Paper short abstract:

Looking at the conception of, and debates surrounding, an 1834 exhibition of fireworks at Calcutta, this paper highlights a major turning point in a long-running debate surrounding the status of the "public" in British India.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores a major transition in imperial ideology and governance through an unlikely but revealing lens: the "Grand Exhibition of Fire Works" held in Calcutta on 10 January, 1834, for an audience of tens of thousands. This was perhaps the largest, most expensive, and most discussed civic gathering in British Asia during the 1820s-30s, a high-water mark for the popular political involvement of the "age of reform." But it was also a turning point in a long-running debate surrounding the status of the "public."

In a series of contestations in the 1820s, The East India Company had defended its despotic mode of governance on the grounds that there was no public in India capable of supporting representative institutions. Reformers, in response, had argued that it was only the Company's despotism that prevented a nascent public from emerging. In negotiations over the renewal of the Company's political functions in 1833, the framers of the new Charter forged a middle-ground, arguing that despotism in the present was the route to liberty in the future. In this view, an as-yet inarticulate "public mind" would, over time, and with the proper cultivation, become a public, displacing despotism and perhaps British rule altogether. These were views with which Governor-General Bentinck agreed: the charter celebration in Calcutta was his attempt to communicate them and garner popular assent. The failure of this attempt, on both counts, would have important consequences, shattering the momentary illusion of a liberal consensus.