I recently finished reading Manu S. Pillai’s latest book, False Allies, where he examines the fortunes of several Indian princely states during the British colonial period. Keeping the travels and patronage enjoyed by the famous painter Raja Ravi Verma as the common thread, Pillai weaves the narrative around the kingdoms of Travancore, Pudukkottai, Mysore, Baroda and Mewar. The book is replete with stories of palace intrigue and fraternal jealousy, but the central premise is how Indian royalty politicked with the British Raj.
Pillai challenges the perception of Indian princes as being indolent and self-serving (a caricature that suited the British) and draws attention to a number of their achievements that history has often ignored. For instance, Sayajirao Gaekwad ( 1863 - 1939, Third of his name and arguably the most famous of the rulers of Baroda) had the foresight and vision to commission the construction of Laxmi Vilas Palace to serve as a premier location for pre-wedding photoshoots of numerous to-be-weds in the 21st century. He also incubated the nationalist ideas arising at that time, but as we all know, creating magnificent locations for photoshoots is the legacy that matters.
To be honest, I found the book a little tedious. I have rarely come across non-academic text where footnotes run into pages. And navigating them on a Kindle is akin to threading a needle or performing surgery. I am no good in the former and barely proficient in the latter. While the research behind books of this nature is undoubtedly important, they also need to be accessible to the layperson. I admire Pillai’s writing and craft, and thoroughly enjoyed a couple of his other books. But there were far too many prosaic historical details in this, which made large parts of the book seem stodgy.
Moreover, while the book contains many pictures of Ravi Varma’s opulent paintings, they translate quite poorly in the monochrome of a Kindle screen - though that is not a fault that can be attributed to the author. (It can be attributed to me for being miserly and buying a Kindle version which was significantly cheaper than the hardcover).
Nevertheless, I did enjoy some portions and learnt about a few interesting individuals. Foremost among them being Colonel James Tod: who was appointed as the British political agent in Rajasthan (during 1818 - 1823) and ended up becoming “too much of a Rajput”. Pillai narrates how Tod was a ‘de facto’ Rajput as the Rani of Bundi had made Tod her ‘rakhi-brother’. One hopes that Tod accepted the gesture in good grace; unlike a boy in my school, who was so appalled at receiving a rakhi from a girl he liked, that he sought to convince her that they should, in fact, treat it as a ‘friendship band’.
Tod documented his views on the history and geography of the Rajputs (quite literally - he traced the genealogy of the Rajputs and described where they lived in great detail) in his magnum opus Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan. Originally published between 1829 - 1832, the 1920 edition of this book is available here, as part of Project Gutenberg. While The Annals relied on many sources and theories which have since been discredited, it made some fascinating claims.
Tod believed that the Rajputs had much in common with Western European cultures, owing to a shared ‘Scythic’ origin.1 To buttress this argument, Tod pointed to various Vedic and mythological clues: the asvamedha (horse sacrifice) ceremony, the polyandry of Draupadi with the Pandavas, the “passion for…games of chance”, and so on. According to Tod, these rituals and attributes derived from the Scythians, one branch of whom had migrated into India “six centuries…before Christ” while another branch had moved to the West. Admittedly, the evidence presented by Tod to claim shared ancestry between Rajputs and Scandinavians was fanciful. But what is remarkable is that he was (more or less ) right!
Nearly two centuries after Tod published The Annals, the study of ancient human DNA revealed that the Indian population of today is the outcome of a mixture that occurred around 4000 years ago (roughly 2000 BCE), between two distinct groups: ‘Ancestral South Indians ’ (ASI) and ‘Ancestral North Indians’ (ANI). In his book, Who We Are And How We Got Here, David Reich (renowned for his work in studying ancient human genome) notes that the ASI were believed to be an indigenous population in the subcontinent, while the ANI were related to “Europeans, central Asians, Near Easterners, and people of the Caucasus.”2 For readers who believe in the swadeshi movement, I can recommend Tony Joseph’s book, Early Indians, for a more local take on the origin of the Indian population through genetics.
The timelines indicated by these recent investigations into ancient Indian genome suggest that the cultural and linguistic mixture giving rise to the modern Indians is likely to have occurred more than a millennia before Tod had imagined. But notwithstanding his error on the timing, Tod had correctly divined that an influx of Eurasian people and culture had indeed shaped ancient Indian society.
So, essentially, modern science has proved that Tod’s seemingly whimsical theories of Rajputs sharing ancestry with Europeans (through Scythians) because Draupadi married five men, was not so far off the mark after all. True, he erred on the timelines but then, not everyone can claim to be as prescient as Sayajirao vis-a-vis Laxmi Vilas Palace.
An interesting postscript before we end. In his book, Reich explains that the ANI group was originally intended to be called ‘West Eurasians’ given their genetic affinity to populations in Europe, central Asia, etc. However, this was flagged as being problematic as it implied that the migration of people from outside India had a major impact on the genetic make-up of the Indian population. To soothe these sensitivities, the researchers settled on the benign ANI formulation, without making any claim as to their original location. While research on ancient human DNA continues, it is currently unclear how or when the gene responsible for self-aggrandization and insularity, entered the Indian genome.
‘Scythia’ referred to a region encompassing Central Asia and parts of Eastern Europe, which was believed to have been peopled by a nomadic tribe (Scythians) in ancient times (from 8th century BCE to 2nd century CE).
With continuing research, the theory of a simple mixture of ANI and ASI groups has also undergone a change. It is now believed that a farming population of Iranian origin may have migrated to the sub-continent around 9000 - 7000 years ago and mixed with the indigenous hunter-gatherers present in the region. Subsequently, steppe pastoralists (the ‘Yamnaya’) are believed to have constituted a second wave of migration into India during the first half of the 2nd millennia BCE, bringing Indo - European languages with them.
Edited to include a more accurate description of the findings of the latest studies in ancient Indian DNA.