BOOKS OF THE DAY
The Princes of India
The Making of the Indian Princes. By Edward Thompson. (Oxford University Press. 2os.)
Tests book is to be welcomed, for it directs attention to one often- overlooked aspect of the problem of India. Too many of us think in terms of British India only, forgetting that two-fifths of the whole country, and nearly one-fourth of the population, fall within the boundaries of the Indian States. How, the; can any lasting founda- tion for self-government be laid which ignores the importance and the characteristics, alike distinctive, of what is sometimes called " Indian India "? Mr. Thompson appreciates this. He remarks in his Preface: "Now that India's right to independence has been acknowledged, the Princes' rights and status remain her outstanding constitutional problem. It cannot be decided by mere legal examina- tion of their treaties with the Paramount Power. There exists, in addition, a body of practice and tradition." He continues (I con- sider with more doubtful validity): " Also, there arises the question of the status and position of the parties to these treaties when they were made. This question only a knowledge of the events which shaped India's political framework can answer."
This I take to be Mr. Thompson's justification for the title of the book, as well as for a number of obiter dicta, to some of which I shall refer below. But, in fact, what we read is an historical narrative of the struggle between British and Marathas for the mastery of India during the years 1799-1819. Students of the period will gladly pay a whole-hearted tribute to the careful research and informed judgement which have gone to its composition. Never, I think, has the tale of those fateful years, which left the British lords of India, and placed at their discretion the once-dreaded "Country Powers," been narrated with such majestic sweep and com- prehension. Mr. Thompson is at his best—and this is saying much —in his portraits of the actors who played their part in the great drama. For example, this of Wellesley: " Wellesley lay down, slept, and awoke always the Governor-General, shaken from his dreams into a world of men and women calling for constant oversight and sharp correction. No novelist would dare to invent such a style of correspondence for one of his characters ; he would be told that no person could ever be so humourlessly oppressed with his own towering importance and undeviating rectitude. Nevertheless, Lord Wellesley was. The directors' recall of him is censured as injustice to a great man. The marvel is that, being human, they endured him so long." And what scope Mr. Thompson finds! Daulat Rao Sindhia, Yeswant Rao Holkar, the Peshwa Baji Rao, Arthur Wellesley, John Malcolm, Charles Metcalfe, Thomas Munro, Mount- stuart Elphinstone—truly " there were giants in those days."
All this seems to me a long way from modern India. But Mr. Thompson does not think so: " The Indian Prince, far from being, as most suppose, an impres- sive survival from antiquity, entitled to the veneration called forth by the spectacle of never-challenged right, is the creation of Lord Wellesley in his half-dozen years of daemonic activity."
Indeed,, it seems clear to me that Mr. Thompson considers the helpless position of the Indian Princes in 1819 should be a factor in estimating their rights in 1943: " If the Princes' political status was plain, and such as to make any claim to ' sovereign rights ' in the full sense untenable, if based on an appeal to history, their actual condition of abject misery and weakness- was still more obvious" (p. 279).
I cannot follow him here. Even if it were correct (and I hold it is not, for many of the existing Ruling Houses are very ancient indeed) to assert that the Princes and their States are a creation of British rule, it remains, incontestable that the British voluntarily entered into a nexus of engagements with them ; and that these engagements have been solemnly reaffirmed time and again over a century and a quarter. The result is the States today ; and it is the result that counts in 1943 ; not the origin of the process producing it. I think that Mr. Thompson may be conscious of this ; for in remarking (no doubt hyperbolically) of Hyderabad that " no State can ever have combined such material importance with so undistinguished a record and so fictitious an independence," he appends the saving clause, "until comparatively recently " ; and adds in a footnote : "Hyderabad today is a different matter." Precisely so.
None doubts that the British shaped the present map of " Indian India." They destroyed some States ; created others ; modified at will the boundaries of many. Rut their action does not stand alone. They did no more and no less than had been done by other Powers preceding than in the mastery of India. Always, when disordee overtook the country, the map of the States changed. Some perished, others survived, yet others were created. From time immemorial, the Overlords of India have found the statal structure necessary, prob- ably because it was the only form of organisation to satisfy the needs of the diversity of races and cultures which together make up the population. The solution imposed by the British had, in its essentials, ample precedent. India has always• known Kings as well as Em- perors. " Dost thou style thyself King? " asked the haughty Mughall " Yea indeed," replied the no-less-haughty Rajput, " and how canst thou be Emperor unless thou hast Kings to support thy throne? " Thus—to bring the matter home—there must be lesser Powers to yield sovereignty if there is to be a Paramount Power to exercise paramountcy. In a sense the greater Power is built by cession from the lesser contributors. It is thus I interpret the passage, to which Mr. Thompson takes exception, quoted from The British Crown and the Indian States, a publication of the Chamber of Princes which he generously but inaccurately ascribes to myself.
No. I am afraid that historical controversy, even when conducted by so able a master as Mr. Thompson, provides little clue to the problem of the Indian States today. But there is one incidental passage in this book which I commend to all, for it contains a reminder of the strength of that traditional attachment which binds the people to the Prince ; an attachment which even now turns towards such thrones as that of Udaipur the eyes of many who have for long been under alien rule. " To this day," says Mr. Thompson, " the Maratha nation remembers with gratitude the generosity shown, in his utter ruin, to the man who, however personally un- worthy, was their accepted chief." We shall err, I think, very grievously, if we underestimate the importance of such sentiments. I am glad that Mr. Thompson, who has been so much concerned with the problems of British India, is turning his attention (though less directly than I had expected, from the title of this book) to the problem of the Indian States. I hope other people will follow his example. Meanwhile, his historical narrative is a joy and a
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