India 1885-1947

The Unmaking of an Empire

Ian Copland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317877844
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

The establishment of the Indian National Congress in 1885 marked a turning point in modern South Asian history. At the time, few grasped the significance of the event, nor understood the power that its leader would come to wield. From humble beginnings, the Congress led by Gandhi would go on to spearhead India s fight for independence from British rule: in 1947 it succeeded the British Raj as the regional ruling power. Ian Copland provides both a narrative and analysis of the process by which Indians and Pakistanis emancipated themselves from the seemingly iron-clad yoke of British imperialism. In so doing, he goes to the heart of what sets modern India apart from most other countries in the region its vigorous democracy.

PART ONETHE BACKGROUND

CHAPTER ONE

RULERS AND SUBJECTS

THE POWER OF THE SWORD

The British Raj in India did not come into existence suddenly, fully-fledged; it was built up slowly, often by means of trial and error, over the better part of a hundred years. But by the 1880s, when our story begins, it had achieved what one might call its mature form. Appointment by patronage had largely given way to recruitment by competitive examination; the work of revenue collection had been systematised and to some extent standardised; and a beginning made towards the separation of executive and legislature by the Councils Acts of 1861 and 1892. All the while, the Raj had continued to expand and evolve. By 1887, over 20,000 people were drawing government salaries in excess of rupees 75 a month. Several hundred thousand more held down menial jobs in the postal service, the army, the police, and the public works department. By any standards, the late nineteenth-century Raj was a massive bureaucracy – too massive, some officials complained, for its own good.

Nevertheless it was a government that worked. Far and away the majority of Indians in the late nineteenth century paid their taxes and obeyed the laws. They accepted the Raj as a given in their lives. This, when you think about it, is a remarkable thing: for not only was the Raj, in the last resort, a foreign government, it was racially a government of the very few over the very many. In 1887 there were just over 6,000 Europeans in the public service, about 1,000 in the elite Indian Civil Service (ICS) whose members monopolised the senior administrative posts. In 1921 the entire white population, including women, was only 156,000, which equates to approximately one European for every 1,500 Indians. How did the British maintain control when they were so vastly outnumbered?

The official response to this question (at least down to the 1920s) was usually couched in terms of the ‘good government’ provided by the Raj. ‘Efficiency has been our gospel, the keynote of our administration’, boasted Lord Curzon [64 p. 242]. This is of course a far from sufficient explanation, but neither should it be dismissed out of hand. Compared to previous Indian governments (at least those of recent memory), the Raj did have a lot to commend it. The ICS, while not quite the platonic cadre of high-minded ‘guardians’ its apologists have claimed [e.g., 70], was hardworking, conscientious and notably incorrupt. The calibre of some of the other all-India services, such as the Indian Medical Service, was even higher, as the name of Ronald Ross IMS, discoverer of the malaria bacillus, testifies. As for the government at large, it was paternalistic, and sometimes despotic, but never arbitrary. Officials worked with textbooks and manuals at their side; the courts operated within the confines of the Civil and Criminal Codes and the Code of Civil Procedure; when not circumscribed by statute, viceregal discretion was shackled by the supervision of the Secretary of State and parliament. Ultimately, this was a rule of law. Moreover, it was a government that could claim to have effected some real improvements. By the turn of the twentieth century some 200 million Indians annually were patronising the British-built railway network (the world’s fourth largest); even more were using the government-run postal service. The rail system benefited merchants also as it has been estimated that freight rates on the railways were 80–90 per cent cheaper per ton mile than the charges for bullock-cart carriage. Another success story was irrigation. Canals to divert the seasonal river waters had brought large tracts of wasteland under the plough. Especially (but not only) in the canal colonies, land prices by the end of the century had risen dramatically, which was good news for the small minority of rural-dwellers that actually owned some land. Finally, although the matter is much disputed by historians, there is some evidence in the census and other reports that at least the middle-ranking sections of the population were living better than their forebears [Doc. 1]. Amenities widespread by 1900 but unheard of fifty years before included not only the railways but kerosene lamps and piped drinking water. ‘Can any other country show anything to compare with this wonderful achievement?’, mused former Punjab governor Sir Michael O’Dwyer, after his retirement in 1925 [32 p. 252]. The question is moot; but we might concur with O’Dwyer to the extent of hypothesising that people who benefit from a ruling regime are more likely to tolerate its excesses.

Nowdays, however, historians are inclined to put much more emphasis on other factors, in particular the element of power. As noted above, the Indian Empire was defended by a very large, well-equipped, professional standing army. This force could be reinforced, if needed, by regiments of the British regular army. In the early twentieth century, when nationalist agitation began to become a problem, some fifty battalions of the Indian Army, supplemented by artillery, armoured cars and aircraft, were specifically designated to put down insurrection. Supplementing these awesome legions were some 200,000 police officers, some armed with guns, the majority with steel-tipped bamboo staves called lathis, which were capable of breaking open a man’s skull at close quarters. Arguably, just the knowledge that this stupendous military might existed, ready to be called out in aid of the civil power if the occasion demanded, was probably enough to keep most of the subject population quiet for most of the time. And that suited the Raj, too. Threat was much cheaper and less complicated than actual coercion [Doc. 2]. But when it had to act, the Raj pulled no punches. Rioters who refused police orders to disperse were greeted with lathi-charges; ‘terrorists’ were executed; peddlers of ‘sedition’ were deported to Burma or the Andaman Islands. The mailed fist was especially evident during wartime, when the government arrogated to itself sweeping additional powers of search, arrest, and detention without trial under the Defence of India Rules. However, the weapon of last resort was the army. It was used infrequently, but when it was called out, the consequences were always terrible. The most infamous of these martial law episodes occurred in April 1919, in the Punjab city of Amritsar, when a peaceful crowd at a political meeting was fired on, without warning, for several minutes by a company of Gurkhas under the command of an ailing and possibly unstable British military officer, Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer. The official body-count was 379 killed and over 1,000 wounded, but was probably, in actuality, much higher. An unrepentent Dyer claimed afterwards that his action had made a ‘wide impression’ and had considerably undermined the morale of the ‘rebel’ movement.

But British power in India did not rest simply on force, or the threat of force. Thanks to the work of scholars such as Michel Foucault, we now realise that in addition to the overt instruments of law enforcement, there are other, more subtle agencies of coercion available to the state, such as the mental hospital and the school. In India, as elsewhere, state-sponsored education was used, not just to impart knowledge, but to inculcate obedience to authority. Moreover, that knowledge, itself, was by no means value-neutral. By the latter nineteenth century, British scholarship had generated an impressively vast and ostensibly scientific corpus of historical and sociological data about India. Collectively, this data reflected poorly on Indian society, which was revealed to be hopelessly divided and ridden with outmoded superstitions. Conversely, it showed up the ‘modern’ West in a very positive light [47; 55]. Together these two understandings comprised a persuasive explanation – and justification – for British rule. Caught up in the paradigm, Indians became unknowingly complicit in their own subjection.

More controversial is the human variable in the colonial equation. As we have seen, the British in India numbered scarcely 200,000, and of these only a fraction actually ruled, in the sense of administered; at the policy and command level, the Raj was run by about 1,000 members of the ICS. Thus it was said that the ICS constituted the ‘steel frame’ of British rule in India. Explicit in this steel frame argument is the Kiplingesque notion that the average British district officer was a pretty capable chap who worked hard, lived clean, and had little regard for personal danger. Implicit is the suggestion that the district officers exercised a kind of sway over the ordinary people they ruled, a sway that was partly rooted in deference for their position as the representatives of the government, the sarkar, but was also a function of the sharp physical and social differences that set them apart from their subjects: differences of height, colour, dress and demeanour, that in status-conscious India marked them out as men of high caste, ‘twice-born’ as the local saying went. Today, in the light of modern research, the argument looks a trifle overblown. Recent work on recruitment to the ICS has shown that it never became the first career-choice for the British public school and university elite, as people like Jowett of Balliol had hoped. While the tough examinations excluded downright mediocrities, they let in lots of people who were intellectually fairly average and gifted with no great athleticism either: hardly supermen material [63]. Yet these unlikely lads performed, sometimes heroically. Leonard Woolf once recalled of his time in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), that the English colonials there appeared to have modelled themselves on Rudyard Kipling’s fictional characters. The same role-playing seems to have happened in India. Coming as they often did from service families, the men of the ICS were exposed from an early age to tales of imperial valour. Their training reinforced this ethic, as did the propaganda then circulating about white racial superiority, and contact with their peers on arrival in India. Gradually the young recruits assimilated the authority roles expected of them, and with each passing year the deference they received made it easier for them to believe that Indians actually wanted to be ruled. ‘I had the illusion, wherever I was, that I was infallible and invulnerable in my dealings with Indians’, recalls Sir Walter Lawrence in his memoirs [71 p. 54] [Doc. 3]. What made the district officers generally successful as people-managers was their inordinate self-belief. As Lawrence confesses, it was a self-belief founded in large part on illusion. But the illusion was good enough to fool a lot of people for quite a long time.

Force and personal suasion together go a long way to explaining how the British kept control of the subcontinent until 1947. Yet was military power enough? Was personal influence enough, given that the district officers had on average 100,000 people to look after and could not be everywhere at once? At one level the answer is obvious: consider what would have happened if, in the early twentieth century, the entire population of 300 millions had risen up as one against their foreign rulers? Or even a substantial fraction of that number, say fifty millions? Surely not even the might of the Indian Army could have withstood such a massive movement? Alternatively, could the Raj have survived if all its native soldiers had deserted, or if its contractors had stopped supplying it with goods, or if a substantial section of the peasantry had refused to pay the land tax? Again, the answer is probably ‘no’. But neither of these frightening eventualities was ever on the cards. Revolts do not occur spontaneously; they are planned and led. Even if the people of India had been of one mind and purpose, mobilising such a vast multitude would have been a logistical nightmare. But they were not. As history would show, and as the high priests of colonial knowledge had long insisted, the Indian population was far too socially heterogeneous ever to suffer itself to be welded into a single subcontinental commonality.

As for the alternative, selective civil disobedience, the problem there, as Mahatma Gandhi would discover in 1920, was fear. People who thwarted the government were punished – beaten, jailed, fined. Many Indians wanted to stand up to the Raj; few were prepared to face the dire consequences of law-breaking.

However, the British needed more from the Indian population than mere passivity; they needed cooperation. They needed soldiers for their army, clerks for their offices, lawyers for their courts, guests for their receptions. Beyond that, they needed stalwart friends out in the community, influential intermediaries who could help them sell their message of improvement to the masses. They got them. It is in this sense that some historians suggest that British rule in India rested substantially on the consent of the governed.

COLLABORATION

Why did some Indians offer their services to the Raj? Why (to use more loaded language) did they collaborate? There were both negative and positive reasons. The negative reasons had to do with the way government service was perceived, or rather, how it was not perceived, within the subject community. Until quite late in the piece, most Indians who thought about such matters saw nothing very strange in the fact that India was part of an empire. Much of the civilised world, in the nineteenth century, was made up of polyglot empires, and India itself had an extensive imperial tradition. Nor was the racial aspect all that disconcerting; the previous kings of Delhi had been Mughals from Central Asia. Service with the Raj was not, therefore, in most eyes, unpatriotic. As for the positive reasons, there were many: habit and custom; admiration for British culture; simply the desire for a decent job. But the common factor in all collaborative decisions was an expectation of reward – a salary, a favour, an honour, a raise in status. Meeting these expectations, anticipating them, became a major preoccupation of the Indian authorities during the latter nineteenth century.

The original strategy had been to cultivate the urban professional classes, whose skills were essential to the business of administration. Initially, this had proved quite easy. Groups like the Bengali bhadralok (‘respectable folk’) and the Parsis of Bombay had flocked to the Raj’s standard, drawn not simply by the financial and status rewards of public service employment, but by the heady allure of Western thought and culture. By the 1830s, elite competition for jobs and ‘English’ education was so great that senior members of government like T.B. Macaulay became convinced that it was only a matter of time before there emerged, in India, ‘a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’ [10 p. 601]. However, by the 1870s the high hopes held out for this hegemonic project had begun to crumble. While there were still plenty of candidates for government jobs, their character disappointed. Their Englishness seemed quaint and superficial, their undoubted cleverness flashy and bookish, and they showed a disconcerting lack of interest in manly sports. What was more, the middle class exhibited signs of losing its once-uncritical infatuation with British rule. As late as 1877 one of the leading figures of Calcutta society, Keshub Chandra Sen, could still unblushingly refer to Queen Victoria as ‘an instrument in the hands of Providence to elevate this degraded country in the scale of nations’ [10 p. 619]. But even as Keshub was being warmly applauded by his bhadralok audience, other Bengalis were striking a more discordant note. Especially in the vernacular press, British benevolence was being called into question. Was British rule designed for India’s benefit, or Britain’s? While none of these critics went so far as to call for British withdrawal, their negativism rankled. Officials started to talk of the ‘disloyalty’ of the babu class. No longer convinced that the masses could be bought merely by the provision of good government [Doc. 4], increasingly disenchanted with the abilities and attitudes of the Western-educated, the government moved to cement its ties with other, potentially less troublesome, sections of society.

Initially, its gaze fell on the princes and the aristocracy. The princes, some 600 in number, had been saved from oblivion by the Queen’s proclamation of 1858 pledging no more annexations, and given a new dynastic lease of life by Lord Canning’s sanads of 1862, which allowed them to adopt heirs without restriction. Now the British strove to bring them into the political mainstream: the rulers were made the centrepiece of Lord Lytton’s ‘imperial assemblage’ of 1877 and Curzon’s Delhi Durbar of 1903; they were invited to royal occasions in England; the more efficient princely armies were utilised to help defend the frontier. In a much publicised initiative, the government in 1908 solicited the princes’ advice on how to deal with sedition, and when war came the Nizam of Hyderabad was encouraged to speak out against the Sultan of Turkey’s fatwa calling on Muslims to fight with the Central Powers in the name of Islam. In 1917 the Maharaja of Bikaner was appointed to the Imperial War Cabinet, and in 1921 the rulers were assigned a formal constitutional role with the creation of the Chamber of Princes at Delhi. The princes welcomed these initiatives, and responded enthusiastically, in part because it was made plain to them by Lord Minto in 1909 that if they played their parts properly, they could count on being left alone to rule their own states more or less as they liked. As for the British, they reckoned they had made a pretty good bargain. First, maintaining the princely states relieved them of direct responsibility for a large part of the subcontinent (about one-third). This had important cost-saving implications. Secondly, the princely alliance connected British rule, however tenuously, with Indian tradition. The system of dynastic governance was deeply rooted in the Hindu past. The princes themselves were considered by many to carry the blood-lines of the ancient Hindu god-kings. Having these charismatic rulers as allies gave the Raj a much needed touch of legitimacy [40].

The ‘aristocracy’ was the official term for the titled and landed folk of British India. Unlike the princes, the aristocracy paid taxes and were subject to Indian law. Yet they, too, were influential people. Often, like the maharajas, of kshatriya (warrior) caste, they commanded deference by virtue of their high status. And as large landlords, they exercised a powerful economic sway over the local peasantry. Intuitively, the British had always known this. After all, they too hailed from a society dominated by rural magnates. But their respect for the social power of the aristocracy increased exponentially in 1857, when disaffected rural elements such as the talukdars of Oudh (Awadh) rose up in revolt across large tracts of the Gangetic plain, carrying their occupancy-tenants with them. As the rebellion dragged on into its second year, the government abandoned its ideologically-driven plan to dispossess the landlords and redistribute their land to the peasants, and began to conciliate them. The talukdars and zamindars (landlords) were confirmed in their holdings, which were made subject to primogeniture to prevent them fragmenting. In 1861 they were organised into the British Indian Association of Oudh. Over the following decades they were given economic assistance and special access to officials, were inducted as magistrates and justices of the peace, and were nominated to legislative councils [55; 58].

Last but not least, the Raj struck up a fruitful relationship with a section of its Muslim subjects, notably that segment of the north Indian Muslim elite which belonged to t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• Note on Referencing System
• Preface
• Author’s Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Maps
• Chronology
• PART ONE: THE BACKGROUND
• PART TWO: ANALYSIS
• PART THREE: ASSESSMENT
• PART FOUR: DOCUMENTS
• Glossary
• Who’s Who
• Bibliography
• Index