An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

  Arguably, epidemics existed before colonialism as well, and cannot be said to have been caused or worsened by colonial policy; so they are not comparable, for the purposes of my argument, with famines. But their persistence, and the tragically high human toll they exacted remain a severe indictment of the indifference to Indian suffering of those who ran the British Raj. This is all the more true because ‘marked improvements in public health’ are often cited by defenders of British rule in India. There is not a great deal of evidence for this claim, which rests largely on the introduction of quinine as an anti-malarial drug (though its principal use was in the tonics with which the British in jungle outposts drowned and justified their gin), public programmes of vaccination against smallpox (so inadequate that it was only well after Independence that a free India eradicated this scourge from the country) and improvements in water supplies (done so ineffectually, in fact, that cholera and other waterborne diseases persisted throughout the Raj). It is also telling that there were no great hospitals established by the Raj anywhere in the country: strikingly, every one of the major modern medical establishments of British India was established by the generosity of Indian benefactors, even if, for understandable reasons, these Indian donors often named their hospitals after British colonial grandees.

  FORCED MIGRATION: TRANSPORTATION AND INDENTURED LABOUR

  In the British empire, transportation to penal colonies became a preferred method of dealing with overcrowded prisons in England as well as ensuring the supply of manpower to the underpopulated colonies. The flow of convict labour, run by the government, was soon integrated with the privately-controlled trade in indentured labourers to the Caribbean and the American colonies. This policy was also applied to India.

  From 1787, Indian convicts were transported, initially to the penal colonies in Southeast Asia, particularly Bencoolen in Sumatra (1787-1825, when the British and the Dutch swapped Bencoolen for Malacca to consolidate their holds on Malaysia and Indonesia respectively), Penang, otherwise known as Prince of Wales Island (1790–1860), Mauritius (1815-53), Malacca and Singapore (1825-60), and the Burmese provinces of Arakan and Tenasserim (1828-62). Since they were largely put to work in infrastructure-building projects, Indian convicts were in great demand, especially in Singapore, the fastest growing of the Straits Settlements. In the East India Company’s heyday they were called the ‘Botany Bays of India’. Indian convict labour, put to work as low-cost workers in all public projects, was vital to Penang’s successful colonization. Between 1852 and 1854, when labour costs in the region rose by an estimated 30 per cent, the Company’s government in the Straits Settlements relied almost entirely on Indian convict labour for the construction of public works. Between 1825 to 1872, Indian convicts made up the bulk of the labour force for all public works projects in Singapore.

  Indian convicts—and the term embraces many charged with petty crimes, from theft to indebtedness—were also transported to Mauritius once the British had taken the island from the French in the Napoleonic Wars, though their initial introduction in 1829 was not a success. The plantation economy of Mauritius largely ran on slavery, but the labour crisis that followed the abolition of slavery led to a demand for workers from India, and the British started shipping them anew in 1834. By 1838, 25,000 Indians had arrived; a brief ban, brought about by the anti-slavery campaigners, stopped Indian emigration from 1839-42, but this was overturned, and in 1843 officials reported that 30,218 male and 4,307 female indentured immigrants entered Mauritius. The females were considered essential to encourage labourers to remain after the period of their indentured servitude. By 1868, regulations had increased the share of female migrants to a minimum of forty women for every hundred men.

  Some 500,000 labourers from India were transferred to Mauritius under the contract system for indentured labour; many were convicts, but others came voluntarily, though their willingness was sometimes obtained by coercion. In the words of one scholar, ‘Whether labour were predominantly enslaved, apprenticed or indentured, incarceration was part of a broader process through which the regulation of [the] colonial workforce was taken from the private to the public sphere.’

  An attempt was also made to start a penal colony closer to the Indian mainland in the Andaman Islands, but the first attempt was not successful and 700 convicts were transferred in 1796 from the penal settlement of the Andamans to Penang. Once the Straits Settlements were separated from British India in the 1860s, however, the British had no choice, if they wished to continue to transport Indian offenders, but to redevelop the penal settlement, which they did after 1858; the Andamans soon became the preferred destination for Indians the British deemed to be political troublemakers.

  Besides the Straits Settlements and Mauritius, destitute Indians were also shipped as indentured labour to other British colonies around the world, from Guyana and the Caribbean Islands to South Africa and Fiji in the Pacific. Some 1.9 to 3.5 million Indians (the numbers vary in different sources, depending on who is counted) moved halfway across the globe, most involuntarily, under the colonial project. They played their roles as cogs in the wheels of the imperial machinery, toiling on sugar plantations, building roads and buildings, clearing jungle. Many suffered horribly on harrowing journeys and some perished en route; others endured terrible privations. Recent work by Professor Clare Anderson has established the extent of the horrors: in just one year, 1856-57, and on one route, Kolkata to Trinidad, the percentage of deaths of indentured labour on the transportee ships reached appalling levels: 12.3 per cent of all males, 18.5 per cent of the females, 28 per cent of the boys and 36 per cent of the girls perished, as did a tragic 55 per cent of all infants. To make an admittedly invidious comparison, the deaths of slaves on the notorious ‘Middle Passage’ was estimated at around 12.5 per cent. To be an indentured Indian labourer transported to the Caribbean on British ships was to enter a life-and-death lottery in which your chances of survival were significantly worse than those of a shackled African slave.

  The cultural result of this tragic experience, though, was the creation of a common sorrow-filled bond between slavery-induced and indentured labour. The ‘Brotherhood of the Boat’ became the subject of poetry, shared folklore and, above all, music that persists to this day.

  All those thus transported were cut off from any hope of return to India, or contact with the families they had left behind at home. Though many of the indentured labourers had the right to demand passage home after five years’ bonded labour, this was largely theoretical and few, if any, were allowed to exercise such a right. (Clever tweaks in the regulations, such as the right being forfeit if not claimed within six months after the expiry of the original contract, or a stiff and unaffordable fare being charged for the journey, discouraged many as well.) Some—a tiny minority of Indian transportees—are said to have successfully returned, but the only case I am aware of is a handful of survivors who returned to India from a shipload of unfortunates transported to the Caribbean island of St. Croix in 1868, a majority of whom perished on board.

  In the period 1519-1939, an estimated 5,300,000 people, whom scholars delicately dub ‘unfree migrants’, were carried on British ships, of whom approximately 58 per cent were slaves, mainly from Africa, 36 per cent were indentured labour, mainly from India, and 6 per cent were transported convicts, both from India and other colonies. If nothing else, this British endeavour, motivated as always by the simple exigencies of the colonial project, transformed the demography of dozens of countries, with consequences that can still be seen today.

  Many of the volunteers, as opposed to convicts and others transported, signed up for indentured servitude as a result of their immiseration under Company rule; thousands of Indian farmers were driven off their land and forced into migration by the taking over of their fertile lands for opium cultivation. Some were former sepoys and recruits on the run from the ruthless British reprisals that followed the ‘mutiny’ of 1857. (It made little difference to the British, for whom mutineers,
‘criminals’ and those seeking to escape poverty were all the same.) Niall Ferguson dismisses this immensely painful and disruptive displacement as ‘this mobilisation of cheap and probably underemployed Asian labour to grow rubber and dig gold’. Perhaps a more humane view comes from the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, who has written that the migration of peasants from the Gangetic plains ‘was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart’. The wrenching of people from their homes amid scenes of desolation and despair was a crime that would haunt the history of British rule in India for generations to come.

  THE BRUTISH RAJ

  British imperialism had long justified itself with the pretence that it was enlightened despotism, conducted for the benefit of the governed. Churchill’s inhumane conduct in the summer and autumn of 1943 gave the lie to this myth. But it had been battered for two centuries already: British imperialism had triumphed not just by conquest and deception on a grand scale but, as I have mentioned, by ruthlessly suppressing dissent, executing rebels and deserters and chopping off the thumbs of skilled weavers so they could not produce the fine cloth that made Britain’s manufactures look tawdry. The suppression of the 1857 ‘mutiny’ was conducted with extreme brutality, with hundreds of rebels being blown to bits from the mouths of cannons or hanged from public gibbets, women and children massacred (in retaliation, it must be admitted, for the killing of British women and children) and over 100,000 lives lost.

  ‘British brutality’ seems to many a contradiction in terms: the British are, after all, a byword for gentility, understatement, irony. They triumph through brilliance, not the blunderbuss. Surely they could not have behaved in India like the murderous Belgians in the Congo?

  They did. Not all the time, and not with the sustained and inhuman brutality consistently deployed by King Leopold’s amoral killers, but they were no exception to the basic rule that imperialism extends itself through brute force. ‘Most of the time,’ says the historian Jon Wilson, ‘the actions of British imperial administrators were driven by irrational passions rather than calculated plans. Force was rarely efficient. The assertion of violent power usually exceeded the demands of any particular commercial or political interest.’

  Brutality was an early feature of the military campaigns of the East India Company. Historians attribute the early viciousness of the British to ‘their sense of vulnerability and inability to get their way, in the absence of strong relationships with local society, by asserting power through petty acts of humiliation’. (Such misbehaviour led to the Anjengo massacre of 1721, when several British soldiers and Company men were slaughtered by Nair warriors seething after repeated assaults on their honour.) The perpetrators were punished and the British doubled down on their superior power of violence. Constant paranoia fuelled a preference for force over negotiation, always sought to be justified by the circumstances. One of the English officers reported to the Company’s council during the campaign against the Raja of Tanjore in the 1790s: ‘I can only [subdue resistance] by reprisals, which will oblige me to plunder and burn the villages, kill every man in them, and take prisoners the women and children. These are actions which the nature of this war will require.’

  When the Vellore mutiny occurred in 1806, sparked by changes in the uniforms of the Company’s Indian sepoys that were found offensive by both Hindus and Muslims, the British put it down with ruthless ferocity. Three hundred (some versions say 350) of the mutineers were tied together, lined up against the wall of a fives court and shot at a range of thirty yards; this happened without even a summary trial or an opportunity to explain themselves. After a more formal court-martial process of the rest, six mutineers were blown away from the mouths of cannons, five were shot by firing squad, eight were hanged and five transported to a penal colony.

  During the Revolt of 1857, thousands of mutineers were killed by similar means, as were large numbers of civilians of both sexes. General James George Smith Neill, in Allahabad and Kanpur, was particularly bloodthirsty, as was Sir Hugh Rose in Jhansi, where some 5,000 civilians were massacred, with no ‘maudlin clemency’ shown to the inhabitants of the rebel city of the redoubtable Rani Lakshmibai. When Delhi was retaken, the savagery was pitiless: in one neighbourhood alone, Kucha Chelan, some 1,400 unarmed citizens were massacred. ‘The orders went out to shoot every soul,’ recorded one young officer. ‘It was literally murder.’ So many civilians were killed that an eyewitness reported ‘dead bodies in every street, rotting in the burning sun’. Refugees sheltering in mosques were plucked out and executed. Mass hangings were the norm. Delhi, the Mughal capital, a rich and bustling city of half a million inhabitants, was left a desolate ruin.

  Casual murder was hardly unknown as the British killed Indians with impunity. Denis Judd recounts an incident in which a British soldier overheard two Indians sitting on a cart discussing Kanpur, site of one of the more brutal battles of the 1857 revolt. In the soldier’s own words: ‘I knowed what that meant. So I fetched Tom Walker, and he heard ’em say, “Cawnpore”, and he knowed what that meant. So we polished ’em both off.’

  Some of these killings might be sought to be explained, if not excused, by the heat of battle, particularly in putting down a rebellion. But some reprisals were in cold blood. Though the family of Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar surrendered peacefully to the British forces that captured Delhi, they were cruelly decimated. Most of his sixteen sons were tried and hanged, while several were shot in cold blood, after first being stripped of their arms and, of course, their jewels. Atrocities also took place under civilian rule, on official orders and against civilian victims. In 1872, in Malerkotla, Punjab, some 65 Namdhari Sikhs were blown to bits from the mouths of cannons; in Peshawar’s Qissa Khwani Bazaar in 1930, 400 Indians were butchered; and innumerable smaller incidents of beatings, floggings, racial abuse and assaults, shootings, hangings and transportation of Indians for a varied list of offences speckle the bloody history of British colonialism.

  Such examples of brutality from the days of the East India Company or the early days of Crown rule tend to lay themselves open to the defence that those were other times, when other mores applied. But they continued even in the twentieth century. The brutal force used to repress the Quit India movement in 1942 involved tactics that, in the words of a British governor, if ‘dragged out in the cold light of [day], nobody could defend’. Gang rape by the police was not uncommon: 73 women were violated by police in a bid to terrorize the satyagrahis, prisoners were forced to lie naked on blocks of ice till they lost consciousness, and thousands were beaten in jail. Even strafing of civilian protestors from the air was authorized. At the beginning of the century, Ruskin declared that ‘every mutiny, every danger, every terror, and every crime, occurring under, or paralyzing, our Indian legislation, arises directly out of our national desire to live on the loot of India’. Reprisals against Indians challenging continued British exploitation, he pointed out, had no moral basis. Still, they continued to be exacted.

  One instance of British colonial conduct from the twentieth century deserves detailed description to illustrate the larger point I am making. The incident took place just after the end of World War I (the war to ‘make the world safe for democracy’, in that ringing phrase of Woodrow Wilson’s). I refer, of course, to Jallianwala Bagh.

  It was 1919. The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires had collapsed; new nations were springing up from their ruins; talk of self-determination was in the air. India had just emerged from World War I having made enormous sacrifices, and a huge contribution in men and materiel, blood and treasure, to the British war effort, in the expectation that it would be rewarded with some measure of self-government. Those hopes were belied, as explained in Chapter 2; the dishonest Montagu–Chelmsford ‘reforms’ and the punitive Rowlatt Acts were India’s only reward.

  This is what happened next.

  In March and April 1919, Indians rallied across the Punjab to protest the Rowla
tt Acts; they shut down normal commerce in many cities, including Amritsar, through hartals on 30 March and 6 April that demonstrated, through empty streets and shuttered shops, the dissatisfaction of the people at the British betrayal. This was a form of Gandhian non-violent non-cooperation; no violence or disorder was reported during the hartals. But on 9 April, with no provocation, the British government in the Punjab arrested two nationalist leaders, Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew and Dr Satyapal, who had addressed the protest meetings. As news of the arrests spread, the people of Amritsar came out onto the streets and sought to push their way to police headquarters to protest the arrests. The police barred their way, some stones were thrown by agitated civilians, and the police retaliated by opening fire, killing ten demonstrators. This inflamed the crowd, which reacted to the police killing by venting their fury on any visible symbol of the British empire. In the riot that ensued, five Englishmen were killed and a woman missionary assaulted (however, she was rescued, and carried to safety, by Indians).

  The British promptly sent troops to Amritsar to restore order; by 11 April, 600 soldiers arrived, followed the next day by their commander, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer. By then the city was calm and whatever demonstrations and protest meetings were occurring were entirely peaceable. Nonetheless, Dyer made several arrests to assert his authority, and on the 13th he issued a proclamation that forbade people to leave the city without a pass, to organize demonstrations or processions, or even to gather in groups of more than three. The city was seething under these restrictions, but there were no protests. Meanwhile, unaware of the proclamation, some 10–15,000 people from outlying districts gathered in the city the same day to celebrate the major religious festival of Baisakhi. They had assembled in an enclosed walled garden, Jallianwala Bagh, a popular spot for public events in Amritsar but accessible only through five narrow passageways.