The Indian Princes and Their States (review)

The Indian princes—those medieval throwbacks—make up an essential though often missing part of the puzzle of modern history. For a variety of reasons, but certainly on account of the princely states’ speedy accession to independent India in 1948, they have been eclipsed from standard textbook narratives of the Indian past. It is as if the princes were forever destined only to flavor the unity of the modern nation-state as emblems of traditional India and nothing else. Their iconic status in modern Indian society indicates their dissolution from history proper and absorption into the stuff of memory and fantasy. Today one is more likely to faintly remember the maharaja of Udaipur’s stately palace in the James Bond film Octopussy or India Airways’ cherubic, but mustachioed, princely mascot than know the name of any historical Indian prince. This is generally because the history of the princely states remains tangential to the narrative of colonial domination and nationalist resistance. So even some professional historians may find themselves hard pressed to explain the process by which various imperial polities in the late Mogol era fractured into discrete princely states and became firmly ensconced in the British imperial order. But for the era of Asiatick research and early nationalism, the princely states produced particularly intractable problems of sovereignty, constitutionalism, and India’s uneven assimilation and resistance to imperial cultural norms. To the degree these problems appear salient for understanding our postimperial world, the portrait Ramusack paints of the Indian princes is bound to entice us.

The view that Ramusack offers of the princely states is panoramic, encompassing social, political, and cultural consequences of India’s contact and intercourse with the modern imperial system. Her recounting of the princes’ tale reaches back into the precolonial past with one eye firmly set on enduring traditions and the other on the course of far-reaching innovations. The princely state may have had its genesis as an “antique state,” according to Ramusack, or it may have been a breakaway “successor state,” such as Awadh under Safdar Jang, or in a more problematic way it could simply have been a “conquest state,” as the Marathas or Tipu Sultan’s regime is dubbed. Though she includes Jammu-Kashmir in the latter category—after all, what state is not a conquest state?—this state was created only after the British annexed Punjab in 1848 and sold control over the region to the Rajput maharaja Gulab Singh for 7.5 million rupees. A conquest of convenience, or favorable circumstances, one must presume.

Thus begins the presentation of a history of the princely state form, moving along rough conceptual bases from the very start, through the system of indirect rule, and into modern consumerist fantasy. All along Ramusack’s diligence in surveying the primary and secondary literature makes for a rich empirical quality, certainly making the chapters on patronage, administrative and economic structures, society, and politics worth reading. But all along, more always seems to crop up than can be sustained by her analytic framework. Even if she may realize that her categories and periodizations, derived from different strains of existing scholarship, are not quite adequate or adaptable to her empirical findings, she is more inclined to summarize and qualify rather than boldly rehaul, systematize, and assert afresh. This is most evident when Ramusack espouses the three distinct periods of détente, incorporation, and nonintervention of William Lee-Warner’s 1893 Protected Princes of India, all the while cognizant that it may “obscure the persistent, underlying juxtaposition of indirect rule and annexation and British non-intervention and intervention in the internal structure and policies of Indian states” (56). The mismatch between the framework and the variegated nature of the empirical record that the work displays may simply be due to the fact that the book contains less an argument than a collection of topics, all generated and organized by the rather simple postulate that “many princes represented a continuity of traditional state formation in India and remained autonomous rulers, exercising substantial authority...