Ranjitsinhji (1872–1933) was many things: a Cambridge undergraduate; a champion English cricketer; the jam or sovereign of the small Indian principality of Nawanagar, where (depending on who was speaking) he was either a benevolent modernizer or a despotic spendthrift; a representative of India at the League of Nations. For over a century, his multiple identities have made Ranjitsinhji popular among writers. In Sovereignty, Power, Control: Politics in the States of Western India, 1916–1947 ([Leiden, Boston, and Cologne: Brill, 1999], 1–3), I used his life and death to introduce the complex relationship between the Indian princes and their British overlords. Recent books on the man include two hatchet jobs by sports journalists, a news commentator's first novel, and now Satadru Sen's Migrant Races: Empire, Identity and K.S. Ranjitsinhji. (For reasons that he never explains, Sen gives his subject the title of K.S., “Kumar Shri.” This is a designation for a nonruling member of an Indian royal family, and Ranjitsinhji ceased using it when he became jam of Nawanagar in 1907.)
Sen uses Ranjitsinhji to study “mobility, image and identity in colonial India and imperial Britain” (1). Few historical figures lend themselves so well to this kind of analysis. As he moved back and forth across the boundaries that separated Indians from Englishmen, India from Britain, and English athletes from Indian princes, Ranjitsinhji played many parts. Sen is interested in both how Ranjitsinhji represented himself and how his contemporaries represented him. He organizes his study in four sections, each addressing one of four interlocking aspects of Ranjitsinhji's identities: race, money, loyalty, and gender.
At the beginning of his public life, Ranjitsinhji used cricket to cross racial boundaries, making himself first an English celebrity and then an Indian prince (his sports stardom helped him secure influential British and Indian friends who backed his claim to the throne of Nawanagar). The cosmopolitan imperialism of Victorian and Edwardian Britain could just about accommodate this kind of behavior. India after the First World War had no room for it, however, in an environment where British administrators and Indian nationalists agreed that the boundary between the two peoples had to be rigorously maintained. Money was second only to cricket as an aid to Ranjitsinhji's identity hopping, as it helped him cement his position among English aristocrats, play the maharaja of fantasy to visitors to Nawanagar, and rule as a modernizing king. Unlike cricket, money could also be used against Ranjitsinhji: the relatives who controlled his allowance, the British who sought to rein in his spending, and the critics who denounced him as wasteful all saw money as an aid in their own efforts to fashion identities for Ranjitsinhji.
Ranjitsinhji's loyalty is particularly complex, because he often declared his loyalty to the British empire while denouncing the way that it was run (particularly in cases of racial discrimination or infringements of Nawanagar's autonomy). This provoked charges of hypocrisy, or disloyalty, or both. Sen, however, argues that Ranjitsinhji was sincere: he was loyal to the empire, but only if it could be an empire in which Indians were the equals to Britons (and which allowed mobility to Indians like himself). This meant that he was equally loyal to his own Indian nation, though never to Indian nationalism: like many Indians of his generation, he believed that India should remain within the British empire. Sen presents the intriguing idea that Ranjitsinhji saw Nawanagar as a microcosm of “his” British empire, a place whose diverse inhabitants rewarded good government with loyalty.
Gender played an equally complex part in Ranjitsinhji's life, in this case mainly because the boundaries of manliness were different in his various identities. Thus, the upper-class athlete at Cambridge enjoyed hunting, fishing, and cricket but was never overly muscled, while the Indian prince had to live up to expectations by volunteering to serve in the First World War and hunting big game. In this section, Sen also discusses the unmarried Ranjitsinhji's relations with women and unveils a fascinating series of letters detailing the jam's relationship with an Englishwoman named Madge Holmes.
Sen challenges overly tidy recent theorizing about the demarcation of identities in the British empire, although in the end he concludes that there were always limits on just how far Ranjitsinhji could push against boundaries. He engages with scholars of British imperialism, of Ranjitsinhji and other colonial Indians who inhabited more than one world, of the Indian diaspora, of the Indian princely states, and of “the problem of identity as the individual native moves across a colonial geography” (12). One work that apparently came out too late for him to note is Anne Chambers's study of another of Ranjitsinhji's identities, as a landlord in Ireland (Ranji: Maharajah of Connemara [Dublin: Wolfhound, 2002]).
Migrant Races contains many irritants. Some reflect a lack of knowledge. For example, Sen tells us that Ranjitsinhji was subverting imperial boundaries when in 1921 he looked forward to Dominion status for India (157–58) and when he claimed the Jewish India secretary Edwin Montagu as a fellow “Oriental” (160). In fact, in 1917 the British government had confirmed that Dominion status (or “responsible government”) was the eventual goal of its policy in India, while Montagu himself wrote that on account of his Jewishness, “I am an Oriental” and could therefore understand Indians better than other Britons could.
Other irritants arise from misreadings of scholars. Sen repeatedly criticizes David Cannadine's Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), which he claims said that “class, not race, was the most important barrier in the British empire” (6). Cannadine, however, focused on the worldview of the rulers of the British empire, which was not necessarily the same as the realities of the empire, and he made it clear (Ornamentalism, 9) that racial and social hierarchies coexisted in that empire, an argument that is not very different from Sen’s.
The result of all of this is a complex book, almost as complex as Ranjitsinhji himself. It mixes original analysis with misunderstandings of episodes in Ranjitsinhji's life, groundbreaking research with misuse of the literature, and lucid explanations with jargon-laden paragraphs. In the end, however, Migrant Races is rewarding, sometimes almost brilliant. Sen's insights into the nature of identity and imperial relationships will require a broad spectrum of scholars to rethink their own work. He has certainly helped, and complicated, my approach to the subject of my current research, the Indian member of the British parliament Sir M. M. Bhownaggree, who like Ranjitsinhji assumed multiple identities as he journeyed across the empire.
