THE NATIVE STATES.

One of the chief features of the original scheme of constitutional reforms submitted to the Secretary of State by the Government of India was the creation of an Imperial Advisory Council composed of ruling chiefs and territorial magnates.  The proposal gave rise to a variety of objections, the most serious one being the difficulty of adjusting the relations to the Government of India of a Council in which the most conspicuous members could have had no definite locus standi in regard to the internal affairs of British India—­i.e., of the larger part of our Indian dependency under direct British administration.  The difficulty was evaded by dropping the proposal.  But to evade a difficulty is only to postpone it.  Though the constitutional reforms are confined, in their immediate application, to British India, measures of such far-reaching importance must react more or less directly upon the whole of our Indian Empire.  Is it therefore politic, or, indeed, possible, to leave out of account the Native States, which occupy altogether about one-third of the total area of India and have an aggregate population of over 68 millions, or to ignore the rulers charged with their administration?

The Native States of India vary in size and importance from powerful principalities like the Nizam’s State of Hyderabad, with an area of 82,000 miles—­nearly equal to that of England and Wales and Scotland—–­ and a population of over 11 millions, down to diminutive chiefships, smaller than the holdings of a great English landlord.  Distributed throughout the whole length and breadth of the peninsula, they display the same extraordinary variety of races and creeds and castes and languages and customs and traditions as the provinces under the immediate governance of the Viceroy, and their rulers themselves represent almost every phase and aspect of Indian history.  The Princes of Rajputana, headed by the Maharana of Udaipur, with genealogies reaching back into the mythical ages, have handed down to the present day the traditions of Hindu chivalry.  In the south of India, the rulers of Mysore and Cochin and Iravancore, who also claim Rajput blood, still personify the subjection of the older Dravidian races to the Aryan invaders from the north.  Mahratta chiefs like Scindia and the Gaekwar date from the great uplifting of the Mahratta power in the eighteenth century, whilst the Maharajah of Kolhapur is a descendant of Shivaji, the first Mahratta chieftain to stem the tide of Mahomedan conquest more than a century earlier.  The great majority of the ruling princes and chiefs are Hindus, but besides the Nizam, the most powerful of all, there are not a few Mahomedan rulers who have survived the downfall of Moslem supremacy, just as the Sikh chiefs of Patiala, Nabha, and Kapurthala, in the Punjab, still recall the great days of Ranjit Singh and the Sikh confederacy.  In some of the Native States the ruling families are neither of the same race nor of the same creed as the majority of their subjects.  The Nizam is a Sunni Mahomedan, but most of his subjects are Hindus, and of the Mahomedans some of the most influential are Shias.  The Maharajah of Kashmir, a Hindu Rajput, rules over many Mongolian Buddhists, whilst there are but few Mahrattas in Gwalior or Indore, though both Holkar and Scindia are, Mahratta Princes.