Revisiting the Maharajahs: A Review of False Allies by Manu S. Pillai

In the palaces and paradoxes of colonial India, history sheds its powdered wigs and princely turbans, and dons a human face.

In a quiet room lined with books, I first opened Manu S. Pillai’s False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma expecting a stroll through opulent corridors and gilded anecdotes. What I got instead was a multi-chambered mansion of history, with windows flung open to the scents of reform, resistance, ritual, and reinvention. Pillai doesn’t merely write history. He seduces it into conversation. And his interlocutors are the Indian princes, reviled, romanticized, relegated now returned to us as thinking, breathing, scheming, dreaming mortals.

This is a book that walks into the past not with a gavel of judgment but with a lantern of curiosity. It doesn’t shout down the myths, it sits beside them, tells you a story, and lets the silence do the dismantling. Let’s wander a little in its pages.

 A Subcontinent in Shades of Gold and Dust

Imagine a map, India, 1909. Crimson territories where the British ruled directly. But splashed across it, like brushstrokes on an empire’s canvas, are blotches of yellow. These were the princely states. Over five hundred of them. Some vast as countries. Others the size of a zamindar’s stubborn ego. Together, they covered almost 40% of the subcontinent, and housed a quarter of its people. Yet in our textbooks, they receive all the attention of a footnote.

Pillai restores them. He reminds us that history isn’t the story of only conquerors and rebels. It’s also the story of those who chose diplomacy over defiance, who wielded not swords but signatures, and who learned to dance—sometimes clumsily, sometimes gracefully—on the tightrope stretched between throne and colonizer.

But these princes, Pillai argues, were not the caricatures colonial officials painted: jewel-drunk hedonists parading elephants and neglect. Nor were they simply passive puppets. They were “false allies”—men who shook the British hand while hiding dissent in their sleeves.

The Frame: An Artist’s Brush Across the Courts

To tie these princely portraits together, Pillai uses a clever lens—the life and travels of Raja Ravi Varma. The great painter flits through these chapters like a muse with a sketchbook, commissioned by kings and capturing the contradictions of their courts. His presence is less about biographical detail, more about metaphor. Ravi Varma was India’s first great modern mythmaker—his gods wore gold-bordered sarees, his heroines looked defiantly mortal. Likewise, the princes he encountered, Pillai suggests, straddled tradition and modernity, divinity and doubt.

Through five princely states—Travancore, Pudukkottai, Mysore, Baroda, and Udaipur—we meet a dramatis personae worthy of a political epic. Each chapter unfurls like a novella, complete with plot twists, palace intrigues, and characters you wish you could meet across time’s threshold.

The Princes: Flawed, Fascinating, and Furious with Purpose

Let’s begin with Baroda. Here we meet Sayajirao Gaekwad III—a man who could have been content with silks and salutes, but instead read Karl Marx, implemented compulsory education, and funded Ambedkar’s studies. In 1911, when presented to King George in London, he wore no crown. Just a plain turban. It was an act of quiet rebellion—a refusal to play the native doll.

In Mysore, we find a kingdom restored. The Wodeyar dynasty, dethroned in the 1830s, makes a dramatic comeback in the 1880s. They use their second chance well. Their state flourishes—industries rise, railways snake across its terrain, and science finds a home in palace labs. One prince here is obsessed with physics. Another devours European philosophy. Mysore becomes a laboratory of “Indian modernity.”

Then there’s Travancore, where the matrilineal succession means the queen’s nephew—not her son—rules. The state, already famed for its temples and discipline, surprises us with its social reforms. A jackfruit murder case—yes, really—becomes a media sensation, revealing a legal system both complex and conscientious. Even justice here seems tinged with symbolism.

Pudukkottai, tiny but tempestuous, hosts a power duel between Rani Janaki Subamma and the dewan A. Seshiah Sastri. It’s here we glimpse how zenanas were not just chambers of seclusion, but arenas of subtle strategy.

And in Mewar, the towering figure of Maharana Fateh Singh looms. Conservative, autocratic, stubbornly Rajput. He skips colonial pageants and refuses to be dictated to. The British, ironically, admire him for this—proof that imperial policy wasn’t as ideologically consistent as it claimed to be. They indulged backwardness when it came dressed in martial honour.

The Dewans: Bureaucrats with Spines of Steel

Pillai doesn’t let the limelight blind us to the backstage. His real affection, one senses, is reserved for the dewans—the tireless administrators who kept these princely machines humming. Sir T. Madhava Rao is a recurring star. His constitutional drafts in Baroda, his reforms in Travancore, his belief that governance was a sacred duty—all make him a figure you wish had a Netflix biopic.

These dewans were Western-educated, Eastern-rooted, and utterly Indian in their aspirations. They often clashed with their princely employers, especially when the latter wished to indulge old ways. But together, in these fraught partnerships, they engineered the foundations of Indian federalism, laying the pipes for the idea of self-rule.

The Myth-Busting: History With a Scalpel

Pillai’s greatest success lies in his tone. He writes like a historian in a sherwani, elegant, conversational, faintly amused. He’s not interested in hagiography, but neither does he indulge in easy cynicism. He calls out the wastrels. Malhar Rao of Baroda, who tried to poison the British resident with arsenic-laced sherbet, is offered no redemption. But the point is not to exonerate or demonize. It’s to nuance.

The princes, Pillai shows, were mirrors. Of their time. Of their people’s aspirations. Of the empire’s insecurities. They built universities, sponsored art, introduced laws and also, sometimes, clung to rituals and resisted change. In short, they were human.

The Reader’s Journey: A Walk Through Marble and Dust

As I read, I felt transported—not just to courts and coronations, but to that curious emotional state where history becomes personal. I thought of the ruins we pass on train journeys. The palaces now turned hotels. The portraits hanging above ticket counters. What stories did they swallow?

I also thought of my schoolbooks. How little they told me about these men and women. How quick we were to laugh at their beards and brocade. How blind to their battles—some flamboyant, others fought in files and footnotes.

Quibbles, If Any

There are moments, of course, when the framing device, the “Age of Ravi Varma” feels a little thin. The artist appears more as a whisper than a voice. And readers expecting a biography of the painter might feel shortchanged.

Also, the selection of states though justified raises the question: what of the others? What of Hyderabad, the Nizam’s jewel? Or Kashmir, fraught and fateful? Perhaps, one hopes, another volume awaits.

A Book That Listens as Much as It Speaks

False Allies is that rare thing: a book that educates without exhausting, that critiques without condescension. It reminds us that empires don’t just conquer, they curate the stories that survive. Pillai hands us a different set of stories. Stories of negotiation, navigation, and not a little nobility.

Who should read it? Anyone who’s ever wondered what lay behind the velvet curtains of the princely courts. Anyone tired of history as binaries. Anyone who believes in the poetry of nuance.

As the light fades in a palace corridor in Baroda, and the scent of sandalwood clings to the breeze, you close the book not with answers but with a hundred better questions.

And isn’t that what history, at its best, should do?