Demystifying the ‘Ideal Progressive’: Resistance through Mimicked Modernity in Princely Baroda, 1900-1913

Current scholarship is replete with the praises of princely Baroda, the ‘ideal and progressive’ state which emerged and prospered under the enlightened rule of Maharaja Sayaji Rao Gaekwad III in the early twentieth century. For example, V. B. Kulkarni notes in his Princely India and Lapse of British Paramountcy that ‘It is . . . enough to end this heart-warming story of wise princely governments by recalling the achievements of Sayajirao of Baroda . . . [in part] because he gave an enlightened government to a chronically-misgoverned state . . .’.