Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Since I’ve already covered Junagadh, Hyderabad and Kashmir in other blogs, I won’t repeat the tales of those princely states in this series. In this one, I’ll cover a few of the other states though. ~~   Travancore . A well-run princely state. With access to the main trades of the Indian Ocean. Resource rich – teak, sandalwood, tea, spices, rubber, mica. 47% literacy (three times higher than British India). Progressive in many ways. Plus, it had the world’s second largest monazite reserves. What’s that? A rare earth whose by-product was thorium, a nuclear fuel. Very important in a world that had just entered the atomic age.   Thus, it was a good candidate for independence post-Britain, writes John Zubrzycki in Dethroned . Unsurprisingly, its dewan , CP Ramaswami Aiyar, announced to do just that. Nehru threatened an economic blockade and promised Travancore would collapse within 3 months. In response, Travancore banned the Congress from the state.   On the monazite reserv...

I used to think the Holocaust became a well-known event (in the West) right after the second World War ended, when the concentration camps were found, when the Nurmeburg trials happened. Which is why it came as a shock to me when Malcolm Gladwell wrote about that aspect (when did the Holocaust became universally known in the West) in his book Revenge of the Tipping Point .   European historians barely mentioned the holocaust in books written in 1961. Lots of details of the two World Wars, hardly a few mentions of the holocaust. Contrast that with how it is talked about in recent decades! Turns out even the holocaust survivors didn’t talk much about it, even to their own children. Why remains a speculation. Maybe they weren’t sure if the Christian majority around them would take kindly to be reminded of it, maybe they didn’t want to keep reliving those horrors. Back then, Jewish groups too didn’t want to paint the image of Jews as eternal victims, always needing to be protected ...

VP Menon was happy to be the behind-the-scenes man. Let Patel be the face. Menon was also astute enough to use flattery to persuade Mountbatten (“earning the gratitude of Indians for generations” by “achieving the basic unity of the country”) to tell the princes that they would have to pick a country – India or Pakistan; that independence was not an option. There was another reason he (and Patel) wanted Mountbatten involved – failure could be laid at his door; and everyone knew how much Mountbatten cared for glory and posterity, so he could be trusted to do his best once his name was publicly tied to the endeavour, explains John Zubrzycki in Dethroned .   But it became evident many princes didn’t like the options. Patel told Mountbatten not to worry, that India could(?) take them by force once the British left. Mountbatten wasn’t so sure – some of the bigger states had armies, were well-armed. He told Patel that such an approach might lead to civil war. One version of events sa...

A key aspect to how things played out once Lord Mountbatten became Viceroy was the fact that the British PM, Attlee, wanted to close shop in India. Quickly. He wanted Britain to focus on rebuilding itself after World War II. Therefore, he gave plenipotentiary powers to the new Viceroy. Discretionary powers. London need not be consulted. Unheard of powers, writes John Zubrzycki in Dethroned .   A Cabinet Mission led by Cripps, in 1946, proposed India start as a union of all provinces, both Hindu- and Muslim-majority, and princely states. Foreign relations, defense, and communications would be common policy. Post-independence, they could all choose their future course.   This set the cat among the pigeons. The princely states (rightly) worried that the new Indian government would have no reason to allow them their personal rule. Many saw which way the wind was blowing, and started to think of how best to secure whatever they could. Others, however, thought they could cha...

I was amused that a North Indian like Devansh Malik could write about how Udupi restaurants and hotels spread across the country (It’s because he has lived in Udupi for 2 years).   As someone who lived there, he knows the local cuisine: “No, I’m not talking about the typical dosa, idli, sambhar kind of south indian comfort food. That’s what most people (read: my fellow North Indians) picture.” The local cuisine specialities of Udupi are all non-veg . Chicken ghee roast. Kori roti . Chicken sukka with some neer dosa . Fish curries. And yet, he says Udupi restaurants are almost always vegetarian! “They don’t serve the non-veg food I just described.” What was the story behind all this? How come everywhere? Why only veg? ~~   The tale starts with Udupi, the temple town, built around the Sri Krishna Matha. “Krishna is worshiped as Anna Brahma, the god of food. And feeding people is one of the core religious duties of the temple. Every single day, the temple k...

John Zubrzycki’s book, Dethroned , is the tale of how the princely states were integrated into India at independence by the combo of Sardar Patel and VP Menon. Patel was a mix of “charm and persuasion with coercion”, complemented well by VP Menon’s “skills as a tactician”.   The terms and conditions of accession kept changing during that chaotic period. Mountbatten started off by saying the princely states would have authority on all matters, except defense, foreign affairs and communication. In the same breath, Mountbatten also added that while in theory, the princely states would have a choice, in practice, a majority of the 565 states were geographically and inextricably tied to be part of India. Why no mention of Pakistan here? Because, as this map shows, almost all the princely states lay on the India side. Also, the few princely states on the Pakistan side were Muslim-majority and Muslim-ruled, so Jinnah wasn’t too worried. Contrast that with India, where several princely...