The Scandalous Case of the Rani of Lathi: Female Regency, Princely Politics, and Sexual Impropriety in 1920s Colonial India

Abstract

In 1922, the recently widowed Rani and regent of Lathi state in peninsular Kathiawar took a lover and fled to Bombay, astounding her fellow Indian princes as well as local British political administrators. She was accused of murdering her husband, abusing her royal powers, and illegally leaving her state. By stepping beyond the walls of the sequestered palace interior and in travelling from princely state to British India, the Rani of Lathi transgressed social, political, territorial, and geographic borders. In the official documents of the time, she was portrayed in the familiar language of colonial exoticism as an oversexed, dangerous, and irrational representative of eastern femininity expressed in its most troublesome form: the secluded oriental queen. Regent mothers, like her, had complex relationships with the colonial government. While perceived as politically inept and morally corrupt, they simultaneously frustrated, thwarted, and eluded the censure of colonial administrators. In the process, their resistance to the colonial state presents vivid historical instances of indigenous women’s agency against both the paramount power and local traditional patriarchies. This article examines her contested regency and the role of gender, sexual impropriety, and psychologies of the mind in late colonial ideas of indigenous sovereignty, female governance, and border crossing.