Empress

by Miles Taylor

  2. One of the first ever Indian army medals to feature the monarch, Victoria is depicted here as a warrior queen by William Wyon to mark the defeat of the Sikh armies during the Sutlej campaign of 1846. Queen Victoria saw and approved the designs.

  3. A ‘historical emblem of conquest’, the Koh-i-Noor was taken by the British from Lahore after the overthrow of the Sikh dynasty in 1849 and sent to the queen by Dalhousie, the governor-general of India. She treasured the acquisition and refused to hand it over to the East India Company, allowing it out of her grasp for the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851 but coveting it as her own. Prince Albert had the diamond cut, polished and made into a brooch, here featured in Winterhalter’s portrait, for which Victoria sat in May 1856. Unusually, Winterhalter presented the queen in a formal pose, crowned and without any background or additions, the brooch signalling her Indian empire.

  4. Queen Victoria visited the Indian court of the Crystal Palace exhibition on 16 July 1851, and was shown around by Dr J. Forbes Royle. The centrepiece of the court was the ornamental canopied seat, the howdah, given as a gift to the queen by the Nawab Nizam of Bengal for the exhibition. In fact, when Victoria saw the display, the howdah was not complete: there was no elephant. Throughout May and June the exhibition organisers hunted for one. They deemed borrowing a live animal from the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park too risky, and rejected an offer from a basket-maker to fashion one out of wicker for £4 as too ‘make-do’. Finally, a stuffed elephant, late of a menagerie in Essex, was tracked down, joining the exhibition at the end of July.

  5. Duleep Singh (1838–93) photographed at Osborne House, Isle of Wight, the queen’s summer residence, shortly after he arrived at court in the summer of 1854. The queen met him for the first time on 1 July, noting in her journal that ‘He has been carefully brought up, chiefly in the hills, & was baptised last year, so that he is a Christian. He is 16 & extremely handsome, speaks English perfectly, & has a pretty, graceful & dignified manner. He was beautifully dressed & covered with diamonds.’ Kitted out in ill-fitting English court clothes over a short kurta, Duleep Singh here looks less than dignified compared to the magnificent full-length oil portrait completed later that month by Franz Winterhalter.

  6. Prince Arthur (1850–1942, and from 1874 known as the Duke of Connaught and Strathearn) and Prince Alfred (1844–1900, and from 1866 known as the Duke of Edinburgh) in specially tailored Indian costume, photographed at Osborne House in 1854. A Kashmir shawl – an annual tribute to the queen from the Maharaja of Jammu, with its distinctive ‘teardrop’ motif – is draped over the bench for effect. Both princes went on to see India for themselves, Alfred as part of his world tour of 1867–70, and Arthur in military command in the 1880s, and later on various official visits.

  7. Queen Victoria sketched Duleep Singh at Buckingham Palace in the middle of July 1854, as he sat for a portrait being painted by Franz Winterhalter. As she sketched, Prince Albert and the queen chatted with John Login, Duleep’s guardian. Login told them that ‘the Sikhs are a far superior race to the other Indians, & that the founder of their religion had evidently been a man anxiously seeking for the truth; – that the women kept up superstition, as we both observed they did in many countries. They were very ill educated & schools for girls were much needed. If they could be started, it would make an immense change.’ (QVJl., 13 July 1854).

  8. Charlotte Canning (1817–61), former Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Victoria, accompanied her husband Charles to India in 1856 when he took up his post as governor-general. She became the queen’s eyes and ears on India around the time of the rebellion, sending commentary on the unfolding revolt. Then in 1858 she joined her husband, now viceroy, on his journeys around the country, painting, sketching and photographing as she went, and sharing some of her works with the queen. This watercolour, made at the end of 1858 looking out over the rooftops of the old city of Delhi from the tower of the Lahore gate of the Red Fort towards Jama Masjid (Friday mosque), shows the precise spot of the hauz (bathing tank) in front of the Fort where European prisoners were executed on 16 May 1857.

  9. Barker’s painting, The Relief of Lucknow, which Queen Victoria and Prince Albert viewed on 9 May 1860, used drawings supplied by Egron Lundgren, a court painter, who had been commissioned by the queen to travel to India and record what he saw. The picture shows British army generals James Outram, Henry Havelock and Colin Campbell meeting after having broken down the rebel hold on Lucknow, the battlefield smoke still drifting over the city’s landmarks.

  10. Nabha, a princely state in the Punjab, issued its own postage stamps, choosing a common image of Queen Victoria with added features to make her more familiar in an Indian setting: an embroidered headband, an elongated nose and enlarged eyes. Coinage and paper currency of the period included similar images, all of which were seen and approved by Queen Victoria.

  11. More of a head-dress, this crown was used by the King of Delhi on formal occasions during the 1840s and 1850s, then assumed new significance during his short-lived reinstatement as emperor in 1857. An old man, and in poor health, Bahadur Shah Zafar paid dearly for his disloyalty. Two of his sons and a grandson were executed by the British following the recapture of Delhi, their severed heads presented to the king. Found guilty following a long trial, Bahadur Shah Zafar was exiled to Rangoon where he died in 1862. His crown, looted by the British, was purchased at auction by Prince Albert for the queen.

  12. Paid for by an Indian prince, the Gaekwar of Baroda, this statue of Queen Victoria, the first in India, signified Bombay’s special relationship with the Crown. The city’s philanthropists were conspicuous in their loyalty, naming many new public buildings after members of the royal family. The statue joined another in the city of Prince Albert (1869) – the work of the same sculptor, Matthew Noble – and in 1876 there arrived from Britain an equestrian statue of the Prince of Wales, completed by Joseph Boehm. Times changed. The queen’s statue was tarred in protest during the 1897 jubilee. And in 1965 it was removed (without the canopy) to the Bhau Daji Lad Museum, where it now stands, wearing away, in the garden.

  13. During the Prince of Wales’s tour of India in 1875–6, the Indian princes competed fiercely to stage the best show. Ram Singh II, the Maharaja of Jaipur, had the city painted pink to welcome the prince. Vasily Vereshchagin, a Russian artist, captured on canvas the prince’s entry into the city, exercising some artistic license in doing so for the procession actually took place at night, whereas he shows it during the daytime. Later, Lord Curzon purchased the vast canvas for the Victoria Memorial Hall where it hangs to this day.

  14. Not until 1889 did British royal diplomacy reach the Nizam of Hyderabad, the most powerful of India’s Muslim princes. Earlier attempts in 1870 and 1875 had failed, then in 1889 Prince Arthur, the Duke of Connaught, visited twice, on the second occasion accompanying Prince Albert Victor. Here, on the first visit in January 1889, Prince Arthur takes breakfast after reviewing the nizam’s troops. The photographer only managed to catch the prince’s pith-helmet (centre-right of the table) as he sat alongside the Duke of Oldenburg (also pith-helmeted and obscured).

  15. Prince Albert Victor (1864–92, the Duke of Clarence and Avondale, and the eldest son of the Prince of Wales, seated front and centre with the maharana in white to his left) visited India during the winter of 1889, his trip arranged partly to get him out of London, where rumours were rife that he was caught up in the Cleveland Street male brothel scandal. Here he meets with the Maharaja of Udaipur, having unveiled a statue of his grandmother the queen in the city. The photograph is a rare example of the maharaja and his own son and heir (the little boy seated facing the prince) together in public, a display of the dynasty’s durability, in much the same manner as the prince, as son of the heir to the imperial throne, signified continuity in the British royal family – except that he died two years later.

  16. Struck to mark the pronouncement in India of her new title of queen-empress, gold and silver medals were presented to the i
nvited dignitaries at the Imperial Assemblage in Delhi on 1 January 1877, as well as to other Indian and European officials across the country. The medal, approved by the queen, depicted her wearing an imperial crown, and featured her title as ‘Kaiser-i-Hind’ on the reverse. Lord Lytton, the viceroy who masterminded the event, managed to lose his medal in the mud. Extravagant in every detail of the occasion, Lytton ordered too many medals. Years later, the Calcutta Mint melted down the unused stock.

  17. The Imperial Assemblage of 1 January 1877 took place on the outskirts of the city of Delhi, the old Mughal capital. The same site was used later for the durbar of 1903 to mark the accession of King Edward VII, and for the coronation durbar of King George V in 1911. This photograph, taken by the Calcutta firm of Bourne and Shepherd, shows the main amphitheatre for the Indian princes, with their banners designed by Lockwood Kipling, as well as the dais from which the proclamation of the new title of queen-empress was made.

  18. Queen Victoria’s new title of empress was celebrated by events and memorials across India. In Nagpur in the Bombay presidency, Jamsetji Tata named his new cotton factory ‘Empress Mills’. It was a bad omen, for later that year the mill was badly damaged by fire. In 1886, Tata built new premises in Bombay, this time opting for ‘Swadeshi Mills’, a name that reflected resentment at the stranglehold exerted by Britain on Indian domestic industry, ringed in as it was by tariffs and British monopoly of trade.

  19. William Downey photographed the queen on the occasion of the pronouncement of her new title of queen-empress. The portrait was produced for the English market, so no imperial crown was on show. Instead, Queen Victoria sits on the ivory throne presented to her by the Raja of Travancore in 1850 and wears the sash of the Order of Neshan Aftab, presented to her by the Shah of Persia in 1873.

  20. A popular subject for Indian biographers and writers of didactic literature, Queen Victoria was depicted in a variety of ways. Illustrators often took an English image and adapted it for an Indian audience. Here in a Bengali work of 1895, Thomas Sully’s portrait of the queen on her accession in 1837 is reworked to show a young Indian royal.

  21. In the same work, Prince Albert’s deathbed scene, the subject of a composite photograph by Leopold Manley (1863), shows Queen Victoria as devoted companion, anticipating the status she went on to enjoy in India as a widow.

  22. Shah Jahan (1838–1901), the Begum of Bhopal, one of three women from the same dynasty who ruled the Muslim state during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shah Jahan corresponded directly with Queen Victoria, and was sent copies of her Highland journals and the authorised biography of Prince Albert.

  23. Suniti Devi (1864–1932), Maharani of Cooch Behar, visited Queen Victoria’s court with her husband during the jubilee year of 1887, later modelling herself on the queen as a matriarchal princess.

  24. Chimnabai II (1872–1958), wife of the Gaekwar of Baroda (also pictured), attended Queen Victoria’s court with her husband on two occasions. She looked on the queen as a role model for modern women in Indian public life.

  25. Lady Hariot Dufferin (1843–1936), wife of the viceroy, led a campaign to establish women’s hospitals and nursing education across India, using the queen’s 1887 jubilee to raise funds. She was aided by this collection card designed by Lockwood Kipling.

  26. The queen-empress together with some of the principal princes of India in a photographic montage produced for the golden jubilee of 1887.

  27. A typically regal portrait of the queen-empress, imperial crown aloft, at the time of the 1887 jubilee. This was the frontispiece illustration to a Hindi account of the jubilee celebrations in London, published in Lahore.

  28. Twenty-two Indian cavalry formed an escort for the queen’s carriage during the procession through the City of London on the occasion of her diamond jubilee in 1897, and also attended her during other events in the jubilee calendar. Here they are shown entering Buckingham Palace at the end of the route, leading in the royal carriage.

  29. Abdul Karim (1863– 1909), the queen’s munshi. The son of a Muslim clerk, he joined the royal household shortly after the 1887 jubilee, one of a number of Indian servants taken on by the queen and other members of her family. Soon the munshi was teaching her Hindustani. ‘I am so very fond of him,’ declared the queen, to the dismay of the rest of her household.

  30. Rafiuddin Ahmad (1865– 1954), a Muslim lawyer from Poona, scooped two interviews with the queen in 1891–2, breaking the news that she was learning Hindustani. She described him as a ‘staunch but liberal-minded Mahomedan’ and passed on his opinions on a range of topics to her Indian officials.

  31. Jagatjit Singh (1872–1949), the Maharaja of Kapurthala, a princely state in the Punjab. He met with the queen at Balmoral in October 1900, the last Indian visitor of her reign. Ironically, his grandfather Randhir Singh had died in 1870 en route to London, attempting to become the first Indian prince to have an audience with Queen Victoria.

  32. The Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta, Lord Curzon’s tribute to the queen, nearing completion at the end of 1920, in a race to be ready for the visit of the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII).

  INTRODUCTION

  Shortly before she became Empress of India in 1876, Queen Victoria asked her courtiers to find out whether she was already known by that title. She thought so. She herself had used it on occasion, for example in June 1872. On being told that three envoys from Burma would not prostrate themselves before her on being received at court, the queen declared, ‘[A]s Empress of India, I must insist on this.’ The following year, she inquired of the Liberal government ‘how it was that the title of Empress of India, which is frequently used in reference to her Majesty has never been officially adopted’. At the time the Duke of Argyll, then secretary of state for India, suggested that the title had been used in the text of the 1858 proclamation that had transferred the Government of India from the East India Company to the Crown. Experts scrutinised the proclamation in all its different vernaculars, from Persian, Urdu and Hindi through to Gujarati, Malayalam and Tamil, but to no avail: there was no trace of the word ‘empress’ in any version.1 So in 1876 the search resumed. Lord Carnarvon, secretary of state for the Colonies was sure that the title was in use in Australia. The queen’s resident churchman, the dean of Windsor, chipped in with some historical corroboration, showing that Athelstan had worn an imperial crown. A schoolgirl wrote in to point out that, according to her geography schoolbook, the queen was indeed ‘Empress of India’. Semi-official proof was found too. The India Office unearthed a telegram to the Emir of Kabul in which the queen was referred to as ‘Empress of India’.2 It was too little and too late to change anything. Benjamin Disraeli’s government went ahead with the Royal Titles legislation. For the first and only time in British history, a reigning queen became an empress as well.

  Queen Victoria’s ministers may have suffered from mild amnesia over her imperial title. By the time the history of her reign came to be written total memory loss had set in. There has never been a full study of the British monarchy and India. Queen Victoria personified British rule in India for almost half a century, formally from 1858, when the Crown took over from the East India Company, and by statute from 1876, when she assumed the title of Empress of India. After her death in 1901, her son (Edward VII), grandson (George V) and two great-grandsons (Edward VIII and George VI) all went on to be Emperors of India. Another great-grandson, Louis Mountbatten, was there in 1947 as the last British viceroy when the curtain came down on the Raj. This long relationship between the British royal family and the Indian subcontinent has eluded full analysis. As her reign came to an end there were some attempts both in India and in Britain to put Queen Victoria’s rule in India into historical perspective, but the queen herself barely merited a mention in the chronological sweep.3 Later, the prospect of devolution of power to India produced some potted constitutional histories of the status of the Crown in India. Written as British authority in India was waning, these dry tomes
were prescriptive as much as descriptive, and hardly bothered to distinguish one monarch from the next.4 The Crown and not its wearer was the point at issue.

  Since Britain withdrew from Empire, the political temperament has been set against telling a story of modern India with the monarchy as part of the plot. Postcolonial anger, embarrassment and indifference keep the topic off the agenda. Proud of their republican present, contemporary India and Pakistan remain sensitive about reminders of the colonial past. Disputed treasures, such as the Koh-i-Noor diamond, now part of the crown jewels in the Tower of London, or colonial atrocities such as the Amritsar massacre of 1919, still pop up in diplomatic crossfire. Symbols of empire have been renamed; for example, in Mumbai the main railway station, the Victoria Terminus (1887), changed its name to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in 1996. Or they have been replaced. In Udaipur a statue of Mohandas Gandhi now sits on the plinth once occupied by one of the queen-empress. Many imperial relics have simply been removed altogether from prominent public display.5 In modern India the past is a foreign country, and its name is imperial Britain. Its emblems are no longer welcome; they speak of conquest, not of consent.