by Miles Taylor
Curzon marked the demise of the queen and the advent of the new era with one other grand gesture: the imperial durbar of 1903. Soon after the accession of Edward VII, Curzon suggested that the new king should come to India for a parallel coronation event there. Little enthusiasm for the idea could be found in Britain. The king’s private secretary explained that the king could not be spared for such a long period as a royal visit to India would entail. There would have to be a full tour, and not just a single event in Delhi.57 Daunted but not defeated, Curzon proceeded anyway with plans for a Delhi durbar to coincide with the world tour of Prince Arthur and his wife, Louise. With the Connaughts and Ernest Louis, the Duke of Hesse (a grandchild of Queen Victoria), as royal guests, Curzon himself ghosting the role of the king-emperor, and Mary Curzon, the vicereine, matching her husband all the way for glamour, much to the amusement of the satirical press, India was promised an occasion both awesome and traditional. ‘To the East,’ the viceroy told his Council at Simla in October 1902, swiping away complaints about the costs of the impending durbar, ‘there is nothing strange, but something familiar, and even sacred, about the practice that brings Sovereigns into communion with the people in a ceremony of public solemnity and rejoicing after they have succeeded to their high estate.’58 Except that the sovereign stayed away.
Of all the Delhi durbars, Curzon’s 1903 pageant was the most spectacular. Held on the same spot as Lord Lytton’s Imperial Assemblage of 1877, it was less elaborate than its predecessor. Nor was it as momentous as the appearance of Edward VII’s successor George V and Queen Mary at Delhi in December 1911. The 1903 durbar did, however, outshine the others in the sheer scale of its organisation, much of it caught on moving film.59 Bhai Ram Singh and Ganga Ram, a civil engineer from the Punjab, were commissioned to build and decorate the Indo-Saracenic durbar pavilions designed by Swinton Jacob, veteran of the Public Works department of Jaipur. The 1903 durbar was an international extravaganza, a show put on for an audience back in Britain as much as for the princes and people of India. Compared to 1877, when there was only a handful of unofficial invitees, there was a huge influx of overseas guests, some 1,222 in all, from as far afield as Japan, South Africa and Australia. Only 159 Indians came, most of whom were princes and chiefs. Admittedly, the Indian maharajas came with thousands of followers, and the set pieces of the event – the elephant procession, the military parade – featured them in all their finery. However, there was no missing the wider message of some of the occasion. The time-honoured rituals of the durbar were ignored; there were no return visits of viceroys and chiefs. Curzon dominated the proceedings of the formal proclamation, speaking for thirty minutes, hand on thigh, foot disrespectfully placed on the bottom of the throne. Then, in the most marked break with tradition, all the princes showed their deference in full public view, one by one approaching the dais, from where the viceroy leant down to hear them swear their loyalty. Curzon later claimed that his durbar simply revived an old policy. ‘We touched their hearts with the idea of a common sentiment and a common aim,’ he told an audience at the Guildhall in London the following year. ‘Depend upon it, you will never rule the East except through the heart, and the moment imagination has gone out of your Asiatic policy your Empire will dwindle and decay.’60 But Curzon’s durbar contained a range of innovations that came more from his imagination than anywhere else. Those with longer memories, such as Charles O’Donnell, who had attended Lytton’s assemblage in 1877, were shocked by Curzon’s ‘peacocking Imperialism’ and especially by the affront given to the Indian princes.61 No words of royal sympathy or pledges of justice marked the occasion, just the viceregal boot of authority.
Royal India was never the same again after the death of the queen. Some things carried on as before. In 1905 the Prince of Wales – the future George V – toured India, not long after Curzon’s controversial decision to partition Bengal into separate Muslim and Hindu provinces. The visit was a carbon copy of earlier royal tours, officials poring over the records from 1875–6 to ensure that they had the correct protocol.62 The old magic was still there. Friendships were resumed, most notably with Ganga Singh, the Maharaja of Bikaner, who had been made the prince’s aide-de-camp in 1902, and who would go on to serve in Lloyd George’s Imperial War Cabinet a decade later.63 But, as the Prince of Wales journeyed across the subcontinent, the terrain of Indian politics was being transformed. Muslims gathered at Aligarh used the occasion of the prince’s visit in March 1906 to begin discussions about forming a new political organisation that later in the year became the All-India Muslim League, a rival to the Indian National Congress.64 Prince George was kept on a tight leash, the Government of India insisting that no memorials or requests be presented to him at any stage of the trip.65 In January 1906, whilst in Calcutta, the prince did lay the foundation stone of the Victoria Memorial Hall, on land halfway between the cathedral and the old prison.66 However, the atmosphere had changed, with not much left of the spontaneous enthusiasm that had once accompanied the appearance of royalty in India. Lord Minto, who succeeded Curzon as viceroy, dragged his heels over getting on with the Victoria Memorial Hall.
As the fiftieth anniversary of the transfer of power approached in 1908, Minto vetoed plans for a general amnesty of prisoners. A new proclamation in the name of Edward VII was issued, steered by the secretary of state, John Morley, not least to boost army morale and ease tensions on the north-west frontier. It reflected on a half-century, surveying ‘our labours . . . with clear gaze and good conscience’ and cautiously promised more reform.67 Cracks began to show. In 1909 statues of Queen Victoria at Benares and Nagpur were defaced.68 When Edward VII passed away at the beginning of May 1910 there was little of the unorchestrated outpouring of grief witnessed at the death of the queen. Edward was remembered as ‘the world’s peacemaker’, but, aside from a public letter sent during the 1907 famine, memorialists struggled to recall whether he had brought peace to India. Subscriptions were raised to commemorate the late king-emperor with an equestrian statue in Delhi, the Indian army coming up with a large part of the funding. Hardly any Indians attended the unveiling of the foundation stone, laid on a site between the Fort and the Jama Masjid by George V in December 1911.69 At the 1911 durbar, the only time a serving monarch and his consort showed up in India, the Gaekwar of Baroda refused to dress in ceremonial costume for the occasion, and deliberately turned his back on the royal couple as he retreated from the throne.70 Nonetheless, India fought for king, empire and country in the First World War, and some of the Indian princes – from Bikaner, Patiala, Cooch Behar, Jodhpur, Ratlam and Kishangarh – were selected for service in Europe. India remained loyal. Its loyalism was taken for granted.
Nowhere registered the waning of royal India quite so poignantly as the Victoria Memorial Hall. By 1907, although 4 million rupees had been raised and architects appointed, limited progress had been made on the construction of the memorial. There were problems in the supply of the marble. Subsidence was found to be affecting the site selected for the building. Between the heaven of the cathedral and the hell of the prison lay a lot of swamp.71 None of Curzon’s successors showed much enthusiasm for the project. Curzon lamented that had he stayed in India, the job would have been completed. Minto, he complained, was at best ‘perfunctory’. Finally, in 1913, Lord Carmichael, the governor of Bengal and a trustee of the National Gallery in London, took some interest, securing the plot on the Maidan for the Memorial Hall.72 Wartime restrictions on tools and materials slowed works further, and by 1918, although an end to the construction was in sight, so too was the depletion of the trustees’ working capital. Curzon canvassed amongst Indian princes, testing the water for a further call on their generosity, but even the Maharaja of Bikaner, so loyal and lavish in the past, counselled against such a move. The Victoria Memorial Hall was eventually completed in 1920. However, that still left the grounds around and approaches to the building to be done. As the date of the opening ceremony approached, with the visiting Prince of Wales due to
cut the ribbon, money was again running short, and loans were taken out in India and in London to make up the shortfall.73 George Frampton’s statue of the queen, which had been sitting at the other end of the Maidan waiting for its new home since 1901, was shunted into place. At last, on 28 December 1921, Victoria’s ‘Taj’ was opened to the public, ‘an enduring token of the affection which all, Indians and Europeans, princes and peasants, felt for Queen Victoria’.74
It had taken four viceroys, two king-emperors and one world war to see through the Victoria memorial project from start to finish. In that time, the Raj had changed so much. The capital was on the move, from Calcutta to New Delhi. The oldest part of British India – Bengal – had been split and then put back together again. Guns had been turned on the festival crowds at Amritsar. A terrible beauty had been born: Mohandas Gandhi’s movement for swaraj, or self-rule. Curzon’s version of India, frozen into the marbled splendour of the Victoria Memorial Hall, already belonged to a different age. So too did Queen Victoria. To this day her gargantuan bronze statue sits outside the Hall. She is slumped on her throne, looking north across the Maidan to the old Fort William where it all began. In her hands she clutches an orb and a sceptre. One piece of regalia is missing. No crown, either hollow or imperial, adorns her head.
EPILOGUE
The queen was dead, but the Empire lived on for almost a half century more. The new republic of India was finally proclaimed on 26 January 1950, following the granting of independence and simultaneous partition of India and Pakistan in August 1947. Pakistan became an Islamic republic on 23 March 1956. There was no straight road taken from imperial monarchy to republic. Narratives of national identity in the Indian subcontinent can tell an uncomplicated story of the coming of the modern states of India and Pakistan – of the journey from ‘rebellion to republic’ – as though the final form of polity chosen was always a pre-ordained outcome. As Jawaharlal Nehru, one of the architects of the new India, observed, when introducing the draft constitution for the new state in 1946, it was impossible to ‘produce monarchy out of nothing . . . [India] must inevitably be a republic’.1 Yet the exit from empire, and the rejection of the British monarchy, was considerably more drawn out and complex than this. The idea of the modern republic was novel and untried; the concept of monarchy was almost as old as time itself. The monarchies of Europe had endured and survived the revolutionary era after 1789, and adapted across the age of empire to become multinational, composite systems of rule, of which the Raj in India was a shining example, for better or worse. Republics, especially large ones, by contrast, had a bad nineteenth century, descending into civil war (America, France, Mexico, Spain, Uruguay). In this context, the genesis of India as a republic was as much an act of invention as one of faith.
On the British side, there were no precedents for monarchy giving way peacefully to a republican alternative. The American revolution of 1776 was so seared into the British psyche that colonial rule thereafter steered away from outright confrontation with settlers and indigenous elites. Only two territories managed to break away from the British imperial fold in the nineteenth century: the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. The fact that Britain refused to recognise the Transvaal’s adopted name, the ‘South African Republic’, shows how alien the idea of the republic remained.2 For Indians too, nationalists included, it proved difficult to conceive India without the monarchy. Until the end of the First World War the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim League sought ‘home rule’ for India under the Crown. After the Amritsar massacre of 1919, anti-British feeling intensified in India and during the 1920s the first calls for an independent republic were made. But there was no unanimity about what form a republic might take.
By way of conclusion, this chapter charts how the lure of monarchy in India waxed, waned and finally crashed to the ground in the first half of the twentieth century, and how the idea of a republican future took hold. One led to the other – in other words, the ways in which the Government of India persisted in the symbolism of the British monarchy, long after Queen Victoria’s death, directly contributed to the emergence of the republic as the solution to India’s woes. The Raj overplayed its hand. From being its strongest asset, the monarchy became its weakest link. Without Queen Victoria, royal India was exposed as an imperial sham.
Raj and Swaraj
After 1901 new times brought a new, less deferential tone to Indian nationalism. Criticism of the founding fathers of the INC became common, and dissenting versions of India’s past began to be told. For some it was a complete volte-face. Bipin Chandra Pal, who less than two decades earlier had written a fulsome biographical tribute to Queen Victoria, now championed a ‘new spirit’ of patriotism, one that celebrated India as the motherland. Influenced by Rabindranath Tagore, Chandra Pal derided Lord Curzon’s ‘outlandish Walhalla’ – the Victoria Memorial Hall – and called instead for a ‘Walhalla of our own’, made up of festivals and celebrations of Shivaji, the Hindu king. Chandra Pal railed against the INC’s ritual devotions to the visiting Prince of Wales and to the king-emperor at the 1905 meeting of Congress at Benares. ‘Devoted attachment to the person of the sovereign’, he declared, was no basis for national sentiment.3 Other histories of India that had been dormant now emerged, for example Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s Indian War of Independence 1857, written and published in exile in 1909, the strident title spelling out its theme.4 The partition by the British of Bengal in 1905, seen by many as an undisguised attack on the powerbase of the INC, fuelled this new mood. Unsurprisingly, the most high-octane moments came from Indian nationalists abroad, enjoying the cleaner air of publicity in Europe and America. In 1907, for the first time, the flag of the new India was flown at a meeting of the Socialist Congress at Stuttgart in Germany, taken there by Bhikaiji Cama, co-founder of the Paris India Society.5 London served as both a resting- and nesting-place for Indian militants. There was India House, founded as a meeting point, and home to a newspaper, the Indian Sociologist, edited by Shiyamji Krishna Varma. For all his vitriol, however, Krishna Varma was unclear how India would be shaped in the future, his thoughts often returning to giving more powers to the Indian princes, reconstituting them as a federation.6 Old habits died hard.
No one exemplified the persistence of loyalism within Indian nationalism more than Mohandas Gandhi. As a young lawyer from Gujarat who had emigrated to Natal in southern Africa in 1893, Gandhi frequently invoked the 1858 proclamation in his campaign on behalf of Indians excluded from the franchise. Indians in the colony of Natal deserved the same rights as Indians in India, he claimed: they were all ‘proud to be under the British Crown’, and the queen’s words were their ‘charter of Liberty’. Gandhi also played a prominent part in the events in Natal that marked the queen’s golden jubilee in 1897 and her death in 1901.7 Gandhi would later use this personal history of loyalty to dramatic effect, highlighting the contrast between the reverence he felt for the British constitution during the queen’s lifetime and his conversion to self-rule, or swaraj, sometime in the 1900s. In his Autobiography (1927), he made much of his journey of emancipation from the old politics to the new.8 However, his faith in the British Crown endured beyond the queen’s death in 1901. From his newspaper, Indian Opinion, he sent birthday greetings to the king-emperor in 1904 and 1905, and in 1906 he welcomed the Duke of Connaught to the colony, not least because the ‘superb qualities of the late Queen Victoria’ had descended to her children. A subtle shift was evident. When Edward VII died in 1910, Gandhi downplayed the king-emperor’s political significance and his ‘personal qualities’, noting only that he would be remembered as a sovereign who followed in the footsteps of his ‘revered mother’.9 The sovereign and the system that bore his imprimatur were disentangling. Queen Victoria set the standard; it was for her successors to measure up.
In this way, the Crown continued to be written into, not out of, nationalist visions for Indian reform. Led by Annie Besant, the ‘All-India Home Rule League’ sought a United States
of India, with its own federal parliament. The India Office would go, India would have its own army and navy, and acknowledge ‘the authority only of the Crown and the Imperial Parliament, in which she enjoyed adequate representation’. This was a variation on conventional ‘dominion’ status, of the kind aspired to by settler colonies. The king would still appoint a governor as his representative, the governor would retain the right of veto over Indian legislation, and the Privy Council in London would remain the final court of appeal.10 Loyalty may no longer have been so blind, but it was loyalty nonetheless. No mention was made of a republic.
Indeed, until the 1920s, the idea of an Indian republic lay far away – in California, in fact. From the exile of the west coast of the first modern republic, the Ghadhar movement led a lonely attack on the British monarchy, and colonialism in general, in India. As Ram Chandra, leader of the Ghadhars in exile, declared, the Ghadhar party had shown that British officialdom could no longer talk blithely of the ‘loyalty to the sovereign’ shown by all orientals. The people of India, he asserted, ‘hate tyranny and oppression exercised by monarchs, landed aristocrats and British bureaucrats as much as any other unsophisticated honest people, accustomed from time immemorial to democratic and communal life in their village republics’.11 Here were the ingredients for an Indian republican ideology, even if a long way from home: denunciation of royalty, with no distinction drawn between monarch and government, and an inversion of orientalism, with ancient Indian ways invoked as a model for future sovereignty.