by Miles Taylor
In the diplomatic relations with the kingdoms that surrounded India, and across the seas to imperial China, Queen Victoria thus became the fixed image of Britain as a colonial power around mid-century, displacing the Company Raj. In the Punjab, as the tussle over loot and medals shows, the emergence of the new royal symbolism was dramatic and publicly contested by Whig politicians back in Britain. Elsewhere, change was more subtle. When a British envoy was sent from Calcutta to Rangoon in 1855 to ratify the terms of the annexation of Pegu, the reclusive King of Ava, wanting to know who had sent him, asked him about the welfare of the ‘English ruler’. The king’s mouth was full of paan,64 so it was difficult for the envoy to follow exactly the words used, but he noted that the king chose an expression that could refer to either the queen or to the governor-general.65 Within a few years there would no longer be any ambiguity over who was really in charge.
CHAPTER 3
EXHIBITING INDIA
Maharaja Duleep Singh, the deposed heir to the Sikh kingdom, spent the summer of 1854 with the royal family, first at Buckingham Palace and then at Osborne House. A series of portraits survive as a record of these visits. In London Duleep Singh sat for Franz Winterhalter, with Queen Victoria looking on appreciatively, as a majestic full-length study in oils took shape. At Osborne, where Victoria and Albert enjoyed drawing and experimenting with the new medium of photography, he was sketched by the queen and he also posed for the camera for Ernst Becker, one of the children’s tutors. The royal family liked to dress up, and, during the maharaja’s stay, photographs were taken of Alfred and Arthur, the two younger princes, attired in Indian costume made specially for the occasion: a turban each, embroidered velvet kurta, pajama, slippers and pearls.1 Duleep Singh was an exhibit as much as he was a guest. These portraits carry all the hallmarks of orientalism – the distorting lens through which the western imagination has viewed Asian civilisation, romanticising its antiquity whilst at the same time asserting its backwardness in the face of European progress. It is tempting to explain away the royal family’s infatuation with Duleep Singh, and their interest in India more generally, as a facet of nineteenth-century orientalism, but there was both more and less to it than that. Victoria and Albert enjoyed a uniquely privileged vantage point from which to view Indian culture. They were surrounded at court by scholars, travellers and soldiers whose tales and researches helped form their knowledge of Britain’s eastern empire. The royal couple lent their patronage to museums and exhibitions that featured the arts and industry of India. Moreover, the court of Albert and Victoria increasingly became the destination for Indian princes and maharajas, and their agents, seeking redress from the Government of India. From such materials as these, Victoria and Albert developed their understanding of India and its history.
In the early 1850s, for the first time in Queen Victoria’s reign, the Indian subcontinent came home to Britain. One manifestation of this was the princely exiles. Duleep Singh was not the only Indian royal adopted at court. From the tiny southern Indian state of Coorg (Kodagu) came Princess Gouramma, and Queen Victoria also took up the cause of the last of Tipu Sultan’s sons, Prince Ghulam Mohammed. By far the biggest exposition of India, however, came in the 1851 Exhibition of All Nations at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. The ‘Indian court’ was one of the most memorable features of the show, so successful that it was repeated at a Dublin exhibition two years later, again at the 1862 International Exhibition of All Nations in Kensington and also inspired a wave of new museums in India. The presiding genius behind the 1851 exhibition was Prince Albert. This chapter begins by looking at India through Prince Albert’s gaze, before turning to the 1851 exhibition, and then finally the story of the royal family’s encounter with Duleep Singh and Princess Gouramma.
Prince Albert and India
Prince Albert’s knowledge of India was rooted in a German, as much as an English, tradition. With the encouragement of Baron Bunsen, the Prussian ambassador to London, German scholars steered Albert’s interest in art and architecture.2 This was no less true of his Indian studies. At university in Bonn he encountered leading Indologists, particularly August Wilhelm Schlegel, whose work on the common origin of western and eastern languages inspired a generation. Albert went on to give support to German Sanskrit scholars who came to England, notably Bunsen’s protégé, Max Müller, and later in the 1850s Georg Bühler and Theodor Goldstrücker, both of whom who advised him on his book collecting and on the organisation of his library.3 Albert’s personal library reveals much about the German flavour of his understanding of Indian culture. Some eighty titles relating to India, published between the 1830s and late 1850s, are collected there. German scholarship and travel literature are conspicuous. German, especially Prussian, military acumen was in demand amongst Indian states for help with training native armies, and the dynastic connections of the smaller German duchies via the house of Coburg with the queen meant that restrictions on their travel in India were usually lifted. A series of military officers and curious aristocratic and royal travellers created a genre of German language expertise on India in the 1830s and 1840s. Leading the way was Charles von Hügel, a Bavarian who served in the Austrian army and wrote a bestseller about his travels to the Punjab and Kashmir in the early 1830s. He passed through London in 1845, dining with the royal couple on several occasions.4 Another chronicler of the Sikhs was Leopold von Orlich, whose memoir was also published in 1845, as was Henry Steinbach’s (an English officer of Prussian origin) account of the Punjab. Orlich settled in London after 1848, where he worked on a large history of British India, unfinished on his death in 1860.5 Finally, and closest to the royal family, there was Prince Waldemar, the second son of the Crown Prince of Prussia, who witnessed the first Sikh war, and whose sketches and narratives of his travels were published in German in the mid-1850s. Waldemar visited the court in July 1847, and joined the royal entourage (including Baron Bunsen) that visited Cambridge that month for the installation of Albert as Chancellor of the university.6
German scholarship on India, such as this, differed from its English equivalent in a number of ways. It was less interested in the history of the East India Company, and it was not as preoccupied as the English evangelicals with conversion to Christianity. There was a fascination with and respect for the martial traditions of the Sikhs. There was sympathy for their religion, dating as it did from around the same time as the European reformation. German scholars saw Sikhism as fusing together the Hindu and Islamic traditions. Like Protestant Christianity, Sikhism was based on a single book – the Granth – and on worship of one god. German commentators saw Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, as a man who had renounced worldly goods, and committed himself to a life of contemplation and pilgrimage. Nanak’s descendants were respected for taking up arms to defend their religion. It was a narrative history that was shaped not least by the eye of the beholder: small German Protestant princely houses, hedged in by more powerful states and rubbing against the southern Catholic underbelly of Germany.
Albert also took an interest in another branch of German scholarship on India, one that was not confined to German scholars, but in which they led the way. This was Aryanism, not the twentieth-century variety made infamous by Nazi ideology, but a set of philological studies emergent around the 1830s that identified a common point of origin for the languages of both east and west, and in particular looked to the Sanskrit texts of ancient Hindu culture for evidence. The principal Sanskrit practitioner in England was Horace Wilson, holder of the Boden chair of Sanskrit at Oxford University. His patronage and that of Baron Bunsen and Albert helped introduce a range of German Sanskrit scholars into Britain. Foremost amongst them was Max Müller, who came for a brief visit in 1846, sponsored by the East India Company, and ended up staying for a lifetime, securing an academic post in Oxford.7 Most of his early years in Britain were spent translating into German the Rig Veda, one of the four books of the Hindu Vedas. In the 1850s Müller became more of a public figure, advocating the in
troduction of Sanskrit and other oriental languages to the curricula of the East India Company colleges, so that Company men could better understand the peoples of northern India. In 1857 Müller became a candidate for the Boden chair at Oxford as Wilson’s successor, an appointment that required the holder of the post to be an Anglican. The election to the chair was dominated by the evangelical desire to link Sanskrit study to the work of missionaries in India. Müller’s rival Monier Monier-Williams saw Sanskrit as the means to undermine the oral culture of popular Hinduism. His strident arguments, likening the influence of Indian Brahmins to the Catholic priesthood, and his campaigning methods ended up defeating Müller’s bid for the professorship.8 Whilst there is no evidence that Albert took any interest in the election – it was not his university after all – two of his pronouncements in the decade suggest he subscribed to Müller’s gentler brand of Aryanism. His comments at the jubilee meeting of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in 1850, discussed in chapter one, and later in the decade his design for the insignia for the new ‘Star of India’ order of chivalry (described in the next chapter), indicate that he believed in a common origin for Indo-European civilisation. For her part Victoria did not catch up with Müller until the 1860s. In 1864 he gave a lecture on the languages of India at Windsor Castle, and she noted down his argument about the linguistic links between east and west. More poignantly, she observed how his voice reminded her of Albert’s. Whilst Monier-Williams enjoyed the patronage of the Prince of Wales in the 1880s, Müller kept in regular correspondence with the queen, sending each successive volume of the translation of the Vedas, unperturbed by the royal reply that she was unlikely to read them. In 1887, as part of the queen’s jubilee celebrations, he did provide the Sanskrit inscription for the memorial to Albert erected in Windsor Park in 1887.9
Albert viewed India as a prince as well as an armchair scholar. He took pride in his small royal house, the Coburgs, that could date its existence back to the Holy Roman Empire, and enjoyed a remarkable network of connections through marriage to the principal monarchies of Europe.10 At Bonn, his history and law teachers were disciples of Friedrich Karl von Savigny, the historical jurist who had shown the links between the customary laws of the smaller states of the later Holy Roman Empire and the original Roman law, a marked difference of emphasis from those who rooted the origin of modern sovereignty in the changing map of Europe after 1648: that is to say the growth of the centralised Bourbon monarchy and its modern descendant, revolutionary and Napoleonic France.11 During the German revolution of 1848–9 Albert fell in behind his brother Ernst in supporting the Prussian king’s plan for a confederation of princely states operating under the leadership of the Prussian monarchy, as a middle way alternative to the status quo of the Austrian-led Bund, and a republic of nationalities advocated by the Frankfurt parliament.12 In Germany, the chamber of princes ideal came to nothing, but the seed of an idea was sown. By the end of the decade, Albert was turning closer to home, to the British Empire, as a theatre for princely influence. In 1860 he spoke proudly of two colonial tours being taken simultaneously by his two eldest sons, of the:
curious coincidence, that nearly at the same time . . . though almost at the opposite poles, the Prince of Wales will inaugurate, in the Queen’s name, that stupendous work the great bridge over the St Lawrence in Canada, while Prince Alfred will lay the foundation stone of the breakwater for the harbour of Cape Town.13
The colonies, and later India, might provide a vocation for his sons. In other words, Albert’s understanding of India was not an adjunct to Victoria’s. He shared some of her instinctive evangelicalism and was as covetous of military success in the 1840s as she was. He also encouraged her to think of the Indian empire – and the colonies more generally – as a family enterprise. But Albert’s views were also rooted in German scholarship of the period and in the revival of orientalist studies in Britain, a body of work that drew affinities between European and Indian culture.
India on Display
As president of the Royal Society of Arts, Prince Albert was the genius behind the most extensive display of Indian culture ever seen in Britain: the Indian court at the 1851 ‘Exhibition of All Nations’ at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. The Indian exhibits ranged from priceless ornaments such as the Koh-i-Noor diamond of Lahore and the ivory state chair from Travancore to machinery, metal, ceramic and textile handicrafts, weaponry and raw produce. Prince Albert played his part. He encouraged the Royal Society of Arts in 1849 to include works from the colonies in its annual exhibitions. He also tried to secure expert Indian knowledge to assist, inviting the veteran Indian administrator and historian, Mountstuart Elphinstone onto the Exhibition Commission, but they had to make do instead with the chairman of the East India Company.14
The Indian court was one of the stars of the show in 1851. Three weeks after its opening The Times observed that ‘the tide of spectators sets eastward [towards the Indian and foreign sections] with a far stronger current than towards the rest’, and as the exhibition entered its final month, the paper concluded that ‘the Indian collection is not only the most attractive, but the most instructive display’ of all.15 India took up more space at the Crystal Palace than all the other British colonies combined. Only the United Kingdom, Austria, Belgium, France, the states of the German Zollverein and the USA had a larger exhibition footprint than India, and only the UK and France displayed wares that were more valuable. There were so many consignments of exhibits from India that the East India Company had to clear two floors in its warehouse to store them all.16 The centre of attention was the Koh-i-Noor diamond, its lustre only outshone by the glass of the Palace itself. Case after case featured other jewellery (some misleadingly classified under mining and minerals), carpets, shawls and furniture, machinery and tools, musical instruments, and weaponry, both ornamental and practical (the latter included in the ‘naval architecture and military engineering’ section).17 The Indian court was a triumph over expectation. Early previews of the Indian exhibits had drawn a distinction between India’s glorious past as represented in its gems and guns, and a lethargic present comprising a land fecund with raw materials and resources but without the industrial know-how to develop them. By the close of the exhibition, the ingenuity and vibrancy of Indian crafts and design had won over many commentators.18
Indian princes and chiefs played a significant part in gathering goods for despatch to the Exhibition. Without their participation many of the exhibits that grabbed the headlines would not have featured at all. The ivory state chair from Travancore, the howdah from the Nawab Nizam of Bengal, shawls, scarves and carpets from Kashmir, a model of one of the largest diamonds in the world from Hyderabad, bedsteads from Benares, silks from Nagpur, leather from Cutch, cloths from Lucknow, ivory from Jodhpur and Nepal, and swords, daggers, axes and pistols from almost everywhere – all of these were ordered specially for the exhibition by the princes, not the Company resident.19 Commissioned from local handicraft workers deploying traditional skills and styles, and using local materials, these manufactures all satisfied the exhibition’s requirement for examples of industrial arts peculiar to the region. However, they were luxury goods, fashioned for the princely courts. Indeed, they were fit for a queen. Several of the princes made it clear that these were gifts for Queen Victoria. The Raja of Travancore sent the ivory state chair overland to Madras and thence to London, stipulating that it was a contribution to the exhibition, but also a ‘slight token of my profound respect for your Majesty’s exalted person’, a ‘friendly but humble tribute’ from a faithful ally and dependent.20 Similarly, the Nawab Nizam of Bengal insisted that the howdah was a present for the queen. Somewhat reluctantly, the President of the Board of Control and the East India Company relaxed the rules on this occasion and allowed the Nawab’s present through, and agreed that letters of acknowledgment should be signed by the queen and sent directly to the two Indian princes.21 The examples might be multiplied. Despite the superior quality of much of th
is finery, the Indian princes’ submissions were not considered for exhibition awards by the prize juries. However, twenty-five Indian princes were singled out and given Exhibition medals (nine of them received a presentation catalogue from the Company as well), in recognition of their contributions.22
Victoria, Albert and their children made many visits to the exhibition after its official opening on 1 May. On 16 July, they were guided around the Indian court by Dr J. Forbes Royle, one of the men responsible for assembling the wares on show there. Victoria wrote it up in her journal afterwards: ‘[the Indian section] is of immense interest, & quite something new for the generality of people, these . . . articles having hitherto, only come over as presents to the Sovereign’.23 This observation suggests that Queen Victoria was sharing her India with the nation. The exhibition exposed to the public a version of Indian civilisation and culture confined until then to the private view of the monarch. Moreover, her comments imply that she was lifting the lid on royalty, inviting the public in to gaze upon the instruments and tokens of high diplomacy, of which they normally knew nothing. Displayed to show the variety of Indian products, arts and manufactures, there was no disguising their original provenance as gifts: symbols of homage intended for the queen.
So successful was the Indian court in 1851 that the Royal Society of Arts combined forces with the East India Company to plan a much larger ‘Exhibition of the Arts and Manufactures of India’ to be held in London in the spring of 1853. The follow-up event was intended in particular to furnish information about the prices of Indian wares, and their costs of production, details that had been missing from the Crystal Palace show. The East India Company promised to supply illustrations of suitable items for the new exhibition and instructions were again sent out to India for the collection of exhibits. However, the project floundered. No one could be found to back the exhibition, nor could a large enough venue be secured. Little support was forthcoming from India either. Alexander Hunter, from the Madras School of Art, spoke for many when he pointed out that too few inducements were being offered to exhibitors from India, with none of their transport costs covered. Finally, in the autumn of 1852, plans for the London exhibition were dropped, and, with the approval of Prince Albert, who helped select a few items from Windsor, it was diverted to Dublin, where a meagre 100 square feet was found within the ‘Great Industrial Exhibition’ of May 1853. The Society halted the call for produce from India, hastily brought in Japanese exhibits from the royal collections in The Hague – Queen Sophie of the Netherlands was Victoria’s cousin – and relied on the East India Company, Buckingham Palace and the Royal Asiatic Society for the rest. Consequently, Indian produce again ran second best to gems and guns, with ornamental weaponry dominating the show, including the ‘Gough compartment’, a miscellany of loot taken by the former commander in China and India. A hint of India’s economic future was displayed: a relief map showing the subcontinent’s principal rivers and railways.24 Albert and Victoria dutifully made their way to Dublin to view the exhibition, but made no comment on the Indian artefacts on display, which their intervention had helped to salvage.