The uses of the passport: The Chess Players and narratives of British nationhood

Abstract

This essay investigates the cultural and political genealogy of the passport in the 19th century, as a document that sought to secure the rights of European national citizenship. Examining the historical case of Malika Kishwar (or Jenabi Auliah Tajara Begum), the Begum of Oudh, who led a delegation to London to petition the Queen and parliament against the annexation of Oudh, it shows how liberal concepts of the rights of citizenship were contradicted and undermined by the treatment of imperial “subjects” in Britain. These vexed themes of national‐colonial legitimacy, which presage postcolonial immigration debates, are simultaneously traced in a reading of Satyajit Ray's film The Chess Players (1977), which adapts a short story by Premchand to interrogate the rigged diplomatic game of annexation in northern India prior to the 1857 rebellion.

Keywords:

• passport
• citizenship
• immigration law
• Satyajit Ray
• Premchand

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the AHRC for supporting this work and David Johnson, Graham MacPhee and Alex Tickell for their valuable suggestions and comments on an early version of this essay.

Notes

1. On the expansion of the British Empire in the period preceding the rebellion of 1857–58, and the transformation of notions of a layered and shared sovereignty that had characterized Indian polities of the pre‐colonial era, see Bose. See also Anghie and Poddar on the centrality of colonialism to the formation of sovereignty.

2. In the Private Letters of the Marquess of Dalhousie Dalhousie writes eight years before the event of his keenness to dispose kingdoms: “before two years are over they [i.e. Hyderabad and Oudh] will be managed by us” (33).

3. Ray asks us to read the film between the lines, in that he was “portraying two negative forces, feudalism and colonialism. You had to condemn both” (qtd by Robinson in his Introduction to Ray's The Chess Players [12]).

4. The space of empire or the links between political identity and territory, Mehta further observes, was neglected by British thinkers of the 19th century. The “absence of self‐consciousness regarding the empire's own locality foretold its fated terminus in the fate of nationalism, which [ … ] insisted on the political credence of drawing boundaries” (116).

5. A foreigner had taken exile in Britain and had plotted to commit a crime upon another foreigner to be perpetrated abroad. This was the famous case of Count Felice Orsini, who was found involved in conspiracy, assassination and passport forgery. Lord Palmerston, in response, proposed the bill in the House of Commons:

 A conspiracy has been formed, partly in this country for the purposes of committing a most atrocious crime. That conspiracy has led to most disastrous consequences [ … ] the law in this country – in England – treats a conspiracy to murder simply as a misdemeanour subject to fine and a short period of imprisonment [ … ] the conspiracy to murder is punishable on the same manner as a conspiracy for any other purpose such as hissing at the theatre. (Hansard 8 Feb. 1858)

6. Australia's own Indigenous people were decimated, and those who survived reduced to nothing more than objects. Drawing from a mid‐19th‐century true story, David Malouf writes in Remembering Babylon of how a blond English boy, brought up by Aborigines for 16 years, rejoins colonial society in a white settlement in Queensland. He appears at the edge of the settlement, a spindly scarecrow thing, falling off a fence, shouting: “Do not shoot. I am a B‐b‐british object” (3).

7. Security needs, the reinstatement of order, strategic deployment of troops, and the need to generate revenues to offset these expenses were cited as reasons for annexation. Oudh was already a major supplier of indigo, cotton, textiles and opium.

8. Competitive metropolitan interests constituted an essential element of the dynamic. Anxiety and fear over French machinations in relation to Indian rulers was never far away. In his troubles with the Company, Tipu Sultan had after all set a precedent by approaching the revolutionary government in Paris.

9. I have retained the spellings as they appear in the correspondence.

10. See FO 612/14 (1857), Public Record Office.

11. Enoch Powell declared: “The West Indian or Indian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman” (Foot 119). Margaret Thatcher sought to justify her nationality law on the grounds that the public was afraid “that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture” (Messina 122).