An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

  Self-government under the ‘Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms’ ushered in to fulfil this declaration turned out to involve a system where Indians would serve as window dressing for British imperial power. Representatives—elected by a franchise so restricted and selective that only one in 250 Indians had the right to vote—would exercise control over ‘harmless’ subjects the British did not care about, like education and health, while real power including taxation, law and order and the authority to nullify any vote by the Indian legislators would rest with the British governor of the provinces. The governor, and at the centre the viceroy, retained the right to reject any vote of the elected legislators and enact any laws the elected representatives refused to pass. Far from leading to ‘the progressive realization of responsible government in India’, this was regressive indeed, and it was unanimously rejected by Indian public opinion and by a deeply betrayed Mahatma.

  The Non-Cooperation movement ensued, and though it was suspended by the Mahatma after a shocking incident of violence by Indian nationalists, the turn away from compromise with British colonialism had become irreversible. By 1930, the Indian National Congress had decided to go beyond its modest goals of 1918. It issued a Declaration of Independence on 26 January 1930:

  The British government in India has not only deprived the Indian people of their freedom but has based itself on the exploitation of the masses, and has ruined India economically, politically, culturally and spiritually… Therefore…India must sever the British connection and attain Purna Swaraj or complete independence.

  THE GREAT WAR AND THE GREAT BETRAYAL

  The background to this sense of betrayal is important to understand. Eight years before Gandhi’s return to India, and well before the War, Henry Nevinson had already spelled out in 1908 the reasons why Indians were dissatisfied with the Raj:

  Unrest in India was occasioned by…the contemptuous disregard of Indian feeling in the Partition of Bengal and Lord Curzon’s University speech upon Indian mendacity; the exclusion of fully qualified Indians from public positions, in contradiction to Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858; several notorious cases of injustice in the law courts, where English criminals were involved; numerous instances of petty persecution for political opinions; the well-known measures for the suppression of personal liberty and freedom of speech; the espionage of police and postal officials; and the increasing insolence of the vulgar among Anglo-Indians, as shown in ordinary behaviour and in the newspapers which represent their views.

  To this was added the extraordinary Indian support for the war effort and its humiliating British recompense.

  As many as 74,187 Indian soldiers died during World War I and a comparable number were wounded. Their stories, and their heroism, were largely omitted from British popular histories of the war, or relegated to the footnotes.

  India contributed a number of divisions and brigades to the European, Mediterranean, Mesopotamian, North African and East African theatres of war. India’s contribution in men, animals, rations, supplies and money given to Britain exceeded that of any other nation. In historical texts, it often appears formally that the Government of India ‘offered’ the assistance to the British and that His Majesty’s Government ‘graciously accepted’ the offer to pay unfairly large amounts of money, including a lump sum payment of £100 million as a special contribution to HMG’s expenses towards a European war. This elides the fact, of course, that the ‘Government of India’ consisted of Englishmen accountable to His Majesty’s Government in Britain.

  The number of soldiers and support staff sent on overseas service from India during World War I was huge: among them 588,717 went to Mesopotamia, 116,159 to Egypt, 131,496 to France, 46,936 to East Africa, 4,428 to Gallipoli, 4,938 to Salonica, 20,243 to Aden and 29,457 to the Persian Gulf. Of these Indians, 29,762 were killed, 59,296 were wounded, 3,289 went missing, presumed dead, and 3,289 were taken prisoner. Of the total of 1,215,318 soldiers sent abroad there were 101,439 casualties.

  The British raised men and money from India, as well as large supplies of food, cash and ammunition, collected both by British taxation of Indians and from the nominally autonomous princely states. In addition, £3.5 million was paid by India as the ‘war gratuities’ of British officers and men of the normal garrisons of India. A further sum of £13.1 million was paid from Indian revenues towards the war effort. It was estimated at the time that the value of India’s contribution in cash and kind amounted to £146.2 million, worth some £50 billion in today’s money. (Some estimates place the value of India’s contribution much higher.)

  In Europe, Indian soldiers were among the first victims who suffered the horrors of the trenches. They were killed in droves before the war was into its second year and bore the brunt of many a German offensive. Indian jawans stopped the German advance at Ypres in the autumn of 1914, soon after the war broke out, while the British were still recruiting and training their own forces. Hundreds were killed in a gallant but futile engagement at Neuve Chapelle. More than a thousand of them died at Gallipoli, thanks to Churchill’s folly in ordering an ill-conceived and badly-planned assault reminiscent of the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War. Nearly 700,000 Indian sepoys fought in Mesopotamia against the Ottoman empire, Germany’s ally, many of them Indian Muslims taking up arms against their co-religionists in defence of the British empire.

  Letters sent by Indian soldiers in France and Belgium to their family members in their villages back home speak an evocative language of cultural dislocation and tragedy. ‘The shells are pouring like rain in the monsoon’, declared one. ‘The corpses cover the country like sheaves of harvested corn’, wrote another.

  These men were undoubtedly heroes: pitchforked into battle in unfamiliar lands, in harsh and cold climatic conditions they were neither used to nor prepared for, fighting an enemy of whom they had no knowledge, risking their lives every day for little more than pride. Yet they were destined to remain largely unknown once the war was over: neglected by the British, for whom they fought, and ignored by their own country, from which they came. Part of the reason is that they were not fighting for their own country. None of the soldiers was a conscript: soldiering was their profession. They served the very British empire that was oppressing their own people back home.

  In return for India’s extraordinary support, the British had insincerely promised to deliver progressive self-rule to India at the end of the war. Perhaps, had they kept that pledge, the sacrifices of India’s World War I soldiers might have been seen in their homeland as a contribution to India’s freedom.

  But the British broke their word. As we have seen, Mahatma Gandhi, who had returned to his homeland for good from South Africa in January 1915, supported the war, as he had supported the British in the Boer War. He hoped, he wrote, ‘that India, by this very act, would become the most favourite partner [of the British], and racial distinctions would become a thing of the past’. Sir Rabindranath Tagore was somewhat more sardonic about nationalism: ‘We, the famished, ragged ragamuffins of the East are to win freedom for all humanity!’ he wrote, during the War. ‘We have no word for “Nation” in our language.’ India was wracked by high taxation to support the war and the high inflation accompanying it, while the disruption of trade caused by the conflict led to widespread economic losses—all this while the country was also reeling from a raging influenza epidemic that took millions of lives. But nationalists widely understood from Montagu’s 1917 declaration that at the end of the war India would receive the Dominion status hitherto reserved for the ‘White Commonwealth’.

  It was not to be. When the war ended in triumph for Britain, India was denied its promised reward. Instead of self-government, the British offered the fraudulent Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms in 1918 which left all power in British hands and attempted to fob off the Indians with minimal authority over inconsequential issues. If Indians were disappointed, so were Britons with a sense of fair play. British MP Dr Rutherford declared:

  Neve
r in the history of the world was such a hoax perpetrated upon a great people as England perpetrated upon India, when in return for India’s invaluable service during the War, we gave to the Indian nation such a discreditable, disgraceful, undemocratic, tyrannical constitution.

  Instead of offering more democracy, Britain went farther in the opposite direction. It passed the repressive Rowlatt Act in 1919, reimposing upon India all the wartime restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly that had been lifted with the Armistice. The Act vested the viceroy’s government with extraordinary powers to quell ‘sedition’ against the Empire by silencing and censoring the press, detaining political activists without trial, and arresting without a warrant any individuals suspected of treason against the Empire. The Act granted the authorities the power to arrest Indians on mere suspicion, and to try them in secrecy without a right to counsel or a right of appeal. It was a return to the practices of the Spanish Inquisition animated by the presumption of guilt and with no rights for the accused against a people who thought they had just earned the right to control their own political destiny.

  Public protests against this draconian legislation were quelled ruthlessly. The worst incident was the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of hundreds of unarmed innocents in April 1919, which is discussed more fully in chapters 3 and 4. The fact that Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, who showed exceptional brutality and racism in Amritsar, was hailed as a hero by the British, who raised a handsome purse to reward him for his deed, marked the final rupture between British imperialism and its Indian subjects. Sir Rabindranath Tagore returned his knighthood to the British in protest against ‘the helplessness of our position as British subjects in India’. Tagore’s early ambivalence about the costs and benefits of British rule was replaced after Amritsar by what he termed a ‘graceless disillusionment’ at the ‘misfortune of being governed by a foreign race’. He did not want a ‘badge of honour’ in ‘the incongruous context of humiliation’.

  With British perfidy providing such a sour ending to the narrative of a war in which India had given its all and been spurned in return, Indian nationalists felt that self-governance could never be obtained by legal means from perfidious Albion, but would have to be wrested from the unwilling grasp of the British through a struggle for freedom.

  *It was not just the maharajas who had to suffer: every Indian schoolchild must lament the influence of the British dress code on Indians—especially the tie as a permanent noose around the necks of millions of schoolchildren, in India’s sweltering heat, even today.

  **I have consulted British newspapers of the 1890s to satisfy myself of the accuracy of this version. It has since been improved in the retelling, and some readers might be more familiar with the altered update of the verse: ‘My name is George Nathaniel Curzon/I am a most superior person./My cheek is pink, my hair is sleek/I dine at Blenheim every week.’

  *Up to World War I, only Hyderabad, Baroda and Mysore enjoyed 21-gun salutes; Gwalior and Jammu & Kashmir were added to the list in 1917 and 1921 in appreciation of their soldiers’ services to the British in the Great War. Other monarchs were allowed 21-gun salutes within their own domains, but only 19 outside, and so on: the protocol was fastidiously elaborate.

  *The British ran a complex administrative system with multiple variants. In essence, and at its peak, British India, under the Governor General (later Viceroy), was divided into a number of presidencies and provinces, each headed by a Governor, Lieutenant Governor or Commissioner, depending upon its size and importance. Each province or presidency comprised a number of divisions, each headed by a Divisional Commissioner. These divisions were in turn subdivided into districts, which were the basic administrative units; each district was headed by a Collector and District Magistrate or Deputy Commissioner (in most cases these were all the same person, usually a young Englishman in his mid to late twenties).

  *The British used the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ to refer to British people living and working in India, and ‘Eurasian’ to refer to those of mixed parentage, usually the children of lower-ranking Europeans and ‘other ranks’ who could not afford to snare one of the women from the ‘fishing fleet’ and ended up cohabiting with, and in a few cases marrying, Indian women. Today, the descendants of these Eurasians are known as ‘Anglo-Indians’, a term that causes confusion to readers of colonial documents, where the term only refers to the English in India.

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  DEMOCRACY, THE PRESS, THE PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEM AND THE RULE OF LAW

  The British case for liberal democracy – the (partly) free press – freedom and constraints – the rise of Indian newspapers – the Vernacular Press Act – The Hindu – the Amrita Bazar Patrika & its Kashmir exposé – the Press Act of 1910 – the Parliamentary system in India – ‘rule of law’: the boot and the spleen – Can Englishmen murder Indians? – misogynous laws – racism – ‘criminal tribes’ – colonial-era prejudices entrenched in Indian Penal Code – Section 377, sedition & adultery – British laws outlived colonialism

  A good part of the British case for having created India’s political unity and democracy lies in the evolution of three of democracy’s building-blocks during the colonial era: a free press, an incipient parliamentary system and the rule of law. This trifecta, which India retains and has continued to develop in its own ways, existed in the colonial era, but with significant distortions, and is therefore worth examining.

  At the high noon of early twenty-first-century imperial hubris, with America poised to invade Iraq, Russia in retreat, the Taliban in disarray and Bin Laden in hiding, and the currents of globalization flowing strongly (and seemingly irresistibly) around the world, the controversial Scottish historian Niall Ferguson published Empire: How Britain Made the World, which saw in the past all the virtues he wished to celebrate in the present. The British, Ferguson wrote, combined commerce, conquest, and some ‘evangelical imperialism’ in an early form of globalization—or, in a particularly infelicitous word, ‘Anglobalization’ and in so doing Britain bequeathed to a large part of the world nine of its most distinctive and admirable features, the very ones that had made Britain great: the English language, English forms of land tenure, Scottish and English banking, the common law, Protestantism, team sports, the ‘night watchman’ state, representative assemblies, and the idea of liberty. The last of these, he tells us, is ‘the most distinctive feature of the Empire’ since ‘whenever the British were behaving despotically, there was always a liberal critique of that behaviour from within British society’.

  We shall return to the broader elements of Ferguson’s analysis (and that of other apologists for Empire like Lawrence James) in Chapter 7, but it is the claims to liberal democracy that detain us now. Ferguson is uncompromising: ‘India, the world’s largest democracy, owes more than it is fashionable to acknowledge to British rule. Its elite schools, its universities, its civil service, its army, its press and its parliamentary system all still have discernibly British models… Without the influence of British imperial rule,’ he adds, ‘it is hard to believe that the institutions of parliamentary democracy would have been adopted by the majority of states in the world, as they are today’.

  As befits an economic historian, Ferguson contends, in a later thesis that ventures beyond India, that Empire ‘not only underwrites the free international exchange of commodities, labour and capital but also creates and upholds the conditions without which markets cannot function—peace and order, the rule of law, non-corrupt administration, stable fiscal and monetary policies as well as provides public goods, such as transport infrastructure, hospitals and schools, which would not otherwise exist’. The liberalism of Empire means that those who become its subjects gain greatly from their subjection and this, to Ferguson, proves that Empire benefits the colonized as well as the imperial centre. British rule in India is one of Ferguson’s exhibits for this thesis, and in this (as in the previous and the next) chapter we s
hall examine the actual record of Britain in advancing the much-vaunted elements of liberal democracy so often cited by Raj apologists.

  THE (PARTLY) FREE PRESS

  Apologists for Britain, and many critics, tend to give the Empire credit for introducing the concept of the free press to India, starting the first newspapers and promoting a consciousness of the rights a free citizen was entitled to enjoy. It is certainly true that Indian nationalism and the independence movement could not have spread across the country without the active involvement of the free press.

  Although the first printing press was introduced to the subcontinent by the Portuguese in 1550, it only printed books, as indeed did the first British printing press, established in Bombay in 1664. It took more than a century for the first newspaper to be printed in India when, in 1780, James Augustus Hicky published his Bengal Gazette, or Calcutta General Advertiser. But the East India Company soon looked askance at his inconvenient views and, after two years of mounting exasperation, seized his press in 1782.

  This did not, however, dissuade others less contentious in manner than Hicky, and soon a raft of British newspapers began printing in India: the first four in the Company capital of Calcutta—The Calcutta Gazette in 1784, The Bengal Journal and The Oriental Magazine of Calcutta in 1785, and The Calcutta Chronicle in 1786—and then two in the other principal British trading centres, The Madras Courier in 1788 and The Bombay Herald in 1789. The newspapers all reflected the interests of the small European community, particularly commercial interests, and provided useful, if not always accurate, information about the arrivals and departures of ships and developments in the governance of the colony. They did establish a newspaper culture in British India, however, and though none of the initial newspapers survived, it was soon apparent that the press was here to stay.