by Miles Taylor
When it eventually appeared the final version of the proclamation clarified the new British position of religious neutrality in India and set off a series of evangelical criticisms.59 The proclamation did incorporate most of the concerns expressed by Victoria and Albert. The omissions were significant, however. Two stand out. Despite what passed down into folk memory in India, there was no reference in the proclamation to Indians enjoying the same equality as other subjects of the British Crown. The nearest the proclamation comes to this is in the seventh paragraph, where the queen declares to ‘hold Ourselves bound to the Natives of Our Indian Territories by the same obligations of Duty which bind Us to all our other Subjects’. This did not go as far as Victoria wished, when she called for Indian subjects to be ‘placed on an equality with the subjects of the British Crown’. Nor did the proclamation refer, as she had wanted, to ‘the commencement of her new reign’, a point of less importance perhaps, but the sentiment denoted the fresh start she hoped for her Indian realm.
One final instalment of the transfer of power remained. Back in December 1857, Lord Palmerston had suggested to the queen that an Indian order of knighthood be established as a means of rewarding and strengthening the personal bonds of loyalty between Queen Victoria and the loyal Indian princes. Eighteen months later, the queen returned to the idea, recommending it to Lord Canning. Canning assumed that the queen wanted to keep the new order exclusively for Indians. He made enquiries around British India about how it might work, only to be told that it would not get very far unless both Europeans and Indians were eligible to join. Indian elites, Canning was informed, would not look favourably at an honour set aside just for them.60 So, instead, a new order of chivalry, the ‘Star of India’ was established for senior Indians and Europeans. Prince Albert took up the project with great energy, designing its ribands and mottoes, in consultation with the new Liberal secretary of state for India, Sir Charles Wood. Albert’s stance on India – somewhere between evangelism and toleration, antiquity and modernity – is captured by his ideas for the new Indian order. His preferred title was the ‘Eastern’ or ‘Morning Star’. As he explained to Wood, ‘[t]he Eastern Star preceded the three Kings, or wise men when they did homage to the infant Christ & maybe taken as the emblem of dawning Christianity, as such it would have a memorable meaning which may remain concealed from the Indians, & yet be one day recognised in history.’ At the same time, Albert pointed out, ‘[a]s the light of the world came from the east (like the Sun) & the human races are supposed to have spread from the East, the emblem might be eligible on that account & not uncomplimentary to the Indians’. Albert also enthusiastically drafted a list of Latin mottoes that might accompany the order, eventually settling on ‘lux caeli dux noster’ (heaven’s light our command).61 Albert’s blueprints did not impress either Wood or Canning. Between them the two statesmen pointed out that Latin mottoes were fine for British orders such as the Garter, but not for ‘Princes whose ancestors were sitting on their Thrones four or five centuries before the Garter . . . [was] dreamt of’. It was explained to Albert too that as far as Indians were concerned their country was not in the east, but in the west, for example Muslims in India faced west to pray to Mecca. ‘Indians do not think of . . . themselves as Orientals’, Canning helpfully reminded the court. For good measure Canning also pointed out that ‘star’ in Hindi was ‘satara’, the family name of the Maratha dynasty that the British had defeated in 1804. And so these discussions rambled on for the best part of nine months. Further names for the order were canvassed: the ‘Imperial Star’ (rejected as the British Crown was a royal one), the ‘Celestial Star’ (a tautology), the Star of Peace (no good, as the Hindi equivalent of peace was ‘agreement after war’ or ‘sleep’). At one stage an exasperated Albert suggested it should be known as the ‘golden impossibility’ since no one could agree, and eventually the Star of India was settled on.62
From a distance the Star of India looks like an attempt to impose western ideas of status and hierarchy on princely India, cloaked in the kind of medieval mystique beloved by the Victorians. In some respects, the new honour did just that. It was modelled on the Order of St Patrick, the Irish equivalent of the Order of the Bath, and over time its membership came to read like a who’s who of British Indian society. In the aftermath of the Indian rebellion, however, the Star of India was more a roll call of loyalty, with particular emphasis given to those chiefs who had supported the British in 1857–8. Canning was insistent that the awards be made for service more than in recognition of blood ties or ‘ancient dignity’. From a long list the initial Indian recipients were whittled down to eight: five Hindu princes (the Maharajas of Gwalior, Kashmir, Indore and Patiala and the Gaekwar of Baroda) and three Muslim rulers (the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Begum of Bhopal and the Nawab of Rampur). This was a very different cadre from before 1857, when the Company’s table of gun salutes had begun with the kings of Delhi and Awadh, and included many of the smaller rulers of northern India.63 The Order was also established to mark the queen’s ‘new reign’. The first investitures in 1861 were organised to fall on the anniversary of the proclamation.
The new Order of the Star of India was launched on 1 November 1861, simultaneously in Allahabad and London. Four Indian rulers made the trip to Allahabad: the Maharajas of Gwalior (extra blue ribbon was ordered to suit his extravagant tastes), Patiala and Kashmir, and the Begum of Bhopal (who declined the special title of ‘Lady Knight’), whilst the other Indian recipients were admitted at investiture ceremonies in their own courts. To Canning’s amazement and anger, the Nizam of Hyderabad initially refused, explaining that such awards ran counter to his religious beliefs.64 In London, the first knights were Albert, the Prince of Wales and Duleep Singh. Sadly, the Buckingham Palace ceremony was one of the last such public occasions for Albert. He fell ill later that month with a typhoid attack and died on 15 December. The Star claimed a victim in India too, for Charlotte Canning succumbed to a fatal bout of malaria on her return to Calcutta. Charles Canning’s spirits sank immediately. He followed his wife to the grave seven months later, with barely time to organise her memorial stone at Barrackpore. Time stood still for Queen Victoria too. Already in mourning for her mother, the Duchess of Kent, who had passed away earlier in the year, she now became the most famous widow in the world, disappearing from public view for the best part of a decade.65 In India, by contrast, she was everywhere, as the Government of India, anxious to secure the new Raj, circulated her name, and her image, far and wide.
CHAPTER 5
VICTORIA BEATRIX
‘Anew era has dawned upon India; the reign of Victoria Beatrix has commenced’, declared veteran Indian expert John Kaye, as reports of the publication of the queen’s proclamation in India on 1 November 1858 reached London a few weeks later.1 No expense was spared in spreading the news throughout the Indian subcontinent. Overseen by Charles Canning’s private secretary and linguist extraordinaire Lewin Bowring, the proclamation was translated into the principal vernacular languages of India, and read out in full at formal ceremonies in the major towns and cantonments of the three Presidencies (Bengal, Bombay, Madras), in the princely states and across the seas to Singapore, Malacca and the Straits Settlements. Everywhere, the trappings of the East India Company were removed, and the royal standard substituted in their place, most poignantly in Bombay harbour, where with one hoist of the ensign the ships of the East India Company navy became the fleets of the Royal Indian Navy. Lithograph presses went into overdrive as thousands of copies of the proclamation were printed. In the Punjab, for example, every village was given one. Public celebrations – fireworks, illuminations, feeding of the poor and nautch-dancing – marked the event, from Peshawar to Mysore, from Calcutta to Bombay, from Gujarat to Travancore.2 Addresses – some ornate, some handwritten, in some cases containing signatures than ran into the thousands – were sent onto the queen, many of the memorialists pledging their loyalty as the queen’s subjects at the start of her ‘direct sovereignty’ a
nd her ‘royal supremacy’ in India.3
All happened in haste. Canning only received the final text of the proclamation from London in the middle of October, and many local officials reported getting their copy and translation as late as 27 October. Not everywhere made the day of destiny on time, and even those that did slipped up. The Bombay Custom House flew the Union Jack upside down, a bad omen some thought. In Madras, only the troops were present at the ceremony, as there had been no time to advertise the event: ‘all was solemn, gloomy and dull’. Victoria’s new title also proved difficult to translate, there being no obvious female equivalent in Hindustani: was she a begum, or a maharani, or padishah? Fortunately, a simpler title suggested itself. One illumination at the Auckland Hotel in Calcutta proclaimed Victoria as ‘Empress of India’.4 Despite the rush, the diffusion of the queen’s proclamation throughout India was of huge significance. Never before had there been so conspicuous an identification of the British monarchy with the Indian empire. Rarely had so much resource been put into translating and disseminating an official announcement across the whole of the Indian subcontinent and beyond. The proclamation was the manifesto of a monarch. It made a series of pledges to the people of India: to respect their religions and laws, to treat them in the same manner as the queen’s subjects elsewhere, to open up the administration of the country to Indians, to modernise public utilities, to end the policy of annexation, and to offer clemency to those who had taken up arms against British rule. In short, as the Christian socialist J. M. Ludlow put it, the proclamation was ‘British India’s Magna Charta’. In future India’s governors would be judged against the words of the queen. ‘They may violate every one of its promises,’ Ludlow declared prophetically, ‘but every promise will survive its own violation – and avenge it.’ An irreversible step had been taken in India. Sidelined from power by the English constitution at home, the queen now constituted English authority in India. As the 8th Duke of Argyll observed, ‘the personal authority of the Sovereign’ was now in India brought ‘within the circle of political contention’.5
This chapter explores the immediate consequences of the transfer of power from Company to Crown: how it was implemented, and how it was interpreted. The queen’s proclamation was paternalist and Tory in tone. Carrying out its pledges became the task of liberals. Empowered by the Indian Councils Act of 1861, Charles Canning, the new viceroy, gathered a reforming executive around him, its legal and financial members drawn from the bright lights of liberalism back in Britain. James Wilson, editor of the London free-trade tribune The Economist, arrived to take up the finance post, and Henry Maine, a precocious professor of law at Cambridge, accepted, at the second asking, the law portfolio. Indian expertise was not considered important. Neither Maine nor any of the legal members of the Executive Council down to 1877 had experience of India. Instead, they all signed up to the principles of liberal governance: freedom of trade, freedom of contract under the law and freedom of opinion. These ideas worked well enough at home, even if they sometimes required the strong arm of the state to enforce and regulate them. Early Victorian Britain had gone through a revolution in government; now it was India’s turn for a dose of what James Fitzjames Stephen, Maine’s successor in 1869, called ‘benevolent despotism’.6 After 1858 the Government of India set about turning the Company state into a liberal state. The currency and the post were overhauled, the legal system codified, the civil service and the army reorganised. When all that was done, the Government turned its attention to reform in the princely states. This Indian revolution in government was far more extensive than its British equivalent, and historians have given it due attention.7 What they have overlooked completely is the extent to which the queen’s proclamation loomed large in both the projection of British power in India after 1858, and the ways in which it was debated and contested. To re-establish control after the rebellion, the queen’s status, and the queen’s image, were played out by the Government of India in an unprecedented fashion. At the same time, the guarantees of equality given in the queen’s proclamation created a discursive space within which Indian claims for inclusion within the imperial polity could be made. One way or another, the queen proved central, and not merely ornamental, to this new phase of the Raj.
Sovereigns
The Government of India did not stop at the proclamation in directly associating the name of Queen Victoria with British dominion over India after 1858. Words were one thing. Amongst a population with low levels of literacy, images were another. The reorganisation of the Indian coinage and the paper currency, as well as the expansion and centralisation of the postal system, offered the opportunity of establishing a more fixed image of the queen’s sovereignty amongst her new subjects. In 1862 the famous ‘Company rupee’ was withdrawn. In its place came the queen, her head and shoulders engraved into the new coinage issued from 1862 onwards. She featured on all denominations, from the gold mohur ‘sovereign’ to the tiny copper anna. She also adorned the new banknotes, made legal tender by the Paper Currency Act of 1861.8 Outside of British India, creating a uniform coinage posed difficulties. Many of the princely states maintained their own mints, and, although they obediently removed the image of the Emperor of Delhi, they were mostly reluctant to add the queen. They either preferred an image of their own chief, or no image at all (particularly so in Muslim states such as Bhopal and Hyderabad). Closing down the mints of the native states became a government priority. Separate currencies placed obstacles in the way of trade and encouraged forgery. But, economic utility aside, it was the symbolism of the indivisible sovereignty of the queen’s rule that lay behind the drive to a uniform coinage across the whole of India. In 1871, Mayo, the viceroy, spelled out what was at stake. ‘I cannot help thinking’, he wrote to the Duke of Argyll, the secretary of state for India:
that it would be extremely desirable, that on coins which will pass from hand to hand among the people of India that recognition of suzerainty, which was thought necessary and insisted upon by the Mahomedan Emperors, would be suggested by a Power which exercises an influence in Hindoostan which was unknown to the rulers of Delhi.
In other words, Queen Victoria. Mayo’s successor, Northbrook, agreed, and in 1876 the Native Coinage At was passed, requiring princely states to give up their mints and hand over the manufacture of coinage to Calcutta.9 Few complied, but the passage of time and the free flow of the new Indian rupee did its work in marginalising the smaller currencies.
The new rupee fabricated Queen Victoria across India, and beyond, into the currencies of Ceylon and British territory in east Africa.10 Admittedly, some of her own officials doubted its potency at first. How could the effigy of a woman displace the Company coin, especially amongst Hindus and Muslims, who were not used to depictions of female power?11 Yet considerable effort went into designing the new coin so that it had Indian appeal. Queen Victoria had featured on the old Company rupee in the last two decades of its issue, her bust taken from the same designs used on British coinage at home. Now, in 1862, an Indian version of the queen was substituted. Her nose was straightened and made more prominent, her hair was plaited, a crown was added to her head, and a string of pearls draped around her neck and over an elaborately embroidered blouse. An additional enhancement featured in the banknotes of the 1862 issue: her eyes were darkened. To both the coins and the notes the queen gave her approval, on the recommendation of her secretary of state Sir Charles Wood. They would, he assured her, bear ‘the unmistakeable sign of being issued by the Sovereign, namely the representation of the Sovereign, with same ornaments and accessories on both’.12 Thus she remained in the currency of British India for the rest of her reign, cast permanently as a young woman, orientalised in her appearance.
Queen Victoria’s image, tailored for Indian use, also featured on postage stamps throughout the subcontinent after 1860. The first stamps, designed by Henry Thuillier, the Surveyor-General of India, used the standard depiction of the queen from the British ‘penny black’. However, in t
he early 1860s the Indian Mint commissioned a fresh portrait from Thomas De La Rue, the London printer. He depicted the queen’s bust in an oval vignette; she wore a simple laureate crown with her hair tied back. This was a less regal image than the 1862 currency issue, but, like the coinage and banknotes, the postage stamps caught Queen Victoria as a youthful woman. This remained the standard Indian postal stamp for almost all of the reign. Not until the 1890s did age catch up with the queen on the stamps, when a completely new portrait of the queen as empress, wearing a small crown, partially covered by a shawl, was produced, her eyebrows darkened, with exposed ear and ear jewellery.13 As with the currency in India, postage was not standardised across India, except insofar as mail needed official stamps to be sent outside native states. Six states did opt to become ‘convention’ states, permitting them to counter-stamp the Government of India stamp with the name of their own state. Some of them applied the airbrush to the image of Queen Victoria. Compare for example, the standard Government of India 1866 stamp with the counter-stamped version of the same portrait for the states of Nabha, Chamba or Faridkot, just ten years later. The queen’s eyes are larger and darker, her nose and mouth much fuller than in the original.14 As likenesses these images on coin, banknote and postage stamp rendered the queen almost unrecognisable; as representations of female monarchy in an eastern setting they served an important purpose.
