The three Delhi durbars which took place in 1877, 1903, and 1911 were unique combinations of traditional ceremonies associated with the Indian durbar, the British coronation, and processions that were a mixture of political and religious elements from both India and Britain, held to announce the succession of a new ruler of India.Footnote 1 They were, both in their conception and realization, ‘explicitly political rituals’ employed as means to legitimize the raj, to celebrate empire, and to knit together the British monarchy and empire with India.Footnote 2 As staged occasions of imperial pomp and show, they were widely reported and discussed in the contemporary press with handbooks, guidebooks, and ‘durbar souvenirs’ written by well-known personalities who attended the durbars, as natural ‘products’ of all three durbars. Apart from these forms of dissemination, painting in 1877 and photography and films in 1903 and 1911 concentrated attention on these magnificent imperial durbars.Footnote 3 But, an unfamiliar feature concerning the three Delhi durbars is that they were also commemorative exhibitions of the event of 1857.Footnote 4
The present article discusses how the commemorative rites of the event of 1857, a crucial struggle in the memory and psyche of British rule in India, were being undertaken coincident with acts of legitimization such as ceremonies of coronation, homage, and reverence in the durbars. It shows how these two processes were enacted, each in marked understanding and consideration of the other. This article argues that the dominant cultural memory of 1857 and its commemoration were sketched into these imperial festivals through four illustrative choices: site, the participants (the mutiny veterans), construction of mutiny memorials, and the contribution to the growth of mutiny pilgrimage tours.
I
Delhi was chosen as the site for the imperial assemblage of 1877 in which Lord Lytton celebrated Queen Victoria's assumption of the title of ‘Empress of India’ or ‘Kaiser-i-Hind’, a choice also exercised by succeeding durbars. The second durbar in 1903 was a tribute by Lord Curzon to Edward VII's coronation as the first king-emperor of India. The third, organized by Lord Hardinge, was in honour of George V assuming his father's throne and title. All three were constructed around varying political ideas and concepts of how to perceive and then rule India. Lytton adopted a style of medievalism for his assemblage to represent India as a feudal state with Queen Victoria as its head, Curzon a theme of modernity and an Indo-Saracenic style to signal the deepened ties of the British empire with India. Hardinge designed his durbar around three highly visible and novel features. The first was the actual presence of the sovereign to symbolize the importance of the Indian empire to Britain, the second the announcement of the transfer of capital from Calcutta to Delhi, and the third the announcement of reversal of the unpopular partition of Bengal.
But, in the original selection of Delhi in 1876–7, apart from such practical reasons as the necessity to distance the ceremonies from the ‘contagion’ of famine and death ravaging other parts of the subcontinent or to avoid associating the crown with distinctly regional centres such as BombayFootnote 5 or Calcutta, the cultural significance of the memory of the event of 1857 played an important role. The struggle, occurring a mere nineteen years before, had been seared into British collective memory as an effect of the immense attention given to it by mediums of popular culture such as newspapers, journals, magazines, diaries, memoirs, works of fiction, drama, and parliamentary debates among many others.Footnote 6 Histories on it were being written and re-written till the early years of the twentieth century, being received with unwavering interest and enthusiasm. Contemporary writings of Kaye, Trevelyan, Malleson, and others were representative of the Victorian fascination with time and their place in it, their works both a means of making sense of Britain's place in the world and seeking a basis for stability within the British empire.
In these histories, the identification of empire as the place where the rising ambitions of the emerging middle and professional classes could be fulfilled is complete. India was seen particularly by Kaye, as noted by Douglas M. Peers, as a place where the ‘poetic qualities’ of war could be kept alive and where existed ‘a halo of barbaric romance’ which could lend free rein to imagination.Footnote 7 This imagination was used by historians of the period to paint the events of 1857–8 into a triumphant national war of epic proportions where imperial heroes fought to display their unmistakably Victorian virtues. Further, says Bernard Cohn, the event of 1857 denoted crucial changes in the cultural system of British elites at home and, in India:
the meanings attached to the events of 1857–8, and the resulting constitutional changes, were increasingly the pivot around which their theory of colonial rule rotated…[It] was seen as a heroic myth embodying and expressing their central values which explained their rule in India to themselves – sacrifice, duty, fortitude; above all it symbolized the ultimate triumph over those Indians who had threatened properly constituted authority and order.Footnote 8
This theme, of 1857 being foremost a national and glorious epic in the history of the empire, was highlighted by supporters of imperial enterprise in order to avoid deeper introspections in Britain and not to see the episode as a disaster. It was, instead, an opportunity to condemn and simultaneously cast away the depredations produced by the East India Company and to assure the population of India by the introduction of a new rule – that of the British monarch. Henry Mead (1819–63), journalist and editor of The Friend of India in Calcutta argued that the war in 1857 had saved the British from utter destruction and the contempt of other nations, and they therefore should not dwell only on the tragic aspects of the struggle but make use of this hard-fought prospect: ‘England's difficulty is England's opportunity. If we are wise henceforth in dealing with India, the well of Cawnpore will so fertilize the land, that every corner of it will yield a crop of blessings.’Footnote 9
Claude Lévi-Strauss in his The savage mind explains the sine qua non of dates for original history and how it is coded through a series of them. There are some ‘hot’ classes of dates, he argues, which suffer from the ‘pressure of history’; these are those which are coded with an overwhelming amount of meanings.Footnote 10 The year 1857 turned into one such date where the pressures and pulls of managing and giving a particular meaning to it became not only a necessity but also a means for glorification. Further in this approach to history and memory, Mircea Eliade points out that the most sacred part of any society's past is that which is deemed to be its beginning. Origins incarnate the golden age, ‘the perfection of beginnings’, and give rise to the notion that they are the ‘first manifestation of a thing that is significant and valid’.Footnote 11 The event of 1857 was seen as the sacred origin which ended the uncertainty and half-hearted interest that India evoked in the British public, announcing in dramatic terms the end of the withered Mughal dynasty and the beginning of the wholehearted ‘vigorous’ British crown.Footnote 12
Delhi, the long-standing capital of the Mughals and before them of early medieval kings which had been captured for the Company by Lord Lake in 1803, had been the first to fall into the hands of rebel powers in 1857. This act of rebellion had elevated Delhi to an extreme plane of power and authority which was sought to be de-legitimized by ‘rescuing’ Delhi from their clutches. Kaori Nagai stresses the symbolic value of Delhi, amply demonstrated when the rebels seized the city and proclaimed Bahadur Shah Zafar the emperor of India. The setbacks suffered by the British here were a constant source of embarrassment and a joyous rallying point for rebels all over the country.Footnote 13 The final victory and the successful siege of Delhi were promoted as a golden word in the annals of British military history, making the city a part of the myth of British infallibility synonymous with the victory of ‘British character’ over the overwhelming population of Indians. The siege was seen as the triumph of Victorian notions of civilization, progress, and race, its various twists and turns recounted repeatedly in military histories, personal narratives, diaries, memoirs, eulogies, biographies, plays, and works of fiction, exhibitions, and guidebooks published on the subject of 1857. These cultural works duly contributed to the myth-making of the siege of Delhi as a battle which had displayed the vaunted virtues of masculinity, honour, duty, and death and facilitated the idea that hosting the imperial assemblage in the city would be an excellent way of indicating the beginning of an era of British rule.
Again, in the cultural psyche of Anglo-India, Delhi in comparison to other major battlegrounds of Lucknow and Cawnpore not only represented death, sacrifice, and martyrdom but immense political significance of constituting control over India. Lord Lytton, acutely aware of Delhi being heir to the Mughal political, social, and cultural legitimacy, hoped the assemblage of 1877 would conspicuously ‘place the Queen's authority upon the ancient throne of the Moguls’ with which the imagination of Indians associated ‘the splendour of supreme power’. Delhi's Mughal past of ritual and ceremony made it an appropriate site to invite the princes of India in order to make them feel that they were an integral part of the empire.Footnote 14 Lytton trusted that after seeing the might of empire – evident everywhere in the site of the durbar, the native royalty would contribute towards its perpetuation. The assemblage was to be, then, an occasion to raise the ‘enthusiasm of the native aristocracy whose sympathy and cordial allegiance’, wrote Lytton to Queen Victoria, was ‘guarantee for the stability of the Indian Empire’.Footnote 15 It was important to show, therefore, that the assemblage was a celebration of beginnings not only for the rulers but also for the invited princes. Thus, ‘the decision was made to hold the assemblage at Delhi, the Mughal capital, rather than in Calcutta’.Footnote 16
The amphitheatre of the assemblage itself was located on the Delhi ridge which evoked poignant memories of the siege. J. Talboys Wheeler, the official chronicler of the occasion, joyfully pointed out that the British camps stood on the ‘memorable site’ occupied by the army in 1857.Footnote 17 He was joined in the celebration of the site by the Delhi Gazette, a popular Anglo-Indian journal, which called Delhi ‘the natural capital of the Empire’ and derided the rebels as they had unthinkingly hastened ‘the time when the Queen of England should proclaim herself Empress of India’.Footnote 18 Similarly, Curzon emphasizes that Thomas Metcalf ‘was not unaware of the power of Delhi as a site of remembrance’ and it was ‘not by accident that his Durbar of 1903, like Lytton's a quarter-century earlier took place in Delhi, or that its ritual observances and architectural symbolism were meant to evoke that of the Mughal empire’.Footnote 19
The association between Delhi and political power is made clearer by Stephen Wheeler, son of Talboys Wheeler, former editor at the Civil and Military Gazette (CMG) and the official historian of the occasion, when he paid homage to the previous durbar as an event of ‘deep political significance’, marking, as it did, the ‘commencement of a new chapter in the history of British India’. The central camp of the 1903 durbar, he stressed, was pitched, ‘as in 1877’, to the west of the ridge, on the site of the old British cantonment. Similarly, its amphitheatre was situated ‘on almost identically the same spot where, in 1877 Lord Lytton had proclaimed to the Princes of India the assumption by Queen Victoria of the Imperial Title’.Footnote 20
By 1911, given the precedent established by two previous imperial durbars, no other city could be even considered for hosting a third durbar. Delhi had become a unique city in British minds, acquiring new and greater import for being the site of two successful ceremonial durbars. It ‘represents the very heart of India’, felt The Times, which ‘whenever occasion requires some great and solemn gathering…at once and without question, resumes its inherited position as “the king's house”’.Footnote 21 Another striking example of this view is given by the durbar souvenir Delhi: The Imperial City which compared the city to Rome in its ‘imperial associations’ reiterating its ideological significance. The ridge was ‘ground as hallowed as Waterloo’, and those who clung to its bare slopes knew it ‘spelt dominion’. ‘No city in the Empire has more poignant or more glorious associations for Englishmen’ because it were only these walls which ‘echoed the salute proclaiming the assumption of the Imperial title’, and which heard ‘guns announce the first British Emperor of all India’.Footnote 22 A chronology of empire situated particularly in Delhi was tried to be created, a timeline which would bind the disparate opposing voices together.
Examining the transfer of capital announced in the durbar from this view, the naming of Delhi as the new capital does not seem surprising. The replacement of Calcutta as the seat of power was caused by the continuous resistance to the partition of Bengal, ever-increasing nationalistic activities and the need to divert attention.Footnote 23 To this end, Hardinge turned to Delhi at which, he wrote to the secretary of state for India, the capital should be on ‘geographical, historical and political grounds’. Listing its administrative advantages, he perceived it to be the ‘only possible place’ for a new capital, ‘a name to conjure with’, and a change which would ‘strike the imagination of the people of India as nothing else could do’.Footnote 24 He later pointed out in his autobiography that the idea of shifting the capital was not entirely a unique one – it had been considered earnestly by Viceroys Lawrence (active 1864–9) and Curzon, but given up in the face of their council's opposition.Footnote 25
II
A few months before holding the 1903 durbar, Lord Curzon took the controversial decision of including a march of mutiny veterans in the proceedings. Elaborating on his plans in a meeting of the Legislative Council at Shimla, Curzon asserted that the ‘Delhi Ceremonial’ was no mere pageant intended to ‘dazzle the senses for a few hours or days, and then to be forgotten’. Intending to follow the example of ‘statesmanship and imagination’ set by Lytton, Curzon wished to follow the commemorative pattern set by him but also to sharpen and deepen it.Footnote 26 This was reflected in his decision to include a prominent contingent of mutiny veterans, whom he was later to describe as the ‘survivors of that great drama of mingled tragedy and heroism’,Footnote 27 in the rituals of the durbar. For to speak of the veteran, to look at him, was to revive the memory of the event of 1857, and values and results associated with it. The terms of glory and pride with which the memory of 1857 was coloured, being seen as a national epic of the British race, where Victorian masculine heroes displayed the progressive qualities of duty, honour, and sacrifice, were also invested in those men who had participated in its various and varied sieges, battles, campaigns, and conflicts. These mutiny veterans were seen then as the living witnesses to the ‘great deeds’ done during the tortuous months of 1857–8.
According to Wheeler, the invitation by the government to the ‘survivors of those immortal days’ to take a marked place in the durbar was intended to provide them an opportunity to ‘revisit the scene of their former deeds of daring’, and to take part in the ‘great solemnity which but for their valour might never have been held’.Footnote 28 He acknowledged to the contentiousness of the decision, there being many who had disputed the wisdom of introducing on such an occasion the ‘memories of an earlier and sadder day’, in the form of mutiny veterans. Sorrow and general feelings of ‘bad, dark days’ regarding 1857 were also highlighted by the Indian press to comment on the very insertion of the subject in the script of the durbar. For example, the Basumati, a leading Calcutta newspaper, criticized Curzon for his love of sensationalism which ‘impelled’ him to take the ‘unwise and impolitic’ decision to ‘revise the memory of those dark days’.Footnote 29
Notwithstanding, all doubts, fears, and apprehensions were swept aside when the durbar audience gave a rousing welcome and a standing ovation to the marching mutiny veterans. For Mortimer Menpes (1855–1938), the famous artist engaged by Curzon for the occasion, it was ‘the most interesting incident of the whole Durbar’. The entire audience rose to its feet and ‘cheer after cheer rent the air; for they all felt that but for these hoary, badly-dressed old men there would have been no Delhi Durbar at all that day’.Footnote 30 Wheeler described the scene as extremely moving where ‘few eyes were dry, and there was a choking in many throats’, an ‘episode’ which could never be forgotten by a single man or a woman of those who saw it.Footnote 31 Gertrude Bell (1868–1926), the renowned traveller, glowingly described the march and pronounced it the ‘great moment of all’ of the durbar, after which ‘Viceroys and Kings went by almost without a thrill’.Footnote 32 Though the march was scripted, the enthusiasm was not, coinciding with the meanings and goals to be achieved by the organizers.
There was no ambivalence in the sentimental descriptions of the sight they presented in either newspapers or durbar souvenirs. The mutiny veterans were old and decrepit, but it was not them but their bodies which had been in the primary struggle which demanded homage. The CMG gave a grim account of the march of the veterans, portraying them as ‘in the decline of life and men near its close’, emphasizing that ‘shrunken forms hobbled along with difficulty’. But all stood up, hats were waved, and ‘eyes grew moist though the cheers went louder for those old men of eighteen hundred and fifty seven’.Footnote 33 The Pioneer, the beloved newspaper of Anglo-India, also gave a long, emotional account of the march, describing the faltering veterans in a tragic tone. Age had dealt heavily with more than one veteran and the ‘limping gait, the bowed back, the doubtful attempt to keep step, were pitiful to see’. But it sought to assure the audience that ‘there was nothing of the commonplace about them’ or that if some were tottering, the leaders marched with ‘firm step and manly bearing’. The paper underlined the fact that they had played an important role for the empire and thus commanded reverence and deference:
these men…a living testimonial to the great deeds done nearly half a century ago…men who had fought and bled for Empire in their hot youth, and we honoured them as we honoured no one else…There was emotion among us to the verge of almost of choking the cheers in our throats, and there were tears in the eyes of many a woman.Footnote 34
These sentiments were echoed by Lovat Fraser (1871–1926) the editor of the Bombay Times of India in his durbar souvenir. Trying to reconstruct the finest moments of the durbar, his gaze rested invariably on the parade of the veterans which he felt, ‘without a doubt’, was the emotional high point of the imperial event. ‘That was the most splendid incident of the whole fortnight, by universal consent. Many a strong man was moved to tears.’Footnote 35
Curzon's decision to invite mutiny veterans and to commemorate publicly the event of 1857 was thus vindicated by the enthusiasm of the crowd towards men whom it saw as imperial heroes. ‘The place assigned to them in the ceremonial seemed almost an inspiration’ eulogized Wheeler, and Curzon himself admitted that he had been ‘gratified at the success of the venture’ in the face of much opposition.Footnote 36 In an ‘unrehearsed event’ a day after the march, the mutiny veterans lodged in the durbar camp were invited to meet the viceroy and chief guest, the duke of Connaught, who represented his brother the king-emperor at the durbar. There, Curzon congratulated them on their triumphant reception and told them that ‘nothing could be more appropriate that men who 45 years ago fought and suffered on behalf of the Empire should take part in the great ceremony of the Durbar’.Footnote 37 In this way, the cultural significance of the event of 1857 was celebrated through the second Delhi durbar.
The public honour, admiration, and respect accorded to the mutiny veterans in the previous durbar spurred the government to be more accommodating towards them in the next one, and employ them again as one of the means to overcome one of the difficult periods of the Indian empire. At the 1911 durbar, a vast ‘veteran's camp’ was set out comprising military as well as civil officials,Footnote 38 a departure in policy which demonstrated demands of including even larger numbers of veterans in an imperial event. Moreover, in this durbar, mutiny veterans participated in three separate ceremonies weaved around the visiting British monarchs. Some of them were accorded a prominent position in the guard of honour formed for the king's state entry into Delhi and were especially noticed and asked about by him. Again, there was an inspection of these ‘gallant old men’ by the king and queen the next day and John Fortescue, the official historian of the royal trip, stressed that ‘never was an hour better spent’.Footnote 39 In his reply to their welcome address, George V assured the old soldiers that they would never be forgotten by him, for he was ‘looking into the faces and speaking to those who in a time of sore distress stood loyal to their Queen and country and were ready to sacrifice their own lives in defence of that sacred trust’.Footnote 40
The third ceremony that the mutiny veterans took part in was marching in the durbar amphitheatre heralding the arrival of the viceroy and the monarchs themselves. The details of the medals on their dress were minutely looked into with the government notifying that they would have to wear a red ribbon with a small bronze V attached.Footnote 41 The insistence on attaching a ‘V’ to the bodies of the veterans was clearly to imprint the stamp of the present on the past; to remember while correspondingly forgetting something: while their bodies invoked their proud actions, their medal knit them into the contemporary event. It proclaimed their present status – that of being beholden to the present monarch, King George V. Thus, the importance attributed to the veterans was further reinforced by the third durbar in spite of their decaying physical appearance and the length of time that had passed since they had ‘displayed their valour, charisma and dignity’ in serving the empire, for there could not be such a gathering again for them which could sufficiently memorialize their importance.
III
Monuments play a seminal role in forging collective cultural memory bonds as they represent an architectural expression of emotions, thoughts, and individual memories. Their deliberate placement and recurring commemorative nourishment make them powerful symbols of a significant past, and they embody attributes sought to be associated with that momentous past. As important forms of ‘public anchoring points of memory’ which ‘promote or support particular representations of history’, they are shaped in a way which ‘says more about that society than about the history itself’.Footnote 42
In pursuance of the commemorative plan for the second durbar, Curzon installed the telegraph monument in April 1902 to honour the services of the Delhi telegraphic staff during 1857. On the instance, he also presented the medal of the Victorian Order to William Brendish, the sole survivor of those on duty on 11 May 1857, when the news was first broken through telegram. Curzon recalled in his speech of his enthusiastic support of the idea when consulted by the director-general of telegraphs as to the propriety of erecting the memorial, believing that ‘brave and noble deeds of men ought to be publicly commemorated in honour of themselves and as an example to others’. That a grand imperial event such as the durbar would be a ‘perfect opportunity’ to enact a public commemoration of 1857 was substantiated by the fact that Curzon himself had appealed to the king to confer some kind of a tribute to Brendish, who was present at the unveiling. ‘I felt’, he said, ‘that in his Coronation year His Majesty would like to honour this old and faithful servant who had helped to save the British Empire in India nearly half a century gone by.’Footnote 43
Another site chosen for similar commemoration was the ‘Little house at Arrah’, made famous by the writings of Rudyard Kipling and G. O. Trevelyan, both of whom felt that it was one of the most memorable vestiges left behind by the tumult of 1857. The leitmotif of both their accounts was the obliteration of all traces of the mutiny from the house in Arrah. In Trevelyan's story, originally published in the Macmillan's Magazine in September 1863, the wall, on which a diary of the siege had been kept, had been whitewashed, and the historical building itself was being used for the accommodation of visitors. After only six years, rued the narrator, the associations between the site and the memory of 1857 had begun to ‘grow dim’.Footnote 44
Kipling further pulled up the contrast that England showed against other great nations in preserving and conserving the artefacts of its glorious past. The French, he felt, would have covered the building in a ‘glass case, keeping intact each scar of musket and artillery fire’. The Americans, not far behind, would have ‘run a ring fence round it and exhibited it at 5 cents per head – a pensioned veteran in charge’. But the English, he bewailed, ‘prefer to sweep it up and keep it clean and use it as an ordinary house…just as if nothing worth the mentioning has ever taken place in that unattractive compound…We certainly are a nation of Goths and Philistines.’Footnote 45 The unwillingness to talk about and thus commemorate ‘57’, which Kipling discerned in the colonial government, anticipated his deeper fears of imperial weakness and degeneration. This dread was not new to him as only a year earlier, in his article to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary, he had highlighted the official apathy towards the commemoration of an event which he considered as a central one for the British in India.Footnote 46 This was typical of a government, Kipling considered, obsessed only with the quotidian, unlike the ‘heroic’ footprints left by the Punjab school of administrators through their actions during 1857–8.Footnote 47
It was this general bemoaning that Curzon tried to address by installing ‘suitable’ marks of commemoration. It was very interesting to find through Nagai's article, who in turn quoted Douglas W. Scotland, a correspondent to the Kipling Journal, that Curzon ‘had got experts to try to bring to light this unique record but without success, so a memorial tablet was placed on the wall in 1902’.Footnote 48 This very remarkable fact, of no slight significance, could not be otherwise corroborated through the voluminous correspondence and letters of Curzon. The fascination for fixing commemorative monuments to the past, and events which had no mean consequence for the British in India, was explained by Curzon thus: ‘To me the past is sacred’, he declared. ‘It is often a chronicle of errors and blunders and crimes, but it also abounds in the records of virtue and heroism and valour.’ To him, the past was ‘finished and written’, but it was crucial to ‘keep alive the memory of what it has wrought’.Footnote 49 This was central, both for passing on memories to the future generations and to be remembered by them.
IV
The duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria's second son, was the first royal to visit India (1869–70) after the extension of royal authority over the country through the queen's proclamation of 1858. One of the two remarkable aspects of this tour was that the retinue of the prince was filled with personages who had participated in the actions of the mutiny, whether in a civilian or a military capacity. Three prominent persons in his suite, out of eight – Major-General Sir Neville Chamberlain, Colonel Dighton Probyn, and Dr Joseph Fayrer – can be identified as actors of some note during the event of 1857. The other point of significance was that the duke visited the prominent mutiny sites of Delhi, Lucknow, and Cawnpore, almost as a pilgrimage.
He entered the city of Delhi in a glorious procession of elephants through the Lahore Gate and for his welcome ‘triumphal arches’ were set up at focal points around the Red Fort. The parade was watched with much interest by the crowds in the streets and on housetops. The duke also visited all the important markers of the siege with the mutiny veteran Chamberlain pointing out details. At Cawnpore, the memorial gardens and well were visited; and in Lucknow, accompanied by some survivors of the garrison, he visited the grounds of the Residency. There, various scenes which had been vividly described in eye-witness accounts and other narratives of 1857 were demonstrated to him, especially by the mutiny veteran from Lucknow in his retinue, Joseph Fayrer.
This scheme was repeated by the tour of his elder brother, the prince of Wales to India (1875–6) which was on a much grander and larger scale and, correspondingly, the size of his retinue as well as the number of mutiny veterans in it increased. Amongst other places, the prince made it a point to visit the mutiny sites of Delhi, Lucknow, and Cawnpore, regions which, according to the official chronicler of the tour, W. H. Russell, had been ‘scenes of great troubles, where traditions of the retribution inflicted on rebellion are recent, where confiscations and deposition have left many bitter memories’.Footnote 50 Russell (1820–1907), the famous war correspondent of The Times, seemed well placed to comment as he had reported from India in 1857 and had witnessed the final re-capture of Lucknow. By the time of the tour, his diary of experiences in India had become one of the most popular accounts of the war out of the enormous quantity of literature on the subject.
The symbolism inherent in this royal tour of mutiny sites was directed at the public both in India and in Britain. In India, the British imperatives primarily to inscribe their memory of the mutiny and imperial power at various sites of the struggle, and to show themselves as the legitimate successors of the Mughals through royal pomp, were fulfilled by this circling of Delhi, Lucknow, and Cawnpore. For the British public, the history and significance of the mutiny were made to be understood in terms of national-imperial myths about the empire and their identity in relation to it.Footnote 51 In Lucknow, the prince was received by the same persons who had received his younger brother – survivors of the siege of the Residency. In his four-day stay in the city, he made it a point to visit all the locales associated with 1857.
He visited the Residency twice, once for laying the foundation stone of a memorial to the ‘native brave’ who fell in the defence of Lucknow, and then again in the company of Dr Fayrer to be pointed out the noteworthy aspects of the ruins, similar to the exercise undertaken by his brother. Russell termed the former ceremony a bold departure, for it commemorated the courage of the ‘Native army’ as ‘historic’, describing it in terms of glory and pride.Footnote 52 Another correspondent gushed that it was the ‘most impressive ceremony’ in which the prince took part in India.Footnote 53 After the ceremonial, he even met a chosen few aged Indian veterans who had been invited to witness the ceremony, in pursuance purportedly of his ‘happy unpremeditated thought’.Footnote 54
In his one day at Cawnpore, the prince spent morning to evening visiting all the important markers that had been put up or preserved in the city to commemorate the struggle of 1857, such as the memorial church and its tombs, Wheeler's entrenchments, and especially the prominent spot of the memorial gardens:
There the Prince got out, and the party walked to the building which marks the place of the fatal Well. There was deep silence as the Prince read in a low voice the touching words, ‘To the memory of a great company of Christian people, principally women and children, who were cruelly slaughtered here’ – the name of the great criminal and the date of the massacre are cut round the base of the statue…The Prince then walked to the cemetery, hard by, examined the graves, and expressed pleasure at the neatness of the ground. He…left the scene of these sad events just ere nightfall[.]Footnote 55
The entry of the prince into the city of Delhi resembled that of a triumphant monarch coming to claim his newly conquered capital; its ‘pomp and circumstance’ recorded approvingly by Russell who thought it ‘well fitting the place and occasion’.Footnote 56 Arrayed in a field-marshal's uniform, with the commander-in-chief and other superior officers of the British army at his side, he entered Delhi at the head of an imposing procession.Footnote 57 The route of this procession, which extended five miles, from the railway station to the camp, was lined by several regiments, many of whom had fought in the siege. The course itself winded around roads which recalled episodes of 1857 in Delhi during which, Russell emphasized, the prince ‘did not forget to notice either the stone monument’, or the regiments which had ‘actually fought upon the very ground they occupied before him – the living witnesses of the deeds by which the power of the Empire he represented was established’.Footnote 58
Mary Elizabeth Corbet, one of the numerous travellers who accompanied the prince and then recorded their experiences, gave a striking eye-witness account of the daunting aura created around the royal procession for the varied nature of spectators, some of whom had come from as far as America and Germany (there were fears that Russian spies had also penetrated the thick crowds!):
At last he came, with a very numerous, most brilliant staff, and a splendid military procession, about 10 o'clock. The sides of the road all the way to the station were thickly lined with soldiers. As the Prince and Staff passed on, each regiment closed in and marched after, so the great procession was constantly growing in length…the Prince of Wales was on horseback, in full uniform…We could see in all directions, and truly this great entrée of our Prince into Delhi was a magnificent pageant – no less than eighteen thousand troops! Their various uniforms adding much to the scene.Footnote 59
The martial character of the stopover at Delhi was reinforced by a massive military review and a re-enactment of the attack and defence of British positions, both of which took place on the plains of Badli-ki-serai, where the first battle of 1857 was fought. These and other military parades, exhibitions, matches, etc., demonstrated to the spectators, according to Russell, ‘the daring of those who seized the Ridge in 1857, and the impotence of those who lost such a position’.Footnote 60
For George Wheeler, who accompanied the royal tour as the special correspondent of The Central News, this idea of concentrating a force of 20,000 men beneath the walls of the city which was the ‘keystone of our triumphs in the Mutiny, seemed to every loyal mind peculiarly appropriate’. The symbolic re-conquering of the city of Delhi and indeed India as a whole was epitomized by his casual comment on the ball given by the commander-in-chief of the Indian army to the prince in the Mughal palace: ‘The Prince danced in the great hall in which the King of Delhi was tried by a court-martial composed of English officers.’Footnote 61
The prince left the city after the customary visit around every point ‘rendered famous by episodes of the Mutiny’.Footnote 62 As earlier, this visit was also observed keenly throughout India, especially in Delhi, evidenced by the frequent allusions to crowds and chaos in the many books produced on the prince's tour. J. Drew Gay, special correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, wrote that to watch the military review ‘all fashionable Delhi turned out’ and the English ladies and gentlemen came up ‘in hundreds’ to revel in the re-enactment of the battle of Badli-ke-Serai.Footnote 63
This model of pilgrimage and commemoration was reproduced regularly by newspapers and journals, by magazines, and by handbooks and guidebooks produced both for the Anglo-Indian community residing in India and for the growing tourism industry to India in the late nineteenth century. For example the Illustrated London News, the popular weekly, featured mutiny sites immediately after the mutiny, ten years after, during the prince of Wales's tour, thirty years after, and during the royal visit of 1905 – their accompanying descriptions consecrating specific locations for travellers and visitors akin to a pilgrimage.Footnote 64 Already by 1878, a notable traveller had averred that, when in India, sites of 1857 were what ‘one visits first, and visits last’.Footnote 65
The outlines set by these mutiny pilgrimage tours were over the next few decades repeated in texts of cultural memory such as tourist handbooks and guidebooks, travel-writings, memoirs, and reminiscences about India which, without fail, had a prominent section on 1857 and the memory complex built to commemorate it, whether in the form of places or images. A particularly apposite example of this constant replenishment of the present by the waters of the past, of the process by which each generation created social memories to understand their own lives, can be seen in the several editions from 1881 to 1949 of Murray's handbooks for India. Each edition recommended a pilgrimage tour of the mutiny sites of Cawnpore, Lucknow, and, especially, of Delhi, to register and mark the vast architectural and memory complex located in these cities.
Similarly, vice-regal tours of India included at least one mutiny site in their varied itinerary. For example, even after twenty-five years of the royal tour, a need for the commemoration of the original moment of 1857 was felt when Lord Curzon called several mutiny veterans to his durbar at Lucknow in October 1899. In his speech on the occasion, he counted the homage of the ‘illustrious veterans’ among his highest privileges because they were the ‘still surviving actors in those solemn and immortal scenes’. This dwindling number, he said, were to be given honour and respect because they had participated in ‘the agony of that fateful struggle, the cause of order as against anarchy, of civilisation as against chaos’.Footnote 66
Durbar souvenirs and travelogues also impressed upon the reader, through their constant focus on the history of 1857, the significance of undertaking a mutiny pilgrimage to the cities of Delhi, Lucknow, and Cawnpore. These purpose-driven texts not only explained the importance of the spectacles, but also took up and re-told the story of 1857, intertwined with ceremonies which re-structured networks of power in no uncertain terms. In this light, the three durbars at Delhi seem to be a continuation of weaving a commemorative thread in the staging of imperial spectacles of power and legitimacy. Significantly, the ceremonial procession of viceroys or royals, including in their route and length, entering Delhi for the durbars faithfully followed a template of re-conquest and martial character set by the two royal tours of 1869–70 and 1875–6.
V
Cultural memory, in a broad sense, is a way of understanding how societies remember their past and observe its memory in the present. An intricate notion, it encompasses diverse mediums of media and configuring practices of cultural knowledge. It involves studying historiographical progression of the collective memory of a seminal historical event and the processes whereby this memory is shared across generations. This article pulls up the thread of commemoration which was common to all three Delhi durbars. It traces the rituals commemorating the event of 1857 which were interwoven with celebrations of monarchy, royal pomp, and splendour. Without overemphasizing the cultural symbolism of 1857 and forcing facts to fit the theory, it argues that apart from being imperial demonstrations of power and legitimacy, the durbars can be seen as commemorative displays of the triumphant cultural memory of this decisive event. As seen above, an agenda of commemoration was consciously decided to be included in the three durbars through four very different choices. Delhi, which signified the inception of British rule in India, a site of colonial performance originating from the event of 1857, became a natural choice for the location of all three durbars. In this light, the decision to shift capital particularly to this city does not seem entirely surprising or sudden.
By showcasing the living relics of the struggle of 1857, in the form of mutiny veterans in the durbar of 1903, the British tried to define an idea of empire, to themselves as much as to the world. The unexpected response to and success of this device led to its replication in the final durbar, the presence of participants of a significant past lending relevance, legitimacy, and hegemony to the present and distracting from the growing difficulties of ruling India and other parts of the British empire. Architectural commemoration of 1857, especially in the form of memorials, was also provided impetus by these occasions of pomp and show. The monuments erected represented the needs of colonialism, to mark and to modify, to claim and to strengthen its claim to rule. Similarly, a growing pattern of mutiny pilgrimage was helped to flourish by its replications in many ceremonies of the durbars and in the massive literature produced propagating their splendour.
