Lives of the Indian Princes

by Charles Allen

First published 1984

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4.2(21)

Written with Sharada Dwivedi, Lives of the Indian Princes examines the rulers and royal households of the princely states that survived alongside British-controlled India. Drawing on interviews, photographs and archival material, it explores dynastic traditions, marriages, succession, court ceremony, hunting, military display, palaces, jewellery and the complex relationship between rulers and British political officers.

The book also looks beyond spectacle to the machinery of princely government and the pressures of the twentieth century. Reform, nationalism and the end of paramountcy transformed hundreds of states whose rulers had exercised very different degrees of power. The result is both a social history of elite life and a record of a political order that disappeared with independence and integration into India and Pakistan.