Communications, Media and the Imperial Experience

Britain and India in the Twentieth Century

Chandrika Kaul

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137445964
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Presenting a communicational perspective on the British empire in India during the 20th century, the book seeks to examine how, and explain why, British proconsuls, civil servants and even the monarch George V, as well as Indian nationalists, interacted with the media, primarily British and American, and with what consequences.

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Communications, Media and the Imperial Experience: Perspectives and Perceptions

Introduction

As part of its Empire Day number in 1911, The Times argued that India was ‘the centre of the east’ and of an Asia that was ‘neither changeless nor asleep . . . We are the guardians of a great tradition, but the conditions are changing and with them the forms of guardianship must also change. As we associate the Indian peoples more closely with the mechanism of rule, so must we give more and more consideration to their sentiments and views in the policy of rule.’¹ Arguments for a realignment of imperial ideology to account for the ‘sentiments and views’ of the governed must be contextualised within wider perceptions prevalent in the early twentieth century that emphasised a revitalised Asia, in sharp contrast to Matthew Arnold’s well-known verse about the unchanging East, alluded to above by The Times. The unexpected and resounding nature of the defeat inflicted on imperial Russia by the tiny island state of Japan in the Russo-Japanese War during 1904–5, was a critical turning point. This war was covered by nearly two hundred western journalists (despite strict censorship by the Japanese), civilian observers and many military attachés, including Sir Ian Hamilton of the Indian Army. Major British, US and European newspapers and news agencies utilised advanced communication technologies, including the wireless, which was used for the first time in war reportage.² Historians have argued that after 1905, India too had ‘new interests and objectives and compelled new lines of British policy’.³ In less than four decades after George V’s reaffirmation of imperial grandeur at the 1911 Coronation Durbar, Britain was not simply associating Indians ‘more closely with the mechanism of rule’, as The Times had noted. Instead, a great grandson of Queen Victoria was compelled to hand over the Raj entirely into Indian (and Pakistani) hands and the Times of India was proclaiming the ‘Birth of India’s Freedom’.⁴

These two events, in 1911 and 1947, respectively, help frame the parameters of this book, the aim of which is not to rework the standard theses of the rise of mass nationalism and the onset of imperial decline, punctuated by two world wars. Instead, the essays in this volume seek to offer an alternative window into the rich Raj experience through the prism afforded by communications and the media. All empires, as large conurbations, are predicated on means of control – control of both mind and movement. Jürgen Osterhammel has observed how power was exercised through ‘communication imperialism’.⁵ The British worldwide empire was no exception. Further, the twentieth century itself was a media and communications century par excellence. Whilst many historical periods can lay claim to remarkable advances in technology, there are, nevertheless, defining developments that make the twentieth century epochal. More people communicated with others, with greater speed and more cheaply than ever before, utilising more diverse and developed media over a wider geographical and temporal range. Ironically, this also enabled the twentieth century to become the most officially controlled and regulated era to date. The intense government propaganda of Britain and other combatant nations during the First World War, Bolshevik control of communist Russia after 1917, Nazism’s iron grip on Germany during the period after 1933 and in the Second World War, and the Cold War propaganda of the superpowers beginning soon after – all serve as emphatic illustrations from the period under review.

Communications, Media and the Imperial Experience aims to explore the minds of those who utilised the media and those who controlled it, as well as to examine its output and impact, within the context of Britain and its Indian Raj. Of necessity, it is a limited exercise in the study of a vast and complex field. The role of ‘communication’ is interpreted broadly to include both specific communication and media channels as well as the ways in which the political and sociocultural roles of such channels are envisaged. The book focuses on the media environment of empire as a conceptual tool to investigate its political culture and role in shaping the imperial experience during the twentieth century. The principal area of investigation is the British media, including the national press, Reuters and the BBC, but Indian newspapers and nascent broadcasting as well as US news agencies and select newspapers are also analysed.

Perceptions of the communication process impacted reciprocally, and attention will be focused on the perspectives of the media industries and personnel as well as imperial proconsuls and leading Indian politicians, paying regard to the volatile context of mass nationalism during these years. How did the primary stakeholders frame arguments about the changing communication process and the media as a positive or negative force? Was the media viewed as agents of change by contemporaries? Commentators have ascribed a pre-eminent role to journalism in the creation of modernity: ‘it is easy to describe each in terms of the other’, claims John Hartley, with both being products of European societies over the past few centuries. Both are linked to advances in science, exploration and industrialisation, and both ‘promote notions of freedom, progress and universal enlightenment, and are associated with the breaking down of traditional knowledge and hierarchies, and their replacement with abstract bonds of virtual communities, which are linked by the media’.⁶ In the context of the Raj, is there also a counterhistory of media promoting deference and establishing order? In sum, what have been the role and impact of media in shaping the Raj experience in the first half of the twentieth century?

In terms of its approach and archival focus, the book aims to integrate imperial and media history in the manner popularised by the ‘new imperial’ history, which has sought to demonstrate the significance of the empire in British culture along with the values and ideologies that created and sustained this experience. This is reflected in the variety of primary sources that I have utilised which encompass the archival territories of both imperial and media history. I have relied on official reports, departmental memoranda, proconsular correspondence and memoirs, as well as newspapers, periodicals, news agency output, broadcasting transcripts, newsreels, institutional records of media organisations, recollections of journalists and proprietorial correspondence. Explored in conjunction with each other, these present an assessment of the relationship between media and imperial culture as manifested within different locales – metropolitan, peripheral and transnational – as well as the networks that bound them within a comprehensive frame of reference.

During the twentieth century the Indian empire was increasingly not just ‘read’ about but ‘seen’ and ‘heard’ as well. Varieties of print, photography, theatre, newsreels, cinema and radio all served to transform the imperial experience and transport the consumer over long distances and across time. Such transformations were not limited to media representations. Swift ocean liners now faced competition from civil aviation, which took off, quite literally, in the interwar years, with the subcontinent soon to be within a week’s journey time of European imperial metropolises. ‘Was it not significant of the change that a new invention had brought with it, that our machine had jumped the Channel in ten minutes and had surmounted the Frontier peaks [Northwest Frontier] as a Rolls would take the Newmarket road?’⁷ Thus rhapsodised Sir Samuel Hoare, Secretary of State for Air, upon completing the inaugural passenger flight to India in 1927. What was key, he claimed, was not simply the speed of the travel but its regularity: ‘An ordinary commercial machine with a full load of passengers and luggage had, day after day, carried out its time-table with the precision of a pre-war express train.’⁸

Correspondingly, as will be argued in the book, more intensive exploitation of the media was attempted by various stakeholders, with ‘image’ and ‘perception’ coming to play a critical part in the processes of imperial rule. We witness attempts by the Raj to combine ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power, utilising Joseph Nye’s categorisation of the changing nature of contemporary US foreign policy. Nye claims that these forms of power are related, can occasionally reinforce or interfere with each other, and that overall the distinction between them is perhaps merely a matter of degree. He defines ‘soft’ power as the ability to get ‘others to want the outcomes you want’ through co-option rather than coercion, which ‘rests on the ability to shape the preferences of others’.⁹ It is not, Nye argues, ‘merely the same as influence’ but the ‘ability to attract, and attraction often leads to acquiescence’.¹⁰ ‘Soft’ power can also be seen as the exercise of ‘co-optive power’ and can depend on factors such as ‘the attractiveness of one’s culture and values or the ability to manipulate the agenda of political choices in a manner that makes others fail to express some preferences because they seem to be too unrealistic’. On the other hand, ‘hard’ power tends to be associated with ‘Command power’, which he suggests is ‘the ability to change what others do’ utilising ‘coercion or inducement’.¹¹

The case studies in this book focus on the deployment of ‘soft’ power by the Raj through the channels afforded by communications and media as well as applied news management, including censorship. This strategy was combined with the exercise of ‘hard’ power, which in this context included punitive legislation and imprisonment, as well as physical force, as witnessed, for instance, in its response to demonstrations during the Civil Disobedience movement. ‘Soft’ power ought not to be discounted merely as an ephemeral bid to seek popularity by the imperium, but rather seen as a significant strategy in its approach to the increasingly problematic governance of India in the twentieth century. Nye contends that ‘Winning hearts and minds has always been important, but it is even more so in a global information age. Information is power, and modern information technology is spreading information more widely than ever before in history.’¹² However, this is not a new phenomenon and such an approach can equally be applied to considering the impact of the information revolution during the first half of the twentieth century and in the context of imperial Britain as a global power.

As the twentieth century unfolded, the British were confronted with the problem of the exercise of hegemony in a changing national and transnational context, and attempted to combine the ‘hard’ power of the sword with the ‘soft’ power of publicity, propaganda and news management through newspapers and news agencies, as well as broadcasting, especially under the impetus of the Second World War. During the interwar years, it became politically imperative to have the support of Indian moderates, liberals and constitutionalists, both to counter aggressive forms of mass nationalism and to help manage their Constitution, as embodied in the 1919 Government of India (GoI) Act and, most importantly, in its successor, the monumental GoI Act of 1935. The war also weakened the military might of the Raj, and the Amritsar massacre in 1919 helped transform Indian nationalism from its relatively exclusive and elitist nature into a popular movement. As I have argued in Reporting the Raj, formal strategies of information management and imperial publicity came into their own during 1914–22, due to external pressures combined with a new angle of vision brought to bear upon imperial governance by the Liberal Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu (1917–22).¹³ Montagu was convinced that ‘the feeding of the newspapers, the answering of enquiries, the touch between the Government and those who would support it – all this wants doing . . . It would be so splendid if political methods rather than coercive ones were successful in downing the opponents of the British government.’¹⁴ Building on such initiatives, the 1930s witnessed the next significant watershed with respect to the official implementation of propaganda and publicity strategies largely undertaken through the media. By the end of the decade, these had become an accepted facet of imperial governance enshrined in institutional structures as well as administrative procedures. Equally striking was the terminology routinely utilised by proconsuls and civil servants with respect to the integration of such activities as being not just necessary but also routine actions of imperialists. Thus A. H. Joyce, the veteran India Office (IO) publicist throughout the 1930s and 1940s, who was appointed to the new post of Adviser on Publicity Questions in 1941, remarked to Leonard Matters, the London representative of the Hindu (Madras), who had written to congratulate him: ‘I like to think of my job, and that of the representatives in London of the Indian Press as a sort of partnership, not merely in a profession of publicity and journalism, but in a crusade in which we strive to replace doubts and fears by understanding and goodwill.’¹⁵

However, as Nye has posited, ‘the effectiveness of any power resource depends on the context’.¹⁶ The case studies featured in this book focus on a number of such contexts and engage, on the one hand, with the evolving approaches to communicating power via the media and, on the other, with the media’s purported influence as a political tool. The book seeks principally to demonstrate how and why British politicians, civil servants, journalists, broadcasters and even George V sought to mediate imperial politics through the popular culture of communication. In addition, one case study directs the spotlight on the increasingly influential US press and news agencies (which had begun to challenge the monopoly of Reuters), examines their response to Indian nationalism during the interwar years, and considers the impact of such developments upon a Raj anxious about American public opinion, an area that has been relatively under-researched. The reactions of nationalists and the Indian press are also discussed at apposite junctures, with M. K. Gandhi’s interaction with the media coming under detailed scrutiny.

Percival Spear wrote more than fifty years ago that ‘The very weapons and arguments used by the Congress against the British were largely of western provenance. India broke her British fetters with western hammers. And it was significant of the community of ideas between the two sides that the fetters were never in fact broken by force, but began to be removed by one side as soon as they began to be rattled by the other.’¹⁷ For the nationalists – many of whom were journalists themselves – the media became an increasingly prominent tool of opposition. The link between print and nationalism has been subjected to differing analyses. For example, Benedict Anderson’s thesis of the growth of nationalism through the creation of imagined communities knit together by common cultural and political ties envisages the evolution of a Habermasian public sphere.¹⁸ And while both Anderson and Jürgen Habermas have had their share of critics, there is no denying the impact of more extensive communication links as well as newspapers, pamphlets, periodicals, books and the emergence of a viable reading and debating public on the growth of anti-colonialism in India from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.

The intimate interconnections between media forms and political praxis in the protest movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been variously explored by contemporaries and historians.¹⁹ Ironically, despite rampant illiteracy, print and the written word were ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Currency and Exchange Rates
• 1. Communications, Media and the Imperial Experience: Perspectives and Perceptions
• 2. Coronation, Colonialism and Cultures of Control: The Delhi Durbar, 1911
• 3. India as Viewed by the American Media: Chicago Daily Tribune, William Shirer and Gandhian Nationalism, 1930–1
• 4. ‘Invisible Empire Tie’: Broadcasting and the British Raj in the Interwar Years
• 5. ‘Operation Seduction’: Mountbatten, the Media and Decolonisation in 1947
• 6. Concluding Remarks
• Notes
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index