India’s maharajahs have traditionally been cast as petty despots, consumed by lust and luxury. The British circulated the idea that brown royalty needed ‘enlightened’ white hands to guide it, and many Indians, too, bought into the stereotype. In this brilliant book, Manu S. Pillai disputes this view. Tracking the travels of the painter Ravi Varma through five princely states, he uncovers a picture far removed from this cliché. We meet maharajahs obsessed with industrialization and rulers who funded nationalists.Good governance became a spectacularly subversive act, by which maharajahs refuted claims that Indians could not rule themselves. By refocusing attention on princely India, False Allies reminds us that the maharajahs were serious political actors – essential to knowing modern India.

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