Refusal of Mughal marriage alliance
Alone among the princely houses of Rajasthan, the Sisodias of Mewar declined the marriage alliances with the Mughal throne that bound Amber, Marwar and the lesser houses to Delhi. William Crooke's 1920 edition of James Tod's Annals records that when "every prince in Rajasthan (that of Bundi alone excepted)" had given daughters to the Mughal house, Rana Pratap "renounced all alliance with those who were thus degraded," refusing intermarriage not only with the imperial house but "even with their brother princes of Marwar and Amber," a refusal Tod says held "to the very close of the monarchy of the Moguls." Tod further records that Marwar and Amber later petitioned, "even while basking in court favour," to be readmitted to marriage with Mewar — "to be purified," "to be regenerated," "to be made Rajputs" — on condition of abjuring the practice that had disunited the houses "for more than a century" (Tod/Crooke, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, vol. I, p. 390).
The distinction survived Mewar's own submission to the empire. When Rana Amar Singh made terms with Jahangir, the settlement his son Karan Singh administered preserved Mewar's separateness: exemption from personal attendance at court, and the imperial farman received "without the walls of his capital" — a mark, Tod writes, meant "more strongly to mark their dependent condition." No marriage clause of the kind binding Amber and Marwar to the Mughal court appears among these terms (Tod/Crooke, vol. I, p. 428).