13

Partners and Colleagues: The Problem of the Princes

A THIRD OF INDIA and about a quarter of its population of almost three hundred millions were administered not by the provincial governments but by the native states. There were nearly seven hundred of these, more than half of them in the west under the tutelage of the Bombay Government, most of the others dealing directly with the Government of India. They came in every kind of scale, wealth and custom. Jammu and Kashmir was the size of England and Scotland combined, and Hyderabad was slightly larger. Akdia in Kathiawar, however, had a population of 216 living in two square miles, while the inhabitants of Jalia Manaji occupied an even smaller territory. The history and ancestry of the ruling families were equally varied. Many of the Rajputs, an ancient warrior caste, claimed to belong to ‘the race of the sun’. The Maharaja of Jaipur was supposed to be the 139th direct descendant of Kusha, second son of the god Rama, hero of the Ramayana, while the Maharana of Udaipur, the ‘sacred man’ of the Hindu pantheon, was the living representative of Rama through the Sassanian Kings of Persia and the Caesars of Rome; he was invariably portrayed with an aureole around his head. The Maratha chiefs, by contrast, were proud of their inferior lineage. The Gaekwar of Baroda and the Maharajas of Holkar and Gwalior enjoyed wealth comparable to that of the ruler of Jaipur, but they did not deny that their ancestors had been shepherds and peasants who had risen through the Maratha armies to carve out their states in the eighteenth century. Intermarriage between Maratha and Rajput seldom took place.

The annexation of much of British India had been carried out during the administrations of Wellesley and Dalhousie, who had eagerly sought excuses to acquire more land. Dalhousie was responsible for the policy which prevented native rulers from adopting an heir and led to the annexation of their states if they died without leaving a son to succeed them. Had this system, which provoked much discontent in the years before the Mutiny, continued, there would have been few princes left for Curzon to deal with. Following the rebellion, however, the policy changed. The native chiefs, most of whom had not joined the insurgents, were informed that they could adopt heirs and that the Crown had no intention of extending its territorial possessions. As a result, many of the rulers during Curzon’s viceroyalty had no blood relationship with the princes who had preceded them. Five of the six Hindu chiefs in Kathiawar were not legitimate Rajputs; most of them in fact were purchased changelings.1

The British view of the chiefs changed after the Mutiny. No longer considered feudal anachronisms waiting to be dispossessed, they came to be regarded as important allies of British rule. The zealotry of Macaulay and James Mill, the contempt for native culture and the impatience with antique traditions gave way to a view that the princes, not now considered a threat to the supreme power, added to the gaiety of life as well as the stability of the country. Lord Lytton, the most romantic of Viceroys, encouraged the use of pageantry and hoped to create a sort of Gothic feudalism around the mystical figure of the Queen-Empress. Why not make the Maharaja of Kashmir, he wondered, a Warden of the Marches?2 This trend in policy was followed, less whimsically, by Dufferin, who restored the great fort at Gwalior to its Maharaja, even though the state’s army had joined the rebels in 1858 and had defied the paramount power from the battlements. Lord George Hamilton also extolled the merits of the princes, especially the Rajputs, whom he regarded as ‘such gentlemen, and persons with whom it is very pleasant to have personal dealings’.3

Guaranteed against annexation or external threat, the native chiefs in return had to tolerate a British political officer charged to guide them along the path of responsible rule. Recruited from both the ICS and the Indian army, the officers were known as ‘residents’ in the most important states and as ‘political agents’ in the others. Controlled by the Foreign Department and thus directly supervised by the Viceroy himself, they had to play a complicated dual role as representative of the Government and adviser of the native state. Even if incompatibility of temperament did not hinder relations between ruler and agent, the latter’s mere presence often acted as an irritant to the pride and pretensions of the chief. To many people the constitutional position of the princes seemed to be an irreconcilable mixture of oriental autocrat and British vassal. To Curzon, who agreed with Lytton’s opinions of their value without sharing his sentimental views of their role, their position was quite straightforward. As he informed King Edward VII,

The native Chiefs are not sovereigns. They have been deprived of the essential rights and attributes of sovereignty. They cannot make treaties, they cannot keep armies or import arms, they cannot have any relations with each other, beyond those of friendship, they cannot even build railways without the consent of the Government of India. In the event of aggravated oppression or misrule, they are liable to deposition.4

The closer post-Mutiny relationship with Britain inevitably led to the Anglicization of many of the chiefs. They went to English public schools or to Indian colleges with British teachers, they travelled in Europe, they learnt to play cricket, they had British tutors and advisers with whom they were in daily contact. People from both nations were apprehensive of the effect of this influence. Alfred Lyall had foreseen as early as 1874 that the next generation of princes would be found ‘squandering their revenues in the great hotels of Paris and London … demoralising England rather than improving India’.5 Some years later an elderly Sikh raja predicted that the practice of marrying sophisticated, Westernized sons to wholly uneducated, untravelled girls would result in a breed of mules.6 A real danger, as Curzon soon discovered, was that the princes became so enamoured of European ways that they lost interest in the mules’ mothers and even in their hereditary states. The Raja of Pudukotta, he informed Hamilton, spent most of his time either in Europe with his mistress or in the hill station of Kodai Kanal where he played tennis, danced with English ladies and hoped to be taken for an English gentleman rather than an Indian chief; he even asked the Viceroy for permission to appear at a garden party in English dress instead of native costume.7

A Viceroy’s relationship with the chiefs was complicated by Queen Victoria’s prejudice in their favour. Curzon complained that they were all invested with a sort of halo in her eyes – she liked the unpleasant and half-mad Maharaja of Holkar because he sent her a telegram on her birthday – and were treated, indiscriminately, as if they were important royalty.8 The Maharaja of Cooch Behar, a third-rank chief from Bengal, was a favoured guest at Windsor and Sandringham and a particular friend of the Prince of Wales; but in Calcutta, where he returned pursued by the unpaid bills of Windsor tradesmen, he regarded it as a compliment to be invited to dine at Government House.9 Curzon grumbled that almost anyone with a turban and jewels was regarded in Europe as a prince and treated as if he were a descendant of Nebuchadnezzar. One insignificant Raja, who spent almost all his inheritance on women and gambling in Paris, was a guest of the French President at Longchamps and was given an audience by the Queen at Balmoral.10

So anxious was Curzon about the harm done to India by the more dissolute chiefs that he felt obliged to inform Queen Victoria of their misdemeanours. Some princes were capable and patriotic, he assured her, but a larger number were ‘frivolous and sometimes vicious spendthrifts and idlers’. Scindia, the Maharaja of Gwalior, was the most intelligent and promising of the younger ones, while the Maharaja of Jaipur, an ‘enlightened and munificent chief’ loyal to the customs and traditions of his people, was a fine representative of the older generation; the southern princes of Cochin and Travancore were also humane and sagacious rulers who happily combined the most conservative instincts with the most liberal views. But the list of failures was much longer. The Rana of Dholpur was ‘fast sinking into an inebriate and a sot’, the Maharaja of Patiala was ‘little better than a jockey’, the Maharaja of Bharatpur was a weak and unstable character who had just killed his servant. The Viceroy did not shrink from defining the nature of their misdeeds to his sovereign – the Raja of Kapurthala was only happy philandering in Paris, while Holkar, the sender of her telegram, was ‘addicted to horrible vices’ – but neither did he deny British responsibility for the problem. The rulers had allowed young chiefs to fall into bad hands and had condoned their extravagances and winked at their vices. They had let them learn enough about European ways to become dissatisfied with their own country and their own people, and to be despised by their subjects in return.11

After his famine tour of 1899, Curzon stayed at Gwalior as the guest of Scindia, and delivered a speech at the state banquet on the rights and duties of the princes. Scindia was Curzon’s model of a native chief. He rushed about his state, notebook in hand, receiving appeals, examining accounts, chiding or encouraging officials; although only 23 years of age, he had already thoroughly reformed his administration. So remorseless was his determination to run everything on his own – to the extent of checking the sentries in the garden at night and supervising the making of Curzon’s bed – that his guest noticed a strong resemblance to himself.12 Gwalior was thus an appropriate place to define the position of the native chief. ‘I claim him as my colleague and partner,’ proclaimed the Viceroy, as a fellow administrator who must be ‘the servant as well as the master of his people’, who must learn that his revenues were ‘not secured to him for his own selfish gratification, but for the good of his subjects’, and whose figure should not be known merely on the polo-ground, on the race-course, or in the European hotel, because his real work, his princely duty, lay with his own people.13

Conscientious chiefs such as Jaipur were delighted by the speech, especially by their classification as colleagues and partners, a phrase the Viceroy believed had done more good in the native states and among the ‘better class’ of princes than any action of the Government in recent times.14 Through his long, twice-yearly tours of different regions, Curzon came into closer contact with the chiefs than any other Viceroy. The ‘better class’ welcomed his strong personal interest, just as they appreciated his entertainment of them at Hastings House in Calcutta, which he restored for them and their followers. Others, who hankered after Europe or merely wished to run their affairs without interference, were less enthusiastic about the new relationship. The Nizam of Hyderabad, ruler of the largest and most populous state in India, cannot have enjoyed an interview in which the Viceroy berated him over his son’s education, his attitude towards his chief minister, and his ignorance of famine conditions in his own dominions. Regarded by Curzon as ‘an insignificant little creature … wrapped up in the sloth of the seraglio’, the Nizam probably wanted to be anything but his tormentor’s colleague.15

The Viceroy struggled to persuade the princes and their leading nobles to send their sons to the chiefs’ colleges he had reformed at Ajmer, Indore and Rajkot, where they received a sort of English public school education. But the main problem was what to do with them afterwards. Every year, observed Curzon, scores of young men were graduating from the colleges, trained in English habits and ways, taught to ride and love sport, and indoctrinated as far as possible with a sense of patriotism. Yet no suitable employment awaited them. For centuries the duty of the Rajputs had been to wage wars under a stern code of chivalry that had on occasion required fighting to the last man followed by the collective suicide of their families. They still had their castles, their courts, their minstrels and their dancing girls – Walter Lawrence called it ‘the Middle Ages in sepia’16 – but they were no longer allowed to practise their immemorial profession. ‘I am afraid we do not altogether improve the nobles by keeping them from fighting,’ Alfred Lyall had once remarked,17 and Curzon agreed that a military career should be reopened for them. Asked his opinion about the formation of a cadet corps for Indian nobles, the senior political officer in Rajputana replied that the typical Rajput was neither brilliant nor a bookworm and would probably fail any examination required for promotion. He was, however, a born horseman with a good eye, a keen military spirit, a strong sense of honour and so thoroughly loyal to the Government that he would make a fine staff officer.18

Curzon felt that a scheme for native commissions was also important for political reasons: by removing a source of disappointment and gratifying legitimate ambitions, it. would help strengthen ties between the princes and the Government. He was much impressed by a plea from Cooch Behar, a Maharaja he normally regarded as the ‘spoilt child’ of the British royal family, who hoped that his sons, educated at Eton and Oxford, might acquire commissions in British regiments or, failing that, in the native cavalry. Otherwise, the chief lamented, their prospects were hopeless and disheartening, with nothing for them to do but lead purposeless and indolent lives.19 The Viceroy’s views had the approval of Queen Victoria but found little backing in Britain. Only Hamilton and Salisbury supported his idea of setting up a cadet corps that would in due course provide officers for the Indian army. After a force of Indian troops had helped rescue the European legations in Peking in 1900, Curzon tried again, this time proposing that the Indians would become staff officers not attached to regiments. Such a scheme would overcome the objections of Edward VII, newly arrived on the throne, whose views on the relationship between the races were different from his mother’s and who was deeply perturbed by the idea of Indians commanding white men.20 Hamilton and Salisbury persuaded a reluctant Cabinet to agree to the amended plan, and the Secretary of State managed to get it through his equally reluctant Council. By Christmas 1901 Curzon was happily drawing up plans for the winter and summer accommodation of his new corps.

Encouraging the princes to fall into line was supplemented by a certain amount of goading. In the words of Curzon’s native orderly, one wretched Nawab of doubtful loyalty ‘left the presence of the Great Lord Sahib a wiser and perspired man’.21 Another troublesome figure was the Khan of Kolat, an idle and miserly individual who arrived at the Residency at Quetta with ‘two weedy camels and two miserable hacks’ for the Viceroy. Curzon refused to accept them or anything else from the Khan, a rebuke which quickly persuaded the ruler to start spending large sums on municipal works. Rebukes also had to be administered to those chiefs, usually Europeanized and not of the first rank, who cultivated delusions of royal grandeur. Pudukotta’s extreme Anglophilia led him to sport an imperial crown on his writing paper and a ducal coronet on his seal; when paying an official visit to the Viceroy, his private band played ‘God save the Queen’.22 The Raja of Kapurthala, whom Curzon regarded as a ‘third class chief of fifth rate character’, always apparently gloating over pornography, had become so spoiled by his chats with the Tsar, the Kaiser and Queen Victoria that he started to style himself Maharaja.23 Others fed their pretensions by constantly referring to ‘the throne’ and ‘the royal family’. All had to be admonished. There was nothing royal about the chiefs, Curzon asserted, and none of them was in possession of the sovereignty of his state. Their future, he thought, would be safe only if they were transformed into an hereditary aristocracy, a view that horrified Godley who did not want to see the princes reduced to the status of ‘glorified noblemen’.24

The Viceroy’s aim of preserving the ‘idiosyncrasies of native thought and custom’ was seldom furthered by princes who had been educated in Britain. Curzon was sorry to hear that the Rao of Kutch’s eldest son was being sent to university in England, because he did not believe that Oxford graduates should rule native states. There could hardly be ‘a worse education’, he wrote, ‘for a future Indian chief than that of an English university [where] he learns to despise his people, their ways and their ignorance’.25 Even a single visit to Britain could have a disastrous effect on an impressionable young prince. The Maharaja of Rampur, recorded Curzon, had been a promising and intelligent youth until a journey to Europe transformed him into ‘a sensual and extravagant debauchee’; there had been no finer horseman in India than the Rana of Dholpur, but European influence had left him ‘a prey to every variety of pimp and shark’, turned him into ‘a nerveless inebriate’ and brought about an early death.26 Supported by Jaipur, Curzon was determined to curtail these damaging excursions, and in August 1900 he sent local governments a circular defining the chiefs’ duties and laying down conditions for their travels abroad: the provincial administrations were to permit a journey only when they were satisfied that it would benefit both the chief and his people, and they were then to monitor the effects of the trip on the character and habits of the traveller.

The Viceroy’s decision to issue his circular to the Government Gazette distressed Hamilton, who thought the publication of his ‘pedagogic lectures’ was ‘most ill-judged’ and bound to cause resentment.27 Those chiefs with children or mistresses in Europe were dismayed and tried various ruses to induce the Viceroy to let them go: the Rajas of Pudukotta and Kapurthala, two of the principal targets of the circular, attempted to convince him they needed to see European specialists about their increasing weight problems.28 One senior prince, the Gaekwar of Baroda, took great exception to the circular and announced his intention to travel frequently to England and, when in India, to spend his summers at Naini Tal, a hill station far from the disagreeable heat of Baroda. When the Viceroy remonstrated, pointing out that permission was needed to travel abroad, the Gaekwar replied that he refused to be treated like a cowherd and declined to apply for it.29 Curzon was furious. Baroda was in fact a cowherd’s son who had been adopted to head one of the only three Indian states with the privilege of a twenty-one gun salute. Curzon found him vain and cantankerous, and suspected him, rightly, of pro-Congress sympathies. But he could do nothing about his insubordination. The Gaekwar was intelligent and able, ran an enlightened administration, and took the trouble to find allies during his visits to England. Hamilton, who liked and admired him, was pleased that he set such an excellent example to his fellow chiefs by sticking to one wife.30

The Viceroy did not shrink from upbraiding the princes on family matters and their private lives, although he confessed it was an unpleasant duty. He went to great lengths to reconcile the Maharaja of Orchha with his son, who had been banished for making an unarranged marriage, and after bullying the obstinate father he was successful. Sexual matters were naturally difficult to discuss with noble foreigners he scarcely knew. Sometimes they could be dealt with by a stern note to the relevant agent expressing displeasure at so-and so’s ‘lewd and immoral conduct’, but on other occasions a more personal approach was necessary. In 1903 Curzon had to urge the Raja of Jind ‘to resume conjugal relations’ with his two Sikh wives whom he had ignored since marrying the daughter of a European aeronaut; it was his duty, the Raja was told, to produce a son and heir for his state.31 An even more embarrassing task loomed when he summoned the Maharaja of Mysore, one of the premier Indian princes, to try to persuade him to consummate his marriage. British officials in the state had warned the Viceroy that the neglected Maharani was so badly treated by her husband’s family that she might commit suicide unless he intervened.32 In the end Curzon was spared the interview because the Maharaja, who had agreed to listen to the Viceroy’s strictures even on so delicate a subject, developed chronic laryngitis.

Homosexuality, however, was hardly a subject that could be discussed in an interview, although attempts to suppress it were made from afar. Curzon was dismayed to find it much more prevalent than he had expected, and he soon learnt why Bharatpur had killed his servant. On discovering that his son was the Maharaja’s catamite, the victim had removed him from the palace and had subsequently been murdered by his enraged master, whose plea that both barrels of his shotgun had gone off by mistake was not believed.33 Bharatpur’s immediate neighbour, the Maharaja of Alwar, also had the same ‘horrible taint’ – ‘best suggested’, Curzon told Brodrick, ‘by the name of Oscar Wilde’ – and so did another chief nearby, the Maharaja of Jodhpur, who had, moreover, been encouraged to drink by his wife, ‘a consistent toper’. The Viceroy knew about the predilections of the half-crazy Holkar but was horrified to discover that three Rajput princes had the same tastes. For once he had no solutions beyond separating couples and placing young miscreants in the hands of a British officer under a strict regime of discipline and control. In a letter to Hamilton he attributed the problem, eccentrically, to early marriage. ‘A boy gets tired of his wife, or of women, at a relatively early age, and wants some more novel or exciting sensation’.34 The Secretary of State had a more prosaic explanation and a more traditional remedy. What the British called unnatural vice, he declared, was for the Indian ‘upper orders, a natural pleasure’, and he had no doubt that further revelations would soon follow. But the harder the boys were worked, he suggested, ‘and the more they are kept out of doors in manly and military pursuits, the less inclination they will have for this form of vice’.35