by Miles Taylor
In January 1884 the Ilbert bill, substantially revised to appease European objections, was finally passed. The bill and the outcry it provoked defined Ripon’s viceroyalty. The whites of Calcutta prickled with indignation. They stayed away from his levée at the end of 1883. Employees of the East India Railway, as well as some of the European volunteer regiments in Calcutta, publicly demonstrated their opposition.36 Conversely, Ripon was celebrated as a hero of Indian nationalism. The closer he appeared to be to the queen’s pledges to India, the more he was praised. The Poona Sabha memorialised the queen, requesting that Ripon’s stint as viceroy be extended. A Marathi verse addressed to the queen lamented Ripon’s return to England: the viceroy had ‘raised true and everlasting trophies of thy greatness’. His final months in India were marked by eulogies in the press and his departure from Bombay in December 1884 saw the kind of festivities that were usually reserved for arriving royalty.37 Some of his British colleagues, such as Fergusson in Bombay, could not wait to see him go, but there was no taking away from the popularity of Ripon, and, by proxy, Indian admiration of the queen. When Ripon returned to London, he met with Queen Victoria and told her of the ‘extraordinary loyalty to me [the queen] personally’ that existed in India. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who had raced over to India to document the white mutineers of Calcutta, summed up the Ripon effect on India simply if not very elegantly. The Indian population, he noted, ‘grow yearly more and more estranged from their Anglo-Indian masters, they yearly look with more and more hope to England and to her who sits upon the English throne’.38
National Union
The Ilbert bill had sunk a wedge between European and Indian loyalties to the Crown. The Indian National Congress, formed in 1885, drove it deeper.39 From the beginning, the INC laid claim to loyalty to the monarch as one of their weapons of choice. The INC wore their patriotism like a uniform. Every congress meeting closed out with three cheers for the queen. An ‘airquake’ of hurrahs was given in her golden jubilee year, or her ‘first half century’ as the INC memorial ambitiously referred to the anniversary. A triumphal arch with the words ‘Long live the Empress’ greeted delegates on their arrival at the INC camp at Allahabad in 1888, and a further three portraits of the queen and one of the Prince of Wales hung inside the meeting hall.40 At each gathering speakers took their stand on the promises of the queen’s proclamation of 1858, ‘cherished as a great charter’, its pledges embodying ‘the germs of all we aim at now’. In 1894, all the delegates stood up to applaud the famous document. On three occasions the queen’s letter to Lord Derby, in which she instructed him to use language in the proclamation that showed sensitivity to the people of India, was read aloud: by Madan Mohan Malaviya in 1888, Rungiah Naidu in 1894 and Rahimatulla Sayani in 1896.41 Other delegates referred to the queen as ‘our beloved mother Empress’. So emphatic was INC loyalty that staid English observers found it ‘obtrusive’.42 Nothing quite rallied Indian nationalists as much as the queen’s wise words of 1858.
The loyalist stance of the INC was more than polite rhetoric or show. The INC called for a relaxation in the laws that prevented Indians from contributing to the civic life of British India. First and foremost, the INC wanted the repeal of the Arms Act of 1878, which banned the carrying of hand weapons. The INC’s main criticism was that the Arms Act stifled Indian military volunteers. What better indication of Indian loyalty to the Crown than choosing to serve in its fighting forces, especially with a covetous neighbour, Russia, bearing down from the north? As Bipin Chandra Pal, a delegate from Sylhet, asked at the 1887 Congress:
What . . . are all our professions of loyalty worth in the face of the Arms Act? The Nizam may offer sixty crores instead of sixty lacs for the defence of the Empire, ten thousand jubilee celebrations may be organised, the Government may publicly acknowledge the sincerity of these loyal demonstrations, British newspapers may trumpet them forth to the whole world; but the question is will foreigners believe, will Russia believe, in the truth and sincerity of these demonstrations in the face of the Arms Act?
It was a good point. Corps of volunteers existed for Europeans. There were around thirty by the late 1880s.43 The INC wanted a taste of the action too. Furthermore, the INC sought to open up Indian access to the regular army, breaking with the policy of recruiting exclusively from the ‘martial races’. In 1887 three of the Congress’s eleven resolutions were related to military service: removing the Arms Act, establishing Indian volunteer units, and setting up an Indian military college for the Indian princes wanting an army commission.
A second measure of radical loyalism taken up by the INC was the older demand of improving Indian entrance to the Civil Service. The hostility shown towards Indian magistrates during the Ilbert bill demonstrated that suspicion of Indians in government administration was ingrained, even when they had surmounted all the obstacles placed in their way. The rules had been reviewed and even revised. But the fundamental problem remained: the tyranny of distance. The INC made the holding of ICS admission examinations in India a key demand. It also placed faith in the Indian Public Service Commission that began its enquiries in 1886, reporting at the end of the following year, members of the INC giving evidence, only to find its faith misplaced when the Commission rejected simultaneous examinations.44 Thirdly, the INC emphasised the essential Englishness of its political demands. At its first meeting in 1885 the INC repeated the old demand for a Royal Commission in London to examine the state of the country and recommend reforms. Delegates defended institutions such as trial by jury whenever they appeared to be undermined in India.45 The INC also pressed for the widening of the representation in the legislative councils of India, in the presidencies, as well as in the Viceroy’s Executive Council, by allowing existing civic bodies (chambers of commerce, universities, district boards and so on) to elect candidates. In 1887 Surendranath Bannerjee described this entitlement to better representation as one due to Indians as ‘British subjects’.46 Two years later, a wide-ranging reform bill was introduced at the Bombay congress. It set out the INC’s largest demands to date. For advice on details, the INC turned to one of the most notorious Englishmen of the day: Charles Bradlaugh.
The choice of Bradlaugh as advocate for the INC made sense in many ways. He had supported the original Ilbert bill back in 1883, and, once admitted to the House of Commons in 1886, he lost no time making good his claim to be ‘member for India’, putting twenty-seven questions and five motions relating to India before Parliament, and proving particularly vocal in his criticism of famine policy in Madras, the plight of the Maharaja of Kashmir and the bias against Indians trying to enter the ICS.47 In other respects, his politics went against the grain of the moderate loyalism of the INC. The most infamous atheist of the Victorian era, his views on religion did not recommend him to Indian audiences. At best he earned quizzical sympathy.48 His support for female contraception was not mentioned by his Indian hosts. Above all, Bradlaugh was a republican. In 1874 he had called for the impeachment of Britain’s royal family, noting in passing the support given by George III for the rapacity and greed of Warren Hastings as governor of Bengal in the 1770s. His anti-monarchism continued as he fought his way into Parliament after 1880. In 1889 he proceeded to attack the payments given from the civil list to the younger members of the royal family, including the queen’s eldest grandson, Prince Albert Victor, just then preparing to visit India.49
Shaking off ill health, Bradlaugh came to India specifically to attend the INC’s fifth meeting. Whilst he could not take the INC down a republican road, he did steer it in a much more radical direction. The second resolution of the Bombay congress reiterated the call for reform of the Indian councils, first made three years earlier. This time, however, with Bradlaugh’s input, a two-stage election process was introduced, not unlike the French and American systems, whereby voters would elect a primary college that would then both elect and nominate candidates for the various councils. Stopping short of direct democracy, Bradlaugh’s plan nonetheless introd
uced a popular element, by extending the franchise for the elections to the primary college to all males over the age of 21, subject to certain qualification later settled as all those who paid at least 50 rupees rent, or who paid direct taxes, or whose income was over 150 rupees per year.50 Bradlaugh set to one side nomination and partial election by corporate institutions, the hallowed formula for widening the representation. No one had ever advocated enfranchising so many Indians before. The details of the bill were rushed into print. Eardley Norton lauded Bradlaugh’s document as a new ‘Magna Carta’ for India, but in truth there was little in it that went back to the thirteenth century find the future.51 Bradlaugh’s bill would have catapulted India into the democratic unknown. In the new year of 1890 he returned to Britain with his bill, primed to press it on Parliament as Lord Salisbury’s government prepared its own legislation on the Indian Councils. But Bradlaugh never had his day in the sun. The India Office delayed its plan and, by the time the Indian Council Bill came before the House of Commons in 1891, Bradlaugh was dead and buried. Amongst the 3,000 mourners at his funeral was a young Mohandas Gandhi.
Bradlaugh had been an instant hit in India, although perhaps not in the way he intended. There was no real change in the careful loyalism of the INC. Bradlaugh must surely have bristled when he heard the INC welcome his bill as one ‘founded on the solemn promises of the Queen’. He cannot have missed how many of the addresses presented to him at the Bombay meeting – printed on silk and contained in caskets – combined reverence for the queen-empress with gratitude for his duties.52 The Indian Councils were reformed in 1892, but without any further concession to the elective principle. Indeed, the INC returned to its moderate programme, limited to calling for a broader base for nominations to council membership.53 Bombay and Bradlaugh’s visit was a high watermark in the early years of Indian nationalism. Delegate numbers levelled off thereafter, only rocketing up again at the INC meetings held during the First World War. Some successes were scored in Britain. Naoroji was finally elected to Parliament in 1892 as MP for Finsbury Central. In 1895 there was a Royal Commission under the chairmanship of Lord Reginald Welby, a former Treasury official, to investigate the finances and expenditure of the Indian government. The INC gave evidence; unsurprisingly the Commission gave the Indian government a pretty clean bill of health.
In India the INC faced a barrage of criticism, its loyalty to the Crown contested at every turn. No matter how much the INC asserted its patriotism, it received short shrift from the governing classes. Lord Dufferin signed off his viceroyalty at a St Andrew’s Day dinner at the end of November 1888 by denouncing the INC as a ‘microscopic minority’ bent on exciting ‘hatred against the public servants of the Crown’ and fomenting military insurrection and popular revolt, instead of encouraging reform of Hindu social practices.54 The slightest hint that the INC was stoking dissent towards the queen was seized on by officials as a conspiracy. For example, a tract published by the INC in Tamil and circulated in Madras appeared to liken the Indian empire to a despotism, in which the queen-empress professed to take an interest in Indians whereas in fact she ignored all their appeals. From this and other charges Allan Hume and Eardley Norton defended the INC.55 But the organisation remained under the severest scrutiny. Its activities during 1888 were subject to surveillance, as Dufferin turned over the ‘Thugee and Dacoity’ department of Special Branch to monitoring the INC (as well as other organisations). The INC membership was also affected by an India Office ruling in 1892 that Indians who held official appointments could not be members of the INC nor the temperance movement.56 For the Government of India, patriotism and politics were an unholy mixture.
For Muslim reformers in particular, the INC’s was a spurious loyalism. Alarmed at the formation of the INC in 1885, Syed Ahmed Khan, assisted by the principal of the Anglo-Oriental College, Theodore Beck, set up the United Indian Patriotic Association (UIPA) three years later, its mission to dent the appeal of the INC to Muslim Indians. It was an unusual step, first as a Muslim campaign with an avowedly political purpose, and secondly, one that ventured beyond the borders of the North-West Provinces. Drawing in funding from the Nizam of Hyderabad, amongst others, by 1890 the UIPA had received support from 53 anjumans promising not to send delegates to the INC, sent a petition to Parliament with just under 30,000 signatures opposing Bradlaugh’s bill and conducted a publicity campaign in Britain.57 An effervescent force – it survived no longer than a year – the UIPA nonetheless niggled away at the INC, exposing its more vulnerable points, that is to say its representativeness, and its declared moderation. The UIPA tore into Bengali Brahmin dominance of the INC, arguing that introducing a more elective element into Indian’s councils would mean Hindus outnumbering Muslims four to one, or as Khan put it more offensively, ‘the whole [Viceroy’s] Council will consist of Babu So-and-so Mitter, Babu So-and-so Ghose, and Babu So-and-so Chukerbutty’.58 Here was an early outing of the demonology of ‘Congress-raj’, an Indian future for 30 million Muslims in which the benign despotism of British rule gave way to Hindu majority rule. In the late 1880s, this line of attack was flanked by another argument, namely that the INC’s loyalism was only skin-deep. The INC were, according to Syed Ali Bilgrami, one of the Nizam of Hyderabad’s ministers, and prominent member of the UIPA, ‘soi-disant patriots’ playing a ‘subtle trick’ of showing loyalty to the throne whilst throwing ‘seditious abuse at the administration’.59 What the INC really desired was a republic, claimed Syed Khan; what it would create, warned Beck, were the conditions for another mutiny.60
There were thus a variety of nationalisms in late nineteenth-century India. Each had their own version of the queen-empress as the embodiment of the Raj. For moderate Muslims, such as Syed Khan, the language of loyalism was a way of fending off the spectre of Wahabism, as well as the majoritarianism of the INC. In turn, the INC used the rhetoric of imperial patriotism to contest the policies of the Raj, and press for the pledges of the proclamation of 1858 to be upheld and fulfilled. At the same time, as the conflict over the Ilbert bill revealed, the small but vocal British community in India were always poised ready to seize the Crown as their property, the embodiment of rights that were peculiar to the English race. From afar, Queen Victoria looked on and lamented at what was going on, anxious at the antagonism between the races. Significantly, one nation – India – was largely absent from these languages of loyalism in the late nineteenth-century Raj. Muslims contested the idea of the political nation based on Hindu predominance, yet also kept the caliphate at a distance. The INC looked to a wider imperial citizenship of shared rights across the British Empire. The whites of the presidency towns clung to a residual sense of Englishness, defined where it mattered most, in the privileged status they enjoyed under the law. Historians may look in vain for an authentic or mature Indian nationalism before 1900. That does not mean that India was politically quiescent or blindly deferential. The figure of the queen-empress offered a way of articulating citizenship without talking about the nation.
CHAPTER 11
JUJUBILEE
‘Only in India,’ claimed a Bengali newspaper, observing the queen’s jubilee celebrations in 1887, was it ‘possible for a man to set fire to his own dwelling-house in order to enjoy the lurid spectacle of a great and devastating fire.’ Bangabasi’s ridicule had two targets. Krishna Chandra Banerjee, the editor, criticised the British rulers for ‘intoxicating’ the country with anniversary festivities, and lamented how easily the Indian people set aside their misery in a show of loyalty. Banerjee suggested that the ceremonies should be called the ‘jujubilee’.1 In Bengali, a ‘juju’ was an imaginary monster used to frighten children; in Hindi, as in English, it meant a magical charm. Banerjee’s censure was understandable. In 1887 and again in 1897, the popularity of Queen Victoria seemed to reach new heights in India. Jubilee addresses, gifts and memorials of all shapes and sizes were sent from India on both occasions. In 1887 there were almost 1,100 loyal addresses from India, double the combined tota
l of the rest of the colonial empire, and almost 50 per cent more than were generated back in Britain. In 1897, there were fewer, but they still ran into the hundreds. In between the two jubilees, India supplied most of the funding for the Imperial and Colonial Institute, opened in London in 1893 as a permanent memorial of the first jubilee.2
How much of an exercise in orchestrated loyalty were the two Indian jubilees of 1887 and 1897? The Government of India had good reason to take matters into its own hands on both occasions. The viceroyalty of Lord Ripon unleashed new forms of popular politics in India, particularly through the expansion of municipal government. At the end of 1885, the Indian National Congress held its first meeting, wrapping its demands for reform in the rhetoric of loyalism, but calling for change nonetheless. It was potentially a heady brew. A decade later, in 1897, Indian opinion remained unpredictable, as famine ravaged most of the country, cholera broke out in Bombay, its impact deepened by the heavy-handed and insensitive measures of control implemented by the colonial authorities, and a massive earthquake hit Bengal. Three British officials were assassinated during the jubilee celebrations of that year.
At the same time, there was much that was spontaneous, and a great deal that was distinctly regional about the Indian jubilees. Patriotism by fiat only went so far; local communities did the rest of the work, and from the abundance of surviving evidence it is possible to chart the extent and the limits of Indian loyalism at the height of the Victorian era. The chapter that follows compares and contrasts these two royal jubilees in India, and in the decade that intervened tells the story of how Indian efforts kept alive the flagging fortunes of the Imperial and Colonial Institute in London.
