Kaisar-i-Hind

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6850, 4 March 1929, Page 4

Kaisar-i-Hind

KING GEORGE IS REAL SUZERAIN OF INDIAN PRINCES WHOSE ALLEGIANCE IS REGARDED AS PERSONAL K

SUPREME RULER OF MILLIONS HHE King’s illness, Sir Sidney Low writes, has naturally set us all thinking about the functions and character of monarchy in Britain and the Britannic Realm. The more we think of it the less we are inclined to undervalue its uses and importance. Even in this age of democracy and self-determination we see that constitutional monarchy is a living force for which there is no real working and effective substitute —at least for ourselves and our associates overseas.

Take the position in India. That is one side of the subject -which is worth a great deal of attention. The King’s •illness has been watched closely and sympathetically by his Indian subjects, and even by those Indians who are not his subjects.

A few days ago' I read that the Maharajah of Alwar had arranged with Reuter’s Agency to have all the Buckingham Palace bulletins specially cabled to him at a considerable expense. The Maharajah of Alwar is the ruler of one of those famous Rajput States which held their independence under the Mogul Empire and were never incorporated in the territories of the East India Company. It has been in close alliance with the Imperial Crown for a hundred and fifty years, and its troops have fought valiantly against the enemies of Britain in many campaigns down to the last great wars.

Would they have fought as willingly for the British Parliament or for the president of a British republic? No one who knows India believes it. The Britain to which the Maharajah of Alwar is attached is the Britain of the King-Emperor, the Kaisar-i-Hind. It was no piece of ostentatious display but a fine instinct of statesmanship which prompted Disraeli to revive that title for Queen Victoria and her successors. For India is not a nation but an Empire, an aggregate of many provinces, peoples, and States, whose strongest link of unity is the Imperial Crown.

It is that crown which guarantees the rights and the security of the Alwar ruler and his subjects and that of the 2,000,000 other Indians in the p- :ected States. The princes’ treaties and engagements are with the Crown, and it is to the Crown that they owe allegiance and fidelity. That is given ungrudgingly by these subordinate sovereigns, whose maharajahs and nawabs, some of whose predecessors were reigning kings in India centuries before the East India Company was born and before the Mogul conquerors came in. They stiffly assert that they are in no way bound by any'acts either of the Indian or the British Legislature. Their real “suzerain” is the KingEmperor, and if his authority were to disappear from India which, of course, is not going to happen—they would resume their complete independence. They accept their subordination to the Crown; they would refuse to subordinate themselves to an Indian "Dominion” Government run by Bengali lawyers and Bombay Brahmans. And this sentiment is felt by the Indian multitudes outside the protected States. The peasants, who do not understand anything about the ontagu-Chelmsford reforms and know no more about the diarchy than the average British elector (which is little enough), have the image of the Kaisar-i-Hind in their minds. They think of him as the supreme ruler, with the Viceroy and all the other officials as his servants. So prayers are offered up for the King’s welfare in Hindu temples and Moslem mosques. Even the agitators and sedition-mongers as a rule refrain from attacks upon the King. Their own clients would not like it; and the more instructed among them probably feel that without the nexus of the Crown and the personality of the Sovereign India would fall back to the chaotic fonfusion from which it was rescued by British power.