Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV

Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV was born on June 4, 1884, in the old palace at Mysore, the eldest son of Maharaja Chamaraja Wadiyar X and Maharani Vani Vilasa Sannidhana ^[1]. The Wadiyar family had governed Mysore since the fourteenth century, though its authority had been interrupted in the eighteenth century by Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan and restored by the British in 1799. In 1881 the British returned direct administrative control to the dynasty in an arrangement known as the Rendition, so the prince grew up in a state that was rebuilding its own institutions of government ^[2].

His childhood ended abruptly. In the winter of 1894 Chamaraja Wadiyar X died of diphtheria while visiting Calcutta, and the ten year old boy became maharaja on February 1, 1895 ^[1]. Because he was a minor, his mother Vani Vilasa Sannidhana served as regent, one of the few women to head a major Indian state's government in that era. She oversaw both the administration and her son's education with evident care.

The young maharaja's schooling combined Indian and Western elements. He studied Kannada, Sanskrit, and English at the Lokaranjan Mahal palace school, took lessons in Indian and Western classical music, and received training in administration under British officers, among them Sir Stuart Fraser of the Bombay Civil Service ^[3]. Tours through the districts of Mysore formed part of this apprenticeship and gave him direct knowledge of the villages, tanks, and temples he would later govern.

The regency ended on August 8, 1902, when Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV was invested with full ruling powers at a ceremony in the Jaganmohan Palace attended by the Viceroy, Lord Curzon ^[1]. He was eighteen. Two years earlier, in June 1900, he had married Pratapa Kumari Devi of Kathiawar, who took the name Maharani Lakshmivilasa Sannidhana ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV usually receives the same answer: the ruler who made Mysore a laboratory of development. The foundations were laid early. In 1902 the state commissioned the hydroelectric station at Shivanasamudra on the Kaveri falls, among the first major hydroelectric installations in Asia, and its power was carried by long distance transmission line to the Kolar Gold Fields ^[4]. Bangalore received electric street lighting in 1905, earlier than most cities in India ^[4].

Much of the credit for what followed belongs to the maharaja's habit of appointing exceptionally able chief ministers, or Dewans, and letting them work. Sir M. Visvesvaraya, the engineer who served as Dewan from 1912 to 1918, and Sir Mirza Ismail, who held the office from 1926 to 1941, both acknowledged that their programs depended on the ruler's steady support ^[5]. The maharaja also widened political participation: the Representative Assembly founded in 1881 was strengthened, and a Legislative Council was added in 1907, giving Mysore consultative institutions that most princely states lacked ^[2].

The list of Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV achievements reads like an inventory of early twentieth century state building. The University of Mysore, chartered in 1916, was the first university founded by an Indian princely state outside British India's presidency system ^[6]. The Krishna Raja Sagara dam across the Kaveri near Srirangapatna, begun in 1911 under Visvesvaraya's direction and named for the maharaja, created a reservoir that irrigated large tracts of Mandya district and fed the celebrated Brindavan Gardens laid out below it ^[4].

Industry grew alongside irrigation. The state founded the Mysore Iron Works at Bhadravati in 1918, a sandalwood oil factory at Mysore in 1916, the Mysore Bank in 1913, and later a cement plant, a paper mill, and the Hindustan Aircraft factory at Bangalore in 1940, established with the industrialist Walchand Hirachand in the final months of the reign ^[5]. When Jamsetji Tata sought land for a research institute, the Mysore durbar granted more than 370 acres in Bangalore along with an annual subsidy, enabling the Indian Institute of Science to open in 1909 ^[6].

Social legislation kept pace. Mysore restricted child marriage, supported scholarships for students from disadvantaged castes, and in 1918 commissioned the Miller Committee, whose report led to reservations in government service for backward communities, an early experiment in affirmative action ^[2]. Compulsory primary education was attempted in selected areas, and the state ran one of the larger networks of schools and hospitals in princely India. Visitors regularly ranked Mysore as the best governed of the Indian states, and the phrase model state attached itself to the regime in both Indian and British commentary ^[5].

The maharaja's private life was quiet, disciplined, and religious. He rose early, performed daily worship, and observed the rituals expected of the head of a dynasty devoted to the goddess Chamundeshwari, whose temple crowns the hill above Mysore city ^[3]. He was a strict vegetarian and abstained from alcohol. Contemporaries noted that his court, though housed in the vast Amba Vilas Palace completed in 1912 after a fire destroyed the older wooden palace, avoided the extravagance associated with some princely establishments ^[3].

Music was his deepest personal enthusiasm. He played several instruments, among them the veena, violin, and saxophone, and maintained a palace orchestra that performed both Carnatic and Western repertoire ^[7]. His patronage sustained an entire generation of Carnatic musicians, including the composer Mysore Vasudevachar and the veena master Veene Sheshanna, and he composed music himself under a pen name. Painters such as K. Venkatappa and institutions like the Mysore palace school of traditional painting also flourished under his support ^[7].

He was, as the occupational records note, an author as well as a patron: he wrote and lectured on philosophy and published reflections shaped by his study of Vedanta ^[3]. The British traveler Paul Brunton, who met him in the 1930s, portrayed him in print as a genuine philosopher on a throne. His marriage to Lakshmivilasa Sannidhana produced no surviving children, and he raised his nephew Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar, son of his brother Kanteerava Narasimharaja Wadiyar, as heir ^[1].

The last decade of the reign unfolded against the rise of Indian nationalism and constitutional negotiation. Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV took part in the Round Table Conferences in London in 1930 and 1931, where the future of the princely states within a proposed Indian federation was debated, and he was among the rulers who spoke in favor of federation with British India ^[2]. At home, his Dewan Mirza Ismail beautified Bangalore and Mysore, expanded industry, and managed growing pressure from the Mysore Congress for responsible government.

The period was not free of trouble. In April 1938 police fired on a crowd at Viduraswatha in Kolar district during a flag hoisting agitation, killing several people, an episode that drew national attention and led to negotiations between the durbar and Congress leaders ^[2]. The maharaja's government conceded reforms while retaining ultimate authority, a balancing act typical of the late princely order.

His health declined toward the end of the 1930s. Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV died on August 3, 1940, at Bangalore Palace, aged fifty six ^[1]. The state observed deep mourning, and tributes arrived from across India, including from nationalist leaders who had often criticized princely rule but made an exception of Mysore. His nephew Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar succeeded him as the last ruling maharaja before Indian independence ^[1].

Few princely reigns left as durable a mark. The dams, factories, and institutions founded between 1902 and 1940 shaped the economy of what became Karnataka: the University of Mysore, the Indian Institute of Science, the Bhadravati steel works, the State Bank of Mysore, and Hindustan Aeronautics all trace their origins to his durbar ^[6]. The Krishna Raja Sagara reservoir still irrigates the Mandya plain, and the KR marketplaces, roads, and hospitals named for him remain fixtures of Bengaluru and Mysuru ^[4].

His reputation among contemporaries was remarkable for a hereditary ruler in an age of rising democracy. Gandhi called him a Rajarishi, a royal sage, and observers as different as British administrators and Congress politicians cited Mysore to show what Indian self government could accomplish ^[5]. Historians have qualified the praise, noting that Mysore remained an autocracy, that dissent was policed, and that the model state label served the dynasty's publicity as well as its people. Even so, the substance of the record, early electrification, mass education initiatives, caste based reservations, and planned industrialization, is not in dispute ^[2].

For readers gathering Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV facts, the essentials are these: he reigned from 1895 to 1940, exercised full powers from 1902, presided over Asia's early ventures in public hydroelectricity, founded a university, and died in 1940 leaving Mysore with a budget surplus and an administrative reputation unmatched among the Indian states ^[5]. The Mysore Dasara festival he celebrated with such splendor continues each autumn, and the palace from which he ruled is now among the most visited monuments in India, a working reminder of the king whom his subjects called Nalvadi, the fourth ^[3].