Number of words: 296

How did these states come into existence? Some are quite new, created by the British; others were the vice-royalties of the Mughal Emperor, and their rulers were permitted to continue as feudatory chiefs by the British; yet others, notably the Maratha chiefs, were defeated by British armies and then made into feudatories. Nearly all these can be traced back to the beginnings of British rule; they have no earlier history. If some of them functioned independently for a while, that independence was of brief duration and ended in defeat in war or threat of war. Only a few of the states, and these are chiefly in Rajputana, date back to pre-Mughal times. Travancore has an ancient, 1,000-year-old historical continuity. Some of the proud Rajput clans trace back their genealogy to pre- historic times. The Maharana of Udaipur, of the Suryavansh or race of the sun, has a family tree comparable to that of the Mikado of Japan. But these Rajput chiefs became Mughal feudatories and then submitted to the Marathas, and finally to the British. The representatives of the East India Company, writes Edward Thompson, ‘now set the princes in their positions, lifting them out of the chaos in which they were submerged. When thus picked up and re-established, “the princes” were as completely helpless and derelict as any powers since the beginning of the world. Had the British Government not intervened, nothing but extinction lay before the Rajput states, and disintegration before the Maratha states. As for such states as Oudh and the Nizam’s dominions, their very existence was bogus; they were kept in a semblance of life, only by means of the breath blown through them by the protecting power.’

Excerpted from pages 337 of ‘Jawaharlal Nehru The Discovery of India, by Jawaharlal Nehru