4 - The Importance of Being Empress: Race and Labor in the Court of Queen Victoria

At her home on the Isle of Wight, Queen Victoria fashioned a miniaturized and domesticated India over which she reigned as Empress. She commissioned a Durbar Room inspired by the grand meeting halls of Mughal India, filled a corridor with nearly one hundred paintings of Indian heads, and further outfitted her home with a staff of twelve turbaned men who breathed life into her most outrageous imperial fantasies. While it was the invisibility of servants that was praised in Victorian society, the Queen wanted her Indians - and more precisely their Indianness - to be as visible and legible as possible. The presence of domesticated men of color naturalized and institutionalized British superiority over their colonized subordinates yet, in my paper, I argue that Victoria’s Indians served a primarily aesthetic function. My research centers on the picturesque servitude performed by the Queen's foreign attendants through a study of her photo albums housed in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. I expose striking parallels between these images and 16th-18th c. portraits of Blackamoors and enslaved Africans. As such, my paper positions Victoria’s photographs within a centuries-old convention of using the bodies of imported laborers to fulfill contrasting social and chromatic effects—Indians as decorative props, arranged in a symbolic power play of light and dark, domination and subordination.