Abstract
George V’s durbar proclamation generated great enthusiasm at first, but within weeks open criticism of the plan began to appear in Parliament as the political and economic consequences of the decision became apparent. The viciousness and duration of the criticism suggests that there was much more at stake than simply the transfer of the capital. Indeed, the expansiveness of the policy, which included not only the transfer of the capital but also a broad array of administrative changes throughout India, triggered broad arguments in Parliament about the meaning and purpose of empire. The breadth of issues argued in Parliament as well as the heated, often insulting, tone of the debates arose from the way in which the transfer of the capital and its related administrative changes began to modify traditional forms of dominance and privilege.1 Examining the people who were most upset by the transfer as well as what in the new colonial policy made them the angriest, helps us to understand the full meaning of the new capital.
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Notes
David A. Johnson, ‘A British Empire for the Twentieth Century: The Inauguration of New Delhi, 1931’, Urban History, 35, no. 3 (2008): 462–84.
Charles Hardinge, My Indian Years: 1910–1916: The Reminiscences of Lord Hardinge of Penshurst (London: John Murray, 1948), 52–3.
See John G. Darwin, ‘Imperialism in Decline? Tendencies in British Imperial Policy between the Wars’, The Historical Journal, 23, no. 3 (1980): 678, and
Darwin, Britain, Egypt and the Middle East: Imperial Policy in the Aftermath of War, 1918–1922 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981) for an extended study of Britain’s interwar colonial policy in Egypt and the Middle East. 10. For a recent historiography of the rise of the British Empire primarily from an economic standpoint, see
Anthony Webster, The Debate on the Rise of the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
The constitutional question and its resolution have been covered by R. E. Frykenberg, ‘The Coronation Durbar of 1911: Some Implications’, in Delhi through the Ages: Selected Essays in Urban History, Culture, and Society, ed. R. E. Frykenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 240.
See Lovat Fraser, India under Curzon and After (London: William Heinemann, 1911).
A Public Services Commission, chaired by Lord Islington ( John Dickson-Poynder), had been formed in September 1912 to investigate all levels of the Indian Civil Service with the point of redressing systemic problems. Lord Islington’s committee, which published its report in 1917 (World War One caused delays), dealt with many of Montagu’s concerns. See H. H. Dodwell, The Cambridge History of the British Empire, Volume 4, 1929, 377.
See Andrew Muldoon, Empire, Politics, and the Creation of the 1935 Act: Last Act of the Raj (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). Building upon
Christopher Bayly’s Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communications in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Muldoon cogently shows that there were systemic problems in the Government of India’s information-gathering network. Formulaic reporting, according to Muldoon, plagued the Raj’s massive bureaucracy and its reporting system, which often reflected shallow cultural assumptions and imperial stereotypes rather than solid evidence. This ultimately led to Britain overestimating the strength of their position in India and, conversely, to misreading the actual strength of the Indian National Congress. Worse, district officers — typically junior in rank and mired in this massive colonial bureaucracy — systematically produced flawed reports that, for reasons of self-interest, made districts appear more peaceful than they really were.
For an excellent study of the way in which class and social status shaped British and Indian interactions in Britain, See Martin Wainwright, ‘The Better Class’ of Indians: Social Rank, Imperial Identity, and South Asians in Britain, 1858–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012).
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© 2015 David A. Johnson
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Johnson, D.A. (2015). New Delhi’s New Vision for a New Raj: An ‘Altar of Humanity’. In: New Delhi: The Last Imperial City. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137469878_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137469878_3
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