Book Review: Janaki Nair,Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region under Princely Rule and Aya Ikegame,Princely India Re-imagined: A Historical Anthropology of Mysore from 1799 to the Present

These two books are a timely intervention into the historiography on the princely states because each provides fresh perspectives on princely rule and its meanings for historians of South Asia. Although they both focus on the princely state of Mysore, they question the very utility of the concept of princely state in their formulations on modernity, sovereignty and the relationship between Indian kingship and colonialism, since they are based on a study of the region long before the southern half of it became the princely state of Mysore, as well as after the erstwhile princely state was incorporated into the Indian state of Karnataka.

This is particularly evident in Janaki Nair’s Mysore Modern, which uses the category of region instead of princely state to examine the intricacies of indirect rule as it took on new forms in the period between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. Rather than getting embroiled in the debates about whether Mysore passed through the same stages of modernity as other parts of British India, it coins the term ‘monarchical modern’ to demonstrate the unique ways in which reform was carried out in Mysore ‘using the instrumentalities of state power refracted through the trappings of monarchy’ (p. 2). This in turn, it demonstrates, has wider implications for our understanding of kingly authority, good governance and paths to nation-ness under colonial rule.

Mysore Modern is divided into two distinct parts. The first half is an in-depth analysis of Mysore’s artistic production over the centuries—portraiture, landscape painting, architecture, maps and so on—to highlight its functioning as an autonomous sphere where the demands made by the colonial power, on the one hand, and the popular domain, on the other, were negotiated. For instance, a chapter examines portraits of the royals to illustrate the changing relationships between the Mysore royalty and various clans, elites and the paramount power, and the resultant creation of an entirely new image of the Mysore monarchy.

A discussion of the un-making of Srirangapatna as the capital city and the making of Mysore into a ‘museumized cityscape’ likewise brings out the ways in which the Mysore monarchy positioned itself vis-à-vis the past by creating a new visual aesthetic that overtook the functions of the sacred in the ordering of space and in laying claim to the space of the city of Mysore for the Wodeyars of Mysore. This was done, the book shows, by literally annexing public property to build a series of palaces for the royal family. The main palace asserted what the book calls a new ‘historical presence’ as it redefined the relationship between state and royal family, since the former financed the building of these structures. At the same time, it became a means to negotiate a new relationship with the subjects of the princely state, who now became a new modern public that consumed this museumised cityscape. Both cities, Mysore Modern reminds us, are spaces where the exercise of power is apparent in their making, un-making and remaking.

It is the second half of Mysore Modern, however, that yields a clear understanding of the relationship among the Mysore bureaucratic machinery, the royal house and the public through its richly textured analysis of reform efforts in the early-twentieth-century Mysore. These chapters illustrate how the state itself undertook social reforms as a means to reshape family life, while also providing a ‘moral-intellectual leadership’ that defined the discourse and nature of these reforms. The reforms took place at a faster pace than in British India and were carried out by the state rather than a nationalist leadership. However, much like in regions directly controlled by the colonial state, they were not meant to challenge patriarchy or caste and class ideologies, but rather to consolidate a new moral order with the new middle-class woman as the bearer of a reformed patriarchy.

The chapters on reforming the devadasi system and the infant marriage regulation further illustrate that the pursuit of modernity was not so much about producing rights-bearing individuals but instead defining the extent to which the state could intervene in the law and fashion a legal order. Moreover, it is interesting to note the almost complete absence of the royal family from the debates surrounding these reforms, which reminds us of the need to rethink the nature of the state within princely states as comprising more than simply the royal court.

As is partly evident from the discussion of the reform efforts in Mysore, which were spearheaded by the bureaucracy and not the royal house or a nationalist leadership, Mysore Modern points out that Kannada nationalism did not precede the foundation of the state of Karnataka but rather followed it. The last chapter of the book analyses the stages through which Kannada nationalism passed as it articulated the idea of a unified state of Karnataka. These stages were marked by a focus on linguistic affinity, a common past and a possible future defined in terms of an economic development agenda. The idea of the Mysore state remained central to the efforts to forge a Kannada nation, although by the 1970s there was a move away from Mysore, its products, topography and resources as other regions of the state asserted themselves.

Mysore Modern thus takes us on a journey from Srirangapatna to Mysore and from thence to Karnataka, in the process giving us an idea of the making of a particular region in southern India. It gives centre stage to the visual medium in the first half, and the bureaucracy in the second half, to give us a sense of the nature of the princely state and the modernity it espoused, based as it was on patriarchal and caste norms. It thus illustrates the significant ways in which Mysore’s route to and definition of modernity differed from other princely states and regions of British India. The book unfortunately seems to end abruptly, since it lacks a conclusion, which would have provided the space to bring together the ideas discussed in the narrative.

Unlike Mysore Modern, the royal family remains the centre of the narrative in Aya Ikegame’s Princely India Re-imagined. The first page itself notes that the rajahs who ruled princely India are a ‘people without history’ and hence need to be studied not simply in the context of princely India, but also in terms of their position within the Indian society after independence. The idea of kingship, how it developed in relation to the colonial power and the ways in which it connected people—both during the colonial and post-colonial period—to larger spheres of political activity are the main concerns of this book. It argues that the changes wrought by colonialism on Indian kingship in the context of princely states mediated their ‘transition from pre-colonial polity to post-colonial democracy’ (p. 4). As a result, although focused on the period of princely rule of the Mysore state, the book takes a longer view of kingship and its effects in southern India.

Princely India places itself more squarely within the scholarship on princely states, specifically taking on Nicholas Dirks’ idea of the hollow crown as put forward in his eponymous book. Although the book deploys similar methodologies of historical anthropology as The Hollow Crown, it argues that the Mysore kings were able to exercise a level of agency in shaping their social and cultural bases of legitimacy by bringing people together and mobilising them during the period of colonial rule. Focusing on the palace, royal education, matrimonial alliances and so on, the book illustrates that while grappling with the changes brought about by colonialism, the kings drew on pre-colonial ideas of kingship to present themselves as ideal kings. The book asserts that the changing face of kingship from pre-colonial to colonial provided the space for the democratic polity to emerge in southern India after independence, and therefore a study of princely states can no longer remain external to histories of the emergence of the Indian national idea.

The chapter on the Mysore palace, for instance, rather than discussing it as a piece of architecture, focuses on the space as a political domain. Through an intricate discussion of the politics of gift-giving and tussles for power among the palace, the bureaucracy and the colonial power, it demonstrates the transformation of the palace from a space that at least in part functioned as a state to an arena that performed some state functions, and finally into a privately run, self-financing institution. Thus, emerged a clear division between the palace and the state government, with each performing different political functions.

Mysore city, as we see in Mysore Modern as well, therefore emerged as the capital city specifically of the royal family of the Wodeyars. A chapter of the book examines the changes to the Mysore fort carried out at the behest of the royal family in the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century, as well as the construction of the Mysore palace, as examples of the negotiation between Western ideas of improvement and the Indian concept of dharma. As modern ideas of sanitation were applied to the space of the fort, temples and shrines to goddesses emerged in renovated form within this space. However, it also points out that the negotiation between the ideas of improvement and dharma was constrained by the inability of the kings to exercise their rajadharma to its fullest extent due to the limits on their power. Furthermore, as another chapter illustrates, sacred kingship was further limited during the post-colonial period as the modern Indian state, especially in the figure of Indira Gandhi, sought to become the sole protector of the people.

Princely India Re-imagined elucidates the changing nature of kingship, while at the same time bringing out the recurrence of ideas that defined kingship and kingliness across the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial divides in southern India. It shows how the tropes of political honour and ritual continue to connect newly emergent political leaders with people in ever wider political spheres. The book argues that rather than representing local communities, the Mysore kings became ‘a re-presentation of the state that transcended all communities’ (p. 171), as they adapted traditional ideas to articulate a more modern form of sovereignty. This is not unlike the idea of the ‘monarchical modern’ that Mysore Modern puts forward.

Mysore Modern and Princely India Re-imagined are perfectly complementary. Together they cover the visual, political, sacred and architectural domains of the making of the princely state of Mysore and the region of modern Karnataka. While Mysore Modern focuses both on the Mysore royalty, particularly through a study of artistic and architectural media, and the emergence of a modern bureaucracy, Princely India is more interested in the royalty itself and how it negotiated its position with the colonial state and the emergent state bureaucracy. Both remind us of the necessity of including princely states within our understanding of the emergence of regions in South Asian history and the modern states that defined and continue to define them.

Unfortunately, the people of Mysore appear on the sidelines of both the books. Both make it clear that the people were at the receiving end of the efforts of the royalty and the state to define a new modernity, and that the relationship between the state and the people was critical to this articulation. However, there could have been a fuller discussion of how the royalty and the bureaucracy defined the category of the people of Mysore, and indeed how the inhabitants themselves responded to this formulation and to the social reform and architectural renovation efforts carried out by the monarchy and the state. This might also have helped us understand better why the idea of kingship continues to have such political resonance in contemporary (southern) Indian politics. Nonetheless, by forcing us to re-evaluate our ideas of modernity, sovereignty, kingship and nation and state formation in the context of Mysore, these books provide a solid ground from which to undertake such studies.