Great king in name, many maharajas ruled little more than a few villages
Maharaja literally means great ruler, and its Sanskrit roots share ancestry with the Latin magnus and rex. Yet by the British era the grand title had been handed out so freely that plenty of its holders governed tiny states, sometimes rewarded simply for backing Britain in Afghanistan or the world wars.
The word joins mahant, great, with rajan, ruler. Because Sanskrit shaped vocabulary across Greater India and Southeast Asia, it appears in many Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages. Originally it was reserved for rulers of large territories who had lesser tributary kings beneath them. Its meaning also shifted with place and period: in late ancient India and medieval south India it denoted a king, while in medieval northern India and modern usage it came closer to prince.
The title's history is long and cosmopolitan. Vedic kings used it, and in the second century Indo-Greek rulers such as Menander I adopted it, followed by the Indo-Scythian king Maues and the Kushans, who treated it as a step above raja. Over time such lofty styles lost value. In the medieval period sovereigns reached for Maharajadhiraja, great king of kings, whereas the closest Indian word for emperor is Samrat, popular back in Vedic times, and Muslim rulers such as the Mughals used the Persian Padshah.
Under British rule, many rajas and other Hindu rulers were promoted to maharaja regardless of how small their domains were. By the time India won independence in 1947, there were more than 600 princely states, each with a native ruler, while Britain directly governed two-thirds of the subcontinent and steered the rest through Residents at princely courts. Only a handful of those states were rich or powerful enough to justify the word great. Some holders earned it by force: Ranjit Singh of Punjab won the style in the 19th century by keeping the British beyond the Sutlej. Heads of some very large landed estates also received it.
Regional variants all rework the same idea of great king, among them Maharana in Udaipur and Maharawal in Jaisalmer. Migration has spawned further spellings, including Maharajah, Mahraj and Maraj.
Source: Maharaja
