Banyan Tree Adventures

by Keith Forrester

  However, it is not the East India Company, the network of rail or Lutyens’ Delhi that automatically spring to mind when the British Raj is remembered. Other episodes and characters periodically filter through to the outside world. In 2015 for example, if you looked carefully, you could find some mention and discussion of the contribution made by an undivided India to the 1914–1918 First World War during the centenary commemorations. Careful examination of the media coverage, exhibitions and extensive documentation made available for the anniversary revealed a footnote on the Indian contribution. Over one million Indians were sent overseas to fight as combatants and non-combatants on behalf of the British in places as diverse as France, Egypt and Palestine. As one wounded soldier recovering in England put it, “Do not think that this is war. This is not war. It is the ending of the world. This is just such a war as was related in the Mahabharata about our forefathers.” Many of these Indian troops saw action in some of the fiercest battles of the War – Ypres, Givenchy, Loos – suffering traumatic losses and injuries and, yet, they remained almost invisible in the centenarian activities. Given the absence of written documentation or records that reflected this experience, the British Library attempted to remedy these deficiencies by making available the censored letters home by Indians involved in the War, together with a collection of photographs. There have been a small number of academic texts available on the ‘Sepoys in the trenches’ but much remains invisible and unresearched. Despite valuable efforts like that of the British Library, the full heroic story and horror of the Indian experience remains today undiscovered and untold. Dunkirk, the big budget, blockbuster film success from the summer of 2017, managed to portray an almost totally white experience in this supposedly historical portrayal. Absent from the Dunkirk beaches were the Royal Indian Army Service Corps together with the large number of non-white faces in the marine evacuation – plucky Brits again saving the day.

  In contrast to the semi-official version of the paternalistic, racialised, benign character of British rule, the British Empire responded to any challenges (anywhere) with ferocious repression. It is the great historical ‘set pieces’ and personalities that tend to be scrutinised and discussed but everyday life in the imperial enterprise too is usually underpinned by a degree and threat of violence. Such a view, however, has been overwhelmed by a popular consensus of Britain’s concerns and ideals of ‘justice’ and ‘fair play’. At times, the eulogies sounded almost ‘cuddly’. Within such a perspective, Indians were seen as passive, static and almost welcoming of their subjugation and conquest. Occasionally an alternative view breaks through such as the study by Elizabeth Kolsky in Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law. Underpinning this economic extraction and military violence, however, was systemic racism. As Elizabeth Kolsky notes, “the unsettling picture that emerges from our investigation of white violence and its handling in the colonial courts should not be brushed off as a list of exceptions, an epiphenomenal sideshow to the main stage of Pax Britannica.” Critical studies such as these, however, are the exception. Much more common are accounts of everyday life alongside records of major events which accept uncritically the perspectives and assumptions handed down from on high.

  As was announced and proclaimed many times, it was the duty of the British to lead by example, display their moral and cultural superiority and provide good government on behalf of peoples for whom a free government was impossible. At the end of the day though, and underpinning the later Partition horrors, was a blunt truth. The Indian Empire was and had always been about the British economy and Britain’s wider Empire. The need to keep remittances flowing to London remained central and most reforms centred around this imperative. Land revenue remained the largest source of income although politically difficult to collect. Exports grew rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century. Coinciding with a growing independence struggle, export values increased fivefold between 1870 and 1914. Jute, cotton and tea went to Europe, and rice and opium went East. India was absorbing increasing volumes of manufactured goods from Britain, growing from 8% to 13% during the same period. India was the most important market in the empire with Britain supplying 85% of India’s imports in the 1890s. As the British historian Eric Hobsbawm put it, “India was the ‘brightest jewel in the imperial crown’ and the core of British strategic thinking precisely because of her very real importance to the British economy… (T)he international balance of payments hinged on the payments surplus which India provided.” Each reform appeared to be agreed when no further options were available. While there was a historically strong sense of paternalism by the British towards their subjects, at the end of the day it was an exercise in naked plunder.

  Partition and Britain’s secrets

  As some of the comments from the frequent travellers to India interviewed earlier in this chapter suggest, there is one particular episode from Indian history, or rather the Raj, that is better known not only in Britain but throughout the world. The Partition of the country and the Independence of India continue to resonate with tourists today. This is not perhaps surprising as it must be one of the dramatic, bloodiest and seminal events of the twentieth century. The subject of numerous academic studies, polemics, novels and films the division of the country together with the withdrawal of the British from India continues to arouse fierce passions and deeply-felt personal tragedies – not from the British leaving India but from the way and the consequences of how it was done. The barebones of Partition are generally known. Given that British rule in India never had more than 50,000 troops and depended on the co-option of Indians themselves, once that involvement was withdrawn the days of the Raj were numbered. The struggle for independence after the First World War indicated that this time had come. The founding earlier of the Indian National Congress created in 1885 to increase the involvement of Indians in government resulted in as Michael Wood puts it, “the greatest anti-colonial movement in history.” By the 1930s it was clear that the end was in sight. It was clear that the united secular India championed by the Congress Party was not possible. A Hindu-Muslim unity was rapidly overtaken by events, fears, rumours, personal ambition, accident and mistakes. As the talks over power sharing involving the Indian Congress Party, the Muslim League and the British colonial government began to falter, partition seemed to be the only way forward. The last British Viceroy in India, Lord Mountbatten of Burma only appointed on 21st February 1947, quickly realised that if Britain was not going to be involved in an increasingly likely civil war, he needed to act quickly on both a partition and on an exit from the country. On the 3rd of June 1947, Mountbatten announced among other measures that partition of the country would be voted upon, a boundary commission was to be established should partition be the chosen way forward and India would be independent by 15th August – a few months away. The Quit India Movement launched in August 1942 was only subdued through massive repression: “by far the most serious rebellion since that of 1857 (the great Rebellion), the gravity and extent of which we have so far concealed from the world for reasons of military security,” wrote Viceroy Linlithgow to Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Amid increasing mutinies, communal conflict especially in Calcutta, the formation of an interim government under Jawaharlal Nehru, an increasingly confident Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah and a post-war exhausted and bankrupt Britain, the British Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act on 18 July 1947 that finalised the arrangements for Partition, abandoning control over hundreds of princely states.

  The 15th August 1947 Independence celebrations overseen by Viceroy Lord Louis Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru of the Congress Party masked experiences that would remain and scar indelibly the new states of India and Pakistan from then through to today. Following the Radcliffe decision to partition Punjab and Bengal in the creation of the two new states – India and Pakistan – millions of people throughout the country discovered that they no longer belonged to their places of birth and livelihood. They might h
ave also been of the wrong religion. In the months following the mid-August celebrations, some 20 million people would be on the move, ‘religiously cleansed’ and leaving all behind them forever. Up to a million and a half people died. Military action from each of the three communities – Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims – began enforcing the separation. The figures of those seeking safety were staggering. Once the lines of partition had been established, about twenty million people crossed the borders to a perceived religious and physical security – arguably the largest mass migration ever seen. Searing images of communal violence and slaughter remain today among those that participated and for the world at large. The birth of India and Pakistan from the ashes of the Empire was characterised by a terrible violence and resulted in a harvest and bitterness for further conflict. Four armed conflicts between the beneficiaries of Partition so far have taken place, with both countries remaining on almost permanent war alert with regards to each other; war and famine accompanied the creation of Bangladesh from East Pakistan in the early 1970s and a continuing low intensity conflict simmers in Kashmir.

  It was, however, through this struggle for Indian independence that there emerged two of the iconoclastic figures of the twentieth century – the saintly Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Despite its recent dramatic decline today, the Indian Congress Party is one of the great political parties of the modern world. As is well reported and accepted, this is the party that led the fight for independence, the party that united India and brought people of different religions and different languages into a single political project. It was above all Gandhi, on his return in 1915 from South Africa, that provided the depth, organisation and legitimacy to the party over the next two decades or so. Establishing a presence in rural areas, involving peasants and women, using languages other than English and campaigning to abolish Untouchability addressed weaknesses within the Congress Party as well as deepened and broadened its appeal. Peasants would play a significant role in the Non-Cooperation Movement of the 1920s and in the civil disobedience campaign of the 1930s. In recent years, there has emerged a more critical appreciation of the events and personalities of the organisation and struggle for independence. These weaknesses and shortcomings – such as the marginalisation of Dalits and Muslims together with the influence of Hindu conservatives – have reopened the examination of the Independence period. The achievements of the Indian Congress Party in 1947, however, provided an inspiration for many other subsequent anti-colonial struggles in the twentieth century.

  It was the increasingly politically turbulent events of the decades preceding Independence that forced the hasty exit of Britain from the country. This was no dignified handing over of power. Until the very last moment, it seems that the powers in India never saw the writing on the wall. Events were spiralling out of control with a real risk of Britain being enveloped in a bitter civil war. Mountbatten’s timetable suggests panic and, certainly, gross irresponsibility. Despite attempts today to absolve Britain from the chaos, suffering and carnage of the Partition, Britain was the central actor and power in a series of activities and decisions that continue to resonate today. The world was changing dramatically in the first half of the twentieth century and Britain had failed to grasp and understand these changes. Instead it attempted to preserve, contain and reverse what were irreversible trends.

  Not surprisingly, the partition of the continent and Britain’s subsequent hurried withdrawal remains today a topic of major contestation, literature and research. For one of the seminal events of the twentieth century, it continues to arouse bafflement, debate, study and incredulity. The magnitude of the Partition events and experiences helped to explain the outcry in 2015 when it was revealed that thousands of documents detailing some of the most shameful acts and crimes committed during the final years of the British empire were systematically destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of post-independent governments, reported The Guardian, in April 2012. The archive came to light after a group of Kenyans, detained and allegedly tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion, won the right to sue the British government. The government promised to release 8,800 files filling some 200 metres of shelving from 37 former colonies. Many of the most sensitive files, however, were not hidden away but destroyed under instructions from the government in 1961. Dummy files were created and inserted to replace individual destroyed files. These 8,800 colonial files are a small part of the 1.2 million files occupying around two kilometres of shelving, the secret ‘Special Collections’. Historical scholars from Britain have described their feelings and revelations as “scandalous”, “wholly inappropriate”, “very angry” and “staggering”.

  No doubt in the decades ahead, documents relating to the British in India will be forthcoming. Detail well might be shone on ‘everyday’ issues and events but also on continuing controversies over some of the big episodes, such as the Partition of the British Indian Empire.

  Post-colonial dilemmas

  “The moral balance sheet of the British Empire is a chaotic mixture of black and red. So it is understandable that people today, trying to evaluate this momentous episode in our island history, are confused,” suggests Piers Brendon in the magazine History Today.

  India – its history, culture, cricket, politics – continues to provide an enduring presence within British cultural life in the twenty-first century. India and Britain seem to go together; it is difficult to imagine India without imagining the Raj. It should be true the other way around and it is but in a peculiar, partial and distorted manner. The violence, racism and economic robbery that characterised much of the British presence in India is airbrushed to one of a benevolent gifting of railways, cricket and a civil service to those who didn’t know better. The economic strength of India today opens a few cracks in this widespread historical amnesia of our imperial past, as for example when Prime Minister David Cameron apologised recently for the Amritsar massacre. It is far easier for ‘our’ history to focus on the evils of Nazi Germany or Belgian Congo experiences in Africa than our own imperial legacy.

  And yet, there is that connection. Little incidents even in Britain today continue to remind us of this history. In 2015 for example, it was reported that a museum and library will be built in London to honour the life and work of the Indian campaigner, Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. Ambedkar was a Dalit or ‘untouchable’ who drafted most of the Indian Constitution and tirelessly campaigned (largely unsuccessfully it must be said) for the rights of Dalits. He warned of the perniciousness of the caste system, and controversially in India then and even today associated the caste system with Hinduism. He remains a revered figure among India’s 200 million Dalits with his portraits commonly available throughout the country. Ambedkar studied in London in 1921–22 and eventually qualified as a barrister in London. He was India’s first Law Minister in the Independent Government of 1947.

  Another example of the links between the two countries was the erection of the Gandhi statue on Parliament Square in London in 2015. Making the announcement in Parliament after returning from India with $300 plus million contracts for the British-made Eurofighter Typhoon jet airplane, British Foreign Secretary William Hague praised Gandhi’s commitment to non-violence as “a legacy that is as relevant today as it was during his life.”

  Of course, as many commentators have made clear, the ending of Britain’s imperial role together with the ending of the neat securities of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ associated with the Cold War have resulted in a confusing and bewildering loss of purpose. Britain’s ‘greatness’ is no more, and the global, international presence of yesteryear is an embarrassing irrelevance. Things aren’t what they were. As the Scot Tom Nairn put it when talking about Britain, “The empire may have gone politically, but it has bequeathed a formidable psycho-social inheritance focusing naturally upon the question of Englishness. English identity was for so long over-extended by the needs of empire that it was bound to experience problems of contraction.” Constructions and understanding
s of ‘who we are’ today are inseparable from understandings of ‘Empire’. Britain was transformed by empire. It shaped even the identity and nature of the emerging British working class – from revolt to incorporation – and legitimated the rise of elite social institutions – Oxbridge.

  This awareness must be true for all citizens from imperial powers visiting former colonies, but I think that the British together with the French have had the most difficulties in coming to grips with this imperial past. Maybe it is simply a case of these pasts being so recent. All post-colonial countries today struggle to a greater or lesser extent with the presentation of their past history to a general public. Whether Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany, Britain or any of the other colonial powers, they face similar ambiguities and decisions. Inevitably perhaps, they come down on the side of pride and sometimes ‘glory’. For Britain, this seems more acute than most other powers given the recent nature, importance and breadth of ‘its’ Empire. In the main the principal vehicle for coping with such dilemmas is selection; that is, emphasising certain perspectives and episodes at the expense of diluting or forgetting others. It seems to work, politically anyway, as British politicians have demonstrated in recent years. Historically, culturally and materially, India remains as a positive and, even, sometimes glorious episode of the Empire. That Britain benefited materially so substantially at the expense of its overseas adventures simply complicates and further confuses any reckoning of its imperial past. Perhaps not surprisingly is the realisation that we in Britain do not yet have a developed and agreed account of our colonial experiences. Our history is too turbulent and unsettled. Instead a contradictory, self-defensive tone is in evidence when our political representatives visit India, Jamaica or Africa. For Britain today, their time in India remains both controversial and contradictory. It elicits a widespread range of emotions – sometimes pride, sometimes shame, sometimes guilt and sometimes nostalgia. As Rajnarayan Chandavarkar perceptively notes, the British Raj “is not merely a relic of the past but a vibrant, self-generating, living myth. Its collective memory, images and symbols have proved indispensable to the definition of Englishness, or perhaps Britishness.”