Empress

by Miles Taylor

  CHAPTER 6

  QUEEN OF PUBLIC WORKS

  ‘It is Our earnest Desire’, declared the queen’s proclamation of 1858, ‘to stimulate the peaceful Industry of India’ and ‘to promote Works of Public Utility and Improvement’. Just as the transfer of power from Company to Crown signalled the advent of a new style of government in India under a just monarch, so too were expectations raised about the material progress of the Indian people under a beneficent queen. Enlightened rule would produce economic advancement, or, as the tireless colonial statistician Robert Montgomery Martin put it in 1862, capturing the heady optimism in London of the immediate aftermath of the proclamation, ‘[e]very year of tranquillity and good government in India . . . [gives] . . . scope to unfettered enterprise and capital’.1 In the 1860s and 1870s, Queen Victoria came to symbolise British intervention in the Indian economy. She was seen as the agent of modernity as India’s railway network expanded, its major waterways became canalised and its communications revolutionised by telegraph and by rapid steamship travel. She adorned the entrance to one of the country’s first cotton mills in Nagpur – Jamsetji Tata’s ‘Empress Mills’ – and she was written into the stonework of the new Gothic-style buildings of India’s boom city of the period, Bombay.

  Inevitably, by the time of her diamond jubilee almost forty years later, the state of the Indian economy under Crown rule gave little cause for self-congratulation. The resources of India had been exploited by the British much as they were previously in the days of the East India Company, only now on a grander scale. Government-backed investment in the railways drove Indian capital out of the country and into the London stock exchange. Native Indian industry was strangled at birth by the lack of protective tariffs. The oft-repeated promise that the financial burdens of India would never be visited on the English taxpayer left Indians paying for British ‘foreign policy’ in India (wars against Afghanistan (1878–80), Burma (1885–6) and other territories on the Indian frontier, the invasion of Abyssinia (1868) and the occupation of Egypt (1882)), as well as the costs of viceregal government in India itself. After 1858 there were new taxes imposed on the urban middling classes – principally the income and stamp taxes – and old taxes hiked up for the poor peasant cultivator – most onerously, the salt tax. Above all, British administration of the Indian economy proved helpless at best and directly culpable at worst during successive famines in the Punjab, in Bihar and Orissa, and Rajputana in the 1860s through to the central and southern Indian catastrophe of 1876–7 and on to the nationwide famine of 1897. Between them these famines resulted in around 15 million deaths. This British ‘drain’ on the Indian economy – of lives and incomes – became a standard weapon in the armoury of Indian nationalists from the 1880s onwards, and remains a compelling indictment of the policies of the Raj down to this day.2

  Curiously, Queen Victoria escaped censure in this damning critique. She remained associated with all the trappings of ‘civilisation’ brought by the British to India after 1858, and none of the curses. Economic nationalists such as the Bombay Parsi, Dadabhai Naoroji, who coined the ‘drain’ theory and who was one of the first Indian MPs in the British Parliament, and Romesh Chandra Dutt, the Bengali civil servant, translator and historian, both excluded her from their catalogue of complaints. Likewise, one of the principal British opponents of the policies of the Raj, William Wedderburn MP, could write in 1897 of the ‘skeleton at the jubilee feast’ – juxtaposing famine and the royal celebrations – without even mentioning the queen.3 How was this possible? This chapter opens by describing the ways in which Queen Victoria became synonymous with the application of British and indigenous capital and enterprise to India after 1858, before turning to examine how her reputation for sympathy for the plight of the Indian people developed during the famines down to the end of her reign. Finally, the analysis turns to look at how the queen emerged as a symbol of paternalism amidst economic protest in India, a rhetoric driven not least by evangelical reformers and missionaries.

  The Age of Improvement

  God and the queen were essential elements in the British rhetoric of economic progress in India after 1858. The older providential language of military subjugation and religious conversion was recast as a new mission to modernise the country’s infrastructure. Iron, steel and brick would go where the Bible could not and without recourse to the sword. Railways were rolled out – just under 5,000 miles of track by 1871 – and the great rivers of northern India adapted for transport and irrigation.4 Viceroys enthused over the transformation. Looking out at the worshippers on the river Ganges at Haridwar in 1863, Lord Elgin (Viceroy of India, 1862–3) noted that it was ‘curious to see the old Faith, washing itself in the sacred waters of the Ganges, and the new faith, symbolised in the magnificent works of the Ganges canal’. Seven years later, Lord Mayo (viceroy, 1869–72) described to the Rajputana chiefs assembled at Ajmer how:

  [h]ourly is this great empire brought nearer and nearer to the throne of our Queen. The steam-vessel and the railroad enable England, year by year, to enfold India in a closer embrace. But the coils she seeks to entwine around her are no iron fetters [for] [t]he days of conquest are past; the age of improvement has begun.5

  Officials invoked Queen Victoria in this technological transformation of the Indian empire, especially in the expanding web of railways. From its commencement in the 1840s, railway development in India had been promoted as the arm of Christian evangelism, a ‘true religion’ combining the arts and sciences, with improved locomotion the key to spreading the ‘truth of God’s word’. The official opening of the first major line between Burdwan (Bardhaman) and Calcutta in 1855 was preceded by a long religious service conducted by the Bishop of Calcutta, with illustrative readings taken from the Old Testament and blessings offered to the East India Company and to the governor-general.6 After 1858, this same Anglican ceremony recurred as more lines were unveiled, only this time with the queen rather than the Company being blessed. At Lahore in 1858, before a gathering of 200 Punjabi chiefs at the opening of the Punjab railway, the Government of India held a Christian service to mark the event, where the queen was toasted as the ‘Empress of Hindustan’.7 During the years of rebellion and its aftermath, the railways were turned over to military requirements and later in the 1870s and 1880s to famine-relief projects. Only later in the century did they become predominantly passenger railways.8 But, whatever their purpose, the opening of each new line and junction was the occasion for either or both church and monarch to grace the proceedings, albeit in name only, and give it their seal of approval. Elgin held a durbar for local maharajahs, alluding to the queen, at the commencement of the Benares–Jabalpur line in February 1863. Sir John Lawrence (viceroy 1864–9) organised a similar gathering as the Calcutta line connected to Lahore via Amritsar in October 1864. He also sent on photographs of the new railway station at Lahore to the queen as well.9 As late as 1878, when the novelty of the railways had begun to wear off, the same sacred service with the same invocations of the queen was performed by the Bishop of Lahore at the opening of the ‘Empress Bridge’ across the Sutlej at Bahawalpur.10

  Railways were not the only new technology associated with the queen’s name. For a time during the 1840s and 1850s rivers and canals vied with the railway as the best choice for India’s economic future. Projects such as the Ganges canal, opened at Roorkee in 1854, received the same Anglican baptism as their railway counterparts. As the canal was extended in the later 1850s and 1860s, its new features received the royal appellation: the ‘Queen’s channel’ at the Solani aqueduct, the structure guarded by four stone lions, and the ‘Victoria feeder’, a channel cut to link the Ganges canal to the Yamuna river at Allahabad.11 Similarly, the queen was an unwitting champion of advances in steamship links to the west and east of the Indian subcontinent. The East India Company had been reluctant to develop steamship navigation. So promoters and commercial companies looked instead to the monarch for endorsement, as they pursued lucrative mail contracts and
passenger lines. A royal charter was given to the Peninsular and Oriental Company in 1840 and to the India and Australian Mail Steam Packet Company in 1847.12 The greatest fillip of all was given to steamship connections between Britain and India when the Suez Canal opened in 1869, and it too came with royal approval. The Prince and Princess of Wales visited the completed project in March 1870, shortly after it was officially inaugurated, opening the sluices of one of the feeder canals.13 The first steamship India-bound to use the new route followed in 1872. Once Benjamin Disraeli had flamboyantly bought the Egyptian Khedive’s shares in the canal in the queen’s name in 1875, the canal was incorporated into the imperial Indian mindscape. Queen Victoria was delighted: it ‘gives us complete security for India’, she confided to her journal.14 Steamship business to and from India – passengers, mail, troops and goods – multiplied, and the shipping companies branded their vessels accordingly. The P&O, for example, launched the Kaisar-i-Hind in 1878, and the Victoria in 1887, both Bombay-bound through the Suez Canal on their maiden voyages.15 Although she never travelled so far east, the queen was there in spirit in the passage to India.

  New technologies also brought Queen Victoria’s own words closer to her Indian dominion. The expansion of the telegraph system within India was initially slow, confined as it was to the main railway routes. But as the means of instant communication across seas and land between Calcutta or Simla (increasingly, from the 1860s, the summer retreat for the viceroy and his government) and London, it was irreplaceable.16 The first formal address made by the queen to the people of India via telegram followed the recovery of the Prince of Wales from illness in January 1872, and it was followed almost immediately by another address lamenting the assassination of Lord Mayo. Further telegraphic messages from the queen to the viceroy were promptly published in the newspapers during the second Afghan war.17 Whilst the telegram format did not allow much to be said, it did mean it could be said quickly. During the queen’s jubilees of 1887 and 1897, as hundreds of loyal telegrams came in from India, the Palace responded speedily with almost instant messages of gratitude sent back telegraphically by way of the viceroy.

  Railways, steamships, the telegraph and above all the Suez Canal shifted the axis of British India from east to west, from Calcutta to Bombay. Bombay grew exponentially after 1850, perhaps the first example of an ‘Asian tiger’ metropolis, the largest city of Britain’s overseas territories.18 Bombay’s commercial development coincided with the transfer of power from Company to Crown. The city famously became the site for an ambitious rebuilding of its civic centre in Victorian Gothic style, then in vogue back in Britain, especially in church design. No other city in India proved such an attractive playground for English architects and civil engineers of the Gothic revival. The story of the distinctive architecture of nineteenth-century Bombay is well documented, especially from the British side: the dirigisme of Henry Bartle Frere, the governor, the elastic budgeting of Arthur Crawford, the municipal commissioner, and the pattern books of English designers such as Henry Conybeare and George Gilbert Scott.19 Invariably, however, accounts of Bombay’s Victorian Gothic leave out the eponymous queen. Closer inspection reveals how Queen Victoria herself shaped from afar the style that bore her name.

  The physical redevelopment of Bombay owed much to the loyalty to the British Crown of the predominantly Parsi, Jewish and Brahmin mercantile community of the city. They owned or bought up land in Colaba, in Back Bay and around the old harbour and fort and donated it to the city for public purposes. Two generations of the Parsi merchant house of the Jejeebhoys – Jamsetjee (1783–1859) and Cursetjee (1811–77) – along with other Parsi businessmen such as the Framji Cowasji (1761–1851), Cowasji Jehangir Readymoney (1812–78) and Dinshaw Petit (1823–1901), poured money into the city. They funded schools, hospitals, housing for the poor, drinking fountains, waterworks, veterinary care and the new University of Bombay.20 This was classic philanthropy, turning private gain into public virtue, opium into opulence. It was also conspicuous patriotism. Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy was an attentive admirer of the British royal family. With the Brahmin magnate, Jaganath Shunkerseth, he put up the capital for the Victoria Museum and Gardens, which opened in 1862, a monument to the new Crown government. One of the museum’s supporters was Bhau Daji Lad, a local doctor and educationist, who stated that there was ‘no fitter monument, no better nuzzar’ than the museum; it was a ‘permanent monument of the devotion of the people’ to the queen. Jejeebhoy’s patriotism was rewarded. He was made a baronet a year before he died, having been the first Indian to be knighted in 1841.21 His son, Cursetjee, along with Shunkerseth, led the city’s celebrations of the transfer of power in 1858.22 Framji Cowasji’s loyalty was more entrepreneurial. A keen horticulturist, in 1838 he sent the first mangoes to Britain via steamship, as a gift to the queen.23 In Bombay, Cowasji Jehangir Readymoney, living up to his name, invested in the Back Bay reclamation, Elphinstone College and the Crawford Market, whilst back in Britain he funded a drinking fountain in Regent’s Park and contributed to the ‘Albert Orphan Asylum’ in Bagshot, near Windsor.24 And Dinshaw Petit endowed the Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute in 1887.25

  Another loyal Victorian and Bombay philanthropist was David Sassoon, a Jewish merchant from Baghdad, who came to Bombay in the early 1830s, fleeing persecution. Like his Parsi neighbours he gave over land to the city’s development, especially around the docks that to this day bear his name. He also founded various institutions, most notably the Mechanics Institute and the Industrial and Reformatory Institution. He paid for the clock tower in the Victoria Gardens. When Prince Albert died, and the new museum became the Victoria and Albert Museum, it was David Sassoon who in 1864 dedicated the pedestal for a statue of the Prince Consort in the museum. His son Albert Sassoon then commissioned the full statue of Prince Albert for the Museum (unveiled in 1869) and gave two further lump sums to the Reformatory Institution. One donation commemorated the visit by the Duke of Edinburgh to the city; the other marked the recovery of the Prince of Wales from illness. Albert Sassoon also commissioned an equestrian statue of the Prince of Wales, after his visit to the city, eventually erected in 1879.26

  With the statue of Queen Victoria (unveiled in 1872) at one end of the Esplanade Road and the Prince of Wales at the other, the royal family framed the new city centre. Perhaps this imperial loyalty of the Parsis and Jews of Bombay was sui generis. It might be wrong to extrapolate from it a more widespread enthusiasm for the British monarchy. As religious minorities and ethnic outsiders under the nominal protection of the Crown, families like the Jejeebhoys and Sassoons had more reason than most to be faithful. At the same time, there were plenty of other philanthropists in Bombay, such as the Brahmins Shunkherseth and Bhau Daji Lad, whose patriotism was just as enthusiastic. However their allegiance is interpreted, the magnitude of their gratitude in the built environment of Bombay is striking, and was made known to the queen, not least through a volume presented to her in 1886.27

  Gothic may not have looked very modern, but it was emphatically monarchical. In an age of industry and republican democracy the Gothic style was a romantic return to the late middle ages when kings and clerics ran the show. For the first industrial city of the empire, Gothic was an entirely appropriate form for Bombay. Ornate steeples and campanili softened the effect of factory chimneys, churchlike public buildings imposed solemnity on municipal gatherings. So, once the loyal businessmen of Bombay had sown the seeds for the redevelopment of the city, incurring risk where other capitalists were reluctant to go, the government took over. Steered by Bartle Frere and benefiting from one of the largest public share issues ever known outside Britain, the rest of the new city centre took shape in the 1860s and 1870s. The old ramparts around the Fort were cleared and, in the space created across from the Esplanade, a series of government buildings went up: the High Court, the Mint, the Secretariat, the Telegraph Office and the University. The Port Trust took over further reclamation schemes, and new docks were added in the 1
870s and 1880s: the ‘Prince’s Dock’ and ‘Victoria Dock’. The queen featured prominently in the new buildings. The letters ‘V. R.’were inlaid in the entrance to the High Court and the University’s clock tower chimed out ‘God save the Queen’ on weekdays.28 Then in 1878 work began on perhaps the most grandiose building to be named after Queen Victoria during her lifetime – the Victoria Central Terminus, the new home of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway. Designed by Frederick William Stevens and opened ten years later, the ‘VCT’ symbolised both the predominance of Bombay as a railway hub and the modernity of the monarch. With its stained glass, glazed tiles, multiple spires, arched window openings and doorways, and central dome, the ‘VCT’ might have been mistaken for an overgrown basilica. Yet it was state of the art in its own way. The vaulted dome was a marvel of modern engineering, the train platforms and sheds amongst the longest in the world at that time. Electric light ran throughout the building. There was a restaurant too, although the owner stuck to his temperance principles for the first two years of business. The ‘VCT’ was, according to the newspapers, one of the ‘best modern buildings in India’. The queen was there too. The dome was topped with a female colossus symbolising ‘progress’. Beneath the dome was a smaller statue of the queen.29 Starting with the tour of Prince Albert Victor in 1889 and through until the opening of the Gateway to India in 1924, the ‘VCT’ now became the ceremonial starting point for all royal and viceregal arrivals. Thus, Bombay modern, in its late nineteenth-century version, ‘belonged unmistakeably to Queen Victoria’s world’, as Asa Briggs observed in his classic Victorian Cities.30 Likewise Queen Victoria belonged to Bombay, not simply as a required feature of the city’s colonial iconography, but as a celebration of its social and economic progress.