Princely India and the British: Political Development and the Operation of Empire by Caroline Keen (review)

In this stimulating volume, Caroline Keen explores the relations between India’s princes and their British overlords during the heyday of the Raj, from 1858 to 1909. Based on thorough research in British archives—though not in princely archives or indigenous language materials—Keen’s book, eschewing a conventional chronological narrative, takes the reader through a series of chapters meant in turn to illuminate the “princely life cycle” from accession through education and marriage to the nature of rulership (x). Though analysis of historical change is far from absent in this account, the topical organization provides a fresh and accessible introduction to a colonial encounter often either bathed in romantic nostalgia or lost to the reader in the intricate details of hundreds of princely regimes.

From the earliest days of conquest, the British had to devise strategies for dealing with the varied principalities they encountered in India. In the later eighteenth century they often allied with some, such as Hyderabad or Awadh, to keep others at bay. Later, as British rule over India was consolidated, reform-minded officials, their views informed by early Victorian liberalism, saw the Indian princes as relics of “Oriental” despotism. Hence, especially under men such as Lord Dalhousie in the early 1850s, they sought occasions to annex these princes’ territories to British India. The 1857 revolt, during which the princes still on their thrones supported the British, brought this policy to an end. The Queen’s Proclamation of 1858 guaranteed the remaining princes their thrones in perpetuity. The result was a system that enshrined an enduring contradiction, in which the princes were at once independent rulers and at the same time restrained by British “paramountcy” (9). As Lord Mayo phrased this dilemma, “We act on the principle of non-interference, but we must constantly interfere.” Above all, he said, British support for princely rule “is only to be gained by the exercise of justice, by the certain punishment of crime and the encouragement of those who support our recommendations” (qtd. in Keen 129).

Keen argues that active British intervention in princely affairs, although often decisive, was inconclusive and often ineffectual. On rare occasions, to be sure, as in the case of the Gaekwar of Baroda in 1875, if a ruler was regarded as “blatantly unfit to rule” the British were prepared to depose him (142). But, for the most part, to avoid antagonizing those whom they regarded as pillars of the Raj, the British preferred to cajole and threaten. Much of this, as Keen shows us in chapters full of intriguing accounts of individual cases, took place on the occasion of disputes within princely families over succession and marriage. Here the British often successfully maneuvered to secure the accession of rulers they saw as committed to reform and to provide appropriate brides for them. Princely minorities too, of course, provided opportunities for interference. In a welcome chapter on “Marriage and Royal Women,” Keen shows how, even apart from the exceptional case of the four generations of female rulers of Bhopal, women of the court, especially female regents, as they grew more educated, “succeeded in wielding a considerable amount of power … by gaining British support for their personal position” (105).

The British sought, by providing them with English tutors and princely colleges on the model of Eton, to transform the princes into a “new breed of ruler” committed to good government on “liberal principles” (47). But secure on their thrones, and often inhibited by family opposition, princes had little incentive to undertake any such transformation. As a result, Keen argues, by the start of the twentieth century only a handful of princes were “able to participate fully in the administration of their states” (89).

Most fully committed to a reform agenda, in Keen’s view, were the political agents posted to the larger princely courts. These men, often military officers, have drawn little...