alienated control of land to
zamindars, merchants and bankers for long terms on ijara (tax-farming) con-
tracts. Although this tactic provided some stable income over the short term
for the Jaipur administration, it strengthened economic rivals to the state and
intensified economic stratification in villages.°! Thus a class of rich bankers
in Jaipur was amassing capital resources similar to the revenue officials in

4 oP Gupta, Agrarian System, pp. 144-55.

°0 Madhavi Bajekal, “The State and the Rural Grain Market in Eighteenth Century Eastern Rajasthan’,
in Sanjay Subrahmanyan (ed.), Merchants, Markets and the State In Early Modern India (Delhi, 1990),
pp. 98-104, 110-20.

31 Dilbagh Singh, The State, Landlords and Peasants: Rajasthan in the 18th Century (Columbia MO,
1990), pp. 65-6, 199-207.

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western Rajasthan described by Devra, who were moving increasingly from
tax-farming into merchant ventures. These so-called Marwaris were benefit-
ing from the difficulty Rajput princes had in maintaining effective revenue
administrations when confronted by Maratha offensive raids.

Scholars have yet to analyse in similar detail what happened during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries to agriculture in the princely states. Official
sources, mainly gazetteers and census reports compiled by British and British-
trained Indian administrators, remain the starting place for scholars. The
gazetteers include both volumes in the imperial series and those on individual
states generated on the British Indian model.” Descriptive in nature, they
detail the composition of soils, climate, availability of rainfall and irrigation,
types of crops, patterns of cultivation, varieties of draft animals, horticulture,
transportation networks, internal and external grain trade, and the incidence
of famine. However, the data vary from the specific to the simplistic, and the
interpretive remarks are often stereotypical. For example, the imperial gazetteer
volume on Hyderabad declared that ‘the ryots [peasant-cultivators] have taken
no interest in improving the quality of their crops by selection of seed, or
by the cultivation of new varieties, or by introducing improved agricultural
implements’.»> The volumes that the states themselves assembled report on
individual districts and provide more information on variations in crops and
production, reflecting ecological and social diversity. However, none of these
gazetteers nor the administrative reports, which states striving for a reputation
as progressive produced during the twentieth century, provide much data on
long-term trends. For example, there is little information on the commerciali-
sation of agriculture. In the key area of irrigation there are limited data on how
much the princes and the land-controlling elites spent on the maintenance
and extension of wells in north India and tanks in the south, the traditional
sources of irrigation. There are slightly more data on canal irrigation, perhaps
because it was regarded as modern and often undertaken in conjunction with
British India.

Irrigation
In 1861 Maharaja Narinder Singh of Patiala offered to pay for the surveying,
project preparation and construction within his state of the Sirhind Canal,
which would carry water from the Sutlej River through the western part of his
state. Because of his conspicuous loyalty during the revolt of 1857 and their

52 A strikingly graphic presentation of the coverage of gazetteers is in Joseph E. Schwartzberg,
A Historical Atlas of South Asia (Chicago, 1978), p. 141.
53 Imperial Gazetteer of India. Provincial Series. Hyderabad State (Calcutta, 1909), p. 32.

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interest in expanding canal irrigation in Punjab, the British responded affirma-
tively. After overcoming the technical obstacles in constructing a weir across
the Sutlej at Rupar, the Sirhind Canal was opened in 1882. When Maharaja
Ranbir Singh of Jammu and Kashmir requested a similar collaborative ven-
ture, the response was more lethargic, although eventually the Upper Chenab
Canal, which watered parts of Jammu, was built. These two canals did not open
up new lands for cultivation but rather enabled more intensive cultivation of
existing crop lands.*

A bolder experiment that extended cultivation to fertile but hitherto waste
lands was the Gang Canal in Bikaner state. Shocked by loss of human and
animal life during the great famine of 1899-1900, which occurred just after
he was invested with full ruling powers, Ganga Singh of Bikaner considered the
development of railways and canal irrigation to be the long-term preventives
of future famines. In 1905 he proposed to Viceroy Curzon the construction
of a canal branching off the Sutlej at the northern border of Bikaner state.
The Punjab Government and the neighbouring princely state of Bahawalpur
objected. The Sutlej coursed through Bahawalpur but not Bikaner. The former
state was unwilling to have a reduction in water available for irrigation. After
many compromises over the location of the head-works that determined the
area to be irrigated and negotiations to secure the requisite financing through
private borrowing, the canal was finally opened in 1927. It brought around
1000 square miles under cultivation.” This irrigation project also stimulated
an increase of 49 per cent in the non-agricultural workforce in Bikaner between
1901 and 1931. This rise was the fourth highest among the princely states.*°
Once the debts for the Gang Canal were retired, Ganga Singh was eager to
participate in the Sutlej Valley Scheme, which involved the first storage dam
in the Indus Valley at Bhakra.*” Bahawalpur joined the Sutlej Scheme but its
earlier concerns proved realistic in that it received less water for irrigation than
expected. As less land could be irrigated, land prices and revenues fell during
the 1930s and the Bahawalpur administration became in arrears in payments
on its debts incurred for this scheme.*® Irrigation clearly had both positive and

54 Aloys Arthur Michel, The Indus Rivers: A Study of the Effects of Partition (New Haven CN, 1967),
pp. 67-72.

55 John Hurd states that from 1921 to 1933 in Bikaner ‘the area under crops that was irrigated by
government canals increased forty-one fold, and the percentage of total area under crops irrigated
by such canals increased from 1 per cent to 19 per cent’: Hurd, ‘Economic Characteristics’, p. 20.

°6 Thid.

7 Panikkar, His Highness, pp. 288-306, and Michel, Indus, pp. 120, 316-40.

8 Tbid., pp. 85-98; Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit: An Eyewitness Account of the Partition of India,
new edn (Delhi, 1998), pp. 99-101.

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negative results for states and their subjects. In western Rajasthan irrigation
projects extended state control over local populations as rulers attempted to
transform pastoralists into sedentary agriculturists.””

Such princes as Ram Singh of Jaipur and Chamarajindra Wadiyar and
Krishnaraja Wadiyer of Mysore reaped enhanced revenues and social benefits
from irrigation projects. Ram Singh bargained with the British to eliminate
a provision of their 1818 treaty that Jaipur state was to pay five-sixteenths of
its annual revenue of over Rs 4 million to its British suzerain. Since Jaipur’s
revenue was never reported as being over the stipulated sum, in 1871 Viceroy
Mayo rescinded this claim in return for a promise that the ruler would commit
an increased share of his state revenues to public works. In 1867 Jaipur had
hired Swinton Jacob, a military engineer, to lead the public works department,
which managed irrigation, roads, palaces and other government buildings. By
the time Jacob left Jaipur, the state had invested Rs 5 million in irrigation
and subsequently received over Rs 9 million in increased land revenue. Ram
Singh shrewdly confined most irrigation works to his crown lands where cash
crops such as opium, which carried multiple taxes, were cultivated. Thus irri-
gation in Jaipur furthered the commercialisation of agriculture and made the
khalsa lands more attractive to cultivators when the rains failed than those
of neighbouring jagirdars.©° In Mysore the rulers first subsidised renovation
of irrigation tanks during the 1880s. Later, under the energetic leadership of
M. Visvesvaraya (1861-1961), an engineer who also served as diwan from
1912 to 1918, the durbar constructed the Krishnaraja Sagar dam and reservoir
on the Cauvery River, which were completed in 1931.°! This elaborate project
supplied water for the irrigation of paddy rice and sugar cane as well as hydro-
electric power. Irrigation had multiple benefits for princely states, but scholars
have yet to assess fully its impact on agricultural production, state revenues, or
the lives of peasants.

Railways
Closely linked to irrigation was the construction of railways in the princely
states since both were seen as key elements in the prevention of famine.
Many advocates argued that railways would facilitate the commercialisation

>? Carol Henderson, ‘State Administration and the Concepts of Peasants and Sedentary Agricultural
Production in the Thar Desert’, paper presented at the Wisconsin Conference on South Asia,
6 November 1993.

60 Stern, Cat, pp. 142-4.

61 Bjorn Hettne, The Political Economy of Indirect Rule: Mysore 1881-1947 (London, 1978), pp. 233-4,
269-71.

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of agriculture and would help Indians to modernise because of the transfer of
technology.© So far scholarship has concentrated on how railways expedited
the movement inland of British manufactured goods, especially cotton textiles,
the transport of raw materials, mainly cotton, opium and food grains, to ports,
and the strategic deployment of imperial troops. Since railways were closely
associated with communications and defence — two of the three areas that the
princely states had ceded to the British as paramount power — there were nu-
merous disputes over their construction within and across princely states. Key
issues were finance because of British controls on the ability of states to raise
money in public markets in Britain and in India, the routes to be followed, the
type of gauges to be used, and political control over the right-of-ways. Railway
development in Mysore and Hyderabad illustrates these themes.

A railway line connected Bangalore, the administrative capital of Mysore, to
Madras in 1870. Twelve years later the first line within Mysore state was opened
from Bangalore to Mysore city, the seat of the maharaja. Shortly after the British
rendition of Mysore in 1881, the durbar sought to extend its rail infrastructure.
But the British pressured the diwan to turn over railway development to a
private British firm, the Southern Maharatta Company, in return for a delay
of ten years until 1896 in raising Mysore’s annual subsidy to the GOI from
Rs 24.5 lakhs to Rs 35 lakhs.°? Thus a foreign rather than an indigenous
enterprise was to undertake railway expansion in a progressive princely state.
Although this settlement was clearly not to Mysore’s overall financial advantage,
it would not be as disastrous for state finances as what would occur in its
neighbour to the north.

Perhaps because of its status as the most populous state and its geograph-
ical location astride the Deccan Plateau in the centre of peninsular India,
Hyderabad has attracted the most scholarly attention. Vasant Kumar Bawa
and Bharati Ray have considered the development of railways in Hyderabad as
a key issue in the increasingly troubled relationship between the princely state
and the imperial suzerain during the diwanship of Salar Jung. This chief min-
ister was a fervent promoter of railways despite the reluctance of the nizam, who
perceptively feared that the railways would intensify British influence without
sufficient financial benefits. Tara Sethia has linked railway development in

62 Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850-
1940 (New York, 1988), pp. 49-96.

63 Hettne, Political Economy, pp. 57, 235-7.

64 Bawa, Nizam, pp. 92-7, 117-22; Bharati Ray, ‘Genesis’, pp. 45-69.

6 Bharati Ray, Hyderabad and British Paramountcy 1858-1883 (Delhi, 1988), pp. 137-8; Tara Sethia,
British Imperial Interests and the Indian Princely States, PhD thesis, University of California at Los
Angeles (1986), p. 48.

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Hyderabad state during the 1870s and 1880s to the overwhelming desire of
Salar Jung to recover control of Berar and to the grant of coalmining con-
cessions.°° Consequently Hyderabad experienced many of the problems that
hampered the extension of railways within the princely states.

One controversy erupted over the linkages between all-Indian routes and
the princely states. Bartle Frere, the governor of Bombay, and the India Office
in London had proposed that the Great Indian Peninsular Railway (GIPR)
between Madras and Bombay should meet at Hyderabad city. But because of
political and military considerations, the governor of Madras and the GOI at
Calcutta prevailed over their colleagues and ordered that the mainline should
pass through Hyderabad territory at Raichur, 100 miles south from the al-
leged political dangers of the capital city.°” The British still wished to have
Hyderabad city connected to their railway network. So the multiple levels of
the imperial hierarchy began tortuous negotiations with Salar Jung over the
route, financing, and the gauge of a link between the GIPR and Hyderabad
city. The princely state was eventually constrained to agree to conditions over-
whelmingly favourable to the British. At first they had proposed to share the
cost of construction, with the state’s portion coming from the surplus revenue
of the Berar province, which was allocated to Hyderabad. Because of his de-
sire to regain Berar, Salar Jung vetoed this suggestion, offered to pay all costs,
and formed the Nizam’s State Railway (NSR) to build the link. The proposed
route was conducive to British strategic objectives since it went through Secun-
darabad, its military cantonment near Hyderabad city, and the broad gauge
that the British demanded was much more expensive to construct than the
narrow gauge that Salar Jung had recommended.

Salar Jung sought to raise capital for the NSR from sahukars (local bankers),
but they were reluctant to make the extensive commitment. Salar Jung there-
fore employed British intermediaries to raise Rs 5.5 million on the London
market to circumvent a 1797 parliamentary act requiring GOI approval of any
loans between British subjects and the princely states. Following the pattern
established in British India, the nizam’s government guaranteed a 5 per cent
return to local investors and a generous 6 per cent return to British investors.
Since the NSR never earned more than 1.5 per cent, this settlement was a
continual drain on the state’s revenues. In 1881 London investors, with the
support of the India Office, began to explore the capitalisation of an extension
of the NSR northward to Chanda in the Godavari coalfields and eventually to
Nagpur in British India and southward to Bezwada. Gradually Salar Jung was

6 Sethia, ‘Berar’, pp. 59-78. 67 Ray, Hyderabad, pp. 133-6. 68 Sethia, ‘Berar’, p. 72.

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drawn into the scheme in the hope of increasing traffic and income. The NSR
was to be dissolved and a new enterprise formed, the Nizam’s Guaranteed State
Railway (NGSR). Eventually this new company required an annual payment
of over Rs 30 lakhs, which was more than any surplus revenue of the Hyderabad
Government. The creation of the NGSR illustrates chicanery among private
British investors in London eager to profit from stock manipulation, contra-
dictory opinions within the British official hierarchy about what would be
beneficial for Hyderabad, and ultimately the British goal of facilitating the
extraction of Hyderabadi coal to fuel its railways in south India. The imperial
patron was unconcerned by the damage to their princely client. These dis-
advantageous terms provoked unprecedented political demonstrations against
the nizam’s government. Dr Aghorenath Chattopadhyaya, the Bengali prin-
cipal of Hyderabad College and the father of Sarojini Naidu, the first Indian
woman president of the Indian National Congress, was a prime organiser of
this response. Popular opposition to foreign financing of railways that mort-
gaged tax revenues prefigured popular outbursts in twentieth-century China,
first against the imperial government in 1911 and then against the warlord
regime of Yuan Shih-kai and his successors.

Since the British were determined to expand railway lines throughout
India, some princes shrewdly secured benefits from what they could not stop.
Madhava Rao constructed light railways that were cheaper than metalled roads
since Baroda, composed largely of alluvial plains, lacked useful road-building
materials. By 1934/35 the state system of 707 miles of railway earned 9 per cent
of the state revenues.’? Other states such as Gwalior also constructed light rail-
way systems that were reputed to be profitable investments for the durbars.”!
The rulers of Jaipur were to benefit even more handsomely from collaboration
with the British and the construction of their own state system of railways.

Because of its geographical position across routes from the Gangetic Plain
to Bombay, which became the major entrepét for imports from Europe upon
the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, Jaipur was soon traversed by two
major British lines. In return for his cooperation, Ram Singh won concessions
on such issues as the siting of stations. As a result, the railway lines enabled the
maharaja to undercut traffic through lands controlled by his jagirdars, thereby
decreasing their customs income and increasing his. Coincidentally, easy access
by rail put Jaipur city, proclaimed ‘the finest of modern Hindu cities’? and

6 Sethia, ‘British Interests’, esp. pp. 172-83.

70 Hardiman, ‘Baroda’, in Jeffrey, People, p. 120.

7. H.M. Bulland K. N. Haksar, Madhav Rao Scindia of Gwalior 1876-1925 (Lashkar, 1926), p. 110.
72 WS. Caine, Picturesque India: A Handbook for European Travellers (London, 1891), p. 95.

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favourably compared by Rudyard Kipling and others to Paris,’? on the route of
late-nineteenth-century tourists seeking the real India and handmade Jaipuri
souvenirs.” Meanwhile Ram Singh was able to withhold from the British
any useful information on the economic benefits for Jaipur from the railway.’°
Maharaja Madho Rao Scindia of Gwalior became an investor in British railways
and a builder of the Jaipur State Railway. Although initially the British had
refused the request of the Jaipur, Gwalior and Indore durbars to invest in
sections of the Rajputana—Malwa line that passed through their territories,
in 1905 the GOI reconsidered on the recommendation of its foreign and
political department. It eventually decided there was ‘political advantage of
the chiefs of India having a large monetary interest in the Indian railways’ .”°
On an investment of Rs 5 million secured in the London market, the Jaipur
durbar would earn Rs 9.5 million in two decades. Around the beginning
of the twentieth century, Madho Singh of Jaipur began the construction of
the Jaipur State Railway, which would serve his political as well as economic
interests. This line extended his physical control to Shekhawati, the remote
base of several Marwari clans, directed the trade and social orientation of
that area to Jaipur and away from Jodhpur and Bikaner, and earned a 10 per
cent profit on the northern extension to Shekhawati and a 12 per cent one
on the southern section.’” As the Jaipur State Railway expanded, in 1936 the
durbar took over its management from the British-owned Bombay, Baroda and
Central Indian Railway Company. In 1940/41 the income to the Jaipur durbar
from its own system and its investment in British Rajputana—Malwa line was
Rs 1.6 million.78

Not all Rajput princes were such enthusiastic supporters of railways. The
British Rajputana—Malwa line travelled through Udaipur state via Chittor, but
Maharana Fateh Singh cancelled further railway expansion upon his accession
in 1884. Later he reluctantly agreed to a rail extension from Chittor to his
capital at Udaipur in return for permission to dismiss a reform-minded official,
Mehta Panna Lal, whom he viewed as an agent of the British.”

Railways came to the princely states in varying degrees, but their long-term
impact has not been adequately analysed, either for the microcosm of individ-
ual states or for the macrocosm of the princely states and British India. The

73 Rudyard Kipling, Letters of Marque (New York, n.d.), pp. 13-14.

74 Barbara N. Ramusack, ‘The Indian Princes as Fantasy: Palace Hotels, Palace Museums and Palace
on Wheels’, in Breckenridge, Consuming Modernity, pp. 66-89.

7 Stern, Cat, pp. 139-40.

76 GOL, E&P, August 1911, Internal A., nos 27-31 quoted in Stern, Cat, p. 191.

77 Stern, Cat, pp. 187-92. 78 Ibid., p. 251.

79 Rajat K. Ray, ‘Mewar: The Breakdown of the Princely Order’, in Jeffrey, People, pp. 223-4.

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latter would be difficult to achieve without the former. Railway development
has been viewed narrowly as a site of contestation between the durbars and
the British, with a focus on the high construction cost of railways attributed
to the guaranteed interest system that lessened the incentive for cost contain-
ment. More analysis is needed of the extent to which railways precluded the
British policy of isolating the princes and their states from each other, fostered
ties between social, religious and political associations in the princely states
and British India, and affected the commercialisation of agriculture and the
development of industries in the states.

Industrialisation

The terms of scholarly debate on industrialisation in the princely states set
during the 1970s have yet to be revised. In his pioneering dissertation and two
often cited articles, John Hurd tried to compare ‘development in the princely
states with that in British India. Based on a sample of ninety-eight states con-
taining 89 per cent of the total population of the princely states in 1931, with
fifty-four British districts selected as comparable, Hurd focused on three vari-
ables: the structure of the male labour force, namely the percentage of males
employed in non-agricultural work; migration, specifically the percentage of
males born outside the state; and urbanisation. He concluded that although
economic development declined in both British and princely India from 1901
to 1931, the princely states in general lagged behind the British districts. Two
basic categories of factors were responsible. One was British policies that hin-
dered growth, such as the refusal to extend any guarantee for developmental
loans. The other was the historical evolution of the states. For example, the
higher the percentage of jagirdars in a state, the lower was the level of devel-
opment, and Hurd argued that jagirdars siphoned off revenue from the state
treasury. °°

In a subsequent analysis confined to twenty-eight states, each with over
500 000 people, which comprised 71 per cent of the populations of the princely
states, Hurd added male literacy to his original three criteria of development.
Political factors were mainly responsible for differences in economic develop-
ment between princely and British India. By ‘preserving the princely states as
separate political units, the British contributed to the disparities in economic
development in India’.®! In another article on industrial development, Hurd
postulated an argument similar to Sethia’s. He claimed that the British acted
ambivalently to safeguard their interests. They intervened in the princely states

80 Hurd, ‘Economic Characteristics’, pp. 145-50. 81 Thid., pp. 175.

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to secure the abolition of transit duties and the construction of transcontinental
railways and roads to facilitate British trade. But they did not intercede for the
princes in British capital markets since industrial development in the states was
not a colonial priority.*? In a comparison of industrial development in Alwar
state and the adjoining Gurgaon district of Punjab, Edward Haynes supports
Hurd’s assessment that industrialisation in the princely states was delayed by
contradictory British policies that coupled protection from unscrupulous ‘for-
eign’ investors with frequent opposition to projected indigenous industrial
enterprises (such as a cotton mill in Alwar). Equally important for Alwar was
its lack of integration into the all-India transportation network except for one
railway line financed by state revenues and built during the 1870s when the
British dominated the state administration.*?

C. P. Simons and B. R. Satyanarayana challenged Hurd on his selection of
samples and asserted that comparisons between the states and British India are
invalid. The economy of imperial India was indivisible, comparisons conceal
more than they reveal, and there are no scientific means to measure the factors
that influenced economic development in such a heterogeneous area as India.
In turn, using Hurd’s four indices, they compared statistics on the princely
states and British India as a whole. They concluded that differences in favour
of British India were statistically insignificant and that economic development
in British India and the princely states was commensurate.*‘ Although railways
and metalled roads provided a framework for an all-Indian economy, it remains
important to analyse the development of discrete political units, whether they
are British Indian provinces or districts or princely states. Furthermore, the
numerous general overviews of Indian economic development under the British
do not evaluate in any depth agricultural or industrial activity in the princely
states, even as part of the indivisible imperial economy. So once again, case
studies must suffice to illustrate industrial development within the princely
states.

Here again Mysore and Hyderabad are significant examples. During the
1870s and 1880s, first under British and then indigenous control, Mysore had
granted generous terms for prospecting to a British syndicate who discovered

82 John Hurd II, ‘The Influence of British Policy on Industrial Development in the Princely States,
1890-1933’, IESHR 12 (1975), pp. 409-24, esp. pp. 423-4.

83 Edward S. Haynes, ‘Comparative Industrial Development in 19th and 20th-Century India: Alwar
State and Gurgaon District’, SA, n.s. 3, 2 (1980), pp. 25-42, esp. pp. 38-9.

84 C. P Simmons and B. R. Satyanarayana, ‘The Economic Consequences of Indirect Rule in India:
A Re-appraisal’, JESHR 15 (1979), pp. 185-206. Simmons and Satyanarayana are responding
primarily to Hurd’s article ‘Economic Consequences’, since they do not cite his dissertation and
find his subsequent article on industrial development in the princely states to be much more useful
than his first one (note 13, p. 192).

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gold in the Kolar area in 1884. Although the Mysore durbar gained royalties,
the development of the Kolar fields had little ripple effect on the Mysore
economy. The heavy equipment and supervisory personnel were imported
from England, the labourers from Madras,®° coal from Bengal, and wood from
western India. Profits were remitted to British shareholders. Mysore provided
some infrastructure in a railway line constructed in 1893, a hydro-electric plant
at Sivasamudram in 1902, and eventually the Krishnasagar project. Hettne has
argued that the durbar, driven by its need to pay a large subsidy, a stagnant
land revenue income, and possibly the dominance of Madrassi administrators,
was content with assured royalties of almost Rs 2 crores by 1911.°°

In the sphere of mining concessions as in railway development, Hyderabad
suffered more egregiously than did Mysore. The discovery in 1872 of signifi-
cant coal deposits in the Singareni area near Warangal and the Godavari River
interested the GOI since its railways in the south were dependent on expensive
coal imported from eastern India or even Britain.8” In the early 1880s some
Hyderabadi and British officials sought to combine the railway and mining
concessions since the prospect of profitable freight would be an incentive to
British investors in an expanded NGSR. Under strong pressure from the GOI
and despite warnings from London, the nizam’s government granted mining
concessions on extremely favourable terms to British investors. After convo-
luted negotiations Abdul Haq, a Hyderabadi minister, with British support
purchased heavily watered shares of the company holding the concessions.
He and private British investors profited while the Hyderabadi Government
headed towards bankruptcy.

When some British newspapers and MPs began to question the British
Government’ role in this venture, British officials placed the primary respon-
sibility on Haq, whom both the British and Hyderabad had earlier agreed
lacked skill as a negotiator. Contrasting cultural constructions of manipula-
tive and gullible Indians and well-connected, greedy British investors overlay
a lack of official concern about the fiscal stability of a princely ally. The Fi-
nancial News claimed that ‘a small band of speculators’ in collaboration with a
‘machiavellian mahomedan’, namely Abdul Hag, had victimised Hyderabad.
Another paper referred to the scandal as ‘milking the Rajahs’, which occurred
because the ‘milker’ on the London Stock Exchange had influence with the

85 Janaki Nair, Miners and Millhands: Work, Culture and Politics in Princely Mysore (Walnut Creek CA,
1998), chs 2-3.

86 Hettne, Political Economy, pp. 246-7. A crore is 100 lakhs.

87 Sethia, ‘British Interests’, chs 5-7.

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authorities.8& Once again the GOI interfered in the economic affairs of states
when it suited their interests, turned a blind eye when they would be unaf-
fected, and was indifferent to its princely allies when unscrupulous investors
concluded questionable deals.*?

Ultimately the fraudulent practices of the London financiers led to a par-
liamentary inquiry and a restatement in 1891 of a potentially more restrictive
or protective policy depending on one’s viewpoint. Subsequently the GOI
was to approve all loans and concessions for railways and mining between
the princely states and British subjects. The imperial overlord wished to
‘protect’ the states from ‘mischief’ but also to prevent any infringement on
the British position in India. This statement would be modified in 1930 to
allow Indians, whether or not they were subjects, to make investments in
princely states without British approval. In fact these policy directives were
routinely but circumspectly evaded.?° Mysore and Baroda illustrate the possi-
bilities of and limitations on the expansion of manufacturing in the princely
states. In Mysore the most vigorous promoter of capital-intensive projects was
an engineer attracted to state service by the offer of authority not available to
Indian professionals in British India; in Baroda it was a ‘modernising’ maharaja.
In both cases cotton textile factories were the initial industries. The Mysore
Spinning and Manufacturing Mills were established in 1884, three decades
after the first cotton textile mill in Bombay, and the Bangalore Woollen, Cot-
ton and Silk Mills two years later. Janaki Nair emphasises that Mysore faced
significant obstacles to industrialisation such as the lack of an entrepreneurial
class and indigenous sources of capital as well as restrictive imperial policies in
areas such as tariffs.?! It persisted in order to effect a social transformation that
would strengthen its resource base. M. Visvesvaraya, a brahman from Mysore,
trained as an engineer in Poona and was employed by the Bombay public works
department until 1909 when he was appointed chief engineer in Mysore.?” He
favoured large-scale, state-sponsored schemes to build an infrastructure and
was willing to use non-indigenous capital. Alfred Chatterton was recruited as
the first director of the department of industries and commerce in Mysore
in 1912. He proposed small-scale manufacturing projects based on agrarian

88 Tbid., p.267. © Ibid., pp. 280-3.

9° Hurd, ‘Economic Characteristics’, pp. 65-75.

9! Janaki Nair, The Emergence of Labor Politics in South India: Bangalore, 1900-1947, PhD thesis,
Syracuse University (1991), pp. 41-4.

In Tentacles, pp. 359-60, Headrick implies that Visvesvaraya left the British service because of remote
prospects of becoming the chief engineer.

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products launched with local capital. Mysore state pursued both options with
varying success.

Visvesvaraya had a longer tenure than Chatterton since he was diwan from
1912 to 1918 and later a consultant. He coined the motto ‘industrialise or
perish’ and later became a leader in the campaign for swadeshi or ‘Mysore
for the Mysoreans’, by which the administration meant to exclude Indians
from outside Mysore, mainly Madrassi bureaucrats and Marwari traders, as
well as British agency houses. First, Visvesvaraya fostered an institutional in-
frastructure supportive of industrial development. The Mysore Bank was es-
tablished in 1913, the Mysore Chamber of Commerce in 1916, and Mysore
University, the first university in a princely state, in 1916.” In collaboration
with the GOI and in response to an initial offer from J. N. Tata, the Parsi
industrialist, Mysore helped finance the first Indian Institute of Technology,
which opened in Bangalore in 1911.°4 Second, Visvesvaraya ostensibly pursued
heavy, light and rural industrialisation but personally favoured capital-intensive
schemes such as the Cauvery Reservoir Project and the Mysore Iron and Steel
Works. Both required heavy infusions of state aid and only the first was notably
successful.

Alfred Chatterton advocated more small-scale, intermediate industrialisa-
tion. His endeavours included an Experimental Weaving Factory, a Sandalwood
Oil Factory, and the Mysore Soap Factory based on agricultural products such
as coconut and groundnut oils. After a slight hiatus during the 1920s, Visves-
varaya’s technocratic emphasis on industrialisation and the push for economic
autonomy continued under the diwanship of Sir Mirza Ismail. During the
late 1930s it was proposed to establish an automobile factory financed by the
shipping magnate Walchand Hirachand, which would assemble Chrysler cars
in India, but British resistance rendered that undertaking stillborn.”” Ismail
claimed that this rejection prompted his resignation in 1941. Other signifi-
cant industrial units in Mysore included a small ammonium sulphate plant
outside Mysore City (1937), the first autonomous fertiliser plant in India,
and Hindustan Aircraft, a direct result of the Second World War. Although
Mysore did not attain the economic autonomy Visvesvaraya envisioned, its

°3 Hettne, Political Economy, pp. 264-7; Manu Belur Bhagavan, Higher Education and the ‘Mod-
ern State’: Negotiating Colonialism and Nationalism in Princely Mysore and Baroda, PhD thesis,
University of Texas at Austin (1999), pp. 130-99.

94 Headrick, Tentacles, pp. 335-6. The maharaja offered free land, Rs 500 000, and an annual pledge
of Rs 50000 a year and the GOI supplied Rs 250 000 and an annual pledge of Rs 90 000. Tata’s
initial offer was Rs 3 million for the buildings, equipment, and endowment fund.

°> Hettne, Political Economy, pp. 295-6; Nair, ‘Emergence’, ch. 2.

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industrial enterprises and higher education framework prefigured crucial in-
dustrial development in the decades ahead.

Baroda followed a different path. Influenced by the example of Europe, Saya-
jirao and his diwans used state resources to generate an industrial base. During
the swadeshi era after 1905, the durbar abolished customs duties, established
the Bank of Baroda, organised a department of commerce and industry, and
extended loans.”° By 1918 there were eleven textile manufacturers who formed
the Baroda Millowners Association, the first noteworthy business organisation
in the state. It developed into the Federation of Gujarat Mills and Industries
in which Baroda textile, engineering and chemical/pharmaceutical interests
dominated. Early engineering firms included a tractor repair and importing
firm that became the nucleus of Hindustan Tractors and Bulldozers. Alem-
bic Industries, which moved from Bombay to Baroda in 1907, was a major
success story in the chemical field. By the early 1940s it had spawned two
sizable subsidiaries, Alembic Glass and Jyoti Engineering. Attracted to Bar-
oda by economic incentives and easy land acquisition, the Sarabhai family of
Ahmedabad began small-scale chemical and pharmaceutical firms in the mid-
1940s. After independence, chemical, pharmaceutical and engineering firms
overshadowed textiles with the opening of a major public sector oil refinery
that supports a large contemporary fertiliser complex.”” Although several
states experienced accelerated industrial growth when the Second World War
cut off imported goods and stimulated domestic demand, Baroda sustained
exceptional growth.?® However, historians have yet to analyse the relationship
between these early efforts at creating an industrial infrastructure in Baroda
and Mysore and the subsequent emergence of Baroda as the core of a major
petrochemical complex and of Bangalore as the Indian equivalent of Silicon
Valley. Further study is needed before judgements about the lack of success of
princely industrialisation schemes are canonised.

As most princes did not have a defined privy purse until the last decades
of their rule, those in major states controlled significant sums of money.
A few chose to invest in industrial enterprises in British India and British
government securities, the latter with active British encouragement. Fifteen
princes held 13 per cent of the shares of the Tata Iron and Steel Company
(TISCO), with Madho Rao Scindia of Gwalior injecting £400 000.°? Gwalior

96 Hardiman, ‘Baroda’, in Jeffrey, People, p. 121.

97 Howard L. Erdman, Political Attitudes of Indian Industry: A Case Study of the Baroda Business Elite
(London, 1971), pp. 5-16.

98 Copland, Princes, pp. 184-5.

°° Kumar, Cambridge Economic History, vol. 2, p. 591; Headrick, Tentacles, p. 290.

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was also a major investor in Bombay-based industries, but his activities have
not been studied. Another Maratha prince, Sayaji Rao of Baroda, had invested
in TISCO. Unfortunately he also put capital into the Villiers Companies,
which failed to fulfil their promises to develop coal mines and a new steel mill
in Bihar. The gaekwad eventually lost Rs 7 million of his private and state
assets. 10°

During the minority of Man Singh of Jaipur, British administrators invested
surplus Jaipur state revenues in GOI securities. By then the earlier British pro-
hibition on princes lending to their peers had been lifted, possibly in an effort
to promote princely solidarity and prevent financial crises from weakening
conservative allies. The Jaipur durbar extended loans to Bikaner, Bharatpur,
Alwar and Tonk, and so by 1940/41 it was earning Rs 2 million annually from
these loans and its British securities.'°! There is fragmentary evidence that for
some durbars such as Jaipur and Baroda, income from investments outside the
states and in state railways reduced their critical dependence on land revenue.
Consequently they would be able to make some concessions on land revenue
rates in response to peasant protest movements.

Ports

Although most of the princely states were landlocked, fourteen of them, gen-
erally located in western India, had coastal ports. At first these ports received
little freight destined for British India. However, the expansion of railways pro-
vided shorter transportation links between these princely ports and the major
urban centres of northwestern India than the established ports of Bombay and
Karachi in British India. In the twentieth century, princes attempted to attract
trade by developing their port facilities to receive ocean-going ships and thereby
benefit from increased customs duties. The most prominent developers were
Baroda at Okhla, Nawanagar at Bedi, and to a lesser extent Kutch at Kandla.
As trade increased at Bedi and Okhla and began to decrease slightly at British
Indian ports, the British and the princes hotly debated the issue of customs
duties. John McLeod has analysed the situation for seven coastal states of the
Western India States Agency, namely Bhavnagar, Jafarabad, Junagadh, Kutch,
Morvi, Nawanagar and Porbandar.!

Goods from ports in princely states coming into British India were supposed
to pay British Indian tariffs as they were ostensibly entering from foreign ter-
ritory. Since traffic was so light before 1900, little effort was made to collect

100 Gaekwad, Sayajirao, pp. 337-40. 101 Stern, Cat, p. 250. 102 McLeod, Sovereignty, ch. 5.

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customs duties. Once rail links were in place, some importers began to land
goods at princely ports that had lower duties and then avoid paying British
Indian tariffs at the borders. They also benefited from shorter distances. More-
over, smugglers tended to favour the more lightly patrolled ports in the princely
states. Concerned about its customs revenues, in 1905 the GOI established the
Viramgam Line as a customs cordon around Kathiawar and Kutch. At each
border crossing the British collected customs duties according to their estab-
lished rate, so goods entering through the princely ports had to pay twice. Even
with lower transportation costs, this practice made the princely ports uneco-
nomical and soon the coastal states experienced declining customs revenues.
When the British needed wartime allies, they compromised with the protesting
princes. In 1917 they removed the Viramgam Line in return for a promise from
the princes to charge the British Indian rate of tariffs at their ports, with the
proviso that the customs cordon could be reimposed if warranted by British
fiscal interests.

After 1917 the princes sought to increase trade to their ports by lowering port
fees that were not regulated and by enhancing their port facilities. Nawanagar
was the first to open a modernised port at Bedi by 1927, and between 1925/26
and 1926/27 its customs duties increased from Rs 30 lakhs to Rs 78 lakhs.
That sum represented 2 per cent of the total of British Indian customs duties.
The GOI quickly decided its fiscal interests needed to be safeguarded and
devised the so-called certificate system. The princes had to remit to the GOI
the duty collected on all goods imported into British India. Thus they would
retain only the custom duties on goods consumed within the princely states
of Kathiawar. Although this system was slightly modified in 1929 to allow
princely retention of all duties below Rs 2 lakhs and thus satisfy princes with
smaller ports, the rulers with larger ports remained alienated. Ranjitsinhji of
Nawanagar and Sayaji Rao of Baroda objected sharply to customs policies at
the Round Table Conference of 1930 and during subsequent negotiations over
federation. Neither was a firm ally during those critical years. After federation
became a mute issue in 1939, the British made no further efforts to conciliate
any of the western Indian states on the customs issue.'

McLeod points out that the British were motivated primarily by fiscal
objectives, while the princes were concerned with any attenuation of their
sovereignty. In general the GOI was willing to make concessions to the princes
when their political support was needed, as in 1917 or in 1929, but heeded

103 Thid., pp. 103-8.

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their financial department when they felt less threatened politically. Although
McLeod focuses on the political aspects of the dispute over the ports, his
work illustrates how British policies restricted economic developments in the
princely states that might affect British fiscal or economic well-being.!° At
the same time the princes never ceased to resist incursions on their sovereignty.
Moreover, some undertook significant economic investments within re-
stricted circumstances that laid the groundwork for post-colonial economic
developments.

CONCLUSION

The princely states of India were enmeshed within the overall political and
economic framework of the British India empire. Their autonomy was re-
stricted in numerous ways through treaty provisions but even more extensively
through the never defined doctrines of usage and paramountcy. However, the
significant variations among the princely states that existed until 1947 in-
dicates the possibilities for autonomous activity in some spheres. Ecological
and historical factors were influential, but personal initiatives were also vital.
Thus rulers in three disparate geo-cultural spheres — the coastal Travancore
and Cochin, the peninsular Mysore, and the plains of Baroda — could craft
highly centralised, bureaucratised governmental structures that made signif-
icant improvements in the lives of their subjects through increased literacy,
opportunities for government employment, and sometimes changes in land
revenue rates. In even more difficult climatic environments such as Bikaner,
a maharaja could decisively influence the economic development of his state
and the position of his subjects through an irrigation project such as the Gang
Canal.

Overall, the centralisation of power under the princely durbar that had be-
gun in Mysore and Baroda as early as the late eighteenth century continued.
The expanding bureaucratisation of princely state administrations countered
the power of the nobility but also intensified the intervention of the princely
states into the daily lives of their subjects. This process of intrusion was ex-
tremely uneven. It was strongest in the progressive states that expanded their
functions to include support for primary schools, mobile libraries and public
health facilities. For example, in 1930 Mysore had the first public hospital in
India to dispense information on contraception. But even where the state’s
role remained more circumscribed, durbars encroached on the lives of subjects

104 Thid.

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with British-style land revenue assessments that gave rights to some and cur-
tailed them for others. Irrigation projects designed to increase productivity and
revenues, as well as modern forms of transportation and communication, also
caught state subjects in an expanding web. The impact of these policies would

be one factor in stimulating the rise of new forms of popular political activity
within these states.

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CHAPTER 7

PRINCELY STATES: SOCIETY AND
POLITICS

The paucity of research on social change and popular political activity in the
princely states contributes to Orientalist representations of the princely states
as the epitome of unchanging India. Fortunately the adventurous scholarship
of a few social and cultural historians challenges such interpretations. Karen
Leonard’s path-breaking study of the kayasths of Hyderabad illuminates the
adaptations of a literate, urban-based caste group to opportunities in a large
princely state bureaucracy and then in a post-colonial successor state.’ Robin
Jeffrey has traced the gradual attenuation of nayar dominance in Travancore
and the role of women in the evolution of the Kerala model of economic de-
velopment in independent India.” Analyses of non-elite groups include David
Hardiman’s work on a low-caste reform movement within Baroda; Nandini
Sundar on the tribal population in Bastar; Mridula Mukherjee and Mohinder
Singh on peasant movements in the Punjab princely states before and after 1947
respectively; Shail Mayaram on the construction of Muslim identity among
the marginalised Meos in Alwar; and Janaki Nair on labourers in Mysore.?
Their work explores the internal dynamics of group formation and identity
and political struggles for a greater portion of scarce political, economic, and
ritual resources.

Other scholars have concentrated on the political associations and agitational
activity of elite and non-elite groups. Actors range from newly educated young
men ambitious for political power, to peasants who found their lives and
resources increasingly circumscribed by jagirdars, who were being squeezed by
centralising durbars and commercialised agriculture, to landlords challenging
constraints on their authority and resources. The political activities of these
groups provide a framework through which the complex interplay between
agitational political activity in British India and in the princely states and

! Leonard, Social History.

2 Jeffrey, Decline; Robin Jeffrey, Politics, Women and Well-Being: How Kerala Became ‘a Model’ (Hound-
mills, Hampshire, 1992).

3 David Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India (Delhi, 1987); Sundar,
Subalterns; Mridula Mukherjee, ‘Peasant Movement in Patiala State’, SH 1 (1979), pp. 215-83,
and ‘Communists and Peasants in Punjab: A Focus on the Muzara Movement in Patiala, 1937-53’,
SH 2 (1981); Mohinder Singh, Peasant Movement in PEPSU Punjab (New Delhi, 1991); Mayaram,
Resisting Regimes, Nair, Miners.

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the diversity of political actors and agendas within the states themselves may
be deciphered. To provide a grid on which popular political activity may be
plotted, I will first discuss the evolution and relationship of the territorial
boundaries of the princely states to the linguistic and religious composition
of their populations. During the twentieth century, both rulers and ambitious
popular political leaders in the princely states increasingly appealed to language
and religion as the basis for their legitimacy and for group identity.

TERRITORIAL BOUNDARIES AND THE
POPULATIONS OF STATES

The frontiers of most princely states during the eighteenth century oscillated
frequently depending on a ruler’s and his clansmen’s control of military re-
sources and their skills in the negotiation of alliances. As the British consol-
idated their political dominance in India from 1765 onward, their surveyors
produced maps cataloguing conquests and marking boundaries, at least on
paper, between their possessions and those of their adversaries and allies.’ It
is important to note that the formal inauguration of a British political colony
in India occurred in the same decade as John Harrison’s invention in 1761 of
the chronometer, on which the measurement of longitude, and thus modern
mapping, is based. This scientific discovery aided in the imaginary and physical
construction of the modern empires and nation-states.

In the revised edition of his highly influential work on the genesis of na-
tionalism, Benedict Anderson has analysed the role of mapping in the creation
of the modern Thai state. Thongchai Winichakul, Anderson’s key source on
this topic, has argued that in the Thai experience

[a] map anticipated spatial reality, not vice versa. [A] map was a model for, rather than a
model of, what it purported to represent . . . It had become a real instrument to concretize
projections on the earth’s surface. A map was now necessary for the new administrative
mechanisms and for the troops to back up their claims . . . The discourse of mapping
was the paradigm which both administrative and military operations worked within and
served.”

A similar process appears to have occurred in the British colonial empire in
India. During the nineteenth century both the British and the princes extended
their authority over the populations that were inscribed within the boundaries

4 Sen, Distant Sovereignty, pp. 65-84.

5 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of Siam, PhD thesis, University
of Sydney, 1988, p. 310, quoted in Benedict Anderson, /magined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London, 1991), pp. 173-4.

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of their respective political spheres. In Chapter 6 I have described how princely
administrations augmented their power by reducing that of their nobles and
strengthening that of their appointed bureaucrats. In the princely states, borders
were only gradually defined by maps, and later and haphazardly by physical
markers. Boundaries were firmer where princely states abutted British Indian
provinces, as in Mysore and Hyderabad, or where strategic considerations were
important, as in Punjab. In western Rajputana the demarcation of boundaries
continued into the nineteenth century. In more forbidding locales such as the
Rann of Kutch and northern Kashmir there was never a precise definition, so
the post-colonial states of India and Pakistan still dispute their international
boundaries in those regions. During the nineteenth century British India and
some princely states such as Hyderabad occasionally exchanged territory to gain
borders regarded as strategically or economically more rational. Sometimes, as
after the revolt of 1857, the British also rewarded loyal princes with small
grants of territory that were not always contiguous with their states. In general,
the boundaries of the princely states became frozen at varying stages in state
formation.

Hyderabad, Mysore, Travancore and Cochin were coherent territorial units.
In Rajputana many states had compact boundaries on maps, but they would
be unmarked and vague in physical reality because of the desolate, unproduc-
tive character of the desert terrain. In these states princes shared control over
the land with numerous intermediary jagirdars and thikanadars. In western
and central India, many states ended up having pieces of territory widely dis-
persed among British Indian provinces and other princely states. Baroda was
a prime example — on a map its territory looked like a piece of Swiss cheese.°
E. M. Forster claimed that in Dewas Senior and Dewas Junior in central India
boundaries might be in the middle of streets in the capital city they shared.’
In many states with borders that resembled the seams of a crazy quilt, rulers
might not share the language and religion of their subjects. Before the 1870s
such a situation was not considered unusual since a ruler claimed legitimacy
largely by conquest and then subsequently by offering protection from other in-
vaders. Moreover, new ideas of nationalism and political legitimacy infiltrated
unevenly into British Indian provinces and the princely states.

As theorists of nationalism from Hans Kohn to Benedict Anderson have
argued, the idea that a state should incorporate a ruler and a population who

© See Kenneth X. Robbins, ‘Use of Numismatic and Philatelic Source Material in the Study of the
Princely States of India’, JBR 15 (1988), pp. 144-6.

7 BE. M. Forster, The Hill of Devi (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1965, first published in 1953),
pp. 33-6.

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spoke a common language, had a common history, and shared a common reli-
gion within a defined territorial unit fostered new bases of political legitimacy.
This emphasis on language, history and religion, coupled with the movement
towards representative and responsible government in which the people of the
nation-state were to have a voice, preferably through the election of represen-
tatives, profoundly influenced the development of popular political activity in
the princely states. Numbers now counted. The decennial censuses on which
the Imperial Government counted in order to control its subject populations
demanded that Indians identified themselves according to their caste, language
and religion.

Anderson has remarked on ‘the “census-makers” passion for completeness
and unambiguity. Hence their intolerance of multiple, politically “transvestite,”
blurred, or changing identifications. .. The fiction of the census is that everyone
is in it, and that everyone has one — and only one — extremely clear place. No
fractions’.® This assumption created categories of difference in India that erased
more fluid conceptions of personhood and community. Someone who might
speak several languages had to specify one as a mother tongue. It also began
to undermine the legitimacy of rulers, whether imperial or local, who did
not share language and religion with their subject populations. When coupled
with government policies that allocated resources ranging from grants-in-aid
for schools to seats in a representative assembly on the basis of numbers rather
than status alone, these sharply drawn divisions would spawn new forms of
popular political activity. But before analysing these political developments, I
will briefly outline the complex interplay of ethnicity, languages and religions
in the princely states.

In sparsely populated antique states such as those in Rajputana and the
foothills of the Himalayas, there were two fairly distinct population groups.
One was the adivasis or tribal groups and the other was the ruling clan and
their cohorts. Although the former were readily distinguished from the latter,
extensive differentiation exists among the aboriginal groups. Based on research
in contemporary Udaipur, Maxine Weisgrau has described the complex varia-
tions among one such group, the Bhils. Not only are there social and economic
differences within this category, but individual Bhils responded with a variety
of names for themselves based on their perceptions of which term was thought
most likely to yield desired resources. Thus many Bhils claimed that they were

Minas, who are deemed to have a higher social status.”

8 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 166.
9 Maxine Weisgrau, ‘Accounting for Tribal Diversity in Udaipur District’, paper presented at Wisconsin
Conference on South Asia, 6 November 1993.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

Princely rulers had varied relationships with adivasis. In Amber/Jaipur, one
aboriginal group, the Minas, was ceremonially incorporated into the state
structure. A Mina leader placed the rajatilaka on the forehead of the Jaipur
ruler during his installation ceremony, and Minas guarded the private treasure
of the princely family. In some states such as Tehri Garhwal in the lower
Himalayas, rulers were regarded as protectors of the aboriginals. During the
1960s this role resulted in tragedy in the jungly but mineral-rich state of Bastar
in the northern Deccan. Pravir Chandra Bhanj Deo (1929-66), the erstwhile
ruler, was considered the priest of Danteshwari Mai, the patron goddess of the
adivasis and Bastar state. He provided political leadership for adivasis in their
protests against government exploitation of forest and mineral resources and
corruption in land settlement and reform programs. Local police responded
to their demonstrations with a firing in 1961 that killed thirteen adivasis and
another in 1966 when Pravir was shot on the steps of his palace. Nandini
Sundar argues that the Pravir ‘succeeded in mobilizing people because his
movement articulated more than his own personal goals, it took up local issues
and latent desires’.!° There were also tribal groups such as the Meos in Alwar
who opposed their ruler during the 1930s because of discriminatory religious
and exploitative forest and land policies.!’ Their resistance will be discussed
in greater detail below.

In Mughal successor states, of which Hyderabad was the sole example after
1858, the Mughal governor frequently shared few ties with the local popula-
tion. The nizam was a Muslim, speaking Urdu and using Persian as an official
language, in a state whose population in 1901 included only 10 per cent
Urdu speakers, 46 per cent Telugu speakers, 26 per cent Marathi speakers, and
14 per cent Kannada speakers. The population was 88.6 per cent Hindu and
10.4 per cent Muslim. !? In 1918 the nizam established the Urdu-language Os-
mania University, which fostered the creation of a “Deccani synthesis’ bringing
together Hindus and Muslims in a cultural nationalism. This synthesis used
Urdu as the linking language and constructed a paternity in which tolerant
Muslim rulers fostered local cultural expressions. Unfortunately the education
of mainly local Muslims at Osmania University would lead to an intensified
conflict between these insider, Hyderabadi Muslims and the outsider, largely
Hindu kayasths from northern India, who had monopolised positions in the
westernised administration of the state. Anderson has highlighted the key role
of the study and analysis of language and of universities in the formation of

10 Sundar, Subalterns, p. 231 and ch. 7; Hurtig, Maharajahs, pp. 195-8.
Wy Mayaram, Resisting Regimes, chs 3-5. 2 Imperial Gazetteer. Hyderabad, pp. 23-4.

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SOCIETY AND POLITICS

European nationalisms. In Hyderabad a university that privileged a language
spoken by a minority triggered the development of a Telugu cultural nation-
alism that ultimately achieved the Andhra Pradesh state in 1956.19

In the rebel or warrior states the situation was even more tangled. The
princes of the southern Maratha states tended to share the Hindu religion and
Marathi language with their subjects, but they were brahman and their sub-
jects were labelled Maratha. Other Maratha rulers, such as those of Gwalior,
Indore and Kolhapur, were often considered sudras even though they them-
selves claimed kshatriya status. Gwalior, Indore and Baroda had few Marathi
speakers or Maratha caste members in their populations. In Punjab the ma-
haraja of Patiala was a Sikh, Sidhu Jat, and his state was divided almost equally
between Hindus and Muslims, with the Sikhs a minority. But by the 1931
census Sikhs numbered 38.9 per cent with Hindus 38.2 per cent and Muslims
22.4 per cent.!4 The language situation seemed more straightforward since an
overwhelming majority of 85 per cent claimed Punjabi as their mother tongue
in the 1931 census, and Patiala state would be the core area for the future
demand for a Punjabi-speaking state, eventually achieved in 1967.1

In Travancore and Cochin there were highly stratified societies with large
religious minorities linked by the common language of Malayalam. In the
1941 census Cochin had 45 per cent avarna (lower-caste) Hindus, 28 per cent
Christians, 19 per cent savarna (higher-caste) Hindus, and 8 per cent Muslims;
Travancore had 40 per cent avarna, 32 per cent Christian, 21 per cent savarna,
and 7 per cent Muslims.!° In both states there had been a premium on literacy
because of a long history of cash-cropping and foreign trade, an ecosystem
that allowed the existence of an unusually large leisured class, and higher
status for women fostered by the matrilineal system of nayar Hindus and
attitudes among Christians. Robin Jeffrey has argued that these cultural and
geographical factors made literacy more highly prized than elsewhere, although
state policies were also influential. In 1941 Travancore had a literacy rate

13 Leonard, Social History, pp. 216-21; Karen Leonard, “The Deccani Synthesis in Old Hyderabad:
An Historiographic Essay’, PHS 21 (1973), pp. 205-18; Hyderabad State Committee for History
of the Freedom Movements, Freedom Struggle in Hyderabad, vol. 4 (Hyderabad, 1966).

14 W succinct analysis of the increase in Sikhs from 1881 to 1931 in the Census of India, 1931,
XVII, Punjab, Part I, pp. 304-7 has attributed this phenomenon throughout Punjab to a growing
denotation of Sikhism as a religion distinct from Hinduism and to a feeling among lower-caste
members that there was more prestige in being a Sikh than a Hindu. In the 1911 census the
definition of a Sikh was changed from one who wears his or her hair long and refrains from smoking
to a definition that allowed each person to register as he or she wished: Census of India, 1911, XIV,
Punjab, Part I, pp. 154-5.

5 Census of India, 1931, XVII, Punjab, Part I, p. 284. The next most numerous language was Rajasthani,
which 9 per cent of Patialans claimed as their mother tongue.

16 Quoted from the Census of India, 1941, in Jeffrey, Politics, p. 26.

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of 47.1 per cent and Cochin had 41 per cent when the all-India rate was
15.1 per cent. Thus although Indian princes might have their power sharply
restricted by their colonial overlord, promotion of elementary education by the
rulers of Travancore and Cochin in the Malayalam vernacular could make a
significant difference in the lives of their subjects.’” It also eased the integration
of these princely states with the adjoining British India district of Malabar into
the post-colonial state of Kerala, while the social divisions were a key element
in the development of the communist party there.

Although the popular political movements in the princely states are not the
same as nationalisms in the European or all-India modes, they were intimately
linked to appeals based on class, religious and linguistic commonalities. This
situation was very different from what had prevailed during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Then rulers were not expected to share common bonds
with their subject populations. According to Hindu political theory enshrined
in the concept of rajadharma, rulers were to maintain the military force that
enabled them to provide protection and to secure order for their subjects.
Some rulers might also have a distinctive religious role as priest or servant of
a patron deity of the area. This status tended to be more common in areas on
the periphery of major power centres such as in the Himalayan states or coastal
ones such as Travancore isolated by geographical features from close interaction
with major Indian empires. Consequently, before the late nineteenth century
political and economic elites spoke several languages, and rulers imposed a
link language such as Persian. In the matter of religion, the most that would
be expected is that rulers would be tolerant of the religious practices of their
subjects.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, popular political leaders began
to demand more. They synthesised traditional and new forms of protest, and
rulers responded in equally eclectic modes. What was strikingly different was
the increasingly bounded nature of communal categories, such as caste, religion
and linguistic groups. British Orientalist constructions of types in Indian soci-
ety and their manipulation of these categories stimulated much of this demar-
cation. These fabrications penetrated the Indian states through the instruments
of decennial censuses, state gazetteers, religious pamphlets, and newspapers.
But the princes themselves contributed to these social constructions through
their patronage of caste histories, archaeological projects, and translations of
religious texts, as described in Chapter 5. Thus the categories of brahman
and non-brahman, kshatriya, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh became new ways of

'7 Tbid., pp. 56-8.

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SOCIETY AND POLITICS

defining oneself and moving from the smaller groups of clan and town identity
to larger princely state and pan-Indian categories.

POPULAR POLITICAL ACTIVITY IN
PRINCELY STATES

Political activity, by which I simply mean the pursuit of a share of scarce
material and ritual resources, in the princely states during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries has been studied primarily at the elite levels of rulers, their
immediate relatives, their clan members, their military allies, and those who
controlled land. Frequently all of these were interlinked. Recent scholarship
has begun to focus on popular political activity first among literate groups
and then among peasant-cultivators and tribal peoples in the princely states.
This involvement of larger groups has been labelled political mobilisation. In
my analysis I follow Robin Jeffrey’s concept that political mobilisation means
that there are basic changes in the political attitudes, organisation and goals
of these newly involved groups and that their general orientation is to seek
some structural adjustments. In the princely states three phases of political
mobilisation are discernible.

The first phase of popular political activity centred on specific local
grievances such as too many ‘foreigners’ or outsiders in government offices
and a lack of freedom of the press and assembly. Dick Kooiman has also em-
phasised the ways in which the collection of quantitative data reinforced group
consciousness and triggered demands for equity in government employment
and social benefits.'® Urban, literate groups were initially the most vocal in ar-
ticulating their grievances. In Travancore this stage began in the late nineteenth
century, but elsewhere it emerged only during the 1910s and 1920s. Petition
was the principal mode of operation, and the organisational structure relied
upon informal networks. A second phase commenced in the late 1920s and
early 1930s and demanded greater popular representation and the legal right to
form autonomous political associations. Although urban-based, literate elites
remained dominant, they now entered a more confrontational stance vis-a-vis
rulers. Tactics shifted from petitions to public demonstrations.

During the 1930s and 1940s peasant movements constituted a third phase
that overlapped temporally but usually not organisationally with the urban-
based organisations. In the rural areas middle-caste groups generated the most

18 Dick Kooiman, ‘The Strength of Numbers: Enumerating Communities in India’s Princely States’,

SA 20, 1 (1997), pp. 81-98.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

visible leaders, with relatively few prominent low-caste or scheduled caste and
tribal leaders. Peasant movements sought alterations in land relationships, usu-
ally to provide greater security for tenant rights. By the 1940s there were de-
mands for the abolition of the jagirdari structure and distribution of land to
the cultivators; more equitable land taxes; remission of land revenue in periods
of environmental stress; an end to begar or forced labour; and adjustments in
oppressive conditions resulting from the commercialisation of local economies.
During all three phases populist leaders usually reaffirmed the legitimacy of
princely rule. To illustrate these phases from the late nineteenth century on-
ward, I will focus on Travancore before exploring more broadly their complex
evolution at numerous sites during the twentieth century.

By the 1890s several factors had fostered new organisations and political
activity at the state level in Travancore.!? More influential here than else-
where, missionary schools, increasingly funded with grants-in-aid from the
state, and missionary pronouncements about the theoretical equality of all
believers (despite continuing preservation of social distinctions in many mis-
sionary establishments) had stimulated group consciousness and rising expecta-
tions. Crucial secular factors included an expanded road network that fostered
communication and an awareness of the possibility of other lifestyles, as well
as a developing state administration that provided wage labour for low-status
groups in public works departments and alternative opportunities for edu-
cated but economically disadvantaged groups. When more education did not
achieve more government positions, nayars, the dominant caste, were the first
to organise a new association, the Malayali Sabha, around 1884. Although
it projected a non-communal image, nayars were the overwhelming majority
in this body that inaugurated petition politics in Travancore. Their Malayali
Memorial in 1891 sought a legal definition of who was a native of Travancore
and by inference protested against the Tamil brahman preponderance in the
state administration. Their demand was similar to the contemporaneous efforts
in Hyderabad to define the dividing line between mulki and non-mulki.

Two other major communities in Travancore soon entered petition politics.
Dr P. Palpu (1863-50), an early ezhava (avarna) student at Maharaja’s College
in Trivandrum who was subsequently denied admission to the medical college
and government employment in Travancore, organised ezhava petitions to
the Travancore Government in 1895—96 asking for entry of ezhavas to all
schools and government employment. An ezhava sannyasi, Sti Narayana Guru,
provided the initial focus for the first caste association in Travancore, the

!) This discussion relies on Jeffrey, Decline, Kawashima, Missionaries, and Kooiman, ‘Strength’.

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SOCIETY AND POLITICS

Sri Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam (SNDP Yogam), founded in 1902
‘to promote religious and secular education and industrious habits among
the Elava [ezhava] community’.”° In practical politics their goals were the
opening of government service and Hindu temples to this low-status caste.
Syrian Christians formed a Travancore and Cochin Christian Association that
initially sought to end sectarian divisions among Christians and to petition for
admission to government service.

The nayars launched several small caste associations that would eventually
be superseded by the Nair Service Society (NSS) organised in 1914 to promote
caste unity and advancement. Similar to other caste associations in its nurture
of educational and welfare institutions, reform of ‘controversial or outdated
customs’ and protection of group political interests, the NSS also wanted
reforms of family law. It lobbied for the recognition of liaisons between younger
nayar sons and non-nayar women as legal marriages and for the right of nayars
to initiate partition of the traditional tarawad or joint family holding, thereby
creating individual inheritances. Because Travancore was unusual in the close
integration of its urban and rural populations and its relatively high rate of
literacy, these caste-communal associations bridged the urban/rural divide.
Roads and waterways enabled people to move freely, and newspapers spread
ideas and programs.

Locally generated and based caste and religious reform organisations similar
to those in Travancore may have existed in other princely states during
the late 1800s, but scholarly research has made little progress in excavating
them. Literary, social and political associations began to proliferate in princely
India by the 1920s. R. L. Handa has claimed that there was a growing resent-
ment of princely autocracy, which the British paramount power had allowed
after the departure of Curzon in order to use the princes as counterweights to
Indian nationalism.*! Equally important factors were the rise in literacy rates
and the consequent growth of indigenous professional elites within princely
states; the intensifying hostility against outsiders in princely administrations;
the impact of economic changes related to the tightening integration of India
into a worldwide commercial economy; and the eruption of political activity
during the first non-cooperation movement, which oozed through the porous
boundaries between British and princely India. Another issue was the am-
bivalent relationship between the Indian National Congress and the princely
states.

20 As quoted in Jeffrey, Decline, p. 210.

21 RL. Handa, History of Freedom Struggle in Princely States (New Delhi, 1968), pp. 87-8.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS AND THE
PRINCELY STATES

After a brief flirtation with the princes as financial benefactors during the 1880s,
the Indian National Congress consciously distanced itself from political mo-
bilisation in the princely states. S. K. Patil has bemoaned that ‘[t]he economic
and political demands of the Congress completely neglected the Indian states’
before 1920, and Vanaja Rangaswami has claimed that the Congress ‘refused
to involve itself with the democratic struggle [in the princely states] on its
own, at any time’.”* Both Rangaswami and Urmila Phadnis have defended the
Congress strategy of non-interference, of which Mahatma Gandhi was the lead-
ing proponent. They argue that it was a conscious policy decision to avoid two
fronts because of limited resources, to focus attention on the goal of freedom
from the British, and to avoid regional fragmentation.” As an all-Indian organ-
isation, the Congress confronted many of the same issues faced by the GOI
in its effort to control India with limited resources. In some ways Gandhi's
strategy paralleled the British policy of non-interference unless vital inter-
ests were threatened. The two all-India rivals concentrated their resources on
British Indian provinces and left autocratic princes and their relatively resource-
poor subjects to stalemate each other. Once the outcome was decided in the
main arena, then both the British and the Congress would attend to princely
states.

Several factors besides Gandhi account for Congress ambivalence. Ambi-
tious lawyers dominated the early Congress, and they were concerned about
their lack of legal standing in the states, worried about the difficulties of organ-
ising in so many disparate units where civil liberties were less protected than
in British India, and sympathetic to the princes as sources of legitimation and
models of the Indian capacity to govern.”4 On the death of Maharaja Chamara-
jendra Wadiyar of Mysore, a Congress resolution in 1894 advised Indians that
‘[h]is constitutional reign was at once a vindication of their political capacity,
an example for their active emulation, and their future political liberties’.?°
During the late nineteenth century the social reforms of progressive princes

22 §_K. Patil, The Congress Party and Princely States (Bombay, 1981), p. 15; Rangaswami, Story, p. 236.
23 Tbid., pp. 235-46; Urmila Phadnis, ‘Gandhi and Indian States — A Probe in Strategy’, in S. C.
Biswas (ed.), Gandhi: Theory and Practice, Social Impact and Contemporary Relevance (Shimla, 1969),

. 360-74.

24 he N. Ramusack, “Congress and the People’s Movement in Princely India: Ambivalence in
Strategy and Organization’, in Richard Sisson and Stanley Wolpert (eds), Congress and Indian
Nationalism: The Pre-Independence Phase (Berkeley CA, 1988), pp. 378-81.

25 A. Moin Zaidi and Shaheda Zaidi (eds), Encyclopaedia of Indian National Congress, vol. 1, 1885-1890
(New Delhi, 1976), p. 489.

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SOCIETY AND POLITICS

were positive examples of the Indian capacity to rule and sites of Indian re-
sistance to western models.”° As in the case of Indian women, idealised types
of princely rulers and princely states were constructed as part of the dialogue
between colonisers and the colonised. Consequently many Congress leaders
were equivocal about attacking this part of their heritage.

Since Gandhi’s grandfather and father had served in Kathiawadi princely
durbars, Gandhi is viewed as being personally sympathetic to the princes.
Moreover, he shrewdly calculated the political value of maintaining ties to
conservative Indians, whom he labelled trustees. Congressmen, who were pro-
fessionals, might also have been attracted to the lucrative opportunities for
employment as legal counsel as well as administrators in the princely states.
Not only did lawyers such as C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar in Travancore serve as
‘constitutional advisers’ or diwans, but Motilal Nehru and others continued
to provide legal services for the princes as late as the early 1930s. More re-
cently, subaltern scholars such as David Hardiman and Ramachandra Guha
have emphasised the Congress’s suspicion of peasant movements that it did not
control.”” However, much as the stated British preference for non-intervention
might be modified in practice in response to local conditions or the viewpoints
of particular political officers, so Gandhi as well as other Congress members
maintained contacts and occasionally intruded personally in the princely states.

Pleading with the princes to establish Ramraj, the ideal rule of Rama, the
hero of the epic Ramayana, Gandhi articulated a policy of non-intervention in
overt political mobilisation within the princely states for almost two decades
after his return to India in 1915. Here again there is at least one parallel in the
Gandhian strategy for the populations of princely states and Indian women.
Both were to concentrate on ‘constructive work’.?8 Since the removal of dis-
crimination related to untouchability was a key aspect of ‘constructive work’,
Gandhi felt free to visit Travancore in 1925 to lend support to a satyagraha
campaign demanding the opening of roads around a Siva temple at Vaikam
to low-caste, mainly ezhava, Hindus. As would happen in several Gandhian
offensives, this effort ended in a compromise. The government constructed di-
versionary roads around the temple that all Hindus could traverse. The crusade
for the right of all Hindus to enter the temples, nevertheless, continued into
the 1930s. When Gandhi returned to Travancore in 1934, he validated a more
radical rhetoric including a call for the abolition of caste that brought new

26 Bhagavan, ‘Demystifying’.

27 Hardiman, Coming, pp. 206-17; Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and
Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 83-4.

28 Madhu Kishwar, ‘Gandhi on Women’, EPW 20 (5 October 1985), pp. 1694-701.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

groups of poorer men into the political arena. Eventually Ramaswami Aiyar
would have the young maharaja of Travancore proclaim the opening of all the
temples on the ruler’s birthday of 12 November 1936 to pre-empt the polit-
ical appeal of the SNDP Yogam. By this time, however, class divisions were
emerging within the SNDP Yogam as lower-class ezhavas sought economic
amelioration and equality of ritual and social status.”? A lower-status group in
another administratively ‘progressive’ princely state further north would have
similar goals.

David Hardiman has provided a fascinating account of the Devi movement
among adivasis and the influence of congressmen and Gandhian injunctions
in Gujarat districts spread between the Bombay presidency and Baroda state.
Articulating self-purification legitimated by the authority of the goddess Devi,
who communicated through possessed individuals, the Devi movement ini-
tially promoted temperance, vegetarianism and personal cleanliness among
adivasi, who came to call themselves the raniparaj or people of the forest.
Some goals represented a shift to the lifestyle of clean castes and a higher ritual
status, but temperance and the refusal to work for Parsi liquor dealers fused
ritual and economic issues. They were also a direct attack on a class who ex-
ploited the adivasis as moneylenders and landlords as well as vendors of liquor.
During 1922 the Devi, speaking through her human instruments, advocated
the burning of foreign cloth, the use of kAadi, and the boycott of government
schools. Shortly thereafter Gandhian lieutenants, notably Vallabhbhai Patel,
a Gujarati lawyer and key Congress organiser, began to transform the Devi
movement from a religious to a secular one and to try unsuccessfully to mit-
igate the class struggle against the Parsis. Congress leaders emphasised those
aspects that were congruent with the Gandhian program such as temperance
and cleanliness. They also endorsed a more disciplined organisational structure
with authority coming from resolutions passed by votes rather than messages
transmitted during divine possession.

The Baroda authorities responded both more aggressively and more sympa-
thetically than did British administrators, illustrating the personal autocracy
possible even in a progressive princely state. In 1923 Manubhai Mehta (1868—
1946), the chief minister of Baroda, banned Devi meetings, but the ruling
gaekwad lifted the ban as long as the meetings were confined to temperance.
In 1925 Gandhi presided at the Third Raniparaj Conference, and many of the
adivasis continued to give firm support for a Gandhian program of spinning,

29 Robin Jeffrey, “Travancore: Status, Class and the Growth of Radical Politics, 1860-1940’, in Jeffrey,
People, pp. 148-64.

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SOCIETY AND POLITICS

temperance and vegetarianism despite a communal split over these changes in
lifestyle.>°

Although a few individual congressmen from British India were active in
princely states during the 1920s, there was little deviation in Congress policy
for over a decade. In 1927 political leaders from the princely states made
two efforts to establish coordinating organisations and to forge closer ties
with the Congress. Representatives from western Indian states dominated an
Indian States’ People’s Conference (ISPC) in Bombay on 17-18 December
1927. An association using the same name but later becoming the South
India States’ People’s Conference convened nine days later in Madras just
before the Indian National Congress met there. At their Madras session the
Congress responded by declaring that it was ‘emphatically of the opinion
that in the interests of both the Rulers and the people of Indian States they
should establish representative institutions and responsible Governments in
their States at an early date’.>! Individuals from the princely states were allowed
to join the Congress, and many participated in the civil disobedience movement
of 1930-32. Subsequently they would look for some reciprocal support from
the Congress in their struggle for responsible government in the states.

The Indian National Congress as an organisation remained aloof from the
states’ people’s groups until 1938 and 1939 when several Congress leaders,
notably Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel, became intimately involved in key agi-
tations. Several scholars have argued that the shift in Congress policy was largely
for pragmatic political reasons. First, the emerging political organisations and
their more confrontational tactics in the states might be an asset to Congress.
Second, there was concern about the impact of princely representatives in the
federation proposed in the 1935 Government of India Act, which will be dis-
cussed in Chapter 8. Third, Congress socialists at the national level intensified
their demands for a change in the non-intervention policy; they were led by
Jayaprakash Narayan and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya (1903-90), Congress
provincial leaders, especially in Gujarat, and Congress dissidents, most no-
tably Subhas Chandra Bose (1897-1945). According to Ian Copland, some
princes were also seeking accommodation with the Congress, perceived after
its strong showing in the 1936 elections to be the heir-apparent of their British

3° David Hardiman, ‘Adivasi Assertion in South Gujarat: The Devi Movement’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.)
Subaltern Studies WI (Delhi, 1984), pp. 196-230; Hardiman, Coming.

31_ NN. Mitra (ed.), Indian Annual Register, vol. 2, July-December 1927 (Calcutta, 1927), pp. 411-13.

32 Bipan Chandra et al., India’s Struggle for Independence 1857-1947 (New Delhi, 1988), pp. 356-74
(Mridula Mukherjee wrote this chapter on the “The Freedom Struggle in Princely India’); Copland,
‘Congress Paternalism’, pp. 127-9; Ramusack, ‘Congress’, pp. 387-9.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

patron.*? On the Congress side, by their active involvement in agitations in
Mysore, Travancore and Rajkot, Gandhi and Patel undertook to block their na-
tional and provincial rivals from establishing a firm base within a constituency
that now appeared to have some potential.

Although it was not the sharp break that some have declared, a compro-
mise resolution passed at the Haripura Congress in 1938 legitimated increased
Congress activity in princely India. Initially Gandhi sent emissaries to investi-
gate the situation in the princely states since, like the British, Congress found
it difficult at times to comprehend and to control these internal political net-
works. Because Gandhi wanted these constituencies to conform to his political
and social programs and was generally sympathetic to the princes, he used
agents who were personally loyal to him and likely to be non-confrontational
with durbar officials and popular leaders. Two examples are Rajkumari Amrit
Kaur (1889-1964), a member of a branch of the Kapurthala ruling family
excluded from succession because of its conversion to Christianity, and Agatha
Harrison (1885-1954), a Quaker supporter of Gandhi based in London.**
Gandhi would also encourage Jawaharlal Nehru, his designated successor, to
become more active in princely state politics.

In 1939 Nehru became president of the AISPC (All-India States’ People’s
Conference), which had recently added All to its title, partly to prevent the so-
cialists and Subhas Chandra Bose from capturing this association. Nehru tried
to energise the AISPC by appointing Balwantry Mehta as its general secretary
and Pattabhi Sitaramayya as editor of a weekly journal, by undertaking some
fundraising, and by despatching roving investigators, including Rajkumari Am-
rit Kaur, who acted as intelligence agents in particularly troubled states. The
AISPC also published a few investigative reports and a statistical overview.*°
But Bombay-based leaders continued to dominate, and the AISPC never devel-
oped into a national organisation. Thus political mobilisation among princely
states’ subjects continued to occur at the state level with occasional participa-
tion by individual Congress leaders pursuing particular agendas.

Consequently, despite British allegations, outside agitators were not the
prime organisers of the subjects within the princely states. The relationship
between states’ people’s groups and the Congress was an anguished one even
after the formal prohibition on Congress intervention was modified. This
situation would make it difficult for the Congress to solidify its base after 1947
in states that incorporated large blocks of the princely ruled territories. In

33 Copland, ‘Congress Paternalism’, p. 132. 34 Ramusack, ‘Congress’, p. 390.
35 During the 1930s the tracts were on Patiala, Orissa, Limbdi, Ratlam, and Bikaner and the overview
was What are the Indian States?

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SOCIETY AND POLITICS

Mysore and Travancore, however, indigenous leaders established local Congress
committees during the 1930s with different results.

POLITICAL MOBILISATION WITHIN THE
PRINCELY STATES

During the 1910s urban-based princely state subjects formed praja mandals
(people’s organisations or associations) or lok parishads (people’s conferences).
Generally educated in British India because of the paucity of post-secondary
institutions in most princely states, these subjects were based in British India
if their target state was actively suppressing the right of association. Princely
governments echoed British claims about external agents but few were evident.
In this phase during the 1910s and 1920s, the initial demands were for greater
recruitment of states’ subjects to government employment; the guarantee of
civil liberties, particularly the freedoms of press, assembly and association; and
in a few instances representative assemblies. Few popular leaders questioned
the legitimacy of princely rule or its end. Their epithet for themselves, ‘Slaves
of Slaves’, articulated their assessment that the British had enslaved their rulers.
Praja mandals usually attributed political oppression in states not to princes but
to authoritarian or corrupt officials, frequently outsiders, or scheming zenana
women and their advisers. The Praja Mithra Mandali in 1917 in Mysore might
have been the first such state-level association. It was soon joined by others in
Baroda, Bhor, Indore, the Kathiawar Rajkiya Parishad in 1921, and the Deccan
States Subjects Conference. Similar groups proliferated during the 1920s
and 1930s in Kathiawad states such as Bhavnagar, Gondal and Junagadh; in
Rajputana including Alwar, Bikaner, Jaipur, Jodhpur and Udaipur; in Orissan
states; and in Punjab with the Punjab Riyasti Praja Mandal.*°

By the late 1920s and into the 1940s the praja mandals entered a second,
more activist stage as evinced in public demonstrations and protest marches.
Now urban-based praja mandals sought representative and increasingly re-
sponsible government that would diminish princely autocracy but not deny
princely authority. They asked for the introduction or widening of the fran-
chises for representative assemblies; elected members of legislative councils
selected as ministers, particularly after the popularly elected ministries had
taken office in British Indian provinces in 1937; privy purses for rulers; and
increased funding for social infrastructure, especially educational and medical
facilities. They especially coveted formal recognition of the praja mandals as

36 Copland, “Congress Paternalism’, p. 122; Handa, History, p. 89.

221

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

legitimate political organisations and the release of political prisoners arrested
during public protests. Peasant movements developed simultaneously, but con-
tact and collaboration between them and the urban-based praja mandals were
limited.

The major challenges for popular political leaders in the states were to
broaden their popular base, to use the resources of political groups in British
India, and to achieve some leverage with rulers and state administrations.*”
The first and most intricate problems were to bridge the gaps between urban
and rural sectors and to overcome the boundaries among caste and religious
groups. Mysore, Travancore, Hyderabad, Rajkot, Patiala, Kashmir and states
in Rajputana have elicited most of the scholarly attention, so the following
overview reflects this coverage. To illustrate the general trends in popular politi-
cal activity in the princely states, I will focus on three pairs of contrasting states:
Mysore-Rajkot, Rajputana-Tehri Garhwal, and Travancore-Patiala. Both the
Indian National Congress and individual Congress members interacted with
urban-based groups in Mysore and Rajkot. But Mysore was the site of au-
tonomous labour movements that had few parallels in other states. Rajputana
and Tehri Garhwal illustrate the ongoing tensions between praja mandals and
peasant movements. Associational activities in Travancore and Patiala illu-
minate the potent appeals of communal and class-based organisations within
princely states. Although the Congress was able to lay the groundwork for later
dominance in the first two pairs of states, in Travancore and Patiala communist
and communal parties were such strong antagonists that they would emerge
as major rivals in the post-colonial era. Finally, to delineate the many vari-
ants of Muslim political mobilisation within the princely states, I will survey
developments in Alwar, Jammu and Kashmir, and Hyderabad.

James Manor has examined how Congress politicians in Mysore were able to
integrate three levels of local, state and national politics in a princely state where
politics was compartmentalised because of its social structure.** Belonging
to a kshatriya caste group with fewer than a thousand members in 1881,
the Mysore ruling family had no ties to the countryside. Consequently the
ruler and his administration had allowed elite land-controllers considerable
autonomy at the local level in return for their support of the durbar. During the
1920s and early 1930s, there were two distinct, non-official groupings within
elite Mysore politics. Non-brahman but dominant caste leaders, especially the
Lingayats, adherents of a devotional reform Hindu sect, and Vokkaligas, an

37 Robert Stern analyses what constituted resources for such politicians in ‘An Approach to Politics in
the Princely States’, in Jeffrey, People, pp. 355-71.
38 Manor, Political Change, chs 1-2.

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SOCIETY AND POLITICS

occupational category of cultivators who acquired a base as leaders of district
boards, commanded one coalition. They sought more educational facilities
and government positions for non-brahmans. Urban-based brahmans who
carried the Congress label formed the other bloc and appealed for a responsible,
parliamentary style of government. Since they had a small numerical base,
the brahmans solicited strength from the political resources offered by Indian
nationalism. However, they were relatively ineffective because of the ambivalent
policy of the Congress. Neither Mysore group developed an internal mass
base during the 1920s and early 1930s. Gradually their mutual experiences
with a administratively progressive princely durbar that made only limited
political concessions stimulated more radical political demands. Their new
aggressiveness in turn occasioned stronger repressive measures.°?

By 1936 the non-brahman People’s Federation agreed to merge with the
Mysore Congress. For the non-brahmans the increased attention of the na-
tional Congress to states’ subjects seemed to promise greater Congress pressure
on the British raj, and for the local congressmen the non-brahmans provided
needed links to local politics. Gandhi’s disapproval of a resolution passed at
a meeting of the All-India Congress Committee at Calcutta in 1937 protest-
ing against certain repressive actions of the Mysore administration and call-
ing for support of Mysoreans indicated that Congress patronage was still not
unequivocal. Subsequently, from 1936 until 1942 the unified Mysore State
Congress worked to break down the isolation between the state and local po-
litical arenas,*° but it faced another formidable challenge from Leftists within
and without its organisation over the representation of the interests of industrial
labourers.

Because of its program of economic as well as administrative modernisation,
Mysore had one of the more sizeable industrial labour forces among the princely
states. Janaki Nair has skilfully excavated the development of a working-class
culture in Bangalore and the Kolar Gold Fields that generated public protests
and private resistance as well as occasional alliances with ‘outside’ leaders.
Workers organised substantial strikes beginning with the compositors at the
Mysore Government Press in 1920, to the 18-day strike in the Kolar Gold
Fields in 1930, to a 72-day strike at Bangalore textile mills in 1941, to two
waves of strikes during the Quit India movement. Within the factory environ-
ment workers defied restrictive industrial work routines through tardiness and
absenteeism and the appropriation of materials. These actions reveal impres-
sive organisational skills, a consciousness of their own interests, and ultimately

39 Thid., chs 4-6. 40 Thid., chs 6-7.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

a lack of the economic resources necessary to sustain extended strikes. Nair
discusses women and the influence of gender ideology in the industrial labour
force. Male labour leaders saw themselves as protectors of women, arguing
for benefits specific to them such as maternity leave. But they also relegated
women to stereotypical female work where the labour was unskilled and the
pay was low, such as the winding and reeling sections in textile industries.*!

From the early 1920s Congress leaders in Mysore sought recognition by
the durbar of the representatives of workers as part of their anti-imperialist
campaign, while at the same time accepting the durbar’s program for capitalist
development and social stability.4? Banning labour unions, the Mysore admin-
istration pursued a paternalistic model. Its diwan, Sir Mirza Ismail, served as
the supposedly neutral mediator between management and labour but gener-
ally favoured the former. Escalating labour militancy and fears of ‘uncontrolled’
workers prompted the Mysore Government in 1941 to permit labour unions.
Despite some effective individual protests, socialists and communists lacked
institutional depth for a sustained opposition. Congress became dominant and
gained a reputation for ‘gentlemanly’ trade unionism in Mysore until the late
1970s. Nair has asserted that ‘[t]he Congress programme was rich with ambi-
guities: sharing as it did the aspirations of the Mysore bureaucracy, it hoped
to transform labour into a “partner” in the capitalist order with limited rights,
and unhesitantly used culturally-derived notions of power in order to both
initiate mass activity and keep it pegged to safe levels’.*°

Because of their success in incorporating non-brahman and labour groups, in
1947 Mysore congressmen launched the formidable ‘Mysore Chalo’ movement
that forced the diwan to concede and the maharaja to accept responsible gov-
ernment. After integration with the Indian Union, Congress had a well-forged
political organisation in Mysore, albeit, according to Manor, at a level of devel-
opment that was comparable to those in British Indian provinces during the
1920s.44 Congress would nevertheless remain dominant in the post-colonial
state of Karnataka until the 1970s.

Although Gandhi had withheld active support from agitations in Mysore
in 1937, he chose to intervene in Rajkot, where he had lived for several years.
John Wood has perceptively analysed the failure of this first attempt to secure

constitutional change in a princely state through mass civil disobedience.”

41 Nair, Miners, chs 4-8.

2 Tbid., pp. 163-75, 251-60, 272-86. #8 Ibid., p. 298.

44 James Manor, ‘Gandhian Politics and the Challenge to Princely Authority in Mysore, 1936-47’, in
Low, Congress, pp. 405-6.

45 John R. Wood, ‘Indian Nationalism in the Princely Context: The Rajkot Satyagraha of 1938-9’, in
Jeffrey, People, pp. 240-74; Chandra, India’s Struggle, pp. 360-5.

224

SOCIETY AND POLITICS

The basis for a political confrontation in Rajkot began when a dissolute son,
Dharmendra Sinhji (b. 1910, r. 1931-40), succeeded a sagacious and popular
ruler, Thakore Saheb Lakhaji Raj. During the 1930s the young prince and his
diwan, Durbar Virawala, restricted the political participation allowed under
Lakhaji Raj and granted monopolies of basic products such as sugar, which
enriched the administration at the expense of consumers. Popular reaction
began with a strike at a state cotton mill to obtain better working conditions.
It escalated to a revival of the Kathiawar Rajkiya Parishad, leading to state
repression that sparked a /artal or general strike in August 1938.

Sardar Patel intervened with demands for new elections to the representative
assembly, limits on princely withdrawals from the state treasury, reductions of
land revenue, and the cancellation of monopolies. After multilateral negoti-
ations between Patel, the British political agent and the diwan, with Agatha
Harrison visiting as Gandhi's envoy, the thakore saheb and Patel concluded
a settlement. The tough Gujarati congressman called off the satyagraha cam-
paign in exchange for the ruler agreeing to a privy purse and the appointment
of a committee to recommend reforms. Patel was to propose seven of the
ten committee members. Alarmed by these concessions, the British indicated
that they would support a tougher stance by the Rajkot durbar. The belea-
guered administration responded with ordinances banning meetings, arrests,
and lathi charges by police patrols. When Patel submitted his nominees, who
were either brahmans or banias, the administration adroitly advocated that
the committee should be more inclusive of Rajkot subjects, especially Rajputs,
Muslims and depressed communities. A shrewd diwan whose method has been
labelled intrigue since it relied on surreptitious bargaining checkmated Patel’s
confrontational style.

In early 1939 Gandhi was facing a serious challenge from Subhas Chan-
dra Bose, who had contested and won the presidency of the Congress for a
second term against Gandhi's wishes. To counter the Bengali leader, who argued
for Congress support of the political struggle in the princely states, Gandhi
proceeded to Rajkot. When the thakore saheb refused to accept Patel’s nom-
inees, Gandhi began a fast unto death. The British became worried because
of spreading agitations and the viceroy pleaded for arbitration by the British
chief justice of India, who basically decided in Patel’s favour. But the princely
administration still refused to accept Patel’s nominees. Their position was re-
inforced as Rajputs and Muslims in Rajkot threatened to launch their own
satyagraha campaigns, and British Indian Muslim and depressed class leaders
argued for separate representation on the reform committee. Gandhi admitted
defeat on 17 May 1939. Rajkot was a ‘priceless laboratory’ that vindicated the

225

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

appropriateness of his pleas for non-intervention. His lack of success also in-
dicated that princely administrations as well as British imperialists and British
Indian leaders could manipulate the boundaries between religious and social
communities.

Wood has claimed that this episode reflects the divergent political legacies
of princely states and British India, especially the commitment to behind-
the-scenes negotiations and consensual decisions in the states and the use of
public confrontation and compromise by the Congress. It also indicated the
strength that the princes derived from the willingness of the British paramount
power to back up its clients as counterpoises to the more potent threat from
British Indian nationalists. Still the Rajkot satyagraha campaign provided the
experience of coordinating goals that would stand Saurashtrian politicians in
good stead as they tried to integrate their fragmented political spheres and to
promote regional economic and social development after 1947.“°

Popular political activity occurred decades later in Rajputana than in
Travancore and Mysore. Laxman Singh has catalogued the establishment of
social reform and political organisations in Jodhpur, Bikaner and Kotah during
the early 1920s.4” Richard Sisson has described how these and earlier social
reform groups focused on internal reforms within their communities and is
one of the first scholars to mention the importance of fairs and pilgrimage cen-
tres such as the Krishna shrine at Nathdwara in Udaipur as nodes of political
activity.** Leaders of such groups faced expulsion from or arrest in these states
if their activities challenged princely authority. Consequently their associa-
tions were ephemeral. A more lasting legacy were newspapers such as Naveen
Rajasthan and Tarun Rajasthan in Ajmer, the British Indian enclave within
Rajputana, which reported on conditions in the surrounding princely states.

During this early period, peasant protests erupted in Udaipur, arguably the
most conservative state in Rajputana, against the jagirdar of Bijolia. Although
the details are vague, it appears that £isans, among whom the tribal Bhils were
a significant element, had long been discontented with arbitrary taxes, cesses,
and the demand for begar. In 1922 the jagirdar, under pressure from the
Mewar durbar, instituted panchayats to mediate disputes, but subsequently
he reneged on his commitment. The agitation dragged on throughout the
1920s. Directed against a jagirdar rather than a prince, this episode followed

46 John R. Wood, ‘British versus Princely Legacies and the Political Integration of Gujarat’, JAS 44
(1984), pp. 65-99.

47 Taxman Singh, Political and Constitutional Developments in the Princely States of Rajasthan (1920-49)
(New Delhi, 1970), pp. 38-53.

48 Sisson, Congress Party, pp. 41-5.

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SOCIETY AND POLITICS

a pattern that persisted in Rajputana and provided organising experience for
future political leaders.”

Although there was some sympathetic support for the civil disobedience
movement of 1930-31 among subjects and a few rulers in Rajputana, the
second stage of the formal organisation of praja mandals and more radical
demands for structural change started after 1935. The catalysts seem to be the
strong success of the Congress in the 1936 elections; more explicit rhetorical
support from the Congress; and the emergence of a larger group of educated,
ambitious young men within the princely states who sought some share of
political resources. This list of factors is not definitive and will be modified by
further research. By 1940 praja mandals had been formed in Alwar, Bharatpur,
Bikaner, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kotah, Sirohi and Udaipur.

During this phase of formal organisations with constitutions, elected offi-
cers, dues-paying members, and the goal of representative government, some
princes attempted to co-opt the praja mandals that increasingly identified
with Congress symbols and aspirations. In a striking example, Ganga Singh of
Bikaner advised the British chief minister of Jodhpur that Jai Narain Vyas, the
principal leader of the Marwar Lok Parishad in Jodhpur and the founder of the
Tarun Rajasthan, should be given the resources to carry on his political work.
In 1937 the prescient Bikaner ruler deemed Narain to be ‘thoroughly honest,
incorruptible, and true to his conscience and political creed . . . [and] the only
man who can wield an elevating influence over thousands of his colleagues
and associates who left to themselves will build their thrones upon the ruin of
all classes in Rajputana’.°? An entente between the Jaipur Praja Mandal and
the Jaipur durbar existed from 1936 to 1938. It dissolved when the durbar
outlawed the Mandal under a new Public Societies Regulation and banned
the entry of Seth Jamnalal Bajaj, a devoted Gandhian and long-time treasurer
of the Congress whose ancestral home was in Shekhawati, to preside over a
Mandal meeting and to assist in famine relief. Similar arrests occurred in other
states including Jodhpur, where Parishad leaders were incarcerated in 1940 for
protesting against a ban on political meetings.

Although princely rulers in several Rajputana states attempted to conciliate
these urban-based popular political leaders with representative assemblies in
their capitals and district boards in towns, R. S. Darda has characterised such

49 Laxman Singh, Political Developments, p. 40; Sisson, Congress Party, p. 44, n. 2, p. 74, n. 2; some
documents in Ram Pande, People’s Movement in Rajasthan (Selection from Originals), vol. 2 (Jaipur,
1986), pp. ix-xvi, 1-40.

> Letter No. 201, P. S. 54-37, Ganga Singh to Sir Donald Field, Prime Minister of Jodhpur, quoted
in Sisson, Congress Party, p. 52.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

institutions as ‘toy legislatures and mock local self-governing institutions’.*!

By 1942 the people’s groups ended efforts at collaboration and sought to
develop independently of state support. They attempted to broaden their base,
but in most cases they remained tied to capital cities. Furthermore, educated
brahmans, mahajans, Marwaris and kayasths were dominant leaders. Their
dilatory efforts to forge links with emerging peasant movements were generally
unsuccessful.

In Rajasthan the principal peasant movements developed in specific areas,
protested against local grievances, and sought ritual and economic changes
that were relevant to their particular conditions.°” Sisson has described how
the kisan sabhas evolved within the Jat communities, fought against feudalism,
and targeted jagirdars rather than the princes.*? As discussed in Chapter 6,
some rulers had rationalised relations with peasants on khalsa lands to ex-
tend their control and ultimately to increase revenues through land settle-
ments with fixed revenue rates. Although these princes were hardly utopian
reformers and peasants on khalsa lands still had significant grievances, the
conditions of peasants in jagirdari areas could be much worse. Here there
were few revenue settlements or defined tenancy rights, and begar was of-
ten extracted. Jat political consciousness was raised through contact with
Hindu reform societies, especially the Arya Samaj, which sent missionaries
into Rajputana from its bases in Delhi and Punjab, with Jat caste associations
and Jat religious leaders. A major festival, the Jat Praja Pati Maha-Yagna held
in January 1934 in Shekhawati, was a landmark in developing a collective
identity.

During the 1930s Jat kisan sabhas in Jaipur sought enhancement of their
ritual status and economic conditions through public demonstrations and no-
rent campaigns. One graphic demand was the right to ride elephants, camels
and horses — the prerogative of Rajput jagirdars that symbolised their economic
and political dominance. One of most remembered events of the Jat Praja Pati
Maha-Yagna occurred when some Jats rode on an elephant, defying the prohi-
bition of the Sikar thikanadar.*4 To complicate the situation, the thikanadars
of Jaipur thought that their izzat or honour was being attacked, not just by Jat
peasants but by the British. The latter had commissioned the Wills Report,
which postulated that thikanadars owed their power to the grant of an ijara

>! R.S. Darda, From Feudalism to Democracy: A Study in the Growth of Representative Institutions in
Rajasthan, 1908-1948 (New Delhi, 1971), p. 316.

2 Hira Singh, Colonial Hegemony and Popular Resistance: Princes, Peasants, and Paramount Power
(Walnut Creek CA, 1998).

>3 Sisson, Congress Party, ch. 4. >4 Tbid., pp. 85-6.

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SOCIETY AND POLITICS

and not to a right based on conquest. Subsequently, Raja Rao Kalyan Singh
(succeeded 1922), the thikanadar of Sikar, would be the protagonist in the last
stand of a jagirdar against his overlords.”

In the summer of 1938 an armed confrontation, subsequently labelled a
feudal revolt, erupted in Sikar between small-scale Rajput thakurs and the
superior armed forces of the Jaipur durbar. The immediate cause was a protest
over British prescriptions for the education of the heir, but the fundamental
issues were the British-inspired reforms of the Sikar administration reducing
the authority of the raja rao. Kalyan Singh lost since the British sided with
the durbar. Moreover, the praja mandal, influenced by the Gandhian Bajaj,
stayed on the sidelines because the thikanadar and his Rajput allies would not
subscribe to non-violent means.

Like the praja mandals in Rajputana, the kisan sabhas represented a crucial
organisational development that widened political horizons and emphasised
leadership based on achievement rather than ascription. Hira Singh has ar-
gued passionately that ‘[t]he peasant movements in Rajasthan did not “come”:
they were “made” by the peasants aided by multiple organizations and ide-
ologies, with non-peasant components’.*° The praja mandals that formed the
Rajputana Prantiya Sabha in 1946, which became the Rajputana state unit
of the Congress Party in 1948, found it difficult to ally with peasant groups.
This inability to forge links between urban and rural-based movements was
endemic. Since the Congress had jagirdari abolition as one of its key goals, the
kisan sabhas in Rajputana were pre-empted from forming a Rajasthan peasant
party and gradually joined the Congress. However, rivalries between urban and
rural-based groups and between Rajput and Jat groups continued to exist but
now within the organisational framework of an electoral party.”

Ecological and cultural factors produced another form of political protest.
Ramachandra Guha has argued that ‘[t]he peasant political ideal, in which the
peasantry and the king are the only social forces, came as close as is historically
possible to being realized in Tehri Garhwal’.°® In this sub-Himayalan state of
4500 square miles with a population of 300 000 (1931), the ruler Narendra
Shah (b. 1898, r. 1919-49) traced his dynasty back for twelve centuries. His
legitimacy was further undergirded by public acceptance of him as a speaking
personification of the deity worshipped at Badrinath, one of the holiest Hindu
shrines. Before the late nineteenth century the state revenue demand was low,

>> Barnett R. Rubin, Feudal Revolt and State-Building: The 1938 Sikar Agitation in Jaipur (New Delhi,
1983).

°6 Hira Singh, Colonial Hegemony, p. 248.

57 Sisson, Congress Party, chs 5-6. °8 Guha, Unquiet Woods, p. 62.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

and tension between the raja and praja was not evident. By 1900 lumbering in
state forests of deodar (cedar) for railway sleepers changed this situation. After
several decades of exploitation by British concessionaires, the raja resumed
control of chir (long-needle pine) forests in 1885 and negotiated enhanced
revenues from the deodar forests remaining under British management. These
forests became the main source of state revenue.

Modern forest management severely restricted peasant access to a resource
once held in common. Forests had provided grazing for herds, fertiliser for
agricultural fields, and firewood. State forest officials dramatically intervened
in the lives of peasants. In response, the peasants resorted to dhandak to secure
the withdrawal of forest regulations regarded as unjust. Dhandak was a form
of customary rebellion that involved individual and collective resistance to
oppressive officials, with an accompanying appeal to the raja for justice. A
turning point in raja—praja relations occurred during the Rawain dhandak in
1930. The expected response to this protest against further restrictions on the
size of herds and the trimming of trees for fuel was for the raja to mediate in
person. Unfortunately he was in Europe, so the diwan led a punitive expedition
that fired on and looted protesting villagers. His action weakened but did not
end respect for the raja.

In 1939 the Tehri Rajya Praja Mandal was founded at Dehradun in British
India. Sridev Suman, its principal leader, died in 1941 during a hunger strike
demanding legal recognition for the praja mandal. Similar to the situation in
Rajputana, the praja mandal initially solicited an alliance with the raja but
without incorporating peasant demands. Meanwhile the raja undertook a new
land survey and settlement that provoked a peasant andolan or movement in
1946. Peasants held meetings; some tore up settlement papers, others marched
to the capital, and many were arrested. Congress leaders interceded and se-
cured the legal recognition of the praja mandal but not the release of jailed
peasant leaders. Subsequent peasant agitations overthrew local revenue officials
and appointed their own representatives as patwaris. Losing control, the raja
negotiated with the praja mandal in early 1948 to form a ministry.°? During
the crucial transition to integration with the new state of Uttar Pradesh, the
peasant movement and the praja mandal in Tehri Garhwal had collaborated
but remained distinct. The peasants did not question the legitimacy of the
raja but continued to argue that he did not know of the injustices being done
under his authority by oppressive officials.©? Although the praja mandal was
anti-ruler in its rhetoric, it was willing to share power with the raja. It solicited

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SOCIETY AND POLITICS

and attained positions in an interim ministry. The Congress achieved an uneasy
alliance on the eve of integration.

Contrary to the view that customary rebellion functioned primarily as a
safety valve to release pent-up frustrations and thereby maintain the status
quo, Ramachandra Guha has argued that it was a shrewd tactic used by peas-
ants to achieve changes in oppressive policies when the dominant authority
was judged to be delinquent in dispensing justice.°! Furthermore, the 1930
dhandak in Tehri Garhwal served as a reference point for peasants in neigh-
bouring British Indian provinces and as prototype for the post-colonial Chipko
movement. Chipko leaders focused their protest against forest officials regarded
as corrupt because they collaborated with manipulative logging contractors.
During the 1970s and 1980s Chipko organisers, whose ascetic self-sacrifice
including hunger strikes and non-violent means of protest echoed the earlier
peasant leaders, appealed to prime ministers, most notably Indira Gandhi, who
claimed to be supportive of environmental protection. In the post-colonial pe-
riod elected politicians succeeded to the role of fount of justice once held by the
raja of Tehri Garhwal. In areas more exposed to external influences, political
patterns would be more complex since the populations of these states were
more differentiated.

COMMUNAL ASSOCIATIONS AND COMMUNIST
ORGANISATIONS

Communal and class appeals were long evident in political activity in
Travancore. Various groups had formed political associations as early as the
1890s to lobby for more educational opportunities and government positions.
During the 1930s constitutional reforms intensified communal anxieties.
The three politically active communities — nayars, ezhavas and Christians —
experienced internal divisions yet each tried to create an external united front
vis-a-vis other communities. Such aspirations made it difficult for the Congress
or local political leaders to build an integrated organisation. The Congress was
momentarily successful during the late 1930s, but it confronted challenges
from members of the Congress Socialist Party and the Communist Party dur-
ing the next decade.

63 Dick Kooiman, Communities and Electorates: A Comparative Discussion of Communalism in Colonial
India (Amsterdam, 1995), pp. 39-49, 63-4.

64 Thid.; Jeffrey, ‘Sanctified Label’ in Low, Congress, pp. 435-72; Jeffrey, Politics, chs 3-7.

231

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

In 1933 a newly formed Joint Political Congress (JPC), not related to the
Indian National Congress and known as the Samyuktha Party, composed of
Christian, ezhava and Muslim leaders boycotted elections to a new legislature
that would be nayar-dominated. The constituents of the JPC sought commu-
nal reservations in the legislature and government posts based on population.
Under the shrewd direction of Ramaswami Aiyar, the state government un-
dertook reforms to isolate the Christians and accommodate the Hindus. In
1935 it conceded communal reservations in the legislature. In the next year a
Temple Entry Proclamation removed the most conspicuous sign of discrim-
ination against non-caste Hindus and attenuated the political opposition of
the ezhavas. By 1937 the JPC had won twenty-five out of forty-nine seats
in the legislature, but its impetus soon declined as the government fulfilled
most of its program. The JPC could not link up with the Indian National
Congress since its communally oriented objectives were not congruent with
Gandhian standards. A Travancore State Congress had to be at least ostensi-
bly non-communal and able to fuse nationalist goals and symbols with local
issues.

Formed in February 1938, the Travancore State Congress (TSC) initially
contested the state administration on the issues of freedom of speech and as-
sembly when a nayar lawyer in whose office they had met was arrested for
publishing allegedly inflammatory articles. At the next stage the TSC pre-
sented a memorial calling for universal franchise, responsible government, and
the dismissal and investigation of the foreign diwan, Ramaswami Aiyar. On
26 August 1938, some TSC leaders were arrested as they inaugurated civil
disobedience. But the campaign continued and orchestrated the largest public
procession ever seen in Travancore on 23 October 1938. Although estimates
of the numbers participating range from 2000 to 20 000, the protest was
even more remarkable for its challenges to princely authority. First, its leader
was a woman, Akkamma Cheriyan (1909-82), a Catholic Syrian school head-
mistress. Second, the crowd of mixed castes and religions invaded the cen-
tral ‘Fort’ area of Trivandrum, the acknowledged preserve of caste Hindus.
Eventually the state administration represented to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur,
Gandhi's envoy, that the public violence and attacks on Ramaswami Aiyar
were evidence of the TSC’s lack of commitment to Gandhian tactics of satya-
graha, which required non-violence and respect for one’s opponent. Once the
Travancore Government released Congress political prisoners, the middle-class
Congress leaders terminated their civil disobedience campaign. Ramaswami
Aiyar proceeded to demonstrate the power of the state to reward its clients and

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SOCIETY AND POLITICS

punish its opponents and thereby split the Congress. Nayars won changes in
the franchise, and ezhavas left the TSC to achieve similar gains. Christians also
fractured, with the Roman Catholics supporting the government in return for
protection of its institutions.

During the Second World War the TSC pulled back from agitational activ-
ity and organising workers. Students were the only group to mount significant
demonstrations during the Quit India movement. Educated, dedicated caste
Hindu and Syrian Christian leaders of the Communist Party had an open
field in organising urban workers across communal and caste divisions, with
ezhavas, Latin Catholics and artisan workers as the intermediary level of leader-
ship. When Ramaswami Aiyar and the maharaja proposed to make Travancore
independent of the Indian Union in 1947, the TSC decided against a mass civil
disobedience campaign since they feared losing control to the better organised
socialist and communist parties. The TSC managed to form the state govern-
ment from 1951 to 1956, but the strong infrastructure of the Communist
Party resulted in the first freely elected communist government in the newly
formed state of Kerala in 1957.

Communal appeals and communist organisers were also conspicuous in the
Punjab states. The territory of Sikh-ruled states, particularly Patiala, Nabha
and Jind, was interspersed through the eastern half of Punjab province. Unlike
Baroda and Mysore, they did not enjoy a reputation for progressive reforms.
As of 1924 there were no metalled roads in Nabha state, and in 1933 Patiala
had 1.24 students per 100 people in schools compared to 4.44 in Punjab
province.®” This latter state, the largest and most populous of the three, with
5932 square miles and a population of almost 1.5 million in 1921, had some
elements of administrative modernisation such as a British-style land revenue
settlement, canal irrigation schemes, and railway lines. But industrial devel-
opment was almost non-existent and only 10 per cent of the population was
urban-based. Although there were no jagirdars in the rural areas, biswedars
or land-controllers, who held a sixth of the villages in Patiala, had had their
revenue-collecting rights converted into proprietary rights during the land rev-
enue settlement undertaken in the first decade of the twentieth century. This
instrument of administrative efficiency had transformed cultivating peasants

into muzara or occupancy tenants.

6 Tbid., p. 124 and Jeffrey, ‘Sanctified Label’, in Low, Congress, pp. 454-6.

66 T J. Nossiter, Communism in Kerala: A Study in Political Adaptation (Berkeley CA, 1982).
67 Romesh Walia, Praja Mandal Movement in East Punjab States (Patiala, 1972), pp. 37, 42.
68 Mohinder Singh, Peasant Movement, pp. 13-16.

233

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

During the 1910s and 1920s the Akali Sikhs had mounted a major campaign
to win control over and reform Sikh gurudwaras throughout Punjab. Ramesh
Walia has related how this agitation rather than the freedom movement was the
major factor in determining ‘the shape, character and dimensions of the praja
mandal movement in East Punjab’.” The role of maharaja Bhupinder Singh as
a patron of moderate leaders in the Sikh gurudwara reform movement has been
outlined in Chapter 5. Here it is sufficient to remember that he was an energetic
intermediary between his British patron and Akali leaders during the 1920s.”°
The immediate cause for the founding of the Punjab Riyasti Praja Mandal in
1928 was Bhupinder Singh’s incarceration of Sewa Singh Thikriwala (c. 1882—
1935), a Patiala subject and former state official who had refused to agree, as
more moderate Akalis had done, to British conditions during the negotiations
over the 1925 Sikh Gurdwara Reform Act.’' As in other states such as Jaipur,
the Patiala jail was a convenient repository for political prisoners whom the
British found difficult to retain. The intermittent imprisonment and the harsh
treatment of Sewa Singh were dramatic evidence of the lack of civil rights in
Patiala.

During the first phase of the Punjab Riyasti Praja Mandal from 1928 to
1938, the main focuses were on improving political and economic conditions
in Patiala and on persuading the British to depose Maharaja Bhupinder Singh.
Their success was limited. Because Hidayat (decree) 88, issued in 1932 and in
effect until 1946, banned political meetings and restricted the registration of
political organisations in the Phulkian states, the leaders of the Punjab Praja
Mandal operated from bases in British Punjab. In Patiala the one comparatively
safe site for spreading their message was religious diwans or meetings that even
the autocratic princely government was reluctant to suppress. Consequently
much of the early states’ people’s movement had a Sikh religious or communal
orientation, although in 1931 the Sikh population in Patiala at 38.9 per cent
was only the barest of a majority compared to 38.2 per cent for Hindus and
22.4 per cent for Muslims. Moreover the Patiala rulers adroitly blunted Sikh
opposition. When Master Tara Singh gained control of the SGPC in 1935, he
concluded an agreement with Bhupinder Singh that divided the Akali members
of the praja mandal into those who wanted to continue the struggle against
the maharaja and those who were willing to turn to other objectives. After
Bhupinder Singh died in 1938, his heir, Yadavindra Singh, co-opted one section
of the praja mandal when he married Mohinder Kaur, the 15-year-old daughter

6 Walia, Praja Mandal, p. 27. 70 Ramusack, ‘Punjab States’, in Jeffrey, People, pp. 179-91.
71 Gurbachan Singh Talib, Sardar Sewa Singh Thikriwala: A Brief Sketch of His Life and Work (Patiala,
1971).

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SOCIETY AND POLITICS

of its leader Harchand Singh Jeji.’” As the Akalis neglected peasant issues,
the communists found fertile ground for their organising efforts. Mridula
Mukherjee has traced communist efforts to organise the occupancy tenants in
the biswedari villages during the 1930s and 1940s.’

From 1938 to 1947, there were three distinct elements in the freedom
struggle: the Akalis, the communists, and the praja mandal. The Akalis were
concerned about the position of Sikhs if there were a partition. Some argued
for an independent Sikh state and were sympathetic to the Patiala ruler, whose
territory might serve as its core. Yadavindra Singh favoured Akali causes, and by
the 1941 census the Patiala population was 46.3 per cent Sikh, while Ludhiana,
the British Punjab district with the highest percentage of Sikhs, had 41.7 per
cent. The increase in the Sikh population of Patiala from the 1901—41 censuses
possibly indicates the success of efforts to have Sikhs identify themselves as Sikhs
and not Hindus rather than migration or higher birth rates. The communists
concentrated on gaining proprietary rights for occupancy tenants, which were
eventually achieved in 1952. Mukherjee has pointed out, however, that the
political vision of the communist leaders was limited, never linking economic
improvement to the end of British rule and of their princely collaborators,
namely Yadavindra Singh, and so their efforts had restricted impact.”4

During the second phase of popular political activity in the Punjab States,
urban-based professionals who were mainly Hindu took over the leadership
of the praja mandal. They shifted the mandal’s focus from Patiala to smaller
states such as Nabha and Jind and emphasised different issues such as more
employment of educated states’ subjects and greater protection of civil rights.
The praja mandal was generally silent on peasant demands. After 1947 in the
newly created Patiala and East Punjab States Union, the Pradesh Congress
experienced the earlier inability of the praja mandal to forge a united front.
PEPSU was soon amalgamated into Punjab state in 1956. Seven years later
a Punjabi-speaking state was created with Patiala as its geographical centre.
The tragic events in Punjab during the 1980s manifested the continuing diffi-
culties of channelling communal appeals based on religion and language into
constitutional and electoral arenas.

As seen in Travancore, communal appeals and organisations had existed
since at least the early twentieth century. But many British officials such as

72 Ramusack, ‘Punjab States’, in Jeffrey, People, pp. 187-93. Mohinder Kaur served in the Indian
Parliament (Lok Sabha, 1967-1969 and Rajya Sabha, 1964-1967, 1969-71) and was known for
her social work interests: Hurtig, Maharajahs, pp. 281-94.

73 Mukherjee, ‘Peasant Movement’.

74 Thid., pp. 276-83; Mohinder Singh, Peasant Movement, chs 2-5 covers the post-1947 campaigns
for tenancy legislation.

235

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

Michael O’ Dwyer, Arthur Lothian and Conrad Corfield and Indian nationalist
leaders including G. K. Gokhale had contended that communal activity, by
which they usually meant conflicts, ostensibly on religious issues, between
Hindus and Muslims, was absent in princely states. O’ Dwyer, who had served as
resident in Hyderabad (1908-10) and governor of Punjab (1913-20), declared:
‘Communal tension was unknown in Hyderabad, and generally in Native
States, in those days; for the political agitator who stirs up creed against creed,
class against class, and incites his ignorant dupes to defiance of authority, was
not tolerated at all, or not to the same extent as in British India.’”°

But O’Dwyer saw the virus of communal appeals spreading to the princely
states during the 1920s. His example occurred in Hyderabad in 1924 when an
allegedly Hindu mob murdered a Muslim political officer at Gulbarga. Mus-
lims retaliated by attacking over fifty Hindu temples in the city. Subsequently
there was a sharp increase in communal violence between Hindus and Mus-
lims in princely states during the 1930s. Episodes were reported in Alwar,
Bahawalpur, Bharatpur, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Jind, Junagadh, Kapurthala,
Kashmir, Malerkotla, Ramdurg and Travancore. However, research is fragmen-
tary on most of these incidents and more especially on the possible existence
of earlier occurrences.

In this section I will focus on three states — Hyderabad, Alwar and Kashmir —
where tensions between Hindus and Muslims reveal the wide variations in
communal political activity in princely states. Much of the available research
is descriptive rather than analytical, and consequently my account reflects this
orientation. Moreover, there has been little attention to how public festivals and
institutions such as schools, temples and mosques shaped communal identities
in the princely states.

The 1924 episode at Gulbarga was a precursor ofa more extended confronta-
tion in Hyderabad during the late 1930s. Several bloody riots throughout the
state during 1938 triggered a nine-month satyagraha campaign of civil dis-
obedience that involved the Hyderabad State Congress and indigenous and
external groups from the Arya Samaj and the Hindu Mahasabha demanding
religious freedom and more popular participation in government. Indian na-
tionalists and their local allies had alleged that the Muslim-ruled state favoured
the Muslim minority, which constituted about 11 per cent of the population, at
the expense of the Hindu majority, which was about 85 per cent. Thus demands
for civil rights and an equitable distribution of public revenues in an autocratic
state placed Indians in opposition to an Indian government. Ian Copland has

75 O'Dwyer, India, p. 141.

236

SOCIETY AND POLITICS

argued that politicisation and proselytisation had created this campaign. The
Indian National Congress, the AISPC, the Muslim League and the Hindu
Mahasabha had all turned their attention to Hyderabad as it appeared possible
that federation might bring this large state into an Indian Union. These political
groups attracted the urban proletariat, who had been the object of conversion
campaigns by the Arya Samaj encouraging the return of Muslims with Hindu
ancestors and by the Ittihad-ul-Muslimeen, a local Muslim society seeking to
insulate the Muslim minority position through converts from Hinduism.”
Copland concludes that communalism was less prevalent in princely states
because of their smaller industrial base and their lower level of politicisation
until relatively late.” But Dick Kooiman claims that in Hyderabad, as in
Travancore and Baroda, the spread of official enumeration and earlier rivalries
over government employment fostered communal identities that could erupt
into communal violence as federation and the prospect of increased popular
representation in legislatures raised the stakes.’* Further north, public protests
by Muslim Meos over agrarian and social status issues were coded as communal
in the Hindu-ruled state of Alwar.

From the 1910s onward, Maharaja Jai Singh assiduously extended his inter-
nal control in Alwar by enhancing demands for land revenue, appropriating
natural resources, especially forest products, and exacting forced labour. Simul-
taneously he contested British paramountcy, projecting himself as a Hindu king
and an Indian nationalist through patronage of Hindu organisations, especially
the Sanatan Dharma Sabha and the Arya Samaj, and nationalist ventures such
as Unity Conferences in 1927 and 1932.”? These policies adversely affected his
subjects. The population of Alwar was 73 per cent Hindu and 27 per cent Mus-
lim. Meos, who were 60 per cent of the Muslim category,®° were constructed
in colonial ethnography as a group of indeterminate social status between tribe
and caste, with equally ambiguous religious commitment. The 1901 Census
reported the allegation that the Meos ‘are ready to observe the feasts of both the
Musalman and Hindu religions, the fasts of neither’.8! In a perceptive analysis
based on colonial archives, state propaganda, Meo oral sources and oral in-
terviews, Shail Mayaram has asserted that the Meos claimed ‘a bi-genealogical

status .. . as inheritors of both Muslim and Rajput traditions’.®

76 Tan Copland, ““Communalism” in Princely India: The Case of Hyderabad, 1930-1940’, MAS 22
(1988), pp. 783-814.

77 Thid., pp. 812-14. 78 Kooiman, ‘Strength’, pp. 92-8.

79 Mayaram, Resisting Regimes, ch. 3; Ramusack, Princes, pp. 158-60.

80 Mayaram, Resisting Regimes, p. 164.

81 Census of India, 1901, vol. 25: Rajputana, Part I - Report, p. 157.

82 Mayaram, Resisting Regimes, p. 117.

237

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

Most accounts of the Meo opposition begin with a no-rent campaign in
December 1932. They claim that external Muslim groups, especially the
Tabligh movement, had heightened Meo religious identity as Muslims, and
interpret the protests as communal, with Muslim Meos attacking a Hindu
prince and his Hindu subjects. Mayaram decisively challenges this interpre-
tation. Two Meo texts emphasise that the movement began a month earlier
with actions against oppressive revenue collectors; that indigenous Meos were
leaders; that the protest was against exorbitant land taxes and demands for
forced labour in state properties such as game preserves; that Hindus partic-
ipated in the protests; and that Hindu banias precipitated Meo attacks when
they betrayed their plans to the state.*4 British sources, particularly a report
by A. W. Ibbotson, confirm the agrarian character of the movement and dis-
credit charges of looting and property destruction, while revealing that vio-
lence against the banias erupted only after Meo leaders were arrested.®° More
recently, Ian Copland agrees that the initial rebellion of Meos in November
1932 was not communal in character at the outset but that the indifference
of Hindu groups, the collaboration of external Muslim organisations, and the
activities of Alwar officials glossed the rebellion as communal.®° After request-
ing British military assistance to regain control, Jai Singh openly orchestrated
Hindu support for his regime while defying British pressure for reforms. The
British soon ordered him to leave Alwar in 1933. At the same time the Tab-
ligh and other Muslim groups intensified educational and organisational work
among the Meos and communal tensions increased, but subsided after the
peasant movement. Jai Singh’s successor, Tej Singh, exacerbated the situation
with continuing support for Hindu communal groups and by appointing
N. B. Khare, a strong supporter of the Hindu Mahasabha, as chief minister.
Independence brought terror, death and ethnic cleansing to the Meos of Alwar,
who were homogenised as Muslims and foreigners.°”

Far to the north under the shadow of the Himalayas, the Muslim commu-
nity that constituted 93 per cent of the population in the Kashmir province

83 Partap C. Aggarwal, “The Meos of Rajasthan and Haryana’, in Imtiaz Ahmad (ed.), Caste and Social
Stratification among the Muslims (New Delhi, 1973), pp. 21-44; Ramusack, Princes, pp. 179-80;
Majid Siddiqi, “History and Society in a Popular Rebellion: Mewat 1920-1933’, CSSH 23 (1986),
pp. 442-67.

84 Mayaram, Resisting Regimes, ch. 5.

85 Tbid., pp. 107-10, 151. The British officer deputed to Alwar stated: “The immediate cause of the
Meo rebellion was the excessive taxation levied on the cultivators’: Arthur C. Lothian, Kingdoms of
Yesterday (London, 1951), p. 124.

86 Tan Copland, “The Further Shores of Partition: Ethnic Cleansing in Rajasthan 1947’, PP, No. 168
(August 1998), pp. 220-5.

87 Tbid. and Mayaram, Resisting Regimes, ch. 6.

238

SOCIETY AND POLITICS

of the Jammu and Kashmir state has, until recently, been represented as rela-
tively homogeneous and incorporated with Hindus in Kashmiriyat, a syncretic
Kashmiri cultural concord. Tracing the fluctuating bases of Kashmiri iden-
tity from the Mughal period to the 1950s, Chitralekha Zutshi argues that
regional and national affiliations competed with religious ones in differing for-
mations, with tragic consequences for contemporary Kashmir.*® During the
1880s material changes such as the deteriorating economic position of shawl
merchants and landholders provided the context for contending efforts to de-
fine the nature of Islam in Kashmir. Two mirwaizes (head preachers) embodied
opposing positions — the mirwaiz Kashmir proclaiming a purified Islam and
the need for modern education for Muslims, while the mirwaiz Hamdaani
sanctioned prayers to mystical Sufi pirs, who were deemed saints. Their cam-
paigns to control Muslim mosques and shrines in the Srinagar Valley and
their inability to incorporate rural Muslims hindered the formation of a coher-
ent Kashmiri Muslim community.®? Efforts during the 1920s would be more
successful.

Mass political activity in Kashmir reputedly commenced on 13 July 1931,
which was later celebrated as Martyrs Day and a public holiday in the state.
Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, who became known as the ‘Lion of Kashmir’,
was acclaimed as the charismatic leader who orchestrated the political mobil-
isation. As does Chitralekha Zutshi, Upendra Zutshi has claimed that many
long-term developments such as British imperialism, and not just the person-
ality of one man, fostered the agitations in Kashmir during the early 1930s.”
Both cite British interventions as significant in fostering a political as well as
religious communal identity; these included a reformed land revenue system,
which granted occupancy rights to most Muslim cultivators, and recognition
of Muslim grievances about lack of access to education and government em-
ployment.” Upendra Zutshi traces how, in articulating their support for the
demands of Kashmiri Muslims, informal Muslim groups in Kashmir were
joined by Muslim organisations in British India ranging from the Muslim
Kashmiri Conference, which began in Lahore around 1911, to the Anjuman-
i-Islamia Punjab, to the All-India Muslim League.”? Thus two decades of
petition politics channelled through memorials and resolutions preceded the
attention-grabbing outbreak in 1931.

88 Chitralekha Zutshi, Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir (New
Delhi, forthcoming in 2003).

89 Chitralekha Zutshi, ‘Religion, State, and Community: Contested Identities in the Kashmir Valley,
c. 1880-1920’, SA 23, 1 (2000), pp. 109-28.

9° 'U. T. Zutshi, Emergence, ch. 1, esp. p. 18.

9! Chitralekha Zutshi, ‘Religion’, pp. 114-16. 92 U. T. Zutshi, Emergence, chs 5 and 6.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

The Kashmir agitation had three major phases.”? On 13 July 1931 a crowd
gathered to protest against the trial of a Muslim servant arrested for making
an allegedly anti-Hindu and seditious speech during a public protest against
discriminatory state policies towards Muslims. Police firing into the largely
Muslim crowd triggered widespread attacks on Hindu property in Srinagar.
During the next few months Sheikh Abdullah (1905-82) emerged as a key
leader. He was a 26-year-old graduate of Aligarh Muslim University and a
state subject who had recently left the state education department to become
a full-time political organiser. But other local and external groups were ac-
tive. Three Muslim groups from Punjab soon contended as champions of the
Kashmiri Muslims: the Ahrars, an urban, middle-class political party anxious
to win a rural base for their struggle with the Unionist Party in Punjab; the
Ahmadiyya, a heterodox Muslim proselytising sect based at Qadian in Pun-
jab near the Jammu border; and the All-India Kashmir Conference operating
from Lahore. Sheikh Abdullah forged political alliances with the Ahmadiyyas
and Yusuf Shah, a radical claimant to succeed Rasul Shah as mirwaiz. In the
process Kashmiris acquired substantial experience of agitational politics and
incarceration in state jails for political activity. When repressive policies failed
to quell the public demonstrations, the first phase ended with Maharaja Hari
Singh appealing to the British for military force, which was provided in re-
turn for a British diwan and a commission of inquiry. As would continue to
happen after independence, the GOI became the last resort for an embattled
state administration in Kashmir. But British assistance did not terminate the
multifaceted political campaign.

The second phase centred on rural grievances in Mirpur and western and
southern Jammu, a province with 61 per cent Muslim and 37 per cent Hindu
populations in 1941. Muslim peasants initially sought relief from coercive tac-
tics employed to collect land revenue in 1932, but their economic goal acquired
communal overtones with subsequent attacks on the property of Hindu shop-
keepers and moneylenders. The third phase saw clashes in Srinagar in 1933
between supporters of the rival candidates for mirwaiz. As the popular move-
ment gradually subsided, Abdullah shifted into electoral politics in 1934. In
response to British pressure, Maharaja Hari Singh had promised a legislative
assembly with thirty-three elected members and forty-three nominated and
official members. As in British India, there was a concerted effort to channel

93 This synthesis is based on ibid.; Ian Copland, ‘Islam and Political Mobilization in Kashmir, 1931-
34, PA54 (1981), pp. 228-59; Barbara N. Ramusack, ‘Exotic Imports or Home-Grown Riots: The
Muslim Agitations in Kashmir in the Early 1930s’, unpublished paper presented at Third Punjab
Studies Conference, University of Pennsylvania, 1971.

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SOCIETY AND POLITICS

communal and agitational activity into the electoral arena. Eventually, under
the influence of Jawaharlal Nehru and the Indian National Congress, Abdullah
Ghulam Abbas, a Muslim leader from Jammu, and Prem Nath Bazaz, a
Kashmiri brahman pandit, transformed the Jammu and Kashmir Muslim
Conference into the secular Jammu and Kashmir National Conference.”

Tan Copland has argued that

religion was an essential factor in the process of mobilization, providing an avenue for orga-
nization and propaganda and a sense of communality among Muslims which transcended
the formidable barriers of class, education and religion. But the root cause of the revolt
was socio-economic — a determination on the part of the Muslims to win for themselves a
prominent position in Kashmiri society.”

Upendra Zutshi mentions material factors for politicisation such as the com-
pletion of the Jhelum Valley Road in 1890, which allowed wheeled traffic to
enter Kashmir for the first time, and of the Banihal Cart Road in 1922 link-
ing Jammu to Srinagar.”° Although he does not explore their implications,
these roads might have affected Kashmiri political activity in at least two major
ways. First, they facilitated the movement of outside politicians into Kashmir.
Second, although Kashmir had been linked to Central Asian and European
markets for over a century through the export of shawls,” improved roads ex-
panded the Punjabi-dominated trade network between Kashmir and India and
tied the state more closely to the world economy. Asa result, the dislocations of
the First World War and the 1929 depression would be more keenly felt than
when the Kashmiri economy was less integrated. Recent but as yet unpublished
research of scholars such as Mridu Rai and Chitralekha Zutshi will enhance
our understanding of this fateful political mobilisation.

CONCLUSION

Alwar, Hyderabad and Kashmir as well as Mysore, Rajkot, Jaipur, Travancore
and Patiala provide a base for reaching tentative conclusions about elite political
leadership, non-elite participation and the role of outsiders, the incidence of
communal idioms, and the focus of political opposition in the princely states.
Because they have left more accessible records, educated urban elites have
been portrayed as the path-breakers in associational political activity in the

94 Bazaz, History, chs 8-13. 95 Copland, ‘Islam’, p. 257.

96 Upendra Zutshi, Emergence, p. 129.

97 Michelle Maskiell, ‘Consuming Kashmir: Shawls and Empire, 1500-2000’, /WH 13, 1 (2002),
pp. 27-65.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

princely states. Beginning in the late 1910s, these elites first organised around
class-oriented issues such as state employment and civil rights. Hampered by
repressive measures from princely durbars and ambivalent Congress policies,
they found it difficult to develop autonomous organisations. For much of the
colonial period, praja mandal leaders sought reforms to broaden their political
participation rather than transformations in the political, economic or social
structures of the princely states. As did many Congress members, these elites
desired social stability and were willing to compromise with princely durbars to
gain access to power and economic resources or even more limited goals such
as release from jail. Their class interests made it difficult for such leaders to
cultivate mass bases. Furthermore, they lacked financial supporters and thus
the material resources to undertake full-time political work.

In many princely states, leaders of urban-based praja mandals or rural kisan
sabhas began to acquire experience in organising and mobilising their con-
stituencies about forty years later than had British Indian nationalist leaders.
Thus the political vanguard in the princely states had only a few decades to
establish themselves before independence and integration brought both wider
opportunities and stiffer competition from more seasoned politicians. More-
over, the political associations in unions of princely states as in Saurashtra and
Rajasthan were fragmented along the borders of the erstwhile princely states.
Thus princely state politicians found it difficult to fashion the coalitions nec-
essary to achieve dominance in post-colonial electoral politics. These factors
obscure politicians from the princely states in the scholarship on post-colonial
Indian politics.

During the 1990s scholars have begun to target peasants, tribal groups
and industrial labourers who created autonomous political movements. These
political actors sought the revision of government policies that affected them
adversely. In Tehri Garhwal peasants demanded the revocation of economically
disadvantageous forest policies. In Baroda the Devi movement agitated for im-
proved ritual and economic status for tribal groups. In Mysore urban labourers
showed growing political consciousness and impressive organisational skills in
aseries of strikes from the 1920s onward. Urban elites attempted to incorporate
these non-elite groups during the 1930s and 1940s. Although the Congress
was relatively persuasive in Mysore, it had less success in encompassing peas-
ant and tribal movements in states such as Patiala. Communists were more
effective in Travancore and Cochin.

With a few exceptions, women remain the most veiled of the political ac-
tors in princely states. Janaki Nair has recorded the protests of some women
workers in Mysore during the strikes in the 1940s, but she has little on other

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SOCIETY AND POLITICS

aspects of their lives and political activities. Robin Jeffrey has scrutinised the
increasing literacy of women in Travancore and their subsequent entrance to
salaried professions, but he selected only four women to illustrate changing
roles. Akamma Cheriyan Varkey, who led the 1938 demonstration but then
was rejected by the Congress hierarchy after 1948, is the sole example of a
woman political activist before 1947.

It is now clear that outsiders from British India were not the primary initia-
tors of popular political activities within many princely states as Indian princes
and British officials had claimed. Certainly the borders of princely states were
as porous to political ideas as they were to smuggled goods. Although they
were influenced by the nationalist project being constructed in British India,
local leaders were dominant in the princely states. Only gradually did the In-
dian National Congress, socialists, communists and communal groups from
British India penetrate the princely states. These groups were increasingly ea-
ger to broaden their base of support as independence and the high political
stakes became more real. After some initial forays during the 1920s, Mahatma
Gandhi, Sardar Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru remained disengaged until the late
1930s. Socialists and communists were more aggressive during the 1930s, but
they failed to build a strong popular base except in Kerala. During the same
decades the Arya Samaj and the Hindu Mahasabha championed the protection
of Hindus in the more distant Muslim-ruled states of Bhopal and Hyderabad as
well as in Alwar and Bharatpur. Muslim groups ranging from the conservative
Muslim League to the more radical Ahrars to the heterodox Ahmadiyyas in-
tervened on behalf of co-religionists in Hyderabad and in Kashmir. The Akali
Sikhs had numerous reasons for their deep involvement in Patiala state. But
these outsiders rarely achieved firm coalitions with local leaders.

The princely states demonstrate that the forging of communal identities and
public, sometimes violent, communal confrontations had complex sources.
Although the British exercised considerable formal and informal power over
internal affairs, Indian rulers and their governments had significant autonomy
in formulating policies that aroused internal opposition, such as employment
in expanding state bureaucracies. The Sikhs in Patiala, the Muslims in Kashmir
and the Meos in Alwar provide diverse examples of how religious identities and
economic grievances fuelled communal political activity.

Princes and urban elites influenced the idioms of political protest in their
states. Where a minority of the population shared the ruler’s religion and he
or she favoured his or her co-religionists with government positions, generous
patronage of religious establishments, and protective legislation, popular po-
litical activity could quickly become communal in orientation. This process

243

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

occurred most notably in Kashmir and Hyderabad. In the former a Muslim
majority protested against a Hindu ruler who was protecting Brahman pan-
dits and in the latter a Hindu majority challenged a Muslim prince. In Patiala
the situation was reversed. Here Akali groups demanded that a Sikh maharaja
appoint more Sikh officials including a Sikh chief minister, which Yadavin-
dra Singh eventually did in the 1940s. In Alwar and neighbouring Bharatpur,
Hindu rulers transformed their traditional patronage of religious institutions
into collaboration with communal political organisations, which had tragic
consequences for a liminal minority within their states.

It was quite late in the colonial era before either elite or non-elite politicians
endeavoured to alter radically or end princely rule. At least publicly, most
viewed princes as benevolent rulers who desired to protect their subjects as
a father did his children. Rapacious colonial suzerains, self-seeking ministers,
greedy relatives, and perhaps substance abuse deterred rulers from this duty.
But princes played multiple roles and increasingly were unable to accommodate
their diverse constituencies.

244

CHAPTER 8

FEDERATION OR INTEGRATION?

By 1929 Indian princes and nationalists were mutually frustrated with British
policies. The princes smarted from the refusal of the Indian States Committee
to define paramountcy and thereby limit the extent of British intervention
in their states. Indian nationalists were angered by the appointment of an
Indian Reforms Commission that included no Indian members to investigate
the operation of the 1919 reforms. The public demonstrations against the
Commission, colloquially known as the Simon Commission after its chair, Sir
John Simon, during its tour in India indicated that it would not be business as
usual. In a bold move that consigned the Commission’s report to the archives,
Lord Irwin persuaded Ramsey MacDonald, the Prime Minister, to convene a
Round Table Conference in London in 1930. Representatives of all British and
Indian parties would be invited to discuss the future constitutional relationship
between Britain and India. For the first time, representatives of the Indian
princes would participate in such deliberations. Although the prime goal of
the British was to channel elite Indian opposition into constitutional debates
away from mass protests, the Round Table Conference also put the final nail
in the coffin of the British policy of isolating the princes from each other and
from British Indian leaders.

Princely participation in the Round Table Conference shows that neither
the British nor the Indian nationalists considered the princes to be politi-
cal ciphers or puppets. Although the British wanted the princes to counter
the Indian nationalists, they did not pull the strings that triggered princely
support for or later opposition to federation with British Indian provinces.
Both British officials and Indian nationalists pursued princely allies, but the
princes, for better or worse, exercised significant autonomy throughout the
protracted constitutional negotiations, inaugurated in 1927 and finally sus-
pended in 1939. This process was the first instalment in the integration of the
princely states into a post-colonial government. It reveals the difficulties that
the princes encountered in any effort to present a united front, as well as the
multiple constituencies in Britain with conflicting agendas in India.

Although formal constitutional proposals during the Second World War
were limited to the Cripps Mission in 1942, the princes, like other political
leaders, worked to enhance their bargaining positions. Congress politicians

245

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

broadened their mass appeal; socialists and communists organised urban in-
dustrial workers and peasant unions (kisan sabhas); Muslim League leaders
undertook a mass contact campaign. Simultaneously the Muslim League and
many Indian princes sustained their beleaguered patron during crucial internal
challenges such as the Quit India Movement of 1942.

By mid-1943 most British officials and Indian politicians understood that
substantial devolution of power would occur whenever the war ended. By
May 1945, when victory was declared in Europe, the British accelerated the
process known as decolonisation. Much of the historiography on this topic has
focused on whether the British withdrew from India primarily on their own
initiative or whether the Indian nationalists pushed them out. Historians have
tended to a middle position. H. V. Brasted and Carl Bridge have argued for ‘an
approach which coordinates all of the existing contextual strands’! and suggest
that first, the ““high political” story has still not been satisfactorily told as
regards Congress and British strategies’; second, ‘more detailed psephological
analysis of the 1937 and 1945-46 elections is needed’; third, ‘the “history from
below” studies must be integrated into the main account — Did the subalterns
force Congress, the League, and the British, to solve the constitutional problem
quickly in order to head off an impending social “revolution”?’; and fourth,
‘since decolonisation was the product of changes at the metropolitan, colonial
and international levels, it is likely that it can only be explained in terms of
changes at all of those levels’.

These same trends should also be applied to the analysis of the last two
decades of the princely states. Expanding in breadth and depth upon ear-
lier studies by Steven Ashton, Urmila Phadnis and myself, Robin Moore and
more recently Ian Copland have detailed the high political story of British
and princely strategies and personalities during the devolution of power.*
John McLeod has surveyed the merger of small princely states in the attach-
ment scheme in western India,* and Lucien Benichou and Michael Witmer
have analysed the integration of Hyderabad in the context of international
diplomacy as well as Indian regional and national politics.” Consequently our

! H. V. Brasted and Carl Bridge, “The Transfer of Power in South Asia: An Historiographical Review’,
SA 17, 1 (1994), p. 94.

? Thid., p. 114.

3 Ashton, British Policy; Urmila Phadnis, Towards the Integration of Indian States, 1919-1947 (London,
1968); Ramusack, Princes; R. J. Moore, Escape from Empire: The Attlee Government and the Indian
Problem (Oxford, 1983); Ian Copland, Princes.

4 McLeod, ‘Agency’, and Sovereignty.

> Benichou, Autocracy; Michael D. Witmer, The 1947-1948 India—Hyderabad Conflict: Realpolitik
and the Formation of the Modern Indian State, PhD thesis, Temple University, 1995.

246

FEDERATION OR INTEGRATION?

understanding is slowly being refined; certain aspects become more sharply
defined while others remain indistinct.

Several human and structural factors were responsible for the unexpectedly
smooth and quick integration of most princely states into independent India
and Pakistan. First, the princes, who did not have decades of experience in col-
lective negotiations, found it difficult to decide on their mutual best interests
and then to unite and stay united in a common campaign, both during the
1930s and the more intense bargaining from 1945 to 1948. Second, the British
had made promises that they lacked the material resources and the ideological
resolve to fulfil. Third, the official British hierarchy had long encompassed
conflicting opinions about the princely states and these differences sharpened
during this unprecedented crisis. In the face of such divisions, authority grav-
itated to those who were politically secure and prepared to exercise power. In
1946, Lord Mountbatten had the political support at home and the personal
rapport with Jawaharlal Nehru to impose a policy of accession of the princely
states to independent states despite stout resistance from key British political
officers. Fourth, Congress leaders had equally ambivalent views of the princes
and employed threats, equivocation and British collaboration to secure integra-
tion after the British departed. Here again, individuals who were prepared to
act decisively at a crucial juncture were pivotal. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, with
extensive experience in the states’ people’s politics of Gujarat, and V. P. Menon,
his administrative deputy, secured integration with skill, determination, and
Mountbatten’s active collaboration. Integration was not a foregone conclu-
sion but once the process began it was carried through with extraordinary

rapidity.

PREPARATIONS FOR CONSTITUTIONAL
NEGOTIATIONS

Disgruntled by the refusal of the Butler Report to define paramountcy, the
princes saw the Round Table Conference in London as a venue to negotiate
directly with British authorities in the metropole to restrict British intervention
in their internal affairs. Although the support of the princes for federation
at the Round Table Conference in November 1930 was a dramatic formal
gesture, it was not without precedent. Neither were the process of negotiations
or the factors that influenced their course. There were at least five areas of
continuity.

First, some princes renewed informal deliberations with British Indian
politicians, who still saw them as useful allies or players who had to be

247

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

accommodated. Second, ministers employed by the princes, either individually
or jointly, were influential intermediaries in the consultations. Third, the
Standing Committee of the Chamber of Princes became a battleground for
control of the Indian States Delegation to London and its agenda. Fourth,
internal rivalries among the princes were now projected into a larger arena
and amplified as the stakes were perceived as larger. Fifth, conflicting attitudes
towards the princes within the British imperial establishment continued to
influence, usually covertly, the strategies of individual princes as well as the
negotiations.

Once the Congress and Gandhi declined to attend the Round Table Confer-
ence and decided to launch a civil disobedience movement, moderate national-
ists, most notably Tej Bahadur Sapru, and communalists such as Muhammad
Ali and M. M. Malaviya dominated the negotiations prior to the Conference.
Meanwhile prominent princes within the Chamber, mainly Ganga Singh of
Bikaner, Hamidullah of Bhopal and Hari Singh of Kashmir, were meeting with
British Indian leaders during 1929. They sought to generate a constitution that
would be acceptable to all major political groups in India.° Such consultations
became more crucial as British officials hinted that it might be possible to
go beyond the recommendations of the Simon Report. However, the princes
and nationalists, ranging from congressmen such as Motilal Nehru, to Hindu
Mahasahbites such as Malaviya and B. S. Moonje, to Muslim Leaguers such
as Muhammad Ali and M. A. Jinnah, reached no concrete agreements at a
series of teas and dinners during 1930. On 29 March 1930, British Indian
leaders assured the princes that a dominion government would be far more
cooperative than the existing GOI. Moreover, Malaviya promised them that
they would not be forced to adopt any prescribed form of government.’ These
remarks were clearly sweet music to the ears of the princes. However, as fewer
Indian nationalists were willing to attend such sessions, Liberal and communal
leaders were more prominent.

Collaboration between princes and British Indian politicians sympathetic
to federation also occurred on the faultline of Muslim politics. On the
princely side, Hamidullah of Bhopal was friendly with many Muslim politi-
cians since his student days at Aligarh.* Before the first Round Table Confer-
ence, Hamidullah hosted a series of talks in London between moderates such
as Sapru, Sastri and Setalvad and Muslims leaders including the Aga Khan,
Jinnah, and Muhammad Shafi from Punjab. Later in 1931, Bhopal, with the

© Ramusack, Princes, pp. 188-91. Other significant sources are Ashton, Copland and Phadnis.
v Meeting of March 29, 1930, PSAP, CS, Supplementary Index, Case No. V, File No. 14 of 1930.
8 Ramusack, Princes, pp. 54-5 and passim.

248

FEDERATION OR INTEGRATION?

blessing of Gandhi, would try unsuccessfully to fashion a compromise on the
issue of separate electorates for Muslims in a federation.”

From the late 1920s onward, the ministers and legal advisers of the princes
played a more conspicuous role as surrogates for their employers. Indeed Ian
Copland has argued that the princes agreed to a rapprochement with the nation-
alists in 1928 mainly because of the ‘artfully deceitful pen’ of K. M. Panikkar.!°
This assertion ignores the extended contacts that Chamber members had with
moderate, pro-federation British Indian politicians in their professional ca-
pacity as lawyers and in cultural and religious institutions. At the same time,
it highlights the changing roles of ministers. Princes had long used talented
British Indians as bureaucrats within their states to consolidate princely control
at the expense of their indigenous nobilities. Now rulers engaged resourceful,
ambitious British Indians externally as diplomatic agents and internally as ad-
ministrators. They used ministers to produce position papers and speeches on
complex issues and to serve as contemporary vakils in Westminster and New
Delhi. Increasingly, these ministers shaped the agendas as well as the strategy
and tactics of the princes in their constitutional negotiations with the British,
Indian nationalists, and other princes.

Kailash N. Haksar (1878-1953), a Kashmiri brahman, and K. M. Panikkar
(1894-1963), an Oxford-educated nayar from Travancore, were the two most
active intermediaries during the 1930s. A member of the minority govern-
ment in Gwalior, Haksar undertook several assignments for the Chamber of
Princes. Panikkar looked to Haksar as a mentor and worked in the Cham-
ber Secretariat and later in Patiala and Bikaner.'’ Other significant ministers
were Sir Manubhai Mehta (1868-1946), then at Baroda; Sir Abkar Hydari
(1869-1941), the finance minister at Hyderabad; Sir Mirza Ismail, the diwan
at Mysore; and Mir Maqbool Mahmud and Sir Liaqat Hayat Khan at Patiala.
Although only a few ministers such as Mir Maqbool Mahmud moved freely
between political careers in princely states and British India,'? many of these

? Thid., p. 204, notes 74 and 75; R. J. Moore, The Crisis of Indian Unity, 1917-1940 (Oxford, 1974),
pp. 126-7, 144, 158-63.

10 Copland, Princes, p. 75.

11 KM. Panikkar, An Autobiography, translated from the Malayalam by K. Kirshnamurthy (Madras,
1977), pp. 73-146.

12 Unlike most of the ministers in princely states, Mahmud and Liagqat also participated in British
Indian politics. Elected to the Punjab Legislative Council in 1923 and 1926 (as a member of the
Swaraj Party) and to the Punjab Legislative Assembly in 1937 (as a member of the Unionist Party),
Mir Maqbool Mahmud was a close political associate and relative of Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan, the
Unionist leader and chief minister (1937) of Punjab. Two of his sisters were married to Sikandar
and a daughter married Shaukat Hayat Khan, Sikandar’s son. Liaqat Hayat Khan was the brother of
Sikandar: Syed Nur Ahmad, From Martial Law to Martial Law: Politics in the Punjab, 1919-1958,

249

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

men were concerned about the future shape of the Indian nation.!? However,
there has been no significant study of their contribution to the ideology or
construction of Indian nationalism.

The participation of these ministers in the negotiations over federation has
long been known, but their influence is not sharply etched. Moreover, moderate
and communal British Indian politicians were significant collaborators with
them. One prime example is the relationship between two Kashmiri brahmans,
Haksar and Tej Bahadur Sapru.'4 A Liberal party leader and highly successful
lawyer based in Allahabad with many princes as professional clients, Sapru had
written the chapter on the Indian princes in the 1928 report of the All-Parties
Conference that formulated principles for a future Indian constitution. This
document argued for federation, that treaty rights and obligations of the princes
should transfer from the British Crown to an Indian successor government, and
that any dispute on treaty provisions should be referred to a supreme court.!*
Haksar, a close personal and political friend of Sapru, was an enthusiastic
advocate of federation. These two men lobbied intensively with the princes for
this goal. In 1927 Haksar had approached Panikkar to accept employment in
Kashmir state and subsequently used the latter’s research and journalist skills as
an employee of the Chamber of Princes to fashion pro-federation propaganda.

During the summer of 1930, preparations for what was to be the first of
three Round Table Conferences were in high gear. Appointed as secretary of
the India States delegation, Panikkar produced the draft for a book, Federal
India, which advocated ministries responsible to elected legislatures in British
India with full internal autonomy for the princely states.!° More specifically,
federation might accomplish three princely goals. First, the ability of the British
to intervene in princely durbars because of paramountcy might be reduced.
Second, a federation might lead to the dissolution of the political department in
the GOI since federating units would have full responsibility for their internal
affairs and a federation would have no need for political officers. Malcolm

edited by Craig Baxter from a translation from the Urdu by Mahmud Ali (Boulder CO, 1985),
pp. 53, 61, 113, 152, 186. Another example is Dr Jivraj Narayan Mehta, the son-in-law of Manubhai
Mehta, who served as Prime Minister of Baroda in 1948 and then was Chief Minister of Gujarat
from 1960 to 1963.

13 Panikkar, Autobiography, p. 138 and passim mentions his commitment to federation and Indian
nationalism.

14 Mohan Kumar, Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru: A Political Biography (Gwalior, 1981); Sender, Kashmiri
Pandits, pp. 262-6.

15 Ramusack, Princes, pp. 190-1.

16 Panikkar presented an insider’s view of the extended negotiations over federation in his Autobiography,
pp. 82-110 and claimed that Haksar’s name was added to the book as an author to obtain greater
credibility for his arguments: ibid., pp. 83-4.

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FEDERATION OR INTEGRATION?

Hailey, a distinguished former governor of Punjab and the United Provinces,
remarked after the First Round Table Conference that ‘the princes seem to be
out for the extinction of the Political department, rather than the creation ofa
Federal constitution’.'” Third, the princes might enhance their reputation for
statesmanship by agreeing to federation that would trigger political advances in
British India.'® Other ministers generated additional schemes, notably Hydari
in Hyderabad and Ismail in Mysore, who possibly hoped for a reduction of the
large Mysore subsidy. Their efforts disclose how ministers served not only as
intermediaries but also attempted to shape the policies of the Indian princes.

Princely responses reveal the diversity and difficulty of the rulers operating
as a coherent order. Bikaner and Bhopal were early and energetic advocates
of federation. However, Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, who as Chancellor of
the Chamber of Princes was the nominal supervisor of Haksar and Panikkar,
initially supported federation but then vacillated. His inconstancy forecast how
challenging it would be to secure and retain princely support for federation,
the multiplicity of factors that influenced princes, and, most significant, how
for many advocates of federation it was an instrument for achieving other goals
rather an end in itself.

Patiala’s primary objective was the diminution of paramountcy and not
of his own authority, now besieged from many sides. In 1930 Sikh groups
and the Punjab Riyasti Praja Mandal, the local states’ people’s group, assailed
his sexual habits, his financial extravagance and alleged mismanagement, and
his political despotism. As mentioned earlier, an official inquiry headed by
Fitzpatrick, the local political officer, had exonerated him. Although there is
no surviving documentation of what was said in meetings between Fitzpatrick
and Patiala, Copland suggests that Patiala’s wavering support for federation
might indicate that Fitzpatrick, who was ‘a “Diehard” before the term had
gained . . . notoriety’, had pressured him to resist federation and cooperation
with Indian nationalists.”

In the lengthy negotiations over the composition of the Indian States
Delegation to London, there were two key issues. First, the states’ people’s
groups were seeking representation. Princes were adamantly opposed. British
officials and moderate Indian politicians such as B. L. Mitter and Chimanlal
Setalvad supported the princes. W. Wedgwood Benn, the Labour Secretary of
State, reasoned that ‘[o]ur prime objective is to make the Conference a success.
Merely on the grounds of tactics, therefore . . . it would be fatal to alienate

7 Hailey to Irwin, 19 November 1930, OIOC, MSS Eur E 220/34.
18 Kailas N. Haksar and K. M. Panikkar, Federal India (London, 1930).
9 Copland, Princes, p. 82.

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THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

the princes’.”? The second issue was more critical: which princes should be
invited. On the one hand Patiala sought to limit the composition to members
of the Standing Committee of the Chamber (whom the resident at Hyderabad
said people in the Deccan called a phalanx of Rolls Royce rajas) and others
who were generally not supportive of federation. The nizam of Hyderabad
was miffed since he thought that his state lacked appropriate representation.
Therefore Akbar Hydari, his chief minister; Ismail from Mysore, who also felt
slighted; and Ganga Singh of Bikaner, Patiala’s long-term rival, collaborated
to influence the viceroy to pressure Patiala to revise his list. The result was an
enlarged delegation that included Hamidullah of Bhopal and Sayajai Rao of
Baroda, strong advocates of federation, as well as such pro-federation minis-
ters as Haksar, Ismail and eventually Hydari, who became a firm supporter of
federation during the voyage out from India.!

THE FEDERATION DRAMA

Once most of the delegates reached London in October, informal meetings
proliferated. Acting as the secretary-general of the Indian States delegation,
Haksar continued to lobby for princely commitments to federation, but he
faced powerful countervailing factors. First, Maharaja Gulab Singh of Rewa,
representing conservative princes, feared that federation would bring democ-
racy to the states. Second, some officials at the India Office were rumoured
to be against federation. Third, the ministers who supported federation were
divided by personal ambition and conflicting strategies about how to realise
this goal. But Haksar persisted and with Sapru and M. R. Jayakar as interme-
diaries between the Indian States and the British Indian delegations, they set
the stage.

On 12 November 1930, George V opened the Round Table Conference with
words of welcome spoken into a silver and gold microphone that represented
a new era of communication in imperial politics.

After an adjournment to study the official despatch from India on the Simon
Report, the first plenary session opened five days later. Then Sapru, the liberal
constitutionalist, asked the princes to join an all-India federation, and Ganga
Singh of Bikaner dramatically assented. The Simon Report was consigned
to the archives. The conference quickly divided into several committees
to devise concrete formulas for a federation. The Minorities Committee chaired

20 W, Wedgwood Benn to Lord Irwin, 12 December 1929, NAI, GOI, F&P, 1929, Reforms Branch,
File No. 193-R.
2h Copland, Princes, pp. 83-6.

252

Plenary session of the first Round Table Conference, with Bhupinder Singh of Patiala in a western suit at the far end of the table.

Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, Maharaja Jai Singh of Alwar and Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald at the first Round Table Conference.

FEDERATION OR INTEGRATION?

by Ramsey MacDonald and the Federal Structure Committee headed by Lord
Sankey, the lord chancellor, were the most significant groups.

After the British delegation recovered from its initial surprise, Labour Party
members, the Liberals under the guidance of Lord Reading, the former viceroy,
and moderate Conservatives pondered the possibility of limited responsible
government at the centre. In a federal central government, the princes could
act as a counterweight to the nationalists. Thus all three parties — the princes,
moderate Indian politicians, and British officials — considered federation prin-
cipally as a means rather than as a primary goal. Although some indications
of future sticking points emerged, most crucially in regard to communal rep-
resentation and the federal structure, the first Round Table Conference ended
optimistically.?2

After their laudatory treatment as political innovators in London, the mem-
bers of the Indian States delegation received a much cooler reception in India.
Many princes were lukewarm towards, afraid of, or even hostile to federation.
After reluctant acquiescence in London, Bhupinder Singh of Patiala became
ambivalent towards federation. He was concerned about the princes’ ability to
compete effectively in a parliamentary system, the financial consequences, and
the ongoing lack of definition of paramountcy. Personal pique was also a factor
since Hamidullah defeated Patiala for the chancellorship of the Chamber in
a close election in March 1931. Lord Irwin remarked that he would ‘[n]Jever
feel quite certain that the future would not see Patiala putting spokes in the
Federation wheel that Bhopal would be pushing around’.”? The situation was
not more encouraging among large states in the south, whose cooperation was
crucial. The nizam of Hyderabad was more concerned about reclaiming his
sovereignty over Berar than about all-India goals, and the maharaja of Mysore
did not speak out. Their pro-federation ministers, Hydari and Ismail, aroused
personal jealously among their colleagues, who then attacked them by opposi-
tion to federation. But the shock troops of the anti-federation movement were
conservative princes who were against any changes that might possibly open
their states to democratic reforms.

Even more immediately, perhaps as many as 300 princes who ruled smaller
states feared that they would not survive as independent polities. Most of these
states did not enjoy full sovereign rights such as their own high courts or
the ability to impose the death penalty; they did not have direct treaty rela-
tions with the British, and were not directly represented in the Chamber of

22 Tbid., pp. 87-91; Ramusack, Princes, pp. 202-3.
23 Trwin to Wedgwood Benn, 23 March 1931, OIOC, MSS Eur C152/6.

255

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

Princes. As rumours circulated that the upper house of the federal legislature,
in which the princes would have a greater proportion than in the more pop-
ular lower house, would have around a hundred members, even those lesser
princes who were members of the Chamber worried about their future exis-
tence. Bhupinder Singh of Patiala assumed the leadership of this constituency
with the publication in June 1931 of a pamphlet in which he proposed a
Union of States based on a Chamber of Princes enlarged to include more small
states.”4

When the princes and their ministers met at Bombay in late June 1931, they
debated vigorously about the potential impact of federation and their position
at the second Round Table Conference. Several rulers opposed federation,
including those from Bahawalpur, Kutch, Rampur, Sachin and Sangli, and
ministers such as Bapna of Indore and Pattani of Bhavnagar. Bikaner and
Bhopal remained advocates. They claimed that federation would restrict British
encroachment and that representatives in the federal assembly were more likely
to split on regional than on British India/princely lines. Although the pro-
federation princes won at the Bombay session, Patiala retained a firm base
among the smaller states.

In early August 1931 Bhupinder Singh and Udaibhan Singh (b. 1893,
s. 1911, d. 1954) of Dholpur, his cousin, further refined the alternative to
federation. All states presently members of the Chamber and collective rep-
resentatives of the smaller states would form a federation that would then
join British India in a confederation. This government would have restricted
functions and consequently limited expenditures and need for income. The
federation of states would also form an electoral college to select representatives
of the states to a federal legislature with British India. On 28 August 1931,
Patiala was able to attract twenty-nine princes favourable to confederation to
Bombay and asked the viceroy that Dholpur should present their scheme to
the second Round Table Conference. Meanwhile Bhupinder Singh confronted
major financial difficulties since he was unable to obtain loans to satisfy his
many creditors. Therefore, claiming that he wished to remain in India to work
for confederation, he secured the appointment of Liaqat Hayat Khan to the
Indian States delegation. Sending a minister rather than a ruler was far less
expensive and perhaps more effective.

Besides the division within princely ranks, there was opposition to feder-
ation in British India. Jawaharlal Nehru was opposed because Indians would

24 Federation and the Indian States’, PSAP, CS, File No. III (c) 36 of 1931, and Tribune, 18 June

1931, p. 1.

256

FEDERATION OR INTEGRATION?

not control the army or the salaries of the services; princes and landlords whom
he viewed as reactionary were to be included; and there were too many con-
cessions in the area of finance. States’ people’s groups sought a guarantee of
fundamental rights for all citizens and the election of states’ representatives
to any federal legislature. More ominously, groups sometimes sympathetic to
the princes were also negative. Liberal British Indians, especially those asso-
ciated with the Servants of India Society in Poona, protested at the lack of
both democratisation in the princely states before federation and adequate
provision for election of states’ representatives. With a few exceptions such as
Terence Keyes in Hyderabad, British political officers deprecated federation.
Their reasons ranged from a fear that the princes would be no match for British
Indian politicians to a concern about their future employment. So the initial
euphoria over federation had significantly subsided less than a year after it had
first appeared.”°

From September to December 1931 during the second Round Table Con-
ference, the Federal Structure Committee, under the able guidance of Lord
Sankey, worked to make the outline of the future federation more concrete.
The details made many princes apprehensive. A list of fundamental federal
rights was proposed and subjects allotted to the federal government opened
areas for intervention such as jurisdiction over railways. Although the princes
had agreed not to raise the issue of paramountcy in London, they now worried
that they would have to rely on the Crown and the viceroy as the Crown’s agent
for protection of their sovereignty and therefore face renewed British interven-
tion. Another issue was the composition of the federal legislature, where the
princes desired parity, namely half the seats in a large upper house and weighage
in the lower house. The Sankey Report called for an upper house of 200 with
the states allotted 40 per cent. Finally, the princes were distressed about the
fiscal consequences of federation. They optimistically wished to get redress
from fiscal burdens including subsidies, customs duties, and excise taxes on
items such as salt. At the very least they did not want to increase their financial
contributions to a central, federal government. There were signs of princely
disaffection in London. A former political officer and now member of the India
Council, Reginald Glancy, commented that since housing for the princes was
insufficient at the beginning of the Second Round Table Conference, many
left early and ‘[t]here is not one genuine friend of federation left among the
Princes’.”° Still, Sir Samuel Hoare, the secretary of state for India, advised Lord

25 Copland, Princes, pp. 113-21; Ramusack, Princes, pp. 208-14.
26 Reginald I. R. Glancy, Supplementary Memorandum, 29 October 1931, T. C. 2A quoted in Moore,
Crisis, p. 231.

257

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

Willingdon, who had replaced Irwin as viceroy, that ‘[t]he Government and I
are pledged at every turn to the All-India Federation’.””

By early 1932 major states including Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur and
Kolhapur had openly defected from the federation camp. Patiala contin-
ued his propaganda campaign for confederation and attracted several princes
from Kathiawar including Ranjitsinhji of Nawanagar. Perhaps suspicious that
Willingdon did not share his commitment to federation, Hoare urged the
viceroy to prevent the princes from abandoning federation. In March 1932
Willingdon responded with a supportive speech at the annual meeting of the
Chamber of Princes on the advantages to the princes of federation; he also
informally canvassed key princes. At the same time Hoare had urged the mem-
bers of the Federal Finance Committee chaired by J. C. Davidson, which was
to tour India in early 1932, to lobby with the princes for federation.

The Federal Finance Committee was one of three expert committees who
were to supply data that Hoare could use to construct a reform bill. Davidson
promoted federation but also avowed that there was a lack of strong support
in India for federation among both princes and British officials. He advised
Hoare that he did not ‘think Willingdon is capable, certainly the Political
Department is not, of getting the scheme across, especially when it is not their
own, and they are unsympathetic in principle to the whole idea of federa-
tion’.8 Lord Lothian (Philip Kerr), the chair of the Franchise Committee, also
thought that ‘official Delhi’ was not sympathetic to federation since it was
not its initiative.” Meanwhile, Davidson relayed that both M. R. Jayakar and
Lothian urged Hoare or the Prime Minister to make a clear statement that
the British Government was firmly in favour of federation and that princely
hesitation would delay it.*° Although Lord Hastings, another member of the
Finance Committee, thought that a lack of civility by Willingdon towards
Davidson had made the latter take a negative view of Willingdon’s support for
federation, Davidson continued to argue that London should impose a scheme
upon the princes since they could never agree among themselves.*! He was
proposing what the British would do in 1947 when they advised the princes to

27 Hoare to Willingdon, 28 January 1932, OIOC, MSS Eur E240/1.

28 Davidson in Bombay to Hoare, 24 April 1932, OIOC, MSS Eur E240/14(a).

29 Lothian in New Delhi to Hoare, 27 March 1932, OIOC, MSS Eur E 240/14(b).

30 Davidson to Hoare, 12 March 1932, ibid., and Lothian to Hoare, OIOC, Templewood Collection,
MSS Eur E240/14(b). Jayakar thought that the GOI was indirectly assaulting federation by stressing
the difficulties associated with it for the princes.

31 Hastings in Viceroy’s House in New Delhi to Hoare, 16 April 1932, and Davidson in Simla
to Hoare, 15 April 1932, OIOC, Templewood Collection, MSS Eur E240/14(a). Relationships

between members of the Finance Committee must have been tense. Davidson advised that ‘Although

258

FEDERATION OR INTEGRATION?

accede to successor governments or to face the consequences without British
support.

On the princely side, the volatile but astute Bhupinder Singh realised the
need for compromise since he was unable to expand his supporters to in-
clude the largest states, especially Hyderabad and Mysore, whose adherence
was crucial for success. The pro-federation princes, notably Ganga Singh and
Hamidullah, were worried because the prime minister had warned that he
would make an arbitrary award of seats to the princes if they did not produce
their own plan. Once again ministers, especially Prabhashankar Pattani from
Bhavnagar and Mir Maqbool Mahmud, then serving at Alwar, were delegated
to fashion a format that would reconcile confederation with the proposals of
the Federal Structure Committee. After a year of not talking to each other,
Ganga Singh, Hamidullah and Bhupinder Singh met on 11 March 1932, in
New Delhi. Personal animosities were resolved as all three agreed to support a
supposedly neutral Ranjitsinhji of Nawanagar for the chancellorship in 1932,
and subsequently Bhopal and Bikaner would campaign for Patiala in the 1933
election. Meanwhile C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar was to chair another commit-
tee of ministers to devise safeguards that reconciled confederation with the
Sankey Report. Their proposition allowed states to federate either individually
or collectively and became the basis of the so-called Delhi Pact submitted for
approval to the Chamber of Princes.

The March 1932 session of the Chamber was the longest (it lasted for ten
days), the liveliest, and the best attended (sixty were present) of such meet-
ings. Rulers from the smaller states came in force and were not enthusiastic
about the Aiyar plan. But Patiala made a forceful speech and Willingdon and
Davidson lobbied informally. On 1 April 1932, a majority of the princes voted
to federate. However, the proposed federal structure was encircled with two
categories of safeguards. One focused on protecting princely prerogatives such
as individual seats for members of the Chamber in an upper house and the
preservation of treaty rights. The other asked for safeguards from interven-
tion by the federal government in the internal affairs of a state. However, the
demands from middle-sized princes for limits on British intervention in in-
ternal affairs of the states was inconsistent with the concern of small states
for a commitment from the paramount power to guarantee their existence.
British officials in London and in India took small comfort in the princely

Hastings is inclined to be thoughtless and brusque he gets away with it for reasons which you know
as well as I do’ and that Major-General Hutchinson, another member, was lazy and disgruntled that
he had not been chosen as chair: Davidson to Hoare, 7 March 1932, ibid.

259

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

assent and as Reginald Glancy remarked, “We are none of us, I should imagine,
convinced that [federation] . . . will work, but we . . . are pledged to try the

experiment’.*

ANTAGONISTS OF FEDERATION

While Samuel Hoare was a strong supporter of federation, other members of
his party were not. They were eager to exploit the ambivalence of the princes.
During the early 1930s Winston Churchill emerged as the leader of the Diehard
faction. They would be implacably opposed to any constitutional reforms in
India, including federation and its complement of limited responsible gov-
ernment at the centre. Although Churchill enjoyed qualified support among
Conservative MPs, some allies commanded attention because of their admin-
istrative experience in India, and key newspapers — the Morning Post and its
editor H. T. Gwynne, the Daily Express of Lord Beaverbrook, and the Daily
Mail of Lord Rothermere — were sympathetic.* In their effort to derail con-
stitutional advance, the Diehard faction reasoned that if the princes did not
federate then the train of central responsibility would be stalled. So the princes
were the key to frustrating constitutional reforms.

The Diehards focused on Ranjitsinhji, the chancellor of the Chamber in
1932, and recruited L. F Rushbrook Williams, then his foreign minister, to
influence him. Since Nawanager was irate towards the British because of eco-
nomic and symbolic issues and fearful of the penetration of popular politi-
cians from British India into the princely states, he was amenable to anti-
federation proposals. Delhi had refused any concessions in a customs arrange-
ment that drastically reduced the customs revenue at Bedi port which the jam
sahib had developed with state funds; and it had not increased his 13-gun
salute, which was lower than that of many of his Chamber peers.*4 The jam
sahib considered both issues to be serious infringements on his sovereignty.
The Diehards were initially successful. While Ranjitsinhji was in England for
health reasons during the summer of 1932, he issued two circulars claim-
ing the princes would not federate until paramountcy was defined. However,

32 Quoted as Richard Glancy to Sir E Stewart, 29 February 1932, in Copland, Princes, p. 111. It must
have been Reginald Glancy who was then serving on the Indian States Enquiry Committee that
Lord Eustace Percy chaired.

33 Thid., pp. 113-15.

34 In 1934 Ranjitsinhji’s successor accepted Delhi’s offer of arbitration by Lord Dunedin, who ordered
Willingdon to work out a settlement. By its terms Nawanagar was allowed to retain Rs 5 lakhs
collected as duty on goods consumed in British India and all of the duty on goods consumed within
Nawanagar: McLeod, Sovereignty, pp. 105-8.

260

FEDERATION OR INTEGRATION?

Nawanager proved no match for the stout resistance of the reconciled duo
of Bikaner and Patiala and the articulate skills of Panikkar, now secretary of
the Chamber. By September Nawanagar reluctantly agreed to support the
resolution of the Standing Committee and the Chamber favouring federa-
tion. But the Diehards opened another front with Bhupinder Singh, who suc-
ceeded Nawanagar as chancellor in 1933 and benefited from an unlikely ally in
India.

In mid-July 1932 the report of the Federal Finance Committee provided
incentives for the princes to federate. It recommended the phasing out of trib-
utes paid by some states to the Crown and some concessions such as allowing
coastal states in Kutch and Kathiawar to manufacture salt for local consump-
tion. Most states would benefit, but a few, notably Cochin and some Kathiawar
states, would lose revenue from customs that they presently collected. At the
same time Willingdon undertook a strategy that impeded federation despite
its proclaimed support for that goal.*°

Acting on a suggestion from Sir Maurice Gwyer, a legal adviser to the
India Office, the viceroy now decided that a more reliable means of achieving
federation would be to court six of the largest states - Hyderabad, Mysore,
Travancore, Gwalior, Baroda and Indore — at the expense of the middle-sized
Chamber group dominated by Bikaner and Patiala. His premise was that if
larger states obtained multiple seats in a small upper house, then only a smaller
number of states would have to accede to achieve federation. Supported by
Hydari and other ministers from the so-called Big Six states, Willingdon called
a meeting at Simla in September 1932. Here he divided the states with his
proposal for multiple seats based on historical importance, salute rank, and
population. Ministers of large and small states were amenable to a strong
paramount power as an ally vis-a-vis nationalist interference. Their position
was an affront to the Bikaner-Bhopal demand for safeguards to prevent the
paramount power from interference in the internal affairs of states. By the end
of the meeting an angry Hamidullah reiterated that the Standing Committee
would not federate without the resolution of paramountcy, a position similar
to that of the jam sahib. Willingdon had unconsciously furthered the objec-
tive of the Diehards against the often-stated policy of Hoare, his superior in
London.*©

The omens for success at the third Round Table Conference in late 1932 were
not positive. Willingdon invited rulers of twelve states to attend or to send their
ministers, and thereby excluded Haksar. Once again Bhupinder Singh could

35 Copland, Princes, pp. 114-18. 37 Tbid., pp. 118-21.

261

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

not attend for financial reasons, and he was able to persuade Bikaner and Bhopal
that their attendance would be an affront to his honour.*” Consequently, with
the exception of the raja of Sarila, the Indian States delegation included only
ministers who could not make binding decisions on behalf of the princes. Since
the Congress refused to join the British India delegation, the five-week session
in London resolved few issues.

Disunity prevailed among the princes. The states delegation remained di-
vided on representation in the federal legislature and the basis for allocating
it. They reluctantly had to accept a proposal for 40 per cent of the seats in an
upper house instead of their demand for parity. They also could not agree on
a timetable for the accession to federation by their employers, with the con-
sequence that the princes appeared to control the inauguration of federation
and responsible government at the centre. Meanwhile, in London on a private
visit, the jam sahib, in contact with the Diehards, once again threw a spanner
in the works by diverting attention to paramountcy. He eventually claimed
that the princes should stay out of federation to prevent democratisation. The
Bikaner-Patiala group was now concerned about Nawanagatr’s possible appeal
to smaller states.

Robin Moore argues that the third Round Table Conference retreated from
a ‘self-governing conference’ to a ‘Simonesque procedure for the preparation
of an official scheme, its embodiment in a state document, and its consid-
eration by a joint committee, assisted by witnesses or assessors, prior to its
presentation to parliament’.*® If the princes and Indian politicians could not
draw up an acceptable blueprint, then the British would. A White Paper
was published on 18 March 1933. A Joint Select Committee of Parliament
(chaired by Lord Linlithgow, who would succeed Willingdon as viceroy) de-
liberated on its contents from April 1933 to October 1934, and its report
was the basis for a Government of India Act that received royal assent in
August 1935.

Still dedicated to federation, Hoare gained some concessions for the princes
in the White Paper. Their seats in the upper house of 260 were increased
from ninety to a hundred and references to fundamental rights were removed.
Although Liaqat Hayat Khan and Manubhai Mehta recommended that the
Chamber endorse the White Paper at their March 1933 annual meeting in

37 Patiala’s finances remained precarious and were the main reason why the viceroy did not want the
ruler to go to London to give evidence before the Joint Select Committee: Willingdon to Hoare,
23 May 1933, OIOC, MSS Eur E240/12 (a).

38 Moore, Crisis, pp. 296-7.

262

FEDERATION OR INTEGRATION?

Delhi, Ranjitsinhji protested that ‘the constitution as it has emerged from the
White Paper will inevitably work as to destroy the very principle of Indian
Kingship’.*? Willingdon ruled the chancellor out of order. Many princes, in-
cluding Patiala, obliquely rallied to Nawanagar’s defence by demanding more
safeguards. The Chamber ended up passing two contradictory resolutions —
one made the accession of the princely states to federation conditional on
safeguards, and the other, from Nawanagar, linked accession to a resolution of
paramountcy. Suffering from ill health that brought his death ten days later,
the jam sahib did not stand for the chancellorship and Bhupinder Singh easily
won.

Now the Diehards opened another front with the Patiala ruler, whom Delhi
had rebuffed on several issues. The GOI had denied Patiala’s request to appoint
Fitzpatrick as his prime minister and then imposed Sir Frederick Gauntlett as
his finance minister and a schedule of reduced expenditures to stem possible
bankruptcy. Moreover, personal relations between Bhupinder Singh and the
viceroy were strained and the new resident, Harold Wilberforce-Bell, was far
less sympathetic than the departing Fitzpatrick. As agents, the Diehards used
N. Madhava Rao, an Indian correspondent for the Morning Post, who allegedly
had evidence suitable for political blackmail of Bhupinder Singh, and Mir
Maqbool Mahmud, now the secretary of the Chamber. Madhava Rao urged
Gwynne, his editor at the Morning Post, to orchestrate a delegation of Diehard
MPs to lobby with Patiala and other princes during 1934 as the Joint Select
Committee in London was hearing testimony on a proposed Government of
India Bill. Lymington from the Lords and Jack Courtauld from the Commons
found receptive listeners among the numerous princes, including Patiala, who
still judged British intervention more troublesome than that of British Indian
politicians or popular political opponents and were uncertain about the benefits
of federation. Consequently the envoys were able to secure the signatures
of five out of ten members of the Standing Committee of the Chamber to
a letter stating that they might not accede to federation unless there were
significant changes in the White Paper. These middle-sized and smaller rulers
were apprehensive because of reports from London that the final form of the
GOI bill might not be as favourable to them as hoped. They were also alarmed
by popular agitations in Kashmir and Alwar and the deposition of Jai Singh of
Alwar. Although the erratic Alwar ruler had few close personal friends among
the princes, his fate was disconcerting.

39 Speech of 24 March 1933 quoted in Copland, Princes, p. 124.

263

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

After a second delegation of Diehards returned from India and reported
positively on princely opposition to federation, in late July 1934 Winston
Churchill and other Conservatives promised publicly that they would support
the princes ‘against any attempt to encroach upon their rights and privileges’.
However, the Diehard strategy began to unravel in the autumn. Ministers such
as Liaqat, Panikkar and Akbar Hydari stiffened princely support for federation.
In Delhi, Willingdon made some timely concessions, most notably on Berar
to Hyderabad, on the possible retrocession of the Bangalore cantonment to
Mysore, and on the customs dispute with Nawanagar, as well as some covert
threats to Bhupinder Singh. Meanwhile in Bristol at the annual meeting of the
Conservative Party, the Diehards lost by seventeen votes on an amendment to
repudiate Hoare’s policy on India. Although that margin was small, the House
of Commons subsequently endorsed the report of the Joint Select Committee
by a vote of two to one.”

The final scene in the constitutional saga that began in 1927 transpired
in January 1935 with the annual session of the Chamber of Princes. In his
opening speech Bhupinder Singh, still the chancellor, equivocated, asking his
colleagues

to consider whether we should put ourselves in the position in which practically every
important body of opinion in British India considers us unwelcome partners and looks
upon our entry into Federation with suspicion. The benefits of a Federal Scheme to the
Indian States are . . . not so overwhelming that, whatever the opinion of British India, it
would be in our best interest to join it.*!

Both Willingdon and Patiala’s colleagues on the Standing Committee applied
immediate pressure that seemed to have an effect. By the next day the Sikh
ruler retracted some of his comments. When Ganga Singh moved a resolution
of endorsement for the Joint Select Committee report, it passed with no word
from Patiala. Although the Diehards by now understood that Patiala’s support
was like the motion of a weathervane, they continued to apply pressure through
Madhava Rao.

When the princes and their ministers next met at Bombay in March 1935
to decide their response to the GOI bill, their highly conditional acceptance
encouraged the Diehards. The princes continued to bargain for better terms,
especially on the issue of paramountcy, but London and Delhi decided to stand

40 Thid., pp. 121-43.

41 Speech of 22 January 1935, quoted in Kavalam M. Panikkar, The Indian Princes in Council: A Record
of the Chancellorship of His Highness the Maharaja of Patiala, 1926-1931 & 1933-1936 (London,
1936), pp. 118-20.

264

FEDERATION OR INTEGRATION?

firm.” Willingdon threatened Patiala with possible deposition for maladmin-
istration and Hoare reported that the king-emperor himself gave the ruler ‘a
proper dressing down . . . saying that it was an outrageous affair for a great
Indian Prince to intrigue with conspirators here and [with] a miserable corre-
spondent of the Morning Post in India.“ Hoare also engineered a directive that
the princes would not be invited to the silver jubilee celebrations of George V
in 1936. Nevertheless he tried to be conciliatory and made concessions in the
bill in response to princely concerns about the power of the federal legislature
to make laws for the states and the obligations of the Crown to the states in
the non-federal areas. In June 1935 the bill passed and became law with royal
assent on 2 August 1935.

ACCESSION IS DEFERRED

Desultory negotiations between the British and the Indian princes ensued from
1935 to 1939. Although they were ultimately suspended upon the outbreak of
the Second World War, this result should not be read backwards into the his-
torical narrative. In the late 1930s many British officials and Indian princes still
considered federation to be possible even if the initial euphoria had evaporated
during the realpolitik of extended negotiations. Moreover, personnel shifts and
political events slowed the pace of negotiations so that their suspension in 1939
did not alarm anyone.

First, there was a reversal in the respective attitudes towards federation of
Delhi and London. Earlier, Hoare in London had persistently pushed Will-
ingdon in India to motivate the princes to support federation proposals more
vocally. Even when the viceroy acted, some Britons questioned his commit-
ment. In June 1935 the marquess of Zetland, who as Lord Ronaldshay had
served as governor of Bengal, replaced Hoare. Then in April 1936, Lord Lin-
lithgow succeeded Willingdon. Both men endorsed federation with the princes
as a goal, but they differed over procedures and timing. Now the viceroy in
India acted with a sense of urgency, planning to inaugurate federation by
1 April 1938, while his superior in London urged caution. In August 1936,
four months after his arrival in India, Linlithgow appointed three political of-
ficers, Courtenay Latimer, Arthur C. Lothian and Francis Wylie, as his special

42 Copland, Princes, pp. 138-40.

43 Hoare to Willingdon, 31 May 1935, OIOC, MSS Eur E240/4.

a4 Copland, Princes, pp. 138-43.

45 Linlithgow to Wylie, 18 August 1936, OIOC, L/P&S/13/613 in Copland, Princes, p. 145.

265

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

emissaries to the princes to probe their positions on federation. But in late
September the secretary of state advised the viceroy:

It does, however, occur to me that there may be a point in the negotiations with the
Princes beyond which the application of more haste might result in the achievement of less
speed . . . Let me add that I shall have to keep a sharp eye on Parliament in all matters
connected with the establishment of the Federation.°

Although no one found the princes enthusiastically investigating the opportu-
nities that federation might present, the British envoys had differing percep-
tions of the princely response. Lothian, who toured in central and south India,
claimed ‘that, if one or two of the bigger states could be persuaded, “even at
the sacrifice of principle, financial or otherwise”, to join the Federation, the
rest of the States would “tumble over each other to follow”.*” Thus the princes
apparently continued to bargain for concessions on longstanding grievances as
the price for accession. In later recollections a more pessimistic and perhaps
cynical Wylie asserted that most princes did not understand the implications of
federation and were confused by high-priced lawyers. He added that the
largest ones, especially Hyderabad, did not want to federate, whatever they
might say, and that others such as Hari Singh of Kashmir were bored by dis-
cussions over federation. Wylie, who adopted a demanding policy towards
the princes when he was political adviser during the early 1940s, concluded
that

if left to their own devices, there was never the slightest chance of getting rulers representing
fifty percent of the population of the princely states to sign instruments of accession before
the second world war broke out in September 1939. The only way, so far as the British
government were concerned, if they genuinely wanted to expedite the creation of federation,
would have been to take the princes by the neck and compel them to come. This is what
Patel and V. P. Menon did later on.*®

An Instrument of Accession acceptable to the princes was never achieved, and
most scholars share Wylie’s perception of the negative role of lawyers in this
process. But the lawyers acted on behalf of combatants who had longstanding
enmities. Within the Chamber, Patiala, who was now publicly supportive of
federation, sponsored W. H. Wadhams (1891-1970), a retired American judge,
as the Chamber’s advocate. When Dholpur, who had remained committed to

46 Zetland to Linlithgow, 25 September 1936, OIOC, MSS Eur F 125/3.

47 Quoted from NAI, F&P, No. 20, Federation Secret, 1941 in Phadnis, Jntegration, p. 104.

48 Sir Francis Wylie, ‘Federal Negotiations in India 1935-9, and After’, in C. H. Philips and Mary
Doreen Wainwright (eds), The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives 1935-1947 (Cambridge,
MA, 1970), p. 521.

266

FEDERATION OR INTEGRATION?

confederation and was resolutely anti-federation, unexpectedly succeeded his
cousin as chancellor in early 1936, he employed John H. Morgan, the legal
adviser to the Diehard Morning Post. Although a compromise was reached
with both lawyers representing the Chamber, the two were not united in
their negotiations with the India Office during 1936 over the Instrument of
Accession. Meanwhile the nizam of Hyderabad employed Sir Walter Monckton
(1891-1965), who served as his legal adviser until 1947.

However, as Ian Copland has argued, many factors other than lawyers were
at work. Some were personal. Ganga Singh of Bikaner was angered by what he
perceived as a lack of appropriate recognition in London at the king-emperor’s
silver jubilee celebration and the number of seats allocated to his state in
the federal legislature. Hydari did not calculate any benefits for Hyderabad
since the Berar issue was settled and internal demonstrations seemed more
threatening. Other states also experienced intensifying popular agitations. By
1938 Congress leaders, including Gandhi, for varying reasons intervened more
publicly in oppositional politics in the states, especially in Rajkot, Travancore
and Mysore. Although the ultimate failure of Gandhi to secure his objectives
in Rajkot in 1939 demonstrated the difficulties of sustained political protest in
the princely states, the Rajkot satyagraha was indicative of future cooperation
across borders. As home-grown state politicians were emboldened to organise
public rallies, princely attention swerved from constitutional negotiations to
the containment of local opposition. These autocrats became more fearful
of the contagion of political hostility spreading from British India to their
states. So when Linlithgow announced that negotiations over federation were
suspended because of the need to focus on wartime demands, the princes were
not perturbed.

PRINCES, THE BRITISH, AND THE SECOND
WORLD WAR

When, without consultation of the elected Indian officials at the centre or
in the provinces, Linlithgow declared that India was at war, the Congress
ministries, at the direction of their party executive, resigned in protest. The
British therefore were most appreciative of Indians who continued to collabo-
rate, especially the Muslim League and the Indian princes. Many rulers were
quick to provide military aid, much as they or their predecessors had done in
1914. Stalwarts such as Ganga Singh, who had first served during the Boxer
Rebellion, were active in planning and coordination. Younger men such as the
future maharao raja of Bundi personally served in Burma, while many more

267

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

rulers made significant donations of cash and war materiel. More crucially,
the princes opened their borders to recruiters for the British India Army and
their subjects enlisted at a higher rate than in any British Indian province with
the exception of Punjab. On the home front princes reaffirmed their personal
loyalty to the British Crown and acted to control political dissent within and
along their borders, especially during the 1942 Quit India movement.”

In turn the British patron acknowledged the assistance of these faithful allies
with positions on government boards and on the Governor-General’s Executive
Council for Indians associated with the princely states, most notably C. P.
Ramaswami Aiyar from Travancore. These appointments followed the pattern
developed when the maharaja of Patiala and a minister from Gwalior had been
appointed to the Governor-General’s Legislative Council as rewards for support
in 1857. Moreover, the British moderated their lobbying for internal structural
reforms such as civil lists, legislative assemblies, and protection of fundamental
rights within the princely states. For example, before his departure in 1943,
Linlithgow lamented that most princes had yet to establish civil lists, a reform
that Lord Irwin had urged in 1927. However, British oversight of the princes
might diminish, but it did not wither.

In 1942 Sir Stafford Cripps, then Lord Privy Seal and a member of the
War Cabinet, attempted a constitutional resolution. He did little to satisfy the
princes. His draft declaration provided for membership of the princely states
in a constitution-making body but added that ‘whether or not an Indian State
elects to adhere to the Constitution, it will be necessary to negotiate a revision
of its Treaty arrangements, so far as it may be required in the new situation’.*°
When members of the Standing Committee of the Chamber sought reassurance
about their future in a meeting with Cripps on 28 March 1942, the Labour
MP pledged:

So far as the undertaking of our obligations of defence of the States was concerned . . . there
was no insuperable difficulty from the naval point of view so long as we held Ceylon, or
from the air point of view so long as we had the aerodromes which were necessary in one or
other of the states . . . [S]umming it all up, we should stand by our treaties with the States

unless they asked us to revoke them.*!

Later Cripps tried to dilute this promise, but the Cabinet at home reiterated
their protection of the princes. His words must have reinforced the princely

49 Copland, Princes, pp. 183-9.

9 Quoted from Reginald Coupland, The Cripps Mission (Bombay, 1942), p. 29 in Phadnis, Jntegration,
p. 136.

>! Quoted in Copland, Princes, p. 188.

268

FEDERATION OR INTEGRATION?

perception that the British would continue to shield them and that drastic
reforms were not yet necessary.

By 1943, however, British support in India for continuing guarantees of
princely rule became more ambiguous. Two factors were crucial. One related
to personnel changes at the top of the official hierarchy. First, in August 1943
Francis Wylie had become political adviser to the viceroy (who was known as
the crown representative in his relations with the Indian princes after 1937).
In October Lord Wavell succeeded Linlithgow as viceroy. Liberal and blunt,
as indicated in the earlier quotation on princes and federation, Wylie was
committed to demanding internal reforms within the states. Wavell, who had
served in the Middle East and was formerly commander-in-chief in India,
had little knowledge of the princes and allowed Wylie significant initiative.
At the same time Allied victories in 1943 indicated that there was likely to
be a successful end to the war, however high the human and material costs.
Consequently the British now must begin to plan for the devolution of power
after the war.

Among the princes there were also significant personnel changes. Key min-
isters such as Hydari died in 1942 or fell out of favour, for example Ismail, who
moved from Mysore to Jaipur. Among the Chamber stalwarts, Ranjitsinhji of
Nawanagar and Bhupinder Singh of Patiala had passed away in the 1930s.
Then in February 1943 Ganga Singh of Bikaner died. Their successors lacked
the political experience and shrewdness of their fathers. Hamidullah of Bhopal
remained, but he withdrew from active participation in the Chamber until he
became chancellor in 1944. There were a few energetic, committed princes
in the Chamber, but they had to operate without a supportive network of
equally dedicated colleagues. Contrary to some expectations, Digvijaysinhji of
Nawanagar, who became chancellor upon the death of Patiala in 1938, had
revived the Chamber with a circumspect expansion of membership and the
regularisation of its finances so that it might lobby more effectively for princely
interests. Unfortunately, the administrative reorganisation and increased atten-
dance at annual sessions did not produce any meaningful political or consti-
tutional reforms within the states. The princes remained naively unaware of
how they might institute painful changes from the top to preclude demands
for more radical reforms from their British patron, their Congress rivals, or
their own subjects.

During the early 1940s the princes did not face consistent opposition from
either the Congress or states’ people’s groups. The former was hamstrung by
massive arrests after the Quit India campaign of 1942, and the latter were
diverted by leadership struggles and conflicts between urban/professional and

269

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

rural/peasant factions.” However, the British continued to challenge princely
sovereignty in two key areas. One was the Attachment Scheme of small non-
salute states in western India. The other was the implementation of industrial
policies that seemed to constrict the economic boom stimulated by war de-
mands in some states.”? John McLeod has traced the origin of the Attachment
Scheme to a proposal that Sayaji Rao of Baroda made in 1920 for annexation of
states that paid tribute to him in western India. His not so disguised objective
was to augment and consolidate his territorially fragmented state. Three times
the British rejected his request because their assent would appear to renege
on the promise made in 1858 that there would be no further annexations of
princely states. By April 1939, however, the viceroy advised his superior in
London that the merger of smaller states into larger ones for administrative
purposes was needed even if pressure was required.°4 The British argued that
a merger that was given the supposedly more benign name of attachment was
required to bring these small units into the federation through the accession
of the attaching states and to improve conditions within these revenue-poor
states. Despite considerable opposition from the princes, the British finalised
the Attachment Scheme in 1943 and thereby reduced around 435 states in
western India to sixteen. McLeod has argued that the British hoped that by
eliminating petty units which could not provide basic government services,
they might fortify the enhanced states against Congress criticisms and en-
sure their survival.®* Furthermore, both McLeod and Copland claim that the
British support of the Attachment Scheme indicated that the British were less
concerned about princely sensitivities than administrative rationalisation and
Congress opposition.®° From their side, several princes were troubled about the
implications of the Attachment Scheme for their sovereignty. When the British
refused to reassure them, Hamidullah of Bhopal and the Standing Committee
of the Chamber resigned in late 1944.

By June 1945 Hamidullah and the Standing Committee had returned to
office, and the chancellor launched a program to protect princely interests
during the momentous postwar changes. His plan was fivefold: to rebuild the
Chamber; to press for internal reforms; to preserve the British relationship;

>? Sisson, Congress Party, ch 4, esp. pp. 89-96 provides one example.

3 A general overview of these constraints is in Copland, Princes, pp. 201-4. In ‘Emergence of Labor
Politics’, Janaki Nair argues that the Second World War stimulated several new ventures in Mysore
but a lack of indigenous capital along with restrictive colonial policies hampered industrialisation
in Mysore: pp. 89-99.

4 Linlithgow to Zetland, 5 April 1939, OIOC, L/P&S/13/971 quoted in McLeod, Sovereignty, p. 128.

> Tbid., p. 136.

56 Tbid., pp. 129-41; Copland, Princes, pp. 198-200.

270

FEDERATION OR INTEGRATION?

to explore the possible benefits of an alliance with the Muslim League; and
to achieve some kind of understanding with Congress. If time had been on
their side, which it was not, the princes might have achieved some notable
successes. At a meeting in Bombay in May 1945, attending princes pledged to
reform their administrations ‘along democratic lines in preparation for the part
which the Indian States expect to play in the event of a national government in
India’.*” Subsequently elected legislative assemblies and at least partly respon-
sible executive councils began to pop up in the states like mushrooms after a
spring rain. Some princes, most notably in Orissa, Punjab, Rajputana and the
Deccan, took the lead in proposing regional confederations in order to create
more viable bargaining units for the forthcoming constitutional negotiations.
Meanwhile Bhopal remained in close contact with Muslim politicians, and
assorted princes and their ministers renewed communications with Congress
leaders including Nehru. Continuing the pattern established from 1927 to
1935, these conversations demonstrate that the Congress, as had their British
predecessors, were prepared to use the princes as best suited their goals.

THE DENOUEMENT OF INTEGRATION

During the tumultuous years from 1945 to 1947, British policies towards the
princes reflected a combination of expediency, nostalgia, and the desire to be
seen as honourable and perhaps even doing the honourable thing. On the one
hand the replacement of an astute but unsympathetic Wylie by Sir Conrad
Corfield (1893-1980) as political adviser to the crown representative in June
1945 meant a sympathetic mediator in the British hierarchy. Corfield had
long seen princely India as the real India and wanted to broker a principled
transition for the princes from British paramountcy to Indian self-government.
His tactics offended Mountbatten, and his memoirs tried to justify the integrity
of his position. However, the new Labour Government in London decided that
British pledges of protection to the princes had to be sacrificed in the process of
decolonisation. The problem was to evolve a scheme by which the British could
disengage themselves without outright repudiation of their legal obligations to
the princes.

In 1946 the Cabinet Mission came to India for one final round of constitu-
tional negotiations that aimed to transfer power to a united Indian dominion.
The princes were clearly subordinated to this goal but were still a concern. The
British assuaged their legal consciences by promising that independence would

°7 Quoted in ibid., p. 212.

271

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

mean the end of their treaties with the princes and that paramountcy could not
be transferred to a third party. While they asserted that the states would have
much to gain from acceding to the new Indian state, the British would not
coerce the princes to accede. The initial princely response was positive since the
Cabinet Mission Plan terminated the hated paramountcy and seemed to grant
independence. However, the British also called for a Constituent Assembly
and the establishment of an interim government of Indian leaders to manage
internal affairs until independence.

As the princes had haggled over the composition of their delegations
to the Round Table Conferences, they now debated their participation in
the Constituent Assembly. Bhopal sought to be the chief negotiator for the
Chamber of Princes in the Assembly and briefly tried to ally the princes with
the Muslims to counter Congress dominance.°® K. M. Panikkar takes credit for
derailing this proposal,°? but C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar, on behalf of Travancore,
was the first to desist from a single princely negotiator. Eventually the repre-
sentatives of sixteen states joined the Constituent Assembly, but the fate of
the princes would be handled by individual, personal negotiations as well as
group debate. The princes could not stand together and therefore they would
be integrated individually.

Communal allegiance became a heightened source of identity and commit-
ment for princes as well as their subjects. The motivation for Bhopal’s political
pilgrimage that eventually led to his resignation from the Chamber is clouded.
Panikkar is vitrolic in his memoirs in depicting Bhopal as a scheming com-
munalist who was anxious to join with the nizam of Hyderabad in forming
a Muslim third column in the heart of an independent India.® Copland,
however, takes a more measured view of Bhopal’s conversion to the cause of
Pakistan. In any case Bhopal was not the only prince to increase his overt
or covert support for communal organisations. The maharajas of Alwar and
Bharatpur, among others, were financial and political supporters of the Hindu
Mahasabha and the RSS,°! and Yadavindra Singh of Patiala was sympathetic
to Sikh groups. Just when the princes needed a united front, a division on
communal lines was added to long-existing ones related to size, region, and
memories of past rivalries.

When Mountbatten arrived as the last British governor-general, viceroy and
crown representative, he sought to accelerate the British withdrawal and to
create a united Indian dominion. He later claimed that ‘nothing had been said

°8 Tbid., pp. 223-4, 235, 240-6, 266-7.
>) Panikkar, Autobiography, pp. 153-7. 69 Thid., pp. 138-64.
61 Mayaram, Resisting Regimes, pp. 171-2 and Copland, ‘Further Shores’, pp. 228-39.

272

FEDERATION OR INTEGRATION?

in London to prepare him for the gravity and magnitude of the problem of
the states’. After five weeks of personal exposure and extensive conversations
with Nehru and Jinnah, Mountbatten was convinced of the inevitability of
a quick partition and transfer of power. Nehru reluctantly accepted partition
and agreed to dominion status with the understanding that the princes would
be integrated into the new dominions. The princes held out for the right not
to accede to either dominion, to remain independent, or to form a union of
states. To retain Nehru’s support, Mountbatten was willing to serve as the
enforcer with the princes.°? Meanwhile Nehru also protested at the proposed
dissolution of the political department in the face of the end of paramountcy.

Mountbatten therefore agreed to the creation of a states department headed
by Vallabhbhai Patel to handle relations between the interim government and
the princes, and then accepted the concept of a Standstill Agreement. This
instrument confirmed that the independent states of India and Pakistan would
continue the agreements and administrative arrangements that existed between
the British and the princes. The crucial document was the Instrument of
Accession by which rulers ceded to the legislatures of India or Pakistan control
over defence, external affairs, and communications. In return for these conces-
sions, the princes were to be guaranteed a privy purse in perpetuity and certain
financial and symbolic privileges such as exemption from customs duties, the
use of their titles, the right to fly their state flags on their cars, and to have police
protection. Between 2 and 14 August 1947, 114 states acceded to India and
none to Pakistan. Only a few such states as Hyderabad, Mysore and Kashmir
were to remain autonomous for the present. By December 1947 Patel began to
pressure the princes into signing Merger Agreements that integrated their states
into adjacent British Indian provinces, soon to be called states or new units
of erstwhile princely states, most notably Rajasthan, Patiala and East Punjab
States Union, and Matsya Union (Alwar, Bharatpur, Dholpur and Karauli).
The integration of princely states into Pakistan proceeded more slowly and has
attracted little scholarly attention.“

The three-step process that led to the integration of most princely states into
the Indian Union as well as the initial refusal of four — Hyderabad, Jammu and
Kashmir, Junagadh and Travancore — to sign Standstill Agreements is better
documented than most aspects of the history of the princes. V. P. Menon’s
account has been extraordinarily influential in shaping the historiography that
generally portrays Menon as the low-key, sensitive negotiator who offered the

62 Moore, Escape, p. 290. 63 Tbid., pp. 290-314.
64 Wayne Ayres Wilcox, Pakistan: The Consolidation of a Nation (New York, 1963) remains the basic
source.

273

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

carrots of income guarantees and political privilege and Patel as the hard-
headed dictator who threatened deposition and physical force. In subsequent
years other participants such as H. V. Hodson, Conrad Corfield and K. M.
Panikkar have produced their memoirs. Significant British official papers are
available in the monumental Transfer of Power series and selected papers of
Nehru and Patel have been published. Unfortunately for them, the princes
involved did not write memoirs and they have not been well served by biog-
raphers. Thus their voices are muted. However, it appears that many princes
belatedly realised that the British left them no alternative but to accede and gain
whatever concessions the Congress were willing to make. It probably worked
to the princely advantage that the Congress leaders were confronting partition,
communal riots, and an unimagined transfer of population while Menon was
negotiating accession and then integration. It was in the best interests of the
Congress to entice as many princes as possible with sweet gifts and to take a
hard line with the few who refused their offers. Most princes acceded for a va-
riety of reasons including patriotism, the advice of their ministers, the pressure
of popular political leaders in their states, and a sense of abandonment.

274

EPILOGUE

Just as the British did not create the native/Indian princes, the accession and
integration of the princely states into the independent states of India and
Pakistan did not cause their rulers to disappear from Indian and Pakistani
politics and culture. The most striking example of the long-term impact of
princely states is the contested status of Jammu and Kashmir. Domestically,
the current militant movement in Kashmir impugns the national identities of
India as a secular state and Pakistan as an Islamic state. Materially, it has caused
both countries to allocate extensive resources to defence and to several wars
and military confrontations that have drastically reduced the funds available
for internal development projects. Internationally, it has occasioned concern
about the dangers of a nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan. The
British colonial policy of indirect rule imposed and helped to legitimate the
rule of a Hindu prince in the Muslim-majority areas of Jammu and Kashmir.
But policies of the rulers of Jammu and Kashmir were factors in fostering
tensions between Muslim peasants and Hindu landlords, Muslim subjects and
Hindu officials. Communal groups in British India, the policies of state and
national governments in India and Pakistan, as well as groups indigenous to
Jammu and Kashmir are also responsible for the present, difficult situation of
this erstwhile princely state.

Although in the decades immediately after 1948 scholars claimed that the
integration of the princely states into independent India and Pakistan ended
the political power of their rulers, princes have continued to play numer-
ous roles in politics and popular culture. Since there is so little research on
the princes in Pakistan, this brief survey will focus on princes in indepen-
dent India. From the late 1940s onward, the princes have served in appointed
positions where political ritual and symbolism were prominent. During the ne-
gotiations over the integration of the princely states into India, several princes
were installed as rajpramukh and uprajpramukh, governor and deputy gover-

nor respectively, of unions of princely states or even of their erstwhile state.!
Rajpramukhs included Yadavindra Singh of Patiala in PEPSU, Man Singh of

! Much of this discussion is based on Hurtig, Maharajahs; Menon, Story; William L. Richter,
“Traditional Rulers in Post-Traditional Societies: The Princes of India and Pakistan’, in Jeffrey, People,
pp. 329-54.

275

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

Jaipur in Rajasthan, Jivaji Rao Scindia of Gwalior in Madhya Bharat (the core
of the present state of Madhya Pradesh), and Rama Varma of Travancore in
Travancore-Cochin. To accommodate princely izzat, senior and junior upra-
jpramukhs were instituted. In Rajasthan, the rulers of Jodhpur and Kotah were
the senior, those of Bundi and Dungarpur were the junior, and the maharana
of Udaipur had his premier position among Rajput rulers recognised with the
ceremonial title of maharajpramukh for life.?, Maharaja Jaya Chamarajendra
Wadiyar became the governor of Mysore, one of the two princely states (the
other being Hyderabad) that remained distinct political units until the creation
of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, which are Kannada and Telugu-speaking
states, in 1956. Reflecting the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, Karan
Singh became Sadar-I-Riyasat (governor) in 1952 upon the abdication of his
father. He retained this post until 1967. The GOI also appointed a few princes
to be governors of states that were not unions of princely territory. The first
was Maharaja Krishna Kumarsinhji of Bhavnagar, who became governor of
Madras in 1948.

After the posts of rajpramukh and uprajpramukh were abolished with the
reorganisation of states and the integration of princely unions into larger states
in 1956, some princes accepted diplomatic postings. Yadavindra Singh of
Patiala was a member of the Indian delegation to the United Nations and
to its Food and Agriculture Organisation, and later was ambassador first to
Italy and then the Netherlands, where he died in 1974. Man Singh of Jaipur
was ambassador to Spain and was later elected to the Rajya Sabha of the Indian
Parliament.

Electoral politics were more risky but potentially provided more power than
appointed positions. The princes who chose to contest elections, either at state
or national level, had three options. They could form loose coalitions or join
parties in opposition to the Congress party, stand as independent candidates,
or run on the Congress ticket. Maharaja Hanwant Singh of Jodhpur (1923—
52) followed the first path when he contested the 1952 elections for seats
in both the Rajasthan legislature and the Lok Sabha. Tragically, he died in
an airplane accident on the day of his victory in both constituencies.* His
coalition won a majority of the seats in the territory of Marwar but did not
develop into an effective force. Running on the ticket of the Swatantra party,
which opposed the socialist policies of Jawaharlal Nehru, in 1962 Maharani
Gayatri Devi won a seat in the Lok Sabha with a plurality of 175 000 votes

2 Menon, Story, pp. 256-68.

3 Dhananajaya Singh, The House of Marwar (New Delhi, 1994), pp. 186-99.

276

EPILOGUE

over the next candidate.* As independents, Maharaja Karni Singh of Bikaner
won several terms in the Lok Sabha, and Maharaja Yadavindra Singh won a
seat in the Punjab Legislative Assembly in 1967. The Congress party recruited
many princes including Karan Singh of Jammu and Kashmir or their close
relatives to run on its party ticket in areas where the Congress did not have
a strong base, mainly in the territories of princely states. Openly pursuing
his father’s informal allegiance to the Congress party, Amarindar Singh of
Patiala became the chief minister of Punjab in 2001 when Congress achieved
victory.

The former ruling family of Gwalior has one of the more complicated pat-
terns of involvement in electoral politics. In 1957 Maharani (rajmata after
the death of her husband in 1961) Vijayaraje Scindia, running on a Congress
ticket, won a seat in the Lok Sabha with a plurality of 60 000 over her op-
ponent from the Hindu Mahasabha, an ironic victory considering her later
affiliation with the BJP.’ In 1967 the rajmata won a parliamentary seat on the
Swatantra party ticket and one in the Madhya Pradesh state assembly on the
Jana Sangh ticket. Accepting the assembly seat, she was a power-broker from
1967 to 1969 in state politics and formally joined the Jana Sangh, the pre-
cursor of the BJP. After imprisonment (which she shared with Gayatri Devi)
during the Emergency in 1975-76, Vijayaraje Scindia joined the BJP and was
elected its vice-president.° Soon estranged personally and politically from her
only son, Madhavrao Scindia (1945-2001), who became a leading member
of the Congress and Minister of Railways in Rajiv Gandhi’s government dur-
ing the late 1980s, she died in January 2001.” Her will, which left nothing
to Madhavrao and sought to deny him the traditional right of a son to light
her funeral pyre, revealed the depth of her antipathy. Tragically Madhavrao,
sometimes mentioned as a future prime minister of India, died in a plane crash
in October 2001 at the age of 56. His death left a major gap in the leadership
of the Congress party. Meanwhile his sister, Vasundhara Raje (b. 1953), had
joined her mother in the BJP. In early 2003 Vasundhara Raje became the leader

4 Gayatri Devi, Princess, pp. 251-75; Hurtig, Maharajahs, pp. 172-7.

> Scindia, Princess, pp. 169-80; Hurtig, Maharajahs, pp. 198-215.

7 In June 2001, Prince Dipendra of Nepal killed most of his immediate family, supposedly because of
his mother’s refusal to permit his marriage to Devyani Rana, the child of Vijayaraje’s second daughter
Usha Raje. It was alleged that Queen Aishwarya opposed Devyani on two counts. Her father was
from a different branch of the Rana’s family than hers, and her grandfather was a Maratha, which the
queen deemed subordinate to Rajputs: The Independent, 4 June 2001, p. 3. Ironically, the rajmata’s
maternal rana grandparents went from Nepal into exile in India in the 1880s after her grandfather's
involvement in the murder of the ruling maharaja and two other rana relatives in December 1885:
Scindia, Princess, pp. 3-23.

277

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

of the BJP unit in Rajasthan and was touted as a chief minister-in-waiting if
her party would win the next state elections.

William Richter has highlighted four major factors that are characteristic
of rulers who entered electoral politics. First, they were primarily from regions
with sizeable concentrations of princely state territories and political leaders
sympathetic to the princes such as Orissa and Chhattisgarh in Madhya Pradesh.
Second, size was significant since politically active princes needed sizeable
resources to contest elections. Those from larger states sought seats in the
national Parliament while those from smaller states focused on state legislatures.
Third, gun salutes as status symbols under the British were another factor. As
was true of participation in the Chamber of Princes, princes from what Richter
labels upper-middle-level families (I would assert from thirteen to seventeen
guns) were the most active. The former ruling families of Hyderabad, Indore,
Mysore, Travancore and Udaipur, having twenty-one or nineteen guns, have
not been attracted to electoral politics. Finally, family ties could be important
although they did not ensure political alliances, as the Scindia family of Gwalior
illustrates. The relatives of Sayaji Rao of Baroda are a counter-example since
five had held elective office as of 1978 and four were members of the Congress
party.®

Through a constitutional amendment passed in 1971, Indira Gandhi
stripped the princes of the titles, privy purses and regal privileges which her
father’s government had granted. Even so in the popular imagination and me-
dia, the former rulers remain symbols of regional identity and rajadharma.
One example occurred in 1989 in Maharashtra. A major controversy erupted
over a new Marathi language edition of the Kolhapur District Gazetteer, which
published letters from Maharaja Shahu Chhatrapati II to the British which
appeared to tarnish his reputation as a nationalist and reformer. Rallies and
newspaper articles soon demanded the withdrawal of the Gazetteer from print
because it was interpretive and not what was deemed an official record. Protests
included a public burning of copies of the offending publication, a bandh ‘in
protest against the distorted gazetteer accounts of beloved Shahu Maharaja’,’
heated debates in the Maharashtra Legislative Council and Assembly, and a se-
ries of scholarly lectures over Shahu’s role as a social reformer and a nationalist
and the function of gazetteers as official documents that report and not histo-
ries that interpret. Véronique Bénéi concludes: ‘Plainly, the history of Shahu

8 Richter, ‘Rulers’, pp. 335-9.

9 Véronique Bénéi, ‘Reappropriating Colonial Documents in Kolhapur (Maharashtra): Variations on
a Nationalist Theme’, MAS, 33(4) (1999), p. 916. The quotation was the subtitle of an article in
Sakal, a statewide newspaper, on 24 October 1990.

278

EPILOGUE

Maharaj nowadays functions as a “myth” in Kolhapur’. She adds: ‘In the local
context, Shahu embodies Kolhapuri identity both in general, and more par-
ticularly for the Marathas, Other Backward Castes and Dalits’.!° Those three
groups had particularly benefited from Shahu’s social reforms, which included
the reservation of 50 per cent of state posts for non-brahmans as well as free
and compulsory primary education. Their interpretation of Shahu’s policies
motivated local leaders and political parties to assert guardianship of Shahu’s
image against brahman attempts to undermine his reputation with the collu-
sion of the Maharashtrian Government.'! Bénéi claims that a unifying bond
exists between Kolhapuris and the person of the king that cuts across caste and
time and is renewed by the annual celebration of Shahu’s birth anniversary
and rituals which his descendants perform during the Dasera festival in the
autumn. |?

Ina more mundane mode, in the 2003 List of the fifty most powerful people
in India published in India Today, Gaj Singh (b. 1948) of Jodhpur is number
45 ‘Because he’s the king of royalty. Because none else in the blue-blooded
pantheon straddles the feudal and the modern with such aplomb’, “Because
he once had Finance Minister Jaswant Singh as private secretary. Because he’s
tourism’s regal face’.!* The last accolade refers to the romantic allure of princely
culture for international and domestic tourists.

The princes of India offer fantasy for post-modern consumption. Faced
with escalating maintenance costs and declining sources of income, princely
entrepreneurs transformed palaces into hotels where tourists could experience
an idealised, pampered lifestyle of royalty during a democratic era. In 1954
Karan Singh of Jammu and Kashmir leased his main palace in Srinagar to
the Oberoi chain; it seems appropriate that he became minister for tourism
and civil aviation in 1967 in Indira Gandhi’s government.!4 In 1958 the
Rambagh Palace Hotel opened in Jaipur followed by the much photographed
Lake Palace Hotel in Udaipur in the early 1960s. In recent decades nobles
and merchants in the former princely states have joined princes in opening
palaces, Aavelis, forts and hunting lodges, from Mysore city in the south to the
foothills of the Himalayas, to tourists. Rajasthan has the largest concentration
of such establishments, many of which stage programs of Indian folk dance and
music to entertain tourists. Palaces-on-wheels, which originally were renovated
railway cars commissioned by the princes and now are replications of such
luxurious cars, connect major sites. Other attractions include museums, which

10 Ibid., p.919. |! Tbid., pp. 927-30. Ibid., p. 926.
13 India Today International, 3 February 2003, p. 46.
14 Karan Singh, Sadar-I-Riyasat: An Autobiography (Delhi, 1985), vol. 2, pp. 12, 158-62.

279

THE INDIAN PRINCES AND THEIR STATES

display princely material culture to those who cannot not afford role-playing
in palace hotels and palaces-on-wheels while preserving historical artefacts.'°

In the past few years the glamour of princely jewellery and clothing has
appealed to new audiences. A museum exhibit of designs by the Paris-based
Cartier showcased the dramatic designs produced for the princes, frequently
with gemstones supplied from princely treasure houses, during the 1920s and
1930s.!° That exhibit also documented how the princes influenced the evo-
lution of Indian-inspired designs of multicoloured gemstones, labelled tutti-
frutti, and bracelets and necklaces of simply polished gemstones, called barbaric
since the stones were not cut or faceted.’ During December 2002 Cartier ex-
hibited a recreation with cubic zirconium stones replacing diamonds in the
original platinum chains of an extravagant bib necklace that Bhupinder Singh
had commissioned using diamonds from his treasury. The New York Times
reported that it was one of the highlights of the Christmas season in New York,
drawing large crowds to Cartier’s holiday window displays on Fifth Avenue.!8

The princes of India and their states were and remain a significant aspect
of the South Asia cultural, economic, and political landscape. Although the
British ensured the continued existence of the princes and the states, the princes,
their officials and their governments were agents who influenced the daily lives
of their subjects and were a factor in imperial and nationalist politics beyond
their borders. The princes played diverse roles as religious and cultural patrons,
symbols of Indian abilities to govern other Indians for good or ill, and imperial
politicians in military and civilian arenas. It is unfortunate that we yet know
relatively little about their lives, their states, and their subjects.

15 Ramusack, ‘Fantasy’, pp. 66-89; Ramusack, “Tourism’, pp. 235-55.

16 Judy Rudoe, Cartier, 1900-1939 (New York, 1997), pp. 31-6. This exhibit appeared in London,
New York, and Chicago. Katherine Prior and John Adamson’s Maharaja’ Jewels (Ahmedabad, 2001)
provides a broad survey from the medieval period to the present and of many western jewellers beyond
Cartier.

17 Rudoe, Cartier, pp. 156-87.

18 Wendy Moonan, ‘An Heirloom Is Resurrected at Cartier’, New York Times National, 29 November
2002, p. B 39; Bill Cunningham, ‘On the Street’, New York Times, 22 December 2002, Sunday
Styles section, p. 4.

280

GLOSSARY

Note: In India it is common to refer to a ruler by the name of his state, for example
Patiala may be used when referring to Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala.

Abhiskheka

Adivasi
Akhbar
Akhara
Amildar
Andolan
Anjuman
Avarna
Bania

Bandh
Begar
Bhadralok

Bharatnatayam

Bhayad

Bhonsle
Biswedar
Brahman
Charan

Chaudhuriyat
Chauth

Chir
Chubdar

Danda
Dargah

Darshan
Dasa

Affusion, the pouring of consecrated substances such as water, milk
or ghee (clarified butter) over a person or the image of a deity.
Aboriginal inhabitant.

Newsletter or newspaper.

Training pit for Indian wrestlers.

Lowest level of revenue officers, similar to tahsildar.

Movement or struggle.

Cultural, educational or political association among Muslims.
Lower-status caste groups in Cochin and Travancore.
Moneylending caste group; some are also associated with industrial
development.

A general strike, involving closing of all businesses in protest.
Forced labour.

Respectable people, generally brahmans and kayasths, in Bengal.
Classical Indian dance form, originally associated with rituals in
Hindu temples.

Brotherhood. Among Rajput and Kathi rulers in western India,
younger sons who had limited rights to revenue and to distribute
criminal justice.

Family name of Marathas who formed the state of Nagpur.
Land-controller, principally in Punjab.

Highest ranking varna of priests in Hindu society.

Bard who composed celebratory poems and genealogies of Rajput
warrior-rulers.

The right to collect land revenue in a designated area, held by the
chaudhuri.

Tax of one-fourth of land revenue that Marathas collected for
military protection or as tribute.

Long-needle pine tree.

Ritual stick that is a symbol of danda.

Stick used to inflict punishment, symbol of sovereignty.

Muslim tomb, frequently of a Sufi saint and thus a site of
pilgrimage.

The auspiciousness of seeing and being seen by a superior being.
Servants.

294

Deshmukh

Dhandak

Dharma
Diwan
Doab
Durbar

Ezhava

Farman
Fitna

Gaddi

Garuda
Gaekwad

Gharana
Ghats

Girasias

Gunijankhana
Gurudwara
Hartal
Hidayat
Holkar

[java
Imam

Izzat
Jagirdar
Jam Sahib
Jamabandi

Jama dar

GLOSSARY

Marathas leaders, frequently with martial skills, who achieve
control over land and people, mainly through colonisation of
abandoned or waste lands.

A form of customary rebellion when the ruled perceived a breach
of the covenant between ruler and ruled; used mainly in the
sub-Himalayan region.

Duty or obligations of an individual or social group.

Senior revenue official in Mughal administration.

Land between two rivers.

The court of a ruler. By extension, the administration of a state or
the ceremonies associated with major life events of a ruler.

Lower caste groups in Kerala associated with cultivation and
products of coconut palm. Also transliterated as irava or izhava.
Imperial order or edict.

A strategy combining conciliation and competition.
Cotton-stuffed cushion. Here used to mean a rajgaddi, the
ensemble of a cushion and low chair that is the Hindu version of
a throne.

Bird who serves as the vehicle of the Hindu preserver god, Vishnu.
Surname of Maratha family who formed the state of Baroda in
Gujarat.

School or style of Hindustani music.

May refer to coastal mountains, as in Kerala but it also commonly
means steps on the banks of rivers or steps leading down into tanks
of water adjacent to Hindu temples where ritual bathing is done.
Literally mouthfuls (singular givas). In Kathiawar girassia meant
petty chiefs who controlled resources sufficient to produce a
mouthful of food.

Royal department of musicians.

Repository of Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy scripture.
General strike.

Decree.

Surname of Maratha family who formed the state of Indore in
central India.

Tax-farming contract.

Gift of land or assignment of revenue from land to secular
subordinates, intellectuals, religious leaders or institutions.
Honor, prestige, reputation.

Holder of jagir, the right to collect revenue from designated tract
of land granted by a superior power in return for service or
acknowledgment of suzerainty.

Title of the ruler of Nawanagar in Gujarat.

Day or period when land revenue was collected, especially

in Mysore.

Military jobber-commander

295

Jatha

Jauhar

Kala pani
Kalari

Kallar

Kayasth

Keddah
Khadi
Khalsa

Khutba
Khilat

Kisan

Kisan Sabha
Kshatriya
Kumkum
Lingayat

Lok Parishad
Madrasa
Mahant

Mahajan
Maharaja
Mansabdari

Mirwaiz
Misldar
Mulki
Mulkegiri

Muzara
Nambudiri

GLOSSARY

Military group among the Sikhs based on personal, kinship, or
regional bonds.

The Rajput practice, when confronted with military defeat, to
consign women and children to a fiery death and men to die
fighting to maintain honour.

Literally black water, and by extension seas and oceans.

System of martial training in Travancore; teachers were known as
panikkars, now a surname among nayars.

Warrior-pastoralist group in south India, sometimes translated

as thief.

Literate, kshatriya caste group with tradition of bureaucratic
employment, frequently in a link language such as Persian or
English.

Round-up of wild elephants in Mysore.

Hand-spun and hand-woven cloth.

Lands from which king directly collected revenue. In Sikhism, the
community of the pure who are baptised by taking amrit or
sugared water.

Prayers offered on Friday in the principal mosque which
acknowledge the legitimate Muslim ruler.

Robe of honour sanctified by being touched to the body of a
patron and then presented to a client.

Peasant-cultivator.

Peasant political or economic organisation.

Second-ranking varna of kings and warriors in Hindu society.
Red powder used in the i/ak ceremony.

Devotional Hindu reform sect in south India, particularly
prominent in Mysore.

People’s conference in princely states.

Muslim school usually attached to a mosque.

A Hindu priest who assumed control of the Sikh gurudwara when
Sikhs were persecuted, mainly during the eighteenth century.
Merchant or moneylender.

Great ruler. Variants include maharana and maharao.

Imperial Mughal administrative system. A mansabdar is the holder
of a mansab or rank in this system. A mansabdar could have both
civilian and military duties.

Hereditary leader of Muslim reform movement in Srinagar.
Leader of mis/, an intermediate Sikh political unit that
incorporated jathas.

Indigenous or son of the soil in distinction to non-mulki

or outsider.

Annual military operation to collect tribute in Kathiawar.
Occupancy peasant tenants in Punjab.

Brahman group in Travancore.

296

Nawab
Nayar

Nazar
Nizam
Panchayat

Pargana
Patel or Patil
Patidar
Patwari
Peshkash
Peshwa

Pindari

Pir

Poligar

Praja mandal
Raja
Rajadharma
Rajaputra
Rajmata
Rajpramukh

Ramayana
Ramraj
Rana
Raniparaj
Ryotwari
Sahukar
Sakti
Samasthan

Sanad

Sannayasi

Sardar

GLOSSARY

Literally the plural of na 7d, the deputy or first minister of a ruler;
by extension, the ruler of a Muslim state.

Caste group in Kerala with martial and matrilineal descent
traditions.

Gold coin given by client to patron.

Title of the Muslim ruler of Hyderabad.

Literally a council of five. Generally a caste or village council that
decided disputes relating to personal law.

District.

Village headman.

Peasant cultivators in Gujarat.

Village accountant.

Valuable object presented by client to patron.

Initially the title of the chief minister of the Marathas, later head
of the Marathas.

Martial groups who frequently support themselves by plundering.
Loosely associated with Marathas.

Sufi saint.

Warrior little king in south India.

Popular people’s association in the princely states.

Ruler.

Duties of a king.

Son of a raja.

Mother of a ruling prince.

Governor of unions of princely states in independent India;
uprajpramukh is deputy governor; maharajpramukh might be
translated as ‘great governor’.

Great Indian epic of Ram, the ideal warrior-king

Rule of Ram and thus an idealised Hindu ruler and his
government.

Title of minor Hindu prince. Also surname of family that served
as prime ministers in Nepal.

Literally people of the forest, term used by Gandhians for
aboriginal people in south Gujarat.

Land revenue settlement made directly with ryot or
peasant-cultivator.

Local banker, used in Hyderabad and Gujarat.

Life force.

Kingdom.

Letter, decree or contract. By extension British certificate offering
protection to or recognition of succession to a Indian prince.
Holy man. Nominally the fourth stage of life for a Hindu man
when he detaches himself from material concerns and seeks
spiritual enlightenment.

Honorific title of a leader. In Punjab a Sikh landholder.

297

Sardeshmukhi

Sarkar

Satyagraha
Savarna
Scheduled castes

Scindia

Shaikh
Shikar
Subahdar
Sudra

Swadeshi

Tahsildar
Talugdar

Tarawad

Thakur
Thikanadar
Tikka Sahib
Tilak

Vakil
Vam
Varna

Vokkaliga
Wazir
Yuvraj
Zamindar

Zenana

GLOSSARY

Assessment of 10 per cent of land revenue to support the
sardeshmukh, the overlord of several deshmukhs in
Maratha-controlled territory.

District. By extension may also mean government. Transliterated as
‘circars’ in designation of districts in eastern India ceded to the
British before 1765.

Grasping the truth, basis for non-violent resistance to evil.
Higher-status caste group in Cochin and Travancore.

Groups outside the varna system. Pejoratively known as
‘untouchables’ because considered to be ritually polluting.
Surname of Maratha family who formed the state of Gwalior in
northern India.

Sufi mysical holy man.

Hunting for animals.

Governor of a Mughal swbah or province.

Lowest ranking of the four varna, generally peasants and some
artisans.

Use of indigenous products, particularly during the independence
movement.

Collector of revenue in tahsil, subdivision of a district

Leader of a taluga or area controlled by a lineage related through
the males, generally found in Awadh.

Joint family with a matrilineal household dwelling and commonly
held lands in Travancore.

Lord, common title among elite Rajputs.

Ruler of a little kingdom, especially in Rajputana.

Heir to a gaddi.

Auspicious, vertical mark on forehead made with kumkum, a red
powder, but sometimes with blood. A rajatilaka was the tilak made
on the forehead of a ruler during an installation ceremony.

Agent or intermediary between rulers.

Mythological unit of inclusiveness among Rajputs.

Literally colour. The four major social ranks or divisions within
Hindu society: brahman, kshatriya, vaishya, sudra.

Occupational category of cultivators in Mysore.

Chief minister of a state.

Heir to a raja or a princely gaddi.

Holder of zamin or land who acquired a right to a share of the
produce of the land for services such as fostering cultivation. Also
a petty chief who offered protection.

Women’s quarters.

298

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