Pratinav Anil at Literary Review:
Others explored even darker recesses. In 1925, Alwar’s ruler mowed down five hundred farmers and then torched their village after they had the temerity to protest against his rapacious land tax – an episode far grislier than the Amritsar Massacre of six years earlier. The penultimate ruler of Patiala’s appetite for quail – he devoured twenty-five in a single sitting – was equalled only by his appetite for tax and sex. Some 60 per cent of the state’s income was spent on his sustenance. Bureaucrats were jailed for failing to supply him with a ‘constant stream of young peasant girls for his sexual gratification’. It was left to his son and successor, Yadavindra Singh, to deal with Partition. ‘Death to all Muslims,’ he intoned on learning in 1947 that Pakistan coveted his kingdom, in which Sikhs were the largest group, before leading a conga through his palace. As it was, his problem solved itself. Around the time of Partition, fear whittled down the Muslim population in the Punjab princely states from a million to under fifty thousand. Patiala went to India.
True, not all princes were tyrants. A few made early experiments in electoral democracy and public health care, though they did so in their own de haut en bas fashion.
more here.