Sony Thomas

“Mysore, one of the greatest princely states, was famously progressive and more industrialised than any other part of India. In Baroda, the British did its people a favour by deposing a Maharajah who spent his time commissioning carpets of pearls, and installing in his place a young prince who would earn the love and respect of his subjects by far-sighted policy. In the 1940s, the ruler of Jaipur imported a minister from Mysore and sought to replicate its successes in his desert principality, starting schools, abolishing purdah, and so on. And, of course, in the south there was Travancore, guided by a line of fairly enlightened rulers into the higher echelons of progressive governance, winning appreciation from all quarters.”
― Manu S. Pillai, The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore

“while the tide was flowing towards greater democratisation and ultimately to India’s independence, the royal family were blinded by their own autocracy, revelling in obsolete notions of prestige and glory and in pursuit of impotent emblems of princely greatness.77 Indeed, even five decades later, the Junior Maharani’s son would refer to the 7,600 sq. miles of land that was Travancore as a veritable ‘empire’.”
― Manu S. Pillai, The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore

“While Gandhi and Rajagopalachari celebrated the proclamation, the all-India leader of the low-caste movement, Dr B.R. Ambedkar himself expressed a more lukewarm response. He was not, he made it clear, convinced that spirituality or emancipation were the real intentions of the Maharajah’s historic proclamation. Instead, it was knowledge that the ‘cessation of so large a community would be the death-knell to the Hindus’ and the fact that Ezhavas by their recent actions had ‘made the danger real’, that compelled the state to act in a substantial manner.125 If it were not for these political pressures, Travancore might never have changed.”
― Manu S. Pillai, The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore

“their emergence was married to industrial successes in the two important districts of Alleppey and Shertallai in north Travancore, which also boasted the first trade union in the state, the Travancore Labour Association. By now it had transformed itself into the Coir Factory Workers’ Union, and with 7,400 fee-paying members, this was perhaps the biggest of fifty unions in the state; Shertallai alone had eleven with 15,000 out of 20,000 local workers registered.16 All of them, it became clear, were prepared to stand up to the Dewan and scotch his latest flirtations with the State Congress.”
― Manu S. Pillai, The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore