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Podcast: New Books in South Asian Studies
Episode: Manu S. Pillai, "False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma" (Juggernauth, 2021)
Description: India’s maharajahs have traditionally been cast as petty despots, consumed by lust and luxury. Bejewelled parasites, they cared more, we are told, for elephants and palaces than for schools and public works. The British cheerfully circulated the idea that brown royalty needed ‘enlightened’ white hands to guide it, and by the twentieth century many Indians too bought into the stereotype, viewing princely India as packed with imperial stooges. Indeed, even today the princes are either remembered with frothy nostalgia or dismissed as greedy fools, with no role in the making of contemporary India. In False Allies: India’s...