Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

Appointment and the Delhi Durbar

Lytton, a career diplomat who had served in various European postings, including as British minister to Portugal shortly before his appointment as Viceroy, and was also a published poet under the pen name Owen Meredith, was the son of the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. He was appointed Viceroy by Benjamin Disraeli's Conservative government with instructions to pursue a more assertive frontier policy toward Afghanistan and Russia and to oversee the formal proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India, a title adopted under the Royal Titles Act 1876, a step Disraeli favored partly to underline British paramountcy in India in the face of Russian imperial expansion into Central Asia. The proclamation was marked by an elaborate ceremonial assembly at Delhi in January 1877, the Delhi Durbar, attended by Indian ruling princes, colonial officials, and troops in a display intended to assert the permanence and grandeur of British paramountcy and to bind the princely states more closely into the imperial order.

Famine policy

The Durbar coincided with the onset of severe famine across large parts of southern and western India, including Madras Presidency, Bombay Presidency, Mysore, and Hyderabad, caused by monsoon failure beginning in 1876. Lytton's government applied a restrictive approach to famine relief, informed by prevailing laissez-faire economic doctrine associated with the Government of India's finance department and a concern that generous relief would encourage dependency and distort grain markets; relief works imposed strict eligibility tests, required manual labor as a condition of aid, and paid wages kept deliberately low, a stance in keeping with the "Temple wage" policy associated with the civil servant Richard Temple, who administered relief in Madras. Mortality from starvation and associated disease during the famine is estimated in the millions, with figures varying widely across contemporary and later sources and the precise toll remaining disputed. The contrast between famine deaths and Durbar expenditure drew sustained criticism from contemporaries and later historians, and the episode contributed to the appointment, after Lytton's departure, of a Famine Commission under Richard Strachey in 1880, whose report led to a more codified famine relief policy in subsequent decades.

Press and arms restrictions

In 1878 Lytton's government enacted the Vernacular Press Act, which allowed district magistrates to require securities from Indian-language newspapers and to confiscate presses judged to publish seditious material, a measure aimed specifically at Indian-language rather than English-language papers and widely resented as discriminatory. The same year saw the Arms Act, which imposed licensing restrictions on the possession of firearms by Indians while exempting Europeans, a distinction that became a long-standing grievance cited by nationalist leaders.

Trade policy and the Afghan war

Lytton's administration also removed import duties on British cotton manufactures in 1879, a free-trade measure favoring Lancashire textile manufacturers that was criticized in India as harmful to the domestic textile industry, which continued to face excise duties of its own. On the northwest frontier, concern over growing Russian influence at the court of Kabul led Lytton to pursue a "forward policy" of assertive intervention in Afghan affairs, in tension with the more cautious frontier approach of his predecessors. When Amir Sher Ali Khan refused to accept a British mission while receiving a Russian one, Lytton's government demanded he admit a British envoy; when this was refused, war followed in November 1878. British forces under generals including Frederick Roberts and Donald Stewart advanced into Afghanistan on three fronts and occupied much of the country, and the 1879 Treaty of Gandamak installed Sher Ali's successor Yaqub Khan as a client ruler accepting British control of Afghan foreign policy and stationing a British Resident at Kabul. The arrangement collapsed within months when the Resident, Sir Louis Cavagnari, was killed along with his escort in an uprising at Kabul in September 1879, reigniting the war. British forces under Roberts reoccupied Kabul in response, and fighting continued past Lytton's tenure, including a serious British reverse at the Battle of Maiwand in 1880, before the war was eventually settled under his successor, Lord Ripon, with the installation of Abdur Rahman Khan as Amir and a British withdrawal from most of Afghanistan short of full political control.

Departure and later life

Lytton resigned in 1880 after the Conservative government fell and William Gladstone's Liberals took office, and was succeeded as Viceroy by Lord Ripon, whose administration reversed several of Lytton's press and tariff measures. Lytton returned to literary work and later diplomatic service, serving as British ambassador to France from 1887 until his death in Paris in 1891; his tenure as Viceroy remained, in India, more closely associated with the Great Famine and the Vernacular Press Act than with the ceremonial grandeur of the Delhi Durbar that had opened it.