At the Zenith of Britain’s Imperial Power in India, Viceroy Lord Curzon Writes the Maharajas of the Indian States Demanding More Money and Troops from Them

This letter of Curzon, one of those to the maharajas, was sent to the Maharaja of Gondal, who ruled his state from 1869-1944

Lord Curzon served as Viceroy of India at the zenith of Britain’s imperial power. He is generally known in the history of British India for his manifold administrative reforms and his anti-nationalist measures such as Calcutta Municipal Corporation Act, Indian University Act, Official Secrets Act and, above all partition of Bengal. What is as significant is the interventionist and domineering role which he played in asserting and extending the various facets of Britishparamountcy over the Princely States of India.

Curzon evinced keen and consistently zealous interest in the ‘Indian India’ and he is reported to have personally visited forty Princely States. The imperious Viceroy put forth the theory that the rights and privileges of the States were derived directly or indirectly from the paramount British power, and that “No Native Chief in our opinion is in possession of sovereignty of his state.” “The sovereignty of the Crown”, he remarked, “is everywhere unchallenged. It has itself laid the limitations of its own prerogatives.” This was essentially a claim not to paramountcy but to complete sovereignty. At the behest of Curzon, many ruling princes of India had been sent to London in 1901 to participate in the Coronation ceremony of the King-emperor, Edward VII, as a mark of their allegiance to the British sovereign. In order to further strengthen the bonds between the Native States and the British government he chalked out a magnificent program for holding a Coronation at Delhi to proclaim the accession of the new sovereign on January 1, 1903. For the first time in the history of British India a British Emperor was to set foot upon the soil of India to receive the homage of princes and people. It was meant “to remind all the princes and peoples of the Asiatic Empire of the British Crown that they had passed under the dominion of a new and single sovereign.” “My one desire”, the Viceroy explained in a circular letter to all the Chiefs, “has been that the Indian Princes, instead of being mere spectators of the ceremony, as they were in 1877, should be actors in it.”

Standing arrangements between the Raj and the princes in 1904 involved both subsidies and the provision by the princes of Imperial Service Troops – auxiliary corps usually delegated by the British Indian Army to supply and transport tasks. Some of these arrangements predated 1857. Curzon noted in his letters and memos that only 23 percent of the princes voluntarily contributed fiscal subsidies to the Army. Going forward, he set a goal of securing 10 percent of their revenues for military purposes, but knew any success would be hard-won.

He wrote the princes a long letter on April 27, 1904, a letter known as “Contribution to Imperial Defence by Native States.” In it he stated, “It has been under the security guaranteed to them by the Indian Army against either external invasion or internal revolt that the revenues of the majority of Native States in India have doubled, and trebled, and in some cases been multiplied tenfold, during the past century. Moreover, if a Foreign Power [Russia] is continually drawing closer to the frontiers of India…that advance is as direct a menace to every Native State in India as it is to any portion of Indian territory.”

This is one of those letters to princes, obtained by us recently in India. Printed letter signed in ink “Curzon”, on his Viceroy’s letterhead, 5 very long pages, April 27, 1904, to Thakor Shri Sir Bhagwant Singhji Sagramji Sahib Bahadur, the Maharaja of Gondal. In it he called “The scheme of Imperial Service Troops [to be] contributions made by certain of the Indian chiefs to the common defense of the Empire. This scheme arose out of voluntary offers, sometimes of money, sometimes of men…” He continued, “On the other hand, there is a reason to think that the Chiefs themselves have sometimes felt the charges entailed upon them… and have not always taken the same amount of interest in their troops…The time seems to me accordingly to have arrived when the entire system may appropriately be passed under review.” This was the stick, not the carrot. He reminded them, “The Chiefs and peoples of the native states profit equally with the inhabitants of British India by the protection accorded to them by the British government, and in the last resort by British arms…” He then asked that a portion of their revenue be used “in furthering the cause of Imperial defense.” He suggested that “the Imperial Service troops should be more closely incorporated the military organization of the Indian empire”, and that a reserve should be formed of experienced men “to replace the wastage that would inevitably ensue upon active service.” Wastage seems a strange word to use to refer to men killed in action. He hoped for their opinions on the subjects he had raised.

Having sent this barrage of letters to the princes, Curzon made his way back to Britain to settle personal accounts before the start of his second Viceregal
term. The tone of the princes’ replies caught him off guard. Instead of a dialog on the rate of subsidy, never mind an agreed increase, he found himself reading principled rejections of the concept of subsidy itself. The princes’ responses reveal the complex interplay between their local sovereignties and the defense of greater India. Some of the wealthiest made conspicuous offers to contribute more troops, while others insisted they could not spare more from their local duties, but they uniformly expressed displeasure at the subsidies they paid to the Raj, however small. Curzon and his government soon realized they would need to reposition their requests to target troop contributions, since these seemed to comport with the princes’ self-image as sovereign actors and co-defenders of the realm.

This mini-revolt of the princes simply presaged what was to come. Soon Indians of all classes began to look for more autonomy or even independence, concepts hard to understand for a Victorian like Curzon.

This comes with a photograph of Curzon in his Viceregal robes, and two photographs of him with various princes.