Page 19 - Demo

youngest vakil, Indian or English, to be appointed as the judge of a superior court (inferior in rank only to the chief justices) in the year 1921. He had been knighted a few months earlier, receiving the decoration personally from the Viceroy in Delhi. In his seventeen years as a judge, this was to be rated as ticklish a case as he had ever heard, with ramifications going far beyond the immediate particulars, to encompass the relationship between the British and the native, the ruler and the ruled. Before the facts of the case, some background: At that time, there were 565 princely states, covering about 48% of the area and holding 28% of the population of the country. These states ranged from a tiny landholding to a kingdom, the size of a European country. The Maharajas and native princes were not mere lackeys of the British. The relationship was more complex, with the native rulers doing their best to assert their relative autonomy, while the British were doing their best to nip any incipient feelings of revolt while at the same time assuaging the ruler's feelings with shows of pomp and fealty. After all, the 1857 revolt had been largely led by the same class. The British employed various mechanisms to exercise control, one of the most effective being the Court of Wards. Simply put, the Court decided on who would be the ruler, and as %u2018succession signifies a critical junction in any political system, but particularly one in which (as in the Indian states) the ruler is a personal, autocratic monarch%u2019, it was a reliable way of keeping their hands on the keys to the kingdom. By embedding themselves into the process of deciding the heir, the British colonial enterprise could operate in a legalistic framework. Maharaja Alak Narayan9