Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia by Priyasha Saksena is a study of the relationship between the British Empire and Princely States in India between the late eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. The book demonstrates how sovereignty as a “polysemic” concept became an instrument for various legal actors vying for political power in South Asia. With the changes in imperial strategy and power relations throughout the period of study, the focus of legal language shifted and evolved. The book shows how concepts of sovereignty, imperial law, and international law were deployed in varied ways by different political actors, including the British, rulers of princely states, and anti-colonial nationalists in India. Ambitiously and thoroughly, Saksena explores the central role of princely states in the evolution of ideas of sovereignty, the creation of the Indian nation-state, and the fraught boundaries of imperial and international law.
Hundreds of princely states of various sizes and capacities spread throughout the length and breadth of South Asia, crisscrossing and interrupting the boundaries of British India. These states were not homogenous in size, structure, relations with the colonial state, or in their political ambition. Not only at its frontiers, but throughout the vastness of the Indian subcontinent, princely states proved the limits of British imperial territoriality and sovereign authority. Thus, the empire developed strategies and policies to ensure political supremacy using the language of law in general and sovereignty in particular. Debates on the legal status of princely states reflected how law was a vehicle for sovereignty, which circumscribed the relationship between categories of national, imperial, and international law.
Saksena shows that legal limitations faced by the East India Company government in controlling and interfering in princely states led to the development and refinement of the concept of paramountcy—an offshoot of sovereignty. The self-declared paramount power of the British in India meant that where annexation was not an option, the colonial state could make political and diplomatic decisions on internal and external affairs of the princely states. However, claims to paramountcy were contested in courts using legal arguments that harnessed the same ideas of sovereignty and international law used by the British. Legal entanglements changed over time, ranging from disputes with individual states on issues such as annexation and jurisdictional conflicts over extradition to infrastructural development in the 18th and 19th centuries. After the revolts of 1857 against East India Company rule, colonial policy was reinvented under the Crown with an emphasis on Henry Maine’s conceptualization of divisible sovereignty and indirect rule in traditional societies. The twentieth century introduced a host of new legal issues and collective mobilization of princely states in favor of or against the federal structure of the subcontinent in the twentieth century.
In the mid-nineteenth century, divisible sovereignty became an important conceptual and legal framework to restructure the relations with princely states following a large-scale revolt against the East India Company government. Here, Saksena draws out the deployment of sovereignty as a shapeshifting legal instrument, which forms the core argument of the book. Divisible sovereignty became crucial in articulations of British relations with princely states. Henry Maine, its architect, stated that while sovereignty is divisible in India due to the presence of multiple sovereign states, independence is not divisible (Saksena, 57). Consequently, the British claimed to be the only independent sovereign in a sea of sovereign princely states. Underlying the conceptualization of divisible sovereignty was the dichotomy of civilized/uncivilized, as evident in Maine’s analysis of traditional societies, as well as the different applications of rules of international law in Western societies and colonies. The debates on the limits and nature of princely state sovereignty clearly demonstrate the blurring boundaries between imperial and international law.
In the early twentieth century, the vocabulary of divisible sovereignty continued to be relevant as a legible form of international law shared by both the British and princely states, albeit with very different aims to assert control and autonomy, respectively. By this time, the princes were not only engaged in a power tussle with the British but also with anticolonial nationalists. When anticolonial nationalism dominated the political stage in British India, many among British imperialists and the princes found yet another offshoot of divisible sovereignty to retain power through federalism. The “flexible” concept of federalism provided a dual possibility of enhancing state sovereignty and autonomy (for the princes) and limiting the sovereign power of the states (for the British).
Divisible sovereignty in the guise of federation was used in theorizing an alternative future for post-colonial South Asia beyond the framework of Western nation-states. Yet, the dominant Western framework of indivisible and exclusive sovereignty and a territorially homogenous nation-state became the norm in post-colonies globally. In the run-up to decolonization, the princely states were pushed into acceding to the new nation-states of India or Pakistan due to internal division between princes and a lack of support and delayed response from the colonial office and British government. However, as Saksena shows, the drastic yet lengthy process of princely states giving up their long-held sovereign power in favor of national integration was far from consensual. Among several examples one can find of the northeastern frontier of military coercion used during this time of Indian nation-state formation, the case of Hyderabad is relatively well documented. Saksena shows how the Nizam of Hyderabad used international law to negotiate for independence and was initially supported by various countries in his bid at the United Nations.
Overall, the book provides a comprehensive and deep look into the invention, theorization, and application of legal ideas and instruments in the expansion and mitigation of colonial power in South Asia. The book examines the varied sources from which legal debates cohered, including case law, legal briefs, petitions, treatises, constitutional debates, and more. The book provokes further inquiry and questions into colonial legal policies and practices in places where sovereign power (whether of the princes or British) was at its weakest or least visible. While the relation between sovereign powers is thoroughly and clearly documented, there remains room to explore the relationship between legal identity and subjecthood of inhabitants of princely states as it evolved through the period. The book makes an important contribution to the historiography of law in the British Empire. This critical yet empirically rich study provides insight into the genealogies, legacies, and limitations of international law in the current global world order.
