by Miles Taylor
Yet on her death in 1901 Queen Victoria’s imprint on India was everywhere, indelible and undeniable. There were statues large and small, starting with the first that went up in Bombay in 1872 and the last in Ayodhya in 1908. There was, and still is, the Victoria Memorial Hall in Calcutta, Lord Curzon’s ostentatious tribute to the queen-empress.6 After her death gazetteers and other topographical surveys listed hundreds of public buildings – hospitals, schools, colleges, clock towers, parks, bathing tanks, gardens, libraries and factories – that had been erected by public subscription in honour of the queen.7 All this might be read as an exercise in official patriotism. Foreign regimes tend to encourage cults through such monuments. Except that only the Victoria Memorial Hall was a project conceived by officialdom, and even that relied on voluntary contributions as well. Elsewhere, the public iconography of the queen was the product of civic organisations. Some of this was princely patronage, but there were plenty of examples of less grandiose projects, supported by a wide range of Indians.
Set in stone, and set in type too, Queen Victoria was a literary phenomenon of nineteenth-century India. By 1901, around 200 biographies, verse collections and eulogies had been published since 1858 about Queen Victoria and the rest of her family.8 In addition, her own diary – Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands – was translated into several Indian languages. Queen Victoria’s reign coincided with the flourishing of vernacular print culture across India, as printing press technology, improved communications and greater literacy expanded the reading public.9 An empire of information gave way to an empire of education and entertainment, over which the Government of India kept a watchful eye through its surveillance of the publishing industry as well as its monitoring of the native newspaper press, in the process leaving behind a rich record of demotic text.10 Biography and history were popular subjects, and within that genre Queen Victoria received plenty of attention, the texts sometimes accompanied by portraits of the queen. She was eulogised in poetry and song as well, particularly in Bengali: Sourindro Mohun Tagore was a one-man industry of celebratory verses devoted to the queen and her family. Queen Victoria also featured in the ghazals of Urdu poets, notably those who were exiled from the King of Delhi’s court after 1857, and who found refuge in Jammu, Lahore and Rampur, sometimes writing under commission from their princely patrons, on other occasions independently.11 Many of these writers and poets, who cut their teeth on Queen Victoria, are today revered as part of a literary renaissance in colonial India that paved the way for political nationalism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.12 During her reign there was less of a contradiction between nationalist poetics and loyalism than might be supposed.
The queen was also the object of much attention from India. Tokens of loyalty and esteem poured into the British court from the princes of India. Their generosity fuelled the success of the famous 1851 exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park, and they bankrolled two major late Victorian institutions, the Imperial and Colonial Institute in Kensington and the Indian Institute in Oxford. Indian professions of loyalty also came in the shape of addresses, presents and memorials, usually sent on formal occasions such as her accession to the throne, the transfer of power in 1858 and during her two jubilees in 1887 and 1897, but also at times of celebration and bereavement in the royal family.13 The Indian princes led the way in this form of direct contact with the monarch, but with the mushrooming of literary societies, schools and colleges, trade and municipal associations, and sabha and anjuman organisations from the 1860s onwards, memorials came from a larger cross section of Indian society. Indeed, so persistent were Indian memorialists that the Government of India frequently changed the rules on direct communication with the queen so as to limit the traffic. At times it seemed as though effusions of Indian loyalty did not require encouragement so much as containment.
Such a culture of loyalism is easier to measure than to interpret. Undoubtedly, the colonial state played its part in the fabrication of Queen Victoria, managing the monarchy in India in ways that are similar to the cults of the emperor that emerged at the same time in Tsarist Russia, the France of Louis Napoleon, Meiji Japan after 1868, and the Austria-Hungary of Franz-Josef.14 However, British rule was always spread thinly on the ground in India. With fewer than 1,000 officials and around 160,000 European settlers at most, it is hard to conceive how some 250 million Indians could be dragooned into silent adoration of the queen. More nuanced explanations of loyalism are required. Indian reverence for the queen might be seen as ‘clientelism’ or collaboration; that is to say, loyalism was a device by which concessions might be extracted from the colonial power.15 There is mileage in this, particularly when it comes to examining parts of Indian society such as the Indian princes, the mercantile communities of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, and the zamindars of Bengal, all amongst the most vocal cheerleaders for the Crown throughout the queen’s reign. But the popularity of the queen spread well beyond Indians who made their living out of the Raj.
There are other explanations on offer. Indian loyalism, especially of the type that permeated the rhetoric of the early years of the Indian National Congress, formed in 1885, has been written off as typifying the timid outlook of the pre-Gandhian generations of intellectuals and activists. Traditional and conservative in their social views, they were cautious in their demands for political change, their faith in European liberalism a symptom of their colonial captivity. Patriarchy in private and imperial patriotism in public went hand-in-hand.16 It is perhaps inevitable that Indian nationalism of Queen Victoria’s reign should be so judged as supine and conformist. Looking backwards to India before Gandhi in this way emphasises the immense distance travelled by later generations of Indian patriots and freedom fighters, whose opposition to the Raj was so uncompromising. Except that Gandhi was also a loyalist, prominent in the support he gave to the Crown whilst a lawyer and newspaper editor in the British colony of Natal in southern Africa.17 Loyalty to Queen Victoria was not just incidental to nineteenth-century Indian nationalism, a polite addition for the sake of form – it was central to its ideology. This points to other possible interpretations of Indian loyalism. One argument, advanced by the late Christopher Bayly, is that the institution of the British Crown in India after 1858 sanctioned older forms of Indian indigenous patriotism, as traditional ideas about ‘good counsel’, virtuous rule and dharma were turned against officials. In this way, opposition to British rule developed within what Bayly termed the ‘cocoon of loyalism’.18 Similarly, another recent historiographical intervention suggests that Crown rule helped to create the space for ‘imperial citizenship’, the means by which Indians could forge a hybrid identity as the queen’s subjects, aspiring through empire to gain the status and rights that were denied them because of their race. Entry into imperial institutions both in India and in Britain – the civil service, the universities, associational life, ultimately the Westminster Parliament itself – was successfully contested by Indians, behaving as both subjects and citizens of the Crown.19 Such reformulations of loyalty in the age of Empire as these might be applied more generally to India under Queen Victoria. The monarchy authorised ways of belonging to a wider imperial identity that transcended class, religion, nation and ethnicity.
Empress is a study of the impact of India upon Queen Victoria, and at the same time the influence of the queen over Indian political and cultural life. Victoria never visited India. Although she received a variety of Indians at court, for much of her reign India was lived in her imagination, stimulated by sources at home and on the subcontinent. She started out with the martial and evangelical prejudices of her age, wanting to conquer and convert India. That did not last. The Indian rebellion of 1857–8 changed her views completely, as it did for many Victorians – only that Queen Victoria moved in the opposite direction, becoming more sympathetic to India and its people, not less, and growing more tolerant and less instinctively racist than her fellow-Britons. By the 1880s, many of her court
iers at home and senior officials in India thought she had gone too far that way, instinctively taking the side of Indians in various disputes with the viceroys’ rule. In India, the queen was made known through different means. Now and then, the lead was taken by the Government of India, for example in the official visits to the Indian subcontinent by members of the queen’s own family. Missionaries did their best to inculcate the image of a Christian monarch. Mostly, however, the queen existed in the Indian imaginary in all its literary, religious, political and cultural forms. Indian people took hold of Queen Victoria and made her their own. By the end of her life she was as much an Indian maharani as a British monarch.
Three themes are interwoven throughout the chronological narrative of the book. Firstly, I emphasise the agency of the queen. I argue that when it comes to India Queen Victoria needs to be seen less as a constitutional monarch hedged in by protocol of the sort with which we are familiar nowadays, and more as a dynastic imperial ruler of the long eighteenth century. Historians have overemphasised the quiescence of Queen Victoria, unduly preoccupied with the symbolic role she played in the ‘propaganda of Empire’ that emerged in Britain from the 1870s. The actual voice of the queen is seldom heard in these studies of the ‘democratic royalism’ of the era.20 Queen Victoria has been silenced for too long. After all this was the Europe of her age and not ours. By the time the Government of India transferred from the East India Company to the Crown in 1858, most of Europe was ruled over by dynastic monarchs in ever-enlarging empires: the Romanovs in Russia, Louis Napoleon in France, Franz-Josef in Austria-Hungary, followed not long after by the Wilhelmine imperial monarchy of Germany. To these Continental empires were added overseas annexes: the Portuguese in Brazil, the French in Mexico (albeit briefly) and the Dutch in Indonesia. Only the Spanish colonial empire was in retreat. This was the heyday of viceregal rule; that is to say, a system of government in which the apparatus of European monarchy was applied to remote colonies and dependencies.21 Queen Victoria was an important part of this new more global monarchy of the nineteenth century. With her marriage to Prince Albert, alongside the existing Hanoverian connections of her own family, she became connected to many of the smaller Protestant courts of Europe, a sphere that widened down to her death as her own children and grandchildren were married into Continental royalty. Some of this dynastic influence is touched upon in older studies of the queen and foreign policy. In two cases – Ireland and Canada – the place of the Crown in colonial governance has been examined at length.22 In India her prerogative powers were even more extensive, the norms of parliamentary government applied less. As head of the Anglican church overseas, as titular head of the armed forces in India, and eventually as sovereign, in theory the queen had greater powers of patronage and control over India than anywhere else. India became an extension of her court. Men who began their careers as part of the royal entourage at home – for example, the 1st Marquess of Dalhousie, Charles Canning and Lord Dufferin – went on to assume command in India, taking their habits of intimate correspondence with the queen with them. A constant stream of traffic from the Raj also passed through the queen’s court: military officers, churchmen, civil servants, travellers, philanthropists and Indian royalty, bringing to the queen information and stories from India. It is not fashionable to suggest that there was a ‘court’ interest in nineteenth-century British politics.23 At times, however, in Indian affairs the queen behaved like a monarch of old, exploiting her own back-channels of communication, pushing for the promotion of her favourites, and leaning on politicians sympathetic to her views. Denied a political role at home, she found it instead in her Indian dominion.
Secondly, the book considers the uses to which the Government of India put the name and fame of the queen. In the aftermath of the Indian rebellion of 1857–8, the full apparatus of the Crown was rolled out as a means of pacification and reassurance. At the heart of this exercise lay a text: the queen’s proclamation of 1858. With its promises of clemency, toleration and equality, the proclamation was immediately dubbed the ‘Magna Carta’ of India, and went on to achieve a status almost as potent as that of the queen.24 That was not all. The name of the queen underpinned the law, finance and currency, the new Indian Civil Service and the newly amalgamated army. Here lay the roots of the ‘ideology of the Raj’, normally dissected by historians without any reference to the Crown. A notable exception is Bernard Cohn’s brilliant examination of the Imperial Assemblage of 1877.25 Cohn’s work apart, British royalty in India is seen as incidental, or ornamental to imperial authority, the gloss and not the substance of the Raj. This is only half the story. For instance, much has been written about how colonial rule in India after mid-century was Janus-faced: liberal and inclusive in theory, but authoritarian and racist in practice.26 Queen Victoria stood for this duality. Formally, she constituted colonial authority in India, giving sovereignty and legitimacy to the state, sanctioning the policies carried out in her name. At the same time, as a female monarch, she represented justice and charity. She was a beacon of beneficence in ways in which British bureaucracy in India could never be, either before 1858 or after. Abstract and remote, the fictive power of the queen both buttressed and softened the rule of colonial difference. There was no masterplan. Sometimes Indian officials and commentators spoke as though there was: how they had discovered the mystery of the lure of kingship in the east, an orientalised understanding of status and symbolism. For the most part, however, the usage of the queen by her officials was banal. Once the East India Company yielded power, sovereignty passed automatically to the Crown. The Government of India accordingly attached the queen to the nomenclature and motifs of the new regime. Little did they know what a runaway success she would be. In time it turned out that they had created a Frankenstein of the proclamation and the benevolent image of the queen that went with it. By the end of her reign officials dared not invoke the queen’s words of 1858, for fear of the expanded notions of liberty and citizenship that it set out. After her death, the Government of India went on putting out fires using the monarchy, but with diminishing returns, and with less reliance on the proclamation.
Thirdly, the book charts the diffusion of representations of Queen Victoria in Indian political culture. Not least because of the 1858 proclamation, the queen developed iconic status in India. Direct criticism of her was extremely rare. She largely escaped the satirical cartoonists’ pen, appearing only on occasion as a benign Britannia.27 There was no one version of the queen that dominated. Hindus might associate her with deliverance from Mughal rule, Muslims might see her as the champion of minority rights. She was seen to be on the side of economic modernity and liberal reform. After 1858 she represented the idea of the beneficent state, alert to the cries of the peasants and victims of famine. She was looked up to by the principal movements of religious reform in nineteenth-century India, amongst them the Brahmo Sumaj. But she also was a guiding light to Muslim educational reform for men such as Syed Ahmed Khan. Over time she came to be seen as the ally of Indian nationalism. Indeed, for the Indian National Congress, the monarch was their greatest weapon, not their fiercest foe. Above all, Queen Victoria’s identity as a woman, and particularly after 1861 as a widow, stimulated the idea of her as an exemplary female. Some of the ways in which the queen was drawn into the sexual politics of Empire are hinted at in classic scholarship on gender and the nation in colonial India, but they remain undeveloped.28 She was invoked in discussions about female education, widow status and marriage reform, about the zenana (the Indian convention of female seclusion), and in the campaigns for the caring professions. In all these ways, by the 1880s, the epithet of ‘mother of India’ began to be applied to Queen Victoria, around the same time that ‘mother India’ entered common parlance.29 She occupied an imaginary space, helping to define a national community, at no time more so than during her two jubilee years of 1887 and 1897, events that spanned the first decade or so of the Indian National Congress. After her death in 1901, it was as though Ind
ia awoke from a ‘strange hypnotism’, as the nationalist Bipin Chandra Pal described colonial rule.30 Her successors never had the same reputation in India as model monarchs. The Crown came to be seen as inseparable from the Government of India, and the wider system of British imperialism. By 1930 a rhetoric of republicanism had taken over: secular and socialist, with an Islamic counterpart. By the time of the last royal proclamation of June 1948, announcing the abolition of the imperial title, there was nothing left in India of the royal appeal or appeals to royalty. So nervous and tense were the British that India and Pakistan were almost the very last new members of the Commonwealth to host a royal visit. The mood had swung the other way.
The passage of time is a distorting mirror. India may now be the largest democratic republic in the world, but for ninety years it was the most extensive monarchical empire ever known, less populous than the India of today, but greater in its girth (including modern-day Pakistan, Bangladesh and from 1886 Burma). At the apex of the Raj for much of this time presided a diminutive white woman, ensconced in a retro-Gothic castle some 4,000 miles away. How Indian people, princes and queen first encountered each other, how they drew together and how they were forced apart, is recounted in the book that follows. It is a history of modern monarchy with the monarch restored to life. It is a case study of the imperial dimension to British politics and culture during the nineteenth century. Most of all it is a missing chapter in the story of the making of modern India.
CHAPTER 1
CROWN AND COMPANY
‘Her Majesty seems to take a deep interest in Indian Affairs and . . . is not ill-informed on the subject.’ So wrote John Hobhouse, president of the Board of Control to Lord Elphinstone, governor of Madras, shortly after Victoria came to the throne in 1837. The news was double edged. It was rumoured that Elphinstone, a courtier to William IV, had been exiled to India as the young princess had grown too fond of him.1 It was about as close a connection that Victoria had to India in the early years of her reign. For Victoria was a ‘Whig’ queen, tutored in the realities of constitutional monarchy by Lord Melbourne, the prime minister, and his Whig colleagues. They managed the choice of her husband, they supplied the staff of the royal household, and Lord Melbourne himself guided the eighteen-year-old queen through her first meetings of the Privy Council, initiating her in her new responsibilities in domestic and foreign policy.2 Not that there were too many of these. For Queen Victoria was also a ‘Whig’ queen in that she was the first new monarch of the era ushered in by the Whigs’ 1832 reform act, her crown prerogative substantially limited by the powers of Parliament and an expanded electorate keen to root out the excesses of royal rule which had dominated the later years of her Hanoverian predecessors.