Series: Open Knowledge Fellowship 2025
In 1877, when Queen Victoria (r. 1837–1901) assumed the title of Kaisar-i-Hind, British officials sought to monumentalize her as a figure of peace and imperial stability. In India, however, her image emerged as a divine sovereign across sections of society. Her likeness appeared as traditional handmade dolls, in temple reliefs and reports from the late 19th-century describe the emergence of a devotional cult amongst tribals in Orissa. The idea of the Queen as goddess (and mother) was not simply an act of colonial propaganda. It emerged from a deeper, reciprocal process of translation, in which Indian subjects absorbed imperial authority into familiar idioms of divinity, kinship, and moral sovereignty. That assimilation left a lasting imprint on emerging ideas of loyalty and nationhood.
Victoria in India: Curiosity and Adoption
Following the 1857 Uprising, control over Indian territories shifted from the East India Company to the British Crown under Queen Victoria. Although she had never visited India, her journals reveal a profound affinity and curiosity about the subcontinent. This became apparent with her ‘adoption’ of two deposed heirs of Indian princely states: Gouramma of Coorg (1841- 1864) and Duleep Singh of Punjab (1838- 1893); and her closeness with Abdul Karim, who worked as her munshi during the last 14 years of her reign.
Reciprocally, Indians across class and region imagined Victoria through a maternal lens : her benevolence elevated above the violence and extractive systems of empire. Throughout the late 19th century, this portrayal appeared in literature, socio-political life, religious iconography, and even in early nationalist discourse.
This essay explores how the colonised adapted the coloniser into the interchangeable roles of goddess, monarch and mother.
The Queen as the ‘Divine Goddess’
At the Indian Museum in Kolkata, ascending to the first floor, one encounters a larger-than-life statue of Queen Victoria, in front of the painting section. This sculpture by Marshall Wood, funded by the Maharaja of Burdwan, Mahtab Chand, casts Victoria as Pax, the Roman goddess of Peace. In her left hand, she holds a wreath of olive branches as a peace offering, and a spectre, symbolising her sovereign authority.
A detailed bronze bas-relief on its pedestal warrants a closer look. It depicts the moment of the 1877 Proclamation at the Delhi Durbar, though inaccurately (Major Barnes, not Lord Lytton, read the proclamation). The bas-relief visually recalls Valentine Cameron Prinsep’s painting of the Durbar in a mirrored fashion; but does not accurately depict the event since it was Barnes who read the Proclamation.
Victoria as Pax Britannica: The Colonial State’s Political Use of Divinity
The statue, inaugurated by Lord Lytton on 1st of January, 1878, portrays Victoria as the restorer of peace and order after the turbulence of the Indian Rebellion (1857-8). It embodied the colonial myth that peace was a British gift, which was delivered through conquest. But, the Indian reception of Victoria as a Goddess was not simply shaped and constructed by state ceremonies; it came from Indians who, through their own idioms turned her into a ‘mother goddess’.
Making of a Goddess: Adopting Victoria in India
In March 1883, The Spectator, reported on the adoption of Victoria as a deity by a tribe in Orissa. It observed that such cultic devotion was “not peculiar” in India: European figures such as Monsieur Raymond (Nizam Asaf Jah II’s French general) and Brigadier-General John Nicholson had been similarly deified. The report speculated that the spread of this cult could lead to “the adhesion of a single province of India to the Queen in any way which made disloyalty or disobedience impossible would change all the conditions of government there, and rest the Empire, now so insecure, on a basis of granite”.
Whether or not the report was an exaggeration, it can be said with certainty that the Queen’s influence lingered in popular imagination
Her likeness appeared in traditional Rani Putul dolls of Howrah (used for religious purposes), and possibly even in terracotta plaques at the Chandranath Siva temple in Birbhum, West Bengal.1
Although the terracotta plaque resembles a Victorian woman generally, its placement above all other plaques (including the East India Company coat of arms) suggests symbolic significance. Here, Victoria is not Pax Britannica; she is a localised benevolent mother-deity, assimilated into the Indian imagination.
Victoria, the Godmother: How Conquest became Kinship
Victoria’s fascination with India shaped her public image. She commissioned the Durbar Room in Osborne House (1890), decorated in Indian style by a Punjabi architect Bhai Ram Singh; an official portrait as Empress of India shows her seated on an ivory throne gifted by the ruler of Travancore. She never set foot in India, but sent her heir, the Prince of Wales, on an official tour (1875–76), and learned Hindustani from Abdul Karim, who she employed as her tutor.
Victoria’s interest in India also found expression in her guardianship of Duleep & Gouramma: two displaced heirs of Indian princely states brought to Britain in the early 1850s.
Both were baptised and raised under the Queen’s ‘maternal’ supervision. In her journals, the reference to them is tender in manner, but their lives embodied the imperial paradox: affection shadowed by dispossession due to colonial conquests. The children received imperial care from the sanctuary of Victoria; from the colonial standpoint, it was a reflection of Britain’s “civilising mission to uplift the native” through education and proselytization.
In 1858, following the Sepoy Uprising in India, Victoria issued in her proclamation assuring religious tolerance:
…none be in anywise favoured, none molested or disquieted, by reason of their religious faith or observances, but that all alike shall enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law; and we do strictly charge and enjoin all those who may be in authority under us that they abstain from all interference with the religious belief or worship of any of our subjects on pain of our highest displeasure.
In the Indian subcontinent, this projected her as a moral sovereign who transcended her own officials’ corruption. She emerged as a compassionate figure, rising above imperial brutality. This image took root in the Indian idea of nationalism that had started to coalesce in the late 19th century. The Empress moved from ruler to redeemer, becoming part of a patriarchal framework. This maternal archetype, which also had roots in Britain, was now being contextualised by Indians, and became central to imagining the colonial monarch and the nation-to-be.
The Queen as the Empress: Between Political Loyalty and Devotional Emotion
The 1877 Delhi Durbar ceremony staged the Empire as divine theatre. Indian princes attended in full regalia, reaffirming hierarchy. This carefully staged spectacle, recorded in paintings and photographs reinforced the legitimacy of British rule.
But Indian writers also produced their own devotional responses.
Sourindro Mohan Tagore’s songbooks reframed Victoria in Sanskritic idioms and musical notation. He worked on four songbooks, published between 1875 and 1898. Works like Victoria Giti-Mala (A Garland of Songs for the Queen) (1877) or the later Srímad-Victoria-Máhátmyam (The Greatness of Empress Victoria) (1898) likened Victoria to a goddess. The compositions used idioms rooted in Sanskrit and Bangla 2 and included notations in English, aimed at transnational audiences.
Such composition were not unique. Malayalam writer M.R. Madhava Warrier’s Victoria Maharani (1931), similarly used the Queen to articulate ideals of womanhood in the backdrop of Travancore’s shift towards a patrilineal system. By using Victoria as an example, these texts attempted to push an idea of idealised womanhood to young girls, and instilled them with ‘virtues’ and ‘ideals’ in conformity to the 19th century reforms.
The Queen as Mother : in painting, plays, hymns and travelogues!
The 19th century nationalist discourse in India bound womanhood and motherhood as inseparable virtues; they embodied kindness and tenderness and bore an attachment to her children (especially sons). Victoria’s image as a mother and wife aligned with this framework (despite her personal discomfort with childbirth and infants), and often resonated with Indian portrayals of motherhood.
In this Rajasthan painting now at Harvard, she appears as an affectionate mother (a parallel to Yashoda and Krishna), breastfeeding her daughter. The painting demonstrates how Indians absorbed the Queen into their own imagination of virtuous womanhood.
Interestingly, the symbolism of Victoria as a benevolent mother figure was prevalent among other colonies as well!
Theatrical performances amplified Victoria as a motherly figure.
In Kiran Chandra Bandopadhyay’s Bharat Mata (1873), Victoria is a benevolent empress, her compassion obstructed by ‘cruel and ruthless’ officials. This was an early instance of loyalty to the Queen and critique of the colonial system coexisting, through the myth of the benevolent monarch.
Similarly, Lahore’s Hardevi, indianised Victoria in her travelogues. In her writing, she framed Victoria’s grief in Hindu ritual terms.
Victoria Stotram, a hymn composed after Victoria’s death in 1901, presents her as mother, moral guide, and guardian
The hymn, is a work representing collective bereavement – mourning the loss of a mother figure. It includes chapters of lament, condolence and recollections of Victoria’s kindness. The text emphasizes the Queen’s concern during famines, motivational guidance to soldiers in the Boer War (1899-1902) and fosters a sense of familial solidarity among her subjects. Advice to widows, orphans, teachers, frames her as a model of the ideal woman, mother and moral authority and a culturally resonant figure within both British and Indian paradigms of womanhood. The establishment of familial relationship by this work extends beyond Victoria, to her family, like references to Prince Leopold, the Duke of Albany as ‘brother’.
Odia poet Madhusudan Rao’s eulogy titled Mahadevi Victoria (‘Goddess Victoria’) appeared in 1901 against the backdrop of rising Odia regionalism in the late nineteenth century. Rao, in his lament, blended goddess, monarch, and mother – articulating regional grievances through devotion.
Motherhood and Expressions of Nationalism
By the late 19th century, Indian nationalism increasingly linked womanhood and motherhood. Victoria fit neatly into this moral vocabulary. Her image as mother intersected with Bharat Mata, producing ambivalent, hybrid iconographies.
In Bharat Bhiksha, a frail India hands her children to Victoria (Britannia). While the print is open to interpretations, it can be read as continuity rather than rupture, a passage from one mother to another.
Colonial power was not simply imposed from above. It was translated, negotiated, and reimagined in visual and literary forms by Indian people themselves. Through the idioms of motherhood and divinity, Victoria became part of a shared moral and affective world; a mythic figure whose symbolic power outlived both her reign and the empire.
Notes
