Inglorious Empire

by Shashi Tharoor

  This pageantry involved the British not merely exalting the principle of hierarchy in ensuring reverence for their own queen, but extending it to India, honouring ‘native princes’, ennobling others and promoting the invention of ersatz aristocratic tradition so as to legitimize their rule. Thus the British created a court culture that the princes had to follow, and a hierarchy that sought to show the Crown as successors of the Mughal emperor. The elaborately-graded gun salutes, from nine guns to nineteen (and in only five cases, twenty-one)6, depending on the importance, and cooperativeness, of the ruler in question; the regulation of who was and was not a ‘Highness’, and of what kind (the Nizam of Hyderabad went from being His Highness to His Exalted Highness during World War I, mainly because of his vast donation of money to the war effort); the careful lexicon whereby the ‘native chiefs’ (not ‘kings’), came from ‘ruling’, not ‘royal’, families, and their territories were ‘princely states’ not ‘kingdoms’—all these were part of an elaborate system of monarchical illusion-building. The India Office in London even had a room with two identical doors for entry, in case two Indian potentates of equivalent rank had to be received at the same time, so that neither had to precede the other. And so it went…

  [6 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.]

  For all the elaborate protocol and ostentation, as David Gilmour points out, the British had very little respect for the Indian aristocracy they were indulging. Curzon himself sneered at ‘the category of half-Anglicised, half-denationalised, European women-hunting, pseudo-sporting, and very often in the end spirit-drinking young native chiefs’. But he realized that Britain alone was to blame for the invention of the Indian royals as an imperial category. In 1888, one imperial official in Central India reported that in his zone of responsibility the result of ‘an English training for princely youths’ so far was ‘sodomites 2, idiots 1, sots 1…[and a] gentleman …prevented by chronic gonorrhoea from paying his respects on the Queen’s birthday’. Curzon himself complained in 1900 of the ‘frivolous and sometimes vicious spendthrifts and idlers’ who made up the bejewelled ranks of the Indian princes. The Rana of Dholpur, he wrote to Queen Victoria, was ‘fast sinking into an inebriate and a sot’, the Maharaja of Patiala was ‘little better than a jockey’, the Maharaja Holkar was ‘half-mad’ and ‘addicted to horrible vices’, and the Raja of Kapurthala was only happy philandering in Paris. Of course, there were enlightened and benevolent Indian princes, and even visionary ones—Baroda, Travancore and Mysore, to name three, enjoyed stellar reputations as exemplary rulers concerned about the well-being of their subjects—but stories of dissolute rajas were far more frequent than tales of good governance.

  The Un-Indian Civil Service

  If the panoply and external trimmings of the Crown’s takeover of India were grand enough, the queen went farther in respect of the substance of her rule. In her celebrated 1858 Proclamation, she expressed her wish that ‘our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to office in our service, the duties of which they may be qualified by their education, ability and integrity duly to discharge’.

  But what was the reality? In Will Durant’s words, it was one of ‘political exclusion and social scorn’. In 1857, F. J. Shore, the colonial administrator in Bengal whom I have quoted earlier, testifying before the House of Commons, confessed that ‘the Indians have been excluded from every honour, dignity or office which the lowest Englishman could be prevailed upon to accept’. Decades later, Indian graduates from the finest universities of India, Europe and America found that, for the most part, only the lowest places in government service were open to them; according to Durant, just 4 per cent of the ‘covenanted’ positions in the Indian (initially the ‘Imperial’) Civil Service, the top cadre, were filled by Indians in as late as 1930.

  As critics have pointed out, it is not as if the best and brightest staffed the posts available to Britons in India. Lord Asquith declared in 1909 that ‘if high places were given to Hindus half as unfit as the Englishmen who then occupied them in India, it would be regarded as a public scandal’. Mediocrities ruled the roost, and they were paid far more than Indians, since they had to endure the ‘hardships’ of the Indian heat—despite the warmth of the sun offering a welcome respite, for most, from the cold and fog of grey, benighted Blighty. (As Rudyard Kipling memorably put it in his novel, The Light That Failed, describing a return to London: ‘A thin grey fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for summer was in England.’) They were also, as a rule, singularly smug and self-satisfied and insufferably patronizing in their attitudes to Indians (when they were not simply contemptuous). Jawaharlal Nehru put it sharply: the Indian Civil Service, he said, was ‘neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service’.

  The British ruled nineteenth-century India with unshakeable self-confidence, buttressed by protocol, alcohol and a lot of gall. Stalin found it ‘ridiculous’ that ‘a few hundred Englishmen should dominate India’. He was not arithmetically accurate, but in principle he was right: it was remarkable that the British Raj was run by so few people. There were only 31,000 Britons in India in 1805 (of whom 22,000 were in the army and 2,000 in civil government). The number increased substantially after 1857, but still, as of 1890, 6,000 British officials ruled 250 million Indians, with some 70,000 European soldiers and a larger number of Indians in uniform. In 1911, there were 164,000 Britons living in India (of whom 66,000 were in the army and police and just 4,000 in civil government). By 1931, this had gone up to just 168,000 (including 60,000 in the army and police and still only 4,000 in civil government) to run a country approaching 300 million people. It was an extraordinary combination of racial self-assurance, superior military technology, the mystique of modernity and the trappings of enlightenment progressivism—as well as, it must be said clearly, the cravenness, cupidity, opportunism and lack of organized resistance on the part of the vanquished—that sustained the Empire, along with the judicious application of brute force when necessary. The British in India were never more than 0.05 per cent of the population. The Empire, in Hobsbawm’s evocative words, was ‘so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled thanks to the devotion of a few and the passivity of the many.’

  In Clive’s time, the Company presided over a ‘dual’ system: the Company exercised power but propped up a puppet nawab. Warren Hastings ended the pretence and overthrew the nawab: direct administration was now under the control of the Company. Cornwallis, in 1785, created a professional cadre of Company servants who were to govern the country for the Company, reserving all high-level posts for the British, and placing Englishmen in charge of each district with the blunt title of ‘Collector’, since collecting revenue was their raison d’etre. The Collector usually exercised the dual function of magistrate in his district.7 The British thus ran government, tax collection, and administered what passed for justice. Indians were excluded from all of these functions.

  [7 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).]

  With these tasks to be performed, a civil service came into being, nominated
by the Company’s bigwigs from influential young people of their acquaintance, and trained after 1806 in Haileybury College, near London, to serve the Company. After 1833, competitive examinations were introduced, though directors’ nominees could still be recruited on a nod and a wink. After 1853, selection was entirely examination-based, and thrown open to all white Britons. Demand for the Imperial Civil Service was high, since the work was ridiculously well-compensated, and the Company’s servants exercised genuine political power in India, which they could not hope to do in any equivalent job they might get in Britain. The tests did not seek to establish any knowledge of India or any sensitivity to its peoples; they sought to identify proper English gentlemen, and emphasized classical learning and good literary skills. After 1860, Indians were allowed to take the examinations too. But the Indian Civil Service remained, in ethos, British. One viceroy, Lord Mayo, declared, ‘we are all British gentlemen engaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race’. Few shared Victoria’s ‘romantic feelings for brown skins’. In David Gilmour’s telling, they had no illusions about preparing Indians for self-government; their view of Indians was at best paternalist, at worst contemptuous (well into the twentieth century, they spoke and wrote of the need to treat Indians as ‘children’, incapable of ruling themselves). Several generations of some families served in India, some over three centuries, without ever establishing roots there: they sent their own children ‘home’ to school and ‘endured’ years of separation from loved ones. It was not, of course, all self-sacrifice and hard work: ICS men earned the highest salaries of any officials in the world, with, as we have seen, generous furloughs and a guaranteed pension, and some at least found it ‘quite impossible’ to spend their income. The English political reformer John Bright, unsurprisingly, called the Empire a ‘gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain’.

  The attitudes the ICS men brought to bear to their work in India had greatly deteriorated by the end of the nineteenth century from curiosity and concern to complacency and cant. ‘The whole attitude of Government to the people it governs is vitiated,’ wrote H. Fielding-Hall, after thirty years of service in the ICS. ‘There is a want of knowledge and understanding. In place of it are fixed opinions based usually on prejudice or on faulty observation, or on circumstances which have changed, and they are never corrected. Young secretaries read up back circulars, and repeat their errors indefinitely…“following precedent”.’

  The British Labour politician Keir Hardie described British rule in India as ‘a huge military despotism tempered somewhat by a civil bureaucracy’. That bureaucracy was all-pervasive, overpaid, obtusely process-ridden, remarkably inefficient and largely indifferent to the well-being of the people for whose governance it had, after all, been created. Lord Lytton, in a lighter mood, described British governance in India as ‘a despotism of office-boxes tempered by an occasional loss of keys’. This bureaucratic despotism went back to the early years of Company rule in the late eighteenth century, when Lord Cornwallis had announced that ‘all rights had been reduced to writing’. As John Stuart Mill, who luxuriated in the title of ‘Examiner of Indian Correspondence’ for the East India Company, put it, the ‘great success of our Indian administration’ was that it was ‘carried on in writing’. But this was in fact the great flaw of the British system. Indian rulers had in the past negotiated with their local subjects because they had to live with them. Now the Company kept a distance from its subjects and only cared for one thing—a network that delivered cash to directors in faraway London as quickly and efficiently as possible. In reality, as Jon Wilson points out, the extraordinary flow of paper that Mill celebrated ‘constructed a world of letters, ledgers and account books that had its own pristine order but could not comprehend or rule the forces which shaped rural society…the new maze of paperwork blocked the creation of the public, reciprocal relationship between the state and local lords which political authority and economic prosperity had relied on before’.

  It also meant that decisions were increasingly made in offices, behind closed doors, by foreigners with no connection to those whose fates they were deciding. The public display of the rulers’ authority was replaced by the private circulation of incomprehensible paper. Decisions were being made by people who were out of the view of those impacted by the decisions. As the public places where Indians could hold their rulers to account were out of bounds, so the scope for intrigue and corruption expanded. Indians were anxious that decisions were being made over which they had no say. Clerks were bribed to find out what was being written in the all-important files. The Raja of Nadia was so concerned about what was happening behind closed doors that he paid a Bengali clerk in the Collector’s office to tell him what was written in the letters exchanged between the district capital and Calcutta.

  The old accessible Indian rulers were replaced by new officious British bureaucrats who were good at manipulating the paperwork created by the new rules but had little interest in the well-being of their subjects nor the capacity to establish their authority other than by reference to their rules. When these were violated, they could only take recourse in the forcible imposition of law and order. ‘The new system was not designed to create a stable political order in the Indian countryside,’ says Wilson. ‘Its aim was to defend the integrity of the East India Company from accusations in Britain of venality and vice. It began life as an effort to manage metropolitan moral anguish, not to handle the complaints of Indians about what Company officers were doing in India.’ The neat registers kept in the Company’s offices ‘allowed British officials to imagine they had created an effective, unitary structure of rule; they fostered a delusion of power’.

  This was the tradition that the Company passed on to the Crown, which continued it without change. Much of the British bureaucracy, as Lytton implied, was excessively formalistic; perhaps the obsession with procedure and paperwork resulted from a sneaking hope that anything resulting from the filling of forms in quadruplicate could not possibly be an injustice. (Or written on stamp paper, a British invention, that imparted a sense of authority to a document and gave the British a feeling of control.) Creating rule book after rule book concealed the fragile nature of the hold they had on the society they ruled. Regulations were framed and were meant to be applied across the board without reference to context and without any sensitivity to the circumstances of the individuals being regulated. Decisions were based on rules rather than facts, ‘often merely disconnecting officers from the political circumstances that called upon them to make decisions in the first place’.

  The British system of rule in India was, by any standards, remarkable. A twenty-four-year-old district officer found himself in charge of 4,000 square miles and a million people. The duties which the district officer had to perform were enumerated in a contemporary account as follows: ‘Collector of the Land Revenue. Registrar of the landed property in the District. Judge between landlord and tenant. Ministerial officer of the Courts of Justice. Treasurer and Accountant of the District. Administrator of the District Excise. Ex officio President of the Local Rates Committee. Referee for all questions of compensation for lands taken up for public purposes. Agent for the Government in all local suits to which it is a party. Referee in local public works. Manager of estates of minors. Magistrate, Police Magistrate and Criminal Judge. Head of Police. Ex officio President of Municipalities…’ All these tasks were performed by a young man, in a foreign country, with little knowledge of the local language or conditions, following uniform rules of procedure laid down by the distant government, but convinced of his innate superiority over those he had been assigned to rule and his God-given right to dispense authority in all these functions. Authority, but not welfare; there was no ‘development work’ listed for any British official in a district.

  If all this were not enough, the young man was subject to the tyranny of the ‘Warrant of Precedence’ and the rigidities of protocol in a hierarchy-co
nscious society, learned the desperate importance of being able to play whist as an antidote to loneliness, and in, due course, to humour the incessant social obligations of higher office (a lieutenant-governor hosted, on a single day, a boathouse lunch, a thé dansant and a garden party, and a dinner at the club). The diversions were plentiful. Wedded inexcusably to its own pleasures, the British bureaucracy retreated to mountain redoubts in the hills for months on end to escape the searing heat of the plains, there to while away their time in entertainments, dances and social fripperies while the objects of their rule, the Indian people, were exploited ruthlessly below.

  In the summer capital of Simla, with its population of ‘grass widows’ enjoying the cooler air while their husbands toiled in the hot plains, the ‘main occupations’ were ‘gambling, drinking, and breaking the 7th Commandment’.

  And yet there is no doubt about the heroic efforts of many individual civilians, who dug canals, founded colleges, administered justice and even, in some cases, advocated Indian self-rule. Their names became part of the geography of the subcontinent: towns called Abbottabad, Lyallpur and Cox’s Bazar, Corbett Park, Cotton Hill, the Mcnabbwah Canal. As a rare left-winger in the ICS, John Maynard, explained, ‘ugly pallid bilious men’ were able to ‘do great things in the very midst of their querulous discontents and unideal aspirations’.