The Story of India

by Michael Wood

  The period of the British Raj – from the East India Company’s rise to power in the eighteenth century to Independence in 1947 – lasted roughly 200 years, a time comparable to the Kushan era, but shorter than the Mughals’. It is a long and tortured story, full of splendours and miseries, of pride and greed, and of fantastic cultural crossovers, as remarkable (I am tempted to say more so) than even under the Mughals. In the open-minded atmosphere of the eighteenth century there were many meetings of minds. General Charles ‘Hindoo’ Stuart in Calcutta bathed daily in the Ganges, recommended English ladies to wear the sari, and made the first collection of Indian art. With striking foresight, Stuart also argued for native customs to be allowed in sepoy army regiments. In his Vindication of the Hindoos he scathingly deprecated European missionaries and praised Hinduism as a religion that ‘little needs the meliorating hand of Christianity to render its votaries a sufficiently correct and moral people for all the useful purposes of a civilized society’.

  Such ‘White Mughals’ had their counterparts in the intellectual sciences. William Jones (see here), James Prinsep and Francis Buchanan, for example, were leading lights in the rediscovery of ancient Indian history; nor should one forget the remarkable Warren Hastings, the troubled first governor general of British India, who knew native languages and played an instrumental role in the cultivation of scholarship in Bengal. This meeting of cultures led to a prodigious multilingual flowering of Bengali civilization that would eventually bring the Bengali reformer and polymath Ram Roy sailing into Liverpool in 1833 on his own version of the search for the ‘meeting place of the oceans.’ Orientalism these days has become an overused and overstated catch-all. Colonial forms of knowledge could indeed be instruments of oppression, but between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries England and Bengal would engage in one of history’s great cross-cultural exchanges, and one that is by no means exhausted yet.

  But the British ‘political’ relationship with India did not develop further on those lines. In the end, the ideologies and exigencies of empire proved too strong. If one by-product of the eighteenth century was a love affair, the nineteenth century saw the falling apart, and the twentieth century the tragic and costly divorce. Thankfully, in our own time the children and grandchildren are friends and are building a new relationship.

  THE EAST INDIA COMPANY AND THE 1857 REBELLION

  The story of the East India Company uncannily echoes that of modern multinational companies, who trade in natural resources and gain new spheres of influence through economic intervention, private armies and proxy war. The British triumphed because of India’s own internal divisions, the decline of Mughal power in the north and because they controlled the sea. Where earlier conquerors had entered India through the Khyber and the Northwest Frontier, the British extended their influence along her coasts, founding fortified trading ports in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay as the first bases of their rule. They were backed by armed force, though at first the numbers were small: 2200 Europeans and a similar number of native troops won the decisive battle at Plassey in Bengal in 1757 against the last independent nawab of Bengal, who also had a tiny force from the French East India Company. A similarly sized army gained victory at Wandiwash in the south, where, between the 1740s and 1760s, the British and the French fought out another part of their global confrontation. Then, in 1765, the Mughal Shah Alam in Delhi formally awarded the British the diwan of Bengal – that is, the right to raise revenues. What had begun as a speculative piece of Elizabethan merchant-venturing had entered a new phase.

  In the south too the struggle with the French soon reached its climax. Between the 1760s and 1799 the British fought four wars with the Muslim rulers of Mysore, who were French allies, ending in the siege of the island fortress of Seringapatam in 1799, in which Sultan Tipu was killed. At that battle the armed forces at the disposal of the Company were 50,000 strong, the size of a big European army. Invest-ment now grew, and in the next few years Company profits rose astronomically: accounts registered with the British parliament show that revenues rose from over £8 million in 1794 to £13.5 million in 1803 – the equivalent of three-quarters of a billion today. The changing perspective is revealed in the vast archive of the Company now preserved in the British Library. In the aftermath of the victory over Tipu the governor general, Richard Wellesley (brother of the future victor of Waterloo), wrote:

  Seringapatam I shall retain full sovereignty for the Company as being a Tower of Strength from which we may at any time shake Hindostan to its centre, if any combination should ever be formed against our interests. I shall not at present enlarge upon the advantages which are likely to be derived to the British interests from this settlement, they are too obvious to require any detailed explanation.

  Soon India could be depicted in British art as a naked black female, submissively offering her riches to Britannia. The conquest had happened piecemeal and opportunistically, with no thought-out, long-term goal. It was effected at no expense to the British taxpayer, by mercenaries picking off regional threats one by one. By the 1830s the Company archives reveal a shift from trade in textiles to ownership of land, and at this point the colonial project acquires a new ideological tone that is exemplified in Lord Macaulay’s 1835 edict on Indian education, which announced the replacement of Persian by English as the new language of government. With this there also came a new emphasis on the desirability of spreading the Christian religion. From now on British dominion in India was not only to be about making money, but about changing India.

  These interventionist attitudes, with their increasingly strident Christian tone, form the background to the 1857 Mutiny, the greatest rising against any colonial power in the Age of Empire. The rising began as a protest in the army ranks against British insensitivity to Hindu religious custom, but rapidly spread as a rebellion against foreign rule in which even Muslim jihadists for the moment made common cause with Hindus. As rebellion spread like wildfire up and down the Grand Trunk Road from Bengal to the Punjab, the presence of Britain in India hung in the balance. But in the end, by luck and grit and ruthlessness, the British gained the upper hand. The war was conducted with horrific violence and savage reprisals by both sides. Both Hindu and Muslim rebels expressed their loyalty to the ageing Mughal in Delhi, Shah Bahadur, who, after the defeat, was exiled to Burma. His sons were killed in cold blood by the British, who were merciless in their revenge.

  In their many colourful histories of the war the British retrospectively painted the rising as if it had come out of the blue, but there had in fact been many revolts against them over the previous fifty years, notably the Vellore Mutiny of 1806, in which southern rebels had proclaimed a son of Sultan Tipu as king. The rising of 1857 wrecked Mughal Delhi and its refined cultural life, and brought devastation on its population, many of whose adult males were summarily massacred. But the rising was a terrible shock to the British establishment, and it put an end to the 258-year existence of the Company. In the aftermath the British parliament decided to take direct control of its Indian possessions. Ever mindful of tradition, the first viceroy, Lord Canning, read out Queen Victoria’s proclamation on 1 November 1858 from the outer rampart of Akbar’s fort at Allahabad, overlooking the sacred confluence. India was now to be taught the new secular dharma of the West.

  BRITISH RULE AND COLONIAL KNOWLEDGE

  At the heart of the British colonial project was the exploitation of India as the centre of Britain’s world trade system. But to rule such an immense and diverse country the British needed an educated Indian class who would join with them in their imperial enterprise, by assimilating British cultural ideals.

  To achieve this they set about the ideological and practical construction of modernity in India. Time, space, geography, caste, religion – all would be redefined by the supposedly superior knowledge, science and ethics of the imperialists. This meant both physical and mental mapping. Sir George Everest, for example, after whom the world’s highest mountain is named, mad
e a great survey to measure the subcontinent down to the last foot, lugging cumbersome theodolites up Tamil temple gopuras, and traipsing with huge segmented metal measuring rods on ox-carts across the Punjab. The imposition of the British legal system was another crucial introduction, along with the codifying of Hindu and Muslim law, and the detailed categorizing of caste in Indian society, as customary law was caste-based. Like the Kushans and the Mughals, the British wanted to know what made their subjects tick.

  Attitudes to traditional Indian religious customs and practices also became much more defined. The British saw it as their Christian duty to wage war against ‘superstition’, and clamped down hard on archaic customs such as child marriage, blood sacrifice and suttee. Sometimes, no doubt, they were justified; but sometimes, as exemplified in their attack on the ancient Gond culture in Orissa, all they managed to do was undermine a people’s identity and cohesion.

  As for Hindu religion itself, from having been a source of fascinated admiration in the eighteenth century to the likes of ‘Hindoo’ Stuart, in some quarters it now became an object of disparagement, dismissed as superstition and ‘debased fetishism’. Indeed, the evangelical element in British society actively crusaded against it. It was at this time that the somewhat misleading term ‘Hinduism’ came into common parlance as a description of India’s religious systems. This connects with the growth in the nineteenth century of the idea that Indian religion was one world religion, like Christianity and Islam. Texts such as the Bhagavadgita or the Tamil Tiruvasagam were given Christianizing interpretations by missionary scholars, quarrying the monotheistic or monist strand in Hindu thought. There was and still is some truth in such ideas, though the great medieval teaching texts of the Saivas and Vaishnavas could equally well be used to demonstrate that these were separate religious systems, with different supreme deities and different sacred texts, rituals and eschatologies. The creation of modern Hinduism was therefore to some extent both a colonial construct and a reaction to colonialism. In the hands of Hindu reformers the Christianizing aspect came to the fore, and offered a congenial bridge to the colonisers for the educated Indian elite. When the great Bengali philosopher and nationalist Swami Vivekananda was hailed as the star of the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, Hinduism in its modern sense had arrived.

  The British project also involved giving a British education to the native ruling class, who would interpret their own culture to the Indian masses in British terms. One curious aspect of this was that the study of English literature became the canon in India before it was institutionalized in England. The choice of exemplary texts, though, was of its time, replete with colonial ideas about ideal manhood. Shakespeare, however, with his pronounced scepticism about power, was not included. Ironically, he ended up being gratefully received by Indian radicals as a liberating tool, as Michael Madshudan Dutt argued in his brilliant essay on the Hindu and the Anglo-Saxon in 1865: the British must go, but they can leave us Shakespeare!

  THE IDEA OF INDIA

  For the future of independent India one critical area of the British imperial project lay in the very idea of India itself. As we have seen throughout this book, India had never existed as one unified state at any time in its history, although Ashoka, for example, had claimed to rule as far south as the Krishna river, and the Kushans, Guptas and Mughals had all wielded power across a great area of northern India between Afghanistan and Bengal. But it was the British who first conceived of India as a political unity; a country rather than a state of mind. Winston Churchill (who counted daredevil adventures among the Pathans in his youthful experiences) famously said, ‘There is no such thing as India’. But that opinion was not shared by the great observers of India over many centuries, for whom India – for all its diversity of peoples, languages and religions – was a unitary civilization. In the tenth century al-Biruni equated Indian civilization with all the lands between the Himalayas and Cape Comorin. The fourteenth-century poet Amir Khusro (an Indian Muslim of Turkish descent) speaks movingly of his love of his country, India, which he says includes people who speak Sindhi, Punjabi and Bengali, but also Tamil, Telugu and Kannada: all inhabit this ‘paradise on Earth’. A similar idea of India can be found in the writings of Akbar’s biographer Abul Fazl, even though the Mughals never extended their rule over the south of the subcontinent.

  The strong perception far back in time, then, is of a broad cultural unity. The British would make their own vital contribution to this. Look at any map of India in the British handbooks of the Raj, and you will see pink covering the lands from Burma to Baluchistan and from Bhutan to Kerala, bounded by the natural frontiers of the sea, the Khyber, the Himalayas and the eastern jungles. Within the map, though, is the image of one of the most ingenious and adaptive empires in history, an immense patchwork loosely embracing almost a quarter of the population of the planet. In different colours are an amazing 675 feudatory and independent princely states (of whom seventy-three were ruled by rajas ‘entitled to salutes of eleven guns or more’). Two of them, Hyderabad and Kashmir, are each the size of a large European country. This was the British solution to the diversity of India: an incredible political sleight of hand. An arrangement so extraordinary that it is hard to believe that it actually existed on the ground rather than just in the mind. But it was India.

  JEWEL IN THE CROWN

  Astonishingly, even at the peak of their empire, the British were able to rule the most populous region on Earth with just 50,000 troops and a quarter of a million administrators. Most of the day-to-day working of the empire was done by Indians, so they depended entirely on Indian cooperation; and as soon as that was withdrawn, the story was over for an empire acquired, as it was said in a disingenuous British understatement, ‘in a fit of absent-mindedness’. That moment came with Indian disillusionment after the First World War, in which a million Indians fought for the king emperor and 50,000 died, and was confirmed by the massacre of Sikh demonstrators at Amritsar in 1919, from which the Indian perception of British fair play, goodwill and justice never quite recovered.

  This is not to deny the complex and profound legacy of the British: above all, the English language, but also English ideas of secular law, education and constitutional government, the first attempt comprehensively to solve one of the great issues of Indian history – the source of secular authority. For all the political struggles since 1947, Indian democracy has been a remarkable success in sustaining an open society and making astonishing inroads in such a short time into the deep-seated injustices of the caste system. In sixty years the idea of secular democracy has powerfully taken root.

  Another legacy was practical: the communications network. India is a huge country; it is a 1000-mile journey by rail from Delhi to Calcutta, and the same distance from Calcutta down to Madras. Such developments also helped shape the political and psychological unity of India: indeed, perhaps the very possibility of a single Indian state only arose as a workable idea because the British made it so. But perhaps the most fateful legacy of the British was to open India irrevocably to a wider world: to force Indians to redefine their age-long civilization in terms of the secular ideals of the West.

  THE FREEDOM MOVEMENT

  In Calcutta in 1835, as we saw earlier, Lord Macaulay published his far-reaching edict on education. A black name among Hindu nationalists, Macaulay believed in the ‘immeasurable superiority’ of the British and their culture. His famous remark that ‘a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India’ was the product of profound ignorance, but his recommendations on the need for a Western education for the Indian elite were pointedly designed to facilitate more thoroughgoing social transformation in India. English, not Persian, would now be the language of government. But from that moment, of course, it was inevitable that the self-professed ideals of European Enlightenment should be applied by Indian intellectuals to their own country, mediated by the rich teachings of their own tradition. The Indian freedom movement
was the result: the greatest anti-colonial movement in history. The driving force, the Indian National Congress, was founded in 1885 with the initial, limited object of gaining a greater share in government for educated Indians. In the almost thirty years since the Mutiny they had seen for themselves the failure of British government in many key areas, but especially in the basic one of providing food and security to the population.

  In the National Library in Delhi are stored the day-today administrative records of this period. In the basement, miles of shelving are stacked with yellowing files of telegrams, reports and memoranda from revenue inspectors and district collectors; and walking along them, the most striking and shocking fact is how many of these files are about one topic: ‘famine’. These were very hard times for the ordinary Indian people. The last four decades of the Victorian era coincided with a disastrous phase in the world climate: what happened was nothing less than a series of late Victorian holocausts. From Bengal down to the south, India was caught up in a cycle of global famine that began with the failure of the El Niño world climate system. It started in 1866 in Orissa, a disaster remembered with painful immediacy in the great autobiography of Fakir Mohan Senapati, who was a mission teacher at the time: ‘To this day,’ he wrote later, ‘people in Orissa have never forgotten this terrible catastrophe: 3 million people died in one year, and there were 6 million homeless. The roads, the bathing ghats, the fields, the jungles, wherever you went you saw dead bodies. Fifty years have passed and it remains engraved on my mind.’

  The Congress Party was founded in the midst of all this, after the great drought and famine in the south in the late 1870s, in which 8 million died, and during the series of famines that ravaged Bengal in the 1870s and 1880s. The initial impetus came from a Briton, the remarkable Allan Octavian Hume. In the view of one of today’s leading Indian historians, after Gandhi, Hume is one of most important influences in the freedom movement. Forgotten now in Britain, this great figure in modern Indian history was recently the subject of a question on the Indian version of the TV quiz show Who Wants to be Millionaire? Hume was the son of a Scottish radical. During the Mutiny he was a young district administrator at Etawah on the Jumna, where he subsequently undertook many social projects and is still remembered as something of a local legend (the town square is still known as Hume Ganj). In later years he rose to high office in the Raj as revenue inspector for agriculture. In that capacity he saw something of the famines at first hand, and was horrified not only by the terrible suffering, but by the often callous disregard of the British government in its reluctance or slowness to shift surplus from one part of the country to another; in some regions not touched by famine grain was even shipped abroad. In his government role Hume had had the chance talk to many prominent Indians, and he was the initial connecting link between some of them. For this he would be attacked by Tories in London, one of whom suggested he should be hanged as a traitor.