by Arjun Gaind
The British Government offered many justifications for spending a fortune on hosting such a lavish spectacle, given that the rest of India was wracked by famine and disease. Hardinge described it as a celebration of empire; Lord Dane called it a pageant of unity, a way to bring together the diverse citizens of England’s many colonies through shared patriotic fervor. An editorial column in the Pioneer even went so far as to insist that it was the Indians who wanted the Durbar, that “it is impossible to see any reason for its discontinuance in the face of the loyal desires and expectations of the Indian people.”
The truth, as it often tends to be, was somewhat simpler. Russia and England had been playing the Great Game for almost a century, each vying for control of Afghanistan and Central Asia. The British military’s reputation for invincibility had also taken a bit of a battering, following the Zulu and Boer Wars, not to mention myriad indecisive conflicts ranging from the Boxer Rebellion in China to the Mahdist conflict in the Sudan. In addition, the European powers, Germany in particular, were spreading the borders of their own empires aggressively, particularly in Africa. What better way then for the English to demonstrate their imperial majesty and wealth than by a public demonstration? That was what the Durbar of 1911 really was, a way for the English to ‘show off’ on a global scale, to intimidate old enemies and dazzle new friends. In many ways, it can be thought of as the last pyrrhic gasp of colonialism, because only a few short years later, the world would be engulfed by the First World War, and the age of Empire would begin its decline in the trenches of the Western Front.
For the record, while there was a princely state called Rajpur, Maharaja Sikander Singh is a figment of my imagination. Also, there was no murder preceding the Durbar of 1911, nor did the King consort with any nautch girls, at least according to public record. However, while Zahra may be entirely fictitious, the rest of the cast of this book are all real, as are most of the incidents chronicled.
There is no Englishman more reviled by Punjabis that Michael O’Dwyer. We meet him here as a young civil servant whose star is on the rise. A few short years later, in 1919, as the Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, he would order the Jallianwala massacre, where the Army opened fire on a peaceful crowd in Amritsar and murdered over one thousand men, women and children. He was in turn assassinated by Udham Singh in 1940.
The Battenbergs are, of course, the Mountbattens, who changed their family name to hide their Germanic origins after World War 1. The Prince mentioned here who leads the Guppies is not Louis, who partitioned India, but rather his elder brother, George, whose sole contribution to history is a vast collection of pornography which he left to the British Museum, where it is hidden away in a private room, deemed unsuitable for general viewing.
The rest of the Guppies were an equally interesting lot, and none more so than Fruity Metcalfe, who would go on to become a close companion of Edward VIII, and end up at the very center of the abdication scandal when he abandoned his throne to marry Wallis Simpson.
As for Malik Umar Hayat Khan, he would go on to become the largest landholder in North India. He remained loyal to the British, even appearing on behalf of Michael O’Dwyer as a witness in a libel case. He died in 1944 in London.
Amar Singh of Kashmir would ultimately be successful in his scheming. His brother, Partap Singh, was removed from the throne for conspiring with the Russians, and his son, Hari Singh was elevated in his stead. He was destined to be the last Maharaja of Kashmir, and much of the current unrest in the valley is the outcome of his vacillating when India attained Independence.
I have taken some liberties with the character of Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala, and made him seem a bit more of a libertine than he truly was. At the time of the Durbar, he was, indeed, married to Anita Delgado, a flamenco dancer of Spanish origin. She did attend the Durbar, and was quite furious with Jagatjit because she wanted to be recognised as his official consort, a request he was unable to grant because of protocol. She was prohibited from attending all official functions, and her pique, I imagine, is quite genuine, as was Jagatjit’s weariness. If you would care to read more about that doomed romance, try Passion India by Javier Moro.
Bhupinder Singh’s vast appetites are well chronicled, as is his passion for sport. He was a great patron of pehelwani in Punjab, and there was indeed a legendary wrestler by the name of Kikkar Singh Sandhu, who got his name because he enjoyed uprooting entire acacia (kikkar) trees out of the ground and pressing them above his head. At the Durbar, he fought a challenger named Kallu for the championship of the Punjab. It was a grudge match, and he lost badly, although it was no fault of Charan Singh.
History has not been kind to Jey Singh of Alwar. He has been much maligned, his eccentricities and extravagances reviled. He is held up as the worst of the Indian Princes, but much of his behavior, I believe, was caused by psychological instability. He is a fine example of what contemporary doctors describe as a sociopath, and he would ultimately come to an ignominious end, deposed and forced into exile, his habits proving too disgusting even for the burra sahibs to endure.
The character of Miss Cavendish is based on a real person, an Irish heiress named Lilah Wingfield. At the tender age of twenty-three, she decided to sail out to India to attend the Durbar, and left behind a diary chronicling her many adventures. It has been adpated into into a charming book, A Glimpse of Empire, by her granddaughter, Jessica Douglas-Home, and makes for a delightful afternoon of reading.
The Maharani of Bharatpur is remembered regettably as a nonentity. However, I believe that she must have been a formidable woman, who held the throne of her state as Regent for more than twenty years after her husband was deposed, no small feat for a woman in Rajasthan at the turn of the century. Sadly, her son would be the one to supplant her, and would in turn be deposed by the English in 1928 for mismanaging his state.
Tukoji Rao of Indore is one of the great romantic rogues of Princely India. In 1925, he would have a man named Abdul Kadir Bawla murdered by hired assassins in Bombay. The reason—Bawla was involved with a dance girl named Mumtaz whom Indore considered his property. When he was brought to trial, the Maharaja’s only defence was that Bawla had besmirched his honor, his princely izzat. He refused to bow to the court, insisting that he was above the laws that governed men of lesser birth. In the end, he was acquitted but the ensuing scandal forced him to abdicate his throne in 1926.
The first meeting between Jitendra Narayan and Indira Raje is a well-documented one. They fell in love instantly, and she jilted her betrothed Mysore by letter. The couple would go on to become the darlings of European media, and her daughter, Gayatri Devi, who was the Maharani of Japiur for many years, is an iconic figure in Royal India, synonymous with dignity and grace.
At the Durbar, Sayaji Rao of Baroda would cause quite a hullabaloo by turning his back to the King. While this may have merely been an oversight on his part, there were many who took it to be a deliberate insult, intended to strike a public blow for the putative Independence movement. Gaekwad weathered the storm admirably, and ruled for the next thirty something years, and is today venerated in India as the most enlightened monarch of his age.
The Durbar was the first event to be filmed in color on a large scale. Charles Urban very nearly went bankrupt trying to keep his footage from being stolen by others, but when With the King and Queen through India was released in 1912, it was a runaway success. A copy of the film can be found online and is well worth watching.
Legend has it that the British considered holding another Durbar in 1937 to celebrate Edward VIII’s coronation. Plans were rumored to be in the preliminary stages, but were abandoned when he abdicated the throne. With the outbreak of the Second World War, any further extravangazas were permanently shelved. Today, all that remains of the Grand Durbar of 1911 is the Gateway of India in Bombay, and a neglected park in one crowded corner of Delhi, which has become the repository for all the Colonial era statues that once lin
ed Delhi’s streets. Now, they lie in crumbling heaps,chief amongst then an effigy of King George himself, his stony visage bearing mute witness to the unyielding irony of time.
If anyone is interested in reading more about the actual Durbar, I highly recommend Delhi Durbar 1911: The Complete Story by Sunil Raman and Rohit Agarwal.
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