Contested Honour: The Raj versus the Princes (original) (raw)

2004, presented to the 18th European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies, Lund, Sweden, 6-9 July 2004

A central factor in the justification for British rule in India lay not in the realm of economics but rather in the vocabulary of honor. Imperialism, as the public discourse ran, was all about achievement and demonstrated achievement. Late Victorian England revisited and reinvented a sense of neo-feudalism and over time this was translated into an imperial ethic of honorable service to the empire and to the Queen-Emperor. 1 While the ideology of the era had created and gradually demanded adherence to the concept that the Crown was the " fount of all honour, " this was to be an encompassing system of honor that bound together all who were subordinate to the Empress. In India, this included not only her British (and, almost as an afterthought, Indian) servants in the " red " parts of the habitual nineteenth-century map, those areas under direct British rule but was also intended to recognize (and, in some ways, especially targeted on) the " yellow " parts of India's political map, those areas ruled by the " Princes " of India. As it would have been unreasonable to expect earlier Sultanate and Timurid modes of governance and of political ceremonial not to influence the overall political vocabulary of the Subcontinent, so would it have been irrational not to expect the altered and progressively altering Victorian view of represented politics not to set indigenous roots and " trickle down " into all niches of India's political ecology. Over the last decades of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, the quasi-independent Indian rulers were drawn, often enthusiastically, into a new mode of representing and acting out political honor. Earlier concepts of khillut and peshkash were at first supplemented – and later replaced by – the award of orders, decorations, and medals to represent loyal and faithful service not only within " British India " but also within " Indian India ". This paper will survey the downward filtration of what the British saw as uniquely " European " modes of representing honor into those Indian-ruled portions of the empire where the