Royal contrarians

An expertly researched book seeks to question the stereotypes about India's princely states

False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma

Author: Manu S Pillai

Publisher: Juggernaut

Price: Rs 899

Pages: 568

Manu Pillai is the deliverance that awaits generations of Indians bored to death by uninspiring history textbooks. His scholarly gifts sit beside an ability to tease out juicy, hilarious, even bizarre nuggets from the nooks and crannies of historical sources. He buries the reader in mounds of notes and references, then regales with a saucy sense of humour.

Can you identify the person that Pillai is describing in the following sentences? “The brown Victorian was swathed in bureaucratic blandness, not silk and colour; if he was exotic, it was only as much as the English queen in whose name starchy civil servants — in matching uniform — governed his country.” The 16-year-old in question is Prince Asvathi Tirunal of Travancore, the subject of a portrait by the celebrated painter Raja Ravi Varma in 1887.

The adolescent is perched on a tricycle, which was “marketed for ageing men and delicate ladies” before it caught the fancy of “the rich and famous” including Queen Victoria. According to Pillai, it signals “a claim to equality with the British, if not in a racial or political sense, at least in the realm of interests and intellect”. There are “rolling hills and wiry trees” in the background, and the prince’s face bears “a look of doleful seriousness”.

With these delightful observations, Pillai welcomes the reader into his expertly researched book False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma. He writes, “To sitter and artist both, the idea was not to portray the man as yet another tropical exhibit as much as a serious gentleman of Eastern make but Western polish.”

The author’s aim here is to question the stereotypes that abound with respect to India’s erstwhile princely states. His guide on this journey is Varma’s artistic oeuvre. Pillai tracks the painter’s travels through five princely states — Travancore, Pudukkottai, Baroda, Mysore and Udaipur — from the 1860s to the early 1900s, and gives an account of the rulers and ministers.

Pillai, who previously wrote The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore (2015) and Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji (2020), has been besotted with Varma “for about half my life now”. Pillai was born in 1990. His deep interest in the subject encouraged him to supplement archival work with “anecdotal information and oral history” from Varma’s relatives, “both from the Kilimanoor and the Mavelikara-Travancore families”.

This book argues that the rulers and ministers of princely states were important political actors resisting British imperialism in India, behind their façade of “outward deference”. Dadabhai Naoroji, the Dewan of Baroda, was one of them. Naoroji became a pain in the neck for Colonel Robert Phayre, a British Resident at the Maratha court, when he used his “excellent knowledge of English customs and habits” to push his maharajah’s cause.

Pillai also writes about Maharana Fateh Singh of Udaipur who exasperated the British with his irreverence. When he was bestowed with an imperial honour for his “less than generous” contribution to the First World War, he remarked that the distinction was owed for doing nothing. He said, “Because I rendered the British the highest service. While the British were away fighting the war in Europe, I didn’t take Delhi. Isn’t that a big enough service?”

In Mysore, Krishnaraj Wadiyar III got sculptures of himself made and installed in temples, emphasising “a sacred kinship” and signalling the lineage that connected him to prominent ancestors. This language of divinity was tough for the British commissioner Mark Cubbon to compete with. Pillai writes, “The British might have appropriated the right to govern, but in serving god and in Mysore’s spiritual landscape, a Cubbon would never replace a Wadiyar.”

If these examples give the impression that Pillai is trying to cover up atrocities committed by the rulers of princely states, that could not be farther from the truth. Pillai points out the evils of Brahminical dominance as well as British colonialism. His broader argument, however, is that the princes should be studied in terms of their role “in the making of contemporary India” rather than being “remembered with frothy nostalgia or dismissed as greedy fools”.

His research was funded by a grant from the Sandeep and Gitanjali Maini Foundation. He has drawn on a variety of archives including the National Archives of India in New Delhi, the British Library in London, the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics in Pune, the Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation in Bengaluru, the Asiatic Society in Mumbai, and the Archive of Modern Conflict in London.

This book will complicate the reader’s understanding of India’s struggle for independence because that story rarely includes the stories of the princely states. As documented in this book, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru once described these states as “sinks of reaction and incompetence”, also “the offspring of the British power in India, suckled by imperialism”. However, early members of the Indian National Congress felt rather differently.

Pillai writes, “Solidarity, in fact, came easily to brown royalty and early progressives under colonial authority, for both had incentives in smashing imperial claims about native incapacity for government: the princes to deter interference and educated Indians to win power.”

As “an anglicized class”, the elite Congressmen were struggling for legitimacy.

The idea of one unified nation had to be “slowly constructed” because people thought of themselves in terms of caste-based, regional and linguistic groups. These were identities that highlighted differences rather than commonalities. As Pillai notes, “A peasant in Gorakhpur had little contact with or knowledge of peasant life in Malabar, let alone the capacity to march together for change.” Some of these divisions have continued into our present, and these are happily exploited by politicians clamouring for power in the Republic of India.