Maharani's durbar and a blinkered view of history

By Swapan Dasgupta

Apart from newspapers that commemorated the event and an agreeable party on the lawns of Ambassador Hotel where the cultural elite drank to the occasion, the centenary of the transfer of the Capital and the foundation of New Delhi was largely unobserved. ‘Official’ India which otherwise loves to organise tacky commemorations by producing unappealing postage stamps gave this event a wide berth. And, while no one was forthcoming about the reason, the rationale was inescapable: the 1911 Durbar was a ‘colonial’ event and, therefore, only worthy of sneer.

The Hindu sense of history has at the best of times been rather feeble. However, when it comes to the 190 years of British rule, the disdain for a recorded past is coupled with a spurious political correctness and hypocrisy. Even after six decades of Independence and flamboyant assertions of national sovereignty, India has yet to develop the necessary self-confidence to view history as history. Instead, the past has been sought to be tailor-made to view the prevailing political fashions of the present.

It is not that the ignominy of being ruled by a ‘foreigner’ has weighed heavily on the national consciousness. In the past thousand years or so, predators from the west have repeatedly overwhelmed indigenous kingdoms, particularly in northern and eastern India, and combined ruthless vandalism with innovations. Turks, Mongols, Persians and Afghans made India their happy hunting ground, and ruled with a mixture of raw coercion and cultural co-option. The conquerors always took care to maintain a discreet distance from the conquered peoples without creating a closed system based on ethnicity and religion. Of course, post-Akbar many of these barriers broke down but never sufficiently for the hapless Dara Shukoh to become a trendsetter. Not enough of the conquerors went ‘native’ although enough of the conquered peoples appropriated facets of the Persian and Turkish ways of life.

Many of these changes stemming from conquest and subordination were also dutifully played out in the two centuries of colonial rule. The British steadfastly maintained their social distance from the ‘natives’, particularly after the uprising of 1857 and the influx of the memsahibs into the Civil Lines and cantonments. The Indians were socially wary of the British but there were enough ‘collaborators’ (as in Moghul times) who sought to bridge the cultural and emotional gulf between the West and the East.

More to the point, there were enough Indians that genuinely believed (particularly after the demise of the East India Company in 1858) that British rule constituted a significant advance on anything the country had hitherto experienced. At one level the 1911 Durbar was a spectacular show of imperial might—as evident from the grovelling genuflection of the Indian princes (barring Baroda and Udaipur) to the King-Emperor. But it would be imprudent to forget that until Mahatma Gandhi captivated the nation with his simple message of swaraj, the common Indian was genuinely enamoured of the “Queen’s peace”. The choreography of the 1911 Durbar was thrown out of gear when the Indian crowds broke the cordon to kiss the ground on which the King and Queen had walked. Were they victims of ‘false consciousness’?

“Maharani” Victoria wasn’t Indian and nor did she ever visit India. Yet, this diminutive frump became as much a part of India as any distant Moghul. In 1911, when the New Delhi project was inaugurated by George V on December 15, the British Empire was the most world’s most decisive power; by 1931, when New Delhi was finally ready to function as the seat of government, the imperial sunset was approaching.  

This is not revisionist history. It is the history that was itself cynically revised as part of the nation-building project of India’s post-imperial rulers. But history isn’t rewritten by removing the George V statue from its canopied pedestal opposite India Gate or by renaming Connaught Place as Rajiv Chowk. Unless India is overcome by perversity, there will be a Lutyens’ Delhi distinct from a DDA Delhi, a Kingsway called Rajpath, the North and South Blocks and a Parliament House built for an India where democracy was conceived of as the future.

The British Raj wasn’t quite the dark ages the sloganeers make it out to be.


Sunday Times of India, December 18, 2011 

History is ignored

By Swapan Dasgupta

The British Empire was above all a celebration of protocol and pageantry-what the historian David Cannadine has called “ornamentalism”. This would explain the somewhat perfunctory treatment meted out by King George V and Queen Mary to the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, when he stepped on board the Medina in Bombay to welcome the only visit of a reigning King-Emperor to India on December 2, 1911. According to convention, the Viceroy of India was the direct representative of the Crown in India: he governed in the name of the King-Emperor. With the monarch now physically present in the Empire’s prize possession, the Viceroy was automatically relegated to the status of a mere Governor-General.

Bruised vanity wasn’t the only hiccup governing the visit. The British Cabinet, in the throes of a vicious encounter between the House of Commons and House of Lords over a high-tax Budget, was most reluctant to have the monarch away from Britain for such a long time — there was just no precedent. The King overruled the elected government peremptorily. “It was”, he said, “entirely my own idea”.

Queen Victoria, the original maharani, would have loved her grandson for the defiance. To her, India was the Jewel in the Crown. The government wasn’t pleased and flatly refused to pay for the costs of a new, bejewelled crown that would symbolise the King’s symbolic anointment as King-Emperor on Indian soil. There was a scheme to make the Indian princes pay but ultimately the bill for the £60,000 crown from Garrard, the Crown Jeweller on Regent Street, was footed by an ever-obliging government of India.

It wasn’t the Asquith government alone that was not amused. The Archbishop of Canterbury threw a minor tantrum when it was suggested that the crown be placed on his head by three princes — one Hindu, one Muslim and one Sikh. As Kenneth Rose noted in his biography of George V, “he argued that coronation implied consecration, and that in a land of Moslems and Hindus, any such act of Christian worship would be misplaced. It was therefore agreed that the King should arrive at the Durbar with the crown already on his head.”

So it was that at noon on December 12, 1911, that the King-Emperor and the Queen-Empress rode in state to the grand domed tent, flanked by Sir Pertap Singh, the Diwan of Jodhpur, and by reputation the wisest guardian of princely India. His carriage was preceded by a contingent of the 10th Hussars that trotted in to the venue where the band played the robust notes of “See, the conquering hero comes.”

Actually, it was an unlikely “conquering hero”. Two days before, there was a spectacular state entry of the King into Delhi and the 25 square mile tented township complete with ornate princely pavilions, metalled roads, railway lines, electricity and post offices that had been put into place in record. Based on the diaries of the 23-year-old Lilah Wingfield, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who travelled to India to experience the Empire in all its glory, writer Jessica Douglas-Home has provided an unflattering description of the first impressions of the King: “Curzon’s (1903 durbar) had been a show fit for the representative of the greatest sovereign on earth. But now, the first time a reigning British monarch had arrived in person on Indian soil, the Emperor of Emperors appeared as an insignificant, virtually invisible, figure, seated uneasily on a small bay horse surrounded by taller, more imposing and better mounted military men.”

“As the lonely figure of the King rode anonymously down the processional route into the mile-long Chandni Chauk, the crowds looked at the Queen in all her glory and came to the conclusion that she must have left His Imperial Majesty behind in England.”

Unfortunately for Hardinge, possessed by a fanatical desire to demonstrate that Lord Curzon’s 1903 Durbar wasn’t the last word in awesome pageantry, there was another boo-boo in the offing. In the ceremonial genuflection of 475 Indian princes before their King-Emperor, Gaekwad of Baroda deviated from the script. Minutes before he was to appear, he took off his ceremonial jewels and dressed as a Maratha gentleman, walked up to throne, bowed and then — horror of horrors — instead of taking the mandatory seven steps backward, turned his back and walked away, “nonchalantly twirling a gold-topped walking stick”. There was, wrote Douglas-Home, “a murmur of dismay” from the crowd.

An equal gasp of surprise greeted the King’s announcement, kept a fiercely guarded secret, that the capital would be transferred to Delhi from Calcutta. “The Times correspondent visited 10 of the camps and informed his readers that the announcement of the new capital was being received without enthusiasm. Some blamed the Calcutta monsoon, others suggested that it was a reflection of a British intention to remain permanently in India. It was believed by some that Calcutta had been chosen as the seat of power because it would be easy to leave by sea in case of an uprising.”

An uprising, however, was the last thing on anyone’s mind. The only show of people’s power occurred when, after the King had departed to his tent “rather tired after wearing the crown for three hours” and a 101-gun salute. A huge crowd of Indians broke the cordon, rushed to the durbar tent and were seen kissing the ground on which their raja and rani had walked. A Tibetan Lilah Wingfield encountered said he had travelled four months to be in Delhi to get a glimpse of the King!

The next day the foundation stone of New Delhi was lowered into a plinth by the King in front of a small audience of 500. “To loud applause the Maharaja of Gwalior offered to give the plinth a statue of the King Emperor.” From faraway London, Lord Curzon decried the move to shift the capital to Delhi — “the graveyard of empires”.

The Durbar was the most important event in India a century ago. It was a great moment for a Raj that would not endure for more than 36 years and which would never really settle down to a New Delhi that was formally inaugurated in 1931. But it was also a moment in India’s history that will live on despite the contrived derision of the “post-colonial” mind. The Raj’s Delhi is as much a show of India as is Shahjehanabad, the creation of rulers who came from Central Asia.

The latter is celebrated; the former isn’t even commemorated. That’s why India has no sense of history, only an overdose of hateful politics.

Asian Age/ Deccan Chronicle, December 12, 2011