Sayajirao Gaekwad III

The boy who became Sayajirao Gaekwad III was born Gopalrao Gaekwad on March 31, 1863, into a distant and impoverished branch of Baroda's ruling family living in the village of Kavlana in the Nashik region of western India ^[1]. His father, Kashirao, farmed for a living, and nothing about the child's first twelve years suggested that he would one day govern one of the wealthiest princely states in the subcontinent. He received no formal schooling in those years and could neither read nor write when fortune found him ^[2].

Fortune arrived through a crisis in Baroda. In 1875 the British Government of India deposed the reigning Maharaja, Malharrao Gaekwad, after a commission investigated charges of gross misrule and an alleged attempt to poison the British Resident, Colonel Robert Phayre ^[1]. With the throne vacant, Maharani Jamnabai, widow of the earlier ruler Khanderao Gaekwad, was permitted to adopt an heir from collateral lines of the dynasty. Kashirao brought his sons to Baroda for inspection. According to a story repeated in most accounts of the succession, when the young Gopalrao was asked why he had come, he answered that he had come to rule ^[2]. Whatever weight the anecdote deserves, the twelve year old was chosen, adopted on May 27, 1875, and given the ruling name Sayajirao III.

Because the new Maharaja was a minor, Baroda was administered by a council while he was prepared for power. His education was entrusted to an English tutor, F. A. H. Elliot, alongside Indian instructors, and the Dewan Sir T. Madhava Rao reorganized the state's finances and administration during the minority ^[2]. The curriculum was demanding: languages, history, administration, and law, compressed into six years for a boy starting from nothing. On December 28, 1881, at the age of eighteen, Sayajirao was invested with full ruling powers ^[1].

Sayajirao inherited a state of roughly eight thousand square miles scattered across Gujarat and parts of the Deccan, with its capital at Baroda, the modern Vadodara. From the start he treated administration as a craft to be studied. He toured his districts, examined revenue records, and traveled repeatedly to Europe, America, and East Asia to observe how other governments handled schooling, sanitation, and industry ^[3]. Foreign travel was unusual and somewhat suspect for Indian princes of his generation; for Sayajirao it became a working method.

He also recruited unusual talent. Romesh Chunder Dutt, the economic historian and former Indian Civil Service officer, served as his revenue minister and later Dewan until Dutt's death in 1909 ^[3]. The young Aurobindo Ghose, later the philosopher Sri Aurobindo, spent thirteen years in the Baroda state service and taught at Baroda College ^[4]. The Maharaja's willingness to employ men with nationalist sympathies did not escape British notice, and colonial files tracked his hires with growing unease ^[5].

By the 1890s Baroda under Sayajirao was being described as a model state, a phrase that carried both praise and political usefulness, since reform strengthened his argument that Indians could govern themselves ^[5]. Historians such as David Hardiman have examined how deliberately the ruler cultivated this progressive reputation, but the substance behind it was real: functioning schools, courts, railways, and a bureaucracy recruited increasingly on merit ^[5].

Any account of Sayajirao Gaekwad III achievements has to begin with education. He introduced compulsory free primary schooling in the Amreli district as an experiment in 1893 and extended it across the whole state in 1906, decades before British India attempted anything comparable ^[3]. To support literate citizens he built a library system, inviting the American librarian William Alanson Borden to Baroda in 1910 to organize a network of village and town libraries around a Central Library in the capital ^[6]. Baroda College, which he nurtured throughout his reign, became the nucleus of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, established in his honor in 1949 ^[7].

Social reform ran alongside schooling. Baroda legislated against child marriage, legalized the remarriage of widows in 1902, and opened schools and scholarships to communities then treated as untouchable ^[3]. The most consequential scholarship went to a young Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, whom the Maharaja funded to study at Columbia University in New York from 1913. Ambedkar went on to become independent India's first law minister and the principal architect of its Constitution, and he acknowledged the Baroda grant as the opening that made his education possible ^[8].

Economic institutions rounded out the program. Sayajirao founded the Bank of Baroda in 1908, an institution that grew into one of India's largest banks ^[3]. His government built railways linking the state's scattered territories, financed textile and other industries, and completed major waterworks, including the Ajwa reservoir scheme that supplied drinking water to the capital ^[2]. The Laxmi Vilas Palace, an enormous Indo-Saracenic residence finished in 1890, remains the most visible monument of his building program, and his patronage supported the painter Raja Ravi Varma, who produced portraits and mythological canvases for the Baroda court ^[2].

Sayajirao married twice. His first wife, Chimnabai I, born Lakshmibai of the Tanjore court, married him in 1880 and died in 1885 ^[2]. Later that year he married Gajrabai of the Dewas family, who took the name Chimnabai II. She became a public figure in her own right, campaigning against purdah and co-writing a 1911 book, The Position of Women in Indian Life, with S. M. Mitra ^[9]. She served as the first president of the All India Women's Conference when it met in 1927.

The couple raised several children, and the family knew repeated grief. The heir apparent, Fatehsinghrao, died in 1908, and two other sons also predeceased their father ^[2]. A daughter, Indira Raje, caused a dynastic storm by refusing an arranged match with the Maharaja of Gwalior and marrying the Maharaja of Cooch Behar instead; her daughter Gayatri Devi later became one of twentieth century India's most photographed public women ^[2].

In private the Maharaja was bookish and disciplined, keeping long working hours and reading widely in history and government. His frequent residence in Europe, partly for health, drew criticism from British officials who thought a ruler should stay home, but he defended travel as part of the job of learning how to govern ^[3].

Relations with the paramount power reached their lowest point at the Delhi Durbar of December 1911, held to honor King George V and Queen Mary. Sayajirao appeared before the King Emperor plainly dressed, bowed once rather than performing the prescribed triple obeisance, and turned his back as he withdrew ^[5]. The Anglo-Indian press erupted, calling the episode an act of sedition, and the Maharaja offered an apology while maintaining that no insult had been intended. Historians still debate whether the incident was deliberate protest, awkwardness, or something in between, but it fixed his reputation as the least deferential of the great princes ^[5].

Suspicion lingered because Baroda kept sheltering inconvenient people and causes. Colonial intelligence connected state employees to nationalist publications, and the Maharaja's own speeches on Indian self improvement could be read as quiet criticism of foreign rule ^[5]. He nevertheless remained within the imperial system, attending the Round Table Conferences in London in the early 1930s as a representative of the princely order and arguing for a federal India in which the states would keep a dignified place ^[1].

The reign's final decade was a long consolidation. Baroda celebrated the diamond jubilee of his accession in 1936 with new endowments for education and public health ^[2]. His health declined in the late 1930s, and he died on February 6, 1939, a few weeks short of his seventy sixth birthday, after a reign of sixty three years ^[1]. His grandson Pratapsinhrao succeeded him as Maharaja.

Anyone asking who was Sayajirao Gaekwad III usually receives the same shorthand answer: the reforming Maharaja of Baroda. The shorthand is fair. Compulsory primary education, a state library network, early social legislation, and the Ambedkar scholarship form a record that few rulers of his era, princely or colonial, can match ^[3]. Manu Bhagavan and other historians have argued that Baroda's schools and university plans amounted to a claim of sovereignty in themselves, proof offered to the world that an Indian government could out administer the Raj ^[10].

The institutions outlived the state. Baroda acceded to the Indian Union in 1949 and merged into Bombay, but the Bank of Baroda, the Central Library, Laxmi Vilas Palace, and the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda continue to anchor Vadodara's public life ^[7]. Sayaji Baug, the large public garden he laid out in 1879, remains the city's principal park.

A balanced Sayajirao Gaekwad III biography also records the limits. He ruled as an autocrat, not a democrat; representative institutions in Baroda stayed advisory, and criticism of the palace had boundaries ^[5]. Yet the basic facts of the reign explain why Ambedkar, Aurobindo, and generations of Gujarati students remembered him with gratitude, and why his statue still stands at the center of the city he rebuilt ^[3].