READING THE EMPIRE FROM AFAR: FROM COLONIAL SPECTACLES TO COLONIAL LITERACIES by DANIELLE LEIGH NIELSEN Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation Adviser: Dr. Kurt Koenigsberger Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY May, 2011 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of Danielle Leigh Nielsen ______________________________________________________ Doctor of Philosophy candidate for the ________________________________degree *. Kurt Koenigsberger (signed)_______________________________________________ (chair of the committee) Kimberly Emmons ________________________________________________ Athena Vrettos ________________________________________________ John Broich ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ 2/18/2011 (date) _______________________ *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. DEDICATION To Scott, without you, I could not have done it. 1 Contents Acknowledgements 2 Abstract 3 Introduction: Genre, Narratives of the Colonial Spectacle, Pedagogies of Victorian History Theory 5 Chapter One: Through Women’s Eyes: Introducing India and the Coronation Durbars to the British Public 52 Chapter Two: Pilgrimage to Lucknow: The 1857 Uprising Sites, Veterans, and Ideologies in Durbar Narratives 85 Chapter Three: Preventing Disaster: Advising Against the Durbars to Protect the Empire 121 Chapter Four: Writing from the Empire: Indian Men, the Indian Subject, and Protecting the Colonial Government 152 Epilogue: Looking to the Future: Cosmopolitanism, Decolonization, and the Modernist Colonial History Lesson 197 Bibliography 226 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to my dissertation committee John Broich, Kimberly Emmons, and Athena Vrettos for their willingness to sit on my committee and their support throughout this project. I am particularly grateful to Kurt Koenigsberger who challenged me as a writer and researcher, urging me to think about my own professionalization and goals, and provided me with the freedom to explore. Because of Kurt, Kim, and T. Kenny Fountain, I have grown as a professional teacher and scholar. I also wish to thank the entire English Department for their support and encouragement during my time as a student at Case Western Reserve University. I must also thank the other graduate students at Case; their support and encouragement was unlimited. A special thank you to Jamie McDaniel, whose comments and questions made this project more interesting and better written, and who was always there with words of encouragement. Thanks to my parents, Sue and Lonney Nielsen, and my brothers, Chris, Kirk, and Alex, for their support, encouragement, and belief in me. To Scott, words do not suffice. You supported and believed in me, never letting me give up. Your willingness to listen to me chatter about colonialism, Coronation Durbars, and India is unparalleled. 3 Reading the Empire from Afar: From Colonial Spectacles to Colonial Literacies Abstract by Danielle Leigh Nielsen This dissertation investigates the relationships among Victorian literacy and history pedagogies, colonial discourse analysis, and colonial texts produced in the early twentieth century. The first four chapters address texts written in the wake of the 1902- 03 and 1911-12 Coronation Durbars held in Delhi, India. The epilogue analyzes E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and encourages new research on Modernist colonial literature like George Orwell’s Burmese Days and Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet and twentieth-century Indian writings like Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World and Mahatma Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj. The dissertation suggests a new way of reading non-fictional documents, Edwardian and Modernist colonial fiction, and Indian literature and non-fiction: as history lessons which advocate best citizenship practices in relation to a global empire. While the Coronation Durbar documents promote the viability of the Empire, the texts discussed in the Epilogue argue that for any type of relationship between Britain and India to be successful, decolonization must occur. These lessons, though they seem to contradict one another, both work to protect the relationship between India and Britain and the status of the British homeland. Looking at the intersection of two often unrelated discourses—rhetorical genre studies and colonial/post-colonial discourse theory—I argue that early twentieth-century 4 texts took up the genre of the history lesson by creating and promoting similar “typified rhetorical actions” to those the history lessons created by late-Victorian pedagogues. The texts analyzed in the dissertation attempt to provide readers with background information, teach them how to understand cause and effect between historical events, and above all, urge patriotism and loyalty, integral parts of the Victorian history lesson. This literature was targeted to an increasingly literate and educated public and attempted to teach British readers not only about the colony, but also worked to persuade them to read the colony in a different way. 5 Introduction: Narratives of the Colonial Spectacle, Victorian History Pedagogy, and Genre Theory For several weeks during 1902-03 and again during 1911-12, Delhi – not London – became the center of the Empire when it hosted the Coronation Durbars. Ceremonial repetitions of Indian Durbars held in centuries past and of Queen Victoria’s 1877 Imperial Assemblage, the Durbars proclaimed King Edward and King George Emperors of India. On January 1, 1903, Lord Curzon opened King Edward VII’s Coronation Durbar at the Durbar Amphitheatre in Delhi, India; December 12, 1911, King George V, Queen Mary, and Lord Hardinge presided over His Majesty’s own Delhi Durbar. The Coronation Durbars were intended to reinforce the power of India’s Emperor, both at home and abroad, and remind Indians of the hierarchical structure the British developed for their native rulers. The Durbar was not a British invention but rather a revisioning of a long-standing Indian tradition. In “Representing Authority in Victorian India” Bernard Cohn explains that historically Durbars helped shore up social and political relationships within the Indian state and made public both the subject's and the ruler's commitments to one another. Beginning with the East India Company in the early-nineteenth century and with increasing frequency after the 1857 Indian Uprising, the British used Durbars to rank allied princes formally under British control, to establish an official code of conduct that controlled how the Indians were recognized by British authorities, and to define a standard of imperial power. In short, the Durbars were intended to foster imperial pride and cultivate a sense of imperial citizenship. In addition to imperial spectacles such as the Coronation Durbars, other events and experiences, like history education, were used to encourage imperial pride and 6 citizenship. A.H. Garlick in A New Manual of Method (1907) suggests that the “prime aim” of history ought to be a lesson that “calls forth feelings of patriotism. It stimulates the national pride, promotes a love of virtue, gives powerful object lessons against vice, and tends, rightly taught, to make good citizens” (Garlick 258, emphasis Garlick’s). For Garlick, and many others including pedagogues and essayists during the fin-de-siècle, history and the texts associated with it taught Britons how to appropriately serve and honor their country. As imperial spectacles designed to foster citizenship and patriotism, the Coronation Durbars and the texts produced in their wake, provided a well- documented example of the ways in which British and imperial events (and history) encouraged citizenship. The Durbars and the texts created for them addressed many of the same ideas that Garlick believed history education did – they encouraged patriotism, national pride, and even citizenship in ways that illustrated the complexity of the Empire, imperialism, and the relationship between India and Britain. While the Durbar texts help readers imagine colonial India, describe the Durbar processionals, and create a narrative of Empire, when the Durbar texts discuss patriotism and citizenship, the “primary aim” of history, they in part take up the genre of the late-Victorian history lesson. In this project, I investigate the intersections among genre studies, early twentieth-century literacy practices, and colonial discourse by rereading this literature in light of the developments in literacy and history education in the late-Victorian era to determine how Edwardian and Georgian readers learned about imperial and civic responsibilities, specifically regarding India. I argue that the texts produced in the wake of the 1902-03 and 1911-12 Coronation Durbars took up the genre of the late-Victorian and Edwardian history lesson, encouraging readers to become well-read, well-informed 7 imperial citizens who understood how to protect the Empire. This project addresses the actions texts encouraged in the wake of the ceremonies, and it examines not the Durbars themselves, but what the texts that reported on and recorded Britain’s colonial presence did. Ultimately I argue that early twentieth-century colonial documents, both fictional and non-fictional, created new ways for Britons and Indians to learn about and read the empire.