It is fascinating to me what the brain remembers, especially as one is reading thousands of pages, looking for something very different. This unexpectedness is the basis for this part of my Aundh Substack. The incident which triggered the recollection of this particular anecdote from the larger history of Aundh’s engagement is worth narrating, so that is where I shall start this time.

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Running into the Singer Sewing Machine

I was recently in Palampur, a small city in Himachal Pradesh. Roughly 20 kilometres from Palampur is a small village called Andretta. Andretta is popular amongst tourists for three main reasons: pottery workshops, an old mud house of Norah Richards, an Irish actress who returned from the UK to settle and start a theatre company, and the house and studio of the legendary painter Sobha Singh. It was my visit to the last one that is of particular interest here. Sobha Singh has become immortal through his paintings. His work, especially his portraits of the Sikh Gurus and other exceptional Sikh leaders like Maharaja Ranjit Singh and his son Maharaja Duleep Singh, has become so famous, reaching every household across Punjab, that it is his portrait of the Sikh Gurus that comes to mind even as I think of their faces while writing today. He had been convinced by Norah to move to Andretta on an Estate where many artists were moving. In this simple village with the view of the mighty Dhauladhar hill range, Sobha Singh lived, painted, and died. His house, from that time, has been converted into a museum-cum-gallery by his descendants.

Amongst the priceless paintings- finished and pending; awards- national and international; and archives- personal and professional, was an item displayed with great prominence: a Singer sewing machine purchased by his wife Inder Kaur in 1932. With the machine was a receipt of the original purchase, showing that it was bought on instalments of INR 20 a month. At first, it seemed to be a queer choice to be displayed in an art gallery and museum, especially since Inder Kaur was not known to be a prolific embroiderer. There were no embroidered pieces on display, and Sobha Singh himself was not known to use embroidery as a medium of expression. So what made the sewing machine so special?

While I was trying to understand the centrality of a sewing machine in their lives, it reminded me of another family and the importance of a Singer sewing machine to them: the Aundh royal family. Amazingly, letters about the purchase and transportation of the Singer sewing machine were recorded and preserved in the archives. So here goes the story.

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Even today, Aundh is a small taluka, far from the larger Maharashtrian cities of Kolhapur, Pune, or Mumbai. Although it has great road connectivity now, thanks to the need for better infrastructure owing to the sugar mills in the area, it was not so in the 1930s. It appears that in 1935, the Princess of Aundh needed a specific Singer sewing machine. It is not known whether the Princess was an artist, an embroiderer, or simply needed it for the day-to-day stitching and repairing of clothes in the household, although the latter seems unlikely. Regardless of the reason for which she needed a sewing machine, and a particular one at that, from a specific company (Singer), she voiced her requirement to Balasaheb Pant Pratinidhi, her father, and the Chief of Aundh at the time. (The Aundh royals were promoted in 1937, and their title changed from Chief of Aundh to Raja of Aundh). Balasaheb, unable to procure the machine from Aundh, reached out to a longtime friend of his, a constitutional luminary in his own right in British India: Mr M.R. Jayakar, from Bombay, with the request to procure a Singer sewing machine and have it transported to Aundh!

A Little About Jayakar

Jayakar was a lawyer based in Bombay in the 1930s. Interestingly, in the early 1900s, he had served as a director of The Bombay Chronicle, a newspaper run by the Congress leader, Pherozeshah Mehta. Even more fascinating is the fact that M.A. Jinnah was also a director of the same newspaper at the same time. A lawyer and a politician, Jayakar became a member of the Bombay Legislative Council and later of the Central Legislative Council. He was considered amongst the best minds in constitutional law in India and served as an advisor to many princely states in the Deccan. A devout non-Brahmin Hindu, he even served as the first President of the Hindu Mahasabha. Given his legal acumen and brilliant political track record, he was made a Judge of the Federal Court of India in 1937 and a Privy Councillor in 1939. Jayakar was a member of the Sapru Committee, which authored the 1945 demanding a constitution-making body. In 1946, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly for the Indian Constitution on a Congress ticket from Bombay. However, after a short stint, he resigned following conflicts with the Congress, specifically Sardar Patel. In a coincidence that is little different from divine intervention, that vacated seat was then used to bring Dr B.R. Ambedkar, whose original constituency in Bengal had gone to Pakistan as per the Partition plan, into the Constituent Assembly.

Coming Back to the Machine

On 23rd September 1935, Rajasaheb Balasaheb Pant Pratinidhi dropped by to meet Jayakar, whom he referred to as Babasaheb, at the latter’s Malabar Hill home in Bombay. In their conversations, Balasaheb requested Jayakar’s help in acquiring a Singer sewing machine for his daughter. This meeting was facilitated by another historical legend, this time in the field of Art: Rao Bahadur M.V. Dhurandhar. Dhurandhar, a prolific painter, was an alumnus of the J.J. School of Art. Balasaheb’s appreciation and fascination with art are well known, not only from his own artwork but also from the patronage that he extended to many artists, especially from the J.J. School of Art. Jayakar, for his part, was also a patron of the arts and was working in Bombay on multiple initiatives to help out young artists. Dhurandhar had begun to teach at the J.J. School of Art after he graduated, retiring as the school’s first Indian director. Via a letter dated 3rd October 1935, Balasaheb reminded Jayakar of the favour he had asked for and informed him that he had sent the details for the sewing machine via Dhurandhar.

Via a letter dated 9th October 1935, Dhurandhar informed Jayakar that he had visited the Singer company’s offices and had made the required inquiries. The machine would cost INR 176, and although it was not the exact model as requested by the Princess, it was nonetheless a great machine, and he had written to Aundh for their confirmation. Accompanying Dhurandhar in his visit was his daughter Ambika Dhurandhar, referred to in the letters affectionately as Ambutai, amongst the first women to graduate from the J.J. School of Art, a prolific painter in her own right, and a political activist active in the Indian independence movement, as well as the unified Maharashtra movement. On 11th October 1935, Dhurandhar again informed that he had received confirmation from Aundh, and that he and Ambutai would pick him from his chambers and the three would go down to pick the machine. But buying the machine was only one part of the problem.

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A bigger problem came up when figuring out a way to transport it from Bombay to Aundh. In a letter dated 15th October 1935, Jayakar informed Balasaheb that while they had purchased the machine on his behalf, the machine was so delicate that it could not be sent to Aundh via train. It appears that the smoothness of the railways of the time was so in question that Singer refused to ship it to Aundh, even when Jayakar offered to buy insurance for it. (Compare that for a second to Blinkit) Jayakar therefore proposed that he would bring the machine in his car till Poona, where Balasaheb had a house, and from there Balasaheb could have it transported to Aundh. Balasaheb wrote back on the 19th of the month with gratitude. He also informed Jayakar that he would send his motor lorry to Poona to pick up the machine and bring it to Aundh. It finally reached Aundh on the 22nd.

Thus ended the journey of this Singer sewing machine from Bombay to the Aundh palace.

Reflections

As one sits with a story like this, from almost a century ago, while surrounded by the abundant rapidity afforded by modern technology, and fast fashion allowing many to never have to repeat their outfits, there are many reflections, political, historical, and some very esoterically personal, of which I will share a few, and afford space for others in the comments of this Substack.

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The first thing that I realised is that the value that we associate with our possessions has changed drastically. The abundance and surplus with which we are surrounded afford most of us the luxury to replace or upgrade without much thought. When we compare that with the pride that the royal family of Aundh or that of Sobha Singh felt in owning the Singer sewing machine, a machine that they must be using on a daily basis, it makes one reflect on the pace of our lives and consumption. It took a full month for Jayakar to procure the machine and for it to reach Aundh. Most of us would not wait that long to procure something that we wanted and had the financial capacity to buy.

Second, this anecdote also shows the permeability across the borders that separated British India from princely India. At a time when Aundh was proving its loyalty to the British Crown, and successfully so, as witnessed from its promotion in the Indian princely hierarchy a year later (from Chief to Raja), its ruler was building and strengthening contacts with leaders in the British Indian leadership. Now, Jayakar might not be the poster boy for anti-colonial activism, given his support of the princely rulers, and close relationship with the British government that elevated him to the Federal Court and then the Privy Council, but the close relationship between Balasaheb and Babasaheb, the former, a princely ruler, the latter a politician active across multiple political parties (he worked with the Congress, led The Hindu Mahasabha and in 1934 joined the Swaraj Party) truly shows how permeable were the borders between British India and princely India, not just physically, but also ideologically and politically. Aundh’s subsequent shift to responsible governance in 1939 should therefore not be seen as a standalone event that shocked the country out of the blue, but rather as the culmination of an exchange of ideas between the ruler of Aundh and progressive leaders in British India.

However, what I am unable to shake out of my head is the image of a constitutional expert, in his 60s, pacing through the aisles of the Singer office/store in Bombay to procure a sewing machine for a friend’s daughter; and then supervising the uploading of this sewing machine.

When I wrote the third part of my Substack on Aundh at the beginning of April, I undertook a responsibility that was much larger and more difficult to perform than I had originally apprehended. The task I gave myself was fairly simple: highlight the stories of three women who participated in the Aundh constitutional making and its working. It seemed easier to me back then because I was confident that I had enough material. After all, I had been to Delhi, Pune, Mumbai, Aundh, and even Kolhapur: that should have been enough.

However, what I seem not to have realised in my naivety is that when men write history, they consciously or unconsciously leave out women.

I discussed this with some of my historian friends and came up with two main reasons for this apparent omission. Both of these reasons are rooted in patriarchy.

The first one, it seems, is that when female leaders emerged or when women participated in protests, walks, discussions, and debates, it was deemed inappropriate to mention their move into the public arena. The second reason, which is even more problematic, if you can believe it, is that men saw women’s participation as worthless, viewing them as secondary or even tertiary actors.

This made my task more complicated. The three women for whom I was able to find sufficient material to write my chapter (from which I will share excerpts below) also come from extremely elite families in the Aundh State.

In my guilty mind, I try to explain it to myself as one step forward.

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Dr Nalini Pant (nee Dravid)

Dr Nalini Pant, a Doctor of Medicine, had married the second son of the Raja of Aundh, that is, Apa Pant. Her qualifications and expertise became indispensable to the functioning of the constitutional government established in 1939. At the time of their marriage in 1941, Nalini was already a well-established doctor, a gynaecologist at the Poona hospital, while Appa was still figuring out how to bring about swaraj in his small State. It must have taken immense conviction in the mission of democratisation to leave her practise in Pune, shift to Aundh, and travel constantly and endlessly to improve the people’s access to healthcare.

Doctor Pant did not just become part of a mobile health care service that was being provided by the government, moving as it did along with Appa. She was also in charge of running the village hospital in Aundh. Both of these roles are noteworthy for another reason. In 1942, when the Quit India Movement was declared, the colonial government responded by arresting and incarcerating a large number of political leaders. Many, however, went underground.

Aundh, because of its association with Gandhi, Nehru, Kher and others, was seen as a safe harbour because British Indian police forces could not arrest them as easily in a princely state.

A large number of these nationalist, anti-colonial activists and leaders were also injured. In addition, their life in hiding made them more susceptible to illnesses. Dr Pant was to come to their remedy. She treated them not only in the village hospitals but also at their hideouts, making a significant contribution to the fight for freedom.

More so, Apa Pant also credits Dr Nalini Pant for convincing Jawaharlal Nehru to make him an ambassador when Aundh merged with India in 1947-8. She was able to see through Appa’s frustration. While the work that they had done was commendable in many ways and more progressive than an overwhelming majority of the states, the Constitutional experiment had not been a complete success. Appa still felt that dependency on sources outside of Aundh made it difficult for the villages to be self-sufficient and self-empowered. His idea for a Deccan states federation had failed, and his ideas of retaining the Gandhian constitutional model had also failed. He was 36 years of age and needed a direction. That’s what Nalini got for him. She sacrificed her medical career to travel with Apa around the world as he was posted from one country to another as India’s Ambassador.

Mrs. Yamutai Kirloskar

As her last name would suggest, Mrs Kirloskar belonged to the famous industrial family set up by Laxmanrao Kirloskar. Lakshman Rao was a painting enthusiast and ended up at the J.J. School of Art, where he became friends with Bhawanrao, the future king of Aundh.

When Laxman Rao had to leave the J.J. School of Art because he was found to be colour blind, he began pursuing his other passion: engineering.

It started with a repair shop in Belgaum. Laxmanrao’s friend invited him to set up a factory and a township in Aundh. The village subsequently came to be known as Kirloskarwadi. His son was married to Mrs Yamutai Kirloskar.

Mrs Yamutai, it appears, was a friend of the Ranisaheb of Aundh. The Ranisaheb, as I will discuss in the last part of this Substack, was closely associated with the ongoing upliftment and developmental projects, whether they were political, constitutional, economic, or social. Mrs Kirloskar served on many such committees working to improve education, health, sanitation, employment, and related areas.

Most prominently, she was active in politics. At the time of Aundh’s constitutional establishment in 1939, Mrs Kirloskar was the Vice President of the Deccan State People’s Conference, a position to which she had been elected at a time when female representatives in elected offices were rare. Her coordination work across the various states of the Deccan also catapulted her into national politics, starting with her membership of the All-India Women’s Conference, where she represented Maharashtra under the presidency of Hansaben Mehta. Mrs Kirloskar was amongst the first to congratulate the Raja of Aundh on the establishment of responsible government, participating in press events, and, as per one record, even had a role to play in nudging him to devolve power.

The Ranisaheb of Aundh, Wife of Bhawanrao Pant Pratinidhi

Despite online searches and archival visits to the National Archives, the Prime Minister’s Museum and Library, and even the Library in Aundh, I have not been able to find the name of Raja Bhawanrao’s second wife. Therefore, out of respect, we simply call her Ranisaheb. Ranisaheb married Raja Bhavanrao after his first wife passed away. More significantly, she became integral to Raja Bhawanrao’s attempts at reform in his princely state.

Gandhi, in his earlier letters, recognised her equal contribution in breaking caste barriers. She accompanied Bhavanrao at all times during these public visits. Her presence had two important impacts. First, it brought women into the conversation. If the Raja had gone alone, he would have talked to the men of the community; but with the Rani also present, grievances, questions, and doubts that women had could be voiced directly to her. Second, her presence added great moral weight to the Raja’s message. It became easier for women to pursue education, access health care, and consider vocational training, because they were emulating their Ranisaheb.

Some Thoughts Before Part 5/8

Unearthing the history of women’s participation is never easy. It is even more difficult when the areas and institutions have been left outside the mainstream. As I rifled through more than 500 pages of notes, tables, and remarks that I had recorded during my archival visit, it dawned upon me how difficult it was to find the women in these stories. They are there, they have always been there. Even between 1920 and 1937, some women are said to have served on the Rayat Sabha, which predated the Legislative Assembly set up under the 1938 Constitution. However, because their names are often left out, it becomes extremely difficult to trace their journeys across archives.

I think that is enough for now.

More critique, thoughts, and confusions to follow in Part 5/8.

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I have spent the last two weeks ruffling through my crazy, chaotic set of notes from the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, the National Archives of India, collections of Mahatma Gandhi’s selected work, catalogues of his unpublished correspondences, my collections from the Aundh Museums Library, and correspondence that I found at the Maharashtra State Archives in Pune, to answer just one question which I had brought up in Part 1 and left unanswered in Part 2: Why did Mahatma Gandhi agree to draft the constitution for Aundh?

One can see how it might be logical for a small princely state like Aundh with limited resources and a comparatively benign ruler to adopt a constitutional form for its governance; however, it’s not equally easy to understand why Gandhi would want to participate in the process. I, therefore, based upon my readings and analyses, would like to highlight four potential reasons why Gandhi would agree to do this or the benefits that he could attain from his labour.

Historical Connection and Nostalgia?

Let’s begin with the most tangential reason possible. Gandhi’s connection to princely India is not really a secret. His father, Karamchand Gandhi, had served as a Dewan since the early age of 25. First with the princely state of Porbandar, where Gandhi was born in 1869, and subsequently for the princely state of Rajkot. Karamchand Gandhi served as Dewan till his death in 1885, which coincidentally also happened to be the foundation of the Indian National Congress. Having been born and subsequently grown up in an atmosphere where a hereditary ruler was not just respected but feared and obeyed, it is easier to see a personal link where Gandhi would have wanted to expand not just his personal influence but also the influence of the Indian National Congress and the larger nationalist movement into princely India.

Letting Go of Non-Intervention

The Indian National Congress had, for the longest time, used a policy of non-intervention in Princely India. This policy of non-intervention had many reasons. Amongst other reasons, one was the inherent limitation on the resources of the Indian National Congress to lead a social revolution in all parts of India. Second, and more importantly, mobilising support from the masses against an external colonising force was easier compared to mobilising people against hereditary monarchs whose legitimacy had seldom been questioned. Some princely families of Rajasthan had been in existence for 7-800 years. Others, like Kangra, had a history of 1,300 years. It was convenient to make the “white guy” with no ethnic/religious/linguistic affinity to the local population a “bad guy”, rather than make a local prince with deep social roots into a bad guy.

Gandhi’s fast unto death in March 1939, merely two months after the Aundh Constitution had come into being at Rajkot, has since become part of many historical textbooks. The ruler of Rajkot had promised a committee that would look into possible reforms and then subsequently refused to set up such a committee, leading the state’s people’s conference to reach out to Gandhi, who felt that, based upon his family’s long-standing relationship with Rajkot, this might be an easy task. He tried to first convince the ruler and his then Diwan, but to no avail. He subsequently started a fast unto death, but largely to no avail. While the ruler seemed comfortable with this socio-political chaos, which was being created, the Viceroy had to step in and coerce the ruler into conceding. Even though technically Gandhi won, he was not happy with it, because he felt that his efforts had been unsuccessful in bringing about a change of heart, given how the Viceroy had to intervene.

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Cultivating ‘Nationalistic Royals’

Gandhi, it seems, was also slowly cultivating a cohort of Indian royals as his followers. The earliest correspondence between Gandhi and the Rajasaheb of Aundh, Bhavanrao, dates back to 1934. His son, Appasaheb, had been visiting the Wardha Ashram since 1937. Gandhi had always been generous and welcoming of the Indian princes and their extended families into his circle of influence, partially, I believe, out of an attempt to break down the borders that existed between Princely and British Indian leaders by allowing for spaces where the two could meet, discuss, learn, and cooperate; and partially to expand the Congress’s influence into the complex web of inter se Princely Indian politics. The other prominent royal who was not only a part of his close associates’ circle, but whose correspondence corroborates the fact that Gandhi was actually working on the Aundh Constitution, was Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, a member of the Kapurthala royal family.

Experimenting With Ideas of Gandhian Constitutionalism

The last of the four reasons that I think are most important to understand Gandhi’s participation in the process is that Gandhi possibly saw Aundh as the perfect experimental laboratory for his largely theoretical ideas of a constitutional structure built around village republics. In that sense, Aundh was perfect: it was small, roughly 72 villages, largely rural, with no major cities (just a few small towns), and a ruling family which was not only actively working against untouchability but also against gender-based discrimination and prejudice. Additionally, since the 1920s, the people of Aundh had been participating in governance, although in different measures, so it would not be like pushing a bunch of people who were not ready for it into self-governance. 72 villages also meant that the experiment could be undertaken in largely controlled circumstances, and even if things didn’t go as planned, it would not have been impossible or too cumbersome for the ruler to rein it in. Of course, the credit for the Aundh’s successful deployment of Gandhian constitutionalism is mostly due to the people of the state and to Appasaheb to lead them while staying between them, far from his small but tasteful palace.

For The Next Part

As I sat down to write part 3, I also re-read parts 1 and 2. I got a feeling that maybe because of the way history has been recorded and written, and potentially also because of the way I have been trained to think, the protagonists and antagonists of my version of the Aundh story have all been men. Let me try to fix that. In the next part, I will be discussing the important contributions of three women: the Ranisaheb of Aundh, Mrs Nalini Panth, and Mrs Yamutai Kirloskar, in their efforts to reform Aundh’s governance.

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Last week, I introduced the 1939 Aundh Constitution to all of you. For some, it was an addition to their increasing repository of knowledge; for others, it was something they had heard of before. Regardless, the response has been nothing but amazing! I am so grateful for the feedback I have received and for the more than 100 people who subscribed to the Substack. Having said that, let me come back to the questions that I ended the last post with:

So how did the Raja come to the decision to give up power? How did he reach the Mahatma?

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The answers to these questions are neither singular nor simple. Like most other things, several small and big factors coalesced to create the space for constitutionalism in the small princely state of Aundh. You may ask- what factors? Well, there was the Government of India Act, 1935 which was trying to bring the princely states into a loose federation with British India, the same Act had also accelerated the demands for similar franchise and responsible governance in the princely states, Europe was in turmoil, and the Indian National Congress seemed to slowly be shedding away its principle of non-intervention in the princely states. The time was ripening. The people’s movements in most princely states to replace pure autocracy with (limited) democracy and self-governance were slowly gaining steam. There had been movements like these in Jammu and Kashmir as early as the 1920s, similarly in Mysore and Hyderabad, and while the Raja of Aundh was obviously and evidently aware of these movements, Aundh had not seen the same levels of civil discontent- yet.

Now, all these factors might be too much to discuss in my self-imposed limit of 1000 words, which is why I am working on a longer manuscript. So instead, I offer you something more interesting; instead of socio-political movements, I offer for your intellectual consumption— two people. Two out of the innumerable non-royals who in one way or another furthered the cause of constitutionalism in Aundh, and these two were particularly helpful in bridging the gap between the Raja of Aundh and Mahatma Gandhi—Pandit S.D. Satwalekar and Maurice Frydman.

Pandit Satwalekar was a man of many interests. He was a painter, a social reformer, a political thinker, and one of Bala Sahib’s lifelong friends and critics. Appasaheb notes in his account that Balasaheb befriended Satwalekar during his graduation days in Poona and remained so, even though Satwalekar was critical of Balasaheb’s occasional excesses as late as in 1946-7 when the INC was thinking of India’s constitutional future.

It was actually their mutual interest in art that led Satwalekar to introduce Balasaheb to Laxmanrao Kirloskar, a young art teacher in Bombay, who was subsequently given land and permissions to start an industrial space within Aundh. That village came to be known as Kirloskarwadi, and even though the princely state of Aundh has since lost its legal identity, the Kirloskar company continues to grow.

What an intriguing thing it is that the legal entity of a company can outlive that of the state it was founded in!

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When Satwalekar faced challenges in British India, his friend Balasaheb invited him to come and live in Aundh. Pandit Satwalekar’s political and social ideology led him to start a movement that tried to break down the existing caste hierarchies within Aundh. His work on trying to remove untouchability was something that Gandhi had been aware of. Satwalekar and Gandhi had been exchanging letters since at least the mid-1920s and shared a rapport of mutual respect for one another. Interestingly, one of the letters from Gandhi to Satwalekar, towards the end of 193,8 even indicates that Satwalekar was one of the people to arrange for Balasaheb and Appasaheb to visit Gandhi at his Ashram and get his suggestions on Aundh’s Constitution!

The second person we look at today was Maurice Frydman or Bharatananda, as he came to be known later in his life, a Polish engineer who had moved to India upon the request of Mysore’s Diwan and happily so because the Jews were being targeted in his part of the world. Appasaheb notes in one of his books that he had simply gone to Bangalore (then part of the princely state of Mysore) as a state guest and was given a tour of the new factory by Maurice. That’s where they became friends.

Around the same time, it appears that Maurice came into contact with Mahatma Gandhi, renounced the material aspects of the world around him, became Gandhi’s disciple, took on the name Bharatananda, and soon packed his bags and moved to Aundh.

Appasaheb also credits Maurice for having one day gone up to Balasaheb and told him that it was time for him to give up power to his people!

The statement obviously was not something that you heard very often, especially not from a guest who was staying in your state. But it seems to have settled into the conscience of Balasaheb, and to an extent where the continuation of the monarchical framework began to seem uncomfortable to Balasaheb. Maurice became part of the constitutional drafting team and stayed in Aundh to help establish Gandhian constitutionalism.

People often say that it’s a small world and that the universe works in infinitely unpredictable ways to make possible things that shortly before seemed impossible or, at the very least, improbable. That is how I see the contributions of Satwalekar and Frydman-- two people who, despite not having been born in Aundh, were instrumental in its constitutional evolution and functioning. However, there is one question which I had raised in the first part of my series and that I have not answered yet, which is: why did the Mahatma agree to participate in the constitution-making of Aundh? That is something that we shall come back to in Part 3.

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The first time that I read about Aundh, it was purely an accident. As a student of history, political science, and law with a keen interest in sub-national movements, I was like many others following the arguments being made before the Supreme Court in the challenge to the abrogation of Article 370 by the Union Parliament. Amongst the many submissions by the Solicitor General that became headlines, claimed that Jammu and Kashmir was not a special princely state but instead a part of a larger cohort of more than 60 such princely states which had their own constitutions in pre-independence India.

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My disbelief shortly gave way to surprise and even excitement when I came across Rohit De’s article, where he listed Aundh as one of the 60+ princely states that had their own constitutions. But of the 60, why did I start my legal research with Aundh? Well, the answer is simpler than you would imagine. My choice of Aundh was not because I had compared all the other princely states and thought that Aundh was something special, but simply because it started with an “A” and came first in that list of 60. With the toughest decision in front of me made easy by my whimsy, I went down the rabbit hole trying to figure out Aundh’s political, but more importantly, constitutional history.

I started with Google. It threw up two important Wikipedia pages. One on Balasaheb Pant Pratinidhi, the Raja who ushered in the era of constitutional and governance reform in this small princely state of 72 villages and about a hundred thousand people; and the other on his equally illustrious, if not loaded with honorific titles son, Appasaheb Pant Pratinidhi, who was amongst the first recruits by Jawaharlal Nehru after India’s independence and the merger of the small princely state with India into the Indian Foreign Services.

But what is it that made Aundh seem so special that I have continued to research for the last two years into the different aspects of its history? So special that I have requested friends at Oxford and in Heidelberg to go and search for books that I cannot find in India, but somehow a copy of which exists in the libraries in Europe?

The hook that caught me, and that I hope will catch some of you into reading this space for the next eight weeks, was a simple fact: Gandhi drafted it.

The 1939 Aundh Constitution, unlike the other princely state constitutions based on the Westminster Principle, was based instead on Gandhi's idea of village republic. And contrary to some of the assumptions that have been since made about the Mahatma's ideas on democracy, governance, and constitutionalism, here was a live example of a constitution drafted by Gandhi himself, based upon what he thought was the best manner in which to democratise these princely spaces, and what I believe is the only constitutional document to be drafted and acknowledged by Gandhi in his 35-odd year-long leadership of the Indian independence movement.

The Aundh Constitution set up a legislative structure where the villagers would vote for five members of the panchayat. The panchayat members would choose their President unanimously. That President would be a member of the Taluka Council. All Presidents of the Taluka Councils would ex officio be members of the Central Legislative Assembly, along with another nominated member from the Taluka Council and a third member who could be an elected or an unelected person. So, each Taluka sent 3 people- the final assembly had 15 members in total. This was keeping in line with Gandhi’s ideas on self-governance, and as we will discuss in the coming weeks, something was constantly proud of and worried for.

What was also surprising about the Aundh Constitution was the insistence on literacy as a prerequisite for the privilege to exercise franchise. Literacy and education will continue to form a major part of my findings in the coming weeks as well. This was something that the Mahatma was fairly insistent on. He did not feel that uneducated people or illiterate people were incapable of making decisions about their political futures, but because he saw in the mandate for franchise a way to create an obligation on the state government to ensure that everybody was literate. Believe it or not, but official administrative reports of the era claimed that within three months of the Aundh Constitution coming into force, the state was able to make every person literate. Of course, the thresholds for considering somebody literate have always been low in India. However, given that 16.1% of India’s population was literate as per the 1941 census, this was a huge deal!

So how did the Raja come to the decision to give up power? How did he reach the Mahatma? Why did the Mahatma agree? Let’s come back to that next week.

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The historical works skimp out on the law; the legal work seems to neglect the politico-historical context of those legal anecdotes or instances.

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Regardless of the source of my obsession, both out of parental pressure and the limitations of the high school I loved so much, I did not pursue history, but instead pursued the sciences. Finally, enrolling in law school, where again my brief sojourn with history in the first and second years of my undergraduate degree helped me reconnect with the discipline. Reading history was okay. But, pursuing a career in history was not something that many people around me supported, and so I went from one law school to another, collecting degrees: first a bachelor’s, then a master’s, and ended up landing a teaching gig at my undergrad alma mater.

Once I was there, and I started teaching constitutional law, I also started to dabble a little bit in what is the emerging field of Indian legal history. But I have found that most texts that you could today categorise as Indian legal history remain ‘kind of incomplete’. The historical works skimp out on the law; the legal work seems to neglect the politico-historical context of those legal anecdotes or instances.

Even more fascinating was my discovery of the fact that more than 60 princely states in pre-colonial South Asia had experimented with limited forms of monarchical constitutionalism. We, of course, know of the experiments in Jammu and Kashmir in 1934 and 1939; the struggle for constitutionalism in the erstwhile Hyderabad state and the fact that princely states in southern India like Travancore, Cochin, Mysore, Baroda were fairly advanced in the way in which they delineated powers and responsibilities of governance both between the monarch and the institutions and also amongst the institutions inter se.

That idea has now bloomed into a full-fledged PhD proposal on which I shall start working in September of 2026.

This introductory blurb on my Substack is thus to introduce you to who I am, why I am writing this, and to explain the passion which I hope I will be able to infect some of you with.

On this Substack, you will often find my thoughts, my findings, and my musings on many of the historical constitutional experiments across the Indian princely states as I sift through the unending archival material. The politics of archives is another subject that I foresee myself thinking deeply about as I engage with them in the coming years. I hope that you will enjoy it, subscribe to it, and help me read better, think better, and write better.

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