The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin: Tales from Indian History by Pillai Manu S

Author:Pillai, Manu S. [Pillai, Manu S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789388689786
Published: 2019-06-23T16:00:00+00:00

Interestingly, for Victoria, India opened up something new on a deeply personal level: renewed relevance. ‘Denied a political role at home’ by constitutional convention, Taylor argues, ‘she found it instead in her Indian dominion’. From the 1840s, for instance, she corresponded privately with viceroys, and although this still offered a lopsided picture, it eliminated some filters installed by officialdom in London. While reports of atrocities against British women during the 1857 rebellion appalled her, she soon suspected sensationalism in the press, and asked for evidence. And she revelled in the adulation that came from India’s elites—whose nationalism at this stage did not sit in opposition to loyalty to the queen—as they composed poems comparing her to Hindu goddesses. Her affection for her Hindi munshi is, of course, well known (the letters they exchanged were destroyed after her death), and even from afar India came to mean something special for her in a way it did not for others in her establishment.

Naturally, Victoria also grew jealous of her position. During the celebrated 1875–76 tour of the country by her son and heir, Edward VII, she was determined to ensure that the masses did not mistake him for their sovereign. Much to his irritation, she made it clear that he was the viceroy’s guest and not her representative. She would not even permit the prince to read out a message on her behalf to her Indian people. In fact, when the tour became a massive success, the queen chose to orchestrate a sensational event of her own to surpass it: the assumption of the title ‘Empress of India’. It was another matter that the innovation was received with borderline hostility in Britain itself, for powerful sections in the House of Commons were appalled by this gaudy claim of imperial status. The queen was furious, but the episode also highlighted the utility India held personally for her—her daughter, married to the German crown prince, was set to one day become an empress, and Victoria could not imagine being outranked by her offspring. Her son, meanwhile, used the occasion to pay his mother back in her own coin: he wrote to the prime minister that he had no desire to be styled His Imperial Highness, and was quite content as a Royal Highness.

In the end, Victoria represented something for everybody in connection with India, becoming a bridge between competing ideologies and identities. The British deployed her to contain the earliest stirrings of Indian nationalism; to Indian nationalists, her proclamation allowed for calls for reform to be issued, couched in a language of loyalism. For Victoria herself, India offered both an empire and queenly purpose, carving out for her an unparalleled position that no British monarch after her was quite able to emulate—or imitate.

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