Few countries can claim to have undergone more visceral changes in as short a time as India. The sub-continent literally vaulted from a thousand years of feudalism to modern democracy in a matter of just twenty years.
This is how it happened.
It is useful to start in a city like Udaipur, the third largest in Rajasthan, because cities like Udaipur and others like it epitomise Indian's radical transformation. Udaipur traces its origins back to the birth of the Kingdom of Mewar in the 7th Century. For more than a thousand years, Mewar’s rulers did their best to accumulate power and wealth, often having to fight for survival and on occasion having to submit to suzerainty; they did so in 1615 to the Mughals and again in 1818 to the British.
Yet, despite these setbacks the rulers of the Udaipur state managed to grow powerful and magnificent. The iconic City Palace on Lake Pichola, constructed in 1553 by Maharama Udai Singh II and made famous in the West as the set for the 1983 James Bond movie 'Octopussy', is testimony to splendour of the Mewar Kingdom.
Yet, throughout the long rule of the Mewar kings almost nothing changed for the little people in Udaipur. Up until Indian Independence in 1947, power in Udaipur was concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite, who owned nearly all land and ran the kingdom like a feudal state. Ordinary citizens were confined to doing small business in the narrow streets around the palace or to pay all kinds of tribute to toil on land they did not even own. Archaic rules of religion and caste locked in social relations that only served to reinforce the ancient power structures.
Enter Vallabhai Jhaverbhai Patel, or Sardar Patel as he is fondly remembered in India today. Patel was born in 1875. A successful lawyer who actively fought British rule, he rose to become India’s first Home Minister and first Deputy Prime Minister. He was also President of the Indian National Congress.
Sardar Patel unified India, much like Bismarck unified Germany in 1871. Only Patel’s achievement was far greater and more impressive than that of Bismarck. For one, Patel faced a far greater fragmentation problem than Bismarck. India consisted of more than 600 individual states, each with its own ruler and associated vested interests. Secondly, the rulers, be they kings, princes, or religious leaders, were hugely powerful within their fiefdoms. Thirdly, the British Raj had deliberately cultivated the system of ‘princely states’ to forestall any attempts to unify the country in opposition to colonialism. The states were therefore accustomed to looking after Number One. Finally, India's situation at independence was made far more complex by rising tensions between Muslim and Hindu nationalists.
Indian independence leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sardar Patel viewed the princely states as anathema to their goal of Indian national unity. They also regarded the system as anachronistic, an obstacle to development.
It was Patel’s task to end the old feudal system and replace it with modern democracy. That he managed to lay the groundwork for solving this seemingly insurmountable task within the first couple of years of independence is truly remarkable.
Patel's first task was to deal with the Muslim-Hindu divide. Many leaders within the independence movement, including Mahatma Gandhi, hoped that India could be a home for Muslims and Hindus alike, but as independence drew closer sectarian interests in both religious groups whipped up hatred to such an extent that Patel, a hyper-realist, saw that Muslim-Hindu divisions could simply not be overcome. He said at the time that India had to choose between being divided once (Muslim versus Hindu) or many times (states versus states AND Muslim versus Hindu). Faced with this choice, he pushed for Partition. This must have been a hugely painful decision, because the partition of the Indian Dominion into India and Pakistan certainly simplified the fragmentation problem, but at the cost of a million lives, untold suffering, and tension between Pakistan and India, which lingers to this day.
Once Partition had ‘solved’ the Hindu-Muslim question, Patel turned his attention to bringing the princely states into the union. Out of the 565 post-Partition states in India, he managed to convince all but three to peacefully surrender sovereignty to the Indian national government. This is a truly formidable achievement, particularly when one considers how difficult it is for, say, the European Union to obtain agreement between just 27 states. Patel's success was achieved using classic diplomatic means, combining persuasion, threats and inducement. Inducement took the form of so-called privy purses, that is, payments from the Indian central government to the states, a practice that continued until 1971.
Only three states objected to having their powers removed: Hyderabad, Junagarh, and Kashmir/Jammu. The first two soon felt the full force of the Indian Army and caved in. Only in Kashmir/Jammu was the conflict unresolved. This remains the case to this day, undoubtedly due to the fact that the conflict here conflates local power struggles and Muslim-Hindu religious divisions.
Patel did not live to see the final collapse of Indian feudalism. He died in 1950. In 1971, just over 20 years after his death the government of Indira Gandhi, having passed the 26th Amendment to the Indian Constitution, withdrew formal recognition of the titles of state rulers. Without formal recognition, the privy purses could in turn be withdrawn. This marked the definitive end to the special treatment enjoyed by the ancient state elites in India. Since 1971, all Indian citizens have been ordinary citizens, equal under the law.
As for Udaipur, the City Palace is now a five-star hotel. Tourists flock to the city in large numbers to marvel at the beautiful lake, the palace, and the thousands of pigeons that fly overhead. The palace owners now make money from foreign and Indian visitors. Feudalism is dead as an officially sanctioned system of government in India, although undoubtedly it continues to live on in the minds of the many Indians who still honour the old caste system.
There is no doubt that Sardar Patel was a huge figure in modern Indian history. To reflect his stature, Patel was recently honoured with a mighty statue in the state of Gujarat, in fact, the tallest statue ever built (182 meters tall). Somehow this grand monument befits a man, whose intense efforts over a very short period of time after independence transformed India from a thousand year old feudal backwater to the largest democracy on Planet Earth.
