The attempt on the life of Viceroy Charles Hardinge in Delhi. India was the lynchpin of the British Empire, a reserve of military manpower and a market for British goods.
Over the course of the first few weeks of 1913, Charles Hardinge was in convalescence. When he was fully recovered, things in India returned to their normal confused state: the jewel of the British Empire, won for Britain as much by chance as by design and as much by commercial interests as by government intention; the greatest asset of empire and its greatest vulnerability; a mystery to many; a multitude of peoples, races and religions which, the British claimed, could be managed only as they did, with skill, disinterest and unflinching composure. Present in India for centuries, the British were now part of the landscape, the story of British India mirroring the growth of British power globally. ‘The English connection with India has grown with the growth of England’, wrote William Wilson Hunter in his introduction to his history of British India, ‘till it now forms flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone’.8
A few months after the attempt on Hardinge’s life in Delhi, a welcome display of moderate Indian loyalty was put on in downtown Bombay – the gateway to India, the seaside city where King-Emperor George V had landed in 1911 on his way to the Durbar. The occasion now was Empire Day 1913, celebrated in Bombay just as in Winnipeg or Melbourne, albeit with a distinctly Indian touch. ‘The premises of Javer Baug were adorned with the Union Flag … and the entrance of the Nar-Narayan temple was hung with a placard with the words “Long Live the Emperor and Empress of India”’, wrote Purushottam Balkrishna Joshi, a noted historian of Bombay in a pamphlet published to accompany the celebrations, Empire-Day and Our Duties and Responsibilities.9 Portraits of George V and his wife Queen-Empress Mary were decorated with garlands of flowers. ‘The Shankaracharya of Karvir who presided was provided with a raised seat covered with the sacred agin or black antelope skin’, Joshi continued, ‘the proceedings commenced with a recitation of a prayer in sanskrit by the Shankaracharya’.
There were advantages to British overlordship, as Joshi saw it. ‘English education [particularly the British foundation of five Indian universities] has revolutionized our society, it has dispelled our puerile prejudices and opened to our view a vista of boundless knowledge’, at least for the tiny minority able to attend.10 In this, were not the British following in the best Brahmanic traditions of spreading education and enlightenment to the people, feeling their responsibilities towards Indians just as Hindu aristocrats felt their duties towards others? Were not the British and the Brahmans thus natural partners in this quest? Without improvements in education, he argued, India would have been condemned to backwardness and the British to being unloved:
India would have remained in the same darkness of ignorance in which Afghanistan and Persia are at present … Englishmen would have been shunned and hated as mlecchas [barbarians], or if tolerated owing to the might of their bayonets, they would have been considered as the descendants of the monkey heroes of Rama.
Politically, had not the British brought order, after the mutiny of 1857? ‘The people of India will never forget the foresight, magnanimity and statesmanship displayed by Queen Victoria [the first Indian Empress] and her able ministers’, suggested Joshi, though he added that the British had not yet made good on all of their undertakings to the people of India on matters of government. ‘We have not asked for any special rights or privileges’, he told his audience at Javer Baug, ‘what we pray for and earnestly wish is the fulfilment of the solemn promises given to us by Queen Victoria’. But, like the Indian National Congress, he counselled an approach of patience, loyalty and friendly argument with their British partners, rather than one of terroristic recklessness, which would be bound to antagonise the British and demonstrate the inaptitude for self-rule some ascribed to India and Indians. ‘No greater sin do the Indians ever commit than by being ungrateful to the British Raj’, Joshi declared, ‘which is taking much pains for their sake ever since the British set their foot on these shores’.
According to this view, India was in Britain’s eternal debt. The Raj, far from being a device for the British oppression of Indians, was ultimately a tool for India’s own self-improvement. In this conception, the relationship of Britain and India was a partnership – unequal at first, perhaps, but tending over time towards a gloriously liberal equality. Did not reforms introduced in recent years – the introduction of sixty elected Indian representatives into the Viceroy’s Council, Indian representatives on provincial councils, and the reversal of the partition of Bengal – demonstrate the unalterable path of reform, a step in the right direction, though perhaps a timorous, halting step?
True, India in 1913 was perhaps even less of a democracy than French Algeria. But then Britain had never promised quite as much as the French Republic. For its mandate, it offered law, education and good government, rather than liberty, equality and fraternity. Indeed, might not democracy as understood in the European sense actually run counter to good government in India? For did the British not have a duty to protect minorities – Muslims, for example – from too great an advance of majoritarian principles which would see them swamped by Hindus? Being overcome by force of Hindu numbers was something feared by the newly formed Muslim League, which prefaced petitions for British protection with ample professions of loyalty to the British Crown. Coming from a group of Indians distinctly over-represented in both army and police – precisely because they were considered particularly loyal – this was warmly accepted. Even while British liberals joined some Indian colleagues – including British-Indian MP Dadabhai Naoroji, elected for the London seat of Finsbury Central in 1892 – in criticism of unreformed imperial rule in India, they did not all necessarily believe that unfettered democracy was the answer. The problems of governing India were not to be solved in a single stroke, by the British or by anyone else.
The British might claim a historic mission in India, but no one could doubt that Britain derived clear material and strategic advantages from her presence in India as well. Moral purpose was handily allied with national pride – and self-interest. ‘As long as we rule India, we are the greatest power in the world’, Lord Curzon, a previous Viceroy, had noted in 1901, ‘if we lose it we shall drop straightaway to a third-rate power’.11 The reason for India’s importance was partly economic. In 1913, Britain’s single biggest export was still cotton piece goods, for which its biggest market was still India.12 British money invested in India had developed a giant railway network across the country and Indian purchases of train engines and carriages in turn represented a third of Britain’s exports of those goods. But it was also political, and strategic. Control of India brought control of the Indian Ocean, and therefore the maritime routes between Europe and Asia. At the same time, control of India forestalled Russian expansion which would lead to further dominance of the Eurasian landmass. Moreover, troops stationed in India, more numerous than were required for India’s own defensive needs yet paid for by taxes raised in India – the so-called ‘Home Charges’ – provided a sizeable additional reserve of military manpower should the need arise to bolster other parts of the British Empire. Finally, Indian gold was held in London, adding to Britain’s own stocks, and ensuring that, as India’s silver-based currency tended to devalue – the subject of a Royal Commission in 1913, ably assisted by John Maynard Keynes – payment of the ‘Home Charges’ due to Britain would be secured.
In 1913, India was called the jewel of empire, as if it were merely a decorative bauble, an ornamental addition to British possessions, an additional body of British subjects to swell a Londoner’s pride at the immensity of the empire of which he was the centre. It might more properly have been referred to as the empire’s lynchpin.
For most travellers from Europe, having travelled through the Suez Canal, been funnelled along the Red Sea and then spat out into the Indian Ocean at Aden, their first landfall in India would be Bombay, a former Portuguese colony given to the British crown as part of C
atherine of Braganza’s dowry when she married King Charles II in 1661.
In the seventeenth century, Bombay had been a city of 10,000 – a fortified island port, one node in a Muslim trading network stretching along the coast of India and across the ocean to Arabia and east Africa. Over time and under British rule the city’s physical form had expanded, land had been reclaimed from the sea, and the island of Bombay had been steadily transformed into more of a man-made peninsula, jutting confidently from the mainland into the Indian Ocean. In 1853 a railway line had first connected Bombay to Thana. In later years – up to 1912, when the Mazagon-Sewri reclamation added 583 acres to the land of the city – engineers extended Bombay outwards, connecting the surrounding islands into a single whole.13 Now, in 1913, Bombay numbered one million residents – a few hundred thousand behind Calcutta. It was an industrial city as well as a commercial one, home to the richest in India as well as some of its poorest, a cosmopolitan, crowded city, where the sounds of Marathi mingled with those of Gujurati and Hindustani, where Muslims of different sects, Hindus, Zoroastrian Parsis, Jews and Christians all found their place.
In 1854, the year after the railway line to Thana was completed, the city’s first cotton mill was founded by Parsi businessman Cowasji Dawar, inaugurating an Indian-owned and Indian-run industry which made Bombay the economic and financial capital of India. By 1911, when the Tata Hydroelectric Power Plant opened at Lonavala, Bombay claimed to house half the cotton looms in the whole of the country.14 ‘The year nineteen hundred and eleven will stand out as a red-letter day in the annals of the development of the city of Bombay’, gushed one journalist, ‘brought to its present stage of development by Indian intelligence and Indian capital’.15 ‘For long India was held an important place in the world because of her vision’, the article continued. But now things were changing:
She [India] has dreamed dreams. She has lived among the stars. When India hitches to the star a waggon of practical life and learning there will undoubtedly be a future for her mightier than even the past has been. India will make, within the next century, mighty advances in science and industry.16
Bombay was a city of empire, to be sure, yet not an imperial city in the same way as its peers: Delhi, built for the purpose of impressing upon Indians the claims of the British Raj to be the successors to the Mughal Emperors, or Calcutta, where the traders and industrialists were as much European as Indian.17 Bombay was not to be a city with its head in the stars, but representative of a practical, commercial, modern, businesslike India: the India of the future, confident and outgoing. Bengal might have produced India’s first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Rabindranath Tagore, in 1913, but it was in Bombay that India’s first film was premiered in the same year, Raja Harischandra. ‘SEE – The Royal Tiger Hunt, SEE – The Fire in the Jungle’, proclaimed a newspaper advertisement for the movie.18 Bombay’s confidence abounded in its physical environment. In the 1880s the city built the magnificent Victoria Terminus railway station, the largest building in the Raj. All brick archways, crenellations, Gothic spires, and gargoyles, it bore more than a faint resemblance to St Pancras railway station in London, with a few additional concessions to the Saracenic style of north India. At the entrance, visitors were greeted by a British lion and an Indian tiger, and the whole building was topped with a fourteen-foot statue representing Progress. Down by the water, the colossal Taj Mahal Hotel greeted its first guests in 1903, built on the orders of Jamsetji Tata, one of Bombay’s leading Parsi businessmen. ‘Urbs Prima in Indis’ – ‘Foremost City in India’ – proclaimed the city’s crest. It was a boast that the residents of Bombay intended to maintain. ‘Of no mean city am I’, crowed Bombay-born poet Rudyard Kipling in the dedication to one of his popular collections of poetry, ‘For I was born in her [India’s] gate/Between the palms and the sea/Where the world’s-end steamers wait’.19
From the sea, the city could be sensed before it was seen. ‘The air is heavy with an indefinable perfume’, wrote Serbian Prince Bojidar Karageorgevitch, approaching the city on board ship in the last years of the nineteenth century, ‘we are already coasting the Indian shore, but it remains invisible and gives no sign but by these gusts of warmer air laden with that inscrutable aroma of musk and pepper’.20 Then, the city itself appeared:
Before daybreak, in the doubtful light of waning night, dim masses are visible – grey and purple mountains – mountains shaped liked temples of which two indeed seem to be crowned with low squat towers as if unfinished. The morning mist shrouds everything; the scene inevitably passes through a series of pale tints, to reappear ere long in the clear rosy light which sheds a powdering of glowing gold on the broad roadstead of Bombay … As we go nearer, gothic towers are distinguishable among the buildings … revived under the burning light of white Asia.
For one German visitor to the city a few years later, Count Hans von Koenigsmarck, it was again the city’s smell – ‘a blend of musk, of spices, and of the smouldering sandal-wood they burn at prayer and festivals’ – which first assaulted his senses.21 But close behind came its colour: ‘the human skin reveals itself here in every shade and tint, and the variety of its garb beggars every colour of the palette’. And it was perhaps the concentrated variety of Bombay which ultimately best characterised the city, in keeping with its traditions as a city of mercantile exchange, a meeting place for those with something to sell and those with money to buy:
The fascination of Bombay lies in its diversity – the diversity of its landscape, of its street scenes, of its population. One would have to have a hundred eyes to be able to take in its exotic, kaleidoscopic va-et-vient. Talk of scenes from The Thousand and One Nights! The Orient, in its entire fairylike splendour, and alongside it sober businesslike Europe; the drab commonplaceness of the West rubbing shoulders with these teeming crowds drunk with colour and adventure. Bombay is at one and the same time pan-Asiatic and cosmopolitan – a melting pot of races and religions.
In Bombay, on one street, one might see a limp body being taken away to be burned, in the hope that this would help cure the city of its periodic bouts of plague. Elsewhere, perhaps on the Malabar Hill, the grandest residential area of the city, overlooking the Back Bay, one could see the automobile drive past of a Parsi millionaire. ‘Who does not recognise the savour, typical here, of blistering human flesh’, asked Koenigsmarck, ‘mingling with the fragrance of tropical vegetation’?22
Stephen Edwardes, an amateur historian of the rise of Bombay and by 1913 the city’s police chief, claimed that ‘of the human tides which roll through the streets of the cities of the world, none are brighter or more varied than that which fills the streets of Bombay’:
Here are Memon and Khoja women in shirt and trousers (‘kurta’ and ‘izzar’) of green and gold or pink and yellow, with dark blue sheets used as veils, wandering along with their children dressed in all the hues of the rainbow. Here are sleek Hindus from northern India in soft muslin and neat coloured turbans; Gujurathis in red head-gear and close-fitting white garments; Cutchi sea-farers, descendants of the pirates of dead centuries, with clear-cut bronzed features … English soldiers in Khaki; Arabs from Syria and the valley of the Euphrates; half-Arab, half-Persian traders from the Gulf, in Arab or old Persian costumes and black turbans with a red border … tall Afghans, their hair well-oiled, in the baggiest of trousers … Sindis in many-buttoned waistcoats; Negroes from Africa clad in striped waist cloths, creeping slowly through the streets and pausing in wonder at every new sight; Negroes in Bombay Mahomedan dress and red fez; Chinese with pig-tails; Japanese in the latest European attire; Malays in English jackets and loose turbans; Bukharans in tall sheep skin caps and woollen gabardines, begging their way from Mecca to their Central Asian homes.23
This, Edwardes might reflect anxiously, was the city in which he was to keep order. It was quite a task, requiring a permanent balancing act between communities, each with their own interests, festivals, traditions and historic rivalries imported from the wide spaces
of the countryside into the close quarters of Bombay. For here in the city, life was uncomfortably compressed. According to the census of 1911, three-quarters of Bombay’s population lived in single rooms in four or five-storey chawls (tenements). The city government occasionally built new buildings with more light and air, but often they charged too much rent to attract tenants, or else found that these larger, better-ventilated rooms ended up being inhabited by more people than the number for which they were designed.24 In 1893, eighty people had been killed in intercommunal riots between Muslims and Hindus. Five years later, in 1898, a heavy-handed search party looking for a concealed plague victim was confronted with an angry crowd, upon which they fired, sparking attacks against Europeans in turn. In 1904 traditional Sunni Islamic tolis (street bands) celebrating the festival of Muharram were banned from the central Doctor Street at the request of Shi’a Bohras, who subsequently inveighed against Sunnis’ irreligious ‘rowdy and irregular processions … making immense noise both vocally and with tom toms … making most indecent gestures and signs and exposing their persons to males and females’.25 When, in 1911, Edwardes the police chief attempted to prescribe the route which could be taken by the marching tolis – the ‘roystering and brawling … of aboriginal spirit-belief’, as he described it elsewhere – twenty people were killed by police gunfire.26
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