Rethinking the Princely States

India’s colonial experience was a complex phenomenon, which often took different shapes in different places, through layers of caste, religious identity, and much else. In this lecture, Manu S Pillai will explore how India’s princely states and their rulers negotiated their political identities and ideas of kingship, both while facing pressures from the British Raj, as well as while resisting it.

Looking beyond the stereotypes in which princely rulers have been trapped, he will investigate their experiments with transforming kingly identities, balancing relationships as much with the British as with their subjects, in constructing political visions for their states–sometimes of great ambition–and their ultimate disappearance from India’s political map, even if not public imagination.