The pomp and circumstance of the coronation is evident, and Cowling’s intertitles report that Singh is wearing jewels ‘valued at twenty million dollars’. The display of power and wealth was surely not lost on the Hindu Maharaja’s subjects, the vast majority of whom were impoverished Muslims.   

While the film is a relatively standard short ‘interest’ film, presented in travelogue style, the subsequent history of Kashmir and the crucial role that Singh played in that history give the film a significance that goes beyond its main content.

It was in part due to Singh’s prevarication at Partition in 1947 that the disastrous Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan developed in such dramatic and tragic form. The demographic composition and geopolitical importance of the state marked it as an obvious bone of contention. Predominantly Muslim, it  might have fallen to Pakistan with whom it had much closer economic and geographic relationships; to the nascent India it remained geopolitically crucial and was also of great symbolic significance in the quest for a nation of secular character (not least to Nehru personally, himself of Kashmiri origins). However, whatever the manoeuvres and complexities of Partition elsewhere in British India, and no matter the machinations, controversies and obscurities that characterised the division of the Punjab, Kashmir’s closest neighbour, Jammu and Kashmir’s status as a Princely State meant that the final decision on accession devolved to the Maharaja.

Wishing to bide his time on the matter – he had refused to discuss business with Mountbatten when the Viceroy had visited him in Srinagar – and weighing up the possibilities of an independent Kashmiri state, Singh allowed Partition to come and go, and in September 1947, as convulsions of sectarian violence wracked the newly created Pakistan and India, he obtained a Standstill Agreement: a device which allowed a Princely State to maintain trade, communication and service agreements with all that had previously been British India, while a decision was taken regarding accession.

Discontent in Kashmir, brewing for some decades, began to boil over, and external actors began to appear. A well-organised armed rebellion in the western Poonch district could not be quelled, and Pakistan began to strangle Kashmir’s main supply routes of fuel and food from the Pakistani Punjab. At the same time a wave of Pathan tribesmen, very likely sanctioned by Pakistan, came to the aid of the rebels in Poonch, flowing into the state from the old North-West Frontier (there seems to be some dispute about the scale of this invasion: Huttenback suggests they came in numbers of up to 60,000, while Lamb gives a much more conservative 3000: Huttenbeck, op.cit., 162, Lamb op.cit., 134). On 24 October, Poonch declared independence as Azad [Free] Kashmir; on 26 October, Singh wrote to Mountbatten, effectively as a supplicant, prepared to accede to India. Two battalions of Indian Army infantry troops were flown into Srinagar the following day (ibid., 140).

Thus was the stage set for the first of the Indo-Pakistani conflicts over Kashmir. Cowling’s film, an exotic travelogue for an American audience, captures the moment that Singh succeeded to the position from which, just over twenty years later, he would play a such crucial hand, with such disastrous consequences.  

Francis Gooding