Empress

by Miles Taylor

  An even more globetrotting royal couple were the Gaekwar of Baroda and his second wife, Shrimant Lakshmibai Mohite (1871–1958), who became Chimnabai II on their marriage in 1885. Sayajirao had been placed on the gaddi (throne) of Baroda following the infamous attempt to murder the British resident Colonel Phayre. Chimnabai was in purdah. As a couple, they too met with the queen, on two occasions, in 1892 and 1900.42 As the Gaekwar described in an article published after their second visit, Chimnabai ‘enjoys [in Britain] to the full the liberty she lacks in Baroda’, where women remained in seclusion, and ‘not even myself can at the present time lift up the veil’.43 Chimnabai herself developed this narrative of European modernity and Indian conservatism into a political programme. Her encyclopaedic primer for social reform led by women, The Position of Women in Indian Life, published in 1911 to coincide with the coronation of George V and Queen Mary, had royal exemplars leading the way: Razia Begum (the Sultana of Delhi in the thirteenth century), Nur Jahan (the wife of Jahangir), Ahalya Bai (the Queen of Malwa in the eighteenth century), the present Begum of Bhopal, and Queen Victoria, under whose ‘sway’ the greatest empire the world had ever known had expanded.44 Chimnabai went on to become an influential voice in the women’s movement in India, supporting the Gaekwar’s efforts to open up education to girls in Baroda. In these ways, courtly encounters with Queen Victoria served as important rites of passage for a younger generation of royal women in India, signifying their membership of a small club of consorts.

  Daughters

  Revered as a mother of India, Queen Victoria was careful not to be drawn into the politics of gender. The woman question in India took centre stage as philanthropists in Britain developed India as a field of mission, and predominantly Hindu reform movements in India challenged the traditions of caste and family life. The queen’s own interest in the condition of women in India dated back to the late 1860s. In 1867 she met Manockjee Cursetjee, on a visit to London, drumming up support for schools in Bombay.45 The following year she was introduced to Mary Carpenter, pioneer of the ‘ragged’ school movement in England, who also travelled to India.46 And in 1870 Keshub Chandra Sen, of the Brahmo Sumaj, visited the Palace.47 These meetings bore fruit. In 1870 Carpenter established the National Indian Association in London, with Sen leading the partner organisation in India. Amongst its aims was the raising of support and awareness of schools for girls in India, a project that was secular in character, explained Carpenter, upholding the queen’s pledge of 1858 not to interfere in Indian religion.48 In 1874, Queen Victoria deputed her second daughter, Alice, to be president of the NIA, an honorary role fulfilled from afar in Darmstadt in Hesse, where she was consort to Louis IV, the Grand Duke of Hesse, until her death four years later. In India, Mary Carpenter continually used the name of the queen to support her activities. In 1876 she presented the queen’s Highland journals as gifts on her travels and brought home addresses and small tokens of gratitude for the queen from her trip.49

  A decade later, the queen’s daughter-in-law, Louise, the Duchess of Connaught, took up the cause. The only female royal ever to have lived in India, until Edwina Mountbatten arrived for a brief stay in 1947, Louischen played an active auxiliary role alongside her husband when he was based in Poona and Bombay as commander-in chief of the Bombay army. They both learned Hindi and tried it out in public. Louischen joined the Bombay governor’s forceful wife, Lady Reay, in fundraising in the city for schools and hospitals, coming to know the Sorabji family, who were the mainstay of the Poona Female Training College, and of the Victoria High School, which opened in September 1888. Some of this she described in detail to the queen in regular letters home.50 Most significant, however, was her support for female education. In addition to aiding the Sorabjis, she made a series of visits around the presidency to see female training colleges. On these occasions it was usually her husband who spoke on her behalf, the duke explaining that she in turn was speaking on behalf of the queen. On one occasion – at Rajkot in 1889 – this ventriloquism was dispensed with, and Louischen spoke in public, probably the only female member of the queen’s wider family to do so in her lifetime.51 In this way, through the patronage first of Mary Carpenter and then of her own family, Queen Victoria’s name was associated with the development of Indian schools for girls and young women.

  Another Indian female cause to which the queen gave her blessing was nursing and the provision of hospitals for women in India, especially pregnant women. In 1882, Lord Ripon, the viceroy of India, had passed on to the queen the evidence of Pandita Ramabai, given to a government enquiry, about the problems in providing expert maternity care.52 This testimony was followed up in 1883 by the dramatic case of the Maharani of Panna, who petitioned the queen via an English missionary, Elizabeth Bielby. The queen was sympathetic, but wary of becoming caught up with missionary endeavour. The episode turned complicated and toxic when it became clear that maharaja and maharani were at odds, and that Miss Bielby was a loose cannon.53 However, the idea was planted. Two years later, Queen Victoria met with another pioneer, Mary Scharlieb, and, with no missionary in sight, gave full endorsement to her work in Madras, becoming patron of Scharlieb’s Caste Hospital for Women in the city. The queen’s ‘moral influence’ was deemed indispensable to this venture.54 Around the same time, Queen Victoria gained a new ally in the reform of Indian nursing at the seat of the Indian government in the person of Lady Dufferin, who accompanied her husband, the new viceroy, out to India at the end of 1884. Before she left, there was the customary audience with the queen.55 Once Lady Dufferin had arrived in Calcutta, and then Simla, her ideas took shape.

  The ‘National Association for Supplying Female Medical Aid to the Women of India’, or the ‘Countess of Dufferin Fund’ as it became known, was the single largest project of philanthropy outside Britain to which the queen’s name was attached in her lifetime. Henry Ponsonby, her private secretary, hinted at its magnitude, probably unintentionally, referring to it as the ‘Women of India Fund’.56 The Fund raised money both for medical schools and hospitals, specifically to train up Indian nurses who would then work in dedicated women’s hospitals. Launched in July 1885, the project was emphatic in its neutrality on questions of race and religion. Missionaries would not be employed, and, although English women and men would be hired as medical teachers and senior staff in the hospitals, the bulk of the investment would go into the future education of Indian nursing expertise.57 Initially, Lady Dufferin did not risk associating the queen’s name with a start-up scheme. However, within a few days, the queen had insisted that she do so. Once royal assent was granted, the queen became part of the brand image. Her own contribution was modest – £100 – but a ‘Queen-Empress Gold Medal’ was struck using that sum, and given as a prize to the best students.58 In 1887, with the queen’s backing, Lady Dufferin led a widely publicised drive for donations, using the golden jubilee celebrations as the draw. Income from donations leapt from around £650 to £3,500 within the space of twelve months.59

  Over the next decade or so, the ‘Countess of Dufferin Fund’ grew in size and reach, with successive vicereines – Lady Lansdowne, Countess Elgin and Lady Curzon – all presiding over the scheme. By 1896, seventy hospitals had been established and around 3 million women had been treated. On Lady Dufferin’s return to Britain in 1888 she set up a UK branch, with another royal, the Princess of Wales, as president.60 The medical establishment in Britain sniped at its work, deeming it amateurish. The queen’s physician Joseph Fayrer chipped in with objections too.61 Over time the Fund has been criticised as an example of Victorian bourgeois do-gooding, shipped out, all its prejudices intact, to India. However, it was a success, not least because of the queen’s patronage. As the hike in donations at the time of the golden jubilee in 1887 demonstrated, substantial support came in precisely because the queen gave her backing.62 The Fund was careful to uphold the queen’s 1858 pledge – the principle of non-sectarian support – taking action against local branches that employed missionaries as t
eachers or doctors, and coming down hard on any reports of proselytising.63 Despite the exhortation to draw back the purdah, included in Rudyard Kipling’s poem, ‘For the Women’ (1887), penned for the opening of Lady Aitchison’s hospital in Lahore, lifting the veil was never part of the organisation’s modus operandi.64 More than anything else, the Fund ensured that the queen was revered as a caring monarch. In the longer term the Fund left a legacy of memorial hospitals and nursing scholarship funds patronised by the monarch. The Fund also created a problem: the royal touch could be decisive, and there were many other causes deserving of the queen’s patronage.

  For, as the ‘mother of India’, a flood of claims now arrived at the queen’s door. Religion could hardly be set on one side with many of them. Campaigners for change in the law applying to child-widows appealed to the queen, with a concerted attempt in 1887 to gatecrash the golden jubilee. Reformers took up the case of Rukhmabai, a child bride (now grown-up), making a direct call on the queen to intervene and change the law by decree. Behramji Malabari, one of the Indian supporters of Rukhmabai, claimed in the Indian Spectator that the queen stood for ‘free’ and not enforced widowhood: she ‘has been a living Sati all these years’. He also pointed out that the queen herself was the daughter of a widow who had remarried.65 The ‘Rukhmabai Defence Committee’, led by Mancherjee Bhownagree and others, including Adelaide Manning of the National India Association, tried to raise sufficient funding to take the case to the Privy Council, where the queen was advised on cases brought for appeal, and by such pressure shame Lord Dufferin, the viceroy, into taking action.66 Three years later, the campaign revived when Malabari visited England and a women’s petition bearing hundreds of signatures was presented to the queen. Despite the mediation of Manning at the India Office, Ponsonby refused to let the queen’s name be used as an endorsement on the grounds that it would offend Hindu opinion in India.67 Even without getting involved, the queen was assumed to have a direct interest in the issue.

  Purdah was another Indian convention in which Queen Victoria declined to interfere. Emancipating Hindu and Muslim women from domestic seclusion became one of the western missionary societies’ principal campaigns of the late nineteenth century.68 The queen was held out as an example of a widow who lived out her virtuous life in public, invoked in vernacular biographies circulated by evangelicals, in homely anecdotes retold in stories of missionary labours and in instructive literature aimed at women. For example, reworking an episode from the queen’s More Leaves, one missionary used a picture of her reading the Bible to a sick old man as a lecture aid.69 The Telugu Zenana Magazine, a reforming periodical published in Madras, began its first issue with a feature on the queen.70 As with the agitation around Rukhmabai, missionaries tried to cash in on the queen’s two jubilees. In 1887 in Delhi, the Baptist Missionary Society held a ‘ladies durbar’, attended by over 700 women in purdah, together with girls and boys from zenana schools, each of the children given medals stamped with the insignia of the queen.71 Significantly, the queen did give tacit support to breaking the custom of purdah in China. In 1897 Queen Victoria accepted two tracts documenting the conditions of Chinese women from the Church of England Zenana Mission Society, but there is no record that she was ever presented with equivalent literature about India.72 Queen Victoria was of course no stranger to the zenana. She had met the Begum of Awadh back in 1856; during 1885 Lady Dufferin described in her letters home her own visits to Indian women in purdah; whilst the Duchess of Connaught passed on to the queen her account of Brahmo Sumaj ladies who opposed purdah.73 Safely returned from India, the Duke of Connaught turned out for the Bible Society, endorsing its stance on reforming the zenana.74 However, as the missionaries knew full well, in India, the queen’s own hand was invisible. For example, in 1890, Charles Townsend, a visiting Baptist and Liberal party activist, complained of a pamphlet he had been given on his arrival. Drawn up by a panchayat of pandits and translated into many vernaculars, it reminded ‘All Faithful Hindoos’ that the queen’s proclamation of 1858 guaranteed religious neutrality, and therefore she could be counted on to stop the activities of lady missionaries in the zenanas.75

  In these ways female missionaries tried to work the queen’s famed omnipotence to their advantage, just as their male counterparts were attempting the same over alcohol and opium. There were other instances of this tactic. Opponents of the Contagious Diseases regulations, introduced in India in cantonment towns in the 1860s, circulated the rumour that the queen was opposed to the measure, her concern heightened as she had daughters of her own.76 However, Queen Victoria kept out of the missionary mania generally, no more so than when it touched upon religious sensitivities around the domestic sphere, keen as she was to avoid the evangelical fervour that had beset India before 1857. Her courtiers understood these limits, being careful to lend her name to schemes of education and nursing that were modernising, but not invasive of Indian culture. The queen’s reputation as a benign matriarch remained intact. Her reputation for philanthropy grew without undermining her status as a totem of toleration.77 Social reformers were not the only ones mobilising the queen. As ‘mother of India’, she became central to the Indian political imaginary as well.

  CHAPTER 10

  PATRIOT QUEEN

  The murder of Lord Mayo, her fourth viceroy, in February 1872 shocked Queen Victoria. The news was telegraphed direct to Windsor Castle four days after the fatal attack at Port Blair on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, a British penal settlement. She pasted the telegram into her journal.1 Mayo’s assailant, Sher Ali Afridi, was assumed to be a Wahabi, an Islamic sect, some of whose followers were committed to jihad. Three months earlier, one of Mayo’s senior colleagues, John Paxton Norman, the chief justice of the Calcutta High Court, had also been killed, on the steps of the Town Hall by a suspected Wahabi, a Punjabi named Abdullah. In the event neither assassin was proved to be a jihadist. But the panic over Muslim ‘fanaticism’ was unabated and undiscriminating. In 1871, in an inquiry commissioned by Lord Mayo, it was claimed that several fatwas had even been issued against the queen herself.2 Her alarm lingered over several months, from receiving the telegram accounts of Mayo’s death in February, through to May, when Mayo’s widow came to Windsor and recounted the viceroy’s dying moments, and on into August, when she met with Major Owen Tudor Burne, Mayo’s private secretary, who had been at his side when he was slain. Burne told the queen that ‘powerful Wahabees at Calcutta’ were behind the deadly deed.3 Safe haven at court was found for both: Lady Mayo became a lady-in-waiting, and Burne was taken on as Argyll’s political aide-de-camp.

  Political assassinations were in fact rare in India. There were only three more such killings during Queen Victoria’s reign, all in 1897, described in the next chapter. Queen Victoria stood more chance of being assassinated at home in Britain than her representatives did in India. She survived eight attempts on her life.4 In contrast India simmered with loyalism throughout her years of direct rule, conditional at times, but instant when required. When the queen survived her eighth assassination attempt in 1882, over 100 memorials and addresses poured in from India to congratulate her on her escape. Nationalism in India never assumed the violent or separatist form that it did in other parts of the British Empire such as Ireland. Indeed, the nascent years of Indian nationalism saw the apotheosis of Queen Victoria’s popularity. Why was this so? This chapter explores the place of Queen Victoria within early Indian nationalism, in both its Hindu and Muslim variants. It also considers a different kind of nationalism – the views of the Anglo-Indian community – which were never more virulent than in 1883, when the reforming viceroy, Lord Ripon, tried to increase Indian representation in the judicial system. For the queen had many Indian subjects, only some proved to be less subject than others.

  Voices of India

  By holding out a broader definition of imperial subjectivity, the queen’s proclamation of 1858 gave new life to Indian reformers. The language of loyalty and adherence to the royal ple
dge became a conspicuous element in the rhetoric of Indian patriotism in the 1860s and 1870s, both amongst Hindus and Muslims. Before the rebellion of 1857 the queen had hardly figured in the petitions and memorials sent to Britain from civic and political associations in India. After 1858 she was rarely absent. The British Indian Association of Calcutta, founded in 1851 by Bengali zamindars and the city’s merchants, registered this transformation. The BIA was most fulsome in its praise for the queen, hailing ‘with delight the proclamation of our gracious sovereign whereby she assumed the direct administration of her Asiatic empire’. The editor of the BIA’s mouthpiece, the Hindu Patriot (est. 1853), Kristo Das Pal, penned anonymously a pamphlet declaring Hindu fidelity to the queen, and it was he who wrote the ‘native’ address presented to the Prince of Wales during his stay in Calcutta in 1875–6.5 Such sentiments were not limited to Bengal, coming from further afield too. For example, faith in the words of the queen came from the Indian members of the East India Association, an organisation set up in 1868. For example, Dadabhai Naoroji, later one of the first Indian MPs in Parliament, invoked the proclamation of 1858 in his plea for Indian reform.6 There was something exclusively Indian about the idea of the queen as a benign force, looking out for the interests of her subjects overseas.