The fate of the maharajahs after independence
DETHRONED
The downfall of India’s princely states
JOHN ZUBRZYCKI
352pp. Hurst. £25.
EVERY YEAR, at the end of October, India observes National Unity Day, celebrating the integration of the separate territories of the colonial period into one unified nation. Not everyone joins in. Last year a separate “felicitation event” took place in Ahmedabad, where thirty former princes gathered to lament the sacrifice of their dynasties – within a few years of the British leaving India in 1947, more than 560 princely states lost their independence as the new republic emerged. Amid the drama and tragedy of the partition of India and Pakistan, the story of the end of princely rule in India is often forgotten. Yet, as John Zubrzycki’s highly readable, balanced account demonstrates, the twilight of the princes was a turning point in history, an event comparable in scale to the unification of Italy in 1861, or of Germany ten years later.
Three figures dominate the narrative: the silvertongued viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, who cajoled the monarchy-loving Indian princes into giving up their special status; the Congress politician Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, “the Bismarck of India”; and the senior civil servant V. P. Menon, a chain-smoking tactician. Patel and Menon proffered carrot and stick to the princes, a stark choice between cash compensation or being left to fend for themselves, islands of feudalism encircled by a modern armed nation. Not that we should feel too sorry for the princes. Zubrzycki does not let up in the details of their decadence – widows tied to trees as tiger bait for royal hunts, drug addicts as rulers, personal menageries of diamond-studded dogs, dildo collections and, everywhere, expensive cars.
Dethroned shows how touch and go the end of empire proved. Fearing a mini Ulster or the Balkanization of India, Mountbatten, Patel and Menon used the Instrument of Accession to bring the princely states into the union. In Pakistan, where there were fewer princes, negotiations proved peaceful. In India, coercion prevailed. The rules were unclear. Jawaharlal Nehru, the leader of the Indian National Congress, was adamant there was no place in the new democracy for the feudal lackeys of the Raj. From Shimla, the viceregal hill station, Mountbatten lured the princes with the possibility of joining the Commonwealth as separate dominions. Plebiscites loomed, but were considered unpredictable tools, especially in states with large Muslim populations. Meanwhile, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the president of the Muslim League, encouraged Muslim princely states to join in the formation of the new Pakistan, an outcome that would have left the subcontinent a patchwork of segregated states. Menon and Patel stuck to their task, and by August 15, 1947, most of the states had yielded, “gobbled up”
