Tukoji Rao III of Dewas Senior: The Maharaja Who Hired E.M. Forster as His Personal Secretary

Somewhere

in central India, in a town so small that the two sides of its main street were governed by different rulers, one of the twentieth century's finest novelists spent the better part of a year answering letters, attending palace rituals, and trying to understand a kingdom that made no sense to him at all. The town was Dewas. The ruler was Maharaja Tukojirao III. And the novelist, employed at three hundred rupees a month, was E.M. Forster.It is one of the most unlikely employer-employee relationships in literary history, and it produced one of the most intimate portraits ever written of daily life inside an Indian princely state.Also Read: Dalit History Month: How Matadin Bhangi Sparked the 1857 Revolt and Was Erased from History

A Kingdom Split Down the Middle

Dewas was founded in the early eighteenth century by two Maratha brothers who arrived in Malwa with Peshwa Baji Rao in 1728. They divided the territory between them, and after 1841 each branch ruled as a separate princely state: Dewas Senior and Dewas Junior. The absurdity was visible to anyone walking through the capital. One side of the main road fell under one administration, the other under another. Even the water supply and street lighting were managed separately.

Tukojirao III ascended the throne of Dewas Senior in 1900, while still a child. By all accounts, he was charming, deeply musical, and possessed of a restless intelligence that never quite found a kingdom large enough to contain it. Forster, meeting him for the first time at a Christmas banquet in Indore in 1912, was immediately won over. He later described the Maharaja as "certainly a genius, and possibly a saint, and he had to be a king."

The Writer in Residence

Forster first visited Dewas as a guest in 1912. He returned in 1921 with an official role: Private Secretary. His days involved morning office hours, afternoon tea, and evenings at palace music recitals and religious ceremonies.He had brought the unfinished chapters of what would become 'A Passage to India', hoping immersion in the country might help him complete it. The opposite happened. Court life was so absorbing, so peculiar, and so resistant to neat narrative structure that the manuscript stalled entirely. He would only finish the novel after returning to England in 1924.

What he did produce was 'The Hill of Devi', published in 1953. Composed largely of letters sent home, the book is a record of bewilderment and affection in equal measure. Forster likened court life to a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. He described birth rituals that subjected new mothers to fifteen continuous days of drumming, trumpets, and rifle fire outside their door. He recorded the Maharaja of neighbouring Chhatarpur, who "always wanted what anyone else had got and tired of it when he got it," and who was much agitated to learn that a rival monarch had secured Forster's services.

The Quiet Tragedy

Behind the comedy lay something more painful. Tukojirao's kingdom was tiny, his resources limited, and his relationship with the British increasingly strained. In 1934, forced out, he fled with his wife and daughter to Pondicherry in French India. He sold valuable jewellery to keep his family afloat. Three years later, he died in exile at forty-eight.Forster mourned him deeply. 'The Hill of Devi' is dedicated to their friendship, and its final pages carry the weight of a man writing about a world that had already vanished.Also Read: Meet Velu Nachiyar: India's First Queen to Fight the British, Forty Years Before the 1857 RevoltFor readers who know Forster only through 'A Passage to India' or 'A Room with a View', 'The Hill of Devi' offers something rarer: not a novel, but a lived document. It is the closest thing we have to a first-hand account of what it felt like to exist inside a tiny Indian kingdom in the early twentieth century, written by someone with the skill to make every detail land. If you have ever wondered what life behind the palace walls truly looked like, not the jewels and the elephants, but the tea, the confusion, the music that would not stop, this is where you begin.