'The English Maharani': Queen Victoria's soft corner for India's royalty

Miles Taylor offers a meticulously researched account of a queen-empress who tried to compensate in India for the political role she was denied at home

Miles Taylor’s title, The English Maharani, brings to mind not Queen Victoria but several lesser aspirants to a royal — or princely — role in India. I once had to collect one of them from Simla’s Cecil Hotel for a lunch party in Mashobra. “Are you …?” I began, repeating the very plebeian name I had been given when the plump, heavily made-up little woman with a chiffon scarf tied over her peroxide curls cooed, “Ektually, I am the last Maharani of …”, naming one of the better known Punjab states. Another Englishwoman, once prominent in Calcutta society, was last glimpsed as hostess-housekeeper at a smart club in London’s Shepherd’s Bush. “So, after all those years of being a Highness, she had gone back to where she started!” commented a businessman, referring to ancient gossip about her demi-mondaine beginnings in a district that was more fashionable than respectable. 

One suspects Victoria would not have disapproved too much of these adventuresses. Although Taylor’s fascinating and scholarly exploration of her relationship with India skirts round this aspect of the first queen-empress’s personality, by all accounts Victoria was the least Victorian of her court. She had no qualms about receiving a maharaja who “was persona non grata (with the government) owing to the ‘debauchery’ of his rule”. Her sympathies would probably have been with the Indian princes if she thought they were victims of manipulative European females. In any case, her response would have been pragmatic, not moral.

Taylor’s book makes fascinating reading. His meticulous research throws light on many unknown aspects of the imperial saga. He is ruthlessly frank about the painstaking invention of tradition with which the British tried to lend authenticity to their rule. He also exposes the greed — for wealth, honours, authority, status — that drove his heroine. But the original title of Empress under which the book was first published in the United States was probably more appropriate than The English Maharani. True, “maharani” was the title by which Victoria was known in India but this was only as a literal translation of great queen. It didn’t necessarily convey a deeper sense of belonging although I did come across a dak bungalow chowkidar in the Himalayas who proudly told me in the 1960s that he worked for “Rani Bhiktoria”, meaning his salary wasn’t paid by the local raja or even the state government but the Central Public Works Department. Told that Victoria was long dead, he nodded that he had heard a “Pancham Jarge” had taken her place.

It has even been suggested — and hotly denied — that the original “Bharat bhagya vidhata” in Jana Gana Mana was that same “Pancham Jarge”, the king-emperor who wore enough for both of them when he entertained a half-naked Gandhi to tea at Buckingham Palace. Given these links, Taylor may not have been too far out in claiming, “There was something exclusively Indian about the idea of the queen as a benign force, looking out for the interests of her subjects overseas.” After all, government is “raj” even in modern Indian parlance. But the driving force of the relationship was more on the queen’s side than Indians’. Victoria and her husband were both obsessed by the idea of India. After Albert’s death and armed with the imperial title Disraeli invented for her, the queen-empress developed a range of Indian contacts and took a personal interest in the country and its people. She tried to make up in India for the political role she was denied at home, imagining the country was a personal fiefdom like her Uncle Leopold’s Congo, though Taylor doesn’t use the comparison. 

Her ministers in England and officials in India must have found this interest as irksome as foreign office diplomats found her meddling a nuisance. But they were not above using her name and authority when it suited their purpose. Then, as now, the Crown was government property, no matter what illusions it nursed or inspired. The government allowed Salar Jung, the Nizam’s prime minister, to meet her but did not allow him to broach the subject of the Berars which remained a sore point with Hyderabad right up to Operation Polo.

Where Taylor is off the mark is in imagining that Indians were seriously interested in the concept of monarchy or that Victoria and her descendants might have had an Indian identity irrespective of colonial rule. Victoria might have seemed at times to give colonialism a human face but was never anything other than another, albeit glittering, adjunct of the superstructure of which the viceroy, provincial governors and the India Office in London were integral features after 1858. His description of Curzon’s physical arrogance (if not insolence) at the Delhi Durbar clearly indicates viceroys were not awed by the imperial title. Moreover, if Taylor had known India and Indians better, he would have been aware of the peril of giving much credence to overt expressions of Indian loyalty. Lord Hardinge, viceroy from 1910 to 1916, was amazed to see Indians rush up to the spot on the Maidan where King George V and Queen Mary had stood during their Calcutta visit and scoop up the dust which they then rubbed on their heads in a fervent demonstration of allegiance.

My coverage of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1968 may be pertinent in this context. When I suggested to a member of Ian Paisley’s congregation in Belfast that the Ulster Catholics he was berating were also loyal to the Crown, she retorted “To the half-crown mister!” Indians were (are?) not much better.

The English Maharani 

Queen Victoria and India

Author: Miles Taylor

Publisher: Penguin/Viking

Price: Rs 799

Pages: 468