Queen Victoria’s Maharajas: An Introduction
An introduction to the princes of the Indian Native States, who helped keep Britain in control of India for nearly two centuries.
For nearly 300 years, Britain was the all-powerful and dominant political, economic, and ruling power in India, subjugating an entire subcontinent and proclaiming it the ‘jewel in the crown’ of its empire. But it could never have done so alone. Even at its height, the British administration numbered little more than 20,000 British officials and soldiers compared to the 300 million Indians they ruled over. Like all hostile and foreign regimes, the British relied upon the willingness and support of native collaborators; in India, these were the dozens of its native rulers- Maharajas, Rajas, Nawabs, and Nizams. Since the British first began establishing themselves in India, her native princes willingly traded their independence, allegiance, and troops for the riches, palaces, prestige, and security their British overlords could provide. It was a collaboration that not only allowed Britain to remain in India until 1947, but also meant the princes to kept their thrones until then too.
Princely Origins
India had been ruled by princes since the time of the Mughals, Persian conquerors who already ruled much of central Asia in the 1500s. Led by Emperor Akbar the Great, the Mughal Empire quickly subjugated much of the subcontinent in the 1560s and 70s, centralising political power and administration in their capitals of Agra and later Delhi. Pre-existing princely states like Bikaner and Jaipur were quick to accept Mughal overlordship in return for confirmation of their local control. Likewise, Akbar prized such Rajput states for their military prowess and preferred to conciliate conquered rulers through marriage and diplomacy. The Mughals therefore ruled India as an imperial centralised power, prizing and utilising local governors and princes to oversee local matters on behalf of the emperor in Delhi.
But by the 1700s, this system was beginning to crumble. Large states like Awadh and Bengal became stronger and more independent and their governors moved residences away from the court in Delhi and made themselves rulers in their own right. In 1713, the governor of Hyderabad left the Mughal court he had grown to despise to preside in his territory itself, naming himself Asfa Jah I, Nizam of Hyderabad and founded what would be the largest and richest Indian state of all. Other local rulers simply fought their way out. States like Bhopal and Mysore were created when rulers like Tipu Sultan (Sultan of Mysore 1782–1799) created powerful centralised military machines the Mughals couldn’t fight and minted their own coins. These warrior states were created by great dynasties like the Gaekwads in Baroda, the Holkars in Indore, and Scindias in Gwalior.
By the mid-1700s, India had practically dissolved into numerous smaller but powerful and secure states ruled by rajas and chiefs. The Mughal Emperor may have remained in Delhi, but actual political power now resided with the local rulers themselves.
The British East India Company
Just as the rulers were abandoning their Mughal masters, however, they became more attached to a new emerging power in the Subcontinent, the British East India Trading Company.
The Company had been trading in India since 1612, when Akbar’s son, Emperor Jahangir, granted them trading and manufacturing rights in Surat, West India. Throughout the 1600s, as a result of wars with the Dutch and French, the Company’s territory in India grew to include Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta and in 1717 it was granted full customs-free trading rights in Bengal. It was in 1757, however, that the Company became a major power in India, when Major-General Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey and he surrendered all his territories to the Company. It continued to grow its territories around Bombay and Madras until, in 1773, it established its own capital at Calcutta and Warren Hastings was made the first Governor General of British India.
By now, the Company had replaced the Mughals as the dominant military and economic power in India. As such, many of the native rulers ensured their continued existence by accepting their new overlords. In 1766, Nizam Ali Khan of Hyderabad entered a treaty with the Company that promised monetary tribute in exchange for Company armed support when required. Agreements with the Company were certainly beneficial to native rulers, they forged state identities by delineating territorial boundaries and calculating resources for tax purposes; they could also help solve local military problems or succession disputes. Numerous rajas and nawabs therefore flocked to make agreements with the Company. It was also beneficial to the Company, allowing them sole trading rights with swathes of India without the cost of annexation and administration. But as time progressed and the Company became more powerful, these agreements became far more than just trade.
In the early 1800s, Governor Generals began asserting Britain and the Company’s ‘paramountcy’, proclaiming it the ruling power in India. As the Company slowly defeated the Sikh, Maratha, and Mughal Empires, many new and smaller states were created that needed Company assistance and security against their neighbours. It was at this time that Governor General Richard Wellesley (brother of the Duke of Wellington) began the programme of ‘subsidiary alliances’. These were agreements between native states and the Company that would provide the state with security and assurance that the Company would assist in any external threat or internal disorder on condition that they acknowledge the Company as the paramount power in India, trade with no one else besides them, and accommodate one of its agents at their court. The Nizam of Hyderabad was the first to enter this agreement in 1798, followed by those like the Rajput rajahs in 1817 and the Gaekwad of Baroda in 1819. Indeed, after the collapse of the Kingdom of Punjab after the Anglo-Sikh War of 1845–46, the new states of Patiala, Jind, and Kapurthala were quick to commit themselves to British overlordship.
Other states were not so lucky; their rulers were seen as too unruly or their assets too important that outright annexation into British India was required. The Mughal capital of Delhi was annexed in 1803, Assam in 1828 and Sindh in 1843. Annexation reached a zenith in the 1840s under the governorship of the evangelical Marquess of Dalhousie. Under his ‘Doctrine of Lapse’ (which forbade the usual custom of a childless ruler to pick his own successor, instead transferring their territory over to the Company) the state of Satora was annexed in 1848, Jhansi in 1854, and Awadh in 1856. This annexation policy was both determined by the loyalty of the native ruler and ensured those under ‘subsidiary alliances’ would do as they were told or face the same fate.
Therefore, by the mid-nineteenth century, three-fifths of the Subcontinent now belonged to the Company as ‘British India’ whilst the remaining two-fifths remained in the hands of hundreds of native rulers who governed with their consent.
The Rebellion of 1857
In 1857, a century after Clive’s victory at Plassey, the Indian ranks of the East India Company’s army, the ‘Sepoys’, mutinied, beginning on 10 May in the garrison town of Meerut in Bengal. The rebellion quickly spread across much of northern India as both soldiers and civilians rose up against Company rule.
Some native rulers leapt at the opportunity to be rid of the Company and reclaim their thrones. Nana Sahib II, whose claim as Peshwa (Prime Minister) of the Maratha Empire was removed when the empire was dissolved by the Company, led Indian fighters in capturing Kanpur from British soldiers and executing the survivors. Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi, whose throne and that of her adopted son was denied in 1854 under the ‘Doctrine of Lapse’, became and remains an Indian nationalist hero for her staunch and active military leadership (imagine an Indian Boudicca). Some rulers under ‘subsidiary alliance’ revolted, including the Holkar of Indore. Even the 81-year-old Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was proclaimed Emperor of all Hindustan and gave his countenance to the rebellion, but only very reluctantly after fighters had captured Delhi and practically forced him to at gunpoint.
The majority of native rulers, however, remained allied to the Company and their donations of resources and troops proved vital whilst they waited for British crown forces to arrive. The Nizam of Hyderabad donated hundreds of lakhs of money and resources to the Company whilst ensuring order was kept in the south. Alongside providing troops and supplies, the rajas of Patiala, Kapurthala, Jind, and Nabha personally led their troops to support the British and keep order in the Punjab. Indeed, it was thanks to the allegiance of the native rulers that the rebellion was confined to the north of the Continent and not spread.
By the autumn of 1857, the British forces had arrived and began recapturing territory. The Mughal Emperor was captured after the Siege of Delhi in September, deposed, tried for treason and exiled to Burma. Kanpur and Lucknow were retaken with vicious atrocities including sewing Muslims in pig skins before hanging them and strapping Indians to cannons and firing them. By the following summer, the rebellion was over and the British were once again in control. This may not have been possible without the cooperation of the many native rulers; indeed, the support of the Rajput princes and rulers of the great states of Mysore, Kashmir, Hyderabad etc. led Governor-General Charles Canning to call them “breakwaters in a storm”. More than ever, the British saw how valuable these princes were as allies and how important they were as the ‘natural’ rulers of India.
Creating the British Raj and the Indian Native States
Following the Rebellion, the East India Company had proven its ineptitude at governing such an important possession as India. To maintain control and ensure India’s riches remained in British hands, Parliament passed the Government of India Act on 2 August 1858; it liquidated the East India Company and transferred all its property, assets, land, and functions to the crown. India was now the possession of Queen Victoria and the British government, beginning a new era called the British Raj.
The newly-created Viceroy of India remained in control of the territory previously owned by the Company as ‘British India’, roughly three-fifths of India and two-thirds of its populace. Provisional governors in areas like Punjab and Bombay were appointed by the crown and a Council of India would advise the Viceroy, its membership strictly by appointment and without any influence or election by the Indian population.
The remaining two-thirds of India remained in the hands of its native rulers. Their right to rule was enshrined in Queen Victoria’s ‘Proclamation to the Princes, Chiefs, and People of India’ of 1 November 1858, which declared India a possession of the British Crown. It promised that no more annexation of land would take place and declared ‘we shall respect the rights, dignity, and honour of native princes as our own’. This proclamation created the ‘Indian Native States’; whilst Britain ruled its own territories itself, the other 500–600 states remained the responsibility of their rulers. These ‘nominally independent’ princes would have control of their own treasuries, taxes, armed forces and and legal matters, but a British ‘resident’ would be present at each of their courts and they ultimately answered to the Viceroy and the British Crown.
However, the British had trouble understanding how to define a ‘prince’ or ‘state’ as opposed to a local lord and settlement, eventually defining hundreds of communities it found as states and promoting their rulers to the title of Maharaja (if Hindu or Sikh) or Nawab (if Muslim). This meant that states greatly varied in size, population, and riches, from the mighty Hyderabad with over sixteen million subjects and an average revenue of of 417 million rupees or Jammu and Kashmir which covered over 85 thousand square miles to tiny states of less than a square mile and fewer than 200 inhabitants.
The Salute Table and the 1877 Imperial Assemblage
As historian Bernard Cohn stated ‘the British operated in India with an ordinal theory of hierarchy- in which individuals could be ranked by precedence’. Everyone in India knew their position; the British enforced the ancient caste system so to rationalise India’s immense population whilst the Raj government and civil service was strictly hierarchised (even down to the Viceregal Astronomer), and the princes of the Native States were no different.
From 1858, each state and its ruler was ranked on the ‘salute table’, a chart which allocated how many gun salutes a prince would be given at an official occasion. Position on the table was determined by the size of a prince’s state, their revenue, their regional importance, their historical importance (such as position in the Mughal Empire) and their historical relationship with, and service to, the British. Hence, for example, the Nizam of Hyderabad was the richest of the princes, his state was the largest, it had a rich history and had been the first to agree to the ‘subsidiary alliance’ scheme; therefore, he was placed at the top of the table with a salute of 21 guns. The other great princes of Baroda, Mysore, Gwalior, and Kashmir were also given 21 guns, whilst the remaining states were ranked accordingly, such as the smaller-sized but immensely rich Maharaja of Patiala with seventeen guns and the minor but devoutly friendly Maharaja of Cooch Behar with thirteen. So this chain continued until it reached the minor states of Rajkot or Sonepur with only nine guns. Position on this table determined everything: the precedence and honour a prince was treated with, where they sat at dinner, how they were greeted by foreign dignitaries, even down to where they stood on the Viceroy’s carpet during an audience.
The salute table was given greater prominence during the Imperial Assemblage of 1877, when all of India’s most-important princes met for the first time. The previous year, the 1876 Royal Titles Act granted Queen Victoria the title of Empress of India (Kaiser-i-Hind). Whilst the Native States and their princes remained de jure independent from the British Empire, they were now feudal servants to their new Empress and her representative, the Viceroy, as they had been under the Mughals, and expected to pay their feudal dues accordingly.
To celebrate this momentous occasion, the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, decided to host a durbar, a Mughal tradition where princes and nobles assembled to honour their emperor or ruler in an elaborate ceremony, which he hoped would exemplify Victoria’s and Britain’s position as India’s suzerain. 84,000 people and 63 of the most-important princes were invited to Delhi in December 1876. A camp five-miles wide was erected to host them, with the salute table determining how close a prince’s tent was to the Viceroy’s and how many attendants they could have, those with seventeen guns or more could have 500 but those with nine only 200.
At the centre was the Durbar amphitheatre, where Lytton held the Assemblage. He sat on a raised platform in front of a portrait of Queen-Empress Victoria; in front stretched the huge viceregal rug where chairs were arranged in a rough semi-circle for the princes and other important members of the Raj. It was here that each prince was given a banner featuring their new coat of arms, which replaced the Mughal tradition of giving khelats (robes of honour) to their princes in a show of feudal relationship and hierarchy. Coats of arms were new in India, a special Indian College of Arms had to be created to design them and few princes and attendants actually knew what to do with the large and heavy banners on brass poles.
On 1 January 1877, Lytton entered the pavilion and read to the assembled princes the proclamation of Victoria’s ascension to the imperial throne in English and Urdu (language of the Mughals), after which the Maharaja Scindia of Gwalior shouted:
Shah in Shah, May God bless you. The Princes of India bless you and pray that your hukumat (the power to give absolute orders which must be obeyed) may remain steadfast forever.
Princely Life under the Raj
The Maharaja of Gwalior’s sentiments, whilst appearing traitorous today, probably reflected the attitude of many of the native princes towards the Raj. Whilst they may have been beholden to a foreign queen and subject to some British intervention, the princes were never more rich, secure, or respected than under the British. Victoria’s proclamation of 1858 meant they no longer had to worry about the British annexing their land and they could once again choose their own heirs. For the price of an English resident at court and paying homage to a picture of Victoria, a prince could live and rule mostly undisturbed; they collected their own taxes and revenue and paid little or none of it to the British, they remained the final say on legal matters in their own courts, they were provided with beautiful castles and clothes. Whilst their fellow Indians in British India were subject to blatant discrimination, starvation, and exploitation, the princes lived in their own sublime upper-class bubble with their English counterparts, hosting elaborate dinners for them, sending their children to the same English schools as them, and partying with them at elite clubs in Simla or Calcutta. Indeed, there was nothing the Maharaja Scindia of Gwalior liked to do more than go tiger hunting with the Viceroy, Lord Curzon. Meanwhile, the British had a cheap, effective, and willing solution to ruling a third of India.
The British also kept the princes onside by littering them with medieval-like styles and honours, creating another supposed bond between the native and foreign rulers of India. In 1861, the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India was created, followed by the Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire in 1878 (to mark Victoria’s promotion to Empress) and the Imperial Order of the Crown of India (for women). The first two of these orders were divided into three divisions: Companion (CSI/CIE), Knight Commander (KCSI/KCIE), and Knight Grand Commander (GCSI/GCIE). In line with the salute table, the great princes of Mysore, Hyderabad and others could expect to be made Knight Grand Commanders (alongside the Viceroy and great officers of British India), whilst less-grand rulers were likely to be made Knight Commanders. Others could even be given greater English honours, such as the Maharaja of Cooch Behar, who became the first Indian prince to be made a member of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath in 1898. Many portraits and pictures of Victorian Indian princes show them proudly wearing their sashes, chains, and stars of their various orders as their white counterparts like the Viceroy and Governors of Bombay and Madras did. The native princes were highly competitive to obtain the highest honours they could to accompany their position on the salute table, paying lip-service to the Viceroy or Victoria and instigating reforms and building projects in the hope of a promotion. Rudyard Kipling even made a satirical poem about it:
Rustum Beg of Kolazai,
slightly backward Native State,
Lusted for a C.S.I.
so he began to sanitate.
Built a Gaol and Hospital
nearly built a City drain
Till his faithful subjects all
thought their ruler was insane.
Then the Birthday Honours came,
sad to state and sad to see
stood against the Raja’s name
was nothing more than CIE
But whilst the British created, maintained, and respected this princely feudal hierarchy with the 1858 proclamation, durbars, and honours, they also constrained, bullied, curtailed, and deposed princes when they deemed it ‘necessary’. With Victoria as Empress, the British claimed ‘Paramountcy’ over the Native States, meaning they could, if required, decide a contested succession, undermine unruly princes and decide inter-state relations. Unlike the East India Company, the 1858 proclamation meant the British could no longer simply annex a state when it wanted to, instead, more devious ways were devised to gain control.
A favourite method was minority rule, when a child inherited a state and a British-controlled regent or regency council would be placed in charge, making decisions on matters like trade with British India, legal reform, and infrastructure. The most famous incident of this was in 1875, when the Gaekwad of Baroda, Malhar Rao, who had been a problematic figure for the Raj, was suddenly accused of attempted murder of an official and deposed. The Government of India in Calcutta then decided a twelve-year-old village child from a minor branch of the dynasty would succeed him as the second-most-powerful ruler in the Native States, becoming Sayajirao III. The young Gaekwad spent six years as a minor with a British resident and council of regency administering his rich and powerful state which, mysteriously, was now very happy to oblige British requests for concessions and implementing taxes. Minority rule also meant they the young princes would receive a ‘modern’ English education, promoting industrialisation, modernisation, and westernisation in the hope that the future ruler would be more accommodating to the British. Indeed, after his education and minority ended in 1881, Sayajirao proved a model Indian prince, creating a progressive administration and social services, removing ancient ‘superstitious’ rituals and customs, and mandating compulsory universal education. Minority rule and education such as this was widespread throughout the supposedly independent Native States; in 1877, 28 states covering half of the Native States were under minority administration, whilst the state of Patiala spent 35 years under minority British rule between 1860 and 1910.
Threat of demotion down the salute table was also a means of controlling a prince. In 1861, the Government of India wrote to the Rajput princes ordering them to denounce the sati (the Hindu tradition of burning a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre) more virulently; those that did not would suffer consideration of ‘reducing the number of guns with which the
Chief of the State is saluted’. More serious misdemeanours could be punished by the mandatory installation of a British or British-controlled diwan (Prime Minster) to the state, such as in Hyderabad in the 1860s. Worst was the appointment of a Commission of Inquiry to assess the suitability of a prince to rule, with the threat of dethronement very real, as the Nawab of Tonk found in 1867 when he was investigated for his collusion in the attack of a tributary, or the ruling family of Manipur in 1891, which was barred from the throne for the killing of five British officers in the state.
These punitive measures, alongside the rewards of promotion up the salute table or the granting of an honour, meant India’s ruling princes became Britain’s most avid supporters and allies in India, in fact, in the whole empire. Siding with the British meant security, honours, and riches, disobeying or disgruntling them could mean demotion or, worse, deposition. As such, the princes were the first to lend their soldiers and resources to Britain for its numerous imperial wars like the 1901 Boxer Rebellion (where Maharaja Gangha Singh of Bikaner personally served) and both world wars (a long story for another time) and the first to extinguish or denounce any notion of independence from the Empire, few princes in the Punjab raised objection to the Amritsar Massacre in 1919.
Alternately, the princes proved vital to Britain’s hold on India too. With a tiny administration and colonial budget, the princes were ‘first and foremost’ a cheap way of administering large areas of uneconomic or geographically inaccessible areas whilst also providing an eye and link to the local levels of society. The princes’ hereditary and ‘natural’ status accorded the British both a legitimacy of rule in ‘preserving’ an unspoiled way of life and an access to native life and control they otherwise wouldn’t have had. Finally, they added an aesthetic tone of nobility and timelessness to Britain’s rule of India, allowing the aristocracy and ruling classes to live in a forgotten feudal world of durbars and elephants, princes and nobles that had long vanished from their British homeland. It was this mutually-beneficial relationship that allowed the Native States and their princes to exist and prosper long into the twentieth century until the British promptly abandoned them and India to their fates in 1947.
Bibliography
- Barbara Ramusack, The Indian Princes and their States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
- Bernard Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’ in The Invention of Tradition, ed. by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp.165–209
- David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British saw their Empire (London: Penguin, 2001)
