False Allies Quotes

“The first half of the nineteenth century saw Protestant evangelicalism enter India. And while Christian missions did much good – in education, uplifting the marginalized and exposing failures even of the Company – as far as Indian elites were concerned, they were a thorn in the side. In Travancore, for example, converts from low castes, empowered by their new identity, now aspired to equality with their ex-superiors. As a Dewan argued, by ‘violating the existing social distinctions’, the new Christians were bound to ‘annoy the high castes’, who demanded retribution. For generations, battles would be fought on dress, access to roads, temples, and even government buildings, and much of the reform Travancore grew famous for owed to this tension with missionaries, and the confidence they gave disempowered segments. Missionaries, however, also tended to magnify the evils they saw, to gain financial sympathy at home, for example. In 1848, thus, it was alleged that Travancore had a ‘professed torturer’, an expert in ‘twenty-three modes’ of abuse, on its payroll. In 1855 the state was described as ‘a perfect pandemonium of torture and misgovernment’. But the core problem was a clash of moralities, causing even the maharajah ‘great uneasiness’.77 As a Hindu king his duty lay in preserving the way things were; or as he said: ‘As my kingdom was in my predecessors’ time, so let it remain, and so let it descend to my heir.’78 His critics, however, wished to smash that caste-based order with a new conception of justice. Which side prevailed at any given moment depended also on higher-ups – Resident Cullen was sympathetic to the maharajah, while the infamous governor-general, Lord Dalhousie, showed personally an evangelical bent.”
― Manu S. Pillai, False Allies: India's Maharajahs in The Age of Ravi Varma

“When in 1892, as alluded to before, a Congressman won election to the British parliament, the governor of Bombay sent congratulations, but in private unleashed a jaundiced pen. ‘I am very disgusted at Dadabhai Naoroji getting elected to the House,’ said Lord Harris. ‘Why England should elect natives I can’t for the life of me see: they can’t govern themselves. Why should they govern us?”
― Manu S. Pillai, False Allies: India's Maharajahs in The Age of Ravi Varma

“Even if a bit too rosy, this was not an outlandish proposition: in 1910, a more senior figure had also blasphemed when he said, ‘We have much to learn from Native States.’ Yes, many presented ‘a loose despotic system’ but given their strong local roots, these governments did not ‘press hard on the daily lives of the people’. On the other hand, the British machinery, though ‘scientific’, was rigid and not particularly better given the procedural harassment it inflicted.118 Yet another colonial officer observed that where the princes were one up on the Raj was in their ‘claim on the general regard of the people’. The idea of a maharajah, he believed, ‘strikes [the Indian] imagination’ in a way impossible for the file-bearing civil servant.”
― Manu S. Pillai, False Allies: India's Maharajahs in The Age of Ravi Varma

“As Sunil Khilnani notes, maharajahs were ‘required to be at once conservative and liberal . . . to sport turbans and read Bagehot’.20 But they could never ascend to equality with their imperial wardens – they would forever be almost modern, never fully so. For if the second possibility were admitted, how would the Raj sustain the myth that white men governed India for its own good?”
― Manu S. Pillai, False Allies: India's Maharajahs in The Age of Ravi Varma