by Miles Taylor
Except that she had a rival: her own son. To boast of its rapid success and transformation, the city Corporation planned a major international exhibition for 1885. Jules Joubert, a French Australian who had masterminded the Calcutta Exhibition of 1883, offered to manage the spectacle, and the governor of Bombay, Sir James Fergusson, gave his approval. Then fate, or rather, the Prince of Wales, stepped in, announcing his own plans to emulate his father and act as patron of an ‘Imperial and Colonial Exhibition’ to be held in London in 1886. Bombay might seek to trump Calcutta, but there was no way the city could rival a royal project in London, especially when it was rumoured that the prince was ‘put out’ by the prospect of a similar event in Bombay. Plans for the city’s own extravaganza were shelved, and many of the exhibits intended for showcasing Bombay in India were appropriated instead for an English audience at home.31 It was a snub, and a right royal one too.
Famine Queen
Poverty sat alongside ‘progress’. The first two decades of the queen’s direct rule saw some of the worst recorded outbreaks ever of famine in India. In the 1860s there were three major famines: in the Doab region of the Punjab, spilling over into Awadh and Rajputana in 1860, in Orissa and Bihar in 1865–6, and in the Rajputana states in 1868–70. Drought and crop failure were compounded by British refusal to interfere in the market, allowing exports out of the affected areas to continue, and providing little in the way of relief until it was too late. Despite the recent ‘great famine’ in Ireland and, moreover, the Irish experience of some Indian administrators, lessons had not been learned.32 For some Indian experts, this hands-off policy amounted to a missed opportunity to effect some good for the people of India. There were precedents, after all. Responding to the Orissa famine, retired Madras army colonel George Thomas Haly noted how the Mughal government had dealt with such catastrophes in its day by improving systems of irrigation and communication to head off further calamity. Arthur Cotton, champion of the canalisation of India, told the Social Science Congress meeting in Manchester that the Orissa famine was the moment for a ‘wise, sympathising, capable Government’ to show itself to the Indian people: ‘If, when this harvest failed, Her Majesty had issued a proclamation, assuring the people that the Government were caring for them . . . it would never have been forgotten.’33 The queen had been deployed on famine duty before. The Whig government of the late 1840s had sent her to Ireland to smooth over the discontent rife there following the famine. When famine conditions temporarily hit Lancashire in the early 1860s, Queen Victoria made a very public contribution of £2,000 as Duchess of Lancaster to the relief fund set up in London to ameliorate the condition of the cotton-factory workers.34 Might the same gestures work for India? The Raja of Travancore had reached into his own pocket to support the starving in Lancashire in 1863.35 A reciprocal act was overdue. In March 1868, at her private secretary’s suggestion, Queen Victoria asked Stafford Northcote, the secretary of state for India, whether it might be made known to ‘these poor People, how her heart bleeds for them, & how deeply she sympathises with them under such unparalleled sufferings’. Northcote welcomed the idea, but considered it too late in the day, some two years after the famine had hit.36 However, when famine conditions returned six years later, this time in Bengal, the queen’s intervention was better timed.
In 1874 the second major famine within a decade to strike Bihar, in the north-western corner of Bengal, was dealt with very differently from almost all of the other famines in British India in this period. When the first reports of crop failure were circulated, pre-emptive plans were made by Lord Northbrook, the viceroy, and Sir Richard Temple, lieutenant-governor of Bengal, both to buy in sufficient grain from Burma and also to employ thousands of relief workers to help with distribution.37 Back in Britain, Disraeli, the new prime minister, singled out in the queen’s speech on the opening of Parliament dealing with the Indian famine as a priority of his government. A relief fund was launched by the Lord Mayor of London, with the queen as patron, around the same time as one was organised in Calcutta. It was to this latter fund that the queen contributed 10,000 rupees (around £1,000) in January 1874, a donation that was publicised in the newspapers the following month. In all the relief subscriptions totalled £131,000 in India, and £146,000 in London, with the Government of India matching the combined sum. They were applauded as model schemes of intervention in food crises. The combination of foresight, extraordinary expenditure and voluntary aid from near and far helped to avert a second Bengal disaster in 1874. Later in the year, as the British Parliament was prorogued, Lord George Hamilton, the under-secretary of state for India, lauded the work of Northbrook and Temple, who had defied ‘Political Economy’ and saved ‘Her Majesty’s subjects’ from death by starvation.38
Small though it was, the queen’s donation to the Calcutta relief fund at the beginning of 1874 enhanced her reputation for generosity, amongst Bengalis in particular. Later in the year a deputation from the British India Association of Calcutta – the principal lobby for the presidency’s landowners – thanked Northbrook and Temple for their actions: ‘the first time in the history of British rule in the East that the State recognised its duty to maintain its suffering subjects at a time of general scarcity’ they declared, going on to say that it is ‘observable that this policy of Your Excellency’s Government has been in conformity not only with Indian notions of a Sovereign’s duty to his subjects, transmitted from historic times both Hindu and Mahomedan, but with the highest teaching of modern political economy’. The largest landowner of all in the state, Metab Chand, the Maharaja of Burdwan, turned his appreciation into raising funds for a statue of the queen, the first in Bengal, eventually unveiled in Calcutta in 1878. And, from Mithila in the north of Bihar, Northbrook sent on a translation of a song for the ‘Great Queen of London’, praising her resolution that ‘no ryot should be allowed to die for want of grain’.39 The actual amount of royal support mattered less than the spirit in which it was given.
Catastrophic hunger and death returned to India within a few years, and this time in the fuller glare of the European media. The famine of 1876–8 began on the Deccan plateau of south-central India and spread to most of the south of the subcontinent, with outbreaks in pockets of the north as well. Disraeli’s government again promised to do all in its power to help, pledging in the queen’s speech that ‘every resource will be employed not merely in arrest of this present famine, but in obtaining fresh experience for the prevention or mitigation of such visitations for the future’. Not quite every resource. In the new year of 1877, Lord Lytton, presiding over the Imperial Assemblage at Delhi, held an emergency council that decided to send Sir Richard Temple south to Madras to oversee the relief operation. On this occasion Temple’s watchword was parsimony. Rigorous tests were brought in to determine and limit who was to be given relief, daily supplements were reduced from previous levels, and there were no attempts to bring in emergency supplies of grain. Strikes amongst relief workers ensued in Bombay and Temple’s own colleagues protested against the severity of the measures being taken.40 From London Queen Victoria watched on, no longer simply reliant on despatches from India for news of conditions there. This latest famine was better covered in the press than any previous. Temple’s critics disseminated their dissent in lectures, pamphlets and magazines. Florence Nightingale joined the fray. The illustrated Graphic newspaper, which specialised in realist depiction of poverty in Britain, now found a subject of equal challenge in India. The Pall Mall Gazette, a pioneer of investigative journalism, despatched Henry Hyndman to cover the crisis. For Hyndman the famine brought into sharp focus the flurry of new British interest in India brought on by the Bengal famine, the tour of the Prince of Wales and the imperial title taken by Queen Victoria.41 Punch made the same point, albeit more dramatically, in a cartoon titled ‘Disputed empire!’, which depicted the queen seated on her throne, wearing her imperial crown with her mace in one hand, trying to ward off the grim reaper (also crowned) with her free hand.42 N
oticeably different, too, was the queen’s own interest in this new famine, which she described as ‘fearful’, ‘terrible’, frightful’ and ‘distressing’, as she became more aware of its spread and scale across the year. Although she expressed confidence in Temple’s handling of the crisis, she urged Lytton to travel south to take over personally the management of the famine in the summer of 1877, and welcomed the slight change of policy that the viceroy’s appearance brought about. Lytton tried to work some royal balm into the misery, using the occasion of the queen’s birthday to issue a special ‘famine’ Gazette, listing honours for those involved in the famine operations.43
The next instance of widespread famine came in 1896, lasting through to the summer of 1897, the year of the queen’s diamond jubilee. It commenced in Bundelkhand, and spread eastwards to Bengal and south to Madras and Bombay, combining in Bombay with an outbreak of bubonic plague. Relief measures followed the guidelines laid down in the new famine code of 1880, but no one bothered with the cautionary advice on charitable aid. The globe shrank in response to the crisis. Volunteers went out from Britain to assist in the relief operations, and contributions came in from Canada and Australia.44 Over £500,000 was raised in Britain by the Lord Mayor’s ‘Mansion House Fund’, and just under £1 million given in India. The royal family chipped in. The queen led off the donations from the court with £500 and the Duke of Connaught spoke at the launch of the Lord Mayor’s fund.45 In India, the queen was once again directly associated with the charitable efforts under way. This was partly a case of the government taking advantage of the queen’s good reputation. In the North-West Provinces, for example, in June 1897, almost a million people on relief work were given three days’ wages in advance of the diamond jubilee holiday to honour ‘the great Maharani under whose gracious auspices the abundant relief and charity of the preceding months had been dispensed to them’. Elsewhere, villagers spoke of the protective instincts of the queen: ‘the talk around the humble firesides and in the homes of the people is that it is the Great Queen who could have so successfully dealt with such a vast and unbounded calamity’ reported a famine official from Bengal. Another official in Bombay reported that the ‘motto’ of the relief workers was ‘the kind and humane message of the Mother Queen Empress to do everything possible and spend anything to save every life of her subjects from starvation’.46
Never mind that British famine policy in India remained committed to non-interference in the market, and became increasingly bureaucratised. Famine recurred once more during Queen Victoria’s reign, in 1899–1900, affecting many of the regions hit hardest three years earlier, especially in Bombay, but there was no change in the government’s parsimonious response. Never mind, as some noted, that once in India charitable aid was quickly diverted into public works rather than food distribution. Then as now the act of giving was more significant than the fact of receiving. One thing remained constant across the famine years in India, however: in the midst of suffering and death, Queen Victoria was believed to be on the side of paternalism and state intervention, for saving lives, not simply alleviating misery.
Immoral Economies
Queen of charity, queen of industry – but there was one Victorian value with which Queen Victoria was seldom associated in India after 1858: free trade. Liberalisation of the economy was the leitmotif of the new regime. Retrenchment in public expenditure, commercialisation of the rural economy and the abolition of taxes on trade and consumption were all principles that had been fought for and won in Britain in the 1840s and 1850s. Now they might be exported to India. The appointment of James Wilson, the proprietor and editor of the London Economist, to the finance portfolio in Charles Canning’s first viceregal council heralded the change. The Economist had led the charge towards free trade in Britain from its first issue in 1843.47 Wilson brought with him to Calcutta two policies close to his heart: the income tax and, as we have seen in the last chapter, a paper currency, adorned with the image of the queen and intended to modernise and monetise Indian commerce. Liberals liked the income tax, if only as a necessary evil. Direct taxation did its work of raising revenue with more reliability and less opposition than taxes on consumer products such as food and tobacco. Moreover, liberals thought India was lightly taxed, even arguing that the Indian middle class was not paying its way.48 Wilson’s Economist made a slightly different case. India’s tax base was too narrow. It was dependent on land revenues collected by tax-farming zamindars, on behalf of the government. A shift to taxing personal property and income was required. Those who benefited from British rule in India would in future make a direct contribution to the costs of government. So Wilson unleashed his income tax on India in February 1860.49
India, however, was not Britain. The new income tax was widely denounced. From Madras it was condemned as a ‘direct contravention’ of the 1858 proclamation, and it was confidently predicted that the queen would use her power to veto the measure.50 Opposition was not confined to better-off Indians now within reach of the tax-gatherer. Wilson’s senior colleagues were appalled as well, their tongues loosened by his premature death in August 1860. Men who had preached free trade at home sang from a different hymn sheet in India. London recalled Charles Trevelyan, the governor of Madras, only fourteen months into his post because of his outspoken criticism of the new income tax. The viceroy was even rumoured to be opposed, preferring, it was later claimed, ‘to govern India with a European army of 40,000 men without the income tax than with 80,000 men with it’.51 Critics deemed the income tax unsuitable for India. Witnesses giving evidence to Parliament a decade later, including Trevelyan, were agreed. Its harsh methods were seized on by journalists as evidence of the shameful officialdom carried out on behalf of ‘England, ruled over by a Queen whose name in India is held in reverence almost as that of the deity’.52 Lord Northbrook abandoned the policy in 1873. It returned, barely disguised as a ‘licence tax’, in 1878, sparking riots in Surat, before becoming an income tax once again in 1886, confined to non-agricultural incomes.
Without an effective income tax, the land continued to bear the brunt of revenue collection after 1858. Not that its yield increased very much. In India as in Ireland, British free trade maxims struggled to break through. Whether collected by the middleman (the zamindar), or directly from the peasant cultivator (the ryot), rents were fixed, discouraging agricultural improvement. The 1858 proclamation, mused one Bengali reformer, might have been the moment for a proper land settlement in Bengal, emancipating the ryots from the servitude imposed by zamindars, ensuring that the queen reigned ‘in their hearts forever’.53 As India entered more and more into the global economy after 1860, the familiar signs of a lopsided cash-crop sector alongside subsistence communities began to appear, encouraged by a new planter class. Cotton production and its ancillaries, such as indigo, brought a greater commercialisation to some parts of the economy. Squeezed out by planters and moneylenders, Indian peasants turned to protest in two widely publicised instances: in the indigo plantations of Bengal and in the cotton fields of the Deccan in 1875. In both cases Queen Victoria was seen as standing on the side of the ryot. In Dhaka, Dinabandhu Mitra published a play, Nil darpan, to draw attention to the condition of the indigo cultivators, having witnessed their plight in his travels as a postmaster. In the preface to the play, Mitra signalled the new paternalism of the queen: ‘most kind-hearted Queen Victoria, the mother of the people, thinking it unadvisable to suckle her children through maid-servants, has now taken them on her lap to nourish them’.54 The play was widely circulated, not least because of its translation by the missionary James Long. Long was prosecuted for libel by the Government of India, and used his trial to raise awareness of the plight of the indigo workers, desiring only, he claimed, to avoid another mutiny.55 Similarly, in the Deccan riots, the protests were triggered by a story that the queen ‘had sent out orders that the Marwaris [the moneylenders] were to give up their bonds’, so freeing the peasant farmers from their debts.56 Popular protest thrives
on whispers and rumour, on the appeal to a higher moral authority. After 1858 Queen Victoria’s omnipotence, rightly or wrongly, was thought to extend into the heart of rural India.