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Princely state
Type of vassal state in India under the British Raj / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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A princely state (also called native state or Indian state) was a nominally sovereign[1] entity of the British Indian Empire that was not directly governed by the British, but rather by an Indian ruler under a form of indirect rule,[2] subject to a subsidiary alliance and the suzerainty or paramountcy of the British crown.
In 1920, Congress under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi declared swaraj for Indians as its goal and asked the princes of India to establish responsible government.[3] Jawaharlal Nehru played a major role in pushing Congress to confront the princely states and declared in 1929 that "only people who have the right to determine the future of the States must be the people of these States".[4] In 1937, after the Congress's electoral victory in 1937 elections, the Congress started to intervene in the affairs of the princely states.[4] In the same year, Gandhi played a major role in formation of federation involving a union between British India and the princely states with an Indian central government. In 1946, Jawaharlal Nehru observed that no princely state could prevail militarily against the army of independent India.[5]
At the time of the British withdrawal, 565 princely states were officially recognized in the Indian subcontinent,[6] apart from thousands of zamindari estates and jagirs. In 1947, princely states covered 40% of the area of pre-independence India and constituted 23% of its population.[7] The most important states had their own British political residencies: Hyderabad of the Nizams, Mysore, Pudukkottai and Travancore in the South, Jammu and Kashmir, and Indore in Central India. The most prominent among those – roughly a quarter of the total – had the status of a salute state, one whose ruler was entitled to a set number of gun salutes on ceremonial occasions.[citation needed]
The princely states varied greatly in status, size, and wealth; the premier 21-gun salute states of Hyderabad and Jammu and Kashmir were each over 200,000 km2 (77,000 sq mi) in size. In 1941, Hyderabad had a population of over 16 million, while Jammu and Kashmir had a population of slightly over 4 million. At the other end of the scale, the non-salute principality of Lawa covered an area of 49 km2 (19 sq mi), with a population of just below 3,000. Some two hundred of the lesser states even had an area of less than 25 km2 (10 sq mi).[8][9]