And following it came a picture of the ancient civilization of India—an hour in the mansion of a native prince: Kumar Schri Samatsinhji Bahadur of the Palitana State.

The young lad, his heir, was with the prince; also, the lad's sister, a wee brown sprite, very pretty, very serious, very winning, delicately moulded, costumed like the daintiest butterfly, a dear little fairyland princess, gravely willing to be friendly with the strangers, but in the beginning preferring to hold her father's hand until she could take stock of them and determine how far they were to be trusted. She must have been eight years old; so in the natural (Indian) order of things she would be a bride in three or four years from now, and then this free contact with the sun and the air and the other belongings of out-door nature and comradeship with visiting male folk would end, and she would shut herself up in the zenana for life, like her mother, and by inherited habit of mind would be happy in that seclusion and not look upon it as an irksome restraint and a weary captivity.

From The Indian Equator:

 If the charm of the governors and their palace remains the same, the governor’s role has changed completely. Whereas Shri Sankaranarayanan’s role in largely ceremonial, to be the local representative of the president (not unlike a governor-general in some Commonwealth countries), Lord Sandhurst was a powerful man indeed. He was only one executive level below the viceroy, and head of the Bombay Presidency, a vast area of twenty-five million people comprising what are now the states of Gujarat, the western two-thirds of Maharashtra, northwestern Karnataka as well as what are Pakistan’s Sindh province and Aden in Yemen. As elsewhere in India only about two-thirds of the country was under direct Raj rule, the remainder being a hotchpotch of “princely states”; in the case of the Bombay Presidency no fewer than three hundred and fifty three of them. The princely states have been unkindly described as the rump of the Moghul Empire, which ran India for nearly three hundred years before the East India Company and then the Raj. Certainly many of the rulers were Muslim but of the kinder, pre-Wahhabi persuasion. The Pax Britannica arrangement was, by and large, a win-win: the princes kept their thrones and their states and were largely autonomous but they signed away to the British responsibility for external relations and defense—for which delegation they had to pay a sizable tax. In each princely state was a British Resident, a political agent who ensured that “the British voice was heard” “for the greater good of all”, an appointment of some influence. The first rule of the British Resident was not to interfere and except in cases of gross misgovernance the rule was followed. The ceaseless civil wars were brought to an end and prosperity, at least for the rulers, reigned with the rulers. And prosperous they were. In terms of wealth the modern equivalent may be the Gulf Arab royal families but the Indian princes had a far longer-standing sense of moral and social responsibility; the Arabs were, after all, desert nomads until—relatively—just the other day. Being Indian they also had their own inter-prince caste system to add to the British-ordained “Warrant of Preference” being determined by the number of gun salutes their arrival or departure attracted. In this way the highest ranking princes like His Exalted Highness the Nizam of Hyderabad and His Highness the Maharaja of Mysore claimed the full 21 salutes, His Highness the Nawab of Bhopol had to keep his head down for just the 19, while His Highness the Maha Rao Raja of Bundi had to get by with 17. In descending order His Highness the Maha Rawal of Banswara heard just 15, His Highness the Deewan of Palanpur had to live with only 13, whereas His Highness the Thakar of Gondal could claim 11, and poor old His Highness the Saraswati Desai of Sawantwadi and His Highness the Thakore Sahib of Rajkot just had the 9 apiece.

Happily for the British they shared just as much in common with the Hindu ruled as with the Muslim rulers. Hindu society is divided up into four castes with numerous sub-castes. British society in India happened to mirror these divisions. At the Hindu head are the Brahmins of upper and lower rank, who corresponded to the viceregal Indian Civil Service and the regional equivalents. Next come the Kshatriyas, the warrior caste and their sub-castes resembling the British Army and the Indian Army. The British businessmen, the successors to the East India Company pioneers, were wealthy but of low caste, known as “box-wallahs” to those above them, and they had their Indian equals in the Vaisyas, the merchant caste. Like the Vaisyas the mercantile class divided into two: those in commerce—bankers, insurance brokers, shippers and the like—and those in trade: shop owners, buyers and sellers who actually handled goods. At the Hindu bottom were the Untouchables who had their British equivalent, those who had “gone native”, or were of mixed blood.

And thence we went to Mr. Premchand Roychand's bungalow, in Lovelane, Byculla, where an Indian prince was to receive a deputation of the Jain community who desired to congratulate him upon a high honor lately conferred upon him by his sovereign, Victoria, Empress of India. She had made him a knight of the order of the Star of India. It would seem that even the grandest Indian prince is glad to add the modest title "Sir" to his ancient native grandeurs, and is willing to do valuable service to win it. He will remit taxes liberally, and will spend money freely upon the betterment of the condition of his subjects, if there is a knighthood to be gotten by it. And he will also do good work and a deal of it to get a gun added to the salute allowed him by the British Government. Every year the Empress distributes knighthoods and adds guns for public services done by native princes. The salute of a small prince is three or four guns; princes of greater consequence have salutes that run higher and higher, gun by gun,—oh, clear away up to eleven; possibly more, but I did not hear of any above eleven-gun princes. I was told that when a four-gun prince gets a gun added, he is pretty troublesome for a while, till the novelty wears off, for he likes the music, and keeps hunting up pretexts to get himself saluted. It may be that supremely grand folk, like the Nyzam of Hyderabad and the Gaikwar of Baroda, have more than eleven guns, but I don't know.

When we arrived at the bungalow, the large hall on the ground floor was already about full, and carriages were still flowing into the grounds. The company present made a fine show, an exhibition of human fireworks, so to speak, in the matters of costume and comminglings of brilliant color. The variety of form noticeable in the display of turbans was remarkable. We were told that the explanation of this was, that this Jain delegation was drawn from many parts of India, and that each man wore the turban that was in vogue in his own region. This diversity of turbans made a beautiful effect.
(Following the Equator)