As I said in the introduction, I admire the crew behind JQ:TRA for realizing that Indians are typically shown on screen in a stereotypical light and set out to change it. So perhaps it was only some of the time and money constraints (not to mention the new producer and crew on season two) that made season two…weird.
The weirdest part–aside from the major character design changes (why!? I mean, season two Hadji looks great, but why?!) is the idea of having Hadji find his Hamlet-esque family and realize he’s the long-lost Maharajah of Bangalore in the season two episode, “Bloodlines”. While I am all about Hadji finding his family, since that makes a great storyline, I am not about tons of people thinking India still has Maharajahs.
This idea is not just artistic licence. The whole “Maharajah” thought in the show just reiterated what a lot of people have been fed to them–that India is a mystical, otherworldy, and slightly backwards place. There are a lot of layers to India, and getting the political aspect of Bangalore wrong is a big oversight.
Let me say, however, that maharajahs were common in India, but they only became common during the British colonization period. Many rajas were upgraded to maharajahs regardless of the fact that many of these rulers governed over small states and were sometimes separate from the eminence of the state (wikipedia). Eventually, the title became a victim of title inflation. The end to the maharajah lifestyle came to an end in 1971, when they were stripped of their riches, palaces, and titles by the then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi
As in other countries, there are still some ceremonial titles in India today, like the President of India as well as descendants of maharajahs, but also like most countries, India is run by the standard political heads used by the west. To elaborate more on Bangalore in particular, Bangalore, being a city in the state of Karnataka, is run by a mayor (Mayor S.K. Nataraj), just like your hometown.
So, if there was a chance to remake Hadji’s past, I would suggest that instead of being an acting Maharajah, something he can’t be due to the path of history, he could be a)a descendant of a maharajah, meaning his family would be very wealthy, b) from a rich, powerful political family who is circling around taking the mayoral title.
Of course, the only real reason to make Hadji a Maharajah is to tell the Hamlet-esque story, because it’d be a bit more difficult with a democratic title such as mayor, but you could still make it work with a mayoral election. Perhaps Hadji’s evil uncle bought the election after he got Hadji’s father killed. Everything else from the original maharajah storyline would still fall into place.
In summation: Hadji can’t be a maharajah in 1997-98 (or even the late ’70s to early ’80s, which would have been around the time Hadji would’ve been a young adult if you’re following the timeline all the way from the ’60s show) because maharajahs were no longer in use.
