by Miles Taylor
The new Institute did not struggle for business. In 1890 a school for modern Oriental studies, the forerunner of today’s School of Oriental and African Studies, was founded, and Max Müller gave the inaugural address. From 1892, the Institute ran an agency for colonial trade information.32 Financial support was harder to come by. By 1891 one-third of the funding for the Institute had come from India. But interest was flagging, and the view was growing that the best way to extend the philanthropic initiatives of 1887 was to invest in local projects in India.33 With the completion of the building and the opening of the new Institute scheduled for 1893, there was a danger that the project would not be completed on time to everyone’s embarrassment. At the eleventh hour two Indian princes – the Maharajas of Jaipur and Bhavnagar – and a wealthy merchant from Bombay – Sir Cowasji Jehangir – stepped in and made up the difference: £40,000 each from Jaipur and Jehangir, and £3,000 from Bhavnagar.34 Ready money from India once more.
The extra funding from India made all the difference, and the opening of the Institute took place at the beginning of May 1893. It was a moment of royal pomp to which Gladstone’s government turned a blind eye. The satirical weekly Moonshine depicted the prime minister hiding under a table as the queen-empress and the Prince of Wales squabbled over arrangements. It was no less grand for all that. Arthur Sullivan performed a reprise, this time composing a march, another ode was dashed off as well, and the Irish historian and Unionist W. E. H. Lecky penned the inaugural address.35 At the queen’s insistence, India was foregrounded for the occasion. A cavalry guard was sent over specially from India, and stood out amongst the other colonial troops, to the evident pleasure of the queen. One of the guard left a rich account of his sojourn in England.36 An ornate ceremonial key fashioned in an Indian style was used to unlock the doors of the new building. Once inside, the queen gazed over the proceedings from the throne of Ranjit Singh. The overseas visitors included three Indian princes – the Thakur of Gondal, who came with his wife, the Maharaja of Kapurthala and the Maharaja of Bhavnagar.37 Not for the first time India had supplied more money, momentum and material for a London extravaganza than had been found anywhere else in the empire. Or, on this occasion, even from home. Lecky’s inaugural address described how British civilisation had freed India from barbarism, but the successful launch of the Imperial Institute suggests it was India that had rescued the Prince of Wales’s pet project from the philistines. Even so, Indian philanthropists had to accept a modest footprint in the new building. Jaipur got a special room, Bhavnagar a corridor. There was also a memorial for Lady Reay, mother of the former governor of Bombay, unveiled by Lord Reay. By the time of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897 the Imperial Institute was regarded as a flop. Its programme of activities in no way fulfilled its original mission statement. Ironically, the Imperial Institute never rivalled Monier-Williams’s Indian Institute at Oxford, bankrolled by railway magnate Thomas Brassey and Bhagvat Singh, the young Thakur of Gondal, and also patronised by the Prince of Wales.38
Critics lined up to attack what had become an embarrassing white elephant. Henry Labouchere, a rich, radical MP and proprietor of one of the pioneers of investigative journalism, Truth, led the onslaught.39 Labouchere called the Imperial Institute ‘a monument of reckless extravagance, purposeless effort, and incompetent administration’. His newspaper exposed its real debts, amounting to £40,000. Without directly blaming the Prince of Wales for the origins of the crisis, Labouchere called for him to take some responsibility for the Institute going forward, perhaps by transferring the assets of the ‘wreck’ to the Prince of Wales Hospital Fund.40 In the end it was a university and not a hospital that came to the rescue. In 1899 the University of London stepped in to agree to write off its mortgage and its remaining debts. Officially handed over as a ‘gift to the nation’ in 1901, the multi-functional site became the property of the amorphous federal university, with some residual activity left to the Imperial Institute, now confined to the west wing. The space allotted to India in the transferred building was substantially reduced, effectively limited by the eve of the First World War to a shared conference room, and some storage space.41 Its Indian patrons had good reason to be aggrieved over the rise and fall of the Imperial Institute. The Institute had been originally conceived at the 1886 Imperial and Colonial Exhibition, an event also presided over by the Prince of Wales, and one that had led to a similar exhibition planned for Bombay being abandoned. The Government of India had tried to divert funds to the Institute from the voluntary subscriptions raised for the queen’s first jubilee in 1887. That the project had only been saved with a large infusion of capital from India left a sour aftertaste that lingered over the 1897 jubilee, and later over schemes to memorialise the queen after her death.
Feast and Famine: The Diamond Jubilee of 1897
Larger in scale than the golden jubilee of 1887, the diamond jubilee of 1897 was less of a spectacle. Overseen in London by the Prince of Wales, aided by the latest technology, which allowed the queen to press a button and electronically telegraph the empire simultaneously with a special jubilee message, and attended in London by the principal colonial leaders, the celebrations of the sixtieth year of the queen’s reign were tempered by the fact that she herself was in her late seventies.42 Queen Victoria’s own preference was for minimal fuss. She wanted neither an exclusively state nor a church ceremonial; however, she did endorse involving the Empire, including India. By the end of February plans were in place for the queen to make a procession through central London, culminating in a drive-by of the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. An Indian guard of honour was to be at her side throughout. As far as the queen was concerned, the complement of Indian officers, mounted on horseback, was more important than the attendance of Indian princes in London.43 This suited the Government of India. From the start, the viceroy, Lord Elgin, discouraged Indian chiefs from travelling to London. Indian princes were asked to stay at home, in some cases to tend to their famine-stricken people.44 In the end only eight Indian chiefs came, alongside other Indian dignitaries such as Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy. Of the Indian rulers, five came from states ranked in the hierarchy of salutes: Hari Singh, the Maharaja of Jodhpur; Sir Pratap Singh, regent of Jodhpur; Jagatjit Singh, the Maharaja of Kapurthala; Bhagvat Singh, the Thakur of Gondal (who came with his consort); and Sir Waghji II Rawaji, the Thakur of Morvi. Of these not all were welcome. Elgin pointedly observed that the rank of the Maharaja of Kapurthala could not excuse his reputation as ‘dissipated & a spendthrift’. Both he and the Thakur of Gondal were suspected of turning up simply in the hunt for honours, Gondal’s case being pressed by a persistent Monier-Williams, grateful for his donation to the Indian Institute in Oxford. Four princely heirs who were attending Eton College were also invited to attend the torchlit procession at Windsor the day after jubilee day.45 Less fuss was made of the princely visitors who did make it to London in 1897 than had surrounded those who came ten years earlier. They were not part of the jubilee procession through London, and only three of them (the Maharaja of Kapurthala, the Thakur of Morvi and the Thakur of Gondal) were presented to the queen. The Maharaja of Kapurthala went home happy, however, collecting his gong – he was made a Knight Commander of the Star of India – at a dinner with the queen on 10 July. The Thakur of Gondal was also a dinner guest, staying overnight at Windsor a few days later, but he only left with a promotion up the rank of the Order of the Indian Empire.46
The Indian guard of honour received much better treatment than the princes. Two Indian military contingents came to London in 1897. Firstly, there were 10,000 soldiers who formed part of the Imperial Service Troops, led by 17 native officers, specially selected from across the Indian princely states, the cost of their attendance charged to their own state treasuries.47 Pride of place, however, went to the second Indian detachment, an Indian escort of twenty-two officers. Accompanied by three English officers and Field Marshal Sir Garnet Wolseley, the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, they rode right al
ongside the queen’s carriage in the procession that made its way through the streets of London on 22 June, captured for posterity in one of the first newsreel films ever made, and also in John Charlton’s sumptuous painting of the scene outside St Paul’s Cathedral.48 They were singled out in commentary on the occasion, and praised by the India Office: Hamilton thought Pratap Singh’s horsemanship was especially impressive. The Indian escort was also invited to Windsor ahead of jubilee day for an audience with the queen, when they were shown the state apartments, as well being included in other events of the jubilee, such as the military review at Aldershot on 1 July. At Windsor the queen gave her own distinctive mark of approval, commissioning Rudolf Swodoba to paint portraits of some of them. They were also on hand as her personal guard at special ceremonies arranged for the presentation of jubilee addresses, not just from India but also from across the country and overseas. On 5 July the Indian escort returned to Windsor to bid farewell, and the officers were given jubilee medals by the queen, who touched the hilts of their swords before they left, and received their loyal address from Pratap Singh.49 It was all an emphatic show of the queen’s need for an Indian presence right at the heart of her jubilee. Just as Abdul Karim, her munshi, had become a part of her own secretariat close at hand, so too these guards now acted as her military attendants throughout the celebrations. The more she aged, the more the queen retreated behind an Indian cordon.
In India the government’s instincts were for a quiet jubilee; ‘nothing . . . on a large scale,’ advised Elgin, the viceroy.50 Nature, hunger and pestilence intervened to prevent a grand event. An earthquake hit Calcutta on the eve of the jubilee, toppling local landmarks, including the steeple of St John’s Cathedral. There was widespread famine as well as outbreaks of cholera and the plague. Adding a mobile population to the mix would not help. Furthermore, the Government of India was reluctant to orchestrate celebrations on the scale of 1887. Some form was duly observed: 20,000 prisoners were released, to the consternation of some princely states, and there was a full distribution of Indian honours.51 But ten years on Indian loyalty to the Crown was hard to predict. A noisy celebration of the queen’s reign was as likely to raise hopes as much as cheers, so precise rules were set. There would be no addresses, memorials or gifts sent directly to the queen: they would all need to go through the viceroy’s office. Any deputation that wished to present an address would need to travel north to Simla, where the viceroy was based in the summer months, to deliver the memorial at the Town Hall, the deputation restricted to a maximum of six people.52 The vernacular and European press were perturbed by the draconian turn in arrangements, and Elgin only made matters worse when he made light of the Simla arrangements.53 This time round, officials also were more inscrutable in their censoring of loyal memorials. An address from the Poona Sabha was rejected, and a disproportionate number of planned addresses from the Punjab were turned away, mostly on the grounds that they were too political.54 So the official jubilee day, presided over by the viceroy at Simla, was a muted occasion, with only forty deputations making the long journey north. The viceroy and the queen exchanged telegraph messages, Queen Victoria saying ‘[f]rom my heart I thank my beloved people. May God bless them.’55
The sober goings-on in the hills at Simla in no way set the tone for the diamond jubilee elsewhere around India. Throughout the length and breadth of India, officials had been instructed to ‘yield the initiative’ in taking steps to commemorate the queen’s diamond jubilee to the ‘spontaneous action of the community at large’.56 For the most part that is what happened. Across the Punjab a chain of fires extended along the hilltops from the Himalayas down to the Jumma and Indus rivers and southwards to the hills of the border with Balochistan. In Assam the highest peaks were lit up by bonfires. At Puri in Orissa the Jagannath temple was illuminated in a fantastic show. At the Nainital hill station in the North-West Provinces the local lake was transformed by a Venetian-style fete.57 As in 1887, celebrations followed a typical pattern. There were local processions, many with an image of the queen held aloft or carried in a palanquin. Prisoners were released, there was distribution of food and clothing to the poor, and festive elements followed: sports and wrestling matches and schoolchildren singing, against a backdrop of illuminated streets and public buildings. Permanent memorials to the queen’s jubilee were funded out of public subscriptions: bathing tanks, markets, buildings and equipment for female hospitals and dispensaries, veterinary hospitals, libraries and reading rooms, parks, and endowments for educational scholarships and prizes. Local rulers chipped in with munificence both traditional and modern. In the Gujarat state of Junagarh, the Nawab established a new bacteriological laboratory. In Travancore, the raja gave money for an orphanage and a library.58 Controversially, in Rajputana funding was put up for the ‘Indian Princes Victorian Health Institute’, led by the Maharaja of Dholpur, in actual fact a vivisection unit, that in turn provoked the opposition of the Indian Anti-Vivisection Society, which claimed that the queen’s ‘never failing womanly sympathy for the weak and helpless’ was at odds with this new initiative so ‘against the sanctity of life’.59 As always, the queen was all things to all people.
The jubilee of 1897 was less regimented than ten years earlier. Colonial authority stayed at home, leaving the field free for local communities to engage with the anniversary in their own way. The effect of this was that more attention was focused on the queen, and less on the fact of British rule. Evidence of this can be seen in Mysore in southern India, for which a particularly good record of the diamond jubilee celebrations exists.60 The jubilee events in Mysore were co-ordinated from the cantonment town of Bangalore. There was inevitable military precision. Close attention was paid to the timing of events, and to the geography of the festivities and sports that were laid on. The Government of India was also on hand. At Bangalore the deputy commissioner addressed the jubilee procession, praising the gathering for their ‘spontaneous enthusiasm’. A local judge took pains to explain to the prisoners released as a jubilee gesture why they were being given their freedom.61 However, these cumbersome interventions aside, the jubilee in Mysore was left to honour the queen according to its own preferred style. At the centre of the proceedings was the Maharani of Mysore, acting as queen regent whilst her son was a minor. She led the procession from her palace to the site of the new hospital, where she laid the foundation stone.62 Elsewhere in Mysore state, the processions placed Queen Victoria at the centre. At Shimoga (Shivamogga) a picture of the queen was unveiled and then placed in an open palanquin at the head of a procession of 1,000 people. At Anekal her photograph was carried in a coach at the head of the procession. In Kolar district soldiers and police saluted her portrait, before joining a procession of the temple gods. At Soraba, town leaders prostrated themselves before her image.63 Partly a civic festival, partly a religious ceremonial, the jubilee in Mysore eluded the best-laid plans of local officials.
Subject to less official monitoring in the 1897 celebrations, the queen’s role as the mother of India and widow-in-chief now came to the fore. In Bombay, the municipal corporation praised her ‘womanly and motherly heart’. For the young Raja of Pudukkottai in southern India the queen was, according to the speech he made, the ‘right example of Spotless Womanhood, perfect Wife, perfect Mother, perfect Friend’.64 Some cheap biographies dwelled on the queen’s long years of widowhood, a biography published in Calcutta noting that ‘[a] widow is debarred from all joys and pleasures; she must live in the strictest seclusion; she must force down the gushing spring of womanly love’. More Tamil histories of the queen appeared. In one her heavily Indianised portrait adorned the cover.65
Compared to the jubilee of 1887 there was there was much more dissent over the celebrations. There was resentment at viceregal influence, particularly over the summons to Simla. As in 1887 there were hopes that there might be fewer royal acts of favour – honours and the like – and more acts of grace, especially charity. And reform. India had demonstrated so much loya
lty, despite widespread famine and poverty and, once again, as in 1858, 1877 and 1887, Indians had received so little reward in terms of political concessions. Two Bengali tributes sneaked in pleas for the queen’s aid for her famine-stricken people.66 Mostly, it was the Government of India that bore the brunt of criticism, not least when it was rumoured that it had planned to profit from the party by selling copies of the queen’s diamond jubilee speech.67 In Lahore there was public opposition to the erection of a statue of the queen to mark the diamond jubilee. Also in Lahore, the launch of the ‘Victoria Diamond Jubilee Hindu Technical Institute’ was accompanied with grumbling about the destructive influence of foreign competition on indigenous manufactures.68 But now, for the first time in her reign, the queen was not immune from criticism. Her independence from British officialdom, for so long her strength, was deemed a disadvantage. As the Dacca Prakash, a Bengali-language newspaper published in Calcutta declared, she had little power to do good, only power to do evil which she chose not to use, whilst for the Jami-ul-Ulum, an Urdu paper from Moradabad, she was a ‘mere signing machine’.69
Elgin had low expectations of the jubilee in 1897, and he almost achieved them. Hamilton, the secretary of state back in London, congratulated Elgin on his jubilee speech in which he had ‘glided over the temporary difficulties’.70 Then terror struck. On the day of the jubilee a government official (John Ross, the secretary to the deputy commissioner) was murdered at Peshawar, capital of the North-West Provinces.71 Simultaneously, in Poona, 1,000 miles to the south, Charles Walter Rand, chair of the Special Plague Committee in the town, together with his military escort, Lieutenant Ayerst, were shot dead by three brothers, Damodar, Balkrishna and Vasudeo Chapekar. The assailants were quickly rounded up, tried and later executed. In Poona, the British authorities identified a conspiracy, some even attributing it to the influence of the Indian National Congress. Damodar Chapekar later confessed his hatred for the queen – ‘a female fiend who devours her own progeny’ – describing how he had helped to tar the face of her statue in Bombay, and, on the day of the jubilee, created an effigy of her using old shoes and other materials from a rubbish tip, with her photograph perched on top.72 But the Bombay police threw their net wider, and entrapped an influential Marathi nationalist. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, editor of the Kesari newspaper, was arrested and put on trial for citing disaffection. Tilak had proven radical credentials. He had been a member of the Poona Sabha and the INC. He also led the local campaign to memorialise Shivaji, the seventeenth-century Maratha warrior king who took on the Mughals and the Adil Shahis.
