A review of the book 'Dethroned : Patel, Menon and The Integration of Princely India' written by John Zubrzycki.
On 25 July 1947, India’s last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, stood before the Chamber of Princes to deliver his career’s most important speech. He had just three weeks to convince over 550 princely states – some the size of Britain, some so small that cartographers had trouble locating them – to become part of a free India. The alternative was unthinkable – the fragmentation of the subcontinent into dozens of autocratic fiefdoms. This is the beginning of John Zubrzycki’s marvellous retelling of the story of how the princely states were coaxed, coerced or bludgeoned into joining India.
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Coming up: A review of the book 'Dethroned : Patel, Menon and The Integration of Princely India' written by John Zubrzycki.
Namaste Friends. My name is 'Shinil Subramanian Payamal' and you are listening to the Historylogy podcast.
Before I proceed, a full disclosure: This book was bought with my own money and not been provided to me by the author or publisher.
Little bit about the author:
John Zubrzycki is the author of several books, including The Shortest History of India; The House of Jaipur: The Inside Story of India’s Most Glamorous Royal Family; Jadoowallahs, Jugglers and Jinns: A Magical History of India; The Mysterious Mr Jacob: Diamond Merchant, Magician and Spy and The Last Nizam: The Rise and Fall of India’s Greatest Princely State.
He majored in South Asian history and Hindi at the Australian National University and has a PhD in Indian history from the University of New South Wales. John has worked in India as a diplomat and foreign correspondent and was the deputy foreign editor at the The Australian newspaper before becoming a full-time writer.
Let me read what is written on the inside flap of the book cover:
QUOTE
On 25 July 1947, India’s last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, stood before the Chamber of Princes to deliver his career’s most important speech. He had just three weeks to convince over 550 princely states – some the size of Britain, some so small that cartographers had trouble locating them – to become part of a free India. The alternative was unthinkable – the fragmentation of the subcontinent into dozens of autocratic fiefdoms. This is the beginning of John Zubrzycki’s marvellous retelling of the story of how the princely states were coaxed, coerced or bludgeoned into joining India.
Zubrzycki expertly juggles a fascinating cast of characters: Mountbatten, who grasped the complexity of the states problem far too late; Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the pragmatic, tough-minded politician and patriot, who employed both fury and charm to get his way; his deputy, V.P. Menon, the cigar-smoking civil servant and tireless master strategist, regarded by some as ‘the real architect’ of integration; Jawaharlal Nehru, who made no secret of his contempt for the princely order; Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who assiduously wooed wavering princes to his side; and finally, an array of bejewelled rulers, grappling with the challenge of a lifetime.
What Patel and Menon described as a ‘bloodless revolution’ was anything but as Indian troops thwarted Junagadh’s bid to join Pakistan, violence engulfed Kashmir and ‘Operation Polo’ put an end to Hyderabad’s dreams of independence. Uniquely, Zubrzycki also looks at how Pakistan dealt with the princely states that fell to its lot and takes the Indian story into the 1970s when an imperious and vengeful Indira Gandhi delivered the final blow to the princely order.
UNQUOTE
Some of the things I learnt after reading this book:
1. Had Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel achieved his ambition of becoming India’s first prime minister, his centrist pro-market ideology would have seen the country take a radically different course from the socialist model espoused by Nehru. Today, Patel is often called the ‘Bismarck of India’ for repeating the German chancellor’s feat of cajoling a group of scattered and disparate princedoms into giving up their sovereignty and creating a cohesive nation state.
Writing a few months after Independence, a Western journalist described Patel as ‘a Hindu Cromwell courteously decapitating hundreds of little King Charleses’, in the process turning the princes into pensioners and giving their subjects political unity and a voice they had never known before.
This feat drew admiration from some unlikely quarters, including the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, who exclaimed: ‘You Indians are a remarkable people. How did you manage to liquidate the princely states without liquidating the princes?’
2. Patel’s writings and speeches also reflect his utter disdain for princely autocracy:
QUOTE
There are six hundred native states in India. There is no country in the world which has so many states. Some states are so small that even a person who rules over six or seven villages announces himself a ruler. Simply because the kings wear a crown, they do not become totally independent. They are also slaves, and we who are their subjects are slaves of slaves.
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3. In May 1951, Nehru appointed Menon as the acting governor of Orissa. The posting to one of India’s most backward states was seen as an act of revenge. When Patel had died six months earlier, Nehru had written two letters to Menon, one asking for the states minister’s Cadillac to be returned to the prime minister’s office, and the other saying the government would not pay the expenses of senior officials in Patel’s department travelling to Bombay for his last rites.
4. Indira Gandhi developed her pathological dislike for the princes from an early age. She would inherit her father’s strongly held views about malevolent maharajas and autocratic nawabs. And she would be exposed to their sense of entitlement first-hand. The year she spent at Rabindranath Tagore’s Patha Bhavana school at Shantiniketan in 1934 coincided with the presence of the princess of Cooch Behar, Gayatri Devi, who would later become Maharani of Jaipur. Young, beautiful and liberated, Devi would spend her breaks surreptitiously smoking cigarettes behind the girls' toilet block while boasting of how she had bagged her first leopard at the age of twelve.
As the writer Khushwant Singh wryly observed: ‘Indira could not stomach a woman more good-looking than herself and insulted her in Parliament, calling her a bitch and a glass doll. Ayesha [i.e. Gayatri Devi] brought the worst out in Indira: her petty vindictive side.’
5. When the bill to abolish the privy purse came up for discussion in the Lok Sabha in the last week of the monsoon session of Parliament in September 1970, (Yashwantrao) Chavan was finance minister and Indira (Gandhi) had taken charge of the home portfolio. The Congress was in power as a minority government, and she desperately needed to introduce some populist policies to buttress the party’s position ahead of the next election, due in 1972. Bank nationalisation was one of those measures. In contrast, abolishing the privy purses, which cost the exchequer around 0.2 percent of the annual budget, was not going to put more food on the table of peasants in Bihar. As the Maharana of Udaipur remarked, the amount was so pitiful ‘it wouldn’t buy every Indian a picture postcard’. But it was a politically sensitive issue, one that could be used in an ideological battle, as Indira framed it, between the forces of progress and those of reaction.
6. This is what jurist Nani Palkhivala had to say after the abolishment of the privy purse:
QUOTE
The basic issues involved in the case were not concerned with privileges and privy purses ─ with the booming of salute guns or the counting of our devalued currency; the basic issues centred round the sanctity of the Constitution and public morality . . . If privy purses could be stopped by executive action, the most unsafe investment in the world would be the securities of the Indian government.
UNQUOTE
7. Menon and Patel were not plagued by self-doubt. Their priority, their long-cherished dream, was the creation of a democratic nation state stripped of all traces of autocracy, inequality and imperial leftovers. Unifying India, as they did in just two years, was by any consideration an astonishing feat. Arrayed against them were hundreds of prince's unwilling to give up their palaces, their treasuries and their ancestral lands.
Conclusion:
The book is littered with numerous anecdotes and examples as mentioned above to give us an idea of what happened in the immediate aftermath of India’s independence.
The narration is very fast paced and doesn’t drag one bit. I give the book 4.5/5.
The book is available for around Rs. 575/- on Amazon India and for around the same price on Flipkart. And it is available for about $32.50 USD on Amazon USA. I have given the respective buy links in the show notes. Please check them out for the latest prices.
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