Empress
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Missionaries, evangelicals and disgruntled Indian officials all encouraged the fiction that the queen could dispense economic justice. They did so by homing in on the tax burden borne by ordinary Indians. For, unable to rein in expenditure, reluctant to impose a comprehensive income tax, and facing falling revenues from the land, the Government of India resorted to tried and tested means of rescuing the finances: taxes on consumption. By the early 1870s, liberals such as Charles Trevelyan and Henry Fawcett were complaining that the Indian government had abandoned treating revenue as fixed, and gone over to a new economy of ‘annual borrowing’. Each projected deficit was made good by increasing indirect taxes.57 By 1880 the three principal forms of customs revenue – duties on salt, opium and alcohol – accounted for almost as much revenue as the land. In particular, the yield from salt duties soared, increasing fourfold between 1860 and 1890.58 India had lurched from low taxation to high. Free trade, which for Victorians meant the removal of duties, was in retreat in India. Critics blamed the Government of India, as it controlled the manufacture and sale of these commodities. One woman was credited with having the power to do something about it: Queen Victoria.
Of all the Indian revenues, the duty on salt was the most elastic. Like the Mughals and the East India Company before them, the Government of India managed all salt manufacture in the territories under its direct control. Salt of the earth, lake, sea and mountains was produced under the watchful eye of officials, who collected the tax at the point of production, leaving tradesmen and sellers to pass on the additional cost to the consumer. Elaborate measures were taken to prevent the illegal private manufacture of salt (especially from coastal waters), and to restrict smuggling across the borders from the princely states into British India, the most ingenious of all being the ‘great hedge’ customs line separating Bengal and Rajputana. The salt duty was effectively a poll tax, salt being the one commodity that everyone needed and everyone consumed.59 Unseen and uncontested, the salt duty was the first tax to be raised in times of budget deficit. Yet the salt tax made liberals uneasy. One governor, Vere Hobart in Madras (1872–5), protested forcibly when the viceroy, Lord Northbrook, adjusted it upwards. Allusions to the unpopularity of the gabelle on the eve of the French revolution were common.60 In the House of Commons, George Balfour, former colleague of Charles Canning when viceroy, led a campaign for its abolition. In 1875 he came up with a simple solution: the queen should break with Asiatic tradition and use the occasion of the Prince of Wales’s visit to India to issue a proclamation doing away with the salt duty. In such a manner, ‘Asiatics’ would come to believe that ‘by eating this free salt they really owed fidelity to the Empress of India’.61 Another liberal, another admirer of the queen as benevolent despot. India did strange things to British sensibilities.
Opium was also a state monopoly in India. By the 1870s, the opium trade was not just confined to export from India to China, but increasingly it was supplying Indian users as well. Queen Victoria knew all about Indian opium. Back in 1851 at the Great Exhibition she had listened and watched with interest as Dr Royle opened up a poppy to explain the structure of the plant and to show how its seeds were extracted.62 Anti-opium campaigners knew about Queen Victoria too. From the mid-1870s they used her name and authority to criticise the ‘poppy plague’. As its name suggested, the Anglo-Oriental Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, formed by Quakers in 1874, primarily targeted the Chinese end of operations. Still, it held Queen Victoria responsible. Now that she was empress, argued the Society’s magazine, the Friend of China, in April 1876, ‘it is a strictly logical, though not a very pleasant deduction, that the queen is made responsible for the growth, manufacture and sale of a destructive poison’.63 Practically, as the magazine admitted, it was the Government of India and Parliament who were culpable. Queen Victoria, however, was too good a moral exemplar to miss. Why could she not intervene ‘to remove . . . the dark stain from the lustre of her glittering crown’ asked a delegate to the Shanghai Missionary conference in 1877. Why had the occasion of the new title of empress not been used to do away with a policy inherited from the East India Company, demanded the industrialist and philanthropist Samuel Mander in the same year.64 In the early 1890s, the anti-opium campaign stepped up a gear, and was instrumental in pressurising William Gladstone’s government into setting up a Royal Commission to investigate the traffic in India, China and Burma too. The Society intensified its propaganda, claiming that in the name of the queen-empress, the Government of India was now extracting opium revenue from Burma, ‘the subjects of the Queen-Empress’ in India suffered from the same ‘havoc which they wrought with a light heart among the Chinese’.65 Additional pressure came from India. Invoking the motto of the royal order of the ‘Star of India’ – ‘heaven’s light our guide’ – Sunderbai Powar, who ran a zenana mission school in Poona, publicised the anti-opium speaking tour she had made in northern India during 1891–2.66 Ultimately, the Royal Commission of 1894–5 settled very little, and it was not until the early twentieth century that public pressure and market forces combined to end the trade. Some of the evidence presented to the Commission did however suggest that Queen Victoria was invested with special powers over the opium trade, if only she would use them. One user in Ajmer allegedly told a missionary that she wanted the queen to send out a medicine to cure her addiction. Another witness told of rumours in Bombay that the queen planned to close down all the opium dens of the city.67 The name of the queen was as powerful as the drug itself.
The drink trade in India also came under the evangelical spotlight. The sale of alcohol was controlled by the Government of India, which extracted a tax – abkari68 – from all liquor stores. Whereas alcohol consumption in the British army in India was tightly regulated, the state monopoly on drink was left alone in the interest of maximising revenue. The tide of temperance reform ebbed and flowed after 1858. Driving drink out of the queen’s army remained a pressing concern. Some wanted total abstinence, others temperance (drinking in moderation), whilst some simply settled for pale ale, a low-alcohol brew especially developed for soldiers in India.69 Hindu reformers also made the liquor traffic an issue. One of the leaders of the Brahmo Sumaj movement, Keshub Chandra Sen, came to Britain in 1870 and spoke at a meeting of the principal domestic temperance organisation, the UK Alliance. As ‘one of the most loyal subjects of Her Majesty Queen Victoria’, it grieved him to witness the state-owned drink trade, one of the ‘blots on the administration of India’.70 In the 1880s, the anti-alcohol lobby in India grew in strength. The Salvation Army arrived in India in 1882, upsetting many with its militant methods, including its campaign for abstinence from intoxicants. In 1888, William Caine, the president of the British Temperance League, visited India, attended the meeting of the Indian National Congress at Allahabad, and two years later helped found the Anglo-Indian Temperance Association. Within a few years this was a nationwide movement, largely run by Indians, topped up by itinerant lecturers from Britain.71
One of these was Thomas Evans, who made a habit of bringing the queen into the battle against the bottle. He argued that the legalised sale of liquor broke with the ‘solemn promises’ of the queen’s proclamation of 1858, which had pledged not to interfere with Indian religion, abstinence from alcohol being the norm for both Hindus and Muslims.72 Evans’s naming and shaming of the queen had little impact, however. Despite the touchstone status of the 1858 proclamation there is no evidence that Indian temperance reformers took up this kind of argument, either in the lectures and meetings of the Anglo-Indian Temperance Association or in the influential Kayastha temperance movement run by Brahmins in Gwalior. The queen remained off-limits in the rhetoric of the temperance movement in India. Off-message as well. Whilst she supported the campaign to drive drunkenness out of the Indian army,73 she was no fan of the opposition to the drink trade, finding temperance reformers an overzealous lot. To one of them – Basil Wilberforce, grandson of William, and rector of St Mary’s in Southampton – she too
k particular objection. Wilberforce visited India in 1890, partly for his health and partly to persuade more Indians to take the pledge and give up alcohol.74 The queen had no desire to lead a moral majority either in India or at home.
Despite the best efforts of evangelicals and other opponents of the burgeoning Indian fiscal state, Queen Victoria eluded criticism. Royal handouts during the famine years were magnified by her officials into momentous acts of grace. If anything, by focusing so centrally on the queen, the clamour over salt, opium and abkari enlarged her omnipotence. She personified paternalism, not the coercion of the market, a moral force that lingered on, later reworked by Gandhi and his followers during the 1920s and 1930s, as they mobilised against the Raj and its control over the basic commodities of life such as salt. In 1880 a Bengali lament referred to Queen Victoria as dina janani (the ‘mother of the poor’).75 Even from a distance the woes of her Indian people were believed to be close to her heart. So, when her sons and heirs began to travel to India, it was hoped they came as messengers.
CHAPTER 7
ROYAL TOURISTS
In the summer of 1861 it was prophesied in the Punjab that a king would ‘come from west to east’ and ‘rule the Country without dipping the end of his little finger in blood’. Missionaries worked this up as a sign that Christianity was nigh. Charles Canning, the viceroy, remarked tartly that ‘if the Emperor of Russia or Louis Napoleon would drop down in India they would find they were not unexpected’. The rumour focused on the deposed Sikh dynasty and the hope that Duleep Singh might return, but Sir Charles Wood mentioned it to Prince Albert as a pretext for sending out to India the Prince of Wales.1 Albert died, the project was shelved, and, when a prince did finally come, he came from the east, not the west. The arrival from Australia via Singapore and Penang of Prince Alfred (the Duke of Edinburgh), Victoria’s second son, at Calcutta on 22 December 1869 marked the first occasion when British royalty alighted on Indian soil. His visit was followed by the tours in 1875–6 of his elder brother, Albert Edward the Prince of Wales, and by the Prince of Wales’s eldest son, Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, in 1889. Additionally, Arthur, the Duke of Connaught (Victoria’s third son), served in India for six years during the 1880s. Queen Victoria never visited India. The furthest east she journeyed was Tuscany. So these visits by her sons were important. The tours made the British monarchy visible across most of the Indian subcontinent, bridging the divide between the virtual sovereignty of the queen and the proxy powers of the viceroy. Royal visits made real the extent and purpose of the British Empire in India, emphasising its military might and geographical girth, its durability in the shape of two generations of heirs to the throne, and its modernity, as the itineraries featured ceremonial openings of new railway lines, docks and other public works. Whilst historians have noted the impact these visits had as media events back in Britain, less has been made of the way they reshaped the meaning of monarchy in the Raj.2
For the tours were the first major test of Indian attitudes towards British rule since the transfer of power in 1858. The times were not propitious. Prince Alfred’s visit came amidst widespread famine and popular resentment over the austerity measures the Government of India had taken to deal with dearth in Orissa in 1866. In 1872, the viceroy, Lord Mayo, was assassinated and fears abounded of Wahabi conspiracy. In these circumstances, unsure as to how royalty might be received in India, the Government of India did its best to manage the tours, leaving as little as possible to chance. Much remained outside their control: not least the royal tourists themselves.
‘A walking proclamation’: Prince Alfred in India, 1869–70
Prince Alfred spent four months crisscrossing India.3 He was a reluctant tourist, wanting his mother to cut him some slack and shorten the length of his naval commission.4 There were good reasons for his lack of enthusiasm. By the time he reached India, Alfred had been on a sea voyage around the world for more than two and a half years. In Sydney there had been an attempt on his life and in New Zealand he had been plunged into the lingering embers of the Maori wars.5 His global tour interrupted by the unsuccessful assassin in Australia, Alfred’s original Indian schedule had to be postponed, and when he did arrive the Calcutta police were told that a suspected Fenian sympathiser, embedded in a circus troupe, had followed his ship, the Galatea, from Melbourne.6
For the choreography of Prince Alfred’s visit to India, there were no real precedents for the government to follow. Previous calls on the colonies by the British royals had been to dependencies without viceroys, that is to say, parts of the British Empire which were not under direct rule: settlement colonies with their own assemblies and a governor-general as the representative of the Crown. The Viceroy of India, in contrast, was invested with the full powers of the monarch. This immediately raised the question of whether a royal prince outranked the holder of the viceregal office. It was decided that he did not, and so Alfred was the viceroy’s guest for the parts of the tour when Lord Mayo was present, otherwise he took precedence as the queen’s representative. Other matters of protocol were more intractable. One was the issue of scale. Great durbars were envisaged at first, then the tour was cut back in size, owing to the scarcity produced by extensive famines in Rajputana and in the Punjab. Mayo proposed one durbar only, at Agra, but eventually cancelled this too, and instead summoned the Indian chiefs to Calcutta.7
Nonetheless, a royal visit was unprecedented. There were expectations of largesse on both sides. Alfred himself told Lord Mayo that he had anticipated ‘oriental magnificence’, whilst the Benares Gazette predicted that the prince’s ‘circle of wealth will come’. The prices of glass and lights rocketed in Calcutta and Bombay, as the Anglo-Indian communities of both cities prepared illuminations of public buildings, with gossipy talk in Calcutta that poor homes were also required to be lit up for the occasion. The military manoeuvres underpinning Alfred’s tour were substantial. For example, for his visit to Agra, nineteen cavalry and infantry regiments were transferred just from Bengal alone. Partly for love of sports, partly for the sake of tradition, British officials decided that hunting should form an integral part of the princely tour, only made possible by extensive preparations of kraals and access roads occupying several months beforehand, undertaken by thousands of labourers.8
Scarcity was not the only factor in the Government of India bearing down on the costs of the trip. Since the transfer of power from Company to Crown in 1858, Indian officials had shown increasing concern at the volume of gifts passing directly from native chiefs to Queen Victoria, and anticipated the prince’s tour being used by Indian maharajas to offer presents with the expectation of receiving the same in return. The India Office in London sanctioned £10,000 to cover the costs of a full-scale durbar, including exchange of gifts, at Agra, only for Mayo to cancel the durbar. Hoping to avoid criticism, the viceroy’s officials suggested setting aside £8,000 of this sum to cover the gifts to be given by Prince Alfred on tour with the proviso that he would not keep any; everything would be passed on to the toshakhana (the government treasury) and sold off. Sensing this would cause offence, the Duke of Argyll, secretary of state for India, overruled Mayo, stipulating that Prince Alfred could give and receive gifts, but the gifts from native chiefs required approval and should be modest: ‘curiosities, ancient arms, or specimens of local manufacture, and gifts of such like nature, which would in fact be more objects of interest than value’.9 In fact, this protocol proved an open invitation to the Indian chiefs to line up not simply souvenirs, but the most ornamental weaponry, carpets and precious stones that could be found in their home states.
For the first and only time before the onset of air travel, Calcutta was the start of a royal visit to India. The Galatea sailed all the way up the River Hoogly to Fort William, and a line of people two and a half miles long thronged the Maidan as the royal party landed and made its way to Government House. On horseback heading the greeting party for the prince were the viceroy, the governors of Bombay and Madras and
the Maharajas of Gwalior, Jaipur, Rewa, Bharatpur, Alwar, Dholpur and Kapurthala, with the Begum of Bhopal (and her daughter) following behind in a carriage. The two weeks spent by the prince in Calcutta were, as befitted the historic capital of British India, as Anglo-Indian as they could be. There were fireworks and illuminations, which took over most of the city, a grand levée, Hebrew prayers, a visit to the Mahomedan Literary Society, a Hindu reception at the Seven Tanks Hall, including Vedic blessings given by professors from the Sanskrit College and nautch dancing, addresses from the University and from the Chamber of Commerce, sports and Sikh games, a fancy dress ball and a visit to the opera (Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia). Good use was made of the Galatea, as the individual visits of the native chiefs took place there, and on the eve of the prince’s departure a ball was held on board. The welcoming procession and the fireworks generated the largest audiences and the most conspicuous displays of loyalty: the letters of ‘God Save the Queen’ lit up in gas along the East Esplanade of the Maidan, together with a revolving portrait of the queen, and huge transparencies hanging over the main buildings, including the motto, ‘God bless the Empress of Hindostan’.10
At most of the formal occasions during the prince’s time in Calcutta, Europeans outnumbered Indians: for example, by about eight to one at the Government House levée on the second day of the visit. However, the centrepiece of the Calcutta programme was the chapter meeting of the Star of India. Then the Indian presence dwarfed the British: seven maharajas to one prince. Suggested by Queen Victoria as a substitute for the cancelled durbar, Mayo encountered a problem straight away. Unlike his elder brother, the Prince of Wales, Prince Alfred was not a member of the order. So the principal object of the meeting was his own investiture, to be overseen by the most senior members of the order, the Knight Grand Commanders, who on this occasion were drawn from the Punjabi and Rajputana maharajas. Mayo’s officials struggled to work out the correct protocol. Charles Girdlestone looked to the example of the Prince of Wales’s installation as a Knight of the Order of St Patrick the previous year in Dublin, but found it inconsistent. He turned for advice to a colleague in the Bengal Civil Service, ‘whose tastes and reading have lain towards heraldry and medieval ceremonies’. From this discussion came a plan to hold the investiture in the Throne Room and Marble Hall of Government House, with the viceroy in the throne as the Grand Master of the Order and the rest of the members of the order seated before him as an audience in rows. The royal warrant approving the chapter would be read in English and Hindustani with the queen’s title referred to ‘Empress of Hindustan’.11 However, once it became obvious that Government House would not be able to accommodate all those called to Calcutta, then the venue moved to the viceroy’s durbar tent in the grounds, specially constructed for the occasion.