Re-visioning princely states in South Asian historiography

Abstract

This article reviews several key works within the scholarship on princely states produced in the past decade, in order to highlight their engagement with larger conversations in South Asian historiography. It argues that princely state scholarship no longer operates on the margins; rather, it has the potential to, and does, contribute to issues such as the idea of the feudal formation, the nature of modernity and the modern state, the articulation of religious and ethnic identities, women's status in Islam, and indigenous agency and resistance in colonial knowledge production, to name a few, that animate South Asian history while also transcending its narrow confines. Rather than analysing princely states in opposition to British India, these works approach them as distinct entities where particular social, economic and political conditions, combined with an interaction with external ideas and movements, produced certain outcomes in the realms of state, society and collective identity. Moreover, by combining archival research with ethnographic studies, these works have allowed access to the oral histories, memories, and vernacular literary traditions of several marginalised social groups in South Asia. More remains to be done, however, as we continue to decolonise these realms in popular memory and scholarly analysis, and the article suggests some directions princely state scholarship can take in this age of global historiographies.