2
Not as Relics but as
Rulers: India’s Princes
I
The great durbars of Nripendra Narayan, Maharaja of Cooch Behar (Koch Bihar), matched any viceregal show for richness and spectacle. One, held at the beginning of the century, left Major Gordon Casserly spellbound. A local garrison commander, he had been invited to witness the maharaja’s eldest son pay homage to his father in a glittering ceremony which simultaneously proclaimed the prince’s status, loyalty to the Crown and love of all things British. Outside the palace there were lines of elephants, painted and caparisoned with cloth of gold, and legions of white-coated servants carrying flambeaux. Inside and illuminated by electric light were the maharaja’s red-jacketed bodyguard, carrying swords, spears and antique muskets, and his aides who wore British-style white uniforms and pith helmets with spikes. The maharaja was traditionally dressed in a pale blue tunic with a diamond-studded aigrette pinned to his turban. He sat on a gilded throne behind which was hung his banner, embroidered with elephants and tigers, a present from Queen Victoria.
It was proper that the Queen Empress should have made such a gift, for Nripendra Narayan was one of her most steadfast subjects and a favourite guest at Windsor and Sandringham. A few years before he had served as a cavalry officer during the Tirah campaign on the North-West Frontier. Later in the evening, he remarked to Casserly that: ‘If ever, during [his] lifetime, the British quitted India, my departure would precede theirs,’ for this would be no country to live. ‘Chaos, bloodshed and confusion would be its lot.’1 Exile would not have proved too tiresome for him, as he preferred England to India and spent as much time there as possible. Nripendra Narayan was not, however, an absentee landlord, indifferent to his subjects’ well-being. He had paid for a hospital and a gaol in which, Casserly noticed, the convicts were better fed and employed than in the prisons of British India. A manly, public-school spirit pervaded the maharaja’s boys’ college where the major was delighted to see playing fields crowded with ‘native youngsters competing in sprint, hurdle and long-distance races and doing high and broad jumps just like their contemporaries in England’.
The maharaja’s eldest son and heir, Rajendra (‘Raji’), had played the same games at Eton. At the durbar he appeared in the scarlet coat of a British cavalry officer and presented his sword to his father with the customary supplication, ‘I place my life and my sword in your hand.’ ‘I accept the gift and give you back your life,’ the maharaja answered. His younger sons also rendered their homage, each dressed in the gala uniform of the Imperial Cadet Corps. One, Prince Victor, a godson of the Queen Empress, was destined to study economics and plantation management at an American university, the better to develop his family’s assets when he returned to Cooch Behar. After the ceremonies, Nripendra and his guests withdrew along corridors hung with the heads of bison, deer, and buffaloes, all of which he had shot. Tiger skins in the billiard room were further evidence that the maharaja was a consummate sportsman, happiest with a gun in his hand. He had a good eye for bloodstock, too; in the dining room there were cups won at the Calcutta races.
Before and during dinner, Casserly chatted with the maharaja’s daughters, who had learned their manners and small talk from English governesses and in the salons of London and Paris, whose dressmakers and perfumiers had provided their wardrobes and scents. The major also talked familiarly with the young princes, discussing shooting, polo and ‘London theatrical gossip’. This subject may have held Raji’s attention more than the others, since he had fallen in love with an English actress, to the horror of his family, who forbade marriage. Piqued, he later took a bizarre form of revenge by drinking himself to death with champagne.2 The durbar ended with a rather tedious nautch, after which Raji and Casserly revived their spirits and cleared their heads by a moonlight drive in one of the young prince’s motor cars.
All that passed during that night fits almost too neatly into a familiar, romantic stereotype of princely India during the heyday of the Raj. There is the hospitable prince whose passionate loyalty to the Crown is matched only by his mania for sport, and whose object in life is to make himself into a benign English aristocrat, caring for his game and tenantry with equal diligence. His cosmopolitan and sophisticated offspring, entranced by the beau monde of Europe, lead lives which revolve around a relentless and expensive pursuit of fizz and fun. Given that ostentation and uninhibited behaviour had always been distinguishing features of India’s princes, their novel pastimes did not cause much stir among their subjects. There was, however, censure from the nationalist press and the Foreign Office in Calcutta, whose job it was to oversee relations with what were pointedly called the ‘subordinate states’.
High-living and over-spending princes were a permanent headache for officials whose taste tended towards the Spartan. The government wanted the princes to visit Britain, where they would be received by the monarch and, perhaps, find inspiration for modernising projects in their states. At the same time they would see for themselves the wonders of the imperial metropolis and leave suitably impressed, although not all were. After a visit to London’s East End in the 1890s, the younger brother of the Maharaja of Jodhpur, Sir Pratab Singh, expressed amazement at the poverty he had seen there. He and probably many others from his background had imagined that Britain’s population consisted of ‘Sahibs’, that is the equivalent to the British soldier, or ‘Chota Sahibs’, the counterparts of their officers and high-ranking officials. Puzzled by the slums, Sir Pratab suggested that London’s paupers and workless might emigrate to Jodhpur, where there was plenty of untilled land.3 Nearly every other Indian prince abroad mixed exclusively with Burra Sahibs and were lionised by high society in London and on the Continent. Regardless of their local means and status, they were universally regarded as exotic, powerful and fabulously rich, fancies which they did nothing to dispel. Rather, many were flattered by the treatment they received and did all in their power to live up to their imagined reputation. One consequence was, in Curzon’s words, that the playboy princes were better known ‘on the polo ground, or on the race course, or in a European hotel’ than in their own states. Conspicuous consumption in Europe and a taste for its luxuries played havoc with noble bank balances: between 1898 and 1903 the Maharaja of Jodhpur ran up debts of over £250,000.
It was impossible to prevent over-indulgence, although the Raj tried as hard as it could. A secret report of 1908 that detailed princely misdemeanours over the previous ten years was a catalogue of every form of addiction and delinquency. The young Maharaja of Alwar combined the vices of Toad of Toad Hall with those of Oscar Wilde, with his taste for ‘new palaces, motor cars’ and boys. Other homosexual princes included Shivaji Rao Holkar of Indore, who was officially forbidden trips abroad in 1900, and the Maharaja of Patiala, who kept the company of ‘stablemen, jockeys, and panders of every description’.4 His excesses represented a fall from grace, for, until recently, he had been under the tutelage of ‘a most worthy and high-minded’ British officer. Curzon was appalled by such goings-on, which he blamed on early marriage, a suggestion dismissed by the Secretary of State for India, Lord George Hamilton, who reminded the Viceroy that for the Indian upper classes homosexuality was ‘a natural pleasure’.5 At least it could not be blamed on contact with Europe. Another victim of ‘physical and moral disease’, the spendthrift Maharaja of Jodhpur, was encouraged in his drinking and pursuit of young men by his wife. The 21-year-old Raja of Jhind rejected his two Sikh wives, and Curzon’s injunction to produce a son and heir, in favour of ‘the daughter of a European professional aeronaut of low character’ whom, allegedly, he had purchased from her father.6 ‘European women of bad character’ hung around the court of the Nawab of Bahawalpur who, in defiance of his faith, consumed large amounts of alcohol as well as chloral and opium.
The hard-drinking prince was a recurring official problem. In 1881, the Maharaja of Gwalior told Sir Lepel Griffin, the senior political agent in central India, that he had
reduced his drinking by four-fifths and was now down to a bottle of brandy a day, which he believed was a ‘fair allowance’ for a diabetic. In Rewah, the Raja was at loggerheads with his mother, ‘a high-born virago’ who sheltered mischief-makers and criminals in the zenana (ladies’ quarters).7 When the Maharaja of Vizagapatam, a keen polo, tennis and cricket player, was mildly reproved by William Horne for his intake of gin, champagne and pilsener lager, he confessed, ‘I know, sir. I am an idle, drunken fellow . . . But what can I do?’ He added, ‘Your Pax Britannica has robbed me of my hereditary occupation. What is my hereditary occupation? It is fighting.’ He died in 1897, sadly aware that he was the third generation of his family to die in bed rather than on the battlefield.8 His summary of his and his fellow princes’ predicament was largely correct; they were the proud descendants of a noblesse d’épée who were now forbidden to wield the sword by a government which had robbed their ancestors of their independence. Although they were revered by their subjects, the princes’ status and power ultimately rested upon their ability to keep on the right side of the Foreign Department. Intemperance, unpaid bills, attachments to stableboys or disreputable white women, indeed all the vices of their European counterparts, were impediments to what Calcutta wanted: hard-working partners in government. ‘You should reflect that you have the honour to be a unit of the great British Empire,’ the local political agent told the young Raja of Kolhapur on the day of his installation in 1910.9 It was a privilege which he and the rest of the princes were never allowed to forget.
II
And yet the Raj needed the goodwill and co-operation of the princes. At the beginning of the twentieth century there were 675 of them, who ruled over an area of 822,000 square miles which contained just over 72.5 million inhabitants, roughly a fifth of India’s population. They were clustered in the north-western part of the country and on the north-eastern frontier with a couple of substantial outliers, Hyderabad and Mysore, in the south. They ranged in size from Hyderabad with 83,000 square miles and Jammu and Kashmir with 80,000, to pocket-sized states such as Jalia, Mengni and Kuba, all in Kathiawar and each of under five square miles. Another of Kathiawar’s tessera of mini-states, Dedan, was so tiny and obscure that it got lost from official sight. In 1906, after being requested by Calcutta for a report on Dedan, the Bombay administration admitted to knowing nothing whatsoever about the place.10 Like every other Indian state, great and small, Dedan’s political status was the result of treaties between its rulers and the East India Company. These agreements acknowledged Britain as the paramount power with control over the state’s defence and relations with its neighbours. In return for protection, the prince was expected to govern even-handedly and humanely with the guidance of a British resident or, in the lesser states, a peripatetic political agent. If a prince or chief broke faith, usually by making war on another state, or, less commonly, by gross misrule, he could be unseated by the Raj, which also insisted upon having the final say in any disputed succession. Calcutta also determined the standing of the prince among his peers by fixing the number of guns to be fired whenever he received an official salute, which was no trifling matter among an élite that set a high store by protocol.
Successive Governor-Generals had turned a blind eye to the internal affairs of the princely states and were reluctant to intervene if abuses occurred. Only in 1860 did the rulers of Patiala, Nabha and Jhind formally agree to outlaw sati, slavery and female infanticide. The old live-and-let-live attitude survived in the new Raj and in a handful of seldom-inspected corners bad old ways lingered on.11 Slavery persisted in the remote northeastern state of Manipur until 1891. The maharaja possessed over a thousand slaves, some of whom he occasionally gave as presents to his favourites, and his subjects were permitted to buy and sell them. And yet Sur Chandra Kirti Singh, Manipur’s ruler from 1851 to 1886, was considered a congenial ruler, more perhaps for his loyalty during the Mutiny than his enlightenment, although he was considered more progressive than most of his contemporaries.12
In Calcutta it was hoped that princes of Sur Chandra’s sort would die out one day and be succeeded by heirs who had been carefully tutored in their moral and political responsibilities in British-run colleges. In the meantime, living Sur Chandras presented the Raj with a dilemma. Were they to be coerced into changing for the better, or were they to be subjected to continual, gentle pressure? In general, and because it preferred a quiet time, the government chose the carrot rather than the stick, which made sense since this policy avoided confrontations and kept friends. This was why princes were allowed to maintain their armed retinues even though, in some instances, they were bands of part-time robbers. In 1881, Sir Lepel Griffin complained to the Viceroy, Lord Ripon, that: ‘The swaggering ruffians who form the bodyguards of the smaller chiefs and Thakurs in Central India and Rajputana are a terror to the countryside.’ A large number were ‘fanatical’ Muslims, Afghan and Baluchi mercenaries whom, he guessed, were dacoits during their abundant off-duty hours.13 A few years after, a British officer, called in to assess their martial usefulness, calculated that there were at least 74,000 of these ‘riff raff’ in Rajputana alone. Armed with old muskets, matchlocks, spears, bows and arrows, swords and some ‘worn out and dangerous cannon’, they menaced no one save those who had the misfortune to live near them.14 Political agents coaxed the Rajputana chiefs to whittle down their private forces which, by 1900, mustered 29,000 men. The eventual solution to this problem was a masterstroke of pragmatism: the surviving men-at-arms were converted into a police force, the first the region had known.15 It is of more than passing interest that that powerful arm of law and order, the Thagi and Dakaiti Department, was only allowed to operate in Rajputana in 1896.16
Cutting down and re-employing princely retinues was a delicate business. The decorative fighting men, some of whom, Griffin noted, wore fine gold-inlaid armour, were a source of pride and a token of a ruler’s ancient rights and power. In a sense they were as much a symbol as the Union Jack which flew over every residency as a reminder of Britain’s supremacy, or the Indian army lancers who escorted political agents when they attended durbars in the smaller states. Convincing a prince he no longer needed or could not afford the customary trappings of authority required tact and patience. Moreover, in the case of the Rajput rajas and chiefs, British officials were disinclined to meddle too zealously in the affairs of men whose frank manliness made them honorary public schoolboys. Reporting in 1907 on relations between British officials and the local princes, the resident of Rajputana told the Viceroy, Lord Minto, that for decades there had always been ‘a sympathy between Rajputs and Englishmen’. ‘Towards the old-fashioned native gentleman the attitude is unchanged; towards the leaders of the younger generation, educated in English methods and frequently adopting our customs, relations have become more friendly than before.’17 This was understandable if the experience of Sir Walter Lawrence is anything to go by. Offered champagne by a Rajput raja, he was urged by his host to ‘drink until your head goes turning, or you will never appreciate the nautch we are going to have in the Palace tonight; until your head goes turning round and round you will not like our dancing’.18
There was rarely any scrimping on hospitality when British officials made their routine visits to the Raj’s princely clients. These duties were undertaken by political agents, who were either seconded army officers with a good command of native languages or ‘uncovenanted’ civil servants, occupying the grade just below that of the ICS. The political officer investigated how a state was being run and reported on the character and abilities of its rulers. He attended durbars, where he observed a prince at work and tried to sense the prevailing atmosphere in the state, and, where they existed, inspected public utilities. This last was often difficult, for, when a prince feared that these were not up to scratch, he might deflect the agent in the manner of the slack functionaries in Gogol’s The Government Inspector. Every agent was assisted by a small staff of Indian clerks, the most important of whom was the daf
tardar (supervisor), who undertook much of the day-to-day business. These officials needed careful watching. One who might have stepped straight from Gogol’s play, Venkalesh Manjekar, native agent in Kolhapur, made 75,000 rupees from bribery and extortion during the ten years before his arrest in 1897.19
Princely government was personal government. Residents and agents therefore needed to know everything they could about the ruler’s private life, intrigue among his often extended family and court factions. From their reports it is clear that those responsible for overseeing native rulers ran their own intelligence networks, which picked up hearsay and gossip. These varied in efficiency. In 1884, informers told the Hyderabad resident that his departure from a tiger shoot had been the signal for ‘a drunken and disgraceful orgy’ by the eighteen-year-old nizam and his companions. The disturbed official investigated the matter closely and was glad to discover that the affair had merely been ‘boyish larking’. This vindication of his moral soundness was complemented by signs of political wisdom; at durbars, the young prince and his ministers listened to the complaints of extortion made by ryots against state officials and had sacked several of the culprits.20
Vigilance was vital, even though it was physically impossible to keep a close eye on the inner workings of every state. Extremes of watchfulness and supervision of the sort practised by twentieth-century dictatorships would have been deemed unnecessary and unwelcome by a government proud of its respect for law and precedence. So long as the princes complied with the guidelines laid down by the Foreign Department and heeded the advice of its agents in the field, they and their inheritances were safe. Nevertheless, the government’s antennae were always highly sensitive to any development or incident within a native state which might injure its prestige or infringe its rights. If a threat was perceived, then intimidation followed, even to the point of enforcing treaty clauses which assigned to the Raj the right to depose a prince or appoint a successor.
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