India After Gandhi - pg. 54

The larger native states had their own railroad, currency, and stamps, vanities allowed them by the Crown. Few had any modern industry; fewer still had modern forms of education. A British observer wrote in the early twentieth century that, taken as a whole, the states were "sinks of reaction and incompetence and unrestrained autoccratic power sometimes exercised by vicious and deranged ." This roughly, was also the view of the  main nationalist party, the Congress.