What were the princely states?

How the arrangement worked

From the treaties of 1817–18 onward, the Rajput states signed agreements with the East India Company and later the Crown: the British guaranteed the prince's throne against enemies and rebels; the prince gave up the right to make war or foreign alliances, accepted a British Resident at court, and in many cases paid a tribute. Internally the states were sovereign — their own taxes, courts, coinage, armies for ceremony and police, their own railways built at the prince's pleasure. The British called the result indirect rule; the princes called it a treaty between equals; the people lived under whichever ruler, reforming or otherwise, the accident of birth provided.

Rank was made visible in gunfire. A prince's status was fixed by the number of guns fired in salute — 21 for the greatest (Hyderabad, Mysore, Baroda, Gwalior, Kashmir), and descending through 19, 17, 15, down to nine and none. Udaipur's Maharana held 19; Jaipur, Jodhpur and Bikaner 17. Princes argued about guns the way others argue about titles.

Nineteen months to end a thousand years

Independence dissolved paramountcy, and the princes were in theory free to join India, join Pakistan or stand alone. Sardar Patel and V. P. Menon, with a mixture of persuasion, patriotism and plain pressure, secured Instruments of Accession from almost all of them within months, and then merged the states into provinces. The Rajput states came together in stages through 1948 and 1949 — Greater Rajasthan was inaugurated on 30 March 1949, still marked as Rajasthan Day — and the state took its present shape by the mid-1950s.

The princes kept titles, palaces and privy purses — annual payments from the treasury — until 1971, when a constitutional amendment abolished both the purses and the titles' legal recognition. After that a maharaja was a private citizen with a very large house.

Why it explains what you see

Nearly every great building in Rajasthan is a princely-state building — a fort, a city palace, a hunting lodge, a 1930s art-deco palace built as famine relief. The conversion of palaces into hotels had begun earlier — Jaipur's Rambagh in 1957, Udaipur's Lake Palace in 1963 — but after 1971 the families had the houses and not the income, and it became the rule: Umaid Bhawan opened as a hotel in the 1970s, the forts became trust-run museums (Mehrangarh, 1972), and the royal collections went on public display. When you pay a fort ticket in Rajasthan you are, very often, paying a former kingdom's family trust to keep a former kingdom's house standing. The princely states ended in 1947 and 1971; you are walking through what they left.

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