An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India
Page 31
THE MORAL BARRIER
Jawaharlal Nehru once described British India as being like an enormous country house in which the English were the gentry living in the best parts, with the Indians in the servants’ hall: ‘As in every proper country house there was a fixed hierarchy in the lower regions—butler, housekeeper, cook, valet, maid, footman, etc.—and strict precedence was observed among them. But between the upper and lower regions of the house there was, socially and politically, an impassable barrier.’
The barrier was not merely social or racial: it was also a moral barrier, one of motive and interest. One claim that cannot be credibly made is that the British authorities ever, in any instance, put the interests of the Indian public above their own, or placed the needs of single suffering Indian woman above the commercial profit-seeking that had engendered her pain. There are simply no examples of this, while a myriad instances tell of the opposite. Take, for example, the British policy on the cultivation and sale of opium. In China, the desire to reduce its people to a drugged stupor in the pursuit of profit even led to a pair of Opium Wars; in India it merely became one more form of exploitation of the masses.
The East India Company ensured that both growing opium and selling it were to be British government monopolies. The facts were laid out in an 1838 account:
Throughout all the territories within the Company’s jurisdiction, the cultivation of the poppy, the preparation of the drug, and the traffic in it, […] are under a strict monopoly…the growing of opium is compulsory on the part of the ryot. Advances are made by Government through its native servants, and if a ryot refuses the advance, ‘the simple plan of throwing the rupees into his house is adopted; should he attempt to abscond, the peons seize him, tie the advance up in his clothes, and push him into his house. The business being now settled, and there being no remedy, he applies himself, as he may, to the fulfilment of his contract…’* The evils which the cultivation of opium entails upon our fellow-subjects in India, arise partly from the ryots in the opium districts of Patna and Benares being compelled to give up fixed portions of their lands for the production of the poppy.
This went on well after the Chinese had thrown off the opium yoke. An 1895 Royal Commission set up in response to public outrage glossed over the horrors of opium and claimed the public’s fears and concerns were exaggerated. (Sir Richard Temple of famine fame, now retired, defended the opium policy before the Commission.) In 1930, Durant found 7,000 opium shops in India, every single one of them British-government owned, and conducting their business over the protests of every Indian nationalist organization and social service group. Some 400,000 acres of fertile land were given over to opium cultivation, these could have produced food for malnourished Indians. When the elected Indian members of the impotent Central Legislature got their colleagues to pass a bill in 1921 prohibiting the growth or sale of opium in India, the government vetoed it by the simple expedient of refusing to act upon it, mindful, no doubt, of the fact that one-ninth of the government’s annual revenues came from drugs. When Mahatma Gandhi, no less, mounted a campaign against opium in Assam and succeeded in halving its consumption, the British responded by jailing him and forty-four of his satyagrahis.
Various World Opium Conferences were held to demand the abolition of this pernicious drug, but Britain refused to accede to their exhortations; in order to appease global outrage, it agreed to reduce its export of opium by 10 per cent a year, but not to restrict or dilute its production and sale in India. (Indeed, a Government Retrenchment Commission, examining economy measures, underscored ‘the importance of safe-guarding opium sales as an important source of revenue’, and recommended ‘no further reduction’.) The result was that opium became the drug of choice of the masses, used recklessly by those who knew no better; mothers gave opium to their children to keep them quiet when they trudged off to construction sites to labour for their daily pittance.
Should the British policy on opium be excused as reflecting the attitudes of their times? Is it wrong to condemn it from the vantage point of today? No: the British were roundly condemned during their execution of their opium policy by every contemporary Indian nationalist grouping, by dozens of foreign delegates at international conferences, and by thoughtful foreign observers and reporters like the indignant Will Durant. Ironically, the most effective broadside against opium came from none other than Lord Macaulay himself, in an 1833 speech to the House of Commons:
[It was] the practice of the miserable tyrants whom we found in India, […] when they dreaded the capacity and the spirit of some distinguished subject…to administer to him daily [a] dose of…a preparation of opium, the effect of which was in a few months to destroy all the bodily and the mental powers of the wretch who was drugged with it, and turn him into a helpless idiot. That detestable artifice, more horrible than assassination itself, was worthy of those who employed it… It is no model for the English nation. We shall never consent to administer [opium] to a whole community, to stupefy and paralyze a great people.
Little did he realize that, for more than a century after he spoke, his own British government would give the lie to his words, for what he inveighed against is exactly what it did.
The British government’s refusal to stop the sale of opium was of a piece, of course, with its official disinclination to take any steps to reform Indian society, even while its policies transformed and distorted it beyond measure. It justified this as being out of respect for native customs and traditions, but its main consideration was, of course, that reform would cost money and stir up trouble, which in turn would require the expenditure of money and time to redress. As a result British rule witnessed the entrenching of the caste system, the domination of the Muslim community by maulanas and conservative religious figures, the persistence of child marriage and untouchability, and a host of other social evils within India which the British preferred to keep at arm’s length rather than risk disturbing. The British interfered with social customs only when it suited them. The gap between liberal principles of universalism and the actual colonial practice of justice and governance was vast.
Such reform as did occur was strongly impelled by Indian social reformers whom the British acceded to, rather than initiated by the British themselves (with the exception of the suppression of Thuggee, which the British undertook to solve a law-and-order problem rather than a religious one). The call for the abolition of sati was initiated by Raja Rammohan Roy and enacted by Bentinck, knowing he had the support of right-thinking Indians, rather than being the product of the British conscience imposing its will on the barbarous native. The modest increase in the age of marriage (to fourteen for women and eighteen for men) that took place under the British Raj was voted by the Indians in the legislature against the opposition, but later acquiescence, of the British authorities. And the persecution of widows, the worst practices of untouchability, and social evils like ritual sacrifice, were first raised and campaigned against by Indian reformists like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj; these evils were all continuing unhampered under the indifferent gaze of the British. Three impressive women presided over the Indian National Congress during an era in which not a single governor, secretary or other British high official was female and the very notion of a female authority figure, let alone a female viceroy, would have been a fantasy. The British, as the government of the day, had the right to permit changes to be enacted and implemented, but very rarely did they initiate them themselves.
Lawrence James brags, ‘Unlike Stalin’s Russia, the British empire was always an open society.’ The comparator is amusing for a Raj apologist, but we shall let that pass. For whom was the British empire an open society? Not for non-whites, as we have seen; not for women of any race; not, indeed, for Indians.
For, as I have pointed out repeatedly, behind everything lay one inescapable fact: unlike every previous conqueror of India (not counting transient raiders like Mahmud of Ghazni, Timur and Nadir Shah), unlike e
very other foreign overlord who stayed on to rule, the British had no intention of becoming one with the land. The French ruled foreign territories and made them French, assimilating them in a narrative of Frenchness; the Portuguese settled in their colonies and intermarried with the locals; but the British always stayed apart and aloof, a foreign presence, with foreign interests and foreign loyalties.
The Delhi Sultans and the Mughals may have arrived from abroad, and their progenitors might initially have harked back to distant cities in the Ferghana Valley as their idea of ‘home’, but they settled in India and retained no extraterritorial allegiance. They married women from India and diluted their foreign blood to the point that in a few generations no trace remained of their foreign ethnicity. Akbar’s son Jehangir was half-Rajput; Jehangir’s son Shah Jehan also came from an Indian bride; Aurangzeb was only one-eighth non-Indian. Of course, the Mughal emperors were all deeply aware of their connections to Ferghana; they would ask emissaries from there about the conditions of their ancestors’ Chingisid tombs and donate money for their upkeep. The past was part of the Mughal identity, but their conceptions of themselves in the present and for the future became more rooted and embedded in India. The British, in contrast, maintained racial exclusivity, practised discrimination against Indians and sneered at miscegenation.
Yes, the Mughal emperors taxed the citizens of India, they claimed tributes from subordinate princes, they plundered the treasuries of those they defeated in battle—all like the British—but they spent or saved what they had earned in India, instead of ‘repatriating’ it to Samarkand or Bukhara as the British did by sending their Indian revenues to London. They ploughed the resources of India into the development of India, establishing and patronizing its industries and handicrafts; they brought painters, sculptors and architects from foreign lands, but they absorbed them at their courts and encouraged them to adorn the artistic and cultural heritage of their new land.
The British did little, very little, of such things. They basked in the Indian sun and yearned for their cold and fog-ridden homeland; they sent the money they had taken off the perspiring brow of the Indian worker to England; and whatever little they did for India, they ensured India paid for it in excess. And at the end of it all, they went home to enjoy their retirements in damp little cottages with Indian names, their alien rest cushioned by generous pensions supplied by Indian taxpayers.
The question never honestly confronted by the apologists of Empire is the classic ‘cui bono?’—who benefited from British imperial rule? The answer is evidently Britain itself.* Let’s look at the numbers one last time, widening the lens a little. A fascinating comparative chart of countries’ share of global GDP throughout history is instructive. In 1 CE, as Christianity lay literally in swaddling clothes, India accounted for 33 per cent of global GDP, while the UK, France and Germany combined scored barely 3 per cent. By 1700, the equivalent figures were 25 per cent and 11 per cent; by 1870, at Empire’s peak, 12.5 per cent for India and 22 per cent for the three European countries; in 1913, with India’s further impoverishment, 9 per cent versus 22.5 per cent. In 1950, just after the British left, India stood at 4 per cent; in 2008, this figure was above 7 per cent and climbing. The UK, France and Germany, having dropped to 16 per cent in 1950, are hovering at 9 per cent today. As of 2014 Britain accounted for 2.4 per cent of global GDP, down from 6 per cent twenty-five years ago. History administers its own correctives.
This is the reality that Raj apologists seek to put lipstick on. As one reviewer of Ferguson’s pro-imperialist screed put it: ‘Ferguson’s “history” is a fairy tale for our times which puts the white man and his burden back at the centre of heroic action. Colonialism—a tale of slavery, plunder, war, corruption, land-grabbing, famines, exploitation, indentured labour, impoverishment, massacres, genocide and forced resettlement—is rewritten into a benign developmental mission marred by a few unfortunate accidents and excesses.’
When Kipling wrote his racist poem, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, as I have noted, a contemporary, Henry Labouchère, published an immediate rejoinder, ‘The Brown Man’s Burden’, that encapsulated much of what was wrong with imperialism—British, or anybody else’s (the Americans were just launching into their conquest of the Philippines). It is worth reproducing extensively, though not quite in full:
Pile on the brown man’s burden
To gratify your greed;
Go, clear away the ‘niggers’
Who progress would impede;
Be very stern, for truly
’Tis useless to be mild
With new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Pile on the brown man’s burden;
And, if ye rouse his hate,
Meet his old-fashioned reasons
With Maxims up to date.
With shells and dumdum bullets
A hundred times made plain
The brown man’s loss must ever
Imply the white man’s gain.
Pile on the brown man’s burden,
compel him to be free;
Let all your manifestoes
Reek with philanthropy.
And if with heathen folly
He dares your will dispute,
Then, in the name of freedom,
Don’t hesitate to shoot.
….
Pile on the brown man’s burden,
Nor do not deem it hard
If you should earn the rancour
Of those ye yearn to guard.
The screaming of your Eagle
Will drown the victim’s sob—
Go on through fire and slaughter.
There’s dollars in the job.
Pile on the brown man’s burden,
And through the world proclaim
That ye are Freedom’s agent—
There’s no more paying game!
And, should your own past history
Straight in your teeth be thrown,
Retort that independence
Is good for whites alone.
Pile on the brown man’s burden,
With equity have done;
Weak, antiquated scruples
Their squeamish course have run,
And, though ‘tis freedom’s banner
You’re waving in the van,
Reserve for home consumption
The sacred ‘rights of man’!
And if by chance ye falter,
Or lag along the course,
If, as the blood flows freely,
Ye feel some slight remorse,
Hie ye to Rudyard Kipling,
Imperialism’s prop,
And bid him, for your comfort,
Turn on his jingo stop.
The fact that, despite all these wrongs and injustices, Indians readily forgave the British when they left, retaining with them a ‘special connection’ that often manifests itself in warmth and affection, says more about India than it does about any supposed benefits of the British Raj.
There is a story—perhaps apocryphal—of Jawaharlal Nehru, who had cumulatively spent 3,262 days (nearly ten years of his life) in eight terms of imprisonment between 1922 and 1945 in British jails, being asked by the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill how it was that he felt so little rancour for his jailers and tormentors. ‘I was taught by a great man,’ Nehru was said to have replied, in a reference to the recently assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, ‘never to hate—and never to fear.’
*The quotes within the quotation are, says the 1838 author, William Howitt, taken from an article on the ‘Cultivation of the Poppy,’ in the Chinese Repository of February 1837.
*Just as this book was going to press, a new work has emerged that makes much the same case: Jon Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire, London: Simon & Schuster, 2016.
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THE MESSY AFTERLIFE OF COLONIALISM
I shall say one last time that, in laying out this case against British colonialism in India, I do not seek to blame the British for everything that is wrong in my country today, nor to justify some of the failures and deficiencies that undoubtedly still assail India. There is a statute of limitations on colonial wrongdoings, but none on human memory, especially living memory, for as I have pointed out there are still millions of Indians alive today who remember the iniquities of the British empire in India. History belongs in the past; but understanding it is the duty of the present.
IMPERIAL AMNESIA
It is, thankfully, no longer fashionable in most of the developing world to decry the evils of colonialism in assigning blame for every national misfortune. Internationally, the subject of colonialism is even more passé, since the need for decolonization is no longer much debated, and colonialism itself no longer generates much conflict. (There are, after all, no empires left whose maintenance or withdrawal might trigger extensive warfare.) Still, it is striking how quickly amnesia has set in among citizens of the great imperial power itself. A 1997 Gallup Poll in Britain revealed the following: 65 per cent did not know which country Robert Clive or James Wolfe was associated with, 77 per cent did not know who Cecil Rhodes was, 79 per cent could not identify a famous poem Rudyard Kipling had written, and 47 per cent thought Australia was still a colony. Over 50 per cent did not know that the United States of America had once been part of the British empire.