by Miles Taylor
By the middle of December the site for the assemblage was ready. Tens of thousands of people and animals made their way to Delhi. The Gaekwar of Baroda, for example, sent on ahead an entourage of 520 men, 114 horses, 24 bullocks, 21 camels and 10 elephants. The Maharaja of Jaipur, who had less of a journey, brought 1,000 men, 300 horses, 300 bullocks, 130 camels and 15 elephants. And the Maharaja of Jodhpur topped them both, attended by almost 1,700 men, although only 15 elephants.43 Soon these stage armies were joined by the main cast. Official welcomes with royal gun salutes and conveyance in the viceroy’s carriage were given to the crème of the Indian courts, starting with the Begum of Bhopal. On 23 December Lytton arrived at Delhi railway station. Accompanied by Lady Lytton, his children and all his senior colleagues, he made a three-hour processional tour by elephant through the city and out to the encampment. Indian princes and their retinues lined the whole route, interspersed with a ‘thin red line’ of royal troops. A viewing area was set aside in front of the Jama Masjid for visiting foreign dignitaries and envoys.44
For the next ten days the camp of the Imperial Assemblage hummed and fizzed: a pop-up suburb blinking brightly over the old city of Delhi. Estimates of the number of visitors ran as high as 100,000 (the population of Delhi itself was only 160,000). The camp had its own streets, latrines, sewage control and extensive signage. Lytton’s domain at the camp was gas-lit (courtesy of the prince-engineer, Ram Singh II, the Maharaja of Jaipur). There was a special police force, a telegraph office and several hospital tents.45 In the days leading up to the proclamation Lytton honoured the old durbar rituals by making return visits to all the chiefs. Commemorative medals, banners and gifts were exchanged. The princes brought so many presents that an iron cage was required to house them all. Amour propre was respected: the Maharaja of Gwalior and the Maharaja of Kashmir were made honorary generals in the Indian army. Knuckles were rapped. Lytton admonished Salar Jung, the prime minister of Hyderabad, for using the occasion to agitate for the return of the Berars territory taken by Dalhousie in 1856. Lytton also upbraided Salar Jung for wrongly translating the viceroy’s words to the nizam at their meeting, substituting ‘friendship’ and ‘alliance’ for what Lytton actually said, ‘loyalty’ and ‘allegiance’ (Lytton then made the government translator state to the nizam that what he really meant was ‘obedience’ and ‘fidelity’).46 The tête-à-têtes were important. Lytton ensured that acts of obeisance to the viceroy, and hence to the queen, took place in private.
The preliminaries over, the ceremony of the proclamation took place on 1 January.47 Prinsep’s group portrait makes it look an intimate indoor occasion, but contemporary photography reveals the sheer physical scale of the event. Two crescent-shaped tented galleries housed the Indian princes, each entourage assembled behind its heraldic banner. These two spectator tents formed arcs around and equidistant to the main circular pavilion – an open-sided bandstand of a marquee, on which the viceroy’s throne was placed, the queen’s portrait hanging above. Once everyone was in place, the announcement of the queen’s new title was signalled by trumpets, and by the playing of the national anthem. Major Osmond Barnes, veteran of the rebellion of 1857–8 and the Abyssinian campaign, acted as herald, wearing a tabard emblazoned with the royal coat of arms, reading out the proclamation, with a translation following in Urdu. Lytton then spoke, explaining the purpose of the queen’s new title. It is doubtful that anyone could hear what he said, such was the distance – at least 100 metres (328 feet) – between the pavilion and the viewing area. In a short, peremptory address, Lytton began with the proclamation of 1858 and welcomed the ‘union of the empire with the princes and peoples of India’. He praised the soldiers and official and non-official Europeans, as well as the princes for their loyalty. He did not hold out much of an olive branch to anyone else. Native Indians, hopeful of a share in the government of their country, were told that ‘present conditions’ demanded ‘supreme supervision and direction of their administration by English officers’. The enemy without was also warned. Foreign powers were told that no one could ‘now attack the Indian Empire without assailing . . . the unlimited resources of the queen’s dominions and the courageous fidelity of her allies and feudatories’. So far, so good. Surprisingly, there was no protocol for how the ceremony was to end. Several Indian princes – Gwalior, Udaipur, Jaipur and Salar Jung (on behalf of the nizam) – made short impromptu speeches of their own, as did the Begum of Bhopal, the only female ruler there. But the crowds had already begun to peel away. A banquet followed in the evening. The day had gone more or less as planned, with a few slips. Ironically, Lytton managed to lose his own commemorative gold medal in all the excitement.48
Lytton regarded his spectacle as a success: ‘no mere pageant . . . a great historical event’.49 As a display of military might, and imperial loyalty, the assemblage achieved its ends. Lytton’s officials reported to London that sixty-three chiefs had attended, and that ‘their united territories exceed the combined areas of England, Italy and France’.50 Not only had princely India been officially incorporated into the Raj, but also hundreds of Indian men (and in a few cases women) had been rewarded with titles and other new forms of status. Indeed, it was the Indian state bureaucracy rather than the princes who were the principal beneficiaries of Lytton’s largesse in 1877. Magistrates, engineers, councillors, clerks, police inspectors, famine-workers, surgeons and builders figured prominently in the honours list. A line was drawn with the past too. The mutiny slate was wiped clean, with almost 16,000 prisoners released, including those who had not been given amnesty in 1858.51 Had it all been worth it? Lytton claimed that the Imperial Assemblage had not blown a hole in his budget, although his accounting methods seem dubious. The military outlay was ‘only’ £23,000, he explained to George Hamilton, the under-secretary of state for India, equal to more or less the sum set aside for such expenditure for the whole calendar year. As to the rest, Lytton guestimated that the increased railway traffic stimulated by all the toing and froing would more than balance the books.52
What did the rest of India make of the viceroy’s parade? Embedding the Indian press meant that the event was fully if not favourably reported. The Civil and Military Gazette welcomed Lytton’s comments about the white community in India, wishing there had been more of the same sentiment, and the Bangalore Spectator thought it right that the strength of the paramount power had been impressed upon the princes.53 However, most newspapers saw Lytton’s address as a missed opportunity. No real concessions had been made. There was nothing in his address about introducing representative government, let alone opening up the administration to native Indians. Some of the vernacular press went further in its criticism, not only lamenting the failure to uphold the principles and hopes of the transfer of power in 1858, but also finding the new imperial title both unnecessary and unworkable, since it referred to a male ruler. The expense of the proceedings at a time of famine was deplored, and the subservience of some of the princes regretted. A young Rabindranath Tagore composed a song condemning the princes for hugging the ‘golden chair’ at a time of want.54 The Indian Charivari seemed to get it right, depicting Lytton as a fairground attendant, the provider of an imperial peep show.55
With the passage of time, the Imperial Assemblage has become less of an object lesson in imperial vanity and more of a case study of colonial power. Bernard Cohn called it a ‘ritual . . . of subordination’ on the part of the Indian princes, as the British appropriated the old feudatory ceremonial of the Mughals, and invented a few more traditions of their own. More recently, Julie Codell has described the 1877 assemblage as part of the performance of ‘feudal subjugation’, the first in a sequence that ‘anticipated modern fascist rallies’. Some of the evidence certainly points this way: for instance the choice of Delhi, the old Mughal capital, as the venue, still smarting from the battering the British gave it in 1858. Then there were the rhetorical allusions to the age of Akbar.56 However, this verdict is too harsh. In the first place, Lytton want
ed to empower Indian princes, not to devalue or degrade them. Lytton’s pageantry was influenced as much by a medieval European imaginary as the precedents set by the Mughals. The Imperial Assemblage brought to life scenes from Lytton’s own lyric fables and poems: knights convened around the round table of a king, tournaments and processions to show off valour and might, and the inauguration of a new chivalric brotherhood of nobles. In this way, the British wanted to fold the Indian aristocracy into their own monarchical order, not separate them, avoiding the alienation of local elites that Lytton had witnessed in Europe. Secondly, there was less submissiveness on the part of the princes than is often claimed. Individual pledges of loyalty, symbolised in the exchange of gifts and the taking of attah and paan all took place in private, through the return visits exchanged between the viceroy and the princes. Apart from being spectators, there was little about the choreography of the ceremony on 1 January to indicate that the princes were paying deference. Depictions of the event, such as Prinsep’s, showing Lytton addressing a captive audience, mislead. The crescent-shaped accommodation was designed to avoid any hierarchy amongst the princes. Moreover, some of them came to the dais and issued their own addresses at the end of the ceremony. None of them made any public show of obeisance to the viceroy. Thirdly, it was the princes themselves who profited most from the Imperial Assemblage. They returned to their territories with their authority and status validated. For the Nizam of Hyderabad, the long trip to Delhi was the first time he had left his state. An elaborate chronicle of his journey was published.57 For others, such as the Begum of Bhopal and the Gaekwar of Baroda, the trip to Delhi was part of a new strategy of making excursions across India and overseas, as they fashioned themselves as improving rulers.58 Court poets were commissioned to describe the event, whilst other commentators emphasised how the grandeur of the occasion was derived from the attendance of so many Indian princes.59 Lytton’s Delhi show was as much a catalyst for catapulting Indian princes into modernity as it was a throwback to an imagined feudal past.
Beyond Delhi the proclamation of the new imperial title had impact too. It was overlooked at the time, and since, that the proclamation was an India-wide event. The governments of each of the three presidencies made small sums available – between 1,000 and 2,000 rupees – for all the principal towns and communities to mark the occasion. Full reports exist for each event, suggesting that the proclamation was as stage-managed an event in the rest of India as it was in Delhi.60 Yet the British involvement was confined to ensuring that the event took place, providing an official to read the proclamation, and leaning on local elites to give their patronage. Some places observed the formality of a durbar, and many chose to spend their funding on illuminations and fireworks. There was spectacle too: triumphal arches, bearing the queen’s new title in English, Urdu or in the local vernacular. Most dramatic of all was the proclamation at Ajmer, where fireworks were set off from rafts on the Ana Sagar lake, climaxing with ‘the fiery design of a giant coming out of a well with a board in his hand, bearing the inscription in the vernacular [Marawi] of “God bless the Empress”’.61 Elsewhere, the proclamation presented an entrepreneurial opportunity. In Nagpur, Jamsetji Tata, a Parsi industrialist from Baroda, opened his new factory on 1 January, naming it ‘Empress Mills’.62
Outside Delhi, the prevailing tone of the proclamation proceedings was one of charity and mercy, not ceremony.63 From Tanjore in Madras, where the famine was striking hard by the new year, Henry Sullivan Thomas, the local revenue collector, explained that the government funding was being used to give ‘distressed’ widows a piece of simple white cloth, in the name of the ‘widowed’ queen. Distribution of alms and food to the poor was widespread. Benares witnessed the most extensive operation, with 15,000 indigent people fed. Prisoners were released; local chiefs came forward to pay for public buildings and utilities – clock towers, dharamsalas and bathing tanks; a new serai (palace) to commemorate the proclamation was promised at Cachar in Assam.64 In these ways, Victoria’s new title was associated with public philanthropy, minimal in its practical effects amidst the famine, but significant as acts of royal kindness and in accordance with older traditions of kingship and rule in India. Addresses from public bodies marking the occasion of the proclamation underlined this sentiment. From Dharwad in Mysore Victoria was likened to the ‘virtuous and beneficent’ kings and queens ‘whose names are taught to every Hindu child’. Conversely other memorialists, including those from Farrukhabad and from Syed Ahmed Khan’s ‘Mahomedan Congratulation Committee’ in Aligarh, compared Victoria to the great Muslim rulers.65 Elsewhere, the new imperial title elicited hopes of reform. In Alibag in Bombay presidency, a memorial was published calling for various privileges in the spirit of 1858 to be granted, including reductions of land rent and salt duties, and the widening of native Indian representation in legislative matters. Reform was also the dominant theme of congratulatory addresses from several places in the heart of British India: from the ‘inhabitants of Calcutta’ (calling for popular election of the supreme and popular legislatures’), from Secunderabad, the British canton town across the river from Hyderabad (recalling the ‘Magna Carta’ spirit of 1858), and most fulsomely from Poona, demanding a new imperial council of the Indian princes, and an opening up of the higher ranks of the army and civil service to Indians.66 In 1877 the queen was not so much Mughalised as domesticated, appropriated by Indians for Indians.
Outside of these meetings, there were also many other smaller acts of homage to the new empress. Poems, acrostics, addresses, books, songs and musical arrangements: a variety and profusion of compositions appeared to mark her new title. Some were published, but many were just collected and collated by local officials, and sent on to Delhi. There they languished. Lytton, the poet-diplomat par exemplar, wrote disparagingly to the queen of every Indian who could ‘write a few words’ turning their hand to ‘enthusiastic effusions’.67 Taken together, however, they do provide revealing testimony to the range of meanings now associated with Victoria’s name and rule, and the kinds of causes with which she was becoming identified. Prose and lyrics came from familiar names. Sourindro Mohun Tagore followed up the verses he had published for the Prince of Wales the previous year with two more works – Victoria-Giti-Mala, or a Brief History of England in Bengali Verses and Victoria Sámrájyanˆ, or Sanskrit Stanzas – and sent on another twenty-seven works as well. Bowmanjee Cursetjee Cowasjee, from Bombay, added to the poems he had produced for the Prince of Wales, this time producing a lyric entitled ‘India’s National Anthem’. Tagore went one better a few years later. Commissioned by Frederick Harford, a canon of Westminster Abbey, he composed a national anthem in Sanskrit and Bengali, and sent it on to the queen.68 Others appeared in 1877. The son of Vedam Venkataraya Sastry, the Tanjore poet, republished for the latest event his father’s verses written in 1858 and 1875.
However, there were new sources of loyal sentiment too, coming from Indians who had carved out their own niche in the Raj: schoolteachers such as D. V. Panandhikar, who translated the loyal Marathi songs sung by the pupils of his Bombay school; minor government officials – a translator from Sindh, a deputy collector from Kanpur, a superintendent from Dhaka, a small courts judge from Rangoon – all composed verses for the queen-empress. Different writers fashioned alternative versions of loyalty. Some of these were sectarian. A series of Telugu verses, published in Madras, compared the British deliverance of India from Mughal rule to Hannibal saving Carthage from the Romans.69 Tagore included a lyric in Victoria Samrajyan praising Victoria for taking the place of the ‘powerful Mohamedans’ who had deprived India of her own native religion. Invocations as a Hindu deity were common. Mahant Narayan Das, head of the math near the Jaganath temple in Puri, and veteran of the Orissa famine relief operation, saw Victoria as the incarnation of Lakshmi (the goddess of wealth, fortune and prosperity), whilst Mooradan, a court poet of Jodhpur, claimed her as a Chakravarti (a universal benevolent ruler). A Bengali poem likened her to Durga, the warr
ior goddess.70 Queen Victoria was also likened to Muslim women rulers – Bilqis and Qaidafa – and to Persian kings such as Nausherwan, renowned for their justice. Chroniclers now included her in the genealogy of the sovereigns of Delhi and previous Indian dynasties.71 Other writers bolted on to their verses calls for reform. Moung Un’s poem from Rangoon was accompanied by a plea for hospitals for the poor with free food, and for public schools. From Bombay, Bowmanjee Cursetjee supplemented his anthem with a book published the following year, complaining about the ‘drain’ of wealth from India and calling for the recruitment of Indians to judicial and local government appointments.72 As ever in Queen Victoria’s India, the language of reform was cloaked in the guise of loyalty.
Lytton remained oblivious to this tidal wave of loyalism. On his return to Calcutta he reiterated his views that Indians might join the government administration only gradually. He poured scorn on the pretensions of the educated elites of Calcutta, deriding the city’s university for turning out ‘more free-thinkers than wise thinkers’. He also began a dispute with the British India Association of the city over the cotton duties and other aspects of his policy.73 Later that year Lytton brought in the controversial Vernacular Press Act, subjecting native newspapers to severe scrutiny ahead of publication. The urbane tone of government in the months leading up to the Imperial Assemblage vanished as swiftly as it had arrived. In the end, despite Lytton’s best efforts, the ‘British Indian Empire’, as it was formally known after 1877, looked just like its Continental European counterparts: barracks, bureaucracy and broken promises. Back in London, casting her eye over Lytton’s India of famine, plunder and treachery, Annie Besant, rising star of socialism, summed up the mood with a sarcastic sneer. Although ‘blessed with an Empress, an English Moguless, Lady Paramount of all mere native rulers’, the Indian people ‘do not love us, and they are not content with our sway’.74 A damning verdict on Lytton’s annus mirablis of 1877, it was a partial one for all that. Across India, away from the main event at Delhi, the cult of Queen Victoria was alive and well.