Lansdowne did prosper and became successively Minister for War and Foreign Secretary under Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour, who had once been his fag at Eton. He and Curzon, who also got the Foreign Office, were exceptional. For everyone else, the viceroyalty was a political terminus. Lytton, Dufferin and Hardinge resumed their diplomatic careers, the former two eventually obtaining the prestigious Paris embassy. Ripon and Elgin had to be satisfied with what was then a minor ministry, the Colonial Office.
This was not surprising; viceroys were not expected to be initiators of policy or men of decision. Memories of Wellesley and Ellenborough made British governments nervous about sending out men with strong wills and expansive visions. The outlines of policy making had been laid down shortly after the Mutiny and deviations were unwelcome in London and Calcutta. India was held by Britain in trusteeship and the Raj existed for the betterment of its subjects, which was to be accomplished through slow but steady progress in education, farming, communications and the generation of wealth through cash crops and industry. Above all, the Viceroy and his councillors had to submit to current financial disciplines and ensure a balanced budget. There was also the perennial problems of defence and security which revolved around keeping the Russians to their side of Afghanistan and the Himalayas and cracking down on sedition inside India. Progress and stability could only be achieved with the collaboration of the Indian population, in particular the princes and landowning classes. As before, these were believed to be susceptible to men of their own kind, which was why viceroys were always aristocrats.
A system whose ends were virtuous was beset by vices, most of them bureaucratic and racial. They were uncovered and vigorously dealt with by Lord Curzon, who arrived in Calcutta in January 1899. He was a man of vision who, unlike his predecessors, had wanted his position and came to it with an unequalled knowledge of Asian affairs. Curzon was certainly the most attractive and intelligent Viceroy, and India’s best ruler under the British Raj. He was not an easy master in that he recognised and upbraided incompetence and procrastination. He found plenty of both in the upper ranks of the ICS, where nearly every pair of safe hands was also arthritic. The government was läocooned in red tape, there was an exaggerated respect for every bureaucrat’s opinion and the day-to-day administration crept forward at a snail’s pace. It said everything for Indian officials that when Curzon began to shake up their procedures they threatened to retaliate by having him ‘paper-logged in three months’. They had done the same to his predecessor Elgin, whom, Curzon discovered, had not taken a single policy decision in over four years.33 A minor, but overdue revolution followed in which procedures were accelerated, but, as he understood too well, it required considerable energy and a thick skin to make officialdom change its ways. Old habits returned after his departure in 1905.
IV
Curzon also gave much attention to what some previous viceroys had considered a chore, the state pageantry of India. Sound, benevolent and even-handed administration alone could not captivate the imagination and win hearts in a country where the exercise of power had always been associated with outward magnificence. This had been understood by Lytton, a Tory with Bohemian inclinations, who had decided to revive Mughal traditions in the grand manner for the formal declaration of Queen Victoria as Empress of India in January 1877.
At his invitation, over 400 Indian princes and their retinues converged on Delhi during the closing weeks of 1876 for a dazzling display of imperial theatre, devised to show them the majesty, permanence and sheer strength of the Raj. There were 15,000 red-coated British soldiers, the muscle of empire, and its brains, the immaculately uniformed, plumed and bemedalled British officials and officers. The Delhi durbar emphasised the new unity of India as well as resurrecting the grandeur of the Mughals. Indians were impressed: Sir Dinkur Rao, chief minister of the Maharaja of Gwalior, was overwhelmed by the size and organisation of the great camp beside the Jumma. It represented ‘the epitome of every title to command and govern which one race can possess over others’ he told Lytton. The Maharaja of Indore saw the durbar as a symbol of a new national cohesion. ‘India has been until now a vast heap of stones, some of them small,’ he informed the Viceroy. ‘Now the house is built and from the roof to the basement each stone of it is in its right place.’34
These were heart-warming reactions to a political coup de théâtre which had been masterminded by Disraeli, now Prime Minister and keen to show the world the solidity of the Raj and the permanence of Britain’s power in India. His Jewishness and former wanderings in the Middle East had convinced him that he possessed a special insight into that mysterious creation of Western imagination, the Oriental mind. According to his reckoning, it revered tradition; accepted hierarchy as both natural and desirable, associating magnificence with authority; and was mesmerised by flamboyant exhibitions of power. By identifying the new Queen Empress with the illustrious Mughal past, Disraeli and Lytton were deliberately appealing to Indian atavism. Besides, Indians were reminded that their country was again united and that the present Raj was a continuation of an ancient and glorious tradition.
Stunning displays of state pageantry made good political sense. An empire which claimed sovereignty over a myriad of different races, religions and castes needed strong bonds if it was to remain intact. Loyalty to the Crown was a bond which transcended India’s divisions and was carefully cultivated, as it had been during the Renaissance when Austrian Habsburg emperors tried to keep control over their multi-racial European empire. In Europe and later in India, the government spent considerable energy on theatrical displays of power designed to win respect and allegiance. Both took trouble to emphasise continuity: the sixteenth-century Habsburgs presented themselves as the heirs of the Roman emperors, the Queen Empress Victoria and her successors revealed themselves in public displays as the heirs of the Mughals.
The value of such shows was appreciated by Curzon, who was the moving force behind the Delhi durbar of December 1902, which simultaneously celebrated the coronation of the new King Emperor, Edward VII, and the achievements of the Raj. It was an ambitious project which Curzon hoped would be more than just another lavish public spectacle. At his direction, elements of India’s past would blend with its present and future to give participants and onlookers the sense that they were making history. In his words, they were permitted ‘a glimpse of a higher ideal, an appreciation of the hidden laws that regulate the march of nations and the destinies of men’. The genius and progress of India were revealed through an exhibition of carpets, jewellery, paintings and gold and silverware. The dignity and omnipotence of the Raj were conveyed by the grand procession in which Curzon rode in place of the King Emperor, raised above the crowds on an elephant, seated in a golden howdah and shaded by the golden parasol. Afterwards, the Viceroy exchanged a placid elephant for a rather wilful horse and took the salute as thousands of imperial troops marched and cantered past. Most striking of all were the Indian cavalry men – big, bearded soldiers carrying pennoned lances and wearing ochre, green and blue tunics and brightly coloured cummerbunds and turbans. No one who saw them could have doubted that India’s martial traditions were flourishing and vibrant under the Raj.
At the heart of India’s theatre of power was the monarchy. The first royal tour of India had been made in 1875–76 by the Prince of Wales, and was a prelude to the announcement of his mother as Queen Empress. It was vital in this and future royal progresses that representatives of the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha conducted themselves in ways which would win the admiration of the Indian aristocracy. They had to display prowess as sportsmen, ritually shooting tigers from the backs of elephants, potting deer, buffaloes and wild fowl, sticking pigs with lances and riding to hounds. Fine horsemanship, nerve and marksmanship were evidence of noble birth and manhood, as was informed enthusiasm at polo matches and race meetings.
The future Edward VII excelled in these activities, or so ran the reports of his tour. His bluff affability touched the right chord with
many; a journalist noted approvingly how the boy Maharaja of Gwalior who ‘delights in manly sports became at once the friend of the Prince who took to him greatly’.35 He found Indian officialdom less engaging, and privately reported to his mother the widespread use of the word ‘nigger’ among Europeans. She too was appalled and prodded Lytton into issuing an unwelcome rebuke to his staff. The prince’s eldest son, the Duke of Clarence, also possessed winning ways, at least with the independent-minded warriors of the Khyber Pass, who instinctively recognised an authentic sahib when they met one. Clarence fell into this category, for, during his 1890 tour of the frontier, he shook the hand of Ayub Khan, the exiled Afghan prince who had led resistance against the British ten years before. This encounter between ‘the grandson of the Queen Empress’ and one of her most persistent foes delighted tribal headmen. Overwhelmed by this display of chivalry, one exclaimed: ‘No wonder the Sirkar [government] is always victorious.’36 Whether this revelation induced the speaker to forgo rustling his neighbours’ flocks or renounce blood feuds is unrecorded. Nonetheless, officials were pleased with the favourable impression the royal visit had had on some of the Queen Empress’s most reluctant subjects.
So much sycophancy surrounded official and unofficial accounts of the various royal peregrinations in India that it is impossible to measure exactly what the Queen Empress’s Indian subjects thought about her. Sir Walter Lawrence, Curzon’s future secretary, recalled that in Kashmir during the 1880s Victoria was a cult figure: her image on the coins was revered and many Hindu homes contained her portrait, an icon of benevolence often similar in style and execution to those in temples. A goddess in all but name, it was widely said that she asked every Viceroy to treat her Indian subjects with tenderness.37 Soon after the Queen Empress’s death early in 1901, Curzon claimed that every class was warmly attached to her and wholeheartedly backed his plan for a Victoria Memorial Hall in Calcutta. He would have liked some counterpart to the Taj Mahal, but there were no artists alive who could match its craftsmanship, and so the hall would be an art gallery filled with portraits and carvings of such heroes of the Raj as Clive and Elphinstone.38
The concept of the Queen Empress as a distant, benign goddess owed something to her attempts to learn Hindustani as well as her intense interest in Indian affairs. In 1887 she took a munshi, Abdul Karim, into her court where he made himself an unofficial adviser on India. Ministers and viceroys found the interference of the son of an Agra prison pharmacist tiresome, but impossible to prevent, for the Queen grew very fond of Karim. A Muslim, he may have prompted the Queen Empress’s partisan remarks to Lord Elgin after Hindu–Muslim clashes in Bombay in 1894. ‘Mahommedans should be protected, and their worship not disturbed,’ she demanded, for, ‘They are the real supporters of the British government.’ Brahmins were at the root of the trouble and Muslims needed to be ‘protected from insults and disturbance in their peaceful and quiet worship which is so opposed to idolatory’.39 Elgin was then asked to deliver his respects to Karim’s father in Agra, as Lansdowne and her grandson had done. Not surprisingly, there was much alarm some years after when an official printer leaked some copies of the Queen’s letters to the Viceroy, mercifully not those which referred to her subjects’ faiths.
Of all Indians, soldiers found it easiest to give their unreserved loyalty to the Crown. ‘I have taken up service for my king,’ wrote an Indian soldier in France in 1915, adding that he and his brothers-in-arms ‘must be true to our salt and he who is faithful will win paradise’.40 There were plenty more, often moving statements of fidelity to George V in other letters home from the front. Among the traditional warrior castes and classes, personal attachment to a great king was natural and honourable; a soldier who served a great and illustrious emperor shared some of his master’s glory and respect. Moreover, as the soldiers serving in Europe knew, the King Emperor regularly visited them in their Brighton hospital or at the front line. On the other hand, the still minute body of nationalists had only distaste for the figurehead of an alien régime: in 1907 one of their journals, clearly aware of some aspects of his private life, called Edward VII ‘drunken, careless, sinful and tyrannical’.41
The Raj also forged bonds of loyalty by creating its own titles. From 1860 onwards, the pseudo-chivalric paraphernalia of the British honours system was imported into India and adapted to meet local requirements. These were roughly the same in each country: the need to flatter those to whom the government looked to for support and goodwill and to reward public service at little expense. This was the age which witnessed the self-conscious revival of the exclusive mediaeval orders of the knighthood by which the monarchy bound itself by elaborate rituals and oaths to its richest and most influential subjects who, in turn, received distinct tokens of favour. During his 1876 progress, the Prince of Wales presided over the neo-Gothic ritual of the new Order of the Star of India, a knightly brotherhood of Indian princes. He invested its latest member, the Raja of Jhind, with a pale blue mantle and the order’s badge set with a cameo profile of Queen Victoria.
Indian orders and titles proliferated during the next forty years. There was the Order of the Crown of India, the Order of British India, the Indian Order of Merit, the Kaisar-i-Hind medal for services in the Raj (gold for outstanding work and silver for run-of-the-mill duties undertaken efficiently) and sundry police decorations. Soldiers were well catered for. Even the smallest expedition to chastise frontier tribesmen merited a special clasp to the handsome silver general service medals and, from 1907, Indian NCOs and rankers were entitled to their own gallantry award, the Indian Distinguished Service Medal. All the chivalric orders were split into grades: the Order of the Indian Empire had a first and second class (Knights Grand Commanders and Knights Commanders), and also a third, Commanders. The former two wore exotic regalia with a purple mantle and a gold chain decorated with elephants, peacocks and lotus flowers.
These baubles mattered greatly in a stratified society. They satisfied civil servants and soldiers whose place in the hierarchy was officially recognised, and also the princes, whose local status was enhanced. Despite his independent views and flirtation with nationalist politics, Sayagi Rao, the Gaikwar of Baroda, was very peeved to see that he had not been made a knight of the Indian empire in the 1919 honours list.42 His omission seemed inexplicable because he had recently given 35,000 rupees to the government’s war fund – he obviously understood the secret mechanism behind political honours in Britain.
The gaikwar’s generosity could not, however, compensate for the dent he had made in the façade of the Raj during George V’s Delhi durbar in December 1911. The only visit to India by a reigning King Emperor was commemorated by a durbar of unprecedented scale and extravagance. It began with a cascade of decorations and orders for princes and proconsuls, including elevating the status of the Maharaja of Gwalior so that he received a twenty-one rather than a nineteen-gun salute. This mark of esteem meant much to Indian princes, for it was, as it were, an aural recognition of their rank and importance to the Raj. The highlight of the celebrations came when the King and Queen, wearing their crowns and ermine-lined robes of imperial purple, received the homage of the princes. The pair sat on golden thrones within a crimson pavilion topped with a golden canopy. Elevated above the 100,000 or so spectators, they were, in the words of The Times correspondent, ‘remote but beneficent, raised far above the multitude but visible to all’. One by one the Indian princes approached the dias, each dressed in his full regalia and festooned with jewels, halted, bowed three times and stepped backwards. The Gaikwar of Baroda, second in line and in a simple white outfit, walked forward, inclined his head once and then turned about. Onlookers were scandalised and, worse still, the incident had been filmed by newsreel cameramen – the Raj’s moment of supreme glory was later shown in British cinemas. Sayagi Rao’s ‘perfunctory’ bow was clearly shown on the footage which, according to The Times, revealed very little of the ‘picturesque’ Indian crowds.43
Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy, pl
ayed down the snub and claimed that no disrespect had been intended by the gaikwar, which was not what spectators thought. When Henry Cobb, the Baroda resident, tried to extract an explanation, the prince showed signs of extreme tension and his words lost coherence. After a headmasterly dressing down from Cobb, the gaikwar set off for Europe and medical treatment.44 His misconduct, if such it was, had been obviated by a royal solecism: George V had ignored precedent and entered Delhi on horseback rather than the traditional imperial elephant. He made amends by mounting one when he went to receive homage from the princes and again when he went hunting in Nepal over the New Year. He claimed twenty-four of the thirty-nine tigers killed and, fittingly for an emperor, managed to shoot one with one barrel and a bear with another. Other casualties of this excursion included eighteen rhinoceroses, which were plainly more numerous than today.
In many ways the late-Victorian and Edwardian Raj resembled the spectacles it staged so splendidly. It was stately and moved with the firm, deliberate tread of the principle prop of Indian state pageantry, the elephant. The direction was always forwards, but the pace was unhurried, which was fortunate, for no one was certain as to the ultimate goal, or when it would be reached. There was also something distinctly elephantine about the government itself. It was a complex and ponderous organism, fundamentally good-natured, but capable of frightening tantrums when its patience was exhausted.
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