by Adams, Byron
In 1905 Curzon, then the viceroy, had split Bengal down the middle, creating Eastern Bengal and Assam, which included the Muslim-majority eastern districts.7 This arbitrary division caused seven years of communal violence and bloodshed among the Hindu and Muslim populations of Bengal, along with a sharp rise in anticolonial activity and general political anarchy.8 Hindi Punch sought to convey the gravity of the 1905 partition in a cartoon entitled “Vandalism! Or, The Partition of Bengal!” that featured a woman (representing Bengal) who has been chopped by an ax into pieces that represent Assam and East Bengal (figure 1).9 The tumult surrounding the partition had marred George’s reception in India as Prince of Wales in 1905 and led him to conclude that the decision had been a serious political error. The repeal, advocated by George V, was agreed upon after a year of secretive debate concerning “the partition crisis,” as the home secretary put it, in which British officials “surveyed the widening cracks in the wall of British authority as a consequence of five years of chaos.”10 The Delhi Durbar thus provided “a unique occasion for rectifying what is regarded by Bengalis as a grievous wrong.”11 But the repeal also signaled the beginning of imperial disintegration, for the partition decision had provided the needed catalyst for effective Indian resistance.12
Masking the Durbar
The Durbar, whose Indian memorial will be the buildings of the new capital, is to be commemorated in England by a masque composed by Sir Edward Elgar.
—The Globe, 9 January 1912
To mark the occasion of the Delhi Durbar, Elgar collaborated with Henry Hamilton on The Crown of India, an “Imperial Masque” produced by Oswald Stoll at the London Coliseum and performed in a mixed music hall program that opened on March 11, 1912.13 The Crown of India was advertised by the London Times as “a project which will evoke extraordinary interest and will, no doubt, prove, under Sir Edward Elgar’s treatment, worthy of the historic event that it is designed to commemorate in so graceful a fashion.”14 Not only graceful, but also elaborate: production costs exceeded £3,000, a huge sum at the time, with ornate costumes and lavish settings by Percy Anderson; after all, the Daily Telegraph remarked, “so vast and dazzling a subject cannot, obviously, be treated in the spirit of parsimony.”15 And the Eastern Daily Press assured readers that “no effort is being spared to imbue the spectacular symbols of the durbar with all the glowing, gorgeous colour of the Orient, and … the score … casts a powerful spell over the whole production.”16 Photographs of scenes from The Crown of India, viewed alongside the colorful illustrated reports that described the spectacle of the Delhi Durbar to the British public, show how closely the masque’s sets resembled those of the actual occasion (figure 2).17
Figure 1. “Vandalism! Or, the Partition of Bengal!” from Hindi Punch, July 1905. Courtesy the British Library.
Press reviews claimed that the masque “put the events of the Durbar in front of the British public in an attractive and concrete form” and that it was “a reconstitution of the scene of the Durbar.”18 Yet the masque staged only part of the events. The first tableau was dominated by the dispute between the cities of India as to whether Delhi or Calcutta should become the new imperial capital and the second tableau featured India and all her cities assembling with the character of St. George and the East India Company to do honor to England and the British Raj.19 That the masque represented (in great detail) transfer of the capital to Delhi is unsurprising, since the move was a calculated step to guarantee the continuance of British rule in the face of ever-increasing Indian demands for political power: Delhi had a long history as the site of India’s imperial throne.20 Yet the most significant moment of the Durbar, the reunification of Bengal, found no mention in The Crown of India, despite the king’s dramatic announcement (reportedly “making history and geography at once”), which might have seemed ideal material for the Coliseum masque.21 Bengal could not be represented because it alluded to a spectacular policy failure and also suggested the narrowing limits of imperial authority. Thus a selective view of the Delhi Durbar, achieved by ignoring successful native resistance to the Raj that led to the partition repeal, served the interests of both the Raj and British sovereignty.
Figure 2. India, from the steps of the throne, hails the advent of the King-Emperor and Queen-Empress: A scene from the Crown of India masque, Daily Graphic, 12 March 1912. Courtesy the British Library Newspapers at Colindale.
The Crown of India was, accordingly, a tool for manipulating popular consciousness.22 India’s personification in the masque, a vivid depiction of how the English spoke for India and represented Indians, determined both what could be said about India and what could count as truth. The words put into the mouth of the figure of India parrot the sentiments and ideology that the British used both to justify their reign in India and to make it palatable for themselves:
Each man reclines in peace beneath his palm,
Brahman and Buddhist, Hindu with Islam,
Into one nation welded by the West,
That in the Pax Brittanica is blest …
Oh, happy India, now at one, at last;
Not sundered each for self as in the past!
Happy the people blest with Monarch just!
Happy the Monarch whom His People trust!
And happy Britain—that above all lands
Still where she conquers counsels not commands!
See wide and wider yet her rule extend
Who of a foe defeated makes a friend,
Who spreads her Empire not to get but give
And free herself bids others free to live.23
Having the figure of India express such uncontested judgments about India and its rulers allowed Hamilton and Elgar to demonstrate to their audience that Indians accept British rule because it is “a mild and beneficent, a just and equitable, but a firm and fearless rule.”24 This has historically always been the way that European imperialism represented its enterprise, for, as Edward Said has argued, nothing could be better for imperialism’s self-image “than native subjects who express assent to the outsider’s knowledge and power, implicitly accepting European judgment on the undeveloped, backward, or degenerative nature of native society.”25 Moreover, by studiously omitting any reference to the partition repeal and excluding the all-too-present challenges to British rule, Hamilton and Elgar eliminated any chance of showing two worlds in conflict. The Crown of India, masquerading as a colorful depiction of the Delhi Durbar, was carefully inscribed with its creators’ considered beliefs and suppressions.
The Composer’s Burden
Edward Elgar had a personal connection with the ventures of the British in India. His father-in-law, Major-General Sir Henry Gee Roberts (1800–61), joined the East India Company in 1818, launching a distinguished military career. During the 1857–58 Indian Rebellion, he commanded the Rajputana Field Force that succeeded in capturing the town of Kota in March 1858.26 Later he was honored in a parliamentary motion of thanks for the skill “by which the late Insurrection has been effectively suppressed.”27 Caroline Alice, Sir Henry Roberts’s daughter, who was born in October 1848 in the residency at Bhooj in Gujarat, married Elgar in 1889, and they lived in a house scattered with Indian artifacts collected by her father.28 Following in the footsteps of his father-in-law, Elgar himself was knighted in 1904, later receiving the Order of Merit in July 1911.29
The family’s links with the Raj can be seen in the larger context of the extraordinary presence of “India” within English life during the years surrounding the turn of the century.30 Following the 1857 Rebellion, the English sought to strengthen their increasingly precarious hold on the subcontinent by perpetuating the powerful fictions (of civilizing savages, of liberal philosophy, of democratic nationalism) that justified the Raj.31 After Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1876, displays of the glories of British rule in India became immensely popular. The 1886 India and Colonial Exhibition, for example, attracted nearly four million visitors.32 International exhibitions that drew attenti
on to India were hosted by Glasgow in 1888, 1901, and 1911, and by London’s Shepherd’s Bush in 1909, 1910, 1911, 1912, and 1914.33 The 1895 Indian Empire Exhibition and the 1896 India and Ceylon Exhibition, both at Earl’s Court, together with the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition at Wembley were renowned for their displays of the arts, music, architecture, crafts, and “tribes” of India.34 These cultural practices were exhibited before the British as microcosms of the larger imperial domain.
Outside these exhibitions, representations of “India” and of the historic events of the Raj became a central subject for musical spectacles during the decades around 1900, including The Grand Moghul (1884), The Nautch Girl (The Savoy, 1891), The Cingalee (Daly’s, 1904), and H. A. Jones’s Carnac Sahib (1899). The last of these was much admired both for its jeweled palace at (the fictional) Fyzapore and for its evocative music, including excerpts from Delibes’s Lakmé and “a Hindu march.”35 Perhaps the most striking of all was the grand pageant India, produced by Imre Kiralfy, director-general of several Indian and colonial exhibitions.36 Staged at the 1895 Earl’s Court Indian Exhibition, Kiralfy’s “historical play,” with music by Angelo Venanzi, was an affirmation of English rule in India. It presented a selective account of Indian history that led naturally from the “Fall of Somnath—The Muhammadan Conquest” in 1024 to Victoria’s imperial coronation at the 1877 Delhi Durbar, culminating in a “Grand Apotheosis” in 1895 (during which “Britannia Crowns Her Majesty the Goddess of India”).37
The 1897 Diamond Jubilee celebrations had established Elgar as England’s imperial bard, a composer whose music glorified colonial policy. Elgar certainly took up “The Composer’s Burden.”38 His contribution to the Jubilee celebrations included the following works: the Imperial March (attributed to Richard Elgar!) played by vast military bands at the Crystal Palace early in 1897 and later by special command of the queen at the State Jubilee Concert (the only English work on the program); the two cantatas, The Banner of St. George, with its grand finale glorifying the Union Jack, and Caractacus, its ancient context encompassing the fall of the Roman Empire and prophesying the rise of the British nation.39 Performances of the Imperial March during that year—at the Albert and the Queen’s Halls, at a royal garden party and a state concert, and at the Three Choirs Festival—placed Elgar in the position of laureate for imperial Britain. The Crystal Palace hosted another grand occasion that year at which a new Elgar work was premiered. For this event, held in October 1897, “Ethnological Groups,” including “Indians, Bushmen, Zulu Kaffirs, Mexican Indians, Hindoos [sic], Tibetans,” were put on display in the south transept. Elgar contributed Characteristic Dances to the program.40 Five years later, Henry Wood gave the London premiere of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance Marches in D Major and A Minor, conducting two encores of the former.41 Charles Villiers Stanford remarked that “they both came off like blazes and are uncommon fine stuff” that “translated Master Kipling into Music.”42 In October 1902, Elgar composed the Coronation Ode to commemorate the accession of Edward VII and his crowning as Emperor of India. At the king’s suggestion, the Ode included the choral setting of the expansive trio melody of Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1, a tune that would in Elgar’s words “knock ‘em flat” and which became known across the world (with words by A. C. Benson) as “Land of Hope and Glory,” the anthem of British imperialism.43
Yet, as inferred from the policies announced at the Delhi Durbar, these imperial festivals, resounding with marches and hymns, marked a high point for the public face, but not the imperial power, of British rule in India. An apologist for the Raj, Tarak Nath Biswas, prefaced his 1912 study of the Durbar by emphasizing how far relations had deteriorated within the Anglo-Indian colonial encounter:
The present peculiar situation of India demands a popular exposition of the bright side of the British rule, for the shade of discontent that one unfortunately notices in the country, can only be removed by a better understanding of our rulers and their beneficent and wellmeaning administration.44
The “shade of discontent” is an oblique reference to the seven years of horrors unleashed by the Bengal partition, and the “bright side of British rule” masks the fact that radical Bengali nationalists and other “enemies of empire” were sent to a prison of death on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal.45 While The Crown of India boasted of Britain’s “beneficent and well-meaning administration” to a packed Coliseum during March 1912, English officials were hanging Indian dissidents in a desperate attempt to avoid a full-scale mutiny. As with so many of Elgar’s imperialist works, The Crown of India, in its subject matter, march topoi, brassy scoring, and massive performing forces, was secretly addressing a crisis of imperial—and thus national—self-assurance.
“East Is East and West Is West.”
Remarks by Elgar during the masque’s composition indicate the composer’s enthusiasm for the project. His earliest thoughts about the masque, outlined to Alfred Littleton of Novello, his publisher, on January 8, 1912, describe it as “very gorgeous and patriotic.”46 By February 3, the Daily Telegraph reported that Elgar had “expressed the keenest satisfaction with Mr. Hamilton’s work.”47 Later that month the composer declined an invitation from friends, explaining, “I must finish the Masque—which interests and amuses me very much.”48 Elgar divided Hamilton’s elaborate reconstruction of the Delhi Durbar into two tableaux comprising some twenty musical numbers together with passages of mélodrame.49 The cast was headed by “India” (played by Nancy Price), with twelve of her most important cities, Delhi, Agra, Calcutta (now Kolkata), and Benares (now Varanasi), as female singing roles; in addition, the masque featured St. George, Mughal emperors, the King-Emperor and Queen-Empress, and a herald called Lotus.
At rehearsals Elgar told the press he found the work hard but “absorbing, interesting.”50 The composer himself conducted the masque twice a day for the first two weeks of its successful run, often running rehearsals between performances.51 His dedication paid off, not least financially: “God Bless the Music Halls!” he exclaimed to a friend, Frances Colvin, at the thought of his emolument.52 The masque—and particularly its “gorgeous and patriotic” music—proved enormously popular with audiences and critics alike. In the production’s fourth week it was still, the Daily Telegraph reported, “a case of ‘standing room only’ at the Coliseum soon after the doors were opened for both the afternoon and evening performances.”53 England’s popular tabloid, the Daily Express, trumpeted Elgar’s “great triumph at the Coliseum,” declaring that “the call was for Elgar at the fall of the curtain… . Truly, The Masque of India is the production of the year.”54
The success of Elgar’s music was due at least in part to the manner in which the score drew on representations of India and its music that were then all the rage in popular culture. The London Times told readers that “the score contains ideas drawn from Oriental sources,” pointing to inclusion of the most un-Indian of instruments, “a new gong” contrived by Elgar “for his special purpose.”55 A “native musician with tom-tom” and a pair of “snake-charmers with pipes” also figured in the opening scene, the former by way of the tenor drum, and the latter by oboes. These touches suggest that Elgar must have absorbed the manner in which Indian music was routinely represented at exhibitions, to wit by “snake-charmers … dancers, musicians, jugglers, and beautiful Nautch girls.”56 Nothing in The Crown of India would have been recognizable as Indian music to an Indian musician, but for audiences caught up in the celebrations of the Delhi Durbar, and with exhibition entertainments ringing in their ears, these allusions were more than sufficient to establish the proper atmosphere. The Crown of India’s libretto, together with the elaborate costumes and stage design of its Coliseum run, brought it close to the late-nineteenthcentury “Indian” stage spectacle in which bayadères and Mughal emperors appeared in London’s music halls and theaters. Moreover, similar in theme, representational style, and imperial purpose to Kiralfy’s India, The Crown of India was intended as an edifying
, historically accurate entertainment.
After completing the score, Elgar explained that “the subject of the Masque is appropriate to this special period in English history, and I have endeavored to make the music illustrate and illuminate the subject.”57 A perceptive review in The Referee addressed the difficulties of representing the Durbar musically:
When Sir Edward Elgar undertook to write music for a masque dealing with historical events in India for the Coliseum he was faced by several problems not easy to solve harmoniously. It was essential that the patriotic note should be made prominent. It was also distinctly necessary to suggest the mystery of the East… . Sir Edward might have made use of the Indian scales … and, by contrasting the two systems of music, reflected in his score the difference of Indian and British outlook. Mr. Hamilton’s libretto, however, mainly regards India from a British standpoint… . The result is that while his music illustrating the Indian portion of the libretto appeals to musicians who will distinguish with pleasure the hand of a master in subtleties of tone-colour and cross rhythms, the chief effect on the ordinary listener is almost entirely confined to the song, “The Rule of England.” This, with its diatonic refrain, sounds the imperial note of popular patriotism.58
Audiences did indeed delight in St. George’s song: critics described it as “a patriotic song of honest ring,” “very stirring,” and “destined to be heard for many a day outside the Coliseum walls.”59
