In the year 1949, Harekrishna Mahtub, a man of letters and the Premier of the state of Orissa in the newly formed Indian Union, finished writing a book called The Beginning of the End. The inspiration of writing the book had come to him in September of the previous year when the state of Hyderabad had finally fallen to the Indian Union. The book was a short history of the accession of the princely states to the Government of India, which as he described, “began when (the state of) Nilgiri was taken over by force and the culmination was reached when Hyderabad was also taken over by force. Mahtub wrote to Sardar Vallabbhai Patel – the first Deputy Prime Minister of India and the man in charge of the accession – asking him to write a foreword to the book.