False Allies

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

Author: Manu S. Pillai

Publisher: Juggernaut Books, 2021 (First)

ISBN: 9789391165895

Pages: 528

 

All of India was under native kings when Europeans descended on India in the age of explorations. They managed to obtain a toehold at strategic locations and then fought their way to the interior and local hegemony. The lust for colonial possessions was so powerful that they tried to annex kingdom after kingdom at the slightest provocation or pretext. Then came 1857 and India erupted in rebellion. Though it was eventually crushed, the Rebellion forced the British to re-calibrate their policy towards the local rulers. When the sepoys recruited and trained by the British turned against them, it was the maharajahs – especially of Rajputana, Punjab and the South – that stood fast with them. It inaugurated a new era in which British intervention was minimal and the native states urged to bring in progress by building roads, hospitals, schools and irrigation projects. There were hundreds of native states and that many kings. The maharajahs were typically cast as ludicrous idiots who served no cause other than their own and played no role in the making of modern India. This stereotype served the purpose of the British, which infantilized Indian rulers and cemented the claim that natives were incapable of serious government. Nationalists saw them as British proxies having no role in the future of India. This book examines five Indian states during the period 1860 – 1910 united by the artistic career of India’s most famous painter, Raja Ravi Varma of Kilimanoor, among the nobility of these states, which are Travancore, Pudukottai, Mysore, Baroda and Udaipur. Manu S. Pillai is the best-selling young author and all his three other books have been reviewed earlier in this blog.

 

A clear goal of this book is to explain why the native states were important to the nation-in-the-making. Two-fifths of the subcontinent’s territory and a quarter of its population were contained in it. However, most discussions of Indian history just leave them out. The difference in public’s perception of politics in the states differed very much from the British-ruled provinces. Public mobilization in the provinces was within nationalistic bounds of Indians versus the Raj, but in states it was divided along caste lines. Being natives themselves, the maharajahs fervently hoped that they could get away with their rule. Earlier, Congress also left the states to their own devices. By the second decade of the twentieth century, the Raj was forced to respond to nationalistic aspirations, but maharajahs did not follow suit. In the nineteenth century, the idea of India as a nation in the Western political sense was a novelty, but in the twentieth, it fast became an emotional reality. At this crucial moment, the rajahs rowed against the current and wrote their own obituary. The native princes were till that time cushioned by the British and protected from internal turmoil. The maharajahs no longer needed to mollify local society in terms of caste networks, commercial guilds, the nobility or otherwise. So long as they paid tribute to the Raj, they could be left in security and this in turn caused them to neglect their people.

 

Ravi Varma employed European techniques in painting. This total shift from traditional representative methods and aesthetics transformed Indian painting. Pillai argues that Ravi Varma was symbolic of a much larger transition in Indian society as well. The ease with which it absorbed this in its stride is truly remarkable. Also, Ravi Varma’s art straddled the rajahs and nationalists. They were on the same page and a future without the maharajahs was yet to be imagined. It is this phase that is the subject of this book. Sanskrit offered the most inexhaustible stores of pictorial representation in the form of stories from mythology. As this had fastened on the national memory and animated the national voice, it also generated a national imagery. In a country with seemingly irreconcilable diversity, the epics were a common passion encapsulating pan-Indian aspirations. Ravi Varma’s strategy was unrivaled in recreating a romantic past for modern India. He idealized a heritage capable of moving audiences anywhere in India, giving visual confirmation of a shared cultural inheritance. Scantily clad women of old Indian art were ill-fitted for the Victorian age. Attractive Indian elements were matched with modern methods and ideals. Ravi Varma’s goddesses were dressed in sarees and high-necked blouses.

 

The period is also emblematic of the rise of capable native statesmen who were well-fitted to administer the land with enlightened principles to guide them. A usual British trope was that they were forced to rule over the country as the natives were unsuitable to provide an administration that can lead it to progress. We see many capable officials cutting their teeth with British training and then moving to the dewanship of native principalities based on recommendations of British superiors. Many of them did a splendid job in lifting the kingdoms out of medieval mindset and provided a role model for others. This buoyed up their own careers as they could not hope to reach prominent positions under the blighting glare of racial prejudice in British India’s administrative services. Dadabhai Naoroji was the dewan of Baroda and he came up with accurate statistical analyses of how Britain plundered India. Dinkar Rao offered a detailed opinion on how to govern India as early as 1862. T. Madhava Rao made a constitution of sorts to bind native rulers to set principles. This sought to put an end to arbitrary will with well-entrenched laws, to ensure such laws were obeyed, to protect public funds from royal misappropriation, to preserve the rights and liberties of the people and to do justice without bias, all while staying loyal to the Raj. The book includes descriptions of how these officials performed.

 

The rajahs were also in a difficult situation around this time. Unlike in art and administration, we see much wider range here. There were rulers who readily agreed to colonial demands and vied with each other to be in the good books of the British. At the same time, there were other princes who did not speak a word of English. The kings managed to keep a footing in both tradition and modernity for different audiences. The Wadiyar dynasty of Mysore led all other states in the parameters of industrial progress. Mysore city became the abode of the maharajah – a museumized landscape – while his modern government was conducted from Bengaluru under the British commissioners. The king and state were traditionally inseparable, but they occupied designated spaces in which the ruler served as a hands-on executive, rather than a monarch. On the other side of the country, in Rajputana, things hardly improved from what it was several centuries ago. The ceremonial status of rulers still depended on the thickness of cushions on which they rested and the colour of the cloth draped over it. All signaled status and were carefully managed. For some vassals, the king might rise only on their arrival but for others, on their departure also. Some nobles were entitled to be received at the palace door by the ruler, as opposed to others who met him in the durbar.

 

Pillai encapsulates a vignette of the making of a modern nation in this book. Culturally the land was united from a very long time ago, but it had not been moulded into a form that could be called a nation state in the modern sense. Political unifiers had to be invented and incorporated into the national whole. The overarching Indian identity was in its infancy. People still thought of themselves as Banias and Brahmins, Marathas and Mewaris, through prisms emphasizing difference rather than oneness. The author claims that nationalism was not a given. It had to be slowly constructed. The nationalists and maharajahs took their part in weaving the national narrative in the period 1860 – 1910.

 

The book is very nice and easy to read. A really huge research had gone into the preparation of this work, with 129 pages of notes and 28 pages of bibliography. Selected Ravi Varma paintings constitute a welcome familiarization with the royal personages under discussion. Even though the book covers five native states, the prime stress is on Travancore, the author’s native place. There was another book, ‘The Ivory Throne’ from the same author detailing the history of the Travancore royal family from the 1920s onwards. It is certain that a portion of the research has been salvaged from the effort spent on that book. However, a clear unifying structure is absent in the narrative which looks more like a series of anecdotes.

 

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star