Bejeweled Blacklegs

The world's fattest trade union, facing a major crisis, last week showed no more solidarity than a flock of peacocks in a thunderstorm. India's Chamber of Princes (an undisciplined brotherhood of rajas, maharajas and nawabs, with a stray Gaekwar and Holkar) held its annual conference in Bombay's Taj Mahal Hotel. The princes looked out over the bay and pondered a prospect that many a union man has faced before--technological unemployment.

Gone like the rains of yesteryear were the comfortable questions which former annual conferences had discussed: How much should a prince take for personal expenses from his state's treasury? (The Gaekwar of Baroda spent $500,000 last year on English race horses.) How much of the budget should go for education? (The people of big, wealthy Hyderabad are 93.2% illiterate.) The 1947 questions were tougher: What will happen to the princes when their British friends leave India 14 months hence? And (more urgently), how and when should the princely states enter India's Constituent Assembly?

Th<< princes as a group had a strong position. Ruling one-fourth of India's people, they could swing the balance to the new Government, perhaps end the threat of dismemberment and chaos. But last week they were not a group; it was every raja for himself.

Skin-Saving.. "How a prince answers the big political question," cabled TIME Correspondent Robert Neville, "depends on whether he is a big 21-gun-salute* prince who thinks that when the British leave he can rule his own roost alone, whether he is a pro-Pakistan prince, whether he is an anti-Pakistan prince, or whether he is the type of prince who believes that Congress is going to be all-powerful in the new India and hence thinks he had better get on the Congress bandwagon."

Heading the bandwagon faction last week was His Highness the Maharaja of Bikaner. Bikaner, an expert shot who has decked his halls with heads and skins of 75 species of game shot in twelve countries, has decided that the best way to save his own skin is to team up with the Congress Party. Last week, when obstructionist highnesses were plugging for a united stand against the anti-princely Congress, Bikaner dramatically walked out, later announced that he was sending his representative to sit in the Constituent Assembly when it next meets, on April 28. By session's end, eleven others had joined him.

Chief leader of pro-Pakistan, anti-Congress princes was the handsome, polo-playing Nawab of Bhopal, who figures that if both the Moslem League and the ruling princes boycott the Constituent Assembly, it can be branded as a rump parliament of Congressites.

One of Bhopal's followers was the Maharaj Rana of Dholpur who has saved more animals than Bikaner has shot. Dholpur keeps a big preserve where all animals are safe. He also consults holy men on his prospects of getting a male heir.

Face-Shaving. While most of the princes were with Bhopal in hoping to weaken the central Government and strengthen their position among neglected subjects at home, each played the game according to local ground rules. Hindu and Sikh princes near territories which Mohamed Ali Jinnah claims for Pakistan opposed the creation of a Moslem state. Prominent among them was the suave, thoroughly Westernized Maharaja of Kapurthala. Though a Sikh, the 74-year-old Maharaja shaves and cuts his hair, in violation of the Sikh ban on removing any hair from the body. But now His Highness, seeing Indian independence grow near, is trying to gain the friendship of the Sikh community. Recently he celebrated the baptism of his young grandson, who drank sugar liquid mixed by five Sikh priests, chanted Sikh hymns, and swore never to shave or have a haircut.

One prince, the Maharaja of Travancore, has already announced his intention of declaring his independence. His Prime Minister, Sir C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar, professed to be scandalized with Nehru's Constituent Assembly resolution declaring that the source of power in sovereign India was the "people." It was well known in Travancore, said Sir C.P., that all powers are derived from the Hindu deity Sri Padmanabha. (Handsome Sir C.P. owes his position in matriarchal Travancore partly to his great administrative ability, partly to the Maharaja's mother, the Dowager Maharani.)

Farthest off the prince's union reservation was the 17-year-old Maharaja of Cochin. Last week he contributed money to the All-India States Peoples' Congress, a branch of the Congress Party devoted to fighting the princes.

Only heaven and the London dockers knew what old Trade Unionist Ernie Bevin would say when he got back from Moscow and heard about the bejeweled blacklegs in Bombay.

* The 88 princes entitled to be called "Your Highness" formerly received salutes, upon entering British India, varying from eleven to 21 guns. There are some 400 other princes not entitled to be called "Your Highness" because they rate less than eleven guns; on the other hand, those that rate less than eleven guns are not entitled to be called "Your Highness." This rule was made by the British, who have a genius for government.

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