by Miles Taylor
Thereafter, Abdul Karim was not around as much. He spent almost the whole of the queen’s final year, 1900, in India, and, apart from the occasional complaint, his behaviour at court roused little comment. Yet, on her death, all traces of the munshi were hastily removed. The new king, Edward VII, packed him off back to India with a generous grant of land. His correspondence with the queen was destroyed and, when her journals and letters from the last fifteen years of her life were published between 1930 and 1932, the munshi was mostly edited out of the story.21 Lord Cromer, the consul-general of Egypt, summed up the mood of many when he claimed that all Queen Victoria’s ideas about India came from the munshi, and, by implication, that they were all wrong.22 This harsh judgement can be disregarded. The queen had been steering her own course as far as Indian politics were concerned long before the advent of the munshi. There is no firm evidence that she either passed on the secrets of state to him or that he plied her with advice about India that was unavailable elsewhere. To conclude otherwise would be to credit Abdul Karim with more guile and intelligence than he possessed, and to afford none to the queen. The queen had her own ideas about Muslim India at the close of her reign, and if there was a voice in her ear it was not that of the munshi, but of his friend the maulvi (lawyer), Rafiuddin Ahmad, to whom we now need to turn.
Rafiuddin Ahmad was a young Muslim from Poona, who came to London in 1889 to study for the bar at Middle Temple. Soon, he became one of the principal spokesmen for moderate Indian Muslim loyalism in England.23 He joined the National Indian Association in 1890, and shortly afterwards helped establish the ‘Moslem Patriotic League’. By then Rafiuddin Ahmad had already come to public attention as a defender of Islam, chiding the English theatre for allowing the Prophet to be portrayed onstage, and also explaining to an English audience the importance of purdah for Indian Muslim women. He chummied up to the poet laureate, Lord Tennyson, visiting him at his home on the Isle of Wight. He visited Constantinople in 1891, for which he had no diplomatic accreditation, but managed to see Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the head of the caliphate, on more than one occasion during the visit.24
At the end of 1892 Rafiuddin Ahmad pulled off a sensation, publishing in The Strand magazine facsimiles of pages from the queen’s Hindustani journal, copied by Her Majesty ‘expressly for this article’. There were two extracts: one described the visit of the Shah of Persia to London in 1889, the other the queen’s grief at the death of Prince Albert Victor earlier in 1892. Ahmad noted how he had been shown the diaries during a visit to Balmoral, an occasion when he also heard the Duke of Connaught ‘break the conversation in Hindustani’. The article lavishly praised the queen for her oriental studies, remarking on how they set an example to the princes of India, how they confirmed her bond with the Indian people and how they exerted a positive influence over the caliphate. Ahmad duly acknowledged the role of the munshi in the ‘rapid progress’ made by the queen in learning Hindustani, and his portrait along with that of the queen, and of course the maulvi, accompanied the piece.25 Instant notoriety came with the scoop. Profiles of Ahmad, the ‘orientalist scholar’, followed in newspapers. Doors began to open. He became a regular visitor at court. The Prince of Wales granted him an audience, and he was on the guest list for the wedding of George the Duke of York to Princess Mary of Teck in July 1893, an occasion which he wrote up for The Strand. The queen gave her customary seal of approval by inviting Ahmad to sit for a portrait by Rudolf Swoboda.26 No other Indian during her reign sped so fast from obscurity to acceptance at court. Yet the maulvi has eluded detection entirely.
Quite how Rafiuddin Ahmad worked his way into the confidences of the royal family is unclear. He had at least two audiences with the queen.27 The queen sang his praises to Cross, the secretary of state, in May 1891, revealing that Lady Harris, wife of the governor of Bombay, had been his patron since his arrival in London. ‘He is remarkably clever & most loyal & anxious to bring about the best of feeling between England and India,’ the queen informed Cross, and went on to describe him as ‘a staunch but liberal-minded Mahomedan’ whom Cross would do well to meet.28 Abdul Karim may have shared the extracts from the queen’s diaries with Ahmad during his second visit, with or without the queen’s consent, or the queen may have herself facilitated the publication. She certainly did nothing to prevent their publication. Moreover, she imbibed some of his ideas. In 1892, not long after her audience with Rafiuddin Ahmad, Queen Victoria expressed her anxiety over the status of Indian Muslims as a political minority to Lord Lansdowne, the viceroy, in relation to the new Indian Councils Act, echoing Ahmad’s stance.29 In 1894, Ahmad took up the cause of Indian Muslims caught up in the plague scares surrounding the pilgrim traffic to the Hajj at Mecca. He was introduced at the Foreign Office as Abdul Karim’s brother, met with Sir Henry Fowler, the new secretary of state for India in Lord Rosebery’s Cabinet, and was instrumental in improving the inspection of ships, something he later claimed had brought ‘unfeigned satisfaction’ to Indian Muslims.30 Finally, towards the end of 1894, Ahmad stepped up his criticism of the Indian National Congress, arguing that the sectarian riots that had broken out in Bombay were the result of political provocation. Again, the queen was prompted into action, sending a telegram to her viceroy, the Earl of Elgin, asking him to provide further information.31
Rafiuddin Ahmad was clearly a persuasive charmer. It is unlikely that he knew Abdul Karim before he came to London, but once he met him in 1891, the munshi most probably became his channel of communication to the queen. The lack of surviving correspondence hinders a definitive conclusion, but it seems plausible to argue that the munshi amplified the views of Ahmad, and encouraged the queen to consult his journalism for herself. For example, in 1898 she recommended that the new viceroy, Lord Curzon, consult Ahmad’s article in the Nineteenth Century calling for a new university in India to be dedicated to the higher education of Muslims.32 As ever, on Indian affairs, the queen followed where her instincts dictated, not where she was pushed. In other words, she adopted a position more tolerant of Muslim views in the 1890s as she wished to avoid strife between the races, in much the same manner as she had despaired over the European backlash in Calcutta against Ripon’s legal reforms in 1883. She reached out to Ahmad, not because he was the munshi’s friend, but rather because his views tallied with her own concerns.
As far as the court and the India Office were concerned, however, Ahmad’s friendship with the munshi was a breach of security. He was ejected as we have seen from the queen’s hotel in 1897, and monitored again by the police in 1898.33 No smoking gun was found to connect him to the emir. To the twitchy British he was a ‘ruffian’ agitator, a ‘Mahomedan intriguer’ and possibly a spy.34 To the queen he was an informant, but of the benign variety. He helped her develop a new perspective on the condition of Muslims in India, on the growing danger of sectarianism. She remained several steps ahead of her blinkered officials. Learning Hindustani, confiding in the munshi and taking guidance from Ahmad were all ways of steering a course independent of the Government of India and the India Office. The queen recommended it to others. In March 1899 she suggested to Lord Curzon that he employ an interpreter, so that Anglo-Indian views did not dominate.35 Curzon had no need of a munshi, and, as we shall see, the youngest and most headstrong of all her viceroys had his own views about the role of royalty in the Raj.
Beyond the royal household Queen Victoria wanted Indians to serve in other parts of her realm. In 1896 she backed a proposal that Indian princes sit in the House of Lords.36 Three years later, during the South African war, the queen urged that Indian forces be deployed, and was subsequently pleased to see 11,000 sent out as auxiliary, non-combatant support. But she wanted more. Might the troops be joined by senior Indian officers who could be given roles of command, she pressed George Hamilton, the secretary of state for India, on several occasions in 1900. Again, she had in mind Indian princes. Her suggestions were politely but firmly brushed aside by Hamilton, despite support from the viceroy, not a lit
tle amused to find the octogenarian queen still as alert, involved and Indophile as ever.37
In Memoriam
By the summer of 1900 Queen Victoria was ageing fast. She made an overseas trip to Ireland in April and hosted a large garden party at Buckingham Palace in July, where the royal couple from Baroda and the Maharaja of Cooch Behar were amongst the guests.38 Her aides now closed in around her, limiting her travel to only her royal residences, and stemming the flow of visitors to the court. Despite this seclusion, her door remained open to Indian princes. Avoiding every obstacle set up by the India Office, the canny Maharaja of Kapurthala made his way to Balmoral at the end of October, where the queen was expecting him. Hamilton, the secretary of state, was aghast, not only as the audience with the queen took place without official sanction, but also because the maharaja was persona non grata, owing to the ‘debauchery’ of his rule.39 Kapurthala was not the last Indian in the queen’s schedule. Prior to the onset of her final illness, the Thakur of Morvi arrived in England, and sent on to the queen some vases, about which she wrote enthusiastically to Curzon just eleven days before her death.40 There was an Indian presence too at the queen’s last official engagement, on 2 January 1901, when Queen Victoria, with Abdul Karim at her side, received Lord Roberts, commander of the British forces in South Africa. Roberts came to Osborne House accompanied by six Indian cavalrymen orderlies. Veteran of the Indian rebellion of 1857–8 and the second Afghan war, ringmaster of the military review at the Delhi Assemblage in 1877, and commander-in-chief of the Madras Army in the 1880s, Roberts personified the royal army in India since the transfer of power in 1858.41 It was a fitting end to a public life lived in Britain, but magnified in India.
During the next fortnight the queen’s condition worsened. From 15 January, daily reports of her health were telegraphed to the viceroy, and printed in the government Gazette. By the 18 January the updates were coming in more frequently: several a day, and then by the hour. Public prayers for the queen’s recovery were ordered in various parts of India. On 22 January Queen Victoria died, her immediate family, physician, nurses and the Bishop of Winchester at her bedside. Her body was removed to the dining room, and the royal household, including Abdul Karim, were allowed in to make their farewells. Then she was taken to the chapel at Osborne to lie in state until the funeral. There, the queen’s coffin was laid upon a dais covered with the Royal Standard, with the Scottish lion and the Irish harp showing at each end. Beneath the Royal Standard lay an Indian shawl, and an Indian carpet was laid on the floor of the chapel. In death as in life, India was never far away from the queen.
On hearing the news, India ground to a halt. The Government of India declared three days of mourning, and stipulated that all government employees wear black crepe. Many of the princely states went further. Four days of mourning were declared in Mysore. In Hyderabad, the nizam interrupted an execution just as the noose was being tightened on the condemned man, and gave him a pardon.42 Memorial meetings were organised to coincide with the funeral in London on 2 February. Curzon led the way, joining his officials for a service in Calcutta Cathedral. A similar service took place in Bombay, although the lines from the ‘Dead March’ imploring that the queen’s soul be delivered from the ‘gates of hell’ were removed as inappropriate after objections.43 As ever, official staging of the monarchy gave way to local, more spontaneous reactions from Indians. The black crepe protocol issued by the government offended many, both for its officious tone and for its choice of colour, white being the convention for mourning in India.44 Perhaps the most striking moment of all came on the Calcutta Maidan, held at the same time as the Anglican service in the cathedral. In a ceremony organised by local Hindus the queen’s portrait was placed on a stand and draped in white. Across the Maidan effigies of the goddess Lakshmi were carried aloft in one of the largest gatherings of Hindus ever seen in the city. In other cities the queen’s death was marked in local style. In Bombay, for example, wreaths of white flowers appeared from nowhere to be laid around her statue.45
Remembering the queen the Indian way continued in the weeks following her final internment in the mausoleum at Frogmore in the grounds of the Windsor Castle estate. Hundreds of memorial meetings were convened across India during February, and through the months that followed there was a steady outpouring of biographies, tributes and offerings.46 Two versions of the queen-empress emerged. On the one side was an Anglo-Indian queen, who had extended Christian civilisation to the east. For example, in the praise offered by The Empress, an illustrated magazine published in Calcutta, the queen was lauded for the protection she had given to Indian Muslims and to the women of India. At the same time, stories began to be told of the Indian dimensions to the queen’s life. The 1858 proclamation took pride of place, not least because the viceroy referred to it as ‘the golden guide to our conduct and aspirations’ in his eulogy delivered to his Council on 1 February, his comments interpreted as a very public rehabilitation after the contempt shown towards India’s ‘Magna Carta’ by the British governing class in the 1880s and 1890s.47 Indian commentary in 1901 focused on how the queen in her last years had taken on Indian Muslim servants and learned Hindustani. The munshi was given pride of place in the narrative. The queen, apparently, had given him his own palace for his family’s use. An illustrated memorial volume depicted the munshi at the queen’s side during the last visit of Lord Roberts. The Friend of India even claimed that the munshi and another Indian servant had kept vigil over the queen’s body as it lay in the chapel at Osborne, an erroneous story that originated in the London press and gathered pace in India.48 The queen was also celebrated as a widow. As The Bengalee put it, the queen was revered more as a woman that as a sovereign, her life of posthumous devotion to her husband summed up the ideal of Indian widowhood. India had lost not so much a great queen as a mother. Dinshaw Wacha, the president of the Indian National Congress, declared her to be ‘an affectionate mother and the type of the highest and most exalted womanhood’. As K. C. Duraisamy, a newspaper editor from Bangalore, observed, ‘the women population are the greatest mourners’ for the ‘mother of mothers’. So the tributes to her as mother and widow went on, with her opposition to widow remarriage added in as well. She was revered by Lajjaram Sharma Mehta, the Hindu nationalist, as an ideal of Indian womanhood, and by the Tamil writer Vidhvan Periya Subbar Reddiar as a ‘maiden wife and sovereign’.49 There was no allusion to her colour – the epithet ‘great white Queen’ would only come later. In India, much more so than back in Britain, the queen was remembered as a female sovereign, the mother of India.
To this roll call of her Indian empathies was added an Indianisation of the queen. She was incorporated into Hindu deity: Queen Victoria was the Adya-Sakti50 of our mythology, explained Sourindro Mohun Tagore. She was included in the telling of the ‘Lays of India’, delivering India from the ‘anarchy’ of its former rulers. She epitomised a divine presence, ‘as a Sovereign in a limited monarchy, but as the visible agent of the invisible Providence’, as Subramania Iyer, founding editor of the Hindu newspaper, described her at a meeting in Madras.51 A ‘Hindu pundit’, writing in the Madras Mail, credited Queen Victoria with reviving respect for kingship, as she summoned from the Sastras the natural obedience shown by Hindus towards monarchs. For Nava Yug, a Bengali newspaper in Calcutta, the queen was a jagadhatri (protector of the world). She had returned India to prosperity, of the sort not known since the time of Rama, according to Kalpataru, a Marathi paper from Bombay. So deified and reified, Queen Victoria left life as a reincarnation of India’s golden age. It was an Indian version of the queen that faced strong competition.
For one man had his own idea of how Queen Victoria should be commemorated: Lord Curzon, the viceroy. With indecent haste – the queen was only just buried – he outlined his ideas for a ‘Victoria Memorial Hall’, a ‘Valhalla’ for India. Curzon likened his project to Nelson’s Column, and to the Albert Memorial. But he wanted something even more spectacular: a building that would be ‘s
tately, spacious, monumental, and grand’, to which people would flock from across India. Curzon’s acolytes promised a new Taj Mahal, a tribute to the empress of the nineteenth century as fine and fitting as that completed for the empress of the seventeenth. The building, Curzon explained, would serve two purposes, first as a monument to the queen, and secondly as a museum or ‘national gallery’ of modern India, that is to say, India under British rule, ‘worthy both of the queen and of the Victorian age’.52 This latter stipulation proved controversial. Curzon viewed India’s indigenous history through a distorting lens, one that celebrated the impact of the west and sidelined the achievements of the east. So the Victoria Memorial Hall would foreground India’s history since the eighteenth century and leave the deeper past to others.
Curzon’s plans developed quickly. Within days, dependable maharajas such as those of Jaipur, Kashmir and Mysore had stumped up large contributions, and over the following weeks a formidable nationwide organisation was established, a pot of funds began to fill and exhibits were donated or pledged. By the end of February Curzon was able to announce his scheme in more detail. The memorial would comprise a central hall, containing a statue of the queen, and around its walls her words in English and in the vernacular – from the proclamation and from her other messages to India – would be inscribed in gold. This centrepiece would lead on to a series of galleries, featuring the history of India since the Mughals, and represented by sculpture, painting, treaties and sannads, maps, newspapers, native arms and musical instruments.53 There would also be a Princes’ Court. But of India’s own pre-history, into which so many Indian eulogies had managed to incorporate the queen, there would be no reference.
Critics lined up over the Calcutta memorial. Firstly, it was objected that a national monument should be in Calcutta. Secondly, that it should celebrate a particular version of Indian history, both in chronology and in content. And, thirdly, that a hall of the dead was to be preferred to more practical and useful schemes for the living.54 Rival schemes of memorialisation emerged. Some had a national remit. The Indian Women’s Victoria Memorial, although based in Bengal, had the Maharani of Mysore as its figurehead. Elsewhere, other places asserted their claim to be the rightful location for a memorial monument to the queen, for example Bombay and Karachi.55 In the main, philanthropy was preferred to pomposity. Schemes came forward for education, most notably technical institutes, such as the one established in Madras. There was a revival of fundraising for medical causes, principally nursing, but also for hospitals. The Dufferin fund for the training of nurses and doctors revived, with a new ‘Victoria Memorial Scholarships’ scheme for training midwives, and several specialist facilities were set up, such as the Institute for the Blind in Bombay.56 Indian initiatives looked forwards as well as backwards.