As I have said more than once in the course of the book, there is no reason to believe that, left to itself, India could not have evolved into a more prosperous, united and modernizing power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many economists blame technological backwardness rather than British malice for India’s economic failure under the Raj. But even if lack of technology was the Indian economy’s single biggest failing, an independent India could always have imported the technology it needed, as Japan, for instance, was to do. This the British refused to allow Indians to do till well into the twentieth century. A country that was quite willing, over the centuries, to import artists and historians from Persia, sculptors and architects from Central Asia and soldiers from East Africa, would have seen no reason not to import the trappings of modernity from Europe, from railways to industrial technology (just as China is doing today).
India’s civilizational impulse throughout history was towards greatness, punctuated undoubtedly by setbacks and conflicts, but which country has been exempt from those? Trade, not conquest, could also have changed India. Something like the Meiji Restoration could have easily taken place in India without the incubus of British rule. It is at least as plausible to argue that India would have modernized, using best practices borrowed (and paid for) from everywhere and adapted to its needs, as to claim that it needed the subjection and humiliation of Empire to reach where it has now begun to.
Joseph Conrad, no radical himself, described colonialism as ‘a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly’. As he wrote in 1902, ‘The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.’ Rabindranath Tagore put it gently to a Western audience in New York in 1930: ‘A great portion of the world suffers from your civilisation.’ Mahatma Gandhi was blunter: asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied, ‘It would be a good idea’.
‘The question,’ Niall Ferguson writes in his defence of Empire, ‘is not whether British imperialism was without blemish. It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity’. As we have seen from the sanguinary record of massacres and brutality by the Raj laid out in the previous chapters, the answer to his question could only be yes. Gurcharan Das, who is inclined to give the British the benefit of the doubt, also does not see deliberate malice in their policy, but his review of the reasons for the industrial failure of British India amount in fact to a devastating summary of what British colonial rule had done to the economy:
The industrial revolution did not occur because [first], Indian agriculture remained stagnant, and you cannot have an industrial revolution without an agricultural surplus or the means to feed a rapidly growing urban population; second, the international trading environment turned hostile with protectionism after World War I, followed by the Depression; third, the colonial government did not educate the masses, unlike the Japanese state; finally, a colonial mindset pervaded the Indian middle class—even the hardiest potential entrepreneur lacks confidence when he is politically enslaved.
In other words, British colonial agrarian policy, its education policy in India and its racist subjugation of Indians contribute three of Das’s four major reasons for India’s backwardness in the period in question; and the fourth, the Great War and its consequences, only affected India as much it did because India was a British possession.
It could be argued that the great crime of the British can be understood in a more neutral way. Critics, this argument runs, muddle the idea of the West in the colonial period, because we conflate two very separate strands that are constitutive of this idea: the first consists of modern state machinery (armies, censuses, bureaucracies, railroads, hospitals, telegraph lines, educational and scientific institutions and so on) and the second is of liberal norms (individual rights; freedom of thought, speech, artistic and political expression; equality under the law; and political democracy). One does not axiomatically go with the other. (Look, after all, at China today, where the former flourishes without the latter.) What separates the British from precolonial Indian rulers, then, is not that they were more rapacious or more amoral, but simply that they were more efficient in making a state, while remaining indifferent, or insincere, about imparting their liberal values. But Britain was also the embodiment of the Enlightenment tradition of liberalism, and we judge the ‘state’ they created harshly on this basis. Is this a valid argument, then, since it obviously cannot be applied on its own terms to the Marathas, the Indian principalities or even the collapsing late Mughal state the British encountered? Who was holding the Maratha Peshwas to the standards of Mill and Pitt?
This is an interesting argument, but not, ultimately, a persuasive one. For the British state in India was indeed, as I have demonstrated, a totally amoral, rapacious imperialist machine bent on the subjugation of Indians for the purpose of profit, not merely a neutrally efficient system indifferent to human rights. And its subjugation resulted in the expropriation of Indian wealth to Britain, draining the society of the resources that would normally have propelled its natural growth and economic development. Yes, there may have been famines and epidemics in precolonial India, but Indians were acquiring the means to cope with them better, which they were unable to do under British rule, because the British had reduced them to poverty and destroyed their sources of sustenance other than living unsustainably on the land—in addition to which Victorian Britain’s ideological opposition to ‘indiscriminate’ charity denied many millions of Indians the relief that would have saved their lives.
It may seem frivolous to confine my appreciation of British rule to cricket, tea and the English language. I do not mean to discount other accomplishments. In outlining the exploitation and looting of India by British commercial interests, for example, I should acknowledge that in the process the British gave India the joint stock company, long experience of commercial processes and international trade, and Asia’s oldest stock exchange, established in Bombay in 1875. Indians’ familiarity with international commerce and the stock market has proved a distinct advantage in the globalized world; India’s entrepreneurial capital and management skills are well able to control and manage assets in the sophisticated financial markets of the developed West today, as Tatas have demonstrated in Britain by making Jaguar profitable for the first time in years, and India’s businessmen and managers are familiar with the systems needed to operate a twenty-first-century economy in an open and globalizing world.
And yet one must qualify this rosy notion—that it is thanks to British colonization that India is busy overrunning the planet with skilled, experienced and English-speaking businessmen straining at the leash to take over the world economy. The fact is that the initial Indian reaction to colonial commercial exploitation was, understandably, the opposite—not imitation but rejection. The fight for freedom from colonial rule involved the overthrow of both foreign rulers and foreign capitalists (though few nationalists could tell the difference). Thanks to colonialism, the great leaders of Indian nationalism associated capitalism with slavery: the fact that the East India Company had come to trade and stayed on to rule made our nationalist leaders suspicious of every foreigner with a briefcase, seeing him as the thin end of a neo-imperial wedge.
So instead of integrating India into the global capitalist system, as a few postcolonial countries like Singapore so effectively were to do, India’s leaders were convinced that the political independence they had fought for could only be guaranteed through economic independence. That is why self-reliance became the default slogan, the protectionist barriers went up, and India spent forty-five years with bureaucrats rather than businessmen on the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, spending a good part of the first four and a half decades after Independence in subsidizing unproductivity, regulating stagnation and trying to distribute poverty. One canno
t blame the British for the choices Indians themselves made in reaction to British rule, but it only goes to prove that one of the lessons you learn from history is that history sometimes teaches the wrong lessons. Our current economic growth and global visibility is a result of new choices made after the initial visceral rejection of British colonialism and its methods.
If there were positive by-products for Indians from the institutions the British established and ran in India in their own interests, I am happy to acknowledge them, but only as by-products, and not because they were intended to benefit Indians. The railways were set up entirely for British gain, from construction to execution, but today Indians cannot live without them; the Indian authorities have reversed British policies and the railways are used principally to transport people, with freight bearing ever higher charges in order to subsidize the passengers (exactly the opposite of British practice). Similarly the irrigation works conducted by the British were criticized for their inadequacy by Indian nationalists—since expenditure on them was barely one-ninth that on the railways—and William Jennings Bryan, the American statesman, pointed out that, ‘Ten per cent of the army expenditure applied to irrigation would complete the system within five years, but instead of military expenses being reduced, the army appropriation was increased.’ However, irrigation still added some twenty million acres, an area the size of France, to the country’s cultivable land (almost all of it, alas, in Pakistan today). It would be idle to pretend that no good came of any of this. But when the balance sheet is drawn up, at the end, the balance weighs heavily against the colonialists.
The Indian Army is sometimes cited as a valuable British legacy, a professional fighting force held together by strong traditions of camaraderie and courage, which has remained a meritocracy and stayed out of politics. How much of the credit for this last accomplishment should go to the British is debatable: after all, the Pakistan Army is as much an inheritor of the same colonial legacy, but it has conducted three coups, as well holding the reins firmly even when elected governments are in the saddle. The essential point is, of course, that the Indian Army was not created in India’s interests, but in those of Britain, both here and abroad. The Indian soldier was merely an obedient instrument: the Indian sepoy was described by a contemporary as ‘temperate, respectful, patient, subordinate, and faithful’. This quiescence ended with the 1857 revolt, but the British managed to restore discipline and the British Indian Army rebuilt itself on notions of fidelity and honour for the next ninety years.
Then the British tore it apart through Partition. The poignant tale is told of Hindu and Muslim officers singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ together at the army mess in Delhi at a farewell dinner for those who were leaving for the new country of Pakistan. For many of those officers, years of comradeship were irretrievably lost in the name of a faith they had been born into and a political cause they had not chosen.
A largely uncritical, indeed romanticized, account of the British Indian Army, and how a few thousand British troops held down a subcontinent of 200 million people, comes from Philip Mason, who quotes a Victorian administrator: ‘Our force does not operate so much by its actual strength as by the impression which it produces’.
That today’s Indian Army, a million strong, has held on to the best of British military traditions while eschewing the temptations to which its Pakistani and Bangladeshi counterparts have fallen prey, is surely more to the credit of its own officers and men, as well as of the inclusive and pluralist nature of Indian democracy.
Some point to physical evidence of the British presence—buildings, ports, trains and institutions—as evidence of a lasting contribution. The fact is the British put in the minimum amount of investment to optimize their exploitation of Indian wealth, while keeping the indigenous population from rebelling. Some of these things were basic to any society; most were created to benefit the British, whether in India or in the UK. Niall Ferguson argues that the British built ‘useful’ things—opulent palaces for themselves and ships to transport indentured labour, no doubt, are good examples of these—while Indians wasted their resources on ‘conspicuous consumption’. Making exportable muslin? Setting global metallurgical standards with its wootz steel? Building magnificent cities and temples? Or perhaps Ferguson thinks the Taj Mahal was a colossal and conspicuous waste?
The story is told—I cannot pinpoint the source—that when the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, visited India in 1921, he pointed to a few magnificent buildings, cars and electrical installations and remarked to an Indian accompanying him, ‘We have given you everything here in India! What is it you don’t have?’ And the lowly Indian replied, gently: ‘Self-respect, sir.’
That too was snatched away by colonialism: the self-respect that comes from the knowledge that you are the master of your own fate, that your problems are your own fault and that their resolution depends principally on you and not some distant person living in a faraway land. The biggest difference that freedom has made lies in this, in the establishment of democratic rights and a shared idea of empowered citizenship, in which every citizen or sub-national group can promote their own rights and ensure their voices are heard. This was always withheld from Indians by the colonial subjecthood that was all the British were willing to confer upon them.
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 myriad instances tell of the opposite. Take, for example, the British policy on the cultivation and sale of opium. In China, the British 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…’14 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.
[14 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.]
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:
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