Kathiawar Agency

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Kathiawar Agency packed 193 separate princely states onto a single peninsula off the western coast of India. Only fourteen exercised genuine independent jurisdiction. The rest existed across a spectrum of subordination to British administration. A single Political Agent, based at Rajkot, oversaw all of them on behalf of the Governor-General. The agency covered 20,882 square miles. By 1901, more than 2.3 million people lived within its borders. Britain had drawn the agency into being in 1822, when the local princely states became protectorates. For nearly a century, dozens of competing sovereignties shared the same land mass. The Political Agent at Rajkot reported to the Political Department in Bombay. That line of command placed every local chieftain within a hierarchy that stretched to the crown itself.

  124

• 2. Ranks and Rulers

  ›

  Eight states held the first rank within the agency: Bhavnagar, Dhrangadhra, Gondal, Jafarabad, Junagadh, Morvi, Nawanagar, and Porbandar. Below them were smaller principalities, and below those came the girasias, chiefs of comparatively low rank. The Rajkumar College at Rajkot educated the sons of many ruling families. A dedicated school at Gondal trained the sons of girasias. Revenue from agriculture, maritime trade, and tribute was what sustained the agency's leading states.

  123

• 3. Economy and Infrastructure

  ›

  The combined gross revenue of the agency's states stood at 1,278,000 rupees in 1911. Total tribute, payable to the British, the Gaekwar of Baroda, and the nawab of Junagadh, came to 70,000 rupees. An excellent system of metre-gauge railways ran across the peninsula, built at the cost of the leading states rather than the British government. Porbandar, Mangrol, and Veraval served as the chief ports for maritime commerce. In 1903-1904, the total value of seaborne exports reached 1,300,000 rupees; imports that year were valued at 1,120,000 rupees. The 1903-1904 trade totals were compiled in the wake of a famine that had reshaped the peninsula's population. A decade-long census comparison would later put a precise number on that loss.

  123

• 4. Famine and Demographic Collapse

  ›

  Between 1891 and 1901, the population of the states within the agency fell by 15 percent. The famine of 1899-1900 was the primary cause. Drought and crop failure contributed to deaths and displacement across the peninsula on a scale that the back-to-back census counts made measurable. The agency's administrative apparatus was designed to manage political relationships and collect revenues. It had no mechanism for preventing a natural catastrophe from reshaping the population it governed. The formal census comparison between 1891 and 1901 stands as the most precise record of what the famine cost. A different kind of record would follow in the 1920s, when the agency itself was formally dissolved.

  12

• 5. Dissolution and Aftermath

  ›

  On the 10th of October 1924, the Kathiawar Agency was abolished. Its territories merged into the Western India States Agency, a larger administrative body. That successor agency divided Kathiawar's territory into subdivisions. The Eastern Kathiawar Agency and the Western Kathiawar Agency were both established from 1926 onwards. The Sabar Kantha Agency was a third subdivision, incorporating the former Banas Kantha Agency, which had itself once been called the Palanpur Agency. On the 1st of September 1943, the Sabar Kantha Agency merged into the Eastern Kathiawar Agency. Not one administrative boundary that existed when the agency was founded survived to mid-century unchanged.

  43