Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. One of the forgotten stories of the Indian

independent struggle, which we've covered several times on the podcast before, is the

role of India's royal families, the Maharajas of the princely states of India, which is

a formally, semi-autonomous within the British Empire. They're not actually parts of the

administrative structure of the British Raj. They ruled with the permission of the British

government, so they were kind of in a way puppet sovereign figures, but legally it was a bit

of a nod to undo when India got its independence after the Second World War. John Zubriski has worked

in India as a foreign correspondence, he's a diplomat, he's an author, he's a historian, and he's

told the story of these royal families. How they were bounced into the Republic of India,

whether they liked it or not, sometimes through the use of force. He focuses in particular

on the Royal House of Jaipur, who during the Heithakold War, some of the most fashionable,

famous celebrities on planet Earth. They were India's mid-century golden couple, like the

Kennedys, or the Windsors here in the UK. It's sort of the end of empire of independence,

of political fights, fashion, of celebrity, it's got it all, it's got it all. So I thought we'd

get John on the podcast to a little chat about it, it's interesting stuff. If you want to listen

to other podcasts about Indian Dependence, we've got loads of people who've talked to Anita

Rani about her traumatic family story, we've talked to Yasmin Khan about how independence came

about. Please become a subscriber to HistoryHit. We've got all the back episodes of the podcast

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we're running at the moment. Huge interest recently in our women of Iran. How many of the

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