Abstract
In the early twentieth century, communal riots between Hindus and Muslims were far less frequent and far less sanguinary, per capita, in princely than in British India. Indeed the difference was so marked that it led some commentators to claim, somewhat excessively, that the states were ‘free’ from communalism. What magic or artifice allowed the major religious communities in the states to co-exist more or less peacefully at a time when collective violence between Hindus and Muslims was fast becoming the scourge of the provinces?
I was very surprised to see our Mohammedan cook taking part in this idolatry [worship of Hanuman] … Narayan said it was not at all an uncommon sight; many of the Mohammedans resident in the State had adopted the Hindu customs …
J.R. Ackerley, recalling his time as private secretary to the maharaja of Chhatarpur during the 1920s
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Notes
Gopal Krishna, ‘Communal Violence in India: A Study of Communal Distur-bances in Delhi — I’, in Economic and Political Weekly, 12 January 1985’, p. 65; and Achin Vanaik, The Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India (London, 1990), p. 139n.
Quoted in Ashis Nandy, Shikha Trivedi, Shail Mayaram and Achyut Yagnik, Creating a Nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and Fear of the Self (Delhi, 1995), p. 83.
Stanley J. Tambiah, Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (Berkeley, 1996), p. 274. Tambiah here is drawing upon the pioneering sociological work of Elias Canetti, particularly his Crowds and Power (New York, 1984), pp. 15–16.
M.S. Gill and Gaganjot Deol, ‘Patterns of Riots in India’, in Asian Profile, Vol. 23, No. 1 (February 1995), pp. 65–6.
Barbara Daly Metcalf, ‘Imagining Community: Polemical Debates in Colonial India’, in Kenneth W. Jones (ed.), Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in Indian Languages (Albany, 1992), p. 230.
James Manor, ‘The Failure of Political Integration in Sri Lanka (Ceylon)’, in Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1979), p. 38. Manor opines that it is surely ‘less than accidental that elections in Sri Lanka have tended to bring in their train [outbreaks of] communal, criminal or insurrectionary violence’.
Richard G. Fox, ‘Communalism and Modernity’, in David Ludden (ed.), Contesting the Nation: Religion, Community and the Politics of Democracy in India (Philadelphia, 1996), pp. 237–9.
James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in SoutheastAsia (New Haven, 1976), esp. pp. 170–4, 180–92.
For a discussion of some of this literature, see Arjun Appadorai, ‘How Moral Is South Asia’s Economy? — A Review Article’, in the Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 43, No. 3 (May 1984), pp. 481–97.
On this see Denis Vidal, Violence and Truth: A Rajasthani Kingdom Confronts Colonial Authority (Delhi, 1997), esp. Chs 2, 4 and 6.
C.S. Ranga Iyer, India in the Crucible (London, 1928), p. 296.
Arjun Appadorai, Worship and Conflict in Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case (Cambridge, 1981).
Joanne Punzo Waghorne, The Raja’s Magic Clothes: Revisioning Kingship and Divinity in England’s India (University Park, Pennsylvania, 1994), p. 9.
Sir Jadunath Sarkar, A Histoty of Jaipur, c.1503–1938 (rev. and ed. Raghubir Singh, Hyderabad, c.1984), p. 17. For details of princely roles in other festivals, see Sardar Sahib Deohri Mualla, Patiala, to Director of Agriculture, Patiala, October 1939, PSA, Patiala, Dharam Arth, 186/92; fort. report on the Gwalior Residency for period ending 31 October 1939, IOR L/P&S/13/1197; Mekhma Khas office order, Jodhpur, dated 21 September 1948, RSAB, Jodhpur, Social, C 1/3 of 1948;
and N.B. Khare, My Political Memoirs: Or Autobiography (Nagpur, 1959), p. 318.
Narayan Mahadev Parmanand, Letters to an Indian Rajah from a Political Recluse (2nd edn, Bombay, 1919), p. 21.
Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (trans. A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, Glencoe Illinois, 1947), p. 328.
Narada quoted in Thomas R. Trautmann, ‘Traditions of Statecraft in Ancient India’, in R.J. Moore (ed.), Tradition and Politics in South Asia (New Delhi, 1979), pp. 95, 137;
and Pratap Chandra Roy (trans.), The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (Calcutta, 1963), Vol. 1, p. 101.
Specifically, it was the power of the goddess that resided in the throne. The installation rituals usually lasted three days, and included worship of titular deities, worship of state emblems, sacrifices, the feeding of brahmins, cir-cumnambulation, the making of the forehead of the ruler with a raja tilak, an effusion (the abishekha), and, lastly, enthronement. Ronald Inden, ‘Ritual, Authority and Cyclic Time in Hindu Kingship’, in J.F. Richards (ed.), Kingship and Authority in South Asia (2nd edn, Madison, Wisconsin, 1981), pp. 37–8;
and Adrian Mayer, ‘Rulership and Divinity: The Case of the Modern Hindu Prince and Beyond’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 25, No. 4 (1991), pp. 767–70.
K.M. Panikkar, His Highness the Maharaja of Bikaner: A Biography (London, 1937), p. 385.
Lt.-Col. G.D. Ogilvie, AGG, Rajputana, to Pol. Sec., GOI, 23 April 1933, Br. Lib., Lothian Coll., 6; Lord Willingdon, Viceroy of India, to Sec. State, 30 April and 22 May 1933, Br. Lib., Templewood Coll., 6; The Times, 22 May 1933; and Iris Butler, Viceroy’s Wife: Letters of Alice, Countess of Reading from India, 1921–5, p. 52 (entry for 7 November 1921).
Iqbal Narain and P.C. Mathur, ‘The Thousand Year Raj: Regional Isolation and Rajput Hinduism in Rajasthan Before and After 1947’, in Francine Frankel and M.S.A. Rao (eds), Dominance and State Power in Modern India: Decline of a Social Order, Vol. 2 (Delhi, 1990), pp. 31–3.
Patrick Hanks (ed.), Collins Dictionary of the English Language (Sydney, 1982), p. 1319.
Robert W. Stern, The Cat and the Lion: Jaipur State in the British Raj (Leiden, 1988), p. 276.
Satirical attack on maharaja of Patiala in the Kirpan Bahadur ji Sangat of Amritsar, 19 September 1929, quoted in L.F. Rushbrook-Williams, Foreign Minister, Patiala, to AGG, Punjab States, 21 November 1927, PSA, Patiala, Hist. Section, file H-89B. Sikh historian and man of letters Khushwant Singh recalled recently how shocked he was to see Bhupinder Singh of Patiala smoking outside the Chamber of Princes building in Delhi. Review by Khushwant Singh of K. Natwar Singh, Magnificent Maharaja, Outlook, 6 April 1998, p. 79.
Charles Allen and Sharada Dwivedi, Lives of the Indian Princes (London, 1984), p. 310; interview with HH of Dhrangadhra, Pune, 26 January 1998; and R.E. Holland, AGG, Rajputana, to Pol. Sec., GOI, 16 March 1921, NAI, F&P, Dep. Intl. (Secret), May 1921, 12.
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© 2005 Ian Copland
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Copland, I. (2005). Islands in the Storm. In: State, Community and Neighbourhood in Princely North India, c. 1900–1950. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230005983_2
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