False Allies: India's Maharajahs In The Age Of Ravi Varma

India’s maharajahs have traditionally been cast as petty despots,
consumed by lust and luxury. Bejewelled parasites, they cared more, we
are told, for elephants and palaces than for schools and public works.
The British cheerfully circulated the idea that brown royalty needed
‘enlightened’ white hands to guide it, and by the twentieth century many
Indians too bought into the stereotype, viewing princely India as
packed with imperial stooges. Indeed, even today the princes are either
remembered with frothy nostalgia or dismissed as greedy fools, with no
role in the making of contemporary India. In this brilliantly researched
book, Manu S. Pillai disputes this view. Tracking the travels of the
iconic painter Ravi Varma through five princely states – from the 1860s
to the early 1900s – he uncovers a picture far removed from the clichés
in which the princes are trapped. The world we discover is not of
dancing girls, but of sedition, legal battles, the defiance of imperial
dictates, and resistance. We meet maharajahs obsessed with
industrialization, and rulers who funded nationalists, these men
anything but pushovers for the Raj to manipulate. Outward deference
aside, the princes, Pillai shows, forever tested the Raj – from denying
white officials the right to wear shoes in durbars to trying to surpass
British administrative standards. Good governance became a spectacularly
subversive act, by which maharajahs and the ‘native statesmen’
assisting them refuted claims that Indians could not rule themselves.
For decades this made the princes heroes in the eyes of nationalists and
anti-colonial thinkers – a facet of history we have forgotten and
ignored. By refocusing attention on princely India, False Allies takes
us on an unforgettable journey and reminds us that the maharajahs were
serious political actors – essential to knowing modern India.