A great deal of dotty folklore had accreted around these curious monarchs and their life-style. According to certain legends these people in their day wore priceless gems for breakfast and conducted their daily business of despotism from the back of elephants, in more-than-Oriental splendour. Another school of though, mainly their own, held that the Indian princes were far-sighted and benevolent rulers and their disappearance mournful. However that may have been (and it was both), one might have thought to have heard the last of the Maharajahs, but not so. Even in the tormented times that so threatened India today the princes stubbornly continued fighting on two fronts: against mythology on the one hand, and democracy on the other.
J. Cameron, An Indian summer (1974), 114
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