Name Change Agent in Rajkot

Rajkot was the capital of Saurashtra State from 15 April 1948 until 31 October 1956. On 1 November 1956 Saurashtra was merged into the bilingual Bombay State, and on 1 May 1960 Bombay State was divided and Rajkot became part of Gujarat. Before all of that, Rajkot was itself a princely state, a nine gun salute state in the Kathiawar Agency of the Bombay Presidency.

Count the layers and a family's documents here can cross four administrations in three generations. A grandfather's record may name a princely state, a father's may name Saurashtra State or Bombay State, and a child's Aadhaar names Gujarat. Not one of those papers is wrong. What they need is an affidavit that lists each document, names the authority that issued it and the year, and states plainly that all of them refer to the same place and the same line of people. That is the part a standard draft never covers.

When Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel brought this peninsula together, the count in the Saurashtra region alone came to two hundred and twenty two rulers and petty chiefs. Within the Kathiawar Agency there were fourteen salute states, seventeen minor states, one hundred and ninety one petty non salute states and forty six jagir level estates. Most of the rulers signed the Covenant on 24 January 1948 and acceded on 15 February that year. Many of those states were no larger than one or two villages, which made this the most fragmented feudal region in the country.

That history is exactly why old paperwork here behaves the way it does. Your grandfather's land entry or birth record may have been created by an administration that governed two villages and stopped existing in 1948. There is no modern district office that holds it, because there is no successor office in the ordinary sense. So the record you have in the trunk at home is often the only copy in existence. It does not need correcting, and it should not be replaced. It needs to be named, dated and placed in the chain by the affidavit, so that its authority is beyond question.

Rajkot was founded in 1620 by Thakur Sahib Vibhaji Ajoji of the Jadeja Rajput clan, and named in honour of its co founder, Raju Sandhi. In 1720 Masum Khan captured the city and renamed it Masumabad. The Jadejas retook it in 1732 and restored the name Rajkot. So even the city's own name has a twelve year gap in the record. Older documents also place it in Kathiawar, sometimes written Kathiawad, and within the Halar prant, neither of which is an administrative unit today.

You will rarely see these on a modern certificate, but they turn up on temple registers, trust deeds, revenue receipts and very old land papers, and they are the reason one family can hold three different descriptions of the same address. We read every version rather than picking one and hoping. The affidavit names each paper, the authority, the year and the place as written, then ties it to your present address so nothing is left for an officer to guess.