Air India, the overseas airline of the independent Government of India (GOI), 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 manyof them… still in the feudal age’? This rotund, red-coated figure epitomises the profoundly ambivalent attitudes towards the Indian princes among successive 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 advantage 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 political 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 ministers; 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, magazines, 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.

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 development 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 onpeasant 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 the diversity of political actors and agendas within the states themselves may be deciphered.

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 leaders. Although many were coerced into subordination, princes usually sought political and material benefits from their agreements with the British.

COLONIAL SOCIOLOGY, CLASSIFICATION AND HIERARCHY

Throughout their imperial tenure in India, British administrators described and categorised Indian legal practices, religious beliefs and rituals, social structures 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 disinterested 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 spatial conception of India; and decennial censuses issued from 1871. After 1858 colonial knowledge specifically targeted the princes and their states.

Initially British officials discovered that there were relatively few documentary 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 entities. There were few documents of explication and no comprehensive collection of treaties or other legal documents such as sanads and letters of understanding.

Although there is a voluminous historiography on the princely states, it is uneven in its coverage, readability and scholarship. Consequently the secondary sources cited are those that I have found most useful or distinctive in their interpretations. Where authors have first published on their topics in journals and then substantially incorporated their articles into a monograph, I have cited only the titles of books, which are usually more developed statements of their research. Moreover, in my footnotes I have cited dissertations and unpublished papers but not included them here since they are more difficult to obtain. Since primary sources are the building blocks for the edifices of historians, I have included a few major collections of key documents, influential histories by British officials, and memoirs of British officials and Indian princes. Finally, all works are cited only once even where they are relevant to the topics of more than one chapter.

Princely States prior to 1800

Thought-provoking analyses of the underpinnings of kingship in India are J. Gonda’s Ancient Indian Kingship from the Religious Point of View (Leiden, 1969); J. C. Heesterman’s The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society (Chicago, 1985); and Ronald Inden’s ‘Ritual, Authority, and Cyclic Time in Hindu Kingship’, in J. F. Richards (ed.), Kingship and Authority in South Asia (Madison WI, 1978), pp. 28–73. Bernard Cohn developed an influential structural model that elegantly categorises differing levels of state formation in ‘Political Systems in Eighteenth Century India: The Banaras Region’, JAOS 82 (1962), pp. 313–20.

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 internal 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 annexation 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 manipulated alliances with external allies and internal supporters, mainly relatives, military entrepreneurs and land-controllers. Although relations with their external competitor, the East India Company and its successor the British Crown, involved continual negotiation, princes also confronted crucial challenges from internal co-partners. Coalitions of a clan, groups of clans, or military allies had created many states. Leaders of such ventures might initially differentiate themselves from their allies by seeking recognition from an outside power, as had the Tondaiman Kallars in Pudukkottai.

Indian princes played multiple roles on diverse stages. Thus their actions triggered complex and sometimes conflicting perceptions among various audiences. 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 influenced 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 cunning, inept or naive politicians will detail the shifting perceptions of their disparate audiences as well as the unequal abilities, ambitions and achievements of Indian princes. These images reflect the ambiguous sources of political authority, the tangled ritual and social status of princes, and a mixture of fact and fantasy in public consciousness.

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.

Political chaos disrupts the status of many, but for others it provides opportunities for political advancement, social mobility and economic gain. During the eighteenth century the Mughal Empire, the largest, most extensive political 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 eighteenth 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 losing 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 entrepreneurs, 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.

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 political 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.