Ocular Sovereignty, Acclamatory Rulership and Political Communication: Visits of Princes of Wales to Bengal

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the visits to India, and especially to Bengal, of three successive Princes of Wales across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It shows how many British actors, cutting across political-ideological divides, suggested that Indians, on seeing the princes, would automatically give them their loyalty, thereby binding ruler and ruled in ties of visual pleasure and affection. The chapter uses the twin concepts of ocular sovereignty and acclamatory rulership to analyse these discourses. It also demonstrates how Bengali actors often strategically appropriated the royal tours to support their own political agendas, and often to turn the colonial message of benevolent monarchic rule against the realities of imperial racial-economic exploitation. It further indicates how many Indians forged their nationalist notions of welfare-oriented rulership by expropriating British princely idioms.

This chapter draws in part on empirical materials and analytical frameworks used in my doctoral dissertation from Heidelberg University: Milinda Banerjee (2014), ‘The Mortal God’: Debating Rulership and Genealogies of Sovereignty in Colonial India, 1858–1947 (with a primary focus on Bengal).