ABSTRACT
Politics was relatively quiet in India at the time of Jawaharlal’s return. The leaders of the Swadeshi movement were in jail, and the government’s apparent concession of the annulment of the partition of Bengal had been balanced by the transfer of capital from Calcutta to Delhi, celebrated by the pomposity of the King and Queen’s Delhi Durbar in 1911. The Durbar, a British appropriation and reconfiguration of Mughal courtly ceremony as a display of imperial power, was intended as a restatement of imperial authority over India. ‘This silly show,’ Motilal had called it, and quoted with approval the remarks to him of Sayajirao Gaekwad, the ruler of the princely state of Baroda, ‘that it would have been all right if we had not to act in it like animals in a circus.’1 Motilal had nonetheless dutifully attended the Durbar, and Jawaharlal, in England, had ordered proper dress clothes for his father for the occasion. (The Gaekwad had later been forced to apologise for a breach of etiquette – apparently he had shown insufficient deference to the King and Queen at the Durbar, merely bowing slightly to them and then walking away twirling his stick – and Motilal felt that it would have been better for him to have behaved himself than have had to make so ‘abject’ an apology.2)
The Geist of the Delhi Durbar – reluctant acquiescence in or quiet acceptance of British hegemony – seemed still to haunt politics in India in 1912, apart from the move towards secret societies engaging in individual acts of terrorism against British rule. More mainstream political groups were less adventurous. Some turned to quiet, self-strengthening
programmes of social service; others got on with their lives. Jawaharlal attended the annual Congress session that year – but not much happened. Some Moderates used the space to welcome the Morley-Minto reforms; with their central figure, Tilak, still in jail, the Extremists were without leadership.
