Empress
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Tilak’s trial that summer, and his eventual conviction and imprisonment, was a defining moment in Indian nationalism, as he appealed to an indigenous Indian tradition of heroic patriotism.73 However, the trial also demonstrated the contested manner in which the queen’s name had come to be used by 1897. The three main charges brought against Tilak all related in one way or another to the diamond jubilee.74 The articles that he penned in Kesari for which he was indicted were part of a series devoted to the queen’s jubilee. In the first he claimed that Shivaji provided a precedent for resisting rule through violence. In the second he was critical of the showy aspects of the jubilee, singling out for ridicule the fawning behaviour of the Indian princes who travelled to London, and referring to the Prince of Wales as a ‘circus-wallah’. At the same time, Tilak made clear that he was loyal to the queen-empress, and only wished that she might be associated with acts of charity towards the Indian people in her jubilee year. Finally, and most significantly, Tilak was charged with bringing the name of Queen Victoria into disrepute by comparing her to Dharmaraja, or, in the epic Mahabharata, Yudhishthira, the ‘monarch of the world’, king of the Pandavas, who spent 109 years on earth before entering heaven, symbolising piety and compassion for his fellow creatures. It was a bold move. The INC had spent over a decade cutting their cloth to fit the rhetoric of constitutional liberalism, invoking the queen’s proclamation and asserting their rights as imperial subjects – all without much impact. Now here was one of them incorporating the queen into a quite different Indian moral universe, giving legitimacy to a Marathi nationalism by comparing the queen to past Indian rulers both mythical and real. Tilak’s was not the first attempt to do this. However, by choosing the jubilee to make his intervention, and against the background of heavy-handed policing of the famine and the plague, his appropriation of the queen was timely, clearly angering the Bombay government.
A low-key jubilee in 1897 thus ended in high-resolution Indian discontent. The Government of India had not tried to manage the second jubilee in the way they had controlled the first, and what few rules they had laid down had been widely resented. Without too much intervention from above, India threw its own show in 1897, paying tribute to the mother of India, celebrating her womanly virtues, and naturalising her into Indian traditions, filtered by religion and region. The Government of India was right to hold back. Militant views lurked beneath surface loyalism, revealing themselves at those points where it was impossible to separate out the queen from the acts of government carried out in her name. Any attempt to project the queen further invited a backlash. Back in May 1897, Arthur Godley, the senior civil servant at the India Office, had counselled against a republication of the queen’s proclamation of 1858 to coincide with the jubilee. ‘This is hardly the moment,’ he told Hamilton, ‘to remind the world that the queen promised to make no distinction of race. The less said about it the better.’75 With the volume turned low on official patriotism, the way was cleared for nationalists such as Tilak to turn the jubilee into an opportunity to craft a more indigenous version of India’s story, and her destiny. Queen Victoria was included in that narrative, but she was there as an Indian monarch as much as an English one.
CHAPTER 12
THE LAST YEARS OF THE QAISARA
In July 1891 ‘Louischen’, the Duchess of Connaught, celebrated her thirty-first birthday in the new wing of Osborne House. Everyone sat down to dinner for the first time in the ‘Indian room’. It was unfinished. Nonetheless, the queen spent the summer showing off the new addition to her home, also known as the ‘durbar room’. The room took up all of the ground floor of the new extension to Osborne House. Originally conceived as a state dining room, it soon became more of a family space. John Lockwood Kipling, principal of the Mayo School of Arts in Lahore, designed it, and Bhai Ram Singh, a Sikh craftsman, carried out the work. From India Kipling and Bhai Ram Singh had already made a billiard room for Bagshot House, the Connaughts’ home. Now Bhai Ram Singh travelled west for a larger commission. Hired at £5 per week, he arrived at Osborne in January 1891. Scheduled to complete the commission in six months, he stayed until April 1892, lodging in nearby Cowes, superintending the London contractors and in turn being supervised by the Duchess of Connaught. Despite the delays, the queen was ‘delighted’ with his work, believing the room to be ‘unique in Europe’. The wooden and plaster décor mixed Hindu and Mughal features, there were carpets woven by women prisoners at Agra, and hangings chosen by the queen. Indian portraits and jubilee gifts from India lined the corridor leading to the new wing. Airy and spacious, the durbar room served as an alternative family dining room in the summer, and most Christmases were spent there as well, including the queen’s last in 1900. Amateur dramatics – the royal family’s favourite tableaux vivants – were played out there too.1 Alongside Indian rooms, there were Indian servants. The Connaughts brought one back with them when they returned from Bombay in 1890, and in 1887 Queen Victoria’s long-standing desire to have her own Indian attendants was gratified with the arrival at court from Agra of two Muslims: Hafiz Abdul Karim and Muhammad Bakhsh. Abdul Karim, elevated from manservant to munshi in 1888, remained at court until the queen’s death in 1901, teaching the queen Hindustani and, to the consternation of courtiers and politicians, seeming to become as close to the queen as John Brown had been in the 1860s and 1870s.
The queen’s last years were in some ways her most Indian. With the Connaughts, who had seven years in India behind them, as her constant companions, with her durbar room to dine in, and above all, with her Indian servants at her side, Queen Victoria recreated her eastern dominion at home. For her officials, this sounded alarm bells. For her Indian public, it made her more popular than ever, so much so that on her death she was celebrated as an Indian monarch as much as a monarch of India. As the fin de siècle Raj became more British, the domestic life of the queen-empress grew more Indian. This final chapter discusses the causes and consequences of this last twist in the Indian history of the Victorian monarchy. It commences in the princely state of Manipur in 1891, when the queen, to her regret, was unable to intervene and prevent the only execution of a reigning prince during her reign. Then the chapter turns to describe the presence at court of not just the munshi but also another Indian Muslim, Rafiuddin Ahmad. Finally, the chapter surveys reactions in India to the queen’s death in 1901.
Manipur
In 1891 Queen Victoria’s annual holiday on the French Riviera was interrupted by news of a murderous seizure of power in Manipur, a small British protectorate on the northern frontier of Burma.2 In 1886 the independent ruler, Maharaja Chandrakirti, had died and a power struggle ensued between his successor, his son Surachandra Singh, and two of his other sons, Tikendrajit (known as the Senapati, or the ‘military commander’) and Kulachandra. The Senapati led a palace coup. Surachandra abdicated and was replaced by Kulachandra, whom the Government of India, reluctant to annex the state, now recognised as legitimate ruler. At the same time, a military force was despatched to punish the Senapati. It proved a disaster. The leader of the expedition, James Quinton, the chief commissioner of Assam, was captured and killed along with several others including the local resident, Frank Grimwood, whilst loyal troops, led by the redoubtable Ethel Grimwood, wife of the resident, managed to escape, later releasing her dramatic captivity story to the newspapers. Mutiny memories were revived, and more recent colonial disasters such as Isandlwana in southern Africa were recalled. Tales of treachery and mutilation of corpses quickly circulated.3 Reinforcements were sent from Burma, joined by Gurkhas, and the coup was ended, with the princes and other ringleaders put on trial.
The whole episode left the queen ‘full of anxiety’. She sympathised with the plight of the prisoners: what Mrs Grimwood went through ‘must have been dreadful’. Of more lingering concern for the queen, however, was the treatment of the Manipuri princes. In Grasse, she swotted up on the history of British dealings with Manipur. On her return to Windsor at the beginning of May, she sought
out Richard Cross, the secretary of state for India. She complained that the attempted seizure of the two brother princes at the durbar arranged by Quinton under the pretext of recognising the new regime created the ‘appearance of treachery’; it was ‘incredible and unpardonable conduct’ for which Quinton had paid with his life. As reports of the trial and verdict reached London during June, she urged that Tikendrajit and Kulachandra be treated with clemency, preferring banishment or life imprisonment instead of execution (the ‘Queen is naturally averse to hanging a Prince’, observed Cross).4
Then Queen Victoria received the heroine of the hour, Ethel Grimwood, at Windsor. She wanted to award Grimwood the Victoria Cross or the Crown of India, but settled, on her secretary of state’s advice, on the Red Cross. In her conversation with the plucky survivor, the queen noted how even Mrs Grimwood blamed another coup conspirator, Lungthoubu Thangal (known as ‘Thangal General’) and not the Senapati for the killings.5 Back in Imphal, the princes’ lawyer, Manomohan Ghose, appealed to the queen for clemency. Lord Lansdowne, the viceroy, and Cross held their breath lest she interfered, a course of action that would be ‘catastrophic’, warned the viceroy. Kulachandra was spared death, but nothing more could be done for the other two. On 13 August, the Senapati and Thangal General were executed, on order of the viceroy, and on the same spot where Quinton and his colleagues had been slain. ‘I regret it,’ the queen wrote in her journal, ‘as I think our whole conduct in that affair is not clear.’ Cross sighed with relief, telling Lansdowne that the ‘Queen was convinced that the peoples of India believed that she could of her own will have spared any execution’.6 Still Queen Victoria did not let go. After the execution she contacted Ethel Grimwood via Harriet Phipps, one of her court staff, seeking further information. Grimwood expressed her sorrow for the prince, and absolved him of responsibility for her husband’s death, but still felt he ‘deserved to suffer’ for what he had done to others.7
The Manipur crisis revealed many of the queen’s usual Indian traits. There was the distrust of local British officials in India and an instinctive tendency to take the side of a native prince. She was forthright in her criticism of Lansdowne and wanted John Gorst, the under-secretary of state for India, reprimanded.8 Even after the Senapati had been identified as the villain of the piece she continued to argue that he was more wronged than wrongful. His seizure by British officials at the durbar was underhand, she insisted, and anyway his punishment did not fit the crime. He had not been found guilty of murder. Nor was he responsible for the bloody reprisals: she pointed out to Cross (as Charlotte Canning had to her in 1857) that the beheadings had taken place after the victims had been killed. She also demanded that proper provision be made for the widows and children of the executed prince.9 Then there was her thirst for first-hand testimony. As in 1857, when she relied heavily on Charlotte Canning’s eyewitness accounts, in 1891 she based her view of events almost entirely on Ethel Grimwood’s narrative. As in 1880 over the retreat from Kandahar, she thought she could pummel her ministers as well as the viceroy around to her way of thinking. In this respect, Queen Victoria proved ignorant of the uses to which the Government of India had been putting her authority since 1858. The Senapati, Thangal General and Kulachandra were all found guilty of ‘waging war against the Queen’. The queen was clearly unaware of the long reach of this law applied in her name. ‘Why shd. the Indian penal code be so different to ours?’ she demanded of Cross.10 Manipur was the only occasion during her reign when the charge of ‘waging war against the Queen’ in India could be made to stick. The queen was left in an invidious position. Unable to intervene to commute the sentences of death, she turned out to be the prince’s executioner and not his saviour. Her warrant sealed his fate. Cross was made to feel the full force of her anger. After the executions had taken place, she told him of her ‘strong feeling that the principle of governing India by fear, & by crushing them, instead of only by firmness & conciliation is one wh. never will answer in the end, and the Queen Empress shd. wish to see more & more altered’. For his part, Cross suspected that voices in the queen’s ear were turning her against her own officials in India. He pointed to one source in particular, the Indian servants in the royal household.11
The Munshi and the Maulvi
By the time of the Manipur crisis in 1891 it was no secret that the queen had taken on an Indian retinue. In October 1887 she sent a public letter to the Government of Bombay Presidency, thanking her subjects there for their jubilee gifts and greetings. In the letter she mentioned that she now had two Indian servants, and that she was learning Hindustani.12 The two Indians referred to were Abdul Karim and Mahomet Bahksh, sent over by John Tyler, the superintendent of the Agra jail, to assist the queen during the jubilee. They were the first of the series of Muslim manservants, all from Agra, who joined the royal household in the late 1880s and 1890s. The longest-serving of them was Abdul Karim, or the munshi as he became known when the queen upgraded him from servant to secretary in 1888.13 Abdul Karim and Mahomet Bahksh quickly became fixtures at court. The queen commissioned two of her favourite artists, the painter Rudolf Swoboda and the sculptor Joseph Boehm, to complete their likenesses, and she herself sketched Abdul Karim’s portrait. They joined the royal family in their tableaux vivants, in which they were usually cast as Arab characters. Queen Victoria laid down elaborate guidelines for the court livery that her new Indian servants were to wear, a hybrid of a red European tunic bearing the royal crest, Indian turban and a silk sash around the waist.14 There was to be no hiding their racial difference, the fact that they were Indians at court, rather than just courtiers who happened to be Indian.
In acquiring her own Indian servants, the queen was, to some extent, following the example of her children. The Prince of Wales had returned from India in 1876 with his own Indian cavalry guard. The Duke and Duchess of Connaught came back from India for the 1887 jubilee bringing with them their own Indian servant, Stephen Damuda, a Christian orphan. The Connaughts could also speak and read Hindustani. Queen Victoria was particularly keen to acquire spoken Hindustani and to practise writing the script as well. She gave instructions to her new Indian servants that they were to converse with her only in Hindustani, albeit slowly. For the next decade or so, interrupted only by his trips home to India, she took daily language lessons from Abdul Karim.15 Abdul Karim also began to act as an interpreter for the queen, when there were Indian visitors to court, starting with the Gaekwar of Baroda in December 1887.
More than anything else that she did as queen-empress, Queen Victoria’s adoption of the munshi as her right-hand man caused widespread concern amongst Palace staff and at the India Office. Abdul Karim was everywhere. Not only was he in daily attendance upon the queen at Windsor and Buckingham Palace, but he also went with her on her travels. From July 1891 he was listed in the court circular whenever the queen’s public engagements were reported.16 He was soon given his own home: Frogmore Cottage at Windsor, a specially built house at Balmoral and Arthur’s Cottage at Osborne. The queen lobbied hard to extend favour to Abdul Karim’s father back in Agra: official honours and land. She insisted that Abdul Karim be given special status when he visited India, allowed to carry arms, excused from customs on arrival and invited to a viceregal durbar. Throughout his time in her service she pressed for various awards and titles of dignity to be granted to him.17
No one likes a court favourite, least of all a foreign one. Resentment towards Abdul Karim grew. He was accused of being involved in the theft of a brooch, of bullying the other Indian servants, and of briefing the press with his photograph and with puffed-up stories about his life and role at court. The palace rumour mill began to doubt that the munshi was all he seemed. In 1894 enquiries were made in India about his family and their status there. It was revealed that his father was simply the apothecary and not the surgeon-general at the Agra jail.18 From doubts about his true identity, it was a short step to questioning his loyalty. Rightly or wrongly, by the mid-1890s the munshi was believed to
be influencing the queen with a pro-Muslim outlook on Indian affairs. In turn the queen was suspected of sharing confidential information and documents with the munshi, which the India Office feared were being leaked to intermediaries associated with the Emir of Afghanistan. Hamilton, the secretary of state for India, threatened to stop showing the queen despatches lest she pass on state secrets. When the munshi returned to India in the spring of 1896 his movements and contacts were closely monitored by a force led by Sir John Lambert, former deputy commissioner of the Calcutta police.19 In 1897 matters came to a head during the queen’s sojourn at Cimiez on the French Riviera, when the munshi met up in the Excelsior Hotel with one Rafiuddin Ahmad, of the ‘Moslem Patriotic League’, to share, it was supposed, sensitive diplomatic information. Ahmad was expelled from the hotel and from the holiday. With the Prince of Wales, and Prince Louis of Battenberg (husband of Princess Victoria of Hesse, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter) briefing against the hapless munshi, the queen was confronted by her physician, James Reid, and persuaded that the situation was not only dangerous but potentially a huge embarrassment.20