So Major General Sir George Le Grand Jacob, an aide to the Resident in Kathiawar during the 1830s, vividly described pardah queens in a memoir of his years spent in western India. In this account, Zenana women appear far from the docile, orientalized figures they have been portrayed in the European and Indian travelogues and novels of the period. This chapter elaborates upon the fraught relationships between British political officers, like Le Grand Jacob, and royal and aristocratic Indian women in colonial princely states, from 1890 to 1947.

As way of introduction, it first investigates the political climate of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India, and then delineates the role of the British Raj and its representatives in the affairs of the princely states, particularly the nature of ‘indirect rule’ through the Residency system. In addition, it examines the internal hierarchy of the female court and the negotiations between British political officers and the pardah women they came in contact with. It then critiques how princely women controlled and acquired power as influential regents and players in succession disputes.

Examining the colonial encounter with the sequestered female ruler sheds greater light upon the contentious relationship between European imperialism and indigenous royal leadership. The meeting between the Indian sovereign and British political officer was one of constant dialogue and tension. Indian princes and courtly women resisted, coerced, avoided, fought and even co-opted British officials into their own courtly agendas, and, in certain cases, manipulated different levels of the imperial bureaucracy. Relying upon the archival writings of Political Agents in the princely states, the work of British historians and indigenous histories, these records reveal the significant and real authority of Zenana women in late imperial politics.