Chapter 3

Indian Aristocrats, British Imperialists

and “Conservative Modernization”
after the Great Rebellion
Maria Misra

On the 22nd of September 1892, the tiny princely of state of Ramnad,

in Tamil Nadu, began the customary Mahanavratni [nine nights] festi-
val. The core of this nine-day ritual dated back to the sixteenth century
and was, in essence, both a symbolic celebration and renewal of Hindu
kingship. During the festival the king (known as Setupati), H. H. Raja
Bhaskarasamy Avargal, ritually re-enacted his conquest of the state by
shooting a ceremonial arrow, demonstrated his virtue as a “dharmic”
[Hindu moral] ruler by feeding thousands of Brahmins, and demonstrated
his potency as pivot of the universe by symbolically slaughtering the
demon goddess.1 All the while “many Vedic [Hindu] scholars, dancers
and musicians, artists, artisans and other deserving persons were liberally
presented with shawls, Benaras cloth, jewels, money gifts and so forth.”2

1 “Celebration of the Navaratri at Ramnad in 1892,” The Miniature Hindi

Excelsior Series, vol. 4, Adyar Philosophical Society, Madras, originally seri-
alized in the Madras Times throughout October 1892 and cited by Carol. A.
Breckenridge, “From Protector to Litigant: Changing Relations between Hindu
Temples and the Raja of Ramnad,” Indian Economic and Social History Review
14 (1977), pp. 75–106.
2 “Celebration of the Navaratri” in Breckenridge, “From Protector to Liti-
gant,” p. 79.

- 65 -
 Maria Misra

As usual the principal venue was the main hall of the old palace—
the Ramalinga Vilas—which for these purposes was draped with various
heraldic artefacts including prominently displayed portraits of various
British dignitaries. For most of the ritual the king sat on his gaddi (cer-
emonial throne-cushion) facing a life-size portrait of Queen Victoria,
Queen-Empress of India. Of more interest to attendees in 1892, however,
was the recently completed Bhaskara Vilas—an extraordinary baroque
confection of British gothic and Hindu architectural style built especially
for this festival in 1892. Octagonal in shape with pillars adorned with
images of various gods and goddesses, at its center stood a wrought-iron
bandstand over which a British-imported cut-glass chandelier glittered.
The first ten days of the Mahanavratani followed their traditional
course—a highly complex set of rituals enacting notions of victory,
kinship and authority, sacrifice and honor. But this particular year an
additional five days were added in honor of the opening of a new wing
of the Setupati’s palace. And on days eleven and twelve a grand durbar
[assembly] took place. The king now moved from his gaddi to a west-
ern-style high-backed chair to observe gymnastic displays, fireworks,
and feasting.
The thirteenth, and last day, took the form of a dinner party for
British officials and leading Indian notables from the state. But the Brit-
ish imperial presence was not confined to the thirteenth day: it had been
there all the time in the style of the new palace, the heraldic devices in
the halls, the prominently-displayed scientific instruments, the photog-
raphers and the military band. Thus the British and their culture were
guests at the ceremony—almost as important as the state’s tutelary god-
dess and other visiting gods.
In the official court report of the festival later that month, the
Madras Times soberly recorded that the “major portion” of the excep-
tional expenditure incurred had been “for the encouragement of science
and learning, as well as for various acts of piety and devotion.” Here,
at the heart of centuries’ old rituals of Hindu kingship was a very clear
acknowledgment of the concerns of the Setupati’s British imperial
overlords.
So how should we interpret this artfully choreographed event?
There are two plausible responses: that the trappings of western culture

- 66 -
 Indian Aristocrats

and the extra days of celebration suggest that the Setupati’s interest in the
“modern” was largely superficial. Or that the pursuit of modernization
had been profoundly internalized by the Setupati and his advisers, as
demonstrated by this striking remodeling of both the environment and
content of the ritual.

Tradition, Modernity and “Conservative Modernization”

The question of the relationship between the British Empire in India and
modernity remains highly contentious, and in some ways has become
even more so in recent years. An older intellectual history approach tried
to deal with the question by focusing on the conflicting and changing
political projects of the British at the highest levels. It argued that the
British were divided between liberal modernizers and conservatives,
and the nineteenth century saw a fundamental change in British policy:
between the 1820s and the 1850s, the British, inspired by utilitarian and
evangelical political thought, promoted a confident liberal moderniza-
tion—involving, among other things, the Anglicization of elite educa-
tion, the introduction of liberal legal codes, and the annexation of the
remaining Indian princely states; however, after the Rebellion of 1857–
58 the British reversed many of these policies to a substantial degree, and
increasingly relied on “traditional” modes of rule—that is through elites
at the top of old status hierarchies, such as aristocrats, and by means of
paternalistic methods.3
However, this approach has been much less popular in recent years.
From the 1970s, the “Cambridge School” argued that British ideological
projects—whether of modernization or support for traditional rule—had
very little impact on local society and politics, which was largely deter-

3 Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959); Ainslee
Embree, Charles Grant and British Rule in India (New York, 1962); Ranajit
Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal (Paris, 1963); Burton Stein, Thomas Munro:
The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire (Delhi, 1986); Louis
Dumont, “The ‘Village Community’ from Munro to Maine,” Contributions to
Indian Sociology 9 (1966), pp. 68–89. These approaches have been helpfully
summarized in Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, 1994).

- 67 -
 Maria Misra

mined by local factional conflicts. For some, there was no real develop-
mental project underpinning British imperialism in India, over and above
what was necessary to secure certain “imperial interests”—markets for
British goods, access to cheap military manpower in the form of the
Indian Army and prompt and predictable payment of Indian financial
liabilities to both the British state and the private financial sector; Brit-
ish policy was largely pragmatic and relatively unaffected by ideology
or party-political divisions in either London or Calcutta-Delhi.4 Others
argue that while the raj may have undertaken some kind of liberal ideo-
logical project (the universalization and codification of law, the imposi-
tion of a free market and liberal individual property rights), it soon ran
into the sands of collaborator machinations and resistance.5
In more recent writings, however, some members of the Cambridge
School have argued that the British did have more of an impact on India,
but by accident rather than design. Chris Bayly and others argue that the
effect, if not necessarily the intention, of raj policy and administration
was the traditionalization of Indian culture, economy and society, while
the deliberate demilitarization of Indian society between c. 1790 and
1840 had the effect of deurbanizing and deindustrializing India.6 Mean-
while for Washbrook, traditionalization was the inevitable consequence
of “collaborator” strategy, for under British rule certain groups such as
high-caste Brahmins and dominant peasants, and certain practices, such
as customary personal law, attained greater purchase over Indian society
than they had previously enjoyed.7

4 John Gallagher, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire (Cam-
bridge, 1982); Brian R. Tomlinson, “India and the British Empire Between the
Wars, 1880–1935,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 12 (Octo-
ber-December, 1975), pp. 338–377.
5 David Washbrook, “Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India,”
Modern Asian Studies 15:3 (1981), pp. 649–721.
6 Christopher A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire
(Cambridge, 1989), chap. 4.
7 David Washbrook, “Economic Depression and the Making of ‘Traditional’
Society in Colonial India, 1830–1855,” Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, Sixth Series 3 (1993), pp. 237–263.

- 68 -
 Indian Aristocrats

In complete contrast to this approach, however, is a recent litera-

ture that stresses the powerful transformational effects of the British in
India through their use of new ideas and techniques of colonial “gov-
ernmentality.” These historians argue that the British sought to know,
order and control Indian society through such modern technologies as
the census, ethnography, cartography, western medicine and education.
However, there is some controversy amongst these historians as to both
the intentions of governmentality and its consequences. Some see these
new methods as producing a colonial form of modernity through the
racial, caste and medical categorization of populations. They also argue
that these new ideologies and technologies of government promoted
cultural homogenization through the codification of regional languages
or the imposition of English, and, to some extent, economic transfor-
mation and capitalist integration.8 Yet other historians who stress the

8 For an overview of these approaches see Harald Fischer-Tine and Michael

Mann, eds., Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British
India (London, 2004). For the impact of modern cartography see Matthew
Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India,
1765–1843 (Chicago, 1997); Ian J. Barrow, Making History, Drawing Ter-
ritory: British Mapping in India, c. 1756–1905 (New Dehli, 2003); Sumathi
Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Durham,
2010). For the impact of British on shaping a modern developmental imaginary
see Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National
Space (New York, 2004). For the census, categorization and ethnography see
Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination” in Carol A. Brecken-
ridge and Peter van der Veer, Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament
(Philadelphia, 1993). For medicine see David Arnold, Colonizing the Body:
State, Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India (Cambridge,
1993). For language see Gauri Vishwanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study
and British Rule in India (Columbia, 1989); Bernard Cohn, “Command of Lan-
guage and the Language of Command,” Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South
Asian History and Society (Delhi, 1985), pp. 276–329; Sumathi Ramaswamy,
Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970 (Berke-
ley, 1997). For the role of liberal ideology in these projects, see, Udhay Singh
Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal
Thought (Chicago, 1999).

- 69 -
 Maria Misra

importance of colonial governmentality argue that the British were using

these “scientific” techniques to promote not a modern but a new form of
traditional, or “neo-traditional” India.9 From the 1870s and 1880s, schol-
ars such as Dirks argue, many raj policy-makers began to demand the
preservation and even recreation of a pre-modern India, in accordance
with notions of Indian history and social structure prevalent among late
nineteenth-century European constitutional historians, political theorists
and anthropologists.10
In this chapter, I will argue that the intellectual history, Cambridge
and “Governmentality” schools all fail adequately to capture the nature
of the British imperial influence in India in the post-Mutiny era. The
intellectual historians exaggerate the dichotomy between liberal mod-
ernizing and traditionalizing strategies, and the disjuncture marked by
1857–58. Meanwhile the Cambridge school goes to the other extreme:
while undoubtedly right in stressing the importance of collaborator net-
works as crucial to the nature of the British raj, it neglects the role of
competing British ideological projects and internal debates over what
kind of society and economy India should be. These controversies can
be seen not only in the rhetoric of politicians in Britain and India, but,
perhaps more importantly, in the actions of many of the administrators,
district officers and other “men-on-the-spot” who actually manned the
civil bureaucracy of the raj. It is also impossible to ignore the links
between these ideological debates and often quite drastic shifts in pol-
icy—for example, in attitudes to land distribution and shifting alliances
with particular collaborator groups.
However, I shall also take issue with the Governmentality school
for their tendency to exaggerate the coherence of British ideas and

9 For the concept of neo-traditionalism see Michael David-Fox, “Multiple

Modernities vs Neo-Traditionalism: On Recent Debates in Russian and Soviet
History,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 54:4 (2006), pp. 535–555.
10 Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern
India (New Jersey, 2001); Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Cambridge, MA,
1992); Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and Liberal Imperial-
ism (New Jersey, 2010); Clive Dewey, “Images of the Village Community: A
Study in Anglo-Indian Ideology,” Modern Asian Studies 7 (1972), pp. 291–328.

- 70 -
 Indian Aristocrats

their effects. It is difficult to see British policy and the political culture
it engendered as one driven by a project of Enlightenment modernity.
Equally unconvincing are Dirks and others, who argue that the later
Raj promoted a cogently conservative anthropological vision of village,
caste and community.11
Rather, I shall argue that central to British post-Mutiny ideas and
political projects was a highly contradictory strategy of “conservative
modernization.” This term was originally used by the historical sociol-
ogist Barrington Moore to describe a political strategy which aims to
promote “modern” aspects of society and the economy—through the
promotion of some achievement-oriented bureaucratic and/or capitalist
social relations—while preserving elements of the “traditional” social
order, such as aristocracies and status-based hierarchies founded on
paternalism or coercion.12 Moore used the term to describe elite strategies
in nineteenth-century Germany and Japan, and scholars of Meiji Japan
still use this approach.13 It has also used by scholars of other countries to
analyze similar strategies elsewhere, but it has rarely been employed in
the case of British India.14 However, this concept captures several aspects

11 So, for instance, in 1920, the Government of India called for the census to
de-emphasize caste and other ethnological data and give more attention to the
categories of industry and occupation. Richard B. Martin, “Bibliographic Notes
on the Indian Census” in N. Gerald Barrier, The Census In British India: New
Perspectives (New Delhi, 1981), p. 63.
12 Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord
and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1993), chap. 8.
13 Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern
Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
14 See, for instance, Miguel Cabo and Antonio Miguez, “El Maurismo en
Galicia. Un Modelo de Modernización Conservadora en el Marco de la Restau-
ración,” Hispania. Revista Espanola de Historia lxix (2009), pp. 87–116; Fer-
nando Filgueira, Luis Reygadas, Juan Pablo Luna, and Pablo Alegre, “Shallow
States, Deep Inequalities, and the Limits of Conservative Modernization: The
Politics and Policies of Incorporation in Latin America,” in Merike Blofield,
ed., The Great Gap: Inequality of the Politics of Redistribution in Latin America
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), chap. 8.

- 71 -
 Maria Misra

of British policy well, and especially its promotion of aristocratic groups

and values among both colonial officials and Indian rulers in the hope
that they would act as agents of economic, technological and capitalist
development. The concept also draws attention to the internal contradic-
tions of British policy, which was simultaneously promoting two very
different value systems—aristocratic and technocratic.
Conservative modernization was not the only British strategy, and
some liberals remained opposed to it; nor was it systematic or coherent.
Indeed there were endless differences among its advocates as to which
elite groups (Indian kings, landed aristocrats, “native gentlemen” or a
gentrified English bureaucracy) were best suited to be the principal agents
of development, as to how they themselves should be “improved,” and
what precisely should be their relationship with the raj itself. However,
much British policy after the Mutiny makes more sense if seen through
this prism.
This strategy, of course, did not transform Indian society as a whole,
but it did have an important effect on two important spheres which the
chapter will focus on—the methods of rule employed by British admin-
istrative officials, and by India’s “princes.” And while the policy was
more successful in princely-ruled than in directly-ruled India, its internal
contradictions ultimately rendered it unsustainable in both cases.

The “Modernization” of Indian Aristocratic Elites

Historians are agreed that the early to mid-nineteenth century saw

the development among British administrators in India of two broad
approaches to governing their new dominions—the Romantic and the
Liberal.15 Romantics such as Thomas Munro, John Malcolm, Colin
Mackenzie and Charles Metcalf (all of whom were senior regional
administrators in India between 1790–1830) were influenced by Burkean
notions of organic conservatism and saw it as their role to revive Indian

15 Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, pp. 25–51; Stein, Thomas Munro, pp.
352–353; Stokes, The English Utilitarians, pp. 1–25; David Washbrook, “India
1816–1869: The Two Faces of Colonialism,” in Andrew Porter, ed., The Oxford
History of the British Empire, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999).

- 72 -
 Indian Aristocrats

laws, customs and practices as most suited to the good government of

the people. Though sympathetic to old aristocracies they did not believe
that the British should govern through them, believing rather that the
paternalistic British district collector should be the chief agent of this
renovation.16
Opposing them were the Liberals, influenced by British Utilitarian
legal philosophy and economic development driven by the spread of free
markets and free trade. They included William Bentinck (Governor-Gen-
eral, 1828–35) and Lord Dalhousie (Governor-General, 1848–56). Also
influential were John Stuart Mill (Examiner at the India Office between
1823–58), and Thomas Macaulay, first Law Member of the Gover-
nor-General’s Council, who strongly influenced India policy and sought
to develop a codified and universalist legal system, to challenge aristo-
cratic privilege and caste discrimination, and to promote education in
English for what they hoped would be a new Indian middle class state
bureaucracy.17 However, as a number of recent writers have pointed
out, this kind of liberal project was often combined with a pessimistic
attitude to India’s cultural suitability for liberal institutions and self-gov-
ernment—except in the very long term—and hence often embraced an
authoritarian politics.18
The Rebellion of 1857–58 saw a major change in policy, as the
British decided that liberal attacks on traditional elites and paternalis-
tic forms of government had alienated many Indians and precipitated
popular unrest. As Metcalf has argued, the result was a loss of faith in a
more optimistic liberalism, and by the late 1860s there was broad agree-
ment among liberals and conservatives that radical social and cultural
change in India was both dangerous and inappropriate. However, he
exaggerates the extent to which the British reverted to a Burkean con-
servatism.19 Rather, official policy increasingly adopted a conservative
16 Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, pp. 25–27.
17 Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, pp. 28–39.
18 Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, p. 2.
19 For this view, see Thomas R. Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt: India
1857–1870 (Princeton, 1964); Bernard Cohn, “Representing Authority in Vic-
torian India,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of
Tradition (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 165–209. However, in disagreeing with Met-

- 73 -
 Maria Misra

modernizing approach—in effect combining a Romantic paternalism

with an authoritarian liberalism. This, in turn, was legitimized by intel-
lectual and scholarly writings, which queried conventional assumptions
that India (especially its village social structures) was some kind of ana-
logue of Western Europe’s medieval past, and that India might simply
follow the same path of British economic and political development.20
The Rebellion, therefore, was crucial in driving these developments, but
they also took place in a broader context of international economic and
geopolitical change, and the increasing interest in conservative projects
of modernization stimulated by the example of Bismarckian Germany
and Meiji Japan.21
The Rebellion had a particularly dramatic effect on British policy
towards Indian aristocratic elites. It was read by many Tories as a revolt
against liberal policies—the “destruction of native authority” and “dis-
turbance of property rights” as Disraeli put it. And several British liberals
agreed with the conservatives that Indians were demanding a more con-
ciliatory approach to aristocrats and princes.22 The result was the aban-
donment of the policy of annexing India’s remaining semi-autonomous
“princely” states, and of breaking-up the large landed estates of aristo-
crats in British India. However, at the same time, the British insisted

calf, I am not agreeing with those who emphasize continuities and assume a
dominant authoritarian liberalism. See Mehta, Liberalism and Empire; Jennifer
Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France
(Princeton, 2005). For a critique of this view of liberalism, see Andrew Sartori,
“The British Empire and its Liberal Mission,” Journal of Modern History 78:3
(2006).
20 John W. Burrow, “The Village Community and the Uses of History in Late
Nineteenth-Century England,” in Neil McKendrick, ed., Historical Perspec-
tives: Studies in English Thought and Society (London, 1974); Clive Dewey,
“The Influence of Henry Maine on Agrarian Policy in India,” in Alan Diamond,
ed., The Victorian Achievement of Sir Henry Maine: A Centennial Reappraisal
(Cambridge, 1995).
21 See Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914:
Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004), pp. 395–431; Fujitani,
Splendid Monarchy, p. 27.
22 See Metcalf, The Aftermath of the Revolt, pp. 72–79.

- 74 -
 Indian Aristocrats

that earlier policies of “improvement” should continue, promoted by the

aristocrats themselves.
Some of the first efforts to transform aristocrats into developmen-
tal leaders took place in the parts of the raj under direct British rule,
and the taluqdars [landowners] of Oudh were typical examples of the
type of “little king” seen as promising material.23 Restored to the land
they had been stripped of just before the Rebellion, this group became
cherished allies of the raj and recipients of manifold privileges, includ-
ing forgiveness of their debts and over-representation on the raj’s late
nineteenth-century consultative councils. Numerous officials celebrated
these aristocrats, from C. A. Elliot in his Chronicles of Oonao, in 1862,
to W. C. Benett’s in his famous introduction to the 1877 Oudh Gazetteer,
to Harcourt Butler in his Oudh Policy: The Policy of Sympathy (1906).24
Though these writers initially took a deeply pessimistic view of Indian
society—Benett, for example, insisted that Hindu society was “equally
incapable of development and impervious to decay”25—they were soon
encouraging the taluqdars to emulate the supposedly reformist English
gentry, and take an interest in agricultural improvement, education,
charitable works and local justice. And though the taluqdars themselves
proved rather resistant to modern education, this did not stop the British
from trying to persuade them.
In 1892 the British opened the Colvin School and efforts were made
to force the sons of taluqdars to attend.26 While much of the curriculum
at these schools involved inculcation of the manners of an English gen-

23 For comparable examples from the Deccan and South India see, Marga-
ret Franz and Georg Berkemer, “Colleges and Kings: Higher Education under
Direct and Indirect Rule,” Economic and Political Weekly 41:13 (April 1–7,
2006), pp. 1261–1268.
24 Thomas R. Metcalf, Land, Landlords, and the British Raj: Northern India
in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp.
191, 197–199.
25 Oudh Gazetteer 1 (1877), pp. xxv–xxvii, cited in Metcalf, Land, Landlords,
pp. 191–192.
26 The examples from this paragraph have been drawn from Metcalf, Land,
Landlords, pp. 306–319.

- 75 -
 Maria Misra

tleman, M. J. While, the head of Canning College, argued that practical

rather than purely academic subjects were more appropriate, in order to
ensure “quick and accurate calculation of interest rates.” He also sug-
gested that they should eschew standard academic exams and concen-
trate on subjects “specially adapted to their circumstances.” In 1893 the
government announced that plans were mooted to open an agricultural
college attached to the school.27
While it would be difficult to see the Oudh taluqdars as ideal devel-
opmental leaders from the British point of view, but, there is some evi-
dence that they felt the need to pay obeisance to British exhortations that
they should be “improving.” In the 1890s the Maharaja of Balrampur
would take the opportunity, during his hunting trips, to “educate” his
tenants on the benefits of crop rotation, the proper matching of seed to
soil and new techniques of manuring, ploughing and irrigation. Mean-
while the Raja of Deotaha claimed (though this was disputed) that he had
cleared jungle, and built wells and houses on his estate. The most con-
spicuous improver was Raja Rampal Singh of Kalakankar who opened
schools and dispensaries for his tenants and experimented with cattle
breeding, and in 1881 the Oudh Akbar newspaper praised the taluqdars
for organizing a state-wide agricultural exhibition which it fulsomely
described as “a successful beginning of the great task of developing the
country.” In education too, it seems that British calls for them to assume
the cloak of enlightened aristocracy did not fall on entirely deaf ears. The
Maharaja of Balrampur opened ten schools for the children of his estates
in the 1860s—though they did not last long. A number of the taluqdars
acted as patrons to the Anglo-Vernacular school movement, often built
near their palaces. They also sponsored a number of English language
schools and Canning College, which subsequently became the Univer-
sity of Lucknow. Its principal sponsor, Maharaja Man Singh declared to
an assembly of fellow taluqdars that such a college would “so educate
our children as to enable them to develop the material resources of our
country, to eradicate the baneful effects of error, to excel in political wis-
dom and learning and to . . . walk in the paths of virtue.”28

27 Metcalf, Land, Landlords, p. 326.

28 Metcalf, Land, Landlords, pp. 308–319.

- 76 -
 Indian Aristocrats

But perhaps the principal objects and beneficiaries of the aristo-

cratic turn in colonial policy were the Indian so-called “princes.” Under
the British raj nearly two-fifths of India’s landmass and nearly 20 percent
of its population was not “British” at all, but comprised nearly 600 indi-
vidual states governed by hereditary aristocrats of various kinds. Of these
only 28 were of significant size—with populations of over 500,000; 8 of
which counted for 50 percent of all revenue and population in these 28.
The largest, Hyderabad, was the size of Italy and stretched across the
central Deccan. Other very sizeable states in the south included Travan-
core and Kochin (now Kerala), and Mysore (now incorporated into the
state of Karnataka). Meanwhile in the north there was a cluster of nine-
teen substantial states in Rajputana (now Rajasthan), and another cluster
lay in the west, of which the greatest was Baroda (now incorporated into
Gujarat). Most of these states were governed according to Mughal prac-
tice: their lands were divided into those centrally administered by the
ruling king or Maharaja, the rest allocated to martial nobility or Jagirdars
who possessed judicial, police and revenue gathering powers.29
Theoretically, at least, these states enjoyed some degree of inter-
nal autonomy from the raj. Thirty nine of them had entered into treaty
arrangements with the British in the early nineteenth century. But during
the Liberal-Utilitarian years before the Great Rebellion several of these
states had been absorbed into British India supposedly on grounds of
poor government or lack of legitimate heirs. After 1860, though, the
policy was reversed and a number of princes were “restored” and per-
mitted to adopt heirs if none had issued naturally. By the turn of the
twentieth century 20 of them had assurances from the British of absolute
power over their subjects, and the British themselves understood this to
mean not absolute autonomy but only that princely power should not be
encroached upon without good reason.30
Even so, the princes were not left alone: after the 1857 Rebellion
they found themselves the objects of British “improvement.” Most nota-
ble in this respect was the initiative of Viceroy Lord Mayo who in 1870

29 For further details see Stephen R. Ashton, British Policy towards the Indian
States, 1905–1939 (London, 1982), pp. 1–4.
30 Ibid., p. 4.

- 77 -
 Maria Misra

established the first of several “Chiefs” Colleges. Modeled in some, but

by no means all ways, on British public schools, the intention was to
train young princes and sons of gentry in the principles of sound admin-
istration, to induce a sense of developmental duty and create a new kind
of Indian “gentleman.”
For Alfred Lyall, the Governor-General’s agent in Rajputana
1874–78, the ideal was the Rajput warrior-king. Rajputs, he argued,
followed a clan rather than feudal social structure, and thus, while not
likely to develop from a medieval aristocracy into a parliamentary gen-
try, as their British counterparts had done, they were nevertheless by
no means oriental despots. Lyall himself ridiculed liberal solutions to
development—“ardent ideologists,” he called them, who “avoided the
extremely difficult business of discovering exactly what suited the very
special circumstances of modern India.”31 “Rajput societies,” he wrote,
“held together by cumbrous bonds and stays of a primitive organism,
present far more promising elements of future development than power-
ful and well-ordered despotisms of the normal Asiatic type . . .”32 Lyall
was, however, also insistent that these Rajput societies should not be
altered too extensively by an English education which would simply
breed middle-class “native ideologists”; for Lyall westernizing “natives”
would become too alienated from the rest of society and have little moral
legitimacy or developmental agency.33 This was, of course, a very sharp
departure from the liberal ideas of Macaulay and Mill, who in the 1830s,
1840s and 1850s had seen the western-educated middle-class Indian as
the chief amanuenses of the British in the project of improvement.
As Lyall had understood, before the arrival of the British, Rajput
kings had shared their sovereignty with their clan nobles, and in the early
to mid-nineteenth century the British residents had tended to uphold
clannish limits on kingly power. After the Rebellion, however, while

31 Alfred C. Lyall, “Life and Speeches of Sir Henry Maine,” Quarterly Review
176 (April 1893), p. 290, cited in Mantena, Alibis of Empire, p. 166.
32 Alfred C. Lyall, Asiatic Studies: Religious and Social (London, 1882), p.
224, cited in Mantena, Alibis of Empire, p. 167.
33 Alfred C. Lyall, “Government of the Indian Empire,” in The Edinburgh
Review 325 (1884), pp. 15–16, cited in Mantena, Alibis of Empire, pp. 167–168.

- 78 -
 Indian Aristocrats

claiming to defend clan power, the British political officers in the Rajput
states generally encouraged greater centralization and integration in
pursuit of efficient administration and fiscal systems. As he noted, “the
inclination of an English government was naturally toward the support
of central administration in the Rajput states” which meant that Rajput
princes who had originally been merely clan chiefs “had modernized
their status towards the likeness of territorial kings.”34 So, for example,
the princely state of Kotah reduced the independent territorial power
of the nobility by making them dependent on the crown. Princes were
pressed to convert their courts into more public institutions—that is to
orient their rule toward state rather than personal and familial benefits.
The differentiation of the princes’ privy purse from the public revenue,
and reports on administration that provided a rudimentary accounting of
how government had discharged its task were the chief manifestations
of this shift. The same influences affected the bureaucracy, which was
urged to reform itself into a professional service, not a body of private
retainers.35
By the mid-1870s this set of ideas about aristocrats and moderniza-
tion was beginning to crystallize into a more coherent policy of conserva-
tive modernization. An early proponent was Viceroy Lytton (1876–80),
appointed by the Conservative Prime Minister Disraeli, who united a
romantic love of India’s old aristocracy, with a strong commitment to
liberal markets and the creation of efficient bureaucracies to promote
economic development.36

34 Alfred C. Lyall, “Introduction,” Gazetteer of Rajputana, 1879, cited in R.

W. Stern, “An Approach to the Politics of the Princely States,” in Robin Jef-
frey, ed., People, Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in Indian
Princely States (Delhi, 1978), pp. 361–362.
35 Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, “Rajputana under British
Paramountcy: The Failure of Indirect Rule,” Journal of Modern History 38:2
(1966), p. 143.
36 Lytton to Marquis of Salisbury, May 11, 1876, cited in Betty Balfour, The
History of Lord Lytton’s Indian Administration, 1876–1880 (London, 1899), p.
109.

- 79 -
 Maria Misra

Lytton is most famous for the inauguration of the Great Assem-

blage of 1877 to mark the visit of the Prince of Wales to India, and,
belatedly, the installation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India in 1872.
In explaining the idea behind this British version of a Mughal Durbar,
Lytton observed:
I am convinced that the fundamental political mistake of able and expe-
rienced officials is the belief that we can hold India securely by what
they call good government; that is to say, by improving the condition
of the ryot [peasant], strictly administering justice, spending immense
sums on irrigation works etc. Politically speaking, the Indian peasantry
is an inert mass. If it ever moves at all, it will move in obedience, not
to its British benefactors, but to its native chiefs and princes, however
tyrannical they may be . . . They are a powerful aristocracy. To secure
completely and efficiently utilize the Indian aristocracy is, I am con-
vinced, the most important problem now before us.37
Lytton’s solution was to incorporate the Indian aristocracy into an inte-
grated hierarchy with the Queen Empress at the top. This unified rank
order, connected through a system of rituals, honors and ceremonies
mirroring that of England, would counsel and advise the Queen Empress
(though in practice Lytton had to settle for a rather less prestigious asso-
ciation of leading princes who would be “councilors of the Empress”).38
Lytton also hoped to create an entirely autonomous “Native” Civil
Service which would be the equal of the Indian Civil Service (ICS),
recruited from among India’s “gentlemanly” rather than middling classes
and trained in a very similar way to its British counterpart.39 It would
therefore be very different to the existing “uncovenanted” service, which
was largely composed of middle-class Indians and lower in prestige to
the British-manned ICS.
But the high point of this British strategy of conservative, aristo-
crat-led modernization was reached under the vice-regency of George

37 Balfour, The History of Lord Lytton, p. 109.

38 Balfour, The History of Lord Lytton, p. 111.
39 Bradford Spangenberg, British Bureaucracy in India: Status, Policy and the
I.C.S., in the Late 19th Century (New Delhi, 1976), p. 44.

- 80 -
 Indian Aristocrats

Curzon (1899–1905). Curzon, a minor aristocrat himself, was also con-

vinced of the need to use old elites to establish centralized and efficient
administrative structures, who had travelled twice to Japan in 1880s and
1890s and been impressed with its example of elite-led development.40
Disheartened by what he saw as the inertia and lack of creativity in the
ICS, castigating its “torpor . . . crassness . . . absence of initiative and
worship of the status quo . . .” and observing that, “the wants of India
seem to have outgrown and over-weighted the administrative machine
we have set up for government.”41 He saw the reanimation of princely
India as an important part of his project of executive-driven reform. He
enjoyed his tours round the princely states and claimed to find there
signs of positive British moral influence along with the picturesque: “I
was delighted with Kathiawar. There is a flavor about it of an old-time
semi-feudal society, which has crystalized into a new shape under British
protection.”42
In particular, Curzon sought to spread the example of the Maharaja
of Gwalior, calling him: “much the most remarkable and promising of
all native chiefs . . . he practically runs the whole state himself . . . In
his remorseless propensity for looking into everything, and probing it to
the bottom, rather reminds me of your humble servant.”43 And it was in
Gwalior that he made a notable policy speech to the assembled princes:
The Native Chief has become, by our policy, an integral factor in the
Imperial Organization of India. He is concerned not less than the Vice-
roy or the Lieutenant-Governor in the administration of the country. I
claim him as my colleague and my partner. He cannot remain . . . a
frivolous and irresponsible despot. He must justify and not abuse the
authority committed to him; he must be the servant as well as the master

40 David Dilks, Curzon in India, vol. 1, Achievement (London, 1969), pp. 28,
36; David Gilmour, Curzon (London, 1994), pp. 89–90.
41 Quoted in Spangenberg, British Bureaucracy, pp. 2–3.
42 George Curzon to Mary Curzon, November 4, 1899, Mary Curzon Papers,
cited in Nayana Goradia, Lord Curzon and the Last of the British Moghuls
(Delhi, 1993), p. 150.
43 George Curzon to George Hamilton, November 26, 1899, Curzon Papers,
vol. 158, cited in Goradia, Lord Curzon, p. 153.

- 81 -
 Maria Misra

of his people . . . his gaddi is not intended to be a divan of indulgence,

but the stern seat of duty. His figure should not merely be known on the
polo-ground, or on the race-course, or in the European hotel.44
For Curzon, it was therefore essential that the princes needed be
“improved” for, as he observed to Hamilton, Secretary of State for India:
“What they want more than anything else is to be schooled by a firm,
but not unkindly, hand . . . We do so not so much in the interests of the
princes themselves, . . . as in the interests of the people, who are sup-
posed to like the old traditions and dynasties and rule.”45
As one might expect, Curzon was also keen to promote Indian aris-
tocratic presence in the army and joined debates on establishing the rank
of Indian King’s Commissioned officer which had been on-going since
the 1880s.46 In 1901 he founded an Indian Cadet Corps (ICC) with a
view to the “modernization” of the princes themselves, a group he saw
as generally dissolute and indolent. The ICC seems primarily to have
been a residential camp devoted to inculcating British notions of modern
self-discipline with much emphasis placed on the development of good
physical bearing and the formation of “character.”47 Curzon’s ICC was
to consist of 20 to 30 young men aged between 17 and 20 who would be
selected according to family pedigree, personal conduct and command
of the English language. Each cohort would be brought to Calcutta and
placed under the tutelage of a prince of exemplary character and military
attainment. They would be taught to dress, ride and perform other physi-
cal activities and would then go on to Delhi for basic military drill. They

44 November 29, 1899, Indian Speeches of Lord Curzon, 4 vols. (Calcutta,

1900–1906), vol. 1, p. 168, cited in Goradia, Lord Curzon, p. 155.
45 Curzon to Hamilton, August 29, 1900, Curzon Papers, vol. 159, cited in
Goradia, Lord Curzon, p. 156.
46 For these debates see Pradeep P. Barua, Gentleman of the Raj: The Indian
Army Officer Corps 1817–1949 (London, 2003).
47 For an account of this training see Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I.
Rudolph, and Mohan S. Kanota, eds., Reversing the Gaze: Amar Singh’s Diary:
A Colonial Subject’s Narrative of Imperial Rule (Boulder, 2002), pp. 468–473.

- 82 -
 Indian Aristocrats

would then go back to their states or estates for the summer and, if still
keen, would return for a more formal course of military training.48
Curzon’s commitment to this strategy of conservative moderniza-
tion was reaffirmed when he opposed the introduction of liberal repre-
sentative reform. In 1908 he argued that what was more important was
“purging the government of its many abuses . . . carrying out an exhaus-
tive program of reforms in . . . every branch of administration [and]
stimulating the loyalty of the chiefs.”49 In 1917, on the eve of limited
democratization in India, he advocated establishing an advisory council
of princes, and in his book, British Government in India he argued that
India’s stability depended largely upon the continued existence of the
Native States as “connecting links with the past, and as representing a
standard of life and government which is in harmony with the traditions
and the tastes of the people,” calling for “the adaptation of western expe-
rience to the genius of the eastern mind.” He prided himself on being the
first to describe the princes as “partners in the British administration of
India,” noting that the major princes were now ruling with “creditable
efficiency” while directly-ruled British India was “seething with the
commotion produced by the attempt to introduce parliamentary institu-
tions and modified forms of self-government into the archaic fabric of
the Indian Commonwealth.”50

Meritocracy and Aristocracy in the ICS

Curzon and the conservative modernizers, however, were not satisfied

with renovating princely rule. They were also determined to aristocratism
the predominantly British covenanted (elite) ICS. From the middle of the
nineteenth century, liberals had made successful efforts to turn the ICS
into an examination-based meritocratic organization. In 1855 an exam-
ination system had finally replaced patronage as the means of recruit-

48 Ibid., p. 11.
49 Curzon to Arthur Balfour, December 11, 1908, cited in Robin J. Moore,
“Curzon and Indian Reform,” Modern Asian Studies 27:4 (1993), p. 725.
50 George N. Curzon, British Government in India: The Story of the Viceroys
and Government Houses, 2 vols. (London, 1925), vol. 2, p. 112.

- 83 -
 Maria Misra

ing candidates into the ICS, with the examination created by the great
reforming liberal Macaulay. In fact, aristocrats had never constituted a
large proportion of ICS recruits, even at the height of the patronage sys-
tem, but their numbers had fallen from around 27 percent immediately
preceding the 1855 reforms, to only 10 percent by the 1870s.51 Liberals
like Fitz James Stephen and John Strachey shared Lytton’s and Curzon’s
preference for authoritarian development, but their favored agents of
such development were not Indian or British aristocrats but middle-class
professionals.
Even so, this apparent liberal victory proved short-lived, as the bat-
tle commenced for the soul of the ICS officer: would he be a middle-class
“examination-wallah,” or would he be a paternalistic gentleman? From
the 1870s onwards the ICS came under constant criticism from con-
servatives, who insisted that there had been a loss of caliber under the
examination system owing to the paucity of aristocratic recruits. So, for
instance, Secretary of State Hamilton wrote to Viceroy Elgin that “giants
are nowadays not easily to be found in the ICS . . . You get fewer bad
bargains and fewer geniuses.” Hamilton thought that the real problem
was that “class” recruitment had been degraded by competition.52
This criticism of the consequences of non-aristocratic recruitment
was most clearly expressed in an anonymous article published in the
April 1874 edition of the Edinburgh Review. The author, who many
believed was the Tory leader Lord Salisbury, argued that men of inferior
social origins were “degrading the ICS.” Their lack of an Oxbridge edu-
cation, and their training for the exam at special “crammers” was “not the
way in which rulers of the nation should be prepared for their great duties
as men who govern as much by force of the implacable qualities which
make up the English gentleman . . . as by mere ability.”53 He argued that
some effort should be made to imbue recruits with the values, attitudes

51 Spangenberg, British Bureaucracy, p. 19.

52 Hamilton to Elgin, April 1, 1898. Cited in Spangenberg, British Bureau-
cracy, p. 36.
53 Edinburgh Review, April 1874, p. 337. Cited in Spangenberg, British
Bureaucracy, p. 24.

- 84 -
 Indian Aristocrats

and attributes of the aristocracy through short-term courses at Oxford

and Cambridge—the traditional finishing schools of upper-middle class
and aristocratic British males.54
The supposedly déclassé ICS was blamed for various ills thought
to be afflicting the British raj. Racism was allegedly one of the conse-
quences of recruiting the wrong kind of civil servant. Lytton spoke of
“the crystallized official formality towards natives of the highest class,”
which led him to the idea that “it really is a wonder our rule is not more
unpopular than it is.”55 He continued: “I fear the danger to British rule is
aggravated by the results of the present covenanted system.”
Another alleged drawback was careerism: Lytton noted that “compe-
tition-wallahs appear to regard work in India as a disagreeable condition
of emoluments attached to them, and to deem the interests of the empire
altogether secondary to their own. I am told by the older generation that
formerly this was not the pervading spirit of the Indian public services.”56
Curzon also argued that men with ‘a high sense of duty and an interest
in the people are declining in the service’.57 Finally, ICS officials were
charged with a fundamental lack of élan and creativity—the qualities
allegedly needed to transform India. Hamilton mused that officials had
lost “that vigour and originality which alone can produce change.”58
Even the Liberal Secretary of State John Morley denounced the
“wooden-headedness of the mere bureaucrat.”59 And several other liber-
als echoed the conservative line. Fitz James Stephen, for instance, wrote

54 Edinburgh Review, April 1874, p. 336. Cited in Spangenberg, British

Bureaucracy, p. 18.
55 Lytton to Salisbury, September 28, 1876. Cited in Spangenberg, British
Bureaucracy, p. 39.
56 Ibid.
57 Curzon to Hamilton, May 2, 1902. Cited in Spangenberg, British Bureau-
cracy, p. 40.
58 Hamilton to Curzon, August 27, 1902. Cited in Spangenberg, British
Bureaucracy, p. 40.
59 Morley to Minto, September 10, 1908. Cited in Spangenberg, British
Bureaucracy, p. 44.

- 85 -
 Maria Misra

to Lytton that the new Viceroy’s greatest challenge was having to do

“first rate work with second, third, fourth and even fifth-rate tools.”60
These complaints brought twenty years of tinkering with the recruit-
ment, examination and training of the ICS. They culminated in 1895 with
the merging of the ICS exam with the Home Civil Service exam, which
was thought to attract more prestigious Oxbridge candidates. A number
of other changes were also made to gentrify recruitment into the ser-
vice—including the weighting of Oxbridge-taught subjects in the exam;
increased marks for interview performance; a very low age limit; and a
horse-riding test.61 ICS exams now tested explicitly for gentlemanly qual-
ities. The following question, from an 1870 exam paper, became typical:
Fortitude, Courage, Endurance, Valour, Virtue. Show by the help of sen-
tences in which these words occur, how they differ in meaning.62
Political leaders’ insistence that ICS officers should have aristocratic
attitudes and a gentlemanly bearing (if not origin) seems to have been
embraced by aspirant recruits from the middle-middle-classes. An entire
sub-set of schools developed largely to cater to this class who could not
afford an education at elite institutions like Eton and Harrow, but craved
the ethos and valued a curriculum tailored to prepare them for the Indian
Civil Service exam.63 A worrying interruption in the flow of good can-
didates immediately following World War I was eased by a large salary
rise in mid 1920s; a young member of the Service “could afford to keep

60 Lytton to Fitzjames Stephen, March 15, 1876; Fitzjames Stephen to Lytton,

May 29, 1877. Cited in Spangenberg, British Bureaucracy, p. 35.
61 The amalgamation of the ICS with the Home Civil Service tests was only
partially successful as those who passed highest almost always chose the Home
over the Indian service. Bradford Spangenberg, “The Problem of Recruitment
for the Indian Civil Service during the Late Nineteenth Century,” The Journal of
Asian Studies 30, no. 2 (1971), pp. 347–350; C. J. Dewey, “The Education of a
Ruling Caste: The Indian Civil Service in the Era of Competitive Examination,”
The English Historical Review 88, no. 347 (1973), pp. 268–274, 279–280.
62 A. C. Ewald, The Guide to the Indian Civil Service (London, 1870), p. 116.
63 Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperialism (Oxford,
2004), pp. 163–180.

- 86 -
 Indian Aristocrats

two polo ponies, a car and six servants,” while the salaries of collectors
provided for a “way of living not only comfortable but impressive.”64
This form of recruitment continued throughout the inter-war period,
and Oxbridge training ensured at least a patina of gentlemanliness. In
1928, 32 of 36 recruits had attended Oxbridge, and of these, 19 read
Classics and 12 History. And at the end of their probationary year, they
were still obliged to take a riding test.65
Given this aristocratic training, it is no surprise that most of the
recruits absorbed the gentlemanly ethos. Many overwhelmingly pre-
ferred appointments in those provinces seen as the most paternalistic
and aristocratic in administrative style—the Punjab and the United Prov-
inces (in 1928, for example, 18 of 36 recruits put the Punjab as their first
choice and 9 put it second; 8 put U.P. first, and 16 second).66 Bengal,
alleged home of the hated educated Indian middle-class “baboo,” was
the least popular.
This carefully-crafted system of recruitment unsurprisingly did not
generally produce ICS officers interested in modern “governmentality.”
Rather, it engendered, as was intended, a highly personalistic and unsys-
tematic attitude to government, captured by the concept of noblesse
oblige. This is well-illustrated in Robert Carstairs’s memoir The Little
World of an Indian District Officer. He saw himself as a beleaguered
paternalist with an innovative and individualistic mind thwarted by
bureaucratic interference from above, as bitterly sketched in his chapter
“The Departmental Mind.”67 Carstairs’s self-perception was not so much
that of a bureaucratic quantifier and categorizer but that of an all-power-
ful improving Whig landlord.
This distinctly paternalistic but nevertheless self-consciously
“improving” and developmental approach to government is strikingly
illustrated in the Chenab colony in the early twentieth-century Punjab.

64 Thomas Beaglehole, “From Ruler to Servants: The ICS and the British
Demission of Power in India,” Modern Asian Studies 11:2 (1977), pp. 239–241.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., p. 248.
67 Robert Carstairs, The Little World of an Indian District Officer (London,
1912), p. 74ff.

- 87 -
 Maria Misra

Chenab was seen by its creators as a model for the rest of the prov-
ince. Peasants were granted land on the condition that they paid rent and
fulfilled strict conditions, including maintaining a clean compound, and
arrangements for sanitary disposal of night soil.68 The Colonization Offi-
cer and his staff supervised all the details of colony life, and his word was
final in all disputes over revenue or conditions, not civil courts which had
been expressly barred from interfering with executive orders. Curzon
and his Council strongly backed the project, and the India Council in
London grudgingly accepted it.69 The peasants themselves soon rebelled,
and the revolt was both unexpected and poorly handled by the Punjab
administration, which heavily relied on prominent Muslim or Hindu aris-
tocrats in the district for information.70

New Model Princes

By 1914, therefore, under both Conservative and Liberal administra-

tions a highly aristocratic form of rule had emerged which included both
Indian princes, British aristocrats at the top, and an ICS recruited from
the middle class, but carefully gentrified. Serious efforts were made to
exclude middle-class Indians and professional, bureaucratic cultures. In
part, such moves reflected anxiety about the emerging political challenge
from middle-class western-educated Indians. But it was also the conse-
quence of a conservative modernizing ruling ethos.
In directly-ruled British India, this conservative modernization
strategy may have been at the center of British ideas of rule, but it was
not very effective. The failure can be traced to a number of causes: lack of
funds; continuing conflict between liberals and conservatives over which
Indian groups made the best collaborators; and disagreements over the
relative power of center and localities. But the central flaw was a reliance
on white middle-class, albeit gentrified, administrators as the principal
agents of this policy. It was implausible that alien officials could have

68 N. Gerald Barrier, “The Punjab Disturbances of 1907,” Modern Asian Stud-

ies 1:4 (1967), p. 357.
69 Ibid., p. 60.
70 Ibid., p. 369.

- 88 -
 Indian Aristocrats

sufficient insight into Indian society, or enough support among Indians,

to promote a serious program of modernization.
The policy, however, was less of a failure where the British were
not in direct control—in princely India. There, the approach had some
genuine affinity with traditional ideas of moral kingship—rajdharma—
which saw the king as provider of welfare, warrior-protector and man-
ager of social equilibrium.71 And crucially, Hindu political thought,
in which there was much interest in the early twentieth century (with
the rediscovery of the Arthashastra, an early manual of Hindu states-
manship) stressed the partnership of warrior-aristocrat (Ksatriya) and
bureaucrat-sage (Brahmin).72 This was very different from the British
denigration of bureaucracy and more exclusive reliance on aristocratic
models.
This strategy enjoyed a certain limited success where the British
were able to control the education of princes during their so-called
“minority”—that is where the prince became ruler before the age of
eighteen and was effectively given over to the British resident, Political
Agent or specially chosen Indian reforming regent for his upbringing
(such cases were remarkably frequent).73 The results of such angliciz-
ing education were soon evident. Travancore, which had a series of
English-educated rulers after 1860 underwent the centralization and pro-
fessionalization of administration, land and legislative reforms for tenant
farmers, and a program of road-building—though all under the auspices
of the monarch and his court.74

71 For more details see Jan Gonda, Ancient Kingship from the Religious Point
of View (Leiden, 1969) and Ronald Inden, “Ritual Authority and Cyclical Time
in Hindu Kingship,” in John F. Richards, ed., Kingship and Authority in South
Asia (Madison, 1978), pp. 28–73.
72 Thomas R. Trautmann, Kautilya and the Arthasastra: A Statistical Investi-
gation of the Authorship and Evolution of the Text (Leiden, 1971).
73 See David Hardiman, “Baroda: The Structure of a ‘Progressive’ State,” in
Jeffrey, People, Princes, pp. 113–114; Terence Creagh Coen, The Indian Politi-
cal Service (London, 1971), pp. 69–70.
74 Robin Jeffrey, “Introduction” and “Travancore: Status, Class and the Growth
of Radical Politics, 1860–1940,” in Jeffrey, People, Princes, pp. 20, 140.

- 89 -
 Maria Misra

Neighboring Mysore, where the British effectively restored kingly

powers in 1881, was ruled by another English educated maharaja whose
son came to the gaddi [throne] at the age of ten.75 By the late 1890s it had
acquired a reputation as “the best administered native state in India.”76
It boasted a Representative Assembly, founded in 1881 as the first of its
kind in India; and after 1900 it successfully developed hydro-electric
projects that brought electrification to Bangalore before Bombay and
Calcutta and fueled various innovative public and private sector indus-
tries. In 1914 Mysore secured its status as a progressive modernizing
princely state with introduction of compulsory mass education—again
a first in India.77
In North India, Baroda held the laurel as most “progressive” state.
Here the British effectively imposed a minor, Sayajirao III, as prince in
1871 and took charge of his education until his accession in 1875. His
reign (1875–1939) brought land reform, the introduction of a semi-bu-
reaucratic form of administration, an advisory legislative council and free
primary education introduced in 1907. By 1931 literacy rates in Baroda
outstripped those of neighboring British-governed Gujarat. Efforts were
also made to stimulate economic development: in the 1870s tax-farming
was abolished to encourage investment in industry; in the 1880s the state
itself became a pioneer of a new sugar mill; in the 1890s it made loans
to industrialists wishing to establish new factories; and in 1909 import
and export duties within Baroda state were abolished in a further effort
to promote industrial growth. In the 1930s this bore fruit with the success
of industrialization, encouraged by tax concessions, subsidized access
to natural resources and state-funded technical assistance, and such pol-
icies finally began to attract big Indian industrialists such as Tatas and

75 Made Gowda, Modern Mysore State 1881–1902: A Study of the Elite, Polity
and Society (Mysore, 1997), pp. 13–19, 31.
76 William Lee-Warner to The Times, August 18, 1897, Lee-Warner papers, file
31 Mss. Eur. F. 92, India Office Library, London [IOL], cited in James Manor,
“Princely Mysore before the Storm: The State-Level Political System of India’s
Model State 1920–36,” Modern Asian Studies 9:1 (1975), pp. 31–58, esp. 35.
77 Manor, “Princely Mysore,” p. 36.

- 90 -
 Indian Aristocrats

the Sarabhais into the state.78 Similarly, in Bangalore, capital of Mysore,

state-led industrial development was heavily promoted, and by 1947 had
outgrown Bombay as the second-largest industrial center in India; it was
also regarded as having the best universities in India and was home to the
first Indian Institute of Science.79
It is clear that for many maharajas there was no contradiction
between their traditional role as promoters of rajdharma and British
understandings of “good governance” and “improvement.” So, for exam-
ple, such indubitably “modern” tasks as holding a population census to
gather information on the caste composition of a state could be seen as
simply a continuation of the old kingly task of managing caste relations.
Similarly, the planning, reorganizing and rebuilding royal cities in accor-
dance with modern ideas of sanitation, but which also re-sited groups by
caste (as was done in Mysore), could also be presented as part of a tra-
ditional kingly duty of fostering social harmony and caste equilibrium.80
Meanwhile in Travancore the maharaja could appear both the ideal
“westernizing” reformer, bringer of “good government” and “sound
administration,” while presenting the same policies to his people as
simply the continuation of traditions of kingly management. Thus old
notions of rajdharma could also be invoked to justify efforts to create
more integrative “national” identities intended to transcend sectarian
divisions as a furtherance of orthodox kingly protection and patronage
to all religions.81 In 1922 the Hindu Maharaja Krishna Wodeyar IV of
Mysore made this connection explicit in a speech for the opening of a
mosque:
It will give me great pleasure if the Musalman community makes full
use of the mosque and if they constantly resort to it for prayer and medi-
tation. This mosque is situated on one side of the lines; the Hindu temple

78 Hardiman, “Baroda,” pp. 114–122.

79 Bjorn Hettne, The Political Economy of Indirect Rule: Mysore 1881–1947
(London, 1978), pp. 233–234.
80 Aya Ikegame, “Royalty in Colonial and Post-Colonial India: A Historical
Anthropology of Mysore from 1799 to the Present” (unpublished Ph.D., Uni-
versity of Edinburgh, 2007), pp. 255–257, 264.
81 Frenz and Berkemer, “Colleges and Kings,” p. 1266.

- 91 -
 Maria Misra

is on the other side . . . Each is symbolic of that unity in diversity, which

will, I hope, become in an increasing measure a pleasing characteristic
of the motherland, with all its diverse castes and creeds. To a devout
Hindu they represent but one of the paths leading to the same goal
. . . I hope that you will bear mind the fact that you are Mysoreans first
and all the rest next, owing a duty to the state, and that you will always
work together for the common benefit and for the prosperity and the
advancement of the state in all possible ways.82 [My italics]
Such a synthesis of integrative and traditional kingly practice also
influenced Baskara Setupati, the Raja of the state of Ramnad. In 1895
in a speech to announce his endowment of school for untouchables he
explicitly referred to this as fulfilment of his kingly dharmic duties. He
noted that some would consider such an endowment “adharma” [i.e.,
contrary to dharma], but insisted that for a modern king this was actually
a dharmic act for:
Her most gracious majesty looks on subjects equally and makes no dis-
tinction in governing them. So also I, being blessed with a large estate,
feel it a duty to treat all the subjects of this Samasthanam (state) also
alike and without distinction.83
Baskara went on to bankrupt himself and his state in pursuit of the
Rajdharmic duty of benevolence donating tens of thousands of rupees
to American Mission hospitals, Masonic lodges and various modern
colleges.84 This extreme generosity to improving causes was part of a
strategy to regain the “name and fame” of the “ancient” dynasties—
the acquisition of renown being another duty of traditional kingship.85
This motivation was also clear in Jaipur, where Maharaja Ram Singh’s
patronage of modern schools, colleges and libraries was not interpreted
as westernizing, but as an acknowledged obligation of a Hindu king. As

82 Speech by Krishna Wodeyar IV, originally given in Urdu, cited in Ikegame,

“Royalty,” pp. 265–266.
83 Pamela Price, Kingship and Political Practice in Colonial India (Cam-
bridge, 1996), pp. 171–172.
84 Ibid., pp. 168–169.
85 Ibid., p. 171.

- 92 -
 Indian Aristocrats

the contemporary historian Hanuman Sharma of Chomu noted in 1919,

“Whatever progress is seen in Jaipur today was established by Ram
Singh . . . he took care of his people and was very famous, like [the
ancient Hindu king] Vikramaditya.”86
Though “improvements” were made under the guise of tradi-
tional rajdharma, the main agents of such change were often not the
maharajas themselves, but of their diwans [chief ministers]. In many
cases these reformist diwans were actually imposed by the British as
part of the machinery of minority government, and in the early days,
at least, could be seen as a “fifth column” of westernized, anglophile
administrators, who had been educated in the raj’s new universities
in Bombay and Madras, but found it difficult to get jobs in the ICS in
British India. Many, though not all, were Brahmins.87 In the 1860s and
1870s these British-imposed diwans pursued policies of Benthamite or
Gladstonian improvement, confining themselves to regularizing and, if
possible, reducing the states’ revenue demands on their populations and
modernizing their administrations. This latter task involved reducing the
influence of the aristocracy (Jagirdars) over administration, revenue and
judicial functions and replacing it with that of professional, westernized
bureaucracies supposedly legitimized by the presence of the princely
head of state.88 Many of these early modernizing diwans also fostered
projects intended to develop agricultural “improvement” and industrial
advancement—though very much within the limits of late nineteenth
century laissez-faire economic orthodoxies.

86 Cited in Giles Tillotson, Jaipur Nama: Tales from the Pink City (New Delhi,
2006), pp. 124–125.
87 See Coen, The Indian Political Service, p. 69; D. A. Low, “Laissez-Faire
and Traditional Rulership in Princely India,” in Jeffrey, People, Princes, p. 378;
Ikegame, “Royalty,” p. 211.
88 See Edward Haynes, “Alwar: Bureaucracy versus Traditional Rulership:
Raja, Jagirdars and New Administrators, 1892–1910,” in Jeffrey, People,
Princes, pp. 35–39; Robin Jeffrey, “The Politics of ‘Indirect Rule’: Types of
Relationships among Rulers, Ministers and Residents in a ‘Native State’,” in
Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 28:3 (1969), pp. 261–281.

- 93 -
 Maria Misra

So, for instance, in Jaipur the Babu Kanti Chander Mukherji, a

western-educated Bengali Brahmin had come to the state in 1865 to head
the newly established Maharaja’s College, and in 1881, one year after
the accession of a very young maharaja, he became diwan.89 With the
assistance of the British Residency surgeon, he built the state’s famous
Economic and Industrial Museum, which, as the maharaja explained in
a speech written by Mukherji, was intended to further the education of
youth and “to promote trade and lead to the increase in manufacture of
rare and beautiful objects.”90 Similarly in Mysore the diwan, C. V. Ran-
gacharlu, launched a project of industrial development in 1881; under his
successor, K. Seshadri Iyer, spending on education was increased and in
1892 a number of industrial schools were founded.91
However, in the 1900s and 1910s this relatively passive, British-in-
fluenced interest in economic development through exhibitions and
education, began to give way to a more ambitious, activist and state-led
projects of development, influenced by the example of Japan. In 1908
the Gaekwad (maharaja), influenced by his sometime diwan, the west-
ern-educated economist R. C. Dutt, authorized the establishment of the
Bank of Baroda Ltd. At its opening ceremony the Gaekwad observed
that the adoption of such “western” institutions reflected “the obvious
moral . . . that India, after the noble model of Japan, must set herself
diligently to the mastery of western science and western industries in
all that concerns finance and industries.”92 The most famous example

89 Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, Lloyd I. Rudolph, and Mohan Singh, “A Bureau-

cratic Lineage in Princely India: Elite Formation and Conflict in a Patrimonial
System,” Journal of Asian Studies 34:3 (1975), pp. 730–732.
90 Cited in Tillotson, Jaipur Nama, pp. 154–155.
91 M. Shama Rao, Modern Mysore: From the Coronation of Chamarajya Wod-
eyar X in 1868 to Present Times (Bangalore, 1936), pp. 128, 135, 138.
92 On Dutt’s influence see Anand Chandavarkar, “Modern India’s Pioneer
Economic Advisor,” Economic and Political Weekly 42:51 (December 22–28,
2007), p. 66; Gaekwad Sayaji Rao III, address at opening ceremony of Bank
of Baroda, Speeches and Addresses of His Highness Sayaji Rao III, Maharaja
of Baroda, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1927), pp. 222–224, cited in Manu Bhagavan,
“Demystifying the ‘Ideal Progressive’: Resistance through Mimicked Moder-
nity in Princely Baroda, 1900–1913,” Modern Asian Studies 35:2 (2001), p. 393.

- 94 -
 Indian Aristocrats

of the more activist type of diwan was Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya,

who became senior minister of Mysore in 1912. A Telugu Brahmin, he
had gained a BA degree from Madras University, and a further degree
in Civil Engineering from the College of Engineering, Pune. In 1900 he
retired from the Public Works Department, Bombay, after he was passed
over for the post of Chief-Engineer.93 Initially brought to Mysore as an
advisor on the state’s dam projects and made diwan in 1912, he began
to develop and implement a project of state-backed industrialization
strongly influenced by Japan, where he had been on a three-month study
tour in 1898.94 In his book Reconstructing India, published in 1920, he
drew heavily on Japan’s example as one that India as a whole, not just
princely states, should follow.95 In 1923 Syed Ross Masood, who had
been sent to Japan by the state of Hyderabad wrote a highly appreciative
report of its educational system.96
Such innovation inevitably attracted the attention of Congress
nationalists. The Chairman of the Congress Reception Committee at the
Madras Provincial Conference of 1906 suggested that more attention
should be paid to the princely states as “object lessons of efficient admin-
istration.”97 After World War I some of the diwans became overt support-
ers of Congress and Pattani, the diwan of the small state of Bhavnagar,
made no secret of his support for Gandhi, visiting him on the eve of the
Dandi march.98 Meanwhile Gandhi himself famously described the state
of Mysore under its Hindu king and Muslim diwan (Mirza Ismail) as
Ram Rajya (the mythical utopia of king Ram).99

93 Dhru Raina, Visvesvaraya as Engineer-Sociologist and the Evolution of His

Techno-Vision (Bangalore, 2001), pp. 14–15.
94 Arvind P. Srinivasamuthy, Sir M Visvesvaraya: A Brief Review of His Ser-
vices (Bangalore, 1984), pp. 10–11.
95 Mokshagundam Vivesvaraya, Reconstructing India (London, 1920), pp. 3, 51.
96 Syed Ross Masood, Japan and Its Educational System: Being a Report
Compiled for His Exalted Highness the Nizam (Hyderabad, 1923).
97 Cited in Price, Kingship, p. 171.
98 John McLeod, Sovereignty, Power, Control: Politics in the States of Western
India, 1916–47 (Leiden, 1999), pp. 199–200.
99 Rao, Modern Mysore, p. 460.

- 95 -
 Maria Misra

But in truth the “progressive” princely states presented a vision of

modernity radically at odds with that associated with the mainstream of
Congress nationalism. Despite the creation of representative assemblies
in a few of them, and even the introduction of a limited franchise, few were
in any sense democratic. They had been, to a limited degree, bureaucra-
tized, but not democratized.100 Moreover even reformist diwans such as
Baroda’s Manubhai Mehta, was increasingly associated with the highly
conservative social and religious ideas of the Hindu Mahasabha.101 And
while education—especially higher education—was a great strength of
the reforming states and their diwans, reform was often accompanied by
religious revival and interest in Vedic learning, of which many national-
ists would not have approved.102
By the eve of World War I the British policy of pushing conserva-
tive modernization through reforming diwans was in retreat. In part this
was because the British became mistrustful of the nationalist leanings
of some of the diwans.103 They were also concerned that in centralizing
and bureaucratizing the states they had succeeded too well in drawing
the princes away, politically, culturally and even spatially, from their
subjects and thus reduced their efficacy as imperial “collaborators.” Cur-
zon considered some of the princes “thoroughly anglicized in tastes and
habit, almost too much so for my conception of what a Native Chief
should be.”104 Fears that the princes had been too “modernized” to be
useful were confirmed in 1915 when Madhao Rao Scindia, Maharaja
of Gwalior, told Viceroy Hardinge that the practice of using periods of

100 Jeffrey, “Introduction,” in Jeffrey, People, Princes, pp. 21–22.

101 Ian Copland, State, Community and Neighbourhood in Princely North
India, c. 1900–1950 (New York, 2005), p. 110.
102 Mridu Rai, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights and the History of
Kashmir (Delhi, 2004), pp. 80–127; Manu Bhagavan, “Princely States and the
Hindu Imaginary: Exploring the Cartography of Hindu Nationalism in Colonial
India,” Journal of Asian Studies 67:3 (2008), pp. 892–893.
103 Gaekwad Sayaji Rao of Baroda was almost deposed on suspicion of sedi-
tion. See Bhagavan, “Demystifying,” pp. 395–408.
104 Curzon to Hamilton, May 10, 1899, Curzon Collection, No. 158, cited in
Ashton, British Policy, p. 46.

- 96 -
 Indian Aristocrats

minority to introduce reforms had “shaken the adherence of the people

to their traditional customs and ways.”105 Hardinge was sufficiently con-
cerned to establish a committee of inquiry composed of three princes and
three British Political Officers, and from 1916 the British adopted a tacit
policy of permitting princes to revoke any measure passed during their
minorities.106
Many of the princes were pleased to finally be free of external pres-
sure, not least because there was increasing opposition to the staffing
of state bureaucracies by “outsiders” among newly educated indigenous
groups.107 But others were rueful about the ultimate consequences of the
removal of British pressure on them to “modernize.” In an interview with
Viceroy Linlithgow in 1938, Krishnaraja Wodeyar of Mysore observed
that the Princes had no chance of survival alongside the democratizing
provinces of British India unless they were “compelled to learn and apply
the principles of good government” as he had been during his minority.108

* * *

The British project of conservative modernization then was there-

fore ultimately limited by its own internal contradictions, which both
undermined its efficacy as a British tool of rule through influential “col-
laborators,” and also began to generate destabilizing intra-elite tensions
within those states which had relied on “outsiders” to staff their new
bureaucracies. It may, however, have had long-term consequences. It is
now widely accepted that the economic reforms of the post-1991 era
have flourished most in the southern and central parts of India, of which

105 GOI, FPD, Letter no. 15 to Secretary of State, cited in Ashton, British Pol-
icy, p. 48.
106 Ashton, British Policy, pp. 48–49.
107 For accounts of these tensions see Manor, “Princely Mysore,” pp. 31–58
and K. Leonard, “Hyderabad: The Mulki – Non-Mulki Conflict,” in Jeffrey,
People, Princes, pp. 65–106.
108 Cited in James Manor, “The Demise of the Princely Order: A Reassess-
ment,” in Jeffrey, People, Princes, p. 309.

- 97 -
 Maria Misra

large parts were former princely states.109 It is surely no coincidence that

Bangalore, the capital of the former state of Mysore, has a tradition of
high-tech and modern industrial development dating back to the early
twentieth century. There are many complex reasons for this, but part of
the explanation may lie in the policy of conservative modernization pur-
sued there in the high colonial era.

109 David Washbrook, “Intimations of Modernity in South India,” South Asia

History and Culture 1:1 (2009), pp. 125–148, esp. 126.

- 98 -