PRINCELY STATES OF INDIA

 

   

   

   

            They are but a dimming memory, the maharajas and nawabs who once held sway over almost half of India. Their states have been wiped off the map, their palaces allowed to crumble or turned into hotels. They have been stripped of the privileges promised in exchange for the surrender of their sovereignty. They have been pictured in literature -–and to a large extent, too, in history-- as irresponsible tyrants and willing tools of their foreign master. With very few though notable exceptions, they have become Ozymandian relics.

Yet, barely sixty years ago, their families --some dating from Antiquity-- still ruled over vast territories stretching from the icy peaks of Chitral in the Northwest Frontier, through the smiling vale of Kashmir and into the steaming jungles of Assam; from the burning deserts of Jaisalmer and Bikaner in proud Rajputana, across the water-logged Rann of Kutch, as far as the Ghats of the Deccan and beyond, to fabled Hyderabad, and Travancore and Cochin, where the enterprise of Old World eastern adventure now slumbers by placid lagoons.

Thus scattered all over India, the numerous native states differed materially from one another in their size, history, and importance, as well as in the nature of their previous relationship with the British government. Historically, they may be grouped into four broad categories:

1. Very old Hindu states, such as the Rajput states of Rajputana, Central India, and the Punjab Hills; Tripura, Mysore and Travancore.

 

2. Fragments of the old Moghul empire whose governors or military leaders became independent, as was the case with Hyderabad, Junagadh and Cambay.
3. Principalities established by military adventurers out of the chaos attending the gradual disintegration of the Moghul empire. The most important states in this group are the Maratha states of Baroda, Gwalior, Indore and Kolhapur; the Sikh states; and the Muslim states of Bhopal, Tonk and Bahawalpur.

 

4. The so-called feudatory states of Orissa and the Central Provinces, mostly founded by Rajput refugees after the Muslim invasions. For the most part they are situated in mountainous country of difficult access, are undeveloped, and their population is largely aboriginal. Mayurbhanj, Bastar and Kalahandi are prominent among this group.

As was to be expected under the circumstances, the number of native states changed with time. In Moghul times there “were quite many states and tribal chiefdoms in … inaccessible hill and mountain regions --often in clusters-- all over India, over which neither the Mughals nor even the Marathas could establish more than a perfunctory kind of paramountcy.”  Emperor Jahangir, in the 17th century, was said to be “king of the plains or the open roads only”, and “the great and petty rajas and zamindars living in the midst of the jungle exceeded 5,000 in number.” The process of agrarian expansion and settlement in the course of time considerably reduced their number. This process had not yet come to a stop by the time the British gained paramountcy at the beginning of the 19th century.

“Territorial sovereignty in India meant, in practical terms, the ability to collect revenue and command the loyalty of local chieftains in time of war. The outer limits of such control would expand or contract, depending upon the abilities and resources of a ruler at a particular time, but in a well-established kingdom there would be blocs of territory integrated into a permanent pattern of administrative control. … For the new European rulers, this old … system of the Mughals was unworkable. Uniformity in administrative methods, distinctions between citizen and non-citizen, a clear notice to neighboring sovereignties that beyond this line could be no intrusions, all the commonplace feature of the modern western state, required border demarcation. … [T]he last decade of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth century ha[ve] been called ‘the most intensive period of boundary construction in the Earth’s history.’ This process was complicated in India by the extraordinary diversity of terrain, ethnic groups, and levels of political development.”

One important first step towards uniformity was the Interpretation Act of 1889 that, at long last, gave precise meaning to the hitherto rather vague concept of India: “The expression ‘India’ shall mean British India, together with any territories of any native prince or chief under the suzerainty of Her Majesty …”. Under the new law, India ceased to be a cultural or a mere geographic expression and acquired a clearly defined political meaning.

But for all their systematizing efforts the British could not altogether dispense with the Protean nature of Indian states. The fact that holdings were partitioned in lands whose rulers did not follow the principle of primogeniture was not the only reason. Looking at the princely order with a jaundiced eye, an Indian observer remarked in the closing years of the Raj: “The history of British relationship with Princely India is littered with instances of States that were made or unmade, of zamindaris being elevated to chiefships and vice versa, by a breath of the imperial power according to the shifting needs of its policy.”

Thus, while Sir Charles Tupper recorded 629 feudatory states in 1886, The Imperial Gazetteer listed 693 in 1907, and Edward Haynes speaks of “the 718 Princely States in India (c. 1912),” by 1920 the British authorities in Delhi could only count 587; ten years later the Butler Commission had pared the number down to 562. Within a year of independence, however, the new national government of India recorded a final figure of 584 states, including those that had acceded to Pakistan.

It is appropriate at this point to proffer a description --it is perhaps too lengthy to qualify as a definition-- of what is meant by an Indian State. According to Sir William Lee-Warner in his seminal work The Native States of India, MacMillan and Co., London, 1910:

A native state is a political community, occupying a territory in India of defined boundaries, and subject to a common and responsible ruler who has actually enjoyed and exercised, as belonging to him in his own right duly recognized by the supreme authority of the British Government, any of the functions and attributes of internal sovereignty. The indivisibility of sovereignty does not belong to the Indian system of sovereign states, … but the sovereignty of Native states is shared between the British Government and the Chiefs in varying degrees.

For Sir Charles L. Tupper, author of the celebrated Our Indian Protectorate, Longmans, Green, and Co., London, 1893, the native states were:

autonomous states, enjoying various degrees of sovereignty,levying their own taxes, administering their own laws, and possessing territory which is, for purposes of internal administration, foreign territory, and has not been annexed to the dominions of the British Crown … [they], or their rulers, can be, and are, punished when the occasion requires, by fine, by the deprivation of salutes and other honors, by sequestration for a time, by the diminution of judicial authority, and, in extreme cases, by the deposition, or even execution, of the ruler and the annexation and incorporation of the states in the territories directly administered by British officers.

But perhaps the most illuminating definition of an Indian State -–despite or, indeed, because of its tautology-- is the one provided in the Government of India Act of 1935:

Indian State means any territory, not being part of British India, which His Majesty recognizes as being such a State, whether described as a State, an estate, a Jagir or otherwise.

After World War I, it became increasingly apparent to both British and Indian that the Raj, as then constituted, would not last forever and that independence and representative government would come sooner rather than later. The Chamber of Princes, an advisory body, was set up by royal proclamation in February, 1921. It did not alter the relations between any state and the Paramount Power, but was a major departure from the traditional policy under which the Crown had discouraged joint action by the Princely States.
 
The term "Princely States" is a convenient but inexact denomination used to include all Indian territorial units not directly ruled by the representatives of the king-emperor. In fact, only those rulers entitled to a salute of 11 guns or more were accorded the princely treatment and addressed as Highnesses. (However, in the closing weeks of the Raj, acting on the recommendation of the Political Service, the treatment of Highness was extended to the 9-gun princes as well.)

According to the 1930 report of the Butler Committee, charged with looking into the relationship between the Paramount Power and the Indian States, the latter could be classified into three distinct categories:

a. States (108) the rulers of which are members in their own right of the Chamber of Princes.

b. States (127) the rulers of which are represented in the Chamber of Princes by 12 members of their order elected by themselves.

1. Jagirs, estates and others (327).

 

These simplified figures, however, were at loggerheads with the reality existing in some parts of India, particularly the Western India States and Gujarat States Agencies, where several thanas grouped minute states, too small and unimportant to be listed even in administration reports or annual statistics.  According to a paper first published by the Government of India in 1932 for private circulation only, in the Western India States Agency alone there were 7,793 “sovereigns” (actually shareholders or bhagdars), each with a minute share of one village yielding a revenue of half a sovereign a year. There the government was faced with “the perplexing political and administrative problems which arise from the existence … of literally hundreds of small units which, though they are usually referred to as ‘semi-jurisdictional’ or ‘non-jurisdictional’ estates or Talukas, do actually fall within the category of ‘Indian States’”.

Between August and December, 1943, in an attempt “to achieve the conditions of administrative efficiency which alone can justify in them the perpetuation of any form of hereditary rule,” the government of India ordered the attachment of 482 minor Kathiawari and Gujarati states to larger neighbors. This was done, the government explained, because the “ultimate test of fitness for survival of any State is … [the] capacity to secure the welfare of its subjects”. The new policy purported to be in keeping “with the overriding principle that autocratic powers shall not be abused and that nothing which is not inherently capable of survival should be artificially perpetuated,” notwithstanding “all due regard to pledges and obligations for the maintenance and support of Indian States, however small and weak”. Although provision was ostensibly made for the continued existence of the “attached” units and of the existing powers and privileges of their talukdars and shareholders “in so far as they may be compatible with modern requirements”, the fact remains that merger was the ultimate goal of the Attachment Scheme.

The smallness of the area and the paucity of the resources –-human and otherwise-- of the pettier states put it beyond the power of their rulers to give their subjects the benefits of education, communications, public health, and courts of justice. Europe has Monaco, San Marino, Liechtenstein, and Andorra left as museum pieces to illustrate the anomaly of the small sovereign state. In India, however, they were so numerous as to create a serious political conundrum, for Britain was bound by precedent and treaty to ensure the integrity and survival of these small units. Their disappearance, foreshadowed in the 1943 Attachment Scheme, became inevitable once Britain ceased to be the Paramount Power in India.

In addition to these states (as they must be called), there were innumerable other entities also ruled by rajas and thakors, but politically subordinated to other native states or to British provincial governments. Central India, in particular, contained numerous jagirs, chiefships, and thakurats. Those whose rulers enjoyed certain guarantees from the British government have been included in the present survey.

Some rulers in the Central India Agency had no territorial possessions and, strictly speaking, cannot be included in a list of Indian States. However, these landless barons did receive cash payments from one or more Indian rulers, the right to receive such payments being guaranteed to them by the British government of India.  They are listed under the Central India Agency for the sake of completeness

Thus, prior to independence and partition in 1947, there existed, legally and politically, not one but two Indias. There was British India (the “pink”), ruled directly by the representatives of the king-emperor and indirectly by the cabinet and parliament in London. And there was the India of the native states (the “yellow”), a group of states protected by the British government, with their own hereditary princes and chiefs who were sovereign rulers, except to the extent that their sovereignty had been abridged by treaty or agreement with the British Crown. However, as the Butler Committee Report acknowledged: “Geographically, India is one and indivisible, made up of the pink and the yellow. The problem of statesmanship is to hold the two together.”

The “sovereignty” of the Indian states and their rulers is an issue as hotly debated today as it was in the heyday of the Raj. Critics of the princely order have quipped that “they were neither fish nor fowl but a red herring across the path of India’s constitutional progress.” To them, it is “not clear what attributes of sovereignty they enjoy other than those conceded to them by the Paramount Power.” Edward Haynes –-a contemporary historian not ill disposed towards the princely order-- has some strong words on the issue:

Under the British, the rajas became princes fit only for the garden party, their links with their kinsmen and local commercial classes were replaced by their ability to impress the Viceroy, his wife, British political figures, or the local agent by their British public school erudition. Links to an older and wider world of responsive ascetic rule and its ritual manifestations were severed. … As his traditional political base was severed, his system of authority was crushed, and the Indian prince had drifted inexorably to misrule and ‘playboy’ status.

Recently, however, a group of revisionist historians has attempted to rehabilitate the princes. In so doing, they have presented the case for their importance in history and challenged the notion that the rulers were nothing more than selfish collaborators and effete playboys. According to this school, the princes, as emissaries of the British overlords, and wealthier and more powerful than most other Indians, were able to bridge the gap between the foreign rulers and the native ruled. They could claim to be loyal representatives of the empire and, at the same time, the last line of defense protecting the Indian people from the full onslaught of British colonial rule. “It was precisely this dual role as both colonial and colonized that defined the princes, here as a group, as neither fully Indian nor fully British. … It was this space between places, between identities, of being neither fully here nor there, that gave the princes the ability to translate terms from one group to another, to capture a concept, detach it from its assigned ideological value, and refashion it with new values and purpose.”

Regardless of the princes’ real or perceived roles, their states were indeed unique, as the Butler Committee emphasized:

It is generally agreed that the states are sui generis, that there is no parallel to their position in history, that they are governed by a body of convention and usage not quite like anything in the world. They fall outside both international and ordinary municipal law, but they are governed by rules which form a very special part of the constitutional law of the Empire. 

Most scholars agree that the external sovereignty of all Indian states was vested in the British government, while internal sovereignty was distributed between the Paramount Power and the rulers. The manner and proportion in which it was distributed varied from state to state according the circumstances of each case. Lord Napier of Merchistoun expressed this relationship in succinct terms: “There is a Paramount Power in the British Crown, of which the extent is wisely left undefined. There is a subordination in the Native States which is understood, but not explained.” Others were less reticent in their interpretations. Writing to King Edward VII shortly after his accession in 1901, Viceroy Lord Curzon summed up the question in typically blunt terms:

The Native Chiefs are not sovereign. They have been deprived of the essential rights and attributes of sovereignty. They cannot make treaties, they cannot keep armies or import arms, they cannot have any relations with each other beyond those of friendship, they cannot even build railways without the consent of the Government of India. In the event of aggravated oppression or misrule they are liable to deposition. …  I maintain that the essential attributes of sovereignty in India are exercised by the British Crown and by it alone; and that so much of the essential attributes of sovereignty has been taken from the Native States that to continue to give them the title in not merely a misnomer, but is a political error. I deprecate the constant use of all those vague and unsatisfactory terms --the invention of constitutional lawyers-- such as subordinate isolation, subordinate co-operation, protected sovereignties, subordinate allies, and the like.

Clearly, the nature of British paramountcy was such that the extent of actual princely sovereignty was a matter largely dependent upon the necessities of the moment. The claims of the Paramount Power were generally asserted in spite –-and very often in violation-- of existing treaties, engagements and sanads. A contemporary Indian scholar has gone as far as to assert that paramountcy was a “miracle” of British statesmanship: hundreds of princes and chiefs were all subjected to conditions tantamount to a denial of most of their sovereign rights. Yet they submitted without any organized demur or demonstration to the dictates of the Paramount Power. This was partly due to the helplessness of the native rulers, but it may be explained mainly in terms of “the extraordinary tact, wisdom and discretion displayed by the shrewd British administrators in conceiving and carrying out the various facets of their policy.” Indeed, as one as those administrators has highlighted,

It was not till after the removal of British paramountcy, in 1947, that the stark facts of life became apparent to the States. Once policy changed because of a change of rulers, and it was no longer desired to retain a system of indirect rule, the successor Government of India created its own paramountcy and swallowed up the States with the merest form of agreement by consent.

The velvet glove had come off the mailed fist; Fürstendämmerung was at hand.

The states had no international life, as the British government possessed the exclusive authority to negotiate and communicate with foreign states, and the princes were required to give effect to the international obligations entered into by the Paramount Power. For external purposes, state territory and state subjects were in the same position as British territory and British subjects. Yet, holders of state passports were not British subjects; they were merely “British-protected persons.”

Not surprisingly, the internal government of the different states varied considerably. They were all hereditary monarchies, except for the 25 Khasi States, which elected their rulers. Had it not been for the British predilection for the monarchical form of government, most likely there would not have remained in India any sovereign rights except among the old Rajput states that the British protected and revived. Under the Raj, the more recent Maratha and Muslim dynasties enjoyed the same form of sovereignty over the alien races they ruled as that of the unimpeachable ancient states of India. According to information provided by the Chamber of Princes in 1946, over 60 states had set up some form of legislative bodies. A similar number claimed to have separated executive from judicial functions and to have established high courts more or less based on the European model. But there were princes “who still imagine that they are the state, that its resources are private property, that its inhabitants are their slaves and that their chief business is pleasure.”These last exhibit the famous 'Golden Age' preserved like a fly in amber. Their court life and the life of the people are sections from the unexpurgated Arabian Nights. On the one side strange outbreaks of rage, jealousy, violence, the sudden and final disappearance over night of a favourite minister, lurid punishments and poisonings, and the endless mortal intrigues of the zenana. On the other side a populace too lifeless even to complain of the burden that crushes it, “ as Katherine Mayo observed in the 1920s. This “medieval administration” prevailed in most Eastern States right up to the end of the British Raj.

For all that,

Many of the perquisites of European royalty were forbidden the Indian princes. They could not call their realms “kingdoms” or refer to themselves as “kings” or their status as “royal.” They were forbidden to refer to their gadi (cushion) as a throne --they assumed the gadi, not the throne-- and they were not permitted to use letterheads with “arched crowns” (as opposed to “open crowns”). When, in 1925, Maharaja Tukoji Rao Holkar of Indore introduced a new letterhead with the prohibited arched crowns, the act was regarded as a serious infringement upon the rights and privileges of the King-Emperor.

Of the 1,585,410 square miles of pre-Partition India, the Indian States covered an area of 715,964 square miles, almost 45 per cent of the total. Fifteen states had territories of more than 10,000 square miles, Kashmir and Hyderabad being the largest. On the other hand, 202 states had an area of less than 10 square miles each; 139, less than five square miles; and 70 states had each an area not exceeding one square mile, Veja-no-ness, the smallest surveyed state, having a total area of 0.29 sq. m. The rulers of these very small entities were, in fact, mere landowners with special hereditary privileges.

According to the last pre-Partition census in 1941, the population of the native States was 93,189,233, or 24 per cent of India's 388,997,955 inhabitants. Sixteen states had a population of over one million, Hyderabad being the most populous. Many had fewer than ten thousand; some, a few hundred. Bilbari, in the Dangs, came in last on the list with a total population of 82.

In general terms, the states included in the present list are those whose internal sovereignty, curtailed though it might have been, was recognized by the British Raj. It should be remembered, however, that –-purely as a matter of historical accident-- there also existed a fair number of rather important and wealthy hereditary Indian noblemen whose political (although certainly not social or economic) status was inferior to that of a petty chief in Kathiawar who very likely ruled a patch of land not a twentieth of the area they held.

The maharaja of Balrampur Raj, in the United Provinces of Oudh and Agra, is a case in point. His holdings covered an area of 1,300 square miles and had population of half a million souls in over one thousand villages; he enjoyed a nine-gun salute, even though -–as the British authorities often reminded him—- his estate had never been independent. Other distinguished potentates included the maharaja of Darbhanga, in Bihar; the maharaja of Burdwan, in Bengal; and the rajas of Bobbili and Vizianagram, in northern Madras. These large zamindars “conceived of their own role in terms of the kingly tradition. They appropriated as many of the symbols of regality as they could, and they patterned their behavior so far as possible in accordance with its demands. Much of what they did indeed had the specific aim of making credible their claims to kingly status.” The zamindars’ ostentatious consumption and charity sustained their image as benevolent rulers acting “as a proper Indian raja ought to act.” But for all their wealth and social prestige, however, these zamindari rajas and maharajas were not, as far as the other rulers were concerned, pukka princes.

Despite the fact that a majority of the rulers were not wealthy, that some were actually poor and that a few may have been considered destitute by contemporary Western standards, the popular image of the princes living in Asiatic luxury was not entirely unfounded. No less an authority than Rudyard Kipling remarked: “Providence created the Maharajas to offer mankind a spectacle.” The maharajas may not have sat down to breakfast smothered in rubies, as Sir Conrad Corfield assures us, but there can be little doubt that their life styles were lavish. A 1947 study "of 85 of the richest and most important nobles revealed a statistical profile of stunning opulence: on the average, each owned five palaces; rode on 9.2 elephants, in 3.4 Rolls-Royce automobiles and 2.8 private railroad cars; and had 5.8 wives or concubines and 12.6 children. Fond of sports, the typical noble had bagged 22.5 tigers in his lifetime."

The vast majority of the rulers were Hindus, but a surprisingly high number were Muslims, the remnants of six centuries of Moghul rule. Muslim princes and chiefs were the norm in Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier, and were also found in Gujarat and Kathiawar, in Central India and as far south as the Presidency of Madras. The Nizam of Hyderabad, a Muslim potentate, ranked first among Indian princes.

Hindu princes predominantly belonged to two bitterly opposed groups, Rajputs and Marathas. Indeed, the Rajput-Maratha feud is the dominant feature of early modern Indian history. The Aryan north, with its “Scythian” traditions, and the Dravidian south, with lingering memories of oppression by the fair-skinned Rajputs, were separated by an unbridged gulf. The contempt –-indeed, the repugnance—- felt by the autocratic Rajput Kshatriya or warrior caste for the Maratha Sudra or humble peasants and artisans precluded any common effort to oppose foreign invaders, whether Moghul or British. The maharaja of Gwalior, one of only five princes entitled to a 21-gun salute, was, however, a Maratha of lowly origins. As late as the 1920s, he still cowered before “blue-blooded princes from Rajputana. When out riding he kept a respectful two lengths behind [them], even though … the size and wealth of his state meant that he could ‘buy [them] out many times over.’”

Rajputs (“sons of kings”) are not a nation or even a race or tribe; rather, they are a military caste, a sort of Hindu chivalry. Rajput dynasties ruled in -–and indeed gave their name to-- Rajputana and in most of Central India and the Eastern States. Maratha families clung to the vestiges of the vast empire built in the 17th century by the great Shivaji of Satara. Living among them were the Chitpavan Brahmins, astute and able men who have traditionally held many administrative offices. The Mahratas were found in the Deccan, but Gwalior, Indore, Dhar and Dewas were prominent Mahrata states in Central India.

Six princes, all of them in the Punjab, were Sikhs; the maharaja of Patiala, the leading Sikh ruler, played a major role in Indian social and political life during the first third of the 20th century. Lastly, a number of chiefs in the remote Khasi Hills and the Dangs were animist.

To complicate matters further, numerous Muslim princes ruled over largely Hindu populations, as was the case in Hyderabad and Junagadh, to mention two states where this situation led to armed conflict after independence. And the Hindu maharaja of Kashmir governed a mostly Muslim state that also dissolved into violence in 1947.

 

“The tediousness of Indian history is proverbial,” Sir Charles Tupper warns us. Christopher I. Bayly, writing a century later, puts it more politically: “Indian society is so complex that any unqualified exposition of historical trends must be superficial, and any deeper one will become enmeshed in paradox.”

The present work is clearly not a history of India or even of its Princely States. It does not concern itself with the larger events that shaped India’s destiny in the closing years of the British Raj. Nor does it pretend to pass judgment on the rulers, their role in history or their political acumen or lack thereof.

It deliberately skirts the controversy raging between those who see the princes as “Gilbertian buffoons who frittered away their lives in self-indulgence,” and their states as “cesspits, into which the accumulating miseries of the rest of India could seep”, and others who consider the princely order as being perfectly attuned to Indian political genius, and the rulers as enlightened despots and engines of change and modernization who did “more to advance the sum total of the happiness of the people entrusted to their care than has been secured in many places by following the mere outward forms and machinery of democratic governance”. Both sides of the issue --as well as the previously noted revisionist school-- are, nevertheless, amply represented in the bibliographical sources consulted.

Rather, the limited purpose of this work, which lays no claim to originality or sweeping research, is to present, possibly for the first time since Indian independence, a complete annotated listing of all the sovereign native states faœ-down to, and with particular emphasis on, the smallest and least populous-- as they existed on August 15, 1947. If this goal is attained while avoiding tedium, shallowness and paradox, I shall be well pleased.

There is a master alphabetical listing with entries for all the states that also provide alternative spellings for ease of reference. A second roster classifies the states by agency, sub-agency and thana (or circle). I have availed myself of diverse and widely scattered sources that may not be readily accessible to Western readers interested in the subject. A select bibliography lists all books and other sources of information consulted in preparing the entries; many other titles, of merely tangential pertinence, have been omitted. A glossary explains some Indian terms often encountered.

Each entry gives the area and population for the state in question, using the latest available census figures (1941 or, in some cases, 1931). It indicates the state's location, the Agency to which it belonged, the salute its ruler received, whether it was jurisdictionary (i.e., entitled to hear criminal and civil cases), its fate under the 1943 Attachment Scheme, the title and religion of its ruler and an historical synopsis. The sources from which this information was obtained are noted at the bottom of each entry.

While my original intent had been to list only those states that acceded to either India or Pakistan in 1947, in the course of my research I arrived at the conclusion that certain feudatory states (feudatory, that is, of other Indian states) deserved to be included in this catalogue. Thus, the tributary states of several Punjab Hills states and the jagirs of Kolhapur, as well as the numerous Central Indian estates enjoying British guarantees, have been given separate entries.

This undertaking would not have been possible without the cooperation of several individuals. Generous though their contributions have been, they have not, however, sufficed to fill the gaps or correct the mistakes in these notes, for which I remain solely responsible.

Professor John McCleod of the University of Louisville, Kentucky, has been an inexhaustible source of unflagging support, encouragement and information. In spite of the many and exacting calls on his time, he has stood ready to patiently answer questions, shed light, provide guidance, and share his intimate and truly encyclopedic knowledge of Indian history and genealogy. I owe him an enormous debt of gratitude.

Joaqui­n de Salas Vara de Rey, Esq., [naoero1968@retemail.es] master cartographer and vexillographer, has provided the accurate and handsome maps without which this effort would have been largely barren.

John McMeekin has generously shared with us his knowledge of the political geography and genealogy of Indian states.

My desire continues to be to provide a complete and reliable --definitive, dare we say-- listing of the Princely States of India in 1947. To this effect, I invite comments, corrections and suggestions from interested parties. Please address them to:

contact@princelystatesofindia.com

Nelson Duran