Queen Victoria, M. M. Bhownaggree, and the “Gujaratee-Speaking Community of India”

Abstract

This essay examines an 1877 Gujarati translation of Queen Victoria's Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. It was the work of M. M. Bhownaggree, later a British MP. The essay explores the circumstances under which Bhownaggree undertook the translation, its content, and its intended audience. It closes with some observations on the book's place in the history of Indian royalism, the place of Indian royalism in the development of modern Gujarati literature, and the interplay of the Gujarati identity that was emerging in the latter part of the nineteenth century with both royalism and Indian nationalism.

In 1877 the Education Society's Press in Bombay published a 335-page volume.¹ It would probably be forgotten today except for its connection with Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree, who in 1895 became the second Indian elected to the British Parliament.² But perhaps more importantly, it is also a fascinating example of the representation of Queen Victoria in South Asian languages, as it is Bhownaggree's translation into Gujarati of Queen Victoria's Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands (1868). This article reintroduces the translation, almost 150 years after it was published. It begins with a brief sketch of Bhownaggree's life and then explores the circumstances under which he translated the queen's book. An overview of the translation's contents is followed by suggestions as to Bhownaggree's intended audience. The article closes with some observations on the book's place in the history of Indian royalism, the place of Indian royalism in the development of modern Gujarati literature, and the interplay between the Gujarati identity that was emerging in the latter part of the nineteenth century and both royalism and Indian nationalism.

1. Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree

Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree was born in Bombay in 1851.³ His father, Merwanjee, was a newspaper proprietor, industrialist, banker, and merchant. Like much of colonial Bombay's Indian elite, the Bhownaggrees were Parsis, or Indian Zoroastrians.⁴ Bhownaggree was educated at Elphinstone College at the University of Bombay. During the 1870s and 1880s, he was a typical wealthy young member of Bombay's elite. He was a fixture in high society, rubbing shoulders with British government officials, Indian businessmen, and the city's emerging professional class. He served as the Bombay representative of the prince of the autonomous state of Bhavnagar, his ancestral home (and the source of his surname). He was a strong advocate of female education and served as the secretary of a girls’ school in Bombay.

In 1885 he qualified as a barrister in London and then took up a senior position in the Bhavnagar state government. However, the death of his beloved sister in 1888, and a protracted legal battle with a scurrilous newspaper, impelled him to pay two extended visits to Britain between 1891 and 1894.⁵ While there, he associated with his fellow Parsi Dadabhai Naoroji, who in 1892 became the first Indian elected to Parliament. Bhownaggree resolved to follow suit, and in 1895 he too was elected to Parliament, from a working-class London constituency that apparently had no Indian residents—although whereas Naoroji sat as a Liberal, Bhownaggree was a Conservative. Bhownaggree was a hardworking and popular member of Parliament, and was reelected in 1900. Although his political opponents caricatured him as a puppet of British colonialism in India, he was in fact a staunch opponent of the misuse of Indian tax revenues and a champion of Indian rights in the British Empire (he was the future Mahatma Gandhi's principal contact in London during the latter's campaigns on behalf of Indians in South Africa). After losing his parliamentary seat in 1906, Bhownaggree advised the British government on matters affecting India, hosted Indian visitors to Britain, and served as the leader of the Parsi community in the United Kingdom. He died in London in 1933.⁶

Throughout his life, Bhownaggree was a prolific writer. Almost all his published work was in English, from a history of the governing structures of the East India Company that was published when he was twenty years old, to articles on Indian topics in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The translation of Queen Victoria's journal was his only literary production in his mother tongue, Gujarati.

2. The Queen's Journal

From girlhood, Queen Victoria kept a daily journal of her life, recording everything from discussions with politicians to mundane domestic details. In 1865, doubtless as a source of comfort in the wake of the death of her husband, Prince Albert, four years earlier, she had extracts from her journal printed for circulation among her family and friends. The extracts dealt with the nonpolitical daily routine at Balmoral, the castle in the Highlands of Scotland that she and the prince had leased since 1848. Sir Arthur Helps, who had edited a collection of Prince Albert's speeches, urged the queen to publish the selections commercially. The resulting book, Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, was released in 1868. It became a national bestseller. Leaves made no pretensions to being literature, but it is redeemed by the interest that it still has as an intimate portrait of royalty. By showing the queen as a wife and mother with normal human emotions, it also helped counteract some of the unpopularity generated by her seclusion since Albert's death.⁷

Whether as literary exercises, gestures of loyalty, or both, some of the queen's subjects translated Leaves into their own languages. In the United Kingdom, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic editions appeared.⁸ John Wilson, former vice-chancellor of the University of Bombay, wanted to see translations into various Indian languages.⁹ In 1871 a Ganpatrao Moroba Pitale published a Marathi edition, with the patronage of the government of Bombay and dedicated to the queen's second son, the duke of Edinburgh, who the previous year had visited India.¹⁰ Four years later, the maharaja of Benares, a leading nobleman in what is now Uttar Pradesh, published a Hindi translation.¹¹ Around 1874, Wilson suggested that Bhownaggree undertake the Gujarati translation.¹²

Wilson and Bhownaggree traveled in the same circles in Bombay. Still, it is not known why Wilson went to Bhownaggree, a man then in his early twenties who had never taken his university degree, rather than to a more established Gujarati-speaking literary man. Such men did exist, and K. M. Jhaveri has noted the role played in the birth of modern Gujarati literature by translations of English classics into Gujarati.¹³ At any rate, Bhownaggree accepted Wilson's suggestion. There is no reason to think that he was influenced by either coercion or money. Rather, he probably welcomed the opportunity of demonstrating his royalist views to the colonial authorities and of publishing a second book. He received assistance from both Wilson and Pitale. By November 1875 Bhownaggree had found a publisher, the Education Society's Press in Bombay (which had also published Pitale's Marathi translation), and he had already delivered a portion of the completed copy. He now solicited permission to dedicate the translation to the queen's eldest son, the prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII), who was then in India. The prince assented, which was a step up from Pitale's dedication to the duke of Edinburgh, and something of a coup for Bhownaggree.¹⁴

The translation was finished by October 1876.¹⁵ A further piece of serendipity now came Bhownaggree's way. In 1876 Parliament added the designation “Empress of India” to the queen's titles.¹⁶ It was decided to mark the assumption of the new title with a spectacular (if somewhat bizarre) ceremony at Delhi, the capital of the old Mughal emperors, where on January 1, 1877, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, would officially proclaim the new empress at an assemblage of princes and other notables.¹⁷ Bhownaggree was among the attendees.¹⁸ He and his publisher decided to set the book's official release for the day of the assemblage (although it actually only became available three weeks later, on January 22).¹⁹ This was apparently a last-minute decision. The book's Gujarati and English prefaces (dated December 24 and 23, 1876, respectively) mention the publication on the day of the proclamation of the new title, but Bhownaggree did not even know the official translation of “Empress of India”—he wrote of Hindusthānnī Śahānśāhjhādīno elkāb, “the title of Imperial Princess of Hindustan,” rather than the correct Kaisare Hind.²⁰ On the title page, Victoria is simply styled Mahārāṇī, “great queen,” with no sign of her imperial title.

3. The Book

The book, entitled Skǒṭlanḍnā Pahāḍī Mulakmāṁ Karelā Pravāsonuṁ Varṇan, “description of stays made in the mountainous region of Scotland,” is crown octavo (7½ by 5 inches) in size, bound in blue leather, with the badge of the prince of Wales stamped in gold on the front. The edges of the leaves are gilt, and the paper is of high quality. The price was a fairly steep six rupees.²¹ The front matter—title page, dedication to the prince of Wales, translator's preface, and acknowledgments—is in both Gujarati and English.²² The two versions are generally close to one another, with occasional differences. For example, the English speaks of the translation “preserving the spirit of the royal work as much as the Gujarati language permits.” Not surprisingly, the implied limitations of Gujarati are not mentioned in the Gujarati version.²³

In his preface, Bhownaggree explained why reading the queen's journal would be especially beneficial to Indians:

in a country like this, where people in the higher and the lower grades of society are so often estranged from one another . . . ;—in such a country, those noble examples which are to be met with so often in these pages, of the deep and abiding interest felt by the Sovereign for the welfare of her subjects and of her gracious recognition of the loyal attachment and attentions offered to her, are so many salutary lessons deserving of very careful study by both its princes and people.²⁴

After the front matter comes Bhownaggree's translation of the original editor's preface by Sir Arthur Helps, which he does not give in its English version.²⁵

The translation itself runs to 299 pages. Most of it is a straightforward rendition of the original, with occasional elaborations to help readers who are less familiar with phrases or terms that a British reader would instantly understand. Thus, the very first sentence of the English original opens: “At five o'clock in the morning we left Windsor for the railroad.”²⁶ Bhownaggree's Gujarati translation expands “Windsor” to “our royal palace Windsor Castle.”²⁷

The English original includes some explanatory footnotes, usually to identify the queen's attendants or obscure places in Scotland. Bhownaggree added many further annotations to his translation, “With the object of making explicit to Gujaratee readers references contained in the original work to places, customs, &c., which may necessarily be strange to them.”²⁸ For example, to the first mention of Scottish Highlanders is appended a footnote whose explanations of the clan system and Highland dress make a fascinating counterpart to Orientalist depictions of Indian communities:

The people living in the mountainous part of the country of Scotland or the Highlands are known by the name of Highlander. Most of them are considered brave by nature and of a happy and witty temperament. Groups of them form bands and in earlier times lived under the command of their nobleman or chief and fought against one another. Nowadays in this time of peace the need to fight certainly does not arise, but there are still different bands among them, and this is clearly shown by their costumes of various colors; in the picture beside this is the distinctive clothing whose colors distinguish men of the different bands. From this picture the strange fanciful style of the garment may be seen. On the upper part before the chest is that distinctive piece of clothing which they call their “plaid,” and below a type of skirt. It is a cloth, the name of which is “kilt.” In the time of the rebellion [of 1857] some of their troops came to this country, and seeing their skirts the people here called them by the name of “the Skirt Regiment” from their costume. This costume meets with the high approval of the celebrated Maharani, and mentions of it will often be seen in the remainder of this book.²⁹

Other annotations are of a historical nature. For example, a note on the queen's account of the arrival of the news of the fall of Sevastopol in 1855 describes both the Crimean War and the battle of Sevastopol: “The Crimean War, which was waged by the English and French armies against the Russians in 1854–55, and in which the Russians were heavily defeated. In this war, the Russians’ artillery and navy were in the harbor of Sevastopol, and all fell into the hand of the enemy.”³⁰

4. The Audience

In his request for permission to dedicate the book to the prince of Wales, Bhownaggree sought to justify his translation:

A general desire on the part of the Gujaratee-speaking community of India having been expressed for a translation into the Gujaratee language of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen's work “Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands,” I have undertaken to publish such translation.³¹

It is impossible to determine whether this “general desire” actually existed, and the suggestion that there was one may or may not run counter to Bhownaggree's assertion that John Wilson approached him to write the translation to help fulfill a dream of having the work put into various Indian languages. However, it appears that Bhownaggree intended to reach a particular Gujarati-speaking audience. The translation is in the sanskritized formal literary Gujarati that developed in the nineteenth century (indeed, two of the words in the title are Tatsam, nineteenth-century borrowings into Gujarati from Sanskrit: pravās, “stay,” and varṇan, “description”). This is perhaps surprising. Riho Isaka has suggested that the new literary Gujarati represented an attempt by Gujarati Hindu literati to marginalize Parsis, who had initially dominated modern education among Gujarati speakers.³² Moreover, Bhownaggree was an educated Bombay Parsi, and one might have expected to him use “Parsi Gujarati,” an anglicized written Gujarati that was used by westernized Gujarati-speakers of Bombay, mainly though not exclusively Parsis.³³

Be that as it may, Bhownaggree's choice of dialect was not intended to let his book reach the largest possible audience: uneducated Gujaratis would have had difficulty understanding literary Gujarati. Rather, his purpose was most likely to create something that could be read by any educated Gujarati who enjoyed the new literature in his language. At the same time, apparently, he was actually aiming primarily at two specific (and small) groups of Gujaratis. One of them he explicitly identifies several times, and both of them immediately become obvious when one looks at the identities of the subscribers who agreed to buy the book before it was published. The list shows that 490 copies of the book were sold in advance.³⁴ Sixty-eight went to a miscellany of twenty-one subscribers. Although the work did not receive sponsorship from the governments of India or Bombay, the viceroy of India and the governor of Bombay both ordered copies. So did two British members of the Bombay Executive Council (the provincial executive) and two Hindu members of the Legislative Council (the legislature); four Britons of the Bombay Civil Service; Robert Knight, who had been Bhownaggree's editor during a brief journalistic career; Ganpatrao Pitale, the translator of the Marathi edition of the queen's journal; the Iranian consul-general in Bombay (at this time, Bombay's Parsis were reestablishing ties with Iran, their ancestral homeland); and two of the city's libraries.³⁵

The subscribers to the remaining 422 advance copies all fall into the two groups: Gujarati princes and Bhownaggree's fellow Parsis. There were more princely states in Gujarat than in any other part of India, and in his request for the prince of Wales's patronage, Bhownaggree was explicit in his belief that the princes of Gujarat would benefit from reading the queen's book:

the examples of the habitual kindness and regard which her Majesty the Queen is known to evince towards all classes of her subjects, which could be gleaned from the pages of the work, cannot fail to impress upon the minds of the native princes of India many a salutary and much needed lesson.³⁶

At first glance, Bhownaggree seems to have had impressive success, in that 276 of the subscribed copies went to princely Gujarat. Things are not as they seem, however. Two hundred of the copies went to the prince of Bhavnagar and the two officials who were conducting the state administration during his minority. This is not surprising: Bhownaggree's ancestors came from Bhavnagar, and in 1877 he was serving as the prince's representative in Bombay. The governments of the Gujarati principalities of Kutch, Wadhwan, and Morvi, all of them administered on behalf of minor rulers by Britons or by Indian officials under British supervision, took a further fifty-three copies.

Another eleven books went to the Rajkumar College, a school for princes in Gujarat. The college itself took one copy, as did its principal Chester Macnaghten, and nine princely students took one copy apiece. Bapu Mian, a member of the ruling family of Junagadh, took five copies; and four other princely governments took a total of seven.³⁷

Finally, there is Bhownaggree's own Parsi community, which took 146 books.³⁸ Again, appearances are slightly misleading. Sir Cowasjee Jehangeer Readymoney, the greatest Parsi philanthropist of the day, took one hundred copies. Another five apiece went to Manockjee Cursetjee, founder of the girls’ school where Bhownaggree served as secretary; Byramjee Jejeebhoy, who was presumably connected with the family of Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, the wealthy leader of the Parsi community of Bombay; and Sorabjee Shapoorjee Bengallee, a philanthropist and member of the Legislative Council. Of the remaining thirty-one, three were taken by a Khan Bahadur Pudumjee Pestonjee of Pune, and two by a Dadabhoy Rustomjee Banajee. Twenty-six Parsis bought one copy apiece. Most of them were men who enjoyed some distinction in their own day but have been forgotten now.

Bhownaggree also hoped that the Educational Department of the government of Bombay would subscribe to his book, as it had done with Pitale's Marathi translation. Unfortunately, the government refused to buy any copies until the work had actually come out (although Charles Gonne, the secretary to the Educational Department, personally subscribed to five advance copies).³⁹ It is not clear why this was. There may have been doubts that the project would come to fruition. It may also be relevant that four years before the publication of the translation, Bhownaggree's involvement with the girls’ school led to an unpleasant clash with Kyrle Mitford Chatfield, a senior official in the Educational Department. After reviewing the published book, the department agreed to buy fifty copies, one for the government library, one for the department's office, and the remainder for distribution “to Gujerathi registered Libraries and Schools.” Bhownaggree happily sent the books, although the department insisted on a 10 percent discount (reducing the cost of the fifty books from 300 rupees to 270) and then delayed payment for several months.⁴⁰

It is unknown how many copies of the book were published, let alone how many were purchased. Print runs of the day were often small, and books might sell surprisingly slowly. For example, Hobson-Jobson, the still-popular dictionary of Indian English, was first published in 1886 in an edition of one thousand copies that did not sell out until 1899.⁴¹ It seems unlikely that the print run for Bhownaggree's translation was any larger, which means that the majority of copies went to either advance subscribers or the Educational Department. Bhownaggree of course received his author's copies, which in subsequent years he distributed to friends.

5. Indians and the British Crown

However widely it may have been read, Bhownaggree's translation of the queen's journal adds some nuances to our understanding of colonial India. Jonathan Schneer, one of the few historians to have paid attention to Bhownaggree, depicts the translation as one among many illustrations of the future MP's craven obsequiousness to the British rulers of India, and an indication of how far out of touch with mainstream Indian thought he was.⁴² However, in reality, whatever they might think or say about the actions of British politicians and administrators in India, educated Indians in the 1870s (and indeed long after) were almost unanimous in proclaiming, and often genuinely feeling, loyalty to the British Crown.⁴³ Miles Taylor and Milinda Banerjee have noted that many Indians (even radical nationalist leaders) saw the queen and other members of the royal family as the best guarantors of rights that were all too often overridden by officials in India.⁴⁴

Similarly, texts praising British monarchs are integral to the history of literature in many Indian languages, including Gujarati. Muncherjee Cawasjee, a Parsi poet who wrote under the pen name Mansukh, was the author of Nāmdār Mahārāṇī Vikṭorīyānā marhām bharthār Parīns Ālbarṭne Lagto Hevāl (Account Concerning the Famous Maharani Victoria's Late Husband Prince Albert), a lengthy poem that both recounted the life of the prince consort and repeated useful words of advice he had given his son, the prince of Wales.⁴⁵ Half a century later, Nanalal Dalpatram, also a poet, published Rāj Rājendrane, “To the King-Emperor,” a Gujarati ode celebrating the proclamation of King George V and Queen Mary as emperor and empress of India in 1911.⁴⁶ In 1884 the queen published a sequel to her journal, which a Parsi woman named Putlibai Dosabhai Jamshedji Wadia translated into Gujarati.⁴⁷ In 1897 another Parsi woman, Sunabai Dinshah Taleyarkhan, translated into Gujarati a biography of Queen Victoria's second daughter, Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse (the grandmother of Lord Mountbatten of Burma, the last viceroy of India).⁴⁸

Moreover, according to stereotype, Indian princes and Parsis, the two groups to whom Bhownaggree apparently particularly directed the book, were passionately devoted to the British monarch. Whatever their private views, princes were effusive in expressions of loyalty to Queen Victoria and her family. The works of Bernard Cohn and David Cannadine, although very different from one another, have demonstrated that at least some Britons regarded the princes of India as leading members of a hierarchy that was headed by the British monarch.⁴⁹ By the same token, Jesse Palsetia stresses the loyalty felt by the Parsis of Bombay to the royal family and particularly to Queen Victoria.⁵⁰ In other words, whether they actually read the book or not, the audience for which Bhownaggree was writing his book did exist: Gujaratis who were supporters of the British monarchy and of Queen Victoria.

Palsetia further notes this loyalty extended to many Parsis who were firm supporters of the Indian nationalist movement.⁵¹ The subscribers to Bhownaggree's book included two men who were to be associated with the principal nationalist association in colonial India, the Indian National Congress, from the time of its first meeting in 1885, and who subsequently served as its presidents: Sir William Wedderburn, a British member of the Bombay Civil Service who was president in 1889 and 1910; and Sir Dinshaw Edulji Wacha, a Parsi journalist who was president in 1901.⁵² Wedderburn and Wacha were among Bhownaggree's bitterest opponents during his career in the British Parliament, where they depicted him as consistently subordinating Indian interests to British ones, but their support of the Congress and opposition to Bhownaggree are fully compatible with royalist sentiment. In 1901, in his presidential address to the Congress, Wacha eulogized Queen Victoria and observed that “it may be unhesitatingly observed that the name of Victoria the Good will live for ages to come in the hearts and affections of the Indian people.”⁵³ At this time, the Congress devoted itself to lobbying for changes in British policy in India, not independence, and it was only in 1930 that the party committed itself to the goal of pūrṇa swarāj, literally “full self-rule” but meaning severing all ties with the British monarchy.⁵⁴ (Even this option was put on a back burner when independence actually came in 1947, and the British king, George VI, remained king of independent Congress-ruled India for over two years, until 1950.)

Perhaps unexpectedly, in fact, there seems to be a link between Indian royalism, in this case specifically royalism among speakers of Gujarati, and Indian nationalism. This interpretation draws on Benedict Anderson's argument that nationalism presupposes a sense among a critical mass of people that they form a nation, in this context meaning a community in which people who can never all know one another are linked by a sense that they have something powerful in common that unites them.⁵⁵ Anderson's notion of an “imagined community” is useful for understanding Indian nationalism, which came into being in the second half of the nineteenth century as a growing (though initially small) number of people across India came to define themselves as Indians, or members of an Indian nation that united a diverse population, with speakers of Gujarati as one of its constituents. At the same time, Benjamin Cohen has argued that celebrations held across India to mark the proclamation of Victoria, Edward VII, and George V as empress or emperor of India allowed ordinary people in the subcontinent to imagine themselves part of a larger imperial community, tied together by the British monarch at its apex.⁵⁶

If Anderson and Cohen are correct, then both Indian nationalism among Gujaratis, and loyalty to Queen Victoria, were based on an assumption of Gujarat as a self-contained unit, distinguished by language, and yet part of a larger whole. Despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that they were politically divided until 1956, Gujaratis had a strong sense of regionalism. Few of them, however, seem to have translated this into a separate Gujarati nationalism. Rather, they looked on themselves as a distinct part of the greater Indian nation, as was expressed by the nationalist K. M. Munshi in the 1930s:

Nationalism, the most powerful sentiment inspiring Gujarāta [Gujarat] . . . , has also been wonderfully blended with Gujarāta-consciousness. . . . In a country so vast as India nationalism can only flourish on the strength of such a hierarchy of group sentiments, provided, of course, the minor is included in the major.⁵⁷

In justifying his translation, Bhownaggree spoke of Gujaratis as being an important element among Queen Victoria's subjects: “it cannot but be regarded as an unfortunate matter that so large and influential a portion of Her Majesty's Indian subjects as the Gujaratee-speaking community, should so long have been left unfurnished with the means of reading for themselves that very excellent work.”⁵⁸ It is striking that Bhownaggree used the expression the “Gujaratee-speaking community,” which echoes Anderson's “imagined communities.” This leaves little room to doubt that he, like Gujaratis who were Indian nationalists, believed in a Gujarati-speaking community that was part of a part of a larger whole, whether that whole is India or the entire British Empire.

Indeed, the act of translation played a role in the creation, or imagining, of this community. As Rita Kothari notes, the nineteenth century saw a wave of Gujarati translations from English, many by authors who were consciously trying to enrich what they saw as an unrefined tongue by exposing it to literature composed in a language they considered to be “a repository of ideas, aesthetics and poetics.”⁵⁹ Whether this was a legitimate goal or not, there seems little doubt that the translations did contribute to the development of Gujarati literature, which in turn was a factor in the formation of the sense of a Gujarati community united by language.⁶⁰ Bhownaggree's decision to write in sanskritized literary Gujarati shows that he intended his book for readers of the new Gujarati literature. (As time went on, many Gujaratis came to define their identity in overtly Hindu terms. It is unclear how strong this sentiment was in the 1870s. If it did exist, the Parsi Bhownaggree was oblivious to it.) And so Bhownaggree's translation of Queen Victoria's journal represents a further nuance in our understanding of the complexities of Indian history, in this case royalism, nationalism, and regional identity.