Edward Elgar and His World (50 page)

—Pall Mall Gazette
, 9 January 1912

In January 1912, at the height of its imperial fervor, the British public eagerly devoured colorful newspaper reports of King George V's visit to India the previous month.
¹
This royal visit celebrated the king's assumption of the title “Emperor of India” that had been bestowed upon him during his coronation in Westminster Abbey on June 22, 1911. The focus of the new king's Indian sojourn was the Delhi “Durbar,” the court ceremony held in his honor in December 1911, and presented in “Kinemacolour” film to packed London picture houses the following year. A magnificent imperial occasion lasting some ten days, the Durbar involved over 16,000 British and 32,000 Indian officials, and displayed the obeisance paid by all the Indian princes to their rulers.
²
An Australian visitor marveled at “the pomp and solemnity of it all; the gorgeous hues … the rhythmic march of regiments; the masses of white-robed, keen-eyed natives; the blended colours where East and West met … the thousand sights seen beneath the glamour of that old Indian sun.”
³
The event was widely reported and attracted praise from all corners of the empire.

Contrary to appearances and popular belief, however, the Durbar was more than a “pageant of splendour,” as one spectator termed it.
⁴
It afforded an opportunity for the king-emperor to announce several crucial measures to bolster England's weakening hold on India. The first, the shift of the imperial capital from Calcutta to Delhi, had been the subject of debate, and the suitability of other cities as capital had been considered. The kingemperor's second announcement was, in the words of an American spectator, “surely the best-kept secret in history … it literally took away the breath of India.” He announced the reunification of Bengal, repealing Lord Curzon's partition of the region in 1905 as part of the English “divide and rule” policy.
⁵
The partition repeal was reportedly “fraught with such vast import” that the king's announcement left “astonishment and incredulity on every face.”
⁶

In 1905 Curzon, then the viceroy, had split Bengal down the middle, creating Eastern Bengal and Assam, which included the Muslim-majority eastern districts.
⁷
This arbitrary division caused seven years of communal violence and bloodshed among the Hindu and Muslim populations of Bengal, along with a sharp rise in anticolonial activity and general political anarchy.
⁸
Hindi Punch
sought to convey the gravity of the 1905 partition in a cartoon entitled “Vandalism! Or, The Partition of Bengal!” that featured a woman (representing Bengal) who has been chopped by an ax into pieces that represent Assam and East Bengal (
figure 1
).
⁹
The tumult surrounding the partition had marred George's reception in India as Prince of Wales in 1905 and led him to conclude that the decision had been a serious political error. The repeal, advocated by George V, was agreed upon after a year of secretive debate concerning “the partition crisis,” as the home secretary put it, in which British officials “surveyed the widening cracks in the wall of British authority as a consequence of five years of chaos.”
¹⁰
The Delhi Durbar thus provided “a unique occasion for rectifying what is regarded by Bengalis as a grievous wrong.”
¹¹
But the repeal also signaled the beginning of imperial disintegration, for the partition decision had provided the needed catalyst for effective Indian resistance.
¹²

Masking the Durbar

The Durbar, whose Indian memorial will be the buildings of the new capital, is to be commemorated in England by a masque composed by Sir Edward Elgar.

—
The Globe
, 9 January 1912

To mark the occasion of the Delhi Durbar, Elgar collaborated with Henry Hamilton on
The Crown of India
, an “Imperial Masque” produced by Oswald Stoll at the London Coliseum and performed in a mixed music hall program that opened on March 11, 1912.
¹³
The Crown of India
was advertised by the London
Times
as “a project which will evoke extraordinary interest and will, no doubt, prove, under Sir Edward Elgar's treatment, worthy of the historic event that it is designed to commemorate in so graceful a fashion.”
¹⁴
Not only graceful, but also elaborate: production costs exceeded £3,000, a huge sum at the time, with ornate costumes and lavish settings by Percy Anderson; after all, the
Daily Telegraph
remarked, “so vast and dazzling a subject cannot, obviously, be treated in the spirit of parsimony.”
¹⁵
And the
Eastern Daily Press
assured readers that “no effort is being spared to imbue the spectacular symbols of the durbar with all the glowing, gorgeous colour of the Orient, and … the score … casts a powerful spell over the whole production.”
¹⁶
Photographs of scenes from
The Crown of India
, viewed alongside the colorful illustrated reports that described the spectacle of the Delhi Durbar to the British public, show how closely the masque's sets resembled those of the actual occasion (
figure 2
).
¹⁷

Figure 1. “Vandalism! Or, the Partition of Bengal!” from
Hindi Punch
, July 1905. Courtesy the British Library.

Press reviews claimed that the masque “put the events of the Durbar in front of the British public in an attractive and concrete form” and that it was “a reconstitution of the scene of the Durbar.”
¹⁸
Yet the masque staged only part of the events. The first tableau was dominated by the dispute between the cities of India as to whether Delhi or Calcutta should become the new imperial capital and the second tableau featured India and all her cities assembling with the character of St. George and the East India Company to do honor to England and the British Raj.
¹⁹
That the masque represented (in great detail) transfer of the capital to Delhi is unsurprising, since the move was a calculated step to guarantee the continuance of British rule in the face of ever-increasing Indian demands for political power: Delhi had a long history as the site of India's imperial throne.
²⁰
Yet the most significant moment of the Durbar, the reunification of Bengal, found no mention in
The Crown of India
, despite the king's dramatic announcement (reportedly “making history and geography at once”), which might have seemed ideal material for the Coliseum masque.
²¹
Bengal could not be represented because it alluded to a spectacular policy failure and also suggested the narrowing limits of imperial authority. Thus a selective view of the Delhi Durbar, achieved by ignoring successful native resistance to the Raj that led to the partition repeal, served the interests of both the Raj and British sovereignty.

Figure 2. India, from the steps of the throne, hails the advent of the King-Emperor and Queen-Empress: A scene from the
Crown of India
masque,
Daily Graphic
, 12 March 1912. Courtesy the British Library Newspapers at Colindale.

The Crown of India
was, accordingly, a tool for manipulating popular consciousness.
²²
India's personification in the masque, a vivid depiction of how the English spoke for India and represented Indians, determined both what could be said about India and what could count as truth. The words put into the mouth of the figure of India parrot the sentiments and ideology that the British used both to justify their reign in India and to make it palatable for themselves:

Each man reclines in peace beneath his palm,
Brahman and Buddhist, Hindu with Islam,
Into one nation welded by the West,
That in the Pax Brittanica is blest …

Oh, happy India, now at one, at last;
Not sundered each for self as in the past!
Happy the people blest with Monarch just!
Happy the Monarch whom His People trust!
And happy Britain—that above all lands
Still where she conquers counsels not commands!
See wide and wider yet her rule extend
Who of a foe defeated makes a friend,
Who spreads her Empire not to get but give
And free herself bids others free to live.
²³

Having the figure of India express such uncontested judgments about India and its rulers allowed Hamilton and Elgar to demonstrate to their audience that Indians accept British rule because it is “a mild and beneficent, a just and equitable, but a firm and fearless rule.”
²⁴
This has historically always been the way that European imperialism represented its enterprise, for, as Edward Said has argued, nothing could be better for imperialism's self-image “than native subjects who express assent to the outsider's knowledge and power, implicitly accepting European judgment on the undeveloped, backward, or degenerative nature of native society.”
²⁵
Moreover, by studiously omitting any reference to the partition repeal and excluding the all-too-present challenges to British rule, Hamilton and Elgar eliminated any chance of showing two worlds in conflict.
The Crown of India
, masquerading as a colorful depiction of the Delhi Durbar, was carefully inscribed with its creators' considered beliefs and suppressions.

The Composer's Burden

Edward Elgar had a personal connection with the ventures of the British in India. His father-in-law, Major-General Sir Henry Gee Roberts (1800–61), joined the East India Company in 1818, launching a distinguished military career. During the 1857–58 Indian Rebellion, he commanded the Rajputana Field Force that succeeded in capturing the town of Kota in March 1858.
²⁶
Later he was honored in a parliamentary motion of thanks for the skill “by which the late Insurrection has been effectively suppressed.”
²⁷
Caroline Alice, Sir Henry Roberts's daughter, who was born in October 1848 in the residency at Bhooj in Gujarat, married Elgar in 1889, and they lived in a house scattered with Indian artifacts collected by her father.
²⁸
Following in the footsteps of his father-in-law, Elgar himself was knighted in 1904, later receiving the Order of Merit in July 1911.
²⁹

The family's links with the Raj can be seen in the larger context of the extraordinary presence of “India” within English life during the years surrounding the turn of the century.
³⁰
Following the 1857 Rebellion, the English sought to strengthen their increasingly precarious hold on the subcontinent by perpetuating the powerful fictions (of civilizing savages, of liberal philosophy, of democratic nationalism) that justified the Raj.
³¹
After Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1876, displays of the glories of British rule in India became immensely popular. The 1886 India and Colonial Exhibition, for example, attracted nearly four million visitors.
³²
International exhibitions that drew attention to India were hosted by Glasgow in 1888, 1901, and 1911, and by London's Shepherd's Bush in 1909, 1910, 1911, 1912, and 1914.
³³
The 1895 Indian Empire Exhibition and the 1896 India and Ceylon Exhibition, both at Earl's Court, together with the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition at Wembley were renowned for their displays of the arts, music, architecture, crafts, and “tribes” of India.
³⁴
These cultural practices were exhibited before the British as microcosms of the larger imperial domain.

Outside these exhibitions, representations of “India” and of the historic events of the Raj became a central subject for musical spectacles during the decades around 1900, including
The Grand Moghul
(1884),
The Nautch Girl
(The Savoy, 1891),
The Cingalee
(Daly's, 1904), and H. A. Jones's
Carnac Sahib
(1899). The last of these was much admired both for its jeweled palace at (the fictional) Fyzapore and for its evocative music, including excerpts from Delibes's
Lakmé
and “a Hindu march.”
³⁵
Perhaps the most striking of all was the grand pageant
India
, produced by Imre Kiralfy, director-general of several Indian and colonial exhibitions.
³⁶
Staged at the 1895 Earl's Court Indian Exhibition, Kiralfy's “historical play,” with music by Angelo Venanzi, was an affirmation of English rule in India. It presented a selective account of Indian history that led naturally from the “Fall of Somnath—The Muhammadan Conquest” in 1024 to Victoria's imperial coronation at the 1877 Delhi Durbar, culminating in a “Grand Apotheosis” in 1895 (during which “Britannia Crowns Her Majesty the Goddess of India”).
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