We have come to the last week of the glorious Nineteenth Century, and your columns and those of every other great London newspaper will, I know, be full of its praises, and especially for the part we Englishmen, in the character of sons of the Empire, have played in it. We shall be told of our imperial expansion, of our glories, of our mission of freedom and justice, and of our claims on the admiration of the world and of ourselves. We shall be called on to fall down as a nation and worship our own golden image revealed in a splendid record of heroic deeds and noble impulses, and, if any dissent, it shall be counted to him for envy and uncharitable-ness or wilful blindness to the sun at noon-day. It is against this self-worship I would raise my voice, however feebly, against this shameless self-praise, this painting in every gaudy colour of the imperial idol in which Englishmen, each day of the week, behold the image of their own imperial faces. Is it possible that we do not see the folly of it all, the childishness of concealing terrible facts known to all the world, the huge vulgarity of pretending to be other than the miserable sinners we are, fulfilling a destiny half chosen by ourselves, half thrust upon us by the disease of our world-hunger, of devouring peoples more beautiful and better than ourselves?188
If ‘imperial scepticism’, to use Gregory Claey’s term, runs like a skein through the dramatic canvas of the second half of the nineteenth century, it would find its apotheosis in Blunt’s persistently raised voice which, as the new century began, was beginning to speak the language of full-fledged anticolonialism. It entailed anti-capitalism too: ‘free labour’ under capitalist imperial rule, where complete destruction is avoided only because labouring hands are needed for the enrichment of the employer, Blunt notes baldly, can spell degradation ‘far worse than slavery’.189 Like Harrison, Blunt points to the dangers of ‘moral and mental decay corresponding very closely with the ruin we have inflicted on others’ rebounding on Britain.190 He deprecates a growing international division of labour whereby Englishmen expect others to work for them, just as in the colonies indentured workers, ‘the black or yellow races, labour in the sun and the white man sits idly in the shade’.191 If the Urabi revolution constituted Blunt’s initiation into the language of anticolonial resistance, he would continue to learn from its later manifestations in various local contexts, not least Ireland. It would be a very long time before anything like the ‘change in the public mind’ with regard to empire which Blunt hoped for would begin to emerge in Britain; he would not live to see it happen.192 But the curtain of the twentieth century opened on a rapidly enlarging theatre of protest and resistance. The best efforts of its politicians and propagandists notwithstanding, Britain could not shut out the echoes.
4
Passages to Internationalism:
The ‘New Spirit’ in India and
Edwardian Travellers
There is no empire lost by a free grant of concession by the rulers to the ruled. History does not record any such event.
Bal Gangadhar Tilak
They had in the House itself the constant co-operation of a small but active group of members, who constituted themselves into an ‘Indian Party’, and were ever ready to act as spokesmen of Indian discontent.
Valentine Chirol, Times correspondent in India
In the spring of 1882, Wilfrid Blunt returned to London from Egypt deeply critical of British foreign policy, but he was not yet the wide-ranging anticolonialist that he would become over the next decade. It would take his very personal involvement with the Irish struggle during the late 1880s to complete his radicalization on questions of empire. In 1883, en route to Ceylon to see Urabi, he broke his journey in India, a country he had previously visited in 1879. Blunt’s diaries record that the suggestion he spend a few months in India came from Afghani, but also that, as a consequence of what he had learned in Egypt, he himself was keen on understanding Indian Muslims as a ‘living force in Islam’. As a ‘Home Ruler’, he also wanted to ascertain ‘what the true feeling of the country was towards its English masters, and what the prospect of India’s eventually gaining her freedom’.1 The immediate result was Ideas about India, whose constituent essays, previously published in Fortnightly Review, Blunt grandiosely billed as ‘the first complete and fearless apology of Indian home rule which had been published’.2 The short volume was also a defence of his friend Lord Ripon’s rule as a liberal viceroy; without further reforms in the direction of home rule such as Ripon had made, Blunt warned, the prospect of revolution was real. Curiously, perhaps, for the reader of the decidedly more militant A Secret History, Blunt’s language in this text is that of a defender of British rule in India, albeit one who wishes for it to continue only until such time as India has ‘worked out her salvation’ under the protection it offers.3 Such mellow paternalism was very much in accordance with the views of other late Victorian and Edwardian critics of empire for whom the horizon of full independence was as yet unimaginable, or certainly very distant. They would voice critiques of British rule (rather than of the imperial project as a whole) predicated on a paternal concern for its subjects, and issue fraternal warnings to politicians and colonial administrators about the dangers posed to the well-being of the British Indian empire by their policies and practices. The assumption, in Annie Besant’s words, was that India had no wish to ‘break her link with England, but she desires so to transform it that it may be a tie honourable to both and prized by both’.4
Blunt and ‘India for the Indians’
Even so, Blunt’s account of his Indian sojourn towards the end of the nineteenth century registered intimations of the agitation that would break out more fully in the wake of the 1905 partition of Bengal. His Egyptian experiences fresh in his mind, he believed he could see signs of ‘the dawn of that day of unrest which is the necessary prelude to full self-assertion in every subject land’.5 He had arrived in India, politicized by his experience of the Egyptian Revolution and taken with Islam, but admittedly ignorant about ‘Hindu life’, as he put it. As a guest of Viceroy Ripon, Blunt was inclined, in a somewhat unexamined manner, to enthusiastically endorse the liberal reform-based approach to ruling India which his host was propounding. That enthusiasm was quite quickly moderated. In a curious comment in a later memoir, based on his journals from that period, Blunt noted that when accused of stirring up trouble where all had been well he had been compelled to ask: ‘Who are the satisfied natives? I have not met a single one since I came to India.’6 He was disconcerted by the extent to which he found ‘everywhere distrust of the Government, fear of the officials, and a certain vague disquiet which is an unmistakable sign with nations that all is not well’.7 Accordingly, his assessment of the British Empire’s prospects in India vacillates – as would the memoirs of those who followed him – between insisting that there has been no irreconcilable breach between ruler and ruled, and gloomily noting: ‘There is no love lost whatever between the Indians and ourselves, whether they be Mohammedan, or Hindu, or Parsi, or native Christian.’8 While characteristically centred on Blunt’s own acumen and insight, Ideas is nonetheless strikingly concerned with the extent to which radical analysis and ideas are already thickening the air in native circles. The post-Egypt Blunt is swift to dismiss the colonial canard that the only Indians holding forth on self-rule are mimic men who are not representative of India: ‘It has constantly been pretended by English writers that it is only what are called “Babus” of Calcutta who are sufficiently educated to have advanced ideas on the political regeneration of their country; but nothing is less true’; this too was an insight later political travellers would reiterate.9 Blunt recounts encounters with a wide variety of people, including peasant farmers or ryots with whom he converses through interpreters. For all that Blunt cleaves to a teleology which finds its apotheosis in the nation form, much of his analysis is taken up with criticizing the destruction of existing resources of governance which had served India well, if not perfectly, in precolonial times.
Ideas about India is structured by a set of parallel tension
s, between reform and overthrow, and between insistence on native loyalty to imperial rule and acknowledging dissatisfaction with it. The text is shot through with the sense that, even in India, different though it is from Egypt, cataclysmic revolt is not an impossibility; Blunt had ‘no doubt whatever that if things continue in their present groove a revolution is the necessary end’, though ‘by timely reform that catastrophe might be averted’.10 While colonial rule may have acted as a catalyst for a cultural reawakening, Blunt writes, it was time for his fellow Britons to admit to ‘the destruction of much that was good and noble and of profit in the past by the unthinking and often selfish action of Western methods’.11 Faced with the realities of the situation, Blunt’s own vision of India’s future is dialectical: he does ‘not wish the past back in its integrity’, but would nonetheless ‘save what can still be saved of the indigenous plan, and … use in reconstruction something of the same materials’.12 The ‘sound’ reasoning of ‘native economists’ looms large in this narrative as Blunt recalls his most recent experiences: ‘We have seen the results of an unsound finance in Egypt: and we shall see them repeated in India before the world is many years older.’13 In the end, however, it was the potentially intractable racial divide fostered by British rule which put Blunt in mind of General Gordon’s warning which he cites to end his narrative: ‘You may do what you will. It will be of no use. India will never be reformed until there has been there a new revolt.’14 In averring that, if things continued as they were, revolution would be the inevitable and catastrophic consequence, Blunt may not have been quite imagining self-emancipation, but was certainly confronting the limits of well-meaning reformism: ‘I am convinced that if at the present moment any serious disaffection were to arise in the native army, such as occurred in 1857, it would not lead to a revolt only. It would be joined, as the other was not, by the whole people.’15
Twenty-five years after the 1857 uprising, concerted and widespread resistance to colonial rule in India had, on the face of it, been eliminated from the wider horizon, although several significant localized uprisings took place, including the Indigo Rebellion in 1859. Two years after Blunt’s visit, the Indian National Congress (preceded by an organization that called itself the Indian Association) would constitute itself under the guidance of the Scotsman Allan Octavian Hume, as a project of tutelage in which Indians would learn to ask for a share in governance. For ‘sympathizers’ like Hume, the language of nationalism, presumed to have universal reach, nonetheless had to be taught to Indians, against the grain of their habitual fatalism, as this verse suggests:
Sons of Ind, why sit ye idle
Wait ye for some Deva’s aid?
Buckle to, be up and doing!
Nations by themselves are made!16
From Theosophist Congress member Annie Besant’s perspective, ‘responsible Englishmen have declared that England desired to give to India the liberties enjoyed by her own people, so soon as India was ready to possess and utilise them’.17 Accordingly, for its first two decades the congress would undertake modest lobbying for a larger native role in the administration of British India, in order, as two early twentieth-century historians would put it, ‘to consider how best they could influence the foreign government under which they and their children were fated to live’.18 In this project, Indian campaigners received support in Britain from ‘prominent individual Whigs or liberals who raised their voices in defence of India’.19 These defenders of India would include, in addition to Besant, former colonial civil servants Henry Cotton and William Wedderburn. In the main, however, such voices were raised in the interests of amelioration and reform rather than as critiques of the imperial project per se. This was as true, in the first instance, for socialist figures such as the relatively militant H. M. Hyndman of the Social Democratic Federation, and J. Keir Hardie of the Independent Labour Party (and, later, one of the founders of the Labour Party) as it was for those of a more liberal disposition, such as Besant and Cotton. As Gregory Claeys has noted in his study of ‘imperial sceptics’ in the last years of the nineteenth century, while there was ‘considerable socialist antagonism towards imperial expansion’, this too was ‘increasingly balanced by a desire to improve rather than dispense with Britain’s colonial possessions … broadly conceived in terms of a co-operative commonwealth ideal rather than an exploitative capitalist model.’20
A will to reconfigure rather than abandon was also manifest in the views of the most famous critic of empire during that period, J. A. Hobson, whose own critique of imperialism drew on the Cobdenite idea that imperialism violated free trade and was harmful for national prosperity. The Boer War at the end of the nineteenth century shaped Hobson’s view that imperialism need not be repudiated but had to be forged as a ‘higher’ ideal in which jingoism had no place. At any rate, the views of the subjugated did not particularly impinge on his critique:
Finally, the government by force, not by consent, of another people, and the chronic temptation hypocritically to feign that the dominating motive in our rule is their good, not our own gain, may react so powerfully and so insidiously upon the mind of an Imperialist nation that it loses the capacity not merely to recognise the advantage of leaving lower peoples to follow their own paths of progress or regression, but to perceive the fatal injuries which domineering practices abroad inflict upon the efficiency of national self-government at home.21
To the extent that ‘sanction’ mattered to Hobson, it was not that of the ruled but that of ‘a society of nations’ in which all were represented, and which ‘delegated England or France in the interests of civilisation to take under tutelage some backward or degraded people which lay on their borders’, so that there would be some ‘moral basis’ for imperialism.22 In other words, the distinction between a moral and a ‘parasitic’ imperialism would largely rest upon the former’s assumption of the role of tutor.23 Stephen Howe has also argued that for most Victorian and Edwardian radicals self-determination was an idea that extended only to the white settler colonies; as both ‘a minority current and a limited and conditional stance’, critiques of empire in Asia and Africa were generally made on the basis of calling for ‘good government rather than self-government’.24 Those Britons who did celebrate rebellion against other empires – the Haitian uprising against the French, for instance – rarely ‘extended similar sentiments to revolts against British rule’.25
Most early socialist engagements with empire in Britain, however critical, were also limited, taking for granted a civilizational hierarchy within which colonies like India would need to be tutored into political maturity. It is worth pausing briefly, however, on the controversial figure of Henry Mayers Hyndman, who has largely been regarded, not entirely without justification, as ‘having nationalist and imperialist tendencies’, and certainly ones in which anti-capitalism was folded into anti-Semitism.26 We know that Hyndman started out as a believer in the beneficence of British rule in India, even supporting the suppression of the 1857 rebellion and calling for ‘a wise, firm, economical, and liberal rule’ so as to avoid disaffection.27 As Claeys notes, however, Hyndman did become a prominent and quite unsparing critic of British rule in India, condemning what he saw as deliberately manufactured famines, impoverishment and the ‘drain’ of Indian wealth – a theory elaborated most famously by Dadabhai Naoroji and William Digby. Hyndman also corresponded quite extensively with Blunt, among others, also producing an 1882 pamphlet titled Why Should India Pay for the War on Egypt? Where Claeys argues that Hyndman never envisaged full independence for India, embracing a ‘Home Rule’ position, Marcus Morris has suggested that he did over time become far more radical and actively anti-imperialist more generally. While there is a debate to be had about Hyndman’s shifting and evolving position on imperialism, and that of his Social Democratic Federation, what is most relevant to my present purpose is the question of whether resistance to empire in India shaped Hyndman’s views in any way. Here it becomes clear that, although Hyndman warned of the conseq
uences of stoking the disaffection of the colonized, it was really in 1907 that he became more fully attuned to the possibility that colonial rule would be overthrown before it might be withdrawn.
In a well-known 1907 pamphlet titled The Unrest in India, Hyndman’s emphasis shifts from his repeated denunciation of British ‘ruin’ inflicted on this subcontinent to the Indian refusal to allow the despoliation to continue. A verbatim report of a speech Hyndman gave to a packed Chandos Hall in London, the pamphlet opened with the motion that would be approved by the meeting held on 12 May 1907, sending ‘cordial greetings to the agitators all over India, who are doing their utmost to awaken their countrymen of every race and creed to the ruinous effect of our rule’.28 Sympathy and admiration were expressed for Lajpat Rai and others on trial at that point for their agitation in Punjab. Hyndman then spoke explicitly about his previous belief that ‘our rule had substituted order for disorder, and amity for discord’, and was a ‘great service to humanity’.29 While several paragraphs return to the drain theory, with damning figures and statistics about the extent of Indian impoverishment, this time Hyndman’s point was one about resistance:
It generally happens, however, that at periods of very great misrule comparative trifles produce the really dangerous crisis. It is the last straw, again, that breaks the camel’s back. All over Hindostan to-day we have got what is called ‘unrest.’ People are not satisfied. (Laughter) Just think of that! (Laughter) They are beginning not to like it! (Laughter and applause)30
Here, Hyndman makes a point that would be made repeatedly in the interwar period in relation to the ‘unfitness’ of some peoples to govern themselves, and their apparent need for colonial tutelage. How could it be that a people (he does refer specifically to ‘Hindus’ here) with such a great history of art, architecture, industries and ‘all that goes to make greatness’ behind them now find themselves so deeply impoverished by an apparently beneficial rule which contends that ‘these people are not capable of managing their own finances today?’31 Quite simply, had India not been wealthy when they arrived there, the British would have ‘scuttled out’ quickly. Beyond that – and there is no mistaking the contextual radicalism of Hyndman’s position here – the direction of tutelage was the other way around: ‘We owe much of our science, much of our mathematics, much of our religion, and much of our laws to these people who cannot govern themselves!’32 For Hyndman, the scale of the resistance now would make its effects felt: ‘We have kept India to a large extent because Indians have let us do so.’33 He was referring to the agitation that is the subject of this chapter – the movement which gathered pace in the wake of the Partition of Bengal in 1905, an event which ‘brought home to the people of India the fact that the British government was a despotism’.34 Confronted with repression in the face of perfectly legitimate objections to misrule, Indians ‘do not altogether appreciate the beauties of injustice, even when committed by Englishmen’.35 Hyndman would also make the point that Englishmen too had been involved in the agitation for India’s rights against its rulers, rulers who ‘if you were at all dangerous, my dear fellow-countrymen … would play exactly the same game with you’.36 He would end with a cautionary allusion to the Haitian leader Touissant L’Ouverture – an ‘early and terrible disaster’ might yet fall upon British rule in India.
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