An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India by Shashi Tharoor
The early crude practices of installing and defenestrating the rulers behind whose nominal authority the East India Company would rule, revealed little respect for the existing political institutions of India nor for the need to develop them to face the challenges of a new era. But the weakening of India’s political institutions went deeper. As part of the ‘Permanent Settlement’, the British enfeebled village communities, since they made direct arrangements with individual local potentates in order to increase revenue collections. They also centralized judicial and executive powers, functions previously dispensed by village communities in their jurisdiction. Reports written by observers of the Company described the village communities as self-governing republics and functioning economic units, linked to the wider precolonial global market, that had governed themselves even as powers at the centre came and went. Under the British this ceased to be true.
It is important to remember that these villages did not exist in some kind of rustic agrarian isolation but were active and functioning political and economic units as well. ‘In India,’ wrote an eminent English civil servant, ‘the village system was the one organism that survived the long years of anarchy and invasion, and it was in full vigour when we conquered India. Those who care to read up the subject can see it in Sir Henry Sumner Maine’s Indian Village Communities.’ But instead of building self-government from the village level up, as the British could have done had they been sincere, the Company destroyed what existed, and the Crown, when it eventually took charge of the country, devolved smidgens of government authority, from the top, to unelected provincial and central ‘legislative’ councils whose members represented a tiny educated elite, had no accountability to the masses, passed no meaningful legislation, exercised no real power and satisfied themselves they had been consulted by the government even if they took no actual decisions.
Part of the problem was that the Indian social structures were unfamiliar to the British, whose own villages survived in a largely feudalistic relationship to their landlords. Empire was in many ways the vehicle for the extension of British social structures to the colonies they conquered. The socio-political constructs that the British made in their Empire were primarily reflections of the traditional, individualistic, unequal and still class-ridden society that existed in England. The architects of Empire, responding to what they knew, sought to recreate the rural arcadia of Tory England, where local government since the sixteenth century had been controlled by those with high social prestige and ruled by an established squirearchy. Instead of the autonomous village governments the British dismantled in India, English villages were in the hands of the traditional lords, the grandees being supplemented by gentry attached to them. The English tried to find similar structures in the traditional societies of their colonies, and when they could not, they invented an approximation of them. Thus was born the ‘indirect rule’ system of government that characterized much of the Empire, with power devolved to an entire hierarchy of greater and lesser imitation ‘gentlemen’, many given British-invented titles like ‘Rai Bahadur’ or even knighted (and, in a couple of cases, ennobled) for their pains. This was both less expensive for the Empire and, as with the English system at home, it was run by complicit amateurs, so there was no need to create a professional class of Indians who would wield, and then seek to exercise, political authority.
This British practice, previously unknown in India, caused long-lasting damage. The historian Jon Wilson has argued that India had a dynamic economic and political order—‘a society of little societies’—where constant negotiation between the rulers and the ruled was the norm. India’s villages were not self-reliant republics that lived in blissful isolation. They were networked and connected, and it was the destruction of Indian industry that forced people to retreat and focus on farming, creating both a more agrarian society and the problem of peasant dispossession. By the early 1800s, India had been reduced from a land of artisans, traders, warriors and merchants, functioning in thriving and complex commercial networks, into an agrarian society of peasants and moneylenders. Extensive scholarship has shown how the British created the phenomenon of landlessness, turned self-reliant cultivators into tenants, employees and bondsmen, transformed social relations and as a result undermined agrarian growth and development. The impact of such policies endures to the present day and has had a distorting effect on India’s evolution: Banerjee and Iyer, for instance, demonstrate how British colonial policy choices led to sustained differences in economic outcomes: ‘Areas in which proprietary rights in land were historically given to landlords have significantly lower agricultural investments and productivity in the post-independence period than areas in which these rights were given to the cultivators.’ There are no victimless colonial actions: everything the British did echoes down the ages.
Underlying the British imperial expansion in India was a congeries of motivations and assumptions—crass commercial cupidity, as we have demonstrated, and the need to consolidate political power in order to safeguard profits, but also the racist European notion, expressed most bluntly during the Iberian conquest of the New World, that ‘heathen’ Indian nations were unworthy of the status of sovereign legal entities. In the Americas, hostility to European traders and resistance to the Christian gospel was considered adequate cause for ‘just’ war, justifying territorial conquest and the enslavement of the losers. While such a proposition was not explicitly advanced in India, the British broadly shared the same sets of beliefs as their European confrères in the West.
Initially the game of thrones was played one step removed, as it were, with nawabs propped up by the Company as the official rulers. This was because the Company’s official status, as of 1764, was as revenue administrators of three major Mughal provinces in eastern India, an authority granted, as we have seen, by a firman from the chastened and weak-kneed Mughal emperor, who issued a diwani to this effect. Robert Clive explained his role to the board of directors of the East India Company in a letter dated 27 January 1764: ‘We may be regarded as the spring which, concealed under the shadow of the Nabob’s name, secretly gives motion to this vast machine of government without offering violence to the original constitution. The increase of our own, and diminution of his, power are effected without encroachment on his prerogative. The Nabob holds in his hands, as he always did, the whole civil administration, the distribution of justice, the disposal of offices, and all those sovereign rights which constitute the essence of his dignity, and form the most convenient barrier between us and the jealousy of the other European settlements.’
Arguably, however, the reality of British paramountcy over India had already become clear thanks to the numerous military victories of the East India Company over Indian princes, and the unequal treaties that reified their subjugation. William Bolts, a Dutch trader who had worked for a few years for the East India Company, wrote in 1772 that the Company was nothing more than a despotic oligarchy of merchants who had usurped the status of sovereigns. The Nawab of Bengal was little more than a ‘stipendiary servant’ and the Mughal emperor, a pensioner and a ‘mere instrument of their power’. The fig leaf of revenue administration was, according to Bolts, a ‘mere fiction’ invented to legitimize the acquisition of these newly acquired territorial possessions ‘for the private purposes of the Company and their servants’. The British historian Edward Thompson argues that after 1819, when Lord Lake defeated the Marathas, ‘only stupidity or hypocrisy, or an excess of tactfulness, could pretend that the East India Company was not the paramount power or that any of the [Indian] Princes were equal to its status’.
Presiding over all of this was the Governor General of India, an executive appointed by the East India Company but, in effect, the monarch of all he surveyed. Dalrymple quotes one contemporary observer as saying: ‘Of all human conditions, perhaps the most brilliant and at the same time the most anomalous, is that of the Governor General of British India. A private English gentleman, and the servant of a joint-stock com
The ad hoc nature of the expansion of British power brought with it its own deinstitutionalization of India’s governance. Between 1746 and 1763 the Company fought three ‘Carnatic Wars’, which combined a quest for local dominance with a British conflict for supremacy against the French, mirroring the parallel wars in Europe at the same time. In many of its conquests and campaigns the Company did not hesitate to outsource its military efforts to mercenaries and armed bands of various sorts. Scholars see the East India Company as an example of a military patronage state, which distributed its patronage to itinerant bands of warriors without regard to any formal or institutional structures. The Company paid soldiers in exchange for their service and others for essential procurements, offering various benefits to ensure their support. Violence, to use today’s language, was contracted to non-state actors. Such methods accentuated the informal, non-institutionalized nature of the British conquest of India, stunting the prospect of the normal development of political institutions in the country.
This resort to free-floating mercenary warrior elements served India ill. Lord Cornwallis, for instance, did not have the resources to provide irregular mounted units with regular rations, so he ordered them to find their own means of subsistence. This led to pillage and extortion as the troops advanced, only adding to the suffering and deprivation of the indigenous population; but then the well-being of the inhabitants had never been a priority for the Company. The freelance warriors and mercenaries associated with the Company enjoyed the license to loot everything they could lay their hands on: hardly a British contribution to good governance in India.
This method of expansion was not to last, however, thanks to the Company’s unquestioned military superiority, especially once ‘the other European settlements’ Clive had referred to had all been routed or taught their place, and the Company—though still a trading corporation—soon had few compunctions about deposing native princes and absorbing their kingdoms. The Crown, when it assumed responsibility for the Raj, through Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858, largely preferred to leave the traditional rulers of India in place, with their authority subordinate to the British. (They exercised their power through an official parked at the princely court with the nominally modest title of ‘the Resident’, another case of British understatement masking the uglier reality of brute power.)
Where the British in the course of their gradual takeover of India over a century did not annex the territory of a subjugated ruler, they made him sign an unequal treaty. This mixture of devices by which the British ruled India was, as I have pointed out throughout this chapter, far from conducive to the development of Indian political institutions, nor did it engender respect for the nominal authority in whose name power was supposedly exercised.
It is also pertinent to nail the canard that whatever the deficiencies of the Company, its rule was no worse than the supposedly rapacious princes whom the British supplanted. This is simply false. Much of the British conquest and expansion before 1857 took place against either benign, or not particularly oppressive, native rulers. The Maratha Peshwas, the Mysore rulers and the chess-playing Nawab of Oudh, to name three, were not accused of misgovernance: they were merely too powerful for colonial comfort or too rich to avoid attracting British avarice. (Indeed there were outstanding examples of good governance in India at the time, notably the Travancore kingdom, which in 1819 became the first government in the world to decree universal, compulsory and free primary education for both boys and girls.) The British charges against the rulers they overthrew were largely specious: a 1907 study concluded that ‘we discover that there is little basis for all this pessimism of the past beyond the eagerness to exalt, however dishonestly, the superiority of European methods’. Where British charges of misrule had any validity, they were principally against rulers the Company had installed in the first place or, in the twentieth century, princes they had removed from their cultural context and educated at Eton and Harrow, leaving them aliens in their own land.
This is not to suggest that precolonial India was universally well-ruled—as we know, it was going through a period of disintegration, collapsing Mughal authority, and in many places, conditions bordering on anarchy—but is merely intended to reject the notion that British rapacity would have been seen as an improvement by most Indians of that time. In large parts of India during the period of British colonial expansion, fairly decent governments, broadly accepted by the people, were removed and replaced by British rulers whose motives and methods were, on the whole, much more reprehensible than those they had overthrown.
THE CROWN TAKES OVER ITS JEWEL
While the case against the misgovernance of Company rule in India is irrefutable—having been made, among others, by Edmund Burke in his celebrated impeachment of Warren Hastings, by Macaulay in his denunciations of the greed of the nabobs, and by Clive himself through his act of suicide—the assumption of power by the British Crown of its imperial ‘jewel’ changes the argument somewhat. With Queen Victoria’s Proclamation in 1858, the British offered a different narrative for their rule of India: that they would govern in pursuit of ‘that prosperity and that social advancement which can only be secured by internal peace and good government…’ The queen added her ‘earnest desire to stimulate the peaceful industry of India, to promote works of public utility and improvement, and to administer the government for the benefit of all our subjects resident therein. In their prosperity will be our strength, in their contentment our security, and in their gratitude our best reward’.
This was a stirring manifesto of the ‘we are ruling you for your own good’ school, far removed, at least in declared intent, from the naked rapacity of the East India Company. With the coronation of 1877, the British monarchy was reinvented by Benjamin Disraeli as an imperial instrument—the queen became an empress, with India the newest and most glittering jewel in her crown, and her domains stretched across the world to an unprecedented extent. Equally important to the imperial project was the perception of grandeur that accompanied it. The British in India spent a great deal on extravagant display, but the gaudy glitter also had an imperial purpose: it was intended by the British, suggests Jan Morris, ‘partly to amaze the indigenes, partly to fortify themselves. In a country of princes, they deliberately used the mystique of monarchy as an instrument of dominion.’
In pursuance of this ‘schlock and awe’ strategy, three gigantic durbars were held to mark imperial occasions—the crowning of Queen Victoria as the Empress of India was commemorated with the grand pageantry of an imperial durbar presided over by Viceroy Lord Lytton in 1887; the accession of Edward VII by an even grander durbar held by Lord Curzon on New Year’s Day 1903; and the final imperial durbar of the Raj, in 1911, to welcome King George V and Queen Mary to the new capital, Delhi.
At the peak of its pomp, the British empire in India conceived and built an immense and hugely impressive new imperial capital at New Delhi. The French statesman Georges Clemenceau was sceptical, seeing it as the latest in a long line of imperial follies; it is said that he laughed when he saw half-built New Delhi in 1920 amid the rubble of seven previous cities in the same area, and observed: ‘Ça sera la plus magnifique de toutes ces ruines.’(This will be the most magnificent of all these ruins.)’ Years later, the management theorist C. Northcote Parkinson would cite the building of New Delhi among many examples in formulating his ‘second law’, that institutions build their grandest monuments just before they crumble into irrelevance.
Morris describes in lavish detail the imperial durbar conducted by Lord Curzon in Delhi, where, amid elephants and trumpets, bejewelled maharajas paying tribute and a public assembled from all four corners of the subcontinent to view the imperial pan
Curzon, who conducted the grandest of the three durbars just two years after a ruinous famine, was the epitome of imperial majesty as viceroy. What Jan Morris called Curzon’s ‘taste for lordliness,’ and Niall Ferguson dubs his ‘Toryentalism’, was integral to his viceroyalty, which he conducted in a manner and with a paternalism befitting a scion of the old British aristocracy (his family was descended from the victorious Norman invaders of Britain 800 years earlier). Curzon’s public life had long been haunted by four lines of Balliol doggerel targeting him in his student days at Oxford, which were unfailingly cited by the popular press whenever he received a new appointment: ‘My name is George Nathaniel Curzon / I am a most superior person / My hair is black, my face is sleek / I dine at Blenheim every week’.** If this undergraduate humour had immortalized him, so would his viceroyalty, which was to eclipse every other accomplishment in his ultimately disappointing political career. Curzon had nurtured the ambition to be viceroy since childhood, and he brought to it a vision of imperial grandeur that he sought both in substance and style to fulfil.
The style that Curzon brought to its apogee reflected what the British writer David Cannadine dubbed ‘Ornamentalism’. Curzon was, to Cannadine, a ‘ceremonial impresario’. Cannadine devoted an entire book to the proposition that the British empire was about ‘antiquity and anachronism, tradition and honour, order and subordination; about glory and chivalry, horses and elephants, knights and peers, processions and ceremony, plumed hats and ermine robes; about chiefs and emirs, sultans and nawabs, viceroys and proconsuls; about thrones and crowns, dominion and hierarchy, ostentation and ornamentalism’. It continued in this vein right until the final surrender, when the ceremonial costumes of the last viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, seemed to be in inverse proportion to his dwindling hold on political power.