Sardar Patel’s 21-day Blitz: How India thwarted ‘Raja-sthan’ threat

Josy Joseph’s Birth of a Nation: The Twenty-one Days that Made India, is an account of some of the negotiations and machinations the leaders of these states engaged in over the three weeks leading up to August 15, 1947, and how India’s interim government, and particularly the newly formed States Department under Patel, worked to thwart their ambitions.

On the one side, the cast of characters includes the leaders of several states, such as the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Nawab of Bhopal, the Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, and the Dewan of Travancore, Sir C P Ramaswami Iyer. On the other side, there are the “giants” — Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Mountbatten — and the “unsung heroes” working in their shadow.

One might quibble about how “unsung” a figure like V P Menon really is. Even others such as Aravamudu Aiyangar, the Nizam’s minister who secretly passed on information to the leadership in Delhi, are not unknown to history.

Some of the stories, including K C S Mani’s assassination attempt on Sir C P and how it stopped his bid to secure independence for Travancore, are quite well known. On the other hand, tidbits such as the efforts by some of the erstwhile rajas of Malabar — who had not held political power since Tipu Sultan’s invasion — to secure greater recognition amid the manoeuvres by the states are interesting.

The book’s stories are “plucked from the dust of the Archives’ files and several private papers and academic collections”. An engaging read, it might have benefitted from incorporating more of the scholarship on that period, including recent works such as Purushottam’s book cited above and Rama Sundari Mantena’s Provincial Democracy: Political Imaginaries at the End of Empire in Twentieth-Century South India.

The narrative is also teleological in nature, which shifts the focus on the tactics — Nehru’s idealistic, hardline republican approach to the princely states, contrasted with Patel and Menon’s seemingly accommodating pragmatism, or missteps in the Northeast. At the same time, the antagonists are painted with a broad brush. Only Sir C P’s proverbial intelligence survives. As stated in the introduction, the book has a lesson in mind: That “a Republic is hard-won, and that its preservation lies in knowing its roots”. That is a grand project, and a vital one today. The book provides a narrative of some important political manoeuvring, but the issues surrounding the birth of the Republic — including contradictions and violence — were complex and entailed more than the heroic efforts of a few men.

A, perhaps, fanciful exercise might be to wonder how realistic the states’ ambitions, such as Sir C P’s vision of an “American-model”, thorium-exporting Travancore, or the pretensions the Nizam held at one point to international Muslim leadership, were in the face of reality: The disintegration of their patron, the British Empire, and the overwhelming economic leverage and military weight of the Dominion of India. That’s not to mention the rising nationalism and Congress influence among the public in the states. Maybe it was always an impossible dream, despite all the plots and conspiracies in the world, as the Nizam would find out.

But what makes the princely states interesting is precisely how they came to have these ambitions, and how these kingdoms, shaped by colonial modernity yet claiming pre-colonial legitimacy, conceived of themselves. They offered their own critiques of what was happening in British India. Hyderabad, for instance, claimed — that is not to say this reflected reality — that it was not affected by communalism, that Hindus and Muslims were the “two eyes of the state”. It has been argued that a “balance” was struck between the communities through the politics of interest rather than the politics of numbers, as Purushottam puts it, with Muslims getting a disproportionate share of power and representation despite making up just 15 per cent of the population. However anti-democratic and unjust, there was a theory of politics here, perhaps, even a worldview. That, and the fact that a quarter of India’s population lived under the rule of these “sovereigns”, makes them deserving of far more study and popular attention.