‘A Right Royal Tamasha’: Imaging Queen Victoria as Kaiser-i- Hind, Malvina Pollock Kalim

This article examines the elevation of Queen Victoria to Empress of India through the prism of John Tenniel’s satirical cartoon ‘New Crowns for Old Ones’ and Val Prinsep’s commemorative painting of the proclamation ceremony in Delhi in 1877. It explores the invented traditions and rituals, fashioned from India’s imagined past and a medievalist aesthetic, that gave political raison d’être to the new title in India and configured the loyalty and legitimacy of the rulers of the Indian princely states to reinforce imperial regime. It looks in particular at how the selected artefacts formed and manipulated perceptions of empire and imaged Victoria’s paramount power.