Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Preface
- Glossary of terms
- Map 1 Madras Presidency, 1900
- Map 2 Pudukkottai State
- The Tondaiman line of Pudukkottai
- PART 1 INTRODUCTION
- PART 2 HISTORY AND ETHNOHISTORY
- PART 3 A LITTLE KINGDOM IN THE OLD REGIME
- PART 4 SOCIAL RELATIONS OF A LITTLE KINGDOM
- PART 5 COLONIAL MEDIATIONS: CONTRADICTIONS UNDER THE RAJ
- 10 Agrarian rebellion? Last gasp of the old regime
- 11 The colonization of the political order: land settlements, political intervention, and structural change
- 12 Temples and conflict: the changing context of worship
- 13 The theatre state: princely politics in colonial south India
- PART 6 CONCLUSION
- Appendix: Land and privilege: inams in Pudukkottai
- References
- List of records and abbreviations
- List of archives and record offices
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES
13 - The theatre state: princely politics in colonial south India
from PART 5 - COLONIAL MEDIATIONS: CONTRADICTIONS UNDER THE RAJ
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Preface
- Glossary of terms
- Map 1 Madras Presidency, 1900
- Map 2 Pudukkottai State
- The Tondaiman line of Pudukkottai
- PART 1 INTRODUCTION
- PART 2 HISTORY AND ETHNOHISTORY
- PART 3 A LITTLE KINGDOM IN THE OLD REGIME
- PART 4 SOCIAL RELATIONS OF A LITTLE KINGDOM
- PART 5 COLONIAL MEDIATIONS: CONTRADICTIONS UNDER THE RAJ
- 10 Agrarian rebellion? Last gasp of the old regime
- 11 The colonization of the political order: land settlements, political intervention, and structural change
- 12 Temples and conflict: the changing context of worship
- 13 The theatre state: princely politics in colonial south India
- PART 6 CONCLUSION
- Appendix: Land and privilege: inams in Pudukkottai
- References
- List of records and abbreviations
- List of archives and record offices
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES
Summary
subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?
Shakespeare, Richard II, III. iiNot until the advent of colonialism would the stage be finally set for India's “theatre state,” to borrow somewhat impiously Clifford Geertz's felicitous phrase. For under British rule little kings in India were constructed as colonial objects and given special colonial scripts. They were maintained, altered, and managed as part of a systematic, if awkwardly developing, set of colonial purposes and understandings. It was initially seen as dangerous, perhaps impossible, to remove the feudal layer of lords ruling over much of the Indian countryside in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As the dangers waned, permanent settlements with local lords yielded to settlements with cultivators, annexations increased, and efforts to control those lords who had been appropriated by British rule intensified. Colonized lords – whether as talukdars, zamindars, or even more saliently as princes in the one-third of India under indirect rule – were progressively constructed as edifices not only of loyalty and subservience, but of a newly created and gentrified managerial elite: a tribute, and a support, to British rule.
When these efforts failed, as they generally did, the British increasingly tried to intervene in the forms and operations of management itself. But, at the very moment they came closest to achieving one component of their objectives, the complete separation of kings from their states, they scented new dangers and withdrew to the creative muddle of indirect rule.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Hollow CrownEthnohistory of an Indian Kingdom, pp. 384 - 398Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988