Most people who know E.M.Forster’s Passage to India (1924) also know that the background research for the novel was undertaken while the author worked as private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas, senior, who ruled a tiny State in north central India. In 1953, many years after the novel appeared, and sixteen years after the Maharajah had died, Forster published as The Hill of Devi recollections of his time in what he called ‘ the oddest corner of the world outside Alice in Wonderland’.
Forster had first met the young ruler, who bore the rather cumbersome cognomen of Sir Tukoji Rao III, in 1912 , while he was the guest of the high-flying administrator Malcolm Darling, who had himself arrived in India in 1904. ‘His Highness’, or H.H., as the Rajah styled himself, was then just in his early twenties, having succeeded his father in 1900 at the tender age of twelve. In 1906 Darling was appointed his tutor and mentor,
