What was Rajputana — and was Rajasthan ever one kingdom?

A name the British needed

Rajputana was an administrative convenience. Between 1817 and 1818 most of the Rajput states signed treaties with the East India Company — Marwar's is dated 6 January 1818 — accepting British control of defence and foreign affairs in exchange for keeping their thrones. Managing twenty relationships from Calcutta was impractical, so from the 1830s a single Agent to the Governor-General sat at Ajmer and dealt with all of them. The territory he dealt with needed a name. Rajputana was it.

Ajmer itself, and the small district of Merwara around it, were the exception: they were British territory, governed directly. Everything else on the Rajputana map belonged to a prince. The word described a jurisdiction, not a nation.

What the princes called it

Nothing, collectively. A Rathore of Marwar did not think of himself as a citizen of Rajputana any more than a Bavarian of the 1850s thought of himself as German first. He was Marwari. The Sisodias of Mewar, who had never bowed to the Mughals and did not intend to start with anyone else, were Mewari. The Kachwahas of Amber and Jaipur, who had done extremely well out of the Mughals, were something else again. These were different histories, different alliances, and in several cases centuries of open war with each other.

The shared identity was Rajput — a warrior caste and a code — not a shared state. That is what the British name captured, and it was accurate as far as it went.

How it became Rajasthan

Independence in 1947 gave every princely state a choice, and the Rajputana states signed instruments of accession to India. Merging them into one administrative unit took two more years of negotiation. On 30 March 1949 most of them became a single state with Jaipur as its capital, and the new state took a new name: Rajasthan, 'the abode of kings' — a name the rulers had used for themselves in Hindi long before it became official. The princes kept titles, palaces and privy purses for a generation; the privy purses ended in 1971.

So the honest sequence is: many kingdoms, then one British label for the map, then one Indian state. Rajputana is the middle step, and it lasted about a century.

What this means when you are standing in a fort

It means the fort was built against the fort in the next city, not with it. Mehrangarh in Jodhpur and the Amber fort above Jaipur were raised by dynasties that fought each other; Jaisalmer's walls were paid for by caravan tolls that Bikaner would happily have collected instead. When a guide tells you 'the Rajasthani style', treat it the way you would 'the European style' — there is some truth in it, and it flattens everything interesting.

The map of kingdoms on our Rajasthan page shows who held what. Read it before the forts, and the forts start to make sense as arguments rather than decoration.

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