An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India by Shashi Tharoor
Though he turned down several invitations to become Britain’s Poet Laureate, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was for much of his adult life the unofficial Poet Laureate of Empire. His roots as the quintessential writer of imperialism ran deep: Kipling, the cub reporter for seven years with newspapers in Lahore and Lucknow, was eighteen when Lord Ripon unsuccessfully attempted to allow Indian judges to try Europeans, and the controversy (in which he, of course, sympathized with his racist fellow settlers) shaped his attitude to the need for ‘dominion’ over ‘lesser breeds without the Law’. Kipling wrote articles designed to show the inability of Indians to govern themselves, prefiguring Kipling the later imperial prophet declaiming thunderous anapests about the white man’s burden. In both incarnations, Kipling the arch-imperialist, in the admission of a sympathetic biographer, wrote of Indians ‘sometimes with a rare understanding, sometimes with crusty, stereotyped contempt’. What matters in Kipling’s work is not Indians, not even the physical and social details of India that he knowingly throws into his narratives, but the vastness and passion animating his vision and rendering of Empire itself. Scholars have come to see Kipling’s writings as ‘part of the defining discourse of colonialism’ which both ‘reinscribe cultural hegemony and the cultural schizophrenia that constructed the division between the Englishman as demi-God and as human failure, as colonizer and semi-native’.
The British saw themselves as a civilizing force, the ‘brave island-fortress/of the storm-vexed sea’ in the line of the poet Sir Lewis Morris, written on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Macaulay, for all his sins, was more alive to the contradictions of the imperial mission: ‘Be the father and the oppressor of the people,’ he wrote, ‘be just and unjust, moderate and rapacious.’ Not every Englishman in India can be accused of having any great notions of serving such warped ideas of Empire. Many, like the teacher Cyril Fielding in Forster’s A Passage to India, saw themselves as merely being in India because they needed the job—petty men in the service of a great cause they did not personally think about, a cause they saw propagated in the form of bibles, bayonets and brandy.
The British aristocracy, of course, saw themselves as transcending every possible distinction held by Indians of whatever lineage. ‘The Aga Khan,’ the College of Heralds in London once noted, ‘is held by his followers to be a direct descendant of God. English Dukes take precedence.’
Rudyard Kipling was emblematic of a late nineteenth-century paradox: imperialists saw their mission not only in terms of the lands they subjugated and ruled, but as part of a vital task of stiffening the backbone of an increasingly soft metropole. The wild frontier was a place for the hardy Englishman to test his mettle, demonstrate his toughness, and celebrate the virtues of manliness, fidelity to a band of brothers, and loyalty to Queen and country. Kim begins with the English protagonist atop the Zam-Zammah cannon that symbolized authority and control over the Punjab, having knocked Hindus and Muslims off the gun before him. ‘Who hold Zam-Zammah, that “fire-breathing dragon”, hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot. There was some justification for Kim…since the English held Punjab and Kim was English’.
According to this line of thinking, the imperial enterprise required men of courage, capable of violence, prepared for action and ready at all times to prevail against the unwashed hordes, qualities reaffirmed in the works of Kipling (such as Stalky & Co., where British schoolboys triumph through savagery) and other ‘masculinist’ writers of Empire. This literary reaffirmation is all the more ironic, since it celebrates qualities that are proudly deployed in pursuit of a civilizing mission. The Empire’s heroes were, in other words, men who used barbarity to pacify the supposedly barbarous.
As Lieutenant Herbert Edwardes wrote in 1846 of his mission in India: ‘There is something noble in putting the hand of civilization upon the mane of a nation like the Punjab…and looking down brute passions.’ It is striking that the Punjab in this metaphor is like an untamed beast on whose ‘mane’ the civilizing British hand must be firmly placed. Lord Curzon told an audience at Oxford University in 1907 that it was on the uncivilized outskirts of Empire that were found ‘the ennobling and invigorating stimulus for our youth, saving them alike from the corroding ease and the morbid excitements of Western civilization’. Impelled by such ideas, imperialists during the second half of the nineteenth century developed and expressed a strong preference for the noble savage (the primitive, wild, martial but ‘manly’ tribesman and his ilk) over the educated wog (the effete, culturally-hybrid Westernized Oriental gentlemen later to be derided as Macaulayputras). In Kipling’s racially repugnant Kim, the latter is typified in the character of Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, the ‘baboo’ ethnographer in the employ of the British authorities, who, with his mangled English and forlorn hopes of being elected to the British Royal Society, is mocked for aspiring to be that which he never can be—a member of the colonizing class rather than merely one of its subjects.
Even E. M. Forster, the English novelist whose A Passage to India received the most uncritical reception from Indian nationalists in his time (the India League chief, Krishna Menon, even arranged its publication by Allen Lane) echoed the idea of Empire, most notably in his depiction of the impossibility of friendship between an Englishman and an Indian in the famous closing lines to his novel:
‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ said the other, holding him affectionately. ‘It’s what I want. It’s what you want.’ But the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart: the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temple, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they emerged from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, ‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said ‘No, not there.’
Of course, Forster’s Indian protagonist, a middle-class doctor with a traditional Muslim family, was not the social or intellectual equal of his Englishman, Fielding, and perhaps true friendship between them would have been impossible even in a non-imperial India. But Forster, whose book omits all mention of the Indian nationalist movement, and who caricatures his only major Hindu character, seemingly cannot conceive of either the kind of Indian (like Surendra Nath Banerjea) who had won entry into the ICS or the kind (like Jawaharlal Nehru) whose critiques of Empire were challenging the foundations of the Raj. It is a stultifying limited vision, which never arises above the mystery and the muddle that this well-intentioned Englishman saw India as. ‘Only connect’, says the memorable epigraph in Forster’s Howards End: as an Indian reader, one can only wish that he, and the British in India, had.
BRITISH GOVERNANCE, THE SWADESHI MOVEMENT AND THE ADVENT OF MAHATMA GANDHI
Britain’s motives may have been entirely selfish, as I demonstrate in Chapter 1, but on the positive side, its imperialism brought in law and order amid what looked perilously like anarchy, settled the perennial conflicts amongst warring groups and principalities, and permitted a less violent form of political competition than might otherwise have occurred in India. ‘Imperialism,’ Robert Kaplan suggests, ‘confers a loose and accepted form of sovereignty, occupying a middle ground between anarchy and full state control’. ‘Accepted’ is a contestable term, of course, but acquiescence is also a form of acceptance, and many Indians, in the end, accepted British sovereignty, if only because they had no choice.
The Government of India Act, 1858, transformed the post of Governor General (soon re-designated as the viceroy), who would be directly responsible for the administration of India, along with provincial governors. The Governors General or viceroys were provided with councils, in which members were nominated. In 1861, new legislation allowed Indians to be added by nomination to the legislative councils of the Governor General and the provincial governors. Indians had to wait till the Indian Councils Act of 1892 (which amended the Act of 1861) and the subsequent Minto–Morley Reforms of 1909, both well a
However, the Acts of 1892 and 1909 were at best cosmetic alterations to the established system and marginally affected how these Indian councils were constituted and functioned. They increased the council membership through indirect election (in other words, selection by the British) but in reality, these councils had no powers worth the name. They had the right to raise issues in the councils but not to make any decisions; they could express the voice of the Indian public (or at least its elite, English-educated sections) but had no authority to pass laws or budgets. That power still lay with the Governor General, who could reject any resolutions passed by the council or impose upon the council the need to discuss and pass a resolution if he deemed it necessary for India.
The Secretary of State for India who gave his name to the 1909 reforms, John Morley, had even opposed increasing membership of Indians to the Indian councils and argued that in his view the British government of India was run with all the consent and representation of the Indian people it needed. ‘[If] this chapter of reform led directly or necessarily to the establishment of a parliamentary system in India, I for one will have nothing at all to do with it’, he declared. Indeed, such a thought could not have been farther from the minds of the reformers; every ‘reform’ that the British government brought into India’s governance, up to the Government of India Act of 1935, protected the absolute authority of the Governor General and the Parliament of Britain. The Indian councils at the centre and provincial levels were always bodies with no real authority on any significant matter, and budgets, defence and law and order remained firmly in British hands. The objective was a gradual increase in representative government, not the establishment of full-fledged democracy.
In the book Recovering Liberties, C. A. Bayly makes an impressive case for the argument that Britain helped liberalism take root in India by institutionalizing it through schools and colleges, newspapers, and colonial law courts, and thereby converted an entire generation of Indians to a way of thinking about their own future that led to today’s Indian democracy. The problem is that this liberalism was practised within severe limits. The Indian National Congress was established in 1885 as a voice of moderate, constitutionalist Indian opinion by a Scotsman, Allan Octavian Hume, and a group of well-educated, establishmentarian Indians. Far from welcoming such a development, as a truly liberal regime seeking to instil democracy in its charges ought to have done, the British reacted to it with varying degrees of hostility and contempt.
The English journalist Henry Nevinson wrote in 1908:
For twenty-two years, ‘it [the Congress] was a model of order and constitutional propriety. It passed excellent resolutions, it demanded the redress of acknowledged grievances, in trustful loyalty it arranged deputations to the representatives of the Crown. By the Anglo-Indians [the British in India]* its constitutional propriety was called cowardice, its resolutions remained unnoticed, its grievances un-redressed, and the representative of the Crown refused to receive its deputation…[Indians realized] that it was useless addressing pious resolutions to the official wastepaper basket.
It was this attitude, more than anything else, that was to transform the Indian nationalist movement into becoming more militant. British attempts to suppress political activities that merely involved the exercise of free speech showed up the insincerity, or at least the poverty, of any claims of liberalism. For instance, Nevinson, who attended an Indian political meeting on the beach in Madras at the dawn of the century, recorded his impressions:
The chairman…summarized the history of the last year of suspicion, repression, deportation, imprisonment, flogging of boys and students for political causes, and the Seditious Meetings Act. It was all done without passion or exaggeration, and he ended with a simple resolution calling on the Government to repeal the deportation statute as contrary to the rights which England had secured for herself under the Habeas Corpus. Four speakers supported the resolution, and all spoke with the same quiet reasonableness, so different from our conception of the Oriental mind… Only Anglo-Indians [i.e. the English in India] could have called the speeches seditious. To a common type of Anglo-Indian mind, any criticism of the Government, any claim to further freedom, is sedition. But though this was avowedly a meeting of Extremists, the claim in the speeches was for the simple human rights that other peoples enjoy the right to a voice in their own affairs, and in the spending of their own money.
Since such approaches never worked, the national movement soon began to take a different approach, that of mass political agitation against Curzon’s 1905 Partition of Bengal, in order to make an effective impact upon the British. Outraged Bengali youths campaigned in towns and villages for the people to show their opposition to the colonial division of their homeland, preaching swadeshi (reliance on Indian-made goods) and urging a boycott of British goods. Shops that continued the sale of foreign goods were surrounded by youths who implored customers often by prostrating themselves in supplication before prospective purchasers, never by intimidation, for the sake of their country, to depart without purchasing. This form of picketing was never violent, but it was not what the British were used to. As British merchants in Bengal complained of a dramatic downturn in their sales and the conversion of regular profits into unaccustomed losses, the agitation triumphed: the British reversed the Partition.
It was with complete awareness of the success of this short-lived burst of mass politics that a thin, bespectacled lawyer wearing coarse homespun, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, returned to India in 1915 from a long sojourn in South Africa. There, his ‘experiments with truth’ and his morally-charged leadership of the Indian diaspora had earned him the sobriquet of Mahatma (‘Great Soul’). Starting off as a not particularly gifted lawyer engaged by an Indian in South Africa to plead a routine case, Gandhi had developed into a formidable figure. Appalled by the racial discrimination to which his countrymen were subject in South Africa, Gandhi had embarked upon a series of legal and political actions designed to protest and overturn the iniquities the British and the Boers imposed upon Indians. After his attempts to petition the authorities for justice (and to curry favour with them by organizing a volunteer ambulance brigade of Indians) had proved ineffective, Gandhi developed a unique method of resistance through civil disobedience.
Gandhi’s talent for organization (he founded the Natal Indian Congress) was matched by an equally rigorous penchant for self-examination and philosophical enquiry. Instead of embracing the bourgeois comforts that his status in the Indian community of South Africa might have entitled him to, Gandhi retreated to a communal farm he established outside Durban, read Henry David Thoreau, and corresponded with the likes of John Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy, all the while seeking to arrive at an understanding of ‘truth’ in both personal life and public affairs. The journey from petition politics to satyagraha was neither short nor easy, but having made it and then returned to his native land, the Mahatma brought to the incipient nationalist movement of India an extraordinary reputation as both saint and strategist.
The Mahatma’s singular insight was that self-government would never be achieved by the resolutions passed by a self-regarding and unelected elite pursuing the politics of the drawing room. To him, self-government had to involve the empowerment of the masses, the toiling multitudes of India in whose name the upper classes were clamouring for Home Rule. This position did not go over well with India’s political class, which consisted in those days largely of aristocrats and lawyers, men of means who discoursed in English and demanded the rights of Englishmen. Nor did Gandhi’s insistence that the masses be mobilized not by the methods of ‘princes and potentates’ (his phrase) but by moral values derived from ancient tradition and embodied in swadeshi and satyagraha.
To put his principles into
Gandhi’s ascent, enabled by the Raj’s failure to live up to the principles and values it professed, proved a repudiation of British liberalism, and not, as Bayly suggests, its vindication.
♦
Even in the twentieth century, when the British moved grudgingly and fitfully towards what Secretary of State for India Lord Montagu had termed ‘responsible self-government’, there was no serious intent to develop credible political institutions in India. There had been widespread expectations that, in response to India’s, and specifically Mahatma Gandhi’s, support for Britain in World War I, not to mention the sacrifices of Indian troops, India would, at the end of the conflict, be granted Dominion status (connoting autonomous self-government within the Empire, as enjoyed by Australia, Canada and the rest of the ‘White Commonwealth’). In 1917, Lord Montagu had placed before the British Cabinet a proposed declaration pledging ‘the gradual development of free institutions in India with a view to ultimate self-government’. The former viceroy and later foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, thought this went too far, and suggested an alternative phrasing straight out of Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes, Minister—that the government would work towards ‘increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British empire’. The Cabinet approved this convoluted and insincere formula in place of Montagu’s original wording and promptly reneged on the intent it had signalled.