1. Shaping Vernacularity

Each of these meanings defines politics as a field inscribed in the “language of Place,” to quote Sheldon Pollock's definition of “vernacular.”Footnote ³ In describing a shift in the late medieval South Asian literary world, from the domination of Sanskrit's transregional “macrospace” to the plural, emplaced political-cultural frameworks of regional languages, Pollock presents the vernacular as invariably conversant with the cosmopolitan: the two draw from and shade into one another.Footnote ⁴ He identifies this dynamism and flexibility as a product of premodern globalization—essentially different from later, capital-driven globalization in the age of colonialism, when vernacular polities and languages are more sharply demarcated against the cosmopolitan and the imperial.Footnote ⁵ And yet, the vernacularization of Victoria—which certainly belongs to this latter age of globalization—also implies a continuum between what is transregional and imperial, on one hand, and what is local and demotic, on the other. The colonial state, even when it seemingly intervenes to discipline this continuum, participates in it: for instance, through measures such as Wood's Despatch (1854), which stipulated that Indians should receive their primary education in the local vernacular languages and progressively shift to English education thereafter. Literally “dispatched” from a liberal, metropolitan British understanding of vernacular languages as the natural carriers of learning and self-expression, the recommendation necessitated a linguistic mapping of India and led to the formalization of several of the subcontinent's languages.Footnote ⁶ There are many other such examples of the profound and consequential interconnection between the colonial state and the lived experience of Indian languages. In her study of Punjabi vernacular culture under British rule, for instance, Farina Mir writes that the colonial designation of certain provincial languages as official led to the standardization of major Indian languages through such formal interventions as grammars and textbooks.Footnote ⁷ Similarly, Kumkum Sangari relates late nineteenth-century rivalries between speakers of Hindi and Urdu to contests for state patronage and recognition.Footnote ⁸

Such colonial makeovers of South Asian languages and language cultures form a significant backdrop for the essays in this volume, but these papers have instead attended to the proliferating and agentive positions enacted by vernacular texts, even those with as singular and overdetermined a focus as the imperial monarch. To return to a term from Satpathy's introductory essay here, the queen as hyperreal figure engenders a vast discursive miscellany. Yet even this diverse textual archive represents a necessarily limited version of vernacularity. Pritipuspa Mishra has written that, before the British Empire transformed the application of the word at its zenith, “vernacularization involved the mapping of spoken language on to the written language” within the British context: the intimate, everyday use of the mother tongue as posited against the classical education of British elites.Footnote ⁹ To hear this emphasis on the vernacular as mother tongue is to recognize the traceless nature of most vernacular expression—to imagine, for example, the numberless spoken exchanges in countless dialects generated daily by the hyperreal queen, every time a coin bearing her likeness crossed the palms of her Indian subjects. After 1862, a new, somewhat Indianized image of Victoria would be found on every coin and banknote across the colony, and by 1876, even the princely states that remained outside colonial rule were obliged to use the official currency.Footnote ¹⁰ One way in which Victoria was vernacularized, therefore, was simply by virtue of being circulated from hand to hand, fingered as the guarantor of every material exchange, every coin toss, every financial transaction in every vernacular language in British India during her reign.

2. Vernacular Literacies

Of necessity, these oral exchanges have left no material deposit other than the mute coins and silent banknotes of the era; the vernacularity these objects enabled and witnessed was as ephemeral as it was voluble. That dematerialized record is where the subaltern speaks. In Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Ranajit Guha notes that most of India at the time of the Revolt of 1857 was “pre-literate . . . transiting slowly—very slowly indeed—towards literacy,”Footnote ¹¹ although, as Christopher Bayly points out, “India was a literacy-aware society if not yet a society of mass literacy.”Footnote ¹² Even so, the archive of printed and authorized texts largely represents the educated elite: those who were negotiating to consolidate collective or individual advantage by mobilizing the figure of the queen.

Of course, along with these elite members of “dominant indigenous groups” who authored texts in regional languages, those without a comparable access to power (such as the rural peasantry or urban poor) also communicated in vernacular languages.Footnote ¹³ Indeed, Guha's influential gloss on “vernacular” centers on its lack of privilege: “the Latin verna inheres in the phrase ‘vernacular’ like memory in a microchip . . . verna means, among other things, ‘a home-born slave.’”Footnote ¹⁴ In terms of both the way colonial historiography defined and classified regional Indian languages, and the sociological profiles of their users, “vernacular” carries the charge of relative powerlessness.Footnote ¹⁵ Being spoken rather than textual, the vernacular language production of subaltern Indians was largely off the historical record.

However, to expand the ambit of the textual archive beyond print culture allows traces of this subaltern vernacularity to surface and reveal themselves. Although the nonelite majority of Indians were themselves generally denied access to literacy, they could approach it through intermediaries.Footnote ¹⁶ As Bayly tells us, letter-writing was not uncommon by the early nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁷ Schoolmasters in the villages, or professional scribes in towns, enabled the unlettered to communicate through the dak or postal system—which, at least in rudimentary form, had been an established presence in the Indian public sphere since before the Mughal era.Footnote ¹⁸ The dak (or its anglicized form, “dawk”) was among the structures and institutions through which the colonial state organized information, though many private daks ran parallel to the British Indian postal service through the early nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁹ The year Victoria ascended the throne, in 1837, British India clamped down on these “native dawks” and finally established a general post, although at first postal services were divided into the Imperial Post (with central charge of larger post offices) and the more local, rural District Post.Footnote ²⁰ In metropolitan Britain, soon thereafter, the postal reform movement successfully campaigned for low, uniform postal rates and led to the introduction of adhesive stamps, beginning with the famous Penny Black stamp featuring the young queen in profile—a push for reform that also affected India and other colonial territories.Footnote ²¹

By 1854, a new Post Office Act established a new and unified postal service in British India, which increased the reach of the post into rural areas: from 700 post offices that year, there were almost 13,000 in 1900—and these don't include the various suboffices, village branch offices, and other stations.Footnote ²² Mark Frost tells us that the Imperial Post Office of India conveyed about 43 million letters in 1860–61, which had gone up to over 250 million by the turn of the century; the cheap quarter-anna postcards that the Postal Department introduced in 1879 would increase that volume exponentially.Footnote ²³ Frost describes the imperial postal service as recognizably a “great leviathan,” but one that “simultaneously enhanced both the physical mobility of its subjects and the reach of their written and printed thoughts.”Footnote ²⁴ This great explosion of vernacular communications may have been centrally administered by the Imperial Post Office, but it also depended on the labor of village postmen and traditional harkaras (post runners): subaltern bodies bore the mail to subaltern readers and writers.Footnote ²⁵ In his poem “The Overland Mail” (1886), Rudyard Kipling romanticizes the physical risks and exertions faced by these indigenous functionaries of the Imperial Post Office.

The call-and-response established by the rhetorical questions and their heroic answers together sketch both the daunting environment that the runner must negotiate and the duty that pushes him to puzzle through the treacherous terrain; it comes to land, at the end of each verse, at the altar of Victoria's name: “the Name of the Empress.”

3. On with Her Head

The very first postage stamps issued in British India, albeit briefly, were the “Scinde Dawks,” which bore no image of the queen.Footnote ²⁷ Another design from the Calcutta Mint, of a lion and palm tree, remained unused. When the Indian equivalent of the Penny Black, the blue half-anna stamp, finally came out in October 1854, it featured a portrait of Queen Victoria created by a “local engraver” who was working off the image used on the Penny Black.Footnote ²⁸ Eventually, in the early 1860s, the Indian Mint would bring in a new image of the queen, one that was even used by “convention” states like Gwalior, which could stamp their own state name on the India postage stamp (as in fig. 1). As Taylor notes, the queen herself is vernacularized—her “eyes are larger and darker, her nose and mouth much fuller than in the original.”Footnote ²⁹

Figure 1.

A Gwalior State postage stamp with “Gwalior” stamped on the queen's image in Devanagari script as well as in the Roman script (courtesy of Suman Dubey).

In a report entitled “The Queen's Head,” which he published in 1852 in Household Words, Charles Dickens describes watching the manufacture of British postage stamps, detailing the process by which the steel die is heated and cooled, engraved with the “exquisite vignette,” and then once more hardened before its transfer to the plates used for the stamps.

Dickens sounds the note of royal motherhood that we also hear in the vernacular texts analyzed in this issue by Pritipuspa Mishra and Arti Minocha. Victoria is the mother of uncountable children, just as she will be to her millions of colonial subjects; her “powers of reproduction”—rendered here as a futuristic mechanical cloning—are indeed “inexhaustible.” In the interval before the stamp is printed, the heterotopian, virtual space of the “beautiful mirror” captures her image, but soon legions of her subjects will hold it in their hands—this portrait of the queen, applauded by Dickens for its “gem-like prettiness, compact shape, beauty of linear execution, and truthfulness of likeness,”Footnote ³¹ but so much more powerful as hyperreal image. As Kate Thomas writes, “In the British postal revolution, the Queen was still separated from her head, but her disembodied noggin on the Penny Black . . . inaugurated the development of state structures that would encourage national and imperial, rather than local (and internecine) thinking.”Footnote ³²

“Vernacular” belongs to the order of the “local”—that which the queen's head, wearing the crown that symbolized nation and empire, sought to eclipse.Footnote ³³ As letters, postcards, and parcels bearing this miniature royal portrait (almost the same as on the Penny Black, until the early 1860s) traversed the length and breadth of British India, they asserted imperial control over information and communication. Yet they also enabled an outpouring of language production in vernacular languages—one so voluminous that not even the sharpest imperial surveillance could effectively police it. As the postal services penetrated deeper into the countryside, they became a “popular and truly subaltern phenomenon.”Footnote ³⁴ In fact, Arun Kumar argues that many poor Indians who used the postal system developed a more complex relationship with the postal system (and its professional letter-writers and postal workers) than historians have acknowledged, and that a more significant proportion wrote their own letters than is generally recognized.Footnote ³⁵

The materiality of these individual postcards, letters, and so on invites us to think of them in quantitative terms—to imagine them collected into an immeasurable totality, the sum of every vernacular text that ever went from sender to bearer in British India, authorized by the hyperreal image of the queen. Whether understood as an aggregate representing the gargantuan cultural diversity of India as a whole or as a universe of particular writings—each representing an individual negotiation between the personal, subjective, and intimate, and the social, political, and economic—the vernacular post approaches sublimity in its scale and magnitude. The Postal Department of the colonial government necessarily viewed it as a logistical and administrative affair, but there are tacit acknowledgments of larger, more epistemological implications. In 1877 the postmaster general of the North-Western Provinces compiled images of different “specimens” of vernacular scripts passing through the postal services (see fig. 2), as if to suggest that rather than the Indological work of sorting, classifying, and ranking the diversity of languages, something about the tumble of letters and scripts made it task enough to simply witness and record the vernacular plenitude.Footnote ³⁶

Figure 2.

Pages from the surveyor-general's photographic record of “vernacular characters” that passed through the Indian post, labeled according to language and community of users: captions that sometimes reveal underlying biases of class and race (images from the scanned volume off the Internet Archive, sourced from the Central Secretariat Library, New Delhi).

The unreadability of India itself seems signaled by its staggeringly prolific vernacular productions. As Geoffrey Clarke, a member of the Indian Civil Service, would write in 1921, “When one considers that there are more than twenty written languages in India in common use, and that a large number of addresses are almost illegible and are mixed up with invocations to the Deity and many other high-sounding phrases, one can only say, ‘Bravo, the Post Office! How do you do it?’”Footnote ³⁷ The note of self-congratulation trails into uncertainty with the rhetorical question. It has an edge of uncomprehending panic to it: the indecipherability of the post (and the high number of letters that thus ended up in the Dead Letter Office) stands for larger illegibilities, other dead ends.Footnote ³⁸

4. Afterlives

The vernacularization of Victoria is not simply a closed fact of the past, an event that achieved finality by landing at the Dead Letter Office of history. The Indianization of Victoria signaled by imperial coins and postage stamps extended into the early decades of the twentieth century and continues beyond. A visitor to Lucknow today might find themselves at “Turiya Ganj,” for example, without recognizing that this was once “Victoria Ganj”; or chance upon a shrine to “Turiya Devi,” the vernacular goddess whose original identity as a statue of Queen Victoria has been long overwritten.Footnote ³⁹ The translation of Victoria into Turiya Devi is an act of colonial forgetting—the “Name of the Empress” merges into South Asian phonemes and becomes a bit of local color when it adorns old buildings and gateways in Indian cities. It is a transformation that also echoes the incantation outside the courtroom at the climax of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, as the gathering crowd chants a demand for the absent Mrs. Moore, reworking her name into “Esmiss Esmoor,” a signifier of justice promised and denied. As the refrain rings out—“Esmiss Esmoor / Esmiss Esmoor / Esmiss Esmoor / Esmiss Esmoor”—her son finds, to his horror, that his Christian mother has been “travestied into . . . a Hindu goddess.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Esmiss Esmoor is the harbinger of Turiya Devi, a colonial “travesty” signaling the postcolonial vernacularization to come.

Mrs. Moore's faith and goodness make her that rare commodity in the novel, a sympathetic Englishwoman—but there is one other. At the very start of A Passage to India, after all, as Indian characters share a hookah and complain about the racism of Englishwomen, one of them reflects—in English, but we imagine this as a translation of Hindustani—“Queen Victoria was different.”Footnote ⁴¹ As Forster wrote his great novel of colonial incomprehension and failure, the age of Victoria, the empress who was “different,” had already given way to the anticolonial unrest of the 1920s. The very end of the novel famously implies that the British and the Indians can have no friendship as long as the material reality of colonialism remains. We know that the smoldering love story of Aziz and Fielding will remain unfulfilled; that the liberal schoolmaster, Mr. Fielding, will not stay in India.

Forster might have let go of the Aziz–Fielding romance without necessarily letting go of the Englishman's professional future in India. After all, some British schoolmasters in the Fielding mold did stay on after India became independent, to staff Indian institutions modeled on English public schools, with nationalist Indian school songs and classes in vernacular Indian languages. In 1954, less than ten years after Independence, an Indian schoolboy sat in one such English-style boarding school and, opening a new album, carefully pasted in his collection of stamps from a hundred years before—Queen Victoria in profile, blurred and defaced, her half-anna stamp authorizing the elegant swoops and curlicues of a message in Urdu that she could, perhaps, have learned to read (fig. 3). The empress of India is still in there, pressed into its pages—waiting between the covers of my father's stamp album, until a special journal issue on vernacular Victoria inspired another look.

Figure 3.

A page from a schoolboy stamp collection with half-anna, one-anna, and two-anna Queen Victoria stamps from the 1850s (courtesy of Suman Dubey).