There is a contradiction in the study of politics in India — while practices of Indian politics are replete with symbols of monarchical sovereignty, there is very little analysis of the antecedents of this form of power in the dominant scholarship on Indian politics. In an attempt to fill this analytical void, this chapter seeks to sketch the rise and fall of ‘princely states’ as an object and site of study within the disciplinary domain of political science in India. ‘Princely states’ that are seen as anachronistic in modern-day democracy provide a useful entry point to critically engage with the liberal epistemologies of state and politics in India. This chapter is a part of my engagement with princely histories of the Indian subcontinent and its ramifications in the post-independence period. It partly emerges from my own experiences of studying and teaching political science in two cities (Delhi and Kolkata) in institutions that served as the hubs of political science pedagogy in contemporary India, while straddling the ‘regional’ princely context of my research on Rajasthan; and partly from the hypervisibility of the monarchical idioms and the mythical pasts in contemporary political practice in India — something that is evident in the populist language of power today.

The conceptual richness of princely terrains mostly remains obliterated in the discourse on politics in India, which, for the most part, has used European and later American epistemic lens. The discipline of ‘political science’ that developed in the context of the nationalist movement in the 1940s expunged any apparent ‘pre-modern’ objects from its field of knowledge, making them a historic curiosity.