ABSTRACT
Education was certainly one of the crucial ways in which the British sought to control Indian princes. By the late nineteenth century, the western style of education brought by the British was widely accepted amongst middle-class Indians. A faction within palace politics, consisting of ex-ministers of the former maharaja and influential Brahmin priests, was trying to maintain its influence over the one-fifth of the state revenue that the maharaja was entitled to receive. Maharaja Chamarajendra Wodeyar's three mothers, two surviving ranis of the last maharaja, Ramavilasa and Sitavilasa, and Chamarajendra's biological mother, Devajammanniavaru, were, at the beginning, strongly opposed to the British plan for educating the maharaja in a school with other boys. The change that British Guardian G. B. Malleson brought into the young maharaja's life was the tour. A Mysore maharaja had never shown himself in public, except on two occasions: his birthday celebrations and the Dasara festival.
