The Limits of Acceptable Intimacy: Gender and Personal Politics in the 19th-Century Princely States

My paper explores the contentious relationship between British Agents and the princely courts at which they were stationed. I will focus on minority periods, during which the prince was too young to govern himself and had to rely on a Regent to act as de facto ruler in his place. Two states in eastern Rajasthan, Bharatpur and Tonk, had minority periods in the late 1820s and late 1860s respectively, immediately following their kings' deposition by the colonial government. In Bharatpur, as in numerous other princely states, the acting Regent was the late king's first wife, Rani Amrit Kanwar. Her brief tenure (1826-1827) as Regent was the occasion for an intense struggle for power between herself and the British Agent, Abraham Lockett. Lockett accused the Rani of being manipulated by her "favorite" courtiers, who abused their personal access to the Regent to secure power for themselves and tarnish the reputation of the British Agency. His (eventually successful) efforts to remove her from power are indicative of a broader British campaign to purge the court of those groups who were deemed to engage in an illegitimate and corrupt form of intimacy and “personal” politics. The British Government's vision for the princely court as a space defined by elite male sociability was an early experiment that, after the rebellion of 1857-58, would help them to carry out their new project of modernizing and bureaucratizing the princely states. In Tonk's minority period (1867-1871), the Agent was no longer instructed to 'purify' the traditional court system of government, but rather to replace it with a bureaucratic structure modeled after the British Government.