T-minus two days until we finish off our Summer Seminar Series with a fascinating paper from Chandrica Barua entitled ‘Subaltern Victorias: The Queen and Her “Poor Little Princesses”’.

In her paper, Chandrica will illuminate the elusive and messy archives of unusual presences in the Victorian court, particularly dwelling upon the story of Princess Victoria Gouramma (1841‒1864), daughter of the deposed King of Coorg, Chikka Virarajendra, made a goddaughter of Queen Victoria. Her circuitous archives reveal the story of a colonised, racialised, exteriorised subject becoming an ornamental interior of the British Empire. Young Gouramma found herself in 1850s England, displaced from her homeland and culture, anglicised and Christianised, pruned and displayed as the glorious civilizational project of the Empire, and yet never truly being an inhabitant of the Victorian courtly landscape. The paper will also briefly reference the story of Sarah Forbes Bonetta (1843-1880), a Yoruba princess from West Africa, as a comparative, to interrogate the slippage between Blackness and brownness in the imperial racial imaginary.

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