Is it therefore politic, or, indeed, possible, to leave out of account the Native States, which occupy altogether about one-third of the total area of India and have an aggregate population of over 68 millions, or to ignore the rulers charged with their administration?
The Native States of India vary in size and importance from powerful principalities like the Nizam's State of Hyderabad, with an area of 82,000 miles--nearly equal to that of England and Wales and Scotland--- and a population of over 11 millions, down to diminutive chiefships, smaller than the holdings of a great English landlord.

Distributed throughout the whole length and breadth of the peninsula, they display the same extraordinary variety of races and creeds and castes and languages and customs and traditions as the provinces under the immediate governance of the Viceroy, and their rulers themselves represent almost every phase and aspect of Indian history.

The Princes of Rajputana, headed by the Maharana of Udaipur, with genealogies reaching back into the mythical ages, have handed down to the present day the traditions of Hindu chivalry.

In the south of India, the rulers of Mysore and Cochin and Iravancore, who also claim Rajput blood, still personify the subjection of the older Dravidian races to the Aryan invaders from the north.

Mahratta chiefs like Scindia and the Gaekwar date from the great uplifting of the Mahratta power in the eighteenth century, whilst the Maharajah of Kolhapur is a descendant of Shivaji, the first Mahratta chieftain to stem the tide of Mahomedan conquest more than a century earlier.