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this phenomenon was evident on an India-wide scale after 1947. In the space of just two years, 1947 to 1949, India’s new Congress government entreated or bullied more than 500 princely rulers to sign away their states to the newly-formed republic in exchange for a generous stipend, known as the Privy Purse. Many left cricket thereafter. The killer blow to princely cricket came in 1971, when the Privy Purse was stopped. No longer able to afford their cricket teams, most of the remaining cricketing princes withdrew from the game. Some turned their palaces into luxury hotels and lived quietly off the proceeds. Most simply hunkered down, to meditate on their past glories and present fears of falling masonry. ‘What a treat for you!’ the Jam Sahib exclaimed. ‘What a lovely creature!’ Through the windscreen, we watched in silence as a tiny fawn took its first trembling steps. Behind it, through a tangle of thorny acacias, I could make out a section of sweeping palace roof. ‘What a treat!’ sighed the king, a broad-shouldered septuagenarian called Shatrusalyasinhji. ‘I must tell you that the spotted deer is in my opinion the prettiest deer in the world.’ He had also been a cricketer, though a much lesser one than his uncle Duleep and great-uncle Ranji. Sat, as he was known to his friends, was also a different character. He was dressed all in white, as a mark of his devotion to the god Shiva, and had a snowy, waist-length beard. He looked a bit like Gandalf. I had come to Jamnagar, where he lived alone in a small bungalow, to discuss cricket with him. But Sat was more interested in natural history. The moment we had met, he had urged me to join him on a safari to ‘a small nature reserve of mine’. This turned out to be a 45-acre walled enclosure, in the middle of Jamnagar, just across the road from the small bungalow where he lived alone. It was one of his palace gardens. The Jam Sahib, as Sat was still respectfully known in Jamnagar, had let it grow wild and stocked it with deer and antelopes that had been brought to him, ‘half torn up by jackals’, by the villagers of his former ancestral estates. This was the least of his passion for nature. At one time, Sat said as we drove through the thorn scrub, he had kept 8,000 pets in his palaces. ‘There were, you know, a lot of birds and reptiles and things in the
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