John Zubrzycki, 'Dethroned: Patel, Menon and the Integration of Princely India', 2023:
"...The motivations of the main players in this endgame of empire differed greatly. For Congress leaders, the princely states were bastions of despotism, debauchery and decay. Nehru derided them as ‘sinks of reaction and incompetence and unrestrained autocratic power, sometimes exercised by vicious and degraded individuals’. Corfield and others who had served in them, including many Indian dewans, ministers and administrators, took a more nuanced view. Yes, there were tyrants who should have been deposed had it not been for their usefulness to the British, but there were also many states such as Mysore, Baroda and Aundh where indigenous rule was benevolent, devoid of communal friction, based on a stable social structure and carried out in an atmosphere of security and loyalty. Given time, it would be possible for the princes to put their houses in order. While Nehru was making no secret of his abhorrence of feudal autocracy, the father of Hindutva, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, saw the states as representing the true India, ‘portals to a pure, ancient past’, and even as ‘the foundation on which the future nation’ could be launched. As for the princes, all but the most myopic had some inkling that the tide of history was turning against them, that the prospect of dozens of ‘mini Ulsters’ made up of larger states exercising their right to independence and of small states creating their own federations would never be tolerated by the leaders of a newly independent dominion of India or Pakistan..."
My grandfather the late D G Kulkarni was a Political Secretary to the ruler of Aundh in 1947 and before.
