India's Princely States

People, Princes and Colonialism

Waltraud Ernst, Biswamoy Pati, Waltraud Ernst, Biswamoy Pati

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134119875
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This is an invaluable collection for scholars working on the princely states of India due to abundance of sources consulted and broad coverage of the subject

It includes contributions by authors from Europe/UK, India and North America. Both editors are highly regarded and well reputed scholars. Most contributors are well known researchers in their field

It will be of interest to scholarly community in Europe/UK, North America, Asia and Australia where Indian History and Politics is taught

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People, princes and colonialism

Waltraud Ernst and Biswamoy Pati

On the margins of the history of South Asia

In recent years, the Indian princely states have become a focus of attention among historians of South Asia. This is to be welcomed as the vast areas that were not painted pink on the maps of the British Empire had hitherto been located at the margins of the historiography of the subcontinent. Yet the Indian states were by no means negligible in terms of size and political and military presence. They comprised two-fifths of south Asia’s territory and about one-fifth of its population at the time when the British Crown took over the control of the remaining provinces from the English East India Company in 1858. Each area of the subcontinent had, of course, its own history of regional and cultural diversity and interaction with the expanding British Empire. It would therefore be inappropriate to generalize about the ways the rulers of the over 500 or so Indian states and the colonial power negotiated the boundaries between ‘princely’ and colonial rule. For example, western and southern areas were riven with conflicts during the period of British expansion. These were due not least to competition over the established opium trade routes along the western coast, the presence and territorial and trading interests of other European powers (such as the Dutch, French and Portuguese) and the military challenges posed by some formidable rulers (such as Hyder Ali, Tipu Sultan and the Marathas) and principalities in the wake of declining Mughal power and the resulting decentralization. Similarly, in the north, Sikh power strongholds created problems for the British. In the east, by comparison, well-organized opposition to the British was negligible, apart from Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1764) and resistance in the hill tracts.

In addition to military engagements and treaties, policies such as ‘subsidiary alliance’ and the ‘doctrine of lapse’ were applied by the British in varied, tailor-made ways in most Indian states from the time of Wellesley and Dalhousie. The exceptions were Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, where colonial hegemony had been established during the late eighteenth century. The varied nature of these states and their different positions in the wider scheme of political governance on the subcontinent has been neglected even in the most outspoken and conceptually astute branches of south Asian studies, such as post-modern, post-colonial, literary and subaltern studies.

The few studies that have been published from the late nineteenth century onwards were in the main relatively self-contained histories of specific states that came to occupy their own niche in the historiography. Meeting the same fate as later writing, they were but barely integrated into the grand sweep of modern south Asian history. A temporary upsurge in the historiography of the Indian states began following Independence in 1947, due to debates about their role in the process of decolonization and the accession of most of them to the Indian Union. Apart from discussion of the contested status of Jammu and Kashmir, hardly anything has been written on those states, which, like Las Bela in 1948, acceded to or were located in Pakistan. Yet, some of these states were maintained until the mid-1950s and early 1970s, as in the cases of the western and northern frontier states. A lacuna therefore continues to exist in the historiography, which may be due also to a politically and historically flawed equation of the princely states with Indian states. This precariously sensitive issue needs to be addressed in future writing.

Indian nationalist historiography tended to celebrate the success of the freedom struggle that had led to the merger of the princely states with the Indian Union. Yet, one of the contentious issues was whether the accession constituted a side-effect of the process of decolonization and the political manoeuvrings at the top (including leaders of the Congress, like Patel) or whether it was due to the struggles of the states’ peoples that reinforced the process of decolonization in the states and thereby created the conditions for political negotiations. V.P. Menon set the trend, subscribing to the former position. The writings of frontline communist activists such as P. Sundarayya and M.A. Rasul point at the alternative position, namely that the struggles in the 1946–47 period in fact created the basis for the Congress to work out the ‘integration’ with the princes and the retreating colonial power.¹

A persistently popular tradition of historical and literary writings focuses on the Indian states in a number of reductionist ways, portraying them variously as relics of former Oriental despotism and feudalism, as vestiges of a golden age, or as mere adjuncts to British colonial governmentality. Although these flawed mono-dimensional portrayals of Indian states and their rulers have rightly been criticized and sidelined in recent decades, some of the Orientalist, romanticized and Euro-focused tropes they are based on continue to inveigle themselves in often-insidious ways into current scholarship. A more nuanced and sophisticated assessment that avoids essentialist stereotyping and undue generalizations is clearly called for. Furthermore, if the history of the Indian states is to be more adequately integrated with existing scholarship on south Asia in general, it needs to address more than nationalist endeavours and the states’ roles in the political and economic policies and rhetorical designs of British colonialism. Rather, social, political and economic developments in the Indian states require analysis both on their own terms and at the same time in relation to colonial governance and resistance in British India. A multi-dimensional approach that is focused on the varied conditions in specific states as well as cognisant of inter-state relationships and interactions with colonial governmentalities is important in two ways. First, it leads to a more sophisticated assessment of the Indian states, on their own terms, as well as in relation to regional and global politics. Second, it enables debates on the nature of hegemonic, colonial rule in south Asia to move beyond their narrowly ‘British India’-focused canvas. The fact that south Asia is made up of a multitude of different cultural formations, that the Indian states as well as the provinces under British control were heterogeneous political, economic and social constellations, and that, therefore, insights derived from the assessment of circumstances in one particular location cannot necessarily be applied indiscriminately to other places, has hitherto been more often honoured in the breach than in the observance and requires critical attention.

Colonial hegemony and princely autonomy

Just as British administrators applied different policy regimes in the various northern and southern provinces, so did Indian rulers who had to adjust their policies to local, communal idiosyncrasies and the demands of different social groups. Moreover, just as the Indian rulers negotiated with the British different kinds of allegiances that fitted with their various other regional treaties and political agreements, so did the British have to accede to different kinds of ‘indirect rule’. An important issue that needs to be considered in the context of such heterogeneity is the extent to which the Indian states were autonomous and sovereign entities. In recent writing in particular it has been suggested that, far from being mere puppet regimes, some of them maintained considerable autonomy and preserved existing social formations or modified them to fit in better with new political ideas, economic rationales and changing communal allegiances – sometimes to the better, sometimes to the worse for the peasantry on whose labour the states depended. This approach could be seen as an attempt to challenge earlier, hegemonic accounts that depicted the princes as at best mere decorative stooges of British imperial power, and to recover their agency as active subjects.² Because of its seemingly anti-hegemonic stance, this argument may sound persuasive within the context of current historical writing.

However, we need to consider that once the British had implemented the treaty system and introduced changes in land ownership and revenue collection based on Western ideas of private property, Indian rulers’ freedom of action in the political and economic spheres became increasingly constrained by the dictates of British colonial governance. Although a policy of ‘non-interference’ was advocated, this was more a matter of colonial rhetoric that fitted in with the less explicitly aggressive and militaristic tone of governance following the Rebellion of 1857. The rhetoric of ‘non-interference’ marked in fact a ‘hegemonic shift’, with emphasis now being put on measures that appeared less interventionist, yet had important structural consequences in the political as well as economic spheres. For example, as Metcalfe has shown, direct relations between Crown and the Indian states continued in the post 1858 period, when the Crown took over India. Thus, what we see is that loyalty was secured through honours, titles, money and territories distributed lavishly in a series of viceregal darbars and the like.³ This drive included the setting up of special educational facilities from the 1870s, such as Rajkumar College at Rajkot and Rajpur, Mayo College at Ajmer, Aitchison College at Lahore and Daly College at Indore, which assured a supply of loyal followers for the British, once the Western-educated Indian elites in British India became all too closely involved in anti-imperialist politics. To prevent the isolation of Indian rulers and any possible striving toward independence, the princes were integrated into British government institutions such as the Imperial Legislative Council (from 1861) and the Chamber of Princes – a consultative cum advisory body that was set up in 1921 to counter increasing anti-British sentiments.⁴

Each of these various measures can be seen as part and parcel of a hegemonic strategy that encouraged Indian rulers to conceive of themselves, against the odds of their actual political impotence, as potent heads of independent states.⁵ Even if some of them happened to have been consummate politicians, the British shift from control through direct military action to policies of ‘subsidiary alliance’, the ‘doctrine of lapse’, and control by means of hegemonic incorporation from 1858 onwards, explains why some Indian rulers looked at themselves – or, in current parlance, ‘imagined’ themselves – as ‘independent’ and ‘autonomous’. Historians who suggest that the British recognized the princes as their ‘equals’ and stress their ‘autonomy’ and ‘independence’ may have unwittingly become, in an endeavour to rescue the princes from hegemonic accounts of history, victims of colonial ideology themselves.⁶

The emphasis on autonomy may have its origin also in the focus on the periods immediately before and after Independence and Partition, when some of the Indian rulers eventually did try to achieve what had been denied to them earlier by the British.⁷ They had woken up to the opportunity, arguably in some cases with encouragement by the retreating colonial power, eventually to become truly independent and autonomous. As we know, the rulers’ high-level political manoeuvres to this end were unsuccessful – occasioning major political movements in some cases, such as the Telengana people’s movement in Hyderabad state.

Regional studies

A plethora of regional studies has explored the role of the popular movements that had emerged from the late 1930s onwards and with which the Congress increasingly affiliated itself.⁸ Like the British, the Congress had officially advocated a policy of ‘non-interference’ in regard to the Indian states, as had Gandhi who had hoped that the princes would eventually become the ‘real trustees of the people’ in the Indian states.⁹ Yet, the Congress frequently stepped in to negotiate on behalf of peoples’ movements and acted as a restraining force, as in the case of some of the Orissan princely states.¹⁰ It also increasingly tried to assume leadership of peoples’ movements when they became prominent forces to be reckoned with in the late 1930s and 1940s. The peoples’ movements in the Indian states were complex and their analysis cannot be confined to the usual binary of people versus rulers. Apart from class demands characteristic of the position of exploited peasants and wage labourers, the struggles included at various points in time an anti-colonial component as well as communalist ambitions.¹¹ The complex and protracted dialectics of the national movements in the Indian states have been highlighted in particular by scholars who focus on how communist inspir...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 People, princes and colonialism
• 2 Colonial and postcolonial historiography and the princely states
• 3 ‘Cruel, Oriental despots’
• 4 Narcotrafficking, princely ingenuity and the Raj
• 5 The agrarian system of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir
• 6 The order of legitimacy
• 7 Loyal feudatories or depraved despots?
• 8 ‘Hostages in our camp’
• 9 Historicizing debates over women’s status in Islam
• 10 The Maharana and the Bhils
• 11 Women’s hospitals and midwives in Mysore, 1870–1920
• 12 Public health administration in princely Mysore
• 13 Border incidents, internal disorder and the nizam’s claim for an independent Hyderabad
• Index