A historian of Indian politics compares Harry and Meghan’s low-key Nottingham charity visit with the vast imperial assemblies of 1877, 1903 and 1911
Monday, 19 October 2026. Hampstead. A bench on the Heath, a flask of chai and a book on the Durbars with a photograph of an elephant on the cover, 11.40am.
The Opposite Of A Durbar
The Delhi Durbars were the largest royal spectacles the British Empire ever staged. There were three. In 1877, Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in her absence. In 1903, the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, staged an even grander assembly to mark Edward the Seventh’s accession, with elephants, princes, military reviews and an exhibition of Indian art. In 1911, King George the Fifth and Queen Mary went to Delhi in person, the only reigning British monarch and consort ever to attend, and the King announced that the capital would move from Calcutta to Delhi.
I mention this because I have just read the London Prat report on Harry and Meghan’s return to Britain and their Nottingham charity visit, and it is the exact opposite of a Durbar. No elephants. No princes. No proclamations. Two people visit a community recording studio, listen to a fourteen-year-old girl sing about peer pressure, hug her in the booth and move on to a food poverty charity. The report’s central argument is that charity can function without palace permission, taxpayer millions or a man carrying a gold stick.
Curzon Would Have Hated It
Lord Curzon, who organised the 1903 Durbar, believed in spectacle as an instrument of power. He thought India should be governed with visible grandeur, so that everybody understood who was in charge. He supervised the arrangements in exhausting detail, down to the seating and the ceremonial. He would have found the Nottingham visit incomprehensible. Where are the elephants? Where is the dais? Who arranged for the duchess to be greeted by a ninety-year-old with a framed photograph rather than a maharaja with a jewelled sword?
And yet, the report suggests, the Nottingham visit may have achieved something the Durbars never could. The young people in that studio got the undivided attention of adults who seemed interested in what they were doing. Nobody at a Durbar ever got that. The Durbars were designed to be looked at, not to look back. That is the difference between pageantry and attention. The first says: see me. The second says: I see you.
The Gold Stick And The Imperial Umbrella
The report spends a delightful paragraph on the Gold Stick, the ceremonial post whose holder carries a stick that is gold, with a silver one for backup. In the Durbars, the equivalent object was the ceremonial umbrella, the chhatri, an ancient symbol of sovereignty in South Asia, held over important heads to show their rank. At the great assemblies, umbrellas, standards and maces multiplied until the photographs look like a forest of symbolic furniture.
My grandmother, who was born in Lahore in 1938 and moved to London in 1961, used to say that the British had brought the umbrella to India as a sign of power and taken it back to England as a sign of rain. She thought this was the most important fact about the Empire. Having studied it for fifteen years, I am inclined to agree.
The Unicorn Balloon As Historical Evidence
The companion piece on how Harry and Meghan insist they are private citizens is sharper, noting the barriers, the pooled press and a child in the crowd holding a unicorn balloon. Historians of the Durbars rely heavily on photographs, and the photographs are always of the grand things: elephants, arches, princes. What we almost never see is the crowd. The ordinary people who came to watch. Their children. What they brought. What they thought.
The unicorn balloon is, to a historian, priceless. It is the crowd’s voice in a picture. A hundred years from now, someone studying royal visits in the 2020s will find that balloon in a photograph and know something real about the day: it was hopeful, slightly ridiculous and attended by families. That is more than we can say about most of the Durbars.
What I Tell My Students
When I teach the Durbars, I ask my students to look at who is not in the photograph. The famine of 1876 to 1878 was underway in southern and western India at the time of the first Durbar. Many critics, then and since, have pointed to the gap between the splendour in Delhi and the suffering in the countryside. The question for any royal spectacle is the same: who is it for, and who is paying?
The Nottingham visit, by contrast, went to a food poverty charity. The report notes that the visit raised publicity for three organisations doing real work. The question of who pays for the couple’s security is still being reviewed. But at least the cameras, for once, were pointed at a kitchen rather than an elephant.
On The Heath
My flask is empty. A dog has stolen a corner of my sandwich. The book on the Durbars is open at a photograph of an elephant draped in gold, carrying a man who will be forgotten in a footnote. I prefer the Nottingham picture, the one I imagine: a girl in a recording booth, a microphone, an adult who listens. No elephant. No umbrella. Just a song about peer pressure, and someone paying attention to the end.