A queen’s gift forgotten, discarded almost

Azhar Qadri in Srinagar

A gift, with the passage of time, becomes a family heirloom, and if kept with the respect with which it was presented, it becomes an object of heritage. But what would you say of the nearly 150-year-old steamboat gifted by Queen Victoria to Maharaja Ranbir Singh of J&K? Left to the elements for about three decades, the boat has rusted like a piece of junk outside the museum.

The steamboat is a testament of the influence of the colonial empire and its relation with the state’s last monarch family. The 30-ft-long and 10-ft-high severely corroded boat has large holes in its stern and bow. The evidence of the boat’s significance is a plaque fixed to the side of its hull. It also serves as its epitaph: ‘Presented by H.M. Queen Victoria to H.H. Shree Maharaja Ranbir Singh Ji Bahadar’.

The initials H.M. — Her Majesty — and H.H. — His Highness — is a reflection of the boat’s royal heritage. It is lying at Srinagar’s Sri Pratap Singh (SPS) Museum.

“There is no space inside the museum. We want to preserve it and we are working on a suitable space for it,” says Pir Iqbal, assistant curator. The directorate of archives, archaeology and museums, plans to place the boat in the museum’s yet-to-be-constructed Archaeological Park. That may take many months.

The SPS Museum was set up in 1898 in the Maharaja’s summer guest house. It was a rich repository of collections transferred from the state Toshkhana, the royal treasury. The museum was recently shifted from a decaying building to a newly constructed complex, which missed multiple deadlines for completion during the past decade.

The museum is also home to 79,595 artifacts and objects from the fields of archaeology, numismatics, decorative art, arms and armoury, paintings, and textiles.

Mohammad Shafi Zahid, director of archives, archaeology & museums, says the boat was a part of the royal treasury. It was shifted to the museum in 1987. “We hope to restore the boat soon,” he said.

There are few details available with the museum about the boat’s history. The timeline of the two monarchs, however, hints at the approximate time-frame when the boat was gifted.

Queen Victoria, who gifted the boat, was the ruler from 1837 till her death in 1901 and became the empress of India in 1876. Maharaja Ranbir Singh, who received the gift, ruled  from 1857 to 1885.

Ram Rahul, a former professor of Central Asia at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in his book Central Asia, An Outline of History, notes that the Queen sent the steamboat to the Maharaja “for his services to the Forsyth mission”. The mission was led by Thomas Douglas Forsyth and concluded with a treaty of commerce between British India and Kashgaria, one of the westernmost cities of China, in 1874.

Forsyth makes multiple references to the “Maharajah of Cashmere” in his autobiography, which mainly deals with the efforts that he made to seal the treaty and his journey to Kashgaria. In the book’s chapter, Closing Years, edited by Forsyth’s daughter, the bonhomie between him and the Maharaja is evident. “The Maharajah of Cashmere expressed a great desire to see Sir Douglas, and telegraphed in these words, ‘Will not my old friend come and see me?’ So, not to disappoint a dying man, Sir Douglas paid a flying visit to Jummoo.”