Not until the advent of colonialism would the stage be finally set for India's “theatre state,” to borrow somewhat impiously Clifford Geertz's felicitous phrase. For under British rule little kings in India were constructed as colonial objects and given special colonial scripts. They were maintained, altered, and managed as part of a systematic, if awkwardly developing, set of colonial purposes and understandings. It was initially seen as dangerous, perhaps impossible, to remove the feudal layer of lords ruling over much of the Indian countryside in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As the dangers waned, permanent settlements with local lords yielded to settlements with cultivators, annexations increased, and efforts to control those lords who had been appropriated by British rule intensified. Colonized lords – whether as talukdars, zamindars, or even more saliently as princes in the one-third of India under indirect rule – were progressively constructed as edifices not only of loyalty and subservience, but of a newly created and gentrified managerial elite: a tribute, and a support, to British rule.

When these efforts failed, as they generally did, the British increasingly tried to intervene in the forms and operations of management itself. But, at the very moment they came closest to achieving one component of their objectives, the complete separation of kings from their states, they scented new dangers and withdrew to the creative muddle of indirect rule.