ROMANCING THE ORIENT
When the Raj is an enchantment as well as an embarrassment
The British fascination for India was born out of very different impulses. There was, of course, the draw of political power and commerce— the load- bearing pillars of what has come to be known as imperialism. However, this was supplemented by a romantic fascination for the mysterious Orient and contributed to the unending search for the ‘ real India’. Where imperial might and romance converged was in the shared love of pomp, splendour and pageantry— what the historian David Cannadine has dubbed ‘ ornamentalism’. Lord Curzon, unquestionably the tallest of the viceroys to rule India, personified this duality: An unflinching belief in the nobility of the imperial endeavour and a corresponding attachment to what he called the “sacredness of India”.
The remarkable extent to which an attachment to the British Empire was coupled with a honest fascination, bereft of condescension, for India is mirrored in the diaries of Lilah Wingfield, a 23- year- old unmarried daughter of an Irish peer who visited India in 1911- 12 for the Coronation Durbar of George V in Delhi. The diaries, discovered by chance in a secondhand shop in 1999, were never intended for publication: In keeping with a fine Victorian tradition, Lilah poured out her innermost thoughts to her diary which, she presumed, would perish with her. As such, her observations are marked by candour and authenticity.
The account of Lilah’s journey to India can be read in many ways. As an account of the rarefied community life of the upper- crust English who managed the Raj, it contains few surprises. There are the inevitable accounts of the bonhomie in the Regimental mess; the endless rounds of dinners and balls— made doubly interesting by the presence of young officers who charmed and flattered a debutante fresh from Blighty; the complex protocol, snobbery and hierarchy that defined the Raj; and the wideeyed awe at the smells and colours of India.
As a diary of the festivities and the social whirl around the Durbar, Lilah has brought out the fact that the visit of a reigning KingEmperor was much more than a mere political event. It was, like most things in India, ultimately a grand celebration which was made possible by the enthusiastic and, in the cases of the Maharana of Udaipur and the Gaekwar of Baroda, the non- enthusiastic participation of some 400 Indian princes. In 1911, British rule in India enjoyed a staggering measure of popular approval. The scale of popular approval comes through in Lilah’s diaries.
At the same time, Lilah was contemptuous of the growing tribe of British freeloaders. “The hospitality that the Indians lavish on their guests,” she confided to her diary, “makes one ashamed of our English mode of entertaining and courtesy— I hate to think how their generosity is imposed on by many of our fellowcountrymen who come to India with a big idea of how they can treat mere ‘ natives’… and invite themselves as the guests of some Prince and Rajah and stay on indefinitely, accepting all the hospitality offered, as if it were their due and without any thought of returning it.”
In Lilah’s reference to visitors from England who had attached themselves to the entourage of Ranjitsinhji and her passing note of how a ball hosted by the Maharaja of Indore was hijacked into an English party, can also be detected a tentative disapproval of the cultural cringe of the Indian aristocracy. To this innocent Anglo- Irish aristocrat, India had its own validity.