Eugenia W. Herbert

The Taj and the Raj: Garden imperialism in India

Abstract In the opening years of the twentieth century, Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, oversaw a vast project of restoring monuments throughout the length and breadth of the sub-continent. The centerpiece in his program was Agra and above all the Taj Mahal (figure I). In this essay I propose to focus on the Taj and specifically on its gardens as restored by Curzon with several questions in mind.

Portuguese adaptation to trade patterns, Guinea to Angola (1443-1640)

As the Portuguese crept cautiously along the western coast of Africa, they met a dizzying multiplicity of African cultures but nowhere did they encounter an economic vacuum. Since their primary interest was trade (pious disclaimers to the contrary), they had to discover and then adapt to local and interregional patterns of exchange before they could hope to exploit them to their advantage. The two centuries between the discovery of Capo Blanco and adjacent Arguim Island in 1443 and the fall of Elmina to the Dutch in 1640 circumscribe the period of Portuguese hegemony and the opening phase of European-African interaction. Though other Europeans followed close on their heels, it was the Portuguese who pioneered both physically and commercially. Ships might put in almost anywhere along the coast where they could find a safe anchorage, but there were five regions that from the beginning seemed to promise profitable and convenient trading contacts: Arguim, Senegambia and the “Rivers of the South,” the Gold Coast, Benin and the Slave Rivers, and Congo-Angola. Each of these presented a different situation and each demanded a different response. These regions have been the subject of specialized monographs which have brought out the local characteristics of trade as they evolved, but there has been no attempt at an overview, no attempt to compare and generalize from the data now available to present a larger picture of trading patterns on the West Coast of Africa as a whole.

Twilight on the Zambezi: Late Colonialism in Central Africa

List of Illustrations and Maps Time Chart Prologue Introduction: Barotseland Kalobo: The View from the Boma Libonda: The View from the Kuta Salisbury: The View from the Federation London: The View from Whitehall Epilogue

Curzon nostalgia: landscaping historical monuments in India

Soon after my book Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India appeared, an Indian newspaper took me to task for speaking ill of Lord Curzon and his restoration of the gardens of the Taj Mahal. As viceroy of India 1899–1905 with a great love—one might even call it an obsession—for Agra’s monuments and most especially the Taj Mahal, he took an unusually personal role in remedying what he saw as the calamitous state of the gardens of that great monument. An Indian blogger likewise defends Curzon’s restorations and, moreover, applauds the ‘Raj’s green legacy’ in general, lamenting misbegotten efforts to replace the tried and true flora of that era with such monstrosities as the ‘greyish palms that sprouted on traffic islands all over Delhi’ before the Commonwealth Games of 2010. Unlike the imported lantana of another era, they did not last a summer. Sadly, today’s youth, ‘SilkStalking’ claims, may flirt with environmentalism, but they scarcely know one plant from another and have no hands-on experience of greenery itself. ‘Like my nostalgia for lantana hedges, it has to get personal.’ Ask those who have visited the Taj Mahal what they remember of the gardens. If your experience is like mine, they will offer only the vaguest description, or, more likely, draw a complete blank. And yet when the Taj was conceived in the seventeenth century, the garden would have been considered just as important as the tomb of Shah Jehan’s beloved wife, both a memorial to the living empress and the embodiment of the Paradise promised to the Faithful by the Qur’an. Now, the gardens are little more than an inoffensive backdrop for the architecture, intended to direct the viewer’s gaze to the mausoleum and incidentally provide a pleasant experience of greenery (figure 1). To all intents and purposes, the landscaping of the Taj remains essentially as Curzon decreed it over a century ago. Even more intriguing, it has to a large extent become the template for subsequent landscaping of India’s historical monuments from Sarnath to Khajuraho, Bhubaneswar to Srirangapatnam, just as Edwin Lutyens ‘green city’ vision of New Delhi has been to a somewhat lesser extent the model of urban planning.

The gardens of Barrackpore

Abstract Barrackpore, in former times the country retreat of the Governor-General of India, lies some fifteen miles upriver from Calcutta. A short distance, one would think, but enough to guarantee a respite from the sweltering heat that descended on the capital of British India for much of the year. Its gigantic trees, luxuriant shrubbery, and gentle lawn sloping down to the rivers edge held the promise of shade and fresh breezes, even a hint of home in a distant land. Like the name of the place itself (referring to the nearby cantonment of soldiers), the garden was a hybrid, both Indian and English. As it evolved, it mirrored the individual tastes of the inhabitants of the house but also the exigencies of the country itself. At the moment when India was reeling from the unexpected ferocity of the Mutiny of 1857–58, the gardens of Barrackpore reached their apogee under the gentle hand of Lady Charlotte Canning.1

Zukas Simon. Into Exile and Back . Lusaka: Bookworld Publishers, 2002. Available from D. Zukas, 189 Mountview Rd., London N4 4JT. 220 pp. Photographs. Select Bibliography. Index. £8/

Simon Zukas deserves to be better known than he is. One of the earliest in the white community to work actively for majority rule in Northern Rhodesia, he was expelled from the colony and forced to live in exile for eleven years before returning to take part in a newly independent Zambia. His memoirs, completed at the age of seventy-seven and written in a direct, if somewhat workmanlike, style offer a vivid picture of the turbulent struggles of the fifties, exile in London, and finally his engagement in the not always edifying politics of the postindependence period. Zukas was born in Lithuania in 1925, then moved with his family to Northern Rhodesia in 1938, thereby escaping the fate of so many of his relatives who died in the Holocaust. A youthful fascination with bridge-building probably determined his future as a civil engineer. He seems to have been born a radical. After an apprenticeship in the Zionist-Socialist movement in Lithuania and eager participation in left-wing activities at university in Cape Town, he was ready to throw himself whole-heartedly into the nascent African nationalist movement on the Copperbelt. As a soldier in East Africa during World War II, he had acquired a profound distaste for racism and the assumptions of white superiority that seemed to him part and parcel of the colonial enterprise. Overcoming African suspicions, he helped organize opposition to Federation, one of the few whites to work with African groups. This cannot have been easy since clearly Zukas was far better educated than his African peers and, indeed, far more radical than many of them in looking ahead already in the early fifties to self-government and majority rule. It cost him most of his white friends at a time when it was difficult to be accepted on familiar terms by Africans.

12.00. Paper.

This is an account of the Jewish community in central Africa, telling the story of the coming of the first Jews to the area in the late-19th century, the heyday of the Jewish community in the mid-20th century, and its decline since Zambian independence. Dealing primarily with the Jewish traders in Zambia who flourished in the face of both anti-Semitism and their own acute social dislocation, the author explores a number of interrelated topics: the Colonial Office discussions about Jewish immigration in the 1930s, the attempts to settle refugees in Africa by both pro- and anti-Semites, Jewish religious life in the region, and the remarkable cultural and professional role played by the Jewish settlers. These issues are set in the context of a general history of southern and central Africa.