1A brief, evanescent presence in the colonial archive reveals the complex interiority of imperial conquest. It lays bare an imperial subjection that operated outside of ‘two of the most rehearsed sites of European conquest [that were] the plantation and the jungle’ (Cheng 2010, 5). How can the scholar hope to address a specific epistemological, ontological and an insidious psychic conquest of personhood beyond a recourse to the language of imperial intimacies?
- 1 Coorg (or Kodagu) is an administrative district in the Karnataka state of India; it had been annex (...)
- 2 The queenly mythos of imperial care and maternal politics saw a recent resurgence after the death (...)
2In thinking with the titular ‘poor little princess’, and grieving with her absence, a third site of European conquest emerges, a peculiar one founded upon imperial care and rehabilitation: the Victorian court fashioned as a recursive colonial sanctuary saving colonial subjects from the colonies. The Victorian court, as an interior conquest site functioning within the architecture of intimacy and care, is distinct from the exterior/ized sites of the plantation and the jungle. From Simon Gikandi’s Slavery and the Culture of Taste, we know that despite the European metropolitan cities’ spatial distance from colonized, enslaved lands, their out-of-view imperial brutalities contributed to the making of European society, culture, aesthetics, and taste. Beyond Gikandi’s crucial linkage between European interiors and European conquest, the story of the eleven-year-old daughter of the deposed King of Coorg,1 who was brought to London by her father and baptised as a Christian goddaughter of Queen Victoria (1819–1901), presents a more immediate and direct connection pointing to a genealogy of maternal politics which this essay attempts to trace.2
- 3 Many scholars have variedly theorized imperial intimacies including Ann Laura Stoler (Carnal Knowl (...)
- 4 Henry James, in a letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., February 20, 1901. From Edel, Leon (Ed.). (...)
3Princess Victoria Gouramma (1841–1864) found herself in 1850s England, displaced from her homeland and culture, anglicized and Christianized, displayed as the glorious civilizing project of the Empire, and yet never becoming truly part of the Victorian Court. This peculiar scenario of an exteriorized subject circumstantially inhabiting the imperial interiors as an object of the Empire demands a careful negotiation with the imperial civilizational agenda but also of the contentious intimacies amongst the Empire and its colonies.3 The intimacy that interests me in this case is how Queen Victoria positioned herself as a para-maternal figure to the Indian princess, wielding a unique politics of care that was in part scaffolded by the maternal mythos created around her. After her death, Henry James, the American-British author, wrote in a letter: ‘I mourn the safe and motherly old middle-class queen, who held the nation warm under the fold of her big, hideous Scotch-plaid shawl’.4
- 5 Digitized by the Royal Archives, UK.
- 6 Worcestershire Chronicle, Wednesday, Sept. 9, 1857.
4Gouramma, a frequent mention in Queen Victoria’s journals5—which is revelatory of the value she held for the Queen—was referred to as a ‘poor little princess’ and was imagined to be needing rescue from her father, who was widely apprehended by the British public as a ‘hoary reprobate’ exhibiting ‘Asiatic prejudices’.6 The following is a discussion of one such effort to remove Gouramma from her father Chikka Virarajendra’s influence:
- 7 The text from Queen Victoria’s Journals has been copied verbatim including all punctuation and syn (...)
We have had a great deal of trouble about poor little Gouramma. The ex-Rajah strengthened I think by the intrigues of some Priests, who wished to get hold of the Child, has turned restive, pretending that Mrs Drummond (a particularly nice lady-like person, about my age) was not of sufficiently high rank to look after Gouramma, even threatening to punish the Child, if she did not say she did not wish to go to Mrs D. In her innocence & openness of character she told this to Mrs Drummond, who acquainted me today of the matter. I determined she should at once take Gouramma to her own house & asked Col: Phipps to communicate with Mr Herries, who sent for the Rajah, & a few hours afterwards we heard that he has surrendered his daughter to Mrs Drummond. (Queen Victoria’s Journals, 2nd July 1852, 300‒01)7
- 8 Almost all the mentions of Gouramma in Queen Victoria’s journals were prefixed with ‘poor little’.
- 9 ‘Poorness’, while perhaps a referent to the penniless former sovereign of Coorg, Gouramma’s father, (...)
5The affective entanglements of compassion, condescension, largesse, and ownership in this narrative reflect the complex interplay of imperial care and Gouramma’s subjection. For the Queen and the Court, Gouramma needs to be saved from her father’s influence—symbolic of the decadent, duplicitous, excessive colony that British India was orientalized as. Furthermore, the recurrence of the adjective ‘poor’ gestures toward the intertwined conditions of being oriental and being pitiful, and the fact that this adjective should be used recurrently throughout the life of Gouramma,8 even after she has been ‘assimilated’ into the British middle class, illustrates that the ‘poorness’9 of (former) colonial subjects is thought to be a perpetual condition by the imperial gaze, justifying the Empire’s violent ‘care-work’ towards them. In this more intimate setting of concern over and rehabilitation of Gouramma’s morality and character, there is a recursive logic at play, that of the Crown providing a ‘sanctuary’ from the conditions of terror and violence that it had precisely perpetuated in the colonies. Christina Sharpe’s identification of ‘monstrous intimacies’ bred in post-slavery metropolitan homes that at once obscure and perform violent subjection informs quite a bit of my thinking around the interplay of imperial subjecthood and subjection in Gouramma’s story.
- 10 Sarah Forbes Bonetta (1843‒1880), a Yoruba native enslaved by the Dahomey kingdom was presented as (...)
- 11 The last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, son of Ranjit Singh, who was exiled to Britain after his kin (...)
- 12 In his short life, Prince Albert (1858‒1862) was the crown prince of the Kingdom of Hawaii, and the (...)
- 13 Son of a Maori Ngapuhi couple, Albert (1863–unclear) was Queen Victoria’s godson.
- 14 As opposed to an absolute monarchy, a constitutional monarch is bound to wield power and authority (...)
6Queen Victoria’s adoptive coterie that inhabited this colonial sanctuary included other royal children and youth as well—Sarah Forbes Bonetta,10 Maharaja Duleep Singh,11 Prince Albert Kamehameha,12 and Albert Victor Pomare13—indicating that her sanctuary was an exclusive one, accessible to royals. Except in rare cases such as with Gouramma and Sarah, and more so with Duleep, where she was interpersonally invested, these godmotherly relationships were occasional and perfunctory (Caine 129). According to historian Priya Atwal, the Queen’s practice of welcoming ‘a range of foreign royal protégés into her courtly world [was] in order to demonstrate the inclusivity, benevolence and staying power of her own royal house’ (Atwal 15), perhaps to imagine a sanctuary for herself as well where she could rise above and circumvent the limiting role of a constitutional monarch.14
- 15 He later wrote Coorg and its Rajahs (1857) to draw public sympathy for Virarajendra’s case.
- 16 Despite the Charter Act of 1813 permitting Christian missionaries to propagate Christianity in Ind (...)
- 17 The Queen appointed three sets of guardians for Gouramma one after the other—the Drummonds, the Ha (...)
7This conditional sanctuary was imposed on Gouramma, as was her migration to England. Virarajendra, on the advice of his close friend, Dr. William Jeaffreson,15 had sought to sue the East India Company for withholding royal funds from him. As the case could only be registered in England, Gouramma was used as a pawn: she was offered to the Empire as a ward and a religious convert, a gesture which necessitated their travel to England. Most officers of the East India Company and the Crown were eager for an Indian royal to convert to Christianity in the hope that it would inspire other royals to do so.16 According to the recollections of Gouramma’s imperial guardians,17 any interest in and concern towards her native country and people were actively taught away: reportedly, by her teenage years, she could not speak her native language, Kannada, could not converse with her father, and exhibited indifference and disinterest in the affairs of her country. Admittedly, as a princess and a goddaughter of the Queen, Gouramma’s story does not speak for other migrants who inhabited a very different, much more fraught colonial experience. But precisely because of her privilege, her tragic life illuminates the further degrees and gradations of trauma lurking at the heart of colonial archives of displacement and diasporic experiences. Reading Gouramma as a migrant woman of color in England, both as a specific, singular iteration of displacement, and as representative of the larger colonial diaspora, reveals the ‘traumatic character of the “colonial experience”’ (Hall 112) that plays out in this case as an amnesia borne out of imperial care.
8Similarly, the violence of amnesia seeps into Gouramma’s archive itself, inhibiting her from having a full archival life. Gouramma’s own writing and correspondence do not survive; what remain are representations and reminiscences by imperialists. For Ann Laura Stoler, the colonial archive was founded and employed as ‘a supreme technology of the . . . imperial state, a repository of codified beliefs that clustered (and bore witness to) connections between secrecy, the law, and power’ (Stoler 97). In reading Gouramma through these colonial archives, I am wary of the postcolonial anxiety regarding the recovery of a subaltern subject from as problematic a site as the colonial archive. After all, the recovery impulse might itself be a repetition of the epistemic violence in the original act of obscuring her voice. Thus, I do not think of my project so much as an archival recovery, or a recovery history, but rather as a project of thinking with and thinking beyond the gaps in her archives, particularly homing in on the intimate politics of Queen Victoria’s colonial sanctuary. But where do we begin when much of what we have access to are part-mentions in mediated, incomplete, messy archives which often offer none of the subject’s voice and subjectivity? In the words of Hartman,
[i]s it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive? By advancing a series of speculative arguments and exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities) . . . [by performing] a critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history, I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling . . . [a story that strains] against the limits of the archive to write a cultural history of the captive, and, at the same time, enacting the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration. (Hartman 11)
9While invested in disrupting the conceptual limits and structure of genre, history, archive, and diaspora at large, Hartman remains wary of the delicate and amorphous boundary between critical fabulation and romantic fictionalization. She says, ‘I feared what I might invent, and it would have been a romance’ (Hartman 8). Undoubtedly, there is a tension between speculation and history-writing that is intertwined with the project of writing or recovering someone’s story without the voice of the subject, especially when it is a mediated, circuitous presence such as Gouramma’s. While Gouramma’s story is not an impossible one in the Hartmanian sense, it is an incomplete one—repressed, elusive, and oblique—and one that stages and disrupts the conditions of its historical, archival, and narrative possibility. Even as I try to disentangle Gouramma’s narrative from the amnesiac violence of the colonial sanctuary, it is in this very space, the purported refuge away from the ‘savage’ and ‘primitive’ colony of Gouramma’s past, that her material and ephemeral presence is articulated. To access, or rather to imagine, this oblique story, I entered the archives obliquely as well, reading and writing meaning into and across holes, elisions, marginalia, romance figurations, etc. The quest was for an 1850s royal court that enabled an emplacement of subjects that transgress the constitutive limits of colonial cartographic imaginations; an architectural subjunctive made real.
10Emerging from shadows, Gouramma’s picture below (Figure 1) presents a scene of oriental mystique—the lush carpet, the patterned curtains, the ottoman, the turbaned servers and attendants, and the Indian regalia of the Rajah—set in London just after their arrival; of course, she is still with her father and under his care at this point. While the rest of the company are engaged in the unfolding of the scene, Gouramma looks straight at the observer—be it the engraver, the audience, or us, centuries later—almost unfolding the seams of the frame and revealing the staged nature of the scene, of imperial care and the colonial sanctuary. But to the colonial gaze, her direct look was perhaps meant to communicate an intimate cry for help, an appeal for imperial rescue from her oriental origins.
Figure 1. ‘The Ex-Rajah of Coorg, and his Daughter the Princess Gouramma, and Suite’, The Illustrated London News, 17 July 1852.
© Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture Library.
- 18 Queen Victoria had suggested to the Marquis of Dalhousie, the Governor General of India, that some (...)
- 19 British newspapers of the period (1852‒58, after which mentions of Gouramma receded) extensively r (...)
11Queen Victoria became the Empress of India in 1876, but as historian Barbara Caine points out, she had always considered herself to be so (Caine 125‒43). Due to her monarchical rule being constrained in her own country, she looked outwards to ‘[her] vast Empire and all its peoples’ (Queen Victoria’s Journals, 1st January 1894) to gain a sense of power and entitlement. In the public actions of Queen Victoria adopting, baptizing, and giving her name or her husband’s name to colonial subjects, there emerges an imperial maternal politics, which had been a cause of worry and consternation to the Parliament and East India Company officials such as Lord Dalhousie.18 In my understanding, Queen Victoria drew the Empire inwards, into the heart of England and the royal court, in a micropolitical iteration of imperial conquest. Just as the imperial project was made intimate, the intimacies of the royal court were also circulated in the public imperial gaze via the newspapers and magazines of the time.19 This imperial maternity was not only commented on openly in newspapers, but it was also intimately noted. Lady Login recollects how she communicated the very trivial day-to-day affairs of and concerns with Gouramma, reflecting on the Queen’s care for her ward in the following manner:
The interest and the maternal care that Queen Victoria lavished upon her god-daughter . . . was remarkable, and it was marvelous how, amid all her cares and duties, she found the time to examine and comment on all the details sent at short intervals by her desire. (Login 156)
12In one of the Queen’s letters that Lady Login transcribes for her Recollections, the Queen writes, ‘The Queen begs that upon the first appearance of the formation of any mutual attachment between the Princess and any gentleman, you would communicate all particulars to Her Majesty, so that She might at once give Her opinion upon it’ (Login 155). This concern, intervention, and intrusion into Gouramma’s romantic behavior is akin to maternal care, a form of surveillance that was highly political and ambivalent.
13C. P. Belliappa’s dramatized history Victoria Gowramma: The Lost Princess of Coorg, offers some tantalizing glimpses of Gouramma’s romantic adventures and the Crown’s investment in them. During her wardship with the Drummonds (Major Robert Drummond and his wife), she was reportedly caught by the Major in flagrante delicto with a stable boy, and later with an under-butler named George Christmas when she was with the Harcourts (Colonel Vernon Harcourt and Lady Catherine Harcourt). While I have not yet found primary sources corroborating these incidents, there are certain clues in Lady Login’s Recollections possibly alluding to the events. Lady Lena Login took over Gouramma’s wardship presumably after the incident with the stable-boy, and she alludes to the circumstances leading to the Drummonds’ withdrawal of guardianship as follows:
although nearly seventeen years of age, [Gouramma] seemed still too backward and too childish to take an intelligent interest in general matters; and as there were indications that the native instinct for duplicity and intrigue were appearing in her character, it was not surprising that Mrs. Drummond expressed a desire to be relieved of a charge which was growing to be somewhat anxious and embarrassing. (Emphases mine, Login 151)
14As Gouramma was seventeen years by then, it would have been close to six years since her arrival in England, and yet we see in the quoted text above that suspicions of her ‘native instinct’ still simmered at the foundations of the imperial care extended to her.
- 20 A secluded interior part of a house reserved for the women of the family, usually only accessible (...)
15The passing of Gouramma’s wardship to the Logins (John Spencer Login and his wife) had another precedent. Around this time, the Queen and Prince Albert sought to establish a marriage between Gouramma and Maharaja Duleep Singh which was to be an inspiration for other members of the Indian royalty to convert to Christianity and to denounce their native culture, lifestyle, and legacy. As the Logins had been previously the guardians of Duleep Singh, their influence was deemed critical to the success of the match. However, Duleep Singh rejected the suit saying that Gouramma ‘was not calculated to make him happy, as he did not feel the confidence in her [as] he would in an English girl’ (Lady Login’s letter to the Queen on March 31st, 1859, quoted in Login 1916, 175). Gouramma was blamed for her coquettish behavior which had driven the Maharaja away, and Lady Login hoped that ‘the lesson might prove an effectual cure’ to her manner and disposition (Login 177). Sometime later, when the George Christmas affair came to light, Lady Login wrote: ‘my sympathy went out more to the ignorant child, rigorously punished for faults due to early upbringing in an Indian zenana, and not wisely corrected when first brought under the influence of Christian morality’ (Emphases mine, Login 190). Thus, the ‘oriental’ continued to be associated with primitivity, decadence, and ignorance, counterposed with Christian morality and English culture. Here, Lady Login also invokes the architecture of a zenana20—a spatial, moral, and cultural exterior to the Empire—as a source of Gouramma’s corrupted morality and unruly behavior, imagined against the moralizing interior world of the sanctuary that her home, or the Drummonds’, or the Harcourts’ had provided.
- 21 In this essay, I do not explore the racial aspects of Gouramma’s ‘passing’ in greater detail due t (...)
16Gouramma’s romantic dalliances performed through the interstices and slippages of the colonial sanctuary that she inhabited—a ‘container of fore-closed intimacies and barely suppressed violence’ otherwise (Rizzo 313)—bring to our attention another layer of negotiation in these intimacies, that of economy and class. With the positionality of these displaced subjects being recast in this new imperial formation, the possibilities of intimacy were also recalibrated. Whereas in Coorg, a romance with a stable boy or an under-butler might have been improbable for a princess, in Britain, the subaltern princess perhaps found a comforting familiarity and a self-identification with the under-class, a shared condition of being not-British or not-aristocratic enough, and of being supplemental to the imperial interior. Just as the stable-boy or the butler helped maintain the imperial splendor and architecture without inhabiting its interior lives, Gouramma too bolstered the civilizing project of the empire and enhanced its ornamentation, without ever really ‘passing’21 for white British gentry. By contrast, for Duleep Singh, a woman from his own country was not the limit of possibility to his desire; he now found himself aspiring to a marriage with an English girl, a marker of his assimilated status as a British royal. Thus, the desires that would have been impossible in India perhaps seemed accessible to Duleep in England and enabled Gouramma to seek out a subaltern alliance. And perhaps, in desiring the ‘other’, these narratives highlight the disruptions within Queen Victoria’s sanctuary, even as the ruptures are contained through archival violence and historical amnesia.
17Later, a match arranged by Duleep Singh between Gouramma and John Campbell, Lady Login’s brother, culminated in a marriage without the knowledge of the Logins. While Lady Login’s writing does not convey evident signs of animosity towards Gouramma, there does appear to be an undercurrent of distance and grievance: ‘It was pathetic, the eagerness with which poor Gouramma identified herself with her husband’s family’ (Login 191). Lady Login seems pitying, if not sarcastic, of Gouramma’s need for love and companionship. Was this ambivalence a consequence of the betrayal she might have felt? Or was it a matter of class and race—that notwithstanding Gouramma’s baptism and anglicization, she was nonetheless a ‘native’, perhaps considered worthy of marriage to an Indian prince in an imperial space, but not to be paired with her white upper-class British brother?
18The Queen’s care for Gouramma’s marriage was calculated to benefit herself and the Empire, particularly the Court, her interior empire. Gouramma was supposed to marry an Indian prince, Maharajah Duleep Singh, and serve as a symbol of and an invitation to the civilizing project of the Empire. However, Gouramma’s dalliances, protests and her eventual marriage to a white man thwarted the framework and the goal of the care extended to her, perhaps offering us a glimpse of her intimate rebellion to the Queen’s care-work conquest.
- 22 Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, Thursday, July 8, 1852.
- 23 From Issue 21157 of The Times (July 2nd, 1852): ‘Several gentlemen from the East, rich in barbaric (...)
19The precarious politics of the colonial sanctuary and imperial care are at once explicated, concealed, and complicated in visual representations of Gouramma. Consider the painting of Gouramma below (Figure 2) by Queen Victoria’s favorite artist, Franz Xaver Winterhalter, completed in the year of her public baptism ceremony at Buckingham Palace in 1852, when she was just eleven years of age. Gouramma is decked in jewels, necklaces, and bangles, an ornate headdress, and a resplendent sari bordered and patterned with golden embossments. The substantial headdress in the painting contains ‘the oriental . . . long black hair’.22 Perhaps, it also plays with the extremities of the colonial gaze—the primitive and uncontrolled versus the excessively covered and ornamental. The opulence of Indian royals was quite the subject of fascination and derision for the British—for example, Virarajendra’s public appearances in England were deemed ‘barbaric’ by news outlets in 1852. In one such report,23 a flattering term, ‘copper-hued’, is used to refer to Gouramma’s brown skin, as opposed to the ambivalent terms used for her father. While the riches of the East are called ‘barbaric’, the journalist’s use of scare quotes around the term ‘fashion’ merit deeper thought. Indeed, this report displays the interplay of an obsession with the East’s opulence and a derision of Eastern indolence that was often thought to be consequential of their wealth.
Figure 2. ‘Princess Gouramma (1841–1864) Signed and Dated 1852’, Oil on Canvas, Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805–73), 1852.
Royal Collection trust/ © His Majesty King Charles III 2022.
- 24 The vaddanam is a gilded belt that is tied around the waist by women, especially in South India, w (...)
- 25 Shiva is a major god of the Hindu pantheon of deities. An ascetic dancer and yogi, he is considere (...)
- 26 ‘Victoria was the name given to her. When we had gave [sic] to the Drawingroom below stairs, I gav (...)
20In Winterhalter’s painting, what would perhaps have been a ‘barbaric’ display of Gouramma’s oriental heritage seems to be tightly contained by the gilded vaddanam,24 still oriental, still exotic, but also made obedient and amenable. Thus, the vaddanam tied around Gouramma’s waist seems to take on a new sartorial meaning in this portrait, recast in colonial vocabulary as the subject herself. And is the bronze (or gold) thick band around her neck a part of her jeweled repertoire or is it an identificatory mark of her colonial subjection, reminiscent as it is of the slave collar? Most significantly, notice that she rests in this almost dismissive stance against a shrouded replica of a temple harboring at least two idols of Hindu gods, one of which seems to be that of Shiva25 with the matted hair and the yogic posture. The official attributions by the Royal Collection Trust of this painting refer to this structure as an ‘Indian table’, a description perhaps borne out of a taxonomic impulse to make the unknown accessible. With her other hand, Gouramma conspicuously holds the Bible, representative of the one that was gifted to her by the Queen on her baptism.26 Set off against a scenic, idyllic backdrop, her presence seems to be an invitation to this exclusive, conditional sanctuary, the microcosmic Empire; of course, this invitation was not indiscriminate as it was specifically aimed at Indian royals.
21According to the Leeds Intelligencer (12th September 1857), ‘The portrait represents a mild and pleasant countenance, with a somewhat stiff and inanimate figure, and strikes us as being more remarkable for its Winterhalter style, than for traits of the individual character of its subject’ (emphases mine). It is quite telling that the stiffness and inanimate depiction of the subject are not attributed to a lack in the painter’s skill but rather a lack in the subject herself. At play in this sentiment is a powerful unmaking of a person; Gouramma’s object-ness is imagined as so self-evident that it infiltrates the frame of a portrait despite the painter’s assumed attempt to render her a subject. Here, it is not so much the case of turning a person into an object, but that the objecthood preconditions the human figure. While Ann Cheng’s visual and conceptual focus is East Asian femininity, her positioning of orientalized femininity, against primitivism, as reliant on the ‘spectacularization not of naked skin but of ornament’ (Cheng 2018, 69), prompts a reconsideration of how Gouramma’s body is articulated in the painting. Within this framework, the sedimented South Indian ‘native’ heritage of the radiant clothing and the gilded jewelry is ‘encrusted’ with an imperial decorative grammar that reframes her embodiment as an imperial ornament. Is Gouramma the subject of the portrait putting on the jewels, the ornaments, and articulating the sartorial meanings, or is she yet another object in the frame through which the imperial sanctuary-making is being articulated?
22Art historian Lynda Nead deems Winterhalter a ‘court jeweler, decorating and enhancing the glamour and power of the courts of Europe’ (Nead 504). The fact that Gouramma’s portrait, along with paintings of other Indian subjects, grace the Durbar Corridor of Osborne House, the royal summer home, perhaps intimate that Queen Victoria had a similar request of Winterhalter, to present her ‘empire’ as glamorous, benevolent, and far-reaching, but also as a site where she exuded control and power. Her emphatic illustrations of her power might have stemmed from what David Cannadine has argued was characteristic of Victoria’s reign: that it was considered ornamental and feminized, and that the Raj, her crowning jewel, specifically came to be seen as the vital component in this perception (Cannadine 229‒32).
23We see Winterhalter in action as a ‘court jeweler’ in Figs. 3 and 4 which show portraits of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria and of Leonilla Bariatinskaya, the Russian Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, that he painted in 1865 and 1843 respectively. Elisabeth is painted onto a landscape as Gouramma is, although instead of a scene of containment, hers is a dreamscape of ‘floating, ethereal mists of chiffon and tulle’, which articulates ‘something much more concrete and substantial; like the steel hoops of the crinoline itself, the economic and political power of European monarchy and empire is what supports the dreamlike layers of expensive fabric’ (Nead 504). Leonilla exhibits a languid posture in a setting that seems oddly oriental—the warm, bright colors, the abundance of cloth and covering, the harem-like aesthetics, the exotic tropical landscape in the background, and even Leonilla’s posture which is reminiscent of a zenana scene—but it is still made an imperial site by the definitive placement of a European aristocrat whose casual toying of the pearls around her neck gestures towards imperial wealth and comfort. The objects in the scene—the pearls, the ottoman, the red curtains, and the scene itself—add to her sensuality, a sensuality again expressed through material referents and residues of the colonial Empire.
Figure 3. ‘Empress Elisabeth of Austria’, Oil on canvas, Franz Xaver Winterhalter. Vienna: The Hofburg.
Wikiart.
Figure 4. ‘Portrait of Leonilla, Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn’, 1843, Oil on Canvas, Franz Xaver Winterhalter.
J. Paul Getty Museum.
24Thus, the celebrity and glamour of Winterhalter’s royal ladies—be it Elisabeth, Leonilla, or Gouramma—buttresses narratives of the empire across Europe. However, for the woman of color, as Cheng points out, glamour was a ‘pragmatic instantiation of the dilemma between violence and aesthetics’ (Cheng 2018, 64), a dilemma rendered visible in Gouramma’s abject object-ness that lays bare the ‘annihilating gestures’ (Cheng 2018, 105)—by the imperial ‘mother’ Queen, the painter, the writer, the archivist—that make up personhood. In Gouramma’s narrative, there are two acts of violence—one that transforms her into an orientalized object, and another that, under the guise of care-work, attempts to remake her into a derived and detracted version of imperial personhood. Although, the imperial posturing of/ by colonial subjects was a matter of public ridicule, images of colonial subjects ‘going British’ became increasingly popular in the nineteenth century.
25In the painting of Maharaja Duleep Singh by Winterhalter (Figure 5), the 16-year-old Prince, another inhabitant of Queen Victoria’s sanctuary, stands in a regal stride before an imaginary Punjab; his stance masks his deposed status as a ward of Britain who surrendered his family’s Koh-i-noor diamond to Queen Victoria. Considering this context, the sword that is symbolic of virility and the honor of a warrior, gains a new meaning of ‘impotence . . . further undermined by the pendant with an image of Queen Victoria around his neck’ (Codell 504). Thus, both Codell and Gail Ching-Liang Low find a crucial asymmetry between the colonized ‘going British’ and the colonizers ‘going native’. While imperial cross-dressing was an act mired in the pleasure of display of power, a voyeuristic eroticism, and a fetishized fantasy of clothes, the colonial subjects’ posturing was perceived as mere mimicry (Codell 513) and widely mocked. However, I would contend that these practices of mimicry reveal deeper entanglements of fantasy, fetish, power, and anxiety, also at stake in the making and inhabiting of the colonial sanctuary. Mimicry could also be threatening to the imperial imagination.
Figure 5. ‘The Maharaja Duleep Singh (1838–93) Signed and Dated 1854’, Oil on Canvas, Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1854.
Royal Collection trust/ © His Majesty King Charles III 2022.
26For Homi Bhabha, the menace of mimicry resides in the ‘partial’ presence of the colonial subject in the discursive process of mimicry and mockery; that is, the ‘colonial’ is dependent upon ‘some strategic limitation or prohibition within the discourse’ and on a ‘proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its . . . failure’ (Bhabha 127). Despite the lack of control over how these ‘going British’ images of colonial subjects were painted, staged, circulated, and received—Duleep Singh’s images had warranted many stereotypical parodies in newspapers and magazines of the time—they also reflected an anxiety of oriental allure and threat. Duleep Singh indeed wears the image of the Queen around his neck and the sword probably invokes a land and a dynasty that are not his anymore, but the rest of his regal paraphernalia—from the bejeweled turban, the gilded sash around his body, to his golden jutis, all inappropriate objects, in that they are not imperial objects—visually overwhelms the authoritative colonial discourse contained in the pendant. Later parodies and mockery of this image then could also be analyzed as reflective of an effort to demean the uncontrollable, inappropriate oriental quality that had impeded the purpose of the original mimicry.
27Thinking back to Gouramma’s portrait, it seems that despite the excessive effort of shrouding the Hindu idols from the colonial eye, they do remain hyper-visible, peeping from under the green cloth. The landscape behind Gouramma, unlike Leonilla’s or Elisabeth’s backgrounds, is cloaked by an ominous darkness and a shadow infiltrates her lower body. Are these visual effects symptomatic of an anxiety of nativity, of the Europeans’ own fascination with the fantasy of the East? Are these effects symptomatic of a fear that, in the attempts to violently (and partially) remake the colonial subjects in their image, it is themselves that might be drawn into ‘going native’, themselves being remade? And finally, perhaps the self-evident object-ness of Gouramma (which made her opaque, incomprehensible, to the painter, unlike his other subjects) is itself an inappropriate object that had proliferated and burst through the seams of the painting overcoming even the will and the skill of the painter.
Figures 6 and 7. ‘Princess Gouramma of Coorg c. 1852–6’, Marble, painted in watercolor, gilded, Baron Carlo Marochetti (1805–67).
Royal Collection trust/ © His Majesty King Charles III 2022.
Figures 8 and 9.‘Princess Victoria Gouramma of Coorg 1841-64’, Albumen prints, Nov. 1854, Roger Fenton (1816–69).
Royal Collection trust/ © His Majesty King Charles III 2022.
- 27 In these photographs, Gouramma is wearing black ribboned bands on her wrists which could be mourni (...)
28Later visual representations of Gouramma show us the gradual assimilation of her body and presence into imperial personhood, her inappropriateness ‘cared’ away as she begins to resemble a member of the British middle class. The images above (Figures 6 and 7) are of Gouramma’s statue made by the French sculptor Baron Carlo Marochetti, sometime between 1852 and 1855, commissioned by the Queen as a gift for Prince Albert in 1855. Gouramma is wearing a sari, yet a much simpler one when compared to the earlier painting; her hair is tightly bound in a single plait, and she dons a minimal gilded hair band which seems to be a string of multiple crosses and there is also the more conspicuous Christian cross worn as a locket. In the photographs (Figures 8 and 9), we see Gouramma in a crinoline gown and a pared down hairstyle, a far cry from the glorious outfit of Winterhalter’s painting, with just her brown skin standing out as a reminder of her racial otherness. Most evocative to me is the part-sorrow27 part-defiance I spy in her expression—an unidentifiable opacity—that enables us, or rather compels us, from centuries apart to contend with an intractable presence in Queen Victoria’s court.
29The foundational principles of the colonial sanctuary at Queen Victoria’s court for the deposed Indian wards emerged in opposition, or at least as divergent, to the image of colonial India as circulated in the colonial gaze and for colonial consumption. In their recent study of photography in India, Nathaniel Gaskell and Divya Gujral contend that for the British stationed in India, ‘the camera provided the opportunity to catalogue, arrange and render legible a once-alien land and people—to domesticate on the printed page a once-inexplicable and unpredictable colony’ (Gaskell and Gujral 20). The images collated in their book vividly depict the colonial anxieties about the colony’s landscape. In the attempts of the British photographers to domesticate the alien landscape, I also see the unfolding of the menace that is contained in mimicry. For instance, in the 1860 photograph of the Taj Mahal (Figure 10), we are presented with mirror-worlds—a Taj Mahal of the past, pristine, immaculate, glorious, and the architectural ruins in the foreground, broken, discolored, and covered in moss and mold. Like all images under study, these visuals are sites of duality, sites of a dialogue between mimesis and alterity. On one hand, to the colonial gaze this is a representation of a crumbling empire of the past, and yet there is the menace of the grand Taj Mahal commanding the eye to the enduring legacy of the colony.
Figure 10. ‘Taj Mahal from the East, with John Murray seated in the foreground’
Albumen print from waxed paper negative, John Murray, 1858–62, printed 2000.
The Clark Art Institute, 2000.14.1.
- 28 Following Christopher Pinney’s corpothetics—‘the sensory embrace of images, the bodily engagement (...)
30The domesticating of the landscape is more vivid in the next photograph (Figure 11) of a lady seated in a Kolkata landscape. According to Gaskell and Gujral, ‘to see Bourne’s photograph of his wife, Mary, at Barrackpore Park is to witness the act of re-framing a foreign land for oneself and one’s own’ (Gaskell and Gujral 61), an attempt to tame the foreign landscape by recasting it in the known image of an English countryside. Despite the rigid British template of image-making,28 the photograph ‘serves as [a] curious space of reconciliation and resistance, where the Indian countryside may not always adhere to the standards that are applied to it’ (Gaskell and Gujral 61). The colonial sanctuary is premised upon similar practices of sanitizing, civilizing, and containment of this excessive yet crumbling, exotic yet ruined, and resolutely opaque landscape of the colony. The material space of the court, the aesthetic imposition of anglicization, the moral demand of Christianity, and the colonial gaze embedded in ‘going British’ mimicry define the contours of the architecture of the sanctuary and of the imperial care that was directed at Gouramma’s education and wardship. Gouramma, as a carefully constructed ornament—another crowning jewel in the making—reveals both the imperialist grammar of personhood at play and the fissures in that project.
Figure 11. ‘Gothic ruin with creepers in Barrackpore Park’, Calcutta, Photographic print, 1865, Samuel Bourne.
© British Library Board Photo 29/ (53) 2953.
31Colonial conquest and decolonial/ postcolonial protest and dissent are usually envisioned as macro-sites of socio-political impact. And indeed, they were, and continue to be, enacted and rehearsed in and through an enormous scale of global networks of consciousness and praxis. However, what this story reminds us of is the political potential of micro-sites of conquest and protest. The space of the colonial pictorial frames, as analyzed by many historians of photography and colonialism—including Robert J. C. Young—is both a site of conquest, in that it contains and remakes Gouramma, and a site of protest, in that her intractable object-ness breaks through and upends the colonial gaze. More significantly, Queen Victoria’s royal court is another potent micro-site—a miniature empire in relation to the macro-Empire—staging an intimate imperial conquest. In defining the court as a miniature empire, I am thinking about Susan Stewart’s theorization of the miniature as a ‘center within center, within within within’ (Stewart 61): the miniature harbors the capacity to mimic the macro, to enclose it and perhaps even to remake its machinery and mechanics, of violence in this case.
Figure 12. ‘The Accession of the Queen of India’, Punch, or the London Charivari, September 11, 1858.
© Punch Cartoon Library/TopFoto.
32The treacherous mirror to imperial care—of debt and servitude—is glaringly clear in an illustration sketched after the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 (Figure 12), and published in Punch, or the London Charivari, a British weekly magazine of humor and satire popular in the 1850s. The depicted scene stages the Queen as regal and serene, forgiving an Indian woman, who is seated in supplication and apology at her feet in the royal court. It is interesting that while the Mutiny was driven by Indian soldiers against their British officers, the supplicant here is a woman, perhaps signalling the feminized nature of the Queen’s control and power. The Queen, the judge, is standing above the colonized individual in a position of power and entitlement, and the female wrongdoer, is holding up her right hand in a gesture to protect herself from the threat of the staff. Is this a rehearsal of a scene between a master and slave or an overseer and a laborer in the plantation or a jungle? Is this a collision of the exterior sites of imperial conquest—the plantation and the jungle—with the interior site, Queen Victoria’s miniature empire?
- 29 In a second part of this project, I hope to explore potential scenes of intimate protest—by Gouram (...)
33When Gouramma died in 1864 at the age of twenty-three leaving behind her husband and a daughter, the Queen wrote to Lady Login to express her hope that ‘the poor little princess’ grave be marked by a suitable memorial’ such that ‘the fact of [me] having been godmother to the poor Indian child may not be forgotten’ (Login 193). For the colonial archive, Gouramma remained a ‘poor little princess’ throughout her short life marked by an intimately violent passing in and out of mediated historical record, a symbol of imperial care.29