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Hyperbolic expression is one of the most common and effective foregrounding expressions employed as a literary device in the form of eulogy across the literary genres. But the most common ground for its usage, among the genres, and where its usage is more effective, is poetry. Hyperbole is manifested clearly in praise-songs, which in Hausa take the form of court-songs. This paper explores the forms and effects of literary devices employed by Hausa court singers. Attention is mainly given to Salihu Jankiɗi and his song Bubakar Ɗan Shehu Bakadire (Bubakar, Shehu's son of Qadiriyya Sect) eulogizing Sultan Abubakar III, but also extoling Sardauna and the Sokoto Caliphate on the occasion of the durbar ceremony in 1965. The presentation includes various forms of the devices, such as irony, overstressing some facts and possibilities, cherishing both the religious and political ideals of Sultan Abubakar III, Sokoto and Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, Premier of the defunct Northern Region, for whom the durbar was organized. The paper further highlights the ability of the artist to capture the political undertones of the durbar procession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The three imperial durbars held in Delhi for the coronation of British monarchs as the rulers of India were gatherings of royalty, administration, and the military, organized in the years 1877, 1903, and 1911. As impressively invented, improvised, and self-styled orientalist representations of the late Victorian tradition, these durbars were pageants of power, prestige, and authority, creations of their organizing viceroys: Robert Lytton (1877), George Curzon (1903), and Charles Hardinge (1911). But, as this article shows, they were also commemorative exhibitions of the triumphant memory of the event of 1857 (variously called the Indian Mutiny, Sepoy war, War of Independence), especially in Delhi which had to be emphasized regularly for perpetuating myths about British superiority and invincibility. Spread over a period of thirty-five years, these rituals of commemoration were performed through four illustrative choices. These were the selection of site, selection of mutiny veterans as participants, the construction of mutiny memorials, and contribution to the growth of mutiny pilgrimage tours. Drawing attention to the successive formation of ???? as a seminal 'cultural moment' through its periodic commemoration, the present article brings to focus the enduring significance of the event for the British empire in India, which had to be re-visited time and again for purposes of legitimation and cultural appropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the English writer Thomas Edward Bowdich entered Kumasi, Gold Coast (current-day Ghana) in 1817, he stated, "Upwards of 5000 people, the greater part warriors, met us with awful bursts of martial music, discordant only in its mixture; for horns, drums, rattles, and gong-gongs were all exerted with a zeal bordering on phrenzy." He was aware of the Ashantee's (Asante's) military might and the association of cultural practice with their sacred-military decorum. The Asante of Ghana used their horns and drums to defeat enemies in war and to speak to past warrior kings at venerations. Both mediums for surrogate speech, horns are made from elephant tusks and still performed on today, and drums are extant. Bowdich added, their "sentences are immediately recognized by the soldiers and people, in the distinct flourish of the horns of the various chiefs: the words of some of these sentences are almost expressible by the notes of the horns." Later on Bowdich made a drawing of a similar event, "The First Day of the Yam Custom," that depicts an Asante festival (durbar) wherein the same musicians take part to "barrage" their sounds in creating a sonic power. The drawing was later engraved by Robert Havell Sr. (1769-1832) and included as foldout 73.5 cm wide in Bowdich's book Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (1819). In precolonial times, this power of sound had been used in combat to scare enemies and their evil spirits. Today it is still used at feasts, to bar evil. Pertaining to this, Bowdich wrote, "More than a hundred bands burst at once on our arrival, with the peculiar airs of their several chiefs; the horns flourished their defiances, with the beating of innumerable drums and metal instruments." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to investigate connections between British and Indian, and elite and subaltern, by exploring the career of colonial administrator Arthur Crawford. The level of separation between British and Indian as portrayed in post-colonial studies is challenged by Crawford's intimate connections with various Indian groups. A particular manifestation of these connections was the Crawford Scandal of 1889. Dubbed as the ‘most notorious case of corruption in Victorian India’ it involved Crawford receiving pecuniary gifts from Indians involved with the colonial administration, ranging from village accountants to Princely Chiefs. The corruption, it is argued here, was a system of transaction between a high-level British administrator and Indians that was modelled on pre-colonial political idioms. The involvement of intermediate groups such as moneylenders and the lower level of colonial administration in village India demonstrate how the colonial state could connect with deeper levels of the Indian society on the underside of colonial rule, i.e. outside of the official halls of colonial rule. While the Crawford scandal does not deal directly with subaltern groups, it demonstrates points of connection between elite and subaltern. These connections were used in the mobilization of support for and the articulation of an early Indian nationalism, here involving the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha and Bal Gangadhar Tilak with the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalistic invocations of past, present and future are a recurring feature of The Times' analysis of Indian affairs, especially after 1911, a manifestation of shifting imperialist conceptions of India and the consequent role of The Times in promoting constitutional reform. Initially hostile, imperialist intellectuals, senior Conservatives and The Times shifted from reluctant acquiescence, to the 1911 durbar declaration, to active support; of the 1919 Government of India Act, the 1929-33 Round Table process and 1935 India Act; to siding with those in the 1940-45 wartime government who, against Churchill, advocated the necessity of full self-government. Throughout, The Times' extensive coverage of Indian affairs contained a subtext, sometimes explicitly stated, that presented a framework of historical time - a coherent sense of past, present and future - intended to legitimize new directions in Indian policy by reconciling change and continuity in a way that was satisfying to Conservative perceptions of British imperial history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I look at the commemoration of the British Empire in Rudyard Kipling's 'The Little House at Arrah' (1888) and the event of the Delhi Durbar - the coronation of King Edward VII as the first Emperor of India in 1903 organized by Lord Curzon. In both cases, the memories of the Indian Mutiny are celebrated through the invocation of the disabled body of the old native man and the sites where the sieges took place. I demonstrate that the perpetuation of the Raj through the commemoration of the Mutiny, repeatedly attempted at the turn of the century when the Empire's grip on India was felt to be more and more unsure, was nevertheless bound to fail, for the materiality of texts (the dying bodies of the old Sikh soldiers or the diary kept on the wall of the house at Arrah during the siege) would not stand the test of time and were subject to effacement. Later in the article, I argue that Kipling's refusal to commemorate the Mutiny was an antidote to the Victorian obsession with the British history in India, the constant remembrance of which only disclosed the British inability to inscribe its lasting traces on the Indian ground. Kipling proposes an alternative way of representing the Indian Empire, timeless and unhistorical, where the Law of the Empire presides without needing to leave any traces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the newsreel film coverage of the 1911 Delhi Durbar. Relationship between the media and Durbar authorities; Exhibition of the film in Europe; Controversy over the conduct of the Gaekware of Baroda.

At the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1880, Val Prinsep’s vast group portrait of British and Indian rulers was singled out for virulent criticism. This essay argues that Prinsep’s commemorative painting of the ‘Imperial Assemblage’ held in Delhi in 1877 registered as a crisis of imperial governance, disrupting the sober visual strategies that had emerged in British portraiture to secure social cohesion. The colourful heterogeneity of the Indian rulers’ dress stood in contrast to the monochromatic palette that dominated Victorian portraits – an aesthetic uniformity that had worked to picture a fractious parliamentary system in terms of an overarching political stability. A key reality of empire – cross-cultural interaction – therefore undermined acceptable aesthetic conventions. At a time when colonial governance was increasingly wedded to the logic of the spectacle, such visual turbulence was no small matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]