Some Structural and Sequential Aspects of the British Imperial Assemblages at Delhi:1877–1911

Abstract

Three great Durbars, royal assemblages, were staged in Delhi by the Government of British India, in 1877, 1903, and 1911. These are particularly interesting as examples of explicitly political rituals, their purpose being to legitimate and popularize British rule in India. The rituals would therefore exemplify, for many social theorists, a form of political manipulation which employs symbolic action as an adjunct to raw force. Yet, while many anthropologists, at least, would reject, in favor of an analysis which addresses the political aspirations of ritual manipulators, any unreconstructed Durkheimian paradigm that would equate ritual acts with social consensus (Moore and Myerhoff, 1975:9), many would also reject, as Tambiah has, the notion that ritual, by nature, constitutes a ‘diabolical smokescreen.’ The more useful approach, in Tambiah's view, is that ritual is ‘an ideological and aesthetic social construction that is directly and recursively implicated in the expression, realization, and exercise of power.’ (Tambiah, 1979: 153)1 shall be working with a similar theoretical point of view and not, largely, with the opposed view that the ritual form is merely a strategy employed by manipulative agents to perpetuate, in Bloch's words, an ‘institutionalized hierarchy’ or ‘legitimate order of inequality.’ (Bloch, 1977:289)