How a Victorian vision reinvented the Raj and transformed Britain’s place in the world.
On 5 May 1876, a tiny woman of German descent became empress of the mighty subcontinent of India and the greatest empire the world had ever seen. Queen Victoria’s accession to the imperial throne was the most visible sign of British world domination in the 19th century and it was a remarkable feat that a small group of islands off the coast of Europe had managed to impose its will so completely on a huge country. However, Victoria’s accession was a very political act that was forged out of one of the shakiest moments in the British Empire’s history and designed to cement colonial rule in India, whether its people wanted it or not.
The road to Victoria’s imperial destiny began in 1857 with the suppression of a huge Indian rebellion. Variously known as ‘The Indian Mutiny’ or ‘India’s First War of Independence’, the rebellion began as a revolt by Indian sepoy soldiers against British rule but it soon escalated into several mutinies along with civilian rebellions. The rebellion occurred largely in central India and posed a considerable threat to British power in the region. By the time the British regained control, the bloodletting had been considerable. The rebels had committed atrocities against white civilians and the British counter-response was swift and brutal, with many thousands being killed in savage reprisals.
The rebellion had exposed a fundamental weakness of British rule in India: the East India Company. It is a strange but remarkable fact that Britain’s dominance in the subcontinent in its early years was not thanks to an official government policy but the actions of a trading business that had got out of hand. The East India Company had been a presence in India since the early 17th century and had grown so large that it had its own private armies, which were officered by Europeans but largely manned by Indian ‘sepoy’ soldiers. Its pre-eminence was such that it ruled India with the diminished Mughal emperor as its puppet head of state. Until 1857, the British had left the status of Indian government on a curiously theoretical footing. India was not formally ruled by the British crown but the Company. Instead of being answerable to Parliament, the Company answered to its directors and shareholders. The Company did have a charter to trade from the British government but its right to govern India was derived from the Mughal emperor, whose nawab (deputy) it claimed to be. However, this was a political marriage backed up by guns, and Emperor Bahadur Shah was kept as a Company hostage in Delhi. Consequently, it was very unclear where the real authority lay in India. The rebellion changed this confusion forever. Company incompetence and insensitivity had caused the fighting and opened a Pandora’s Box of revolution. During the rebellion, the sepoys had ‘liberated’ Bahadur Shah and persuaded him to declare Company rule illegitimate. Despite being an octogenarian drug addict, the emperor became the rebellion’s leading symbol, and in its aftermath, the British government took ruthless action. Bahadur Shah was forced to abdicate and his immediate heirs were executed while the Company was dissolved. British rule in India passed directly to the UK Parliament, where a secretary of state for India was appointed to the Cabinet. Finally, to replace Bahadur Shah, Her Britannic Majesty Queen Victoria was declared Queen of India on 2 August 1858, arguably the first European monarch since Alexander the Great to rule over Indian lands.
“Indian success stories within the empire hid a darker side to Victoria’s Raj”
The British now found themselves in a new position. Prior to 1857, they had been able to benefit from their colonial conquests through the East India Company without having to put in the hard graft of actual governances. With a British queen on the throne of India, the birth of the ‘Raj’ was imminent. The rebellion had exposed inherent inequalities in British rule and now the government had to address Indian ‘grievances’ while still maintaining their colonial power over them. To achieve this, British policies over the next 20 years would eventually result in Victoria being proclaimed empress.
The new government began to offer Indians glimpses of a future of unlimited progress, theirs by right as full ‘subjects’ of Victoria’s empire. This included the introduction of railways, Western industrial methods and, perhaps most importantly, a Western education system. In the same year of the rebellion, the 1857 Indian Universities Act established institutions in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, which attracted a large flow of Indian talent. A year later on 1 November 1858, the British went even further and issued a proclamation to the “Princes and Peoples of India”, that stated, “We hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territories by the same obligations of duty which bind us to all our other subjects… it is our further will that… our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to offices in our services, the duties of which they may be qualified, by their education, ability and integrity, duly to discharge.”
While this sounds like a vision of equal rights for Indian ‘subjects’ under the crown, it was actually directed to the upper-class Westerneducated elite and not Indian society as a whole. Nevertheless, thanks to this ambiguous statement, Indians began to make their presence felt. From the 1860s, Indians began to attend the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and London after competitive examinations were established for entry into the Indian Civil Service. They also became gradually politicised with the foundation of the Indian National Congress Party in 1885. Although it would later become the party that led India to independence in 1947, Congress originally had a permanent committee in London to pursue programmes of reforms and increasing Indian representative rights. Congress even opened and closed their annual sessions to God Save The Queen. By the 1890s, the political turnaround from the 1857 rebellion was so changed that an Indian businessman called Dadhabai Naoroji was elected to the Westminster Parliament as a Liberal MP. These were the fruits of the 1858 proclamation and helped foster loyalty to the British Empire and the crown. Thoughts of independence were rarely betrayed until the 20th century.
However, these Indian success stories within the empire hid a darker side to Victoria’s Raj. The rebellion had increased tensions between the British and Indians and was further hardened by the advent of social Darwinism. Many of the British felt that white supremacy was a fact of nature and that the empire should be viewed as a way of securing the wealth and prestige of Britain at the expense of its colonial subjects. This was particularly felt in the 1870s when there was a growth of international competition for global domination. The British now had to compete with a newly unified Germany, an expanding United States of America and an already huge Russian Empire that was alarmingly close to its Indian borders. Britain, despite its international dominance, was feeling threatened, and the incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli decided that the best way to assert Britain’s imperial pre-eminence was to make it official. The British Empire would have an empress.
Queen Victoria already immodestly felt that she was an empress already. Throughout the 1860s and early 1870s, she habitually referred to herself as “empress” and her Indian territories as her “empire.” This was quite presumptuous as her hold on her own British throne was rather shaky. Ever since the death of her husband Prince Albert in 1861, Victoria had become a recluse and had been rarely seen in public. This detachment had fuelled a substantial republican movement, which could not be easily dismissed in a Europe that was frequently convulsed by revolutions. Disraeli knew this and thought that the best way to get Victoria to re-engage with her subjects was to flatter her out of seclusion. It worked, and Victoria was charmed: “He is full of poetry, romance and chivalry. When he knelt down to kiss my hand, he said, ‘In loving loyalty and faith’.” Disraeli himself wryly remarked: “Everyone likes flattery, and when you come to royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel.” That particular trowel was the ace up his sleeve: India.
Victoria was so thrilled to become Empress of India that she opened Parliament in person for the first time since Albert’s death to announce the change in her royal title. This was then cemented with the passage of the Royal Titles Bill on 5 May 1876. Disraeli was so keen to make Victoria an empress that he neglected to consult the opposition. His critics felt that his imperial pretensions were despotic but many saw it as a brilliant move to confirm Britain’s status as the greatest power on the planet. The creation of Empress Victoria bound India to Britain, and the celebrations were spectacular.
In January 1877, Victoria was proclaimed queenempress at an imperial durbar (public ceremony) in the Mughal capital of Delhi. She was represented as the heir to the Mughal dynasty and her new Viceroy Lord Lytton received the fealty of India’s remaining princes and maharajas. The empress did not just represent the future but also the past, and Lytton’s theme for the durbar was Medieval in tone. Ancient Mughal buildings were used, pavilions were constructed with satin banners displaying the Cross of Saint George and the Union Jack and there were trumpeters dressed in medieval costumes while they played fanfares composed by Richard Wagner. The occasion was huge in scale, and the official state entry travelled through almost eight kilometres (five miles) to a sumptuous tent city for attendees in North Delhi. The durbar was designed to be awe-inspiring, and Lytton insisted that the spectacle appeal to Indians. At one point, he oddly claimed that the Indians loved “a bit of bunting.” The 1877 durbar was designed to reinforce imperial authority and put closure on the tensions created by the 1857 rebellion. However, despite the pomp and ceremony there was one conspicuous absence: Queen-Empress Victoria. The living symbol of India’s new union with the British Empire never once visited her Raj, and indeed it would not be until 1911 when a British monarch (her grandson George V) would attend a durbar in person.
The highly elaborate durbar was nothing short of a lavish exercise in imperial triumphalism. The British did not extend benevolent rule to its Indian subjects in its aftermath but clamped down on dissent, and racist policies prevailed. A year later, Lytton passed the Vernacular Press Act (which restricted the expression of political opinion) along with acts to open the Indian economy to unrestrained exploitation by British businesses. This was capped off by the fact that the British Raj invaded Afghanistan, entering into the Second Anglo-Afghan War which would cost the Indian taxpayers £4 million.
The increasingly hard nature of British imperialism continued its dark course in Indian society. In 1886, measures were implemented to restrict Indian entry to the Civil Service in order to retain its “British” character, and by 1913, legislation was deliberately designed to the protect the “mystique of the white race.” White supremacy was at the very heart of British rule in India and it contributed to the re-emergence of Indian nationalism, which eventually found its voice in the non-violent independence campaigns of the 20th century. Indians began to take pride in their Hindu heritage, which was disconnected from Muslim Mughal rule and therefore from Christian British domination too.
The Victorian vision for a British India ruled by an imperially crowned monarch was doomed to a relatively short life. Exactly 70 years after Queen Victoria became its empress, India became an independent country free from British rule. King-Emperor George VI passed from Indian history in 1947, the last official vestige of an overbearing empire.
“The creation of Empress Victoria bound India to Britain, and the celebrations were spectacular”
THE WITTY PRIME MINISTER
The man who made Queen Victoria the Empress of India was one of the most charismatic premiers in British political history.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) is one of Britain’s most important prime ministers not just for his achievements but also simply for who he was. Although he was a practicing Anglican from the age of 12, he was born a Jew and therefore might be regarded as Britain’s first Jewish prime minister. In an age when anti-Semitism was rife, his rise to – in his own words – “the top of the greasy pole” was remarkable and he remained proud of his Jewish heritage. On one occasion he defiantly brushed off remarks about his ancestry from a fellow MP by saying, “Yes, I am a Jew, and while the ancestors of the right honourable gentlemen were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.”
Disraeli’s articulacy was unsurprising as he was a successful novelist who produced 28 literary works and coined droll phrases like, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics” and, “How much easier it is to be critical than correct.” When he became a Conservative politician, Disraeli served as chancellor of the Exchequer three times and prime minister twice (in 1868, and again from 1874-80) and in both offices oversaw radical legislation, thanks to his ideas of Tory democracy, which is known today as “one-nation conservatism”.
This ideology proposed a paternalistic society where the establishment supported the workingclass, preventing two “nations” of rich and poor and the potential for violent revolution, or as he wryly put it, “The palace is not safe when the cottage is not happy.” Consequently, he oversaw bills that enfranchised working-class men, improved sanitation (including compulsory paving in towns with street lighting) and extended workers’ rights.
Disraeli’s achievements had a lasting impact, and one-nation conservatism is still today a key ideology of the modern Conservative Party. Echoes of it can still be seen in recent times, such as former Prime Minister David Cameron’s call for “compassionate Conservatism”, a “Big Society” and even the controversial slogan, “We’re all in this together!”
KOH-I-NOOR: “MOUNTAIN OF LIGHT”
India was referred to as the jewel in Britain’s empire, and this came to have a literal meaning in the 1850s when the British acquired the most sumptuous diamond that ever existed
The Koh-I-Noor was once the largest diamond in the world – a staggering 186 carats – and currently belongs to the British Royal Family. It forms part of the Queen Mother’s Crown but it has an ancient history that is arguably more exotic than its present status suggests.
India was for centuries the richest source of precious commodities. Hindus had an elaborate mythology for gems, and diamonds were prized for their size, brilliance and supposedly fortunate attributes. It is unknown when the Koh-I-Noor was discovered (legend says it is 5,000 years old) but it was first documented in 1526 when the Mughal emperor Babur owned it. It was mounted on the Peacock Throne and came to symbolise the opulence of India’s dynasty. When Emperor Shah Jahan (who built the Taj Mahal) was imprisoned by his son, it was said he could only ever see the Taj Mahal again through the reflection of the diamond. Emperor Nadar Shah gave it its Persian name of Koh-I-Noor meaning ‘Mountain of Light.’
It fell into British hands in 1849, and was presented to Queen Victoria in 1851. She ordered it to be set into the Crown Jewels and Prince Albert commissioned a Dutch jeweller to carefully cut it to an oval of 105.6 carats. Since then, every queen and queen consort of the United Kingdom has worn it.
However, there is an alleged curse on the jewel, which states that any man who owns it will bring about his own destruction. Accordingly, every person who has owned it since Victoria has been a woman.
“There is an alleged curse on the jewel, which states that any man who owns it will bring about his own distruction”\
english #english language #english vocabulary #english lesson #queen victoria #LITERRA_SCHOOL #английский #английский онлайн #английский для взрослых #английский язык изучение