by Anand, Anita
Senior palace officials counselled Victoria against showing too much favour to a deposed Indian monarch. They warned that it might go to his head, it might set a dangerous precedent or open her to ridicule, but she resolutely ignored them. Victoria’s gifts to her Indian king continued to be ostentatious and personal. She gave the Maharajah jewellery, precious trinkets, cameos of herself and even a thoroughbred horse. She indulged him at any opportunity, even going as far as to allow him to sit on the woolsack in the House of Lords, much to the dismay of her own politicians.3 Prince Albert was also growing very fond of the Maharajah and personally designed a coat of arms for him. It comprised a lion standing beneath a coronet surmounted by a five-pointed star. He even chose the motto that went with Duleep’s design: ‘Prodesse quam conspici’ (‘Do good rather than be conspicuous’). It was an odd standard to bestow on someone who so adored being the centre of attention.
It was hardly surprising that Duleep liked to be noticed, after all, the most powerful monarch in the world had put him on a pedestal, at times quite literally. On 10 July 1854, Queen Victoria fussed over ‘her beautiful boy’ as he posed on a specially constructed stage set up in the White Drawing Room of Buckingham Palace. She had asked the celebrated court painter, Franz Xaver Winterhalter, to capture his likeness for her on canvas.
Duleep enjoyed dressing in all his splendour and stood in silk pyjamas, a heavy gold embroidered shirt on his lean frame, a decorative sword hanging at his waist. On his feet he wore embellished slippers which curled at the toe, and on his head a turban dripping with emeralds – even though the hair beneath had been shorn away. In his pierced ears, Duleep wore thick gold rings, and his neck was heavy with magnificent pearls. One string was long enough to go around five times, and from it, at his throat, hung an ivory miniature of Victoria, set in diamonds. As the Queen recorded in her journal, ‘Winterhalter was in ecstasies at the beauty and nobility of the young Maharajah.’4
There was, however, one item conspicuously absent from all Duleep Singh’s finery: the most famous diamond in the world, the Koh-I-Noor. It ought to have been strapped to his arm like an amulet, just as his father Ranjit Singh had worn it before him. However the Koh-I-Noor no longer belonged to the Maharajah and its loss filled him with pain. Although Duleep said nothing, Queen Victoria guessed the gem was on his mind. While Winterhalter worked, she beckoned Lady Login to follow her into a corner of the room where they could talk quietly. Lena recorded the conversation in her diaries: ‘She had not yet worn it in public, and, as she herself remarked, had a delicacy about doing so in the Maharajah’s presence. “Tell me, Lady Login, does the Maharajah ever mention the Koh-I-Noor? Does he seem to regret it, and would he like to see it again?”’5
There was urgency in the Queen’s enquiry and she ordered Lady Login to find out before the next sitting. Lena said she would raise the matter with Duleep, although in her heart she already knew how he felt: ‘There was no other subject that so filled the thoughts and conversation of the Maharajah, his relatives and dependents as the forsaken diamond. For the confiscation of the jewel which to the Oriental is the symbol of sovereignty of India, rankled in his mind even more than the loss of his kingdom, and I dreaded what sentiments he might give vent to were the subject once re-opened.’6
Despite her fears, Lady Login dutifully brought up the matter while she was out riding with Duleep in Richmond Park a few days later. How would he feel if he saw the Koh-I-Noor again? ‘I would give a good deal to hold it again in my own hand. I was but a child, an infant, when forced to surrender it by treaty . . . now that I am a man, I should like to have it in my power to place it myself in Her Majesty’s hand.’7
Lena knew it was an answer that would please the Queen, but was it the truth? The very next day, as once again Duleep posed for the German artist at the palace, a pantomime of sorts was enacted. Lena Login watched as an emissary from the Tower of London, escorted by yeoman warders, entered the drawing room with great flourish. The diminutive, frock-coated official carried a small casket. The Queen opened it and took out the contents. She showed it to Albert and together they walked to where Duleep stood on the dais. When she was beneath him, she cried out breezily, ‘Maharajah, I have something to show you!’8 Duleep Singh stepped hurriedly to the floor. Before he knew what was happening he found himself once more with the Koh-I-Noor in his grasp as she dropped it into his outstretched hand. Victoria stood within touching distance, asking him ‘if he thought it improved, and if he would have recognised it again?’9
Prince Albert had sent the stone to Amsterdam to be re-cut, spending a fortune in transforming the rough diamond into the multifaceted gem which now caught the light along with the room’s breath. The Maharajah walked towards the window, and held the diamond aloft: ‘For all his air of polite interest and curiosity,’ wrote Lena Login, ‘there was a passion of repressed emotion in his face . . . evident, I think, to Her Majesty, who watched him with sympathy not unmixed with anxiety.’10
The minutes ticked by painfully. ‘At last, as if summoning up his resolution after a profound struggle, he raised his eyes from the jewel. I was prepared for almost anything,’ recalled Lena Login, ‘even to seeing him, in a sudden fit of madness fling the precious talisman out of the open window by which he stood. My own and the other spectators’ nerves were equally on edge – as he moved deliberately to where her Majesty was standing.’ Bowing before her, Duleep gently put the gem into Queen Victoria’s hand. ‘It is to me, Ma’am the greatest pleasure thus to have the opportunity, as a loyal subject, of myself tendering to my Sovereign – the Koh-I-Noor.’11 Neither Duleep, nor any of his family, would ever come so close to the diamond again.
On his sixteenth birthday, the Maharajah was granted an annual income of £25,000 (almost £2.5 million today) by the India Office. Such wealth placed him far above the average English nobleman in terms of income, although it was only a tiny fraction of what he would have possessed had he not lost his jewels and his kingdom: although the value of the Koh-I-Noor is today marked as ‘inestimable and unknown’, in the nineteenth century it was said to be worth ‘two million pounds sterling’ (almost £194 million today).12 The money and the favour the Maharajah received from Queen Victoria made him one of the most sought-after men in court; as aristocrats opened their doors to him, Duleep was suddenly engulfed by London high society. He adored lavishing his friends with expensive gifts and inevitably attracted flatterers and hangers-on. He fell in love with unsuitable – and sometimes married – ladies in the Queen’s court.
Women defied convention to flirt, accept his gifts and agree to secret liaisons with him, but they refused to accept his proposals of marriage. Wealth and patronage notwithstanding, Duleep was still regarded as coming from an inferior race, and not a single noble family would countenance a match with their daughters. Though the rejection hurt him deeply it did little to dampen the Maharajah’s behaviour. Together with his great friend ‘Bertie’, the Prince of Wales, he happily gambled and whored his way around London. When news of Bertie and Duleep’s exploits became the talk of the court, the Queen stepped in. She let it be known that she expected both her eldest son and the Maharajah to settle down immediately.
While casting around for a suitable match Victoria and her retainers also made strenuous efforts to shield the Maharajah from Indian matters, even though at times this was impossible. In 1857, Britain was stunned by news of an Indian uprising. It had started on 29 March on the parade ground at Barrakpore near Calcutta. For months tension had been rising in the ranks all over India since the Company had introduced a new type of rifle musket. Loading and firing the Enfield Pattern 1853 was a complicated affair. A soldier had to take a paper cartridge covered in grease, bite off the end, pour the gunpowder and metal ball contained within down the barrel and ram the mixture down tightly with a rod. Rumours were running wild that the grease was made from pig and cow fat. The former was unacceptable to Muslims as it was deemed haram and against their faith; the latter was an anathe
ma to Hindus, who held the cow as a sacred beast and believed they would lose their caste if they bit into such a cartridge.
Although the British tried to reassure the soldiers that the grease was not made from animal fat, few believed them. At Barrakpore suspicion turned to anger, which in turn boiled over into full-blown mutiny when sepoy Mangal Pandey of the 34th Bengal Native Infantry raised his gun and shot his British senior officer. Unrest spread quickly across India as sepoys followed Pandey’s example and turned their weapons first on their commanding officers and then on British civilians. Ironically it was the Sikh soldiers who first rallied to British aid. Their actions came more from a sense of grievance against the Indian sepoys than a sense of loyalty to their new masters. They remembered well that these same soldiers from the east and the south had fought against them at the behest of the British in the first and second Anglo-Sikh Wars, and blamed them for the worst atrocities and betrayals of those times.
Approximately 1,500 British were killed during the violence of 1857, and many thousands of Indians were slaughtered in reprisals. In August there was moral outrage as details reached London of the ‘Death of Sir Henry Lawrence . . . and the Massacre of the English’.13 Lawrence – the former Resident in Lahore who had ordered Rani Jindan to be separated from her son – had become well known in England thanks to his authorship of Adventures of an Officer in the Service of Runjeet Singh. He had been sent to fortify the city of Lucknow in anticipation of a local uprising. Lawrence created a stronghold where all British military personnel, their families and staff could retreat should violence break out. Full-scale rebellion reached Lucknow on 30 May and 855 British soldiers, 712 loyal sepoys, 153 civilian volunteers and 1,280 non-combatants fell back to the safety of the improvised fort. Sir Henry was one of the first to be killed. On 2 July he was fatally wounded by a shell and died two days later from his wounds. The rest of his compatriots were besieged for six months, under near constant attack, and ravaged by hunger and disease.
Commentators around the world declared Britain’s Eastern Empire to be teetering on the brink. Some blamed the turn in British fortunes on the ‘malignant presence of the Koh-I-Noor’, which had been recently displayed near Buckingham Palace in a ‘golden prison’ during the 1851 Great Exhibition. Others accused officers of the Raj of ‘going native’ – ‘going soft’ and letting their guard down in the face of Indian savagery. Even after the Mutiny was finally put down on 20 June 1858, the events left a deep and lasting wound on the psyche of the Raj. Indian governance was taken away from the East India Company and placed under the direct control of the Crown. There was disillusionment too with Britain’s ‘civilising’ and Christianising mission in the subcontinent and a shift in attitudes towards Indians generally. No longer could they be regarded as friends; instead each was a potential traitor, to be ruled rather than ‘improved’. Two years later, even Victoria’s pet Maharajah appeared to be showing worrying signs of contamination.
In 1860, as he turned twenty-one, Duleep Singh attempted to make contact with Rani Jindan. He penned a message and sent a trusted servant to Nepal to investigate her wellbeing. However, the message was swiftly intercepted by the British. They had the power to stop his letter, but they could not prevent news of her plight from reaching the Maharajah in London. Duleep began to ask politely whether he might be permitted to see his mother again.
The British needed to tread carefully. Although the idea of Duleep being reunited with Jindan was unpalatable, the government could not risk re-igniting passions in India. Nor did they want to insult the Sikhs, who had proved indispensable during the Mutiny. The risk in the Punjab of appearing heartless and insensitive to a son’s duty to his mother was too great. However, it was believed the bond between mother and son had been broken after the years of separation. In many eyes, Duleep was making the request because he felt he had to, not because he was overly concerned about his mother’s welfare. The Maharajah certainly did little to challenge that impression. As he prepared to return to India, he appeared more energised by the prospect of hunting tigers than seeing his mother again.
Permission for a meeting was granted, provided the reunion took place as far from the Punjab as possible. Rani Jindan, in Nepal, was informed by the British that she had leave to meet the child she had longed to hold for so long. In her mind he was still the shimmering and bejewelled boy-king who had been dragged from her side in 1847. Now blind, Jindan would never be able to see for herself the beautiful young man who had captured the heart of court painters, sculptors and Queen Victoria herself.
The place chosen for the rendezvous was the Spence Hotel in Calcutta, a grand building built by and for the British in the 1830s, and chosen by writers such as Jules Verne as an exotic location in novels.14 The hotel would prove a magnificent backdrop for the epic reunion, scheduled to take place on 16 January 1861. Popular accounts describe how, when Rani Jindan was first brought to her son, she held him for the longest time, dry-eyed, silent, yet shaking with emotion. She is said to have run her hands all over his face and body, trying to get a sense of who her little boy had become. It was only when she reached his head and felt the hair that had been shorn away that the tears came. Jindan railed at her son, crying that she could live with the loss of her husband and the kingdom, no matter how much pain it brought her, but that her son had abandoned his Sikh faith was too much for her to bear.15
Yet once she had calmed, Jindan was determined never to let Duleep go. She refused the government’s offer of a house in Calcutta, where it was suggested she might spend the rest of her days in more comfortable surroundings. Wherever her son went, Jindan resolved to follow, even if that meant having to leave India and moving to the country of her enemies.
The British, who had tried for so many years to keep Jindan away from her son, were oddly pleased by the turn of events. To them it meant a totemic figure, who might still have power in the Punjab, would fade away quietly and insignificantly in England. The government returned many of Jindan’s confiscated jewels and even offered the Maharani a comfortable pension of £3,000 a year to convince her to go quietly.
If the settlement seemed a high price to pay, the British were soon reminded of the blind Maharani’s potency, and in dramatic fashion. While mother and son were meeting at the Spence Hotel, a troopship filled with Sikh soldiers returning from fighting in the Second Opium War was sailing up Calcutta’s Hooghly River. Rumours spread of the presence of the Sikh Maharajah and the Queen Mother, and soon hundreds of exhausted and emotional soldiers had gathered around the hotel to salute their deposed rulers. They bellowed the unique Sikh call – ‘Bolo So Nihal, Sat Sri Akal!’ – ‘Whoever says these words will know true joy. Eternal is the Lord God!’ Their voices shook the walls of the Spence Hotel and quickened the beating of Jindan’s heart. After that, the British could not get the Maharani on a boat fast enough.
Back in London, at the end of January 1861, Duleep found a home for his mother and her servants close to his own residence at 5 Lancaster Gate, facing Hyde Park. The Maharani Jindan’s residence at number 1 fascinated the local inhabitants with its odd aromas. The smells of Indian cooking wafted out of the house and over the inquisitive folk who gathered outside to peer through her windows.16 Mostly, however, the front door remained closed to the outside world. Lady Login recalled a rare visit to 1 Lancaster Gate, where she describes finding Duleep’s mother ‘sitting huddled on a heap of cushions on the floor, with health broken and eyesight dimmed, her beauty vanished, it was hard to believe in her former charms of person and conversation! However the moment she grew interested and excited in a conversation unexpected gleams and glimpses and the torpor of advancing age revealed the shrewd and plotting brain of one who had been known as the “Messalina of the Punjab”.’17
Soon mother and son were again inseparable. Duleep took her everywhere with him, even up to Mulgrave Castle in Yorkshire, a 16,000-acre estate which the Maharajah had leased since 1858. Duleep wanted Jindan to see that, even though he was t
housands of miles from home, he still conducted himself as a king. The aristocracy did indeed hold him in high regard, although the same could not be said of his mother. Everywhere she went Jindan was the subject of vicious gossip. Lady Normanby, whose family had leased Mulgrave Castle to the Maharajah, poured scorn on her house guest: ‘She keeps herself very much within the house with her attendants,’ she told her son, and ‘sometimes dresses in a dirty sheet and a pair of cotton stockings, sometimes decked out in Cloth of Gold and covered with jewels . . . It rather seems to me when I see queer Indian figures flitting about that “The Heathen are come in to mine inheritance”.’18
As mother and son drew closer, Duleep seemed to change under Jindan’s influence. He began to consult his mother on all important matters, much to the concern of his former advisers. More worrying still for the India Office, he started to ask direct questions about his inheritance. ‘I very much wish to have a conversation with you about my private property in the Punjab and the Koh-I-Noor diamond,’19 he wrote to Sir John Login as he and his mother prepared to leave Mulgrave. It was the first time that the Maharajah had raised such matters formally. Jindan was clearly driving the questions, which caused a good deal of discomfort in the India Office.
From the moment of their reunion, the Queen Mother reminded her son of the mighty kingdom that his father had created and which should have been his. She steeped her tales in the supernatural, telling Duleep of a prophesy which predicted that he would one day return to reclaim his throne and his place in the pantheon of Sikh saints. As Duleep would later explain to the Queen, ‘Shortly after I ascended to the throne of the Punjab it was found written in the book of Sikh prophecies called Sakhean that a man of my name would be born, who after becoming entirely disposed of all he inherited and residing alone for a long period in a foreign country, would return to be the eleventh gooroo of the Khalsa, or “Pure”’20. Queen Victoria did not enjoy such conversations at all.
