After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  When you come to Lhasa or while you are there, please be very careful to stop any pillaging of the temples or Monasteries. Any other country would strip them bare. But let us set an example as at Peking. Of course enormously important discoveries may be made in respect of manuscripts. But let there be no burning or wanton destruction.9

  Neither Curzon nor Younghusband had any doubts, however, not merely that the British had every right to be invading Tibet, but that they had a duty to do so. Younghusband wrote: ‘I hope His Majesty’s Government will never lose sight of the central fact that British interest in Lhasa is positive, legitimate and inevitable, and that Russian interest is factitious, ulterior, and pursued with unfriendly designs.’10

  One Russian, a Siberian named Buriat Dorjieff, was active in Tibet, and was seen by British intelligence as a grave danger to British interests. He was a Buddhist convert, and his conversations with the Dalai Lama were of a largely spiritual character, but Lord Curzon and Younghusband had persuaded themselves that Dorjieff had ‘taught the Tibetans to rely as trustingly on Russian support as Dr Leyds induced President Kruger’ – of the South African Republic, the instigator of Boer resistance to British domination in South Africa, and so the key figure in promoting the Boer War – ‘to rely upon the Germans’.11

  Even when the British had entered Lhasa and found no evidence for their intelligence reports, no Russian presence, no plans for the Russian Tsar to convert to Tibetan Buddhism (which was one of the rumours), they could still persuade themselves that their very arrival was a blessing. ‘The Tibetans’, Younghusband believed, ‘are not a people fit to be left to themselves between two great Empires … They are nothing but slaves in the power of the selfish and ignorant monks … To force ourselves into personal contact with the leading Lhasa men means no oppression of a harmless people: it means rather the emancipation of a people most willing to be friendly with us, who are held in bondage now by a cruel, self-seeking oligarchy of monks.’12 The Communist Chinese offered similar justification for their invasion of Tibet in October 1950.

  When they eventually arrived in Lhasa, Younghusband gave orders for full-dress uniform to be worn as he marched his troops through the muddy streets. He was delighted by the warm Tibetan welcome. A Tibetan eyewitness recorded: ‘When the British officers marched to the Tsuglakhang [Jokhang] and other places, the inhabitants of Lhasa were displeased. They shouted and chanted to bring down rain, and made clapping gestures to repulse them. In the foreigners’ custom these were seen as signs of welcome, so they took off their hats and said thank you.’13

  By September, the British had withdrawn from Tibet. The secretary of state for war, Lord Lansdowne – Curzon’s predecessor as viceroy of India – rather delighted in a diplomatic coup in which he received Russian reassurance that Russia would not occupy Tibet. The Younghusband expedition had divided opinion in Britain, and not just among cabinet colleagues and bigwigs who disliked Curzon.

  Rudyard Kipling, ‘that little black demon of a Kipling’ as Henry James called him,14 the poet of the Empire, was one of the very many English in the pages which follow to have married an American. (Henry James was best man, on 18 January 1892, when Kipling married Carrie Balestier at All Souls’, Langham Place, in London with only five other people present – Edmund Gosse, his wife and son, the publisher William Heinemann and the clergyman who performed the ceremony.)15 It was in 1899 that Kipling paid his final visit to the United States and apostrophized them upon their taking possession of the Philippine Islands.

  Take up the White Man’s burden –

  The savage wars of peace –

  Fill full the mouth of Famine

  And bid the sickness cease;

  And when your goal is nearest

  The end for others sought,

  Watch Sloth and heathen Folly

  Bring all your hope to nought.16

  Kipling’s perspective of Empire was shaped by his childhood in India. His parents were artists and designers, he was a journalist. They were observers of those he most admired, the engineers, the administrators, the builders and soldiers. With his intuitive artistic antennae, Kipling, ardent British imperialist as he was, could sense, at the very acme of success for the Raj, that America was one day to supersede Britain as the world’s policeman, emperor and banker.

  Kipling’s version of the imperial role was entirely shared by Curzon the viceroy, who said in a speech delivered at Bombay: ‘Since this country first laid its spell upon me, I have always regarded it as the land not only of romance, but of obligation. India to me is “Duty” written in five letters instead of four. All the servants of Government, European or native, are also the servants of duty. The Viceroy himself is the slave of duty as well as its captain.’17

  George Nathaniel Curzon had become the viceroy of India, aged only thirty-nine. In Washington, on 22 April 1895, he had married the beautiful Mary Leiter, the daughter of Levi Z. Leiter, who had made a fortune, partly out of his partnership in the Chicago store, Field, Leiter and Co., partly by successful real estate investments. (He did very well out of the great Chicago fire of 1871.) The family, German Swiss in origin, Mennonite, subsequently Lutheran, in religion, sprang from Pennsylvania, but after old Levi made his money they moved to the American capital. Young Mary captivated the president’s wife, Mrs Cleveland, as she subsequently captivated British aristocratic society in the London season and at country house parties.18

  Curzon, heir to his father the Reverend Lord Scarsdale’s Derbyshire estate at Kedleston, was a person of flair and brilliance, but he had an income of merely £1,500 per annum. Though it may very well be true that he did nothing so crude as to marry for money, the Leiter fortune helped to establish him at a palatial London address, Carlton House Terrace, and there is no doubt at all that such an improvement in circumstances made it possible for him to live as a viceroy should. Upon their marriage, Mary and her descendants were offered immediately the annual income from $700,000 (£140,000) worth of bonds, which totalled $33,500 (£6,700), while on her father’s death her marriage settlement would receive a further million dollars. In the event of Mary predeceasing him (an event to occur when she was aged only thirty-six), Curzon was to be allowed as much of the £6,700 as he desired.19

  It certainly enabled them to keep up a princely style. And they were able, when the old queen died and was succeeded by her son Edward VII, whom Mary had befriended during her own version of ‘The Siege of London’, to represent their monarch at the splendid celebrations held in India, at the Delhi Durbar. On 12 January 1903 she wrote back to old Levi in Washington:

  From the day we entered Delhi on elephants to the day we left it in a state procession, one pageant was grander than another and the State Ball in the palace of Akbar was a thing to dream of – The Duke of Connaught and the Grand Duke of Hesse who had both been to the Coronation in Russia said that nothing there could compare with the positively bewildering beauty of the scene – Halls of alabaster inlaid with precious stones dazzling in the glow of electric light, Indian chiefs covered with jewels – officers in full dress – women in jewels, and as a background the jewelled throne of the old Empress of Delhi towering in lofty beauty as a setting to British rule. People were perfectly speechless with admiration and there were no words to describe the beauty of it. I think that Mamma and Daisy [the youngest sister] enjoyed everything. I had them blessedly looked after, and they had the best places.20

  Mary Curzon saw the superb pageantry of the Delhi Durbar as the outward and visible sign of an extraordinary political phenomenon, namely British rule in India. The subcontinent’s 1,802,629 square miles were equal in size to Europe minus Russia. Its population of nearly 300 million (294,361,056 in 1900) was administered by a Civil Service of fewer than 1,000 people, almost all of whom were British. The Indian army of 150,000 troops was the mightiest in the East, and India also bore the cost of a further 75,000 British army men garrisoned in situ.21 By an elaborate system of tariffs and controls, India was self-supporti
ng, but it was also used to shore up the British economy, for example in its obligation to import cheap Lancashire-made cottons.

  The daughter of the Chicago department-store millionaire Levi Leiter was, like the teeming millions of the Indian subcontinent, helping to bankroll an extraordinarily successful political oligarchy. Later generations came to believe that elitism and privilege were bad because they were based on inequity, because by allowing a family such as the Curzons a large estate in Derbyshire, and encouraging them to be the ruling class, you were depriving others, no less able perhaps but less fortunate, of the chance to share some of their wealth, or to exercise political power. Why should power be exercised by the few on behalf of the many?

  This was to be the deepest political question of the twentieth century: Lenin’s great question of Who, whom? Who has the power to do what to whom? Wherever the British held sway, or wherever they felt constrained to bring their influence, the question is going to arise. In national terms, it will lead to the question why the Indians, the Irish, the Africans, cannot throw off colonialism and govern themselves. In terms of class and personal politics, it will lead to individuals, in Britain and elsewhere, at length achieving political franchise, the vote, regardless of gender or class. In other parts of Europe political solutions, collectivist or corporatist, would be attempted which quickly became far more authoritarian, and certainly more murderous, than the apparently indefensible systems of empire and oligarchy which were in place at the beginning of the century – with much of the Balkans and the Middle East still under the increasingly shaky suzerainty of the Turkish sultans, and much of Africa and the Far East under the colonial rule of European powers – Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Britain.

  Of these world empires, the British was the richest, and the most powerful. George Nathaniel Curzon saw India as the key factor in that power. His reason for the greatest diplomatic blunder of his career, authorizing Younghusband’s invasion of Tibet, was the simple fear that the Russian Empire would extend itself into Afghanistan, Tibet and India itself. The Russian Foreign Ministry in 1900 saw India as ‘representing Great Britain’s most vulnerable point’.22 Curzon was voicing the same idea, from an opposite point of view, when he said that: ‘As long as we rule in India, we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it we shall drop straight away to a third-rate power.’23

  Hindsight tells us that such a drop was bound to happen, that a small north European trading nation whose East India Company from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries was commercially so successful in its dealings with maharajahs and merchants in the subcontinent could never for long sustain a pseudo-Roman empire based on military control. For one thing, that control could never be sustained, without frequent massacre, if the indigenous population chose to rebel against the governing power.

  In the year that Queen Victoria died, 1901, the British Empire was in the midst of its greatest trial to date, namely the Boer War. That war ended in 1902 with a British victory of sorts, but there had been some terrible setbacks, military defeats and psychological humiliations. The other great powers in the world, and many of the smaller nations too, had enjoyed these humiliations very much indeed, rather as the enemies of the United States enjoyed the Vietnam war, or some of President George W. Bush’s Middle Eastern adventures. Two tiny anarchic states of Dutch Bible-bashing farmers had formed themselves into an amateur army which did not even possess uniforms. These Boers had seemed to many other people in the world, in their struggle against the British, to demonstrate what damage could be inflicted upon imperial power if a proud people had sufficient grit and faith. It took a British army of a quarter of a million men three years to defeat the Boers, and it cost not only £270 million, exclusive of postwar reconstruction,24 but also the British reputation for decency and fair play. General Kitchener’s concentration camps, in which women and children suffered and died, have never been forgotten in South Africa.

  In 1894, Curzon had written a book called Problems of the Far East and dedicated it ‘to those who believe that the British Empire is, under Providence, the greatest instrument for good the world has seen’.25 After Kitchener’s genocidal murder and torture of Boer families, or Younghusband’s misguided expedition in Tibet, this belief, unshakeable in Curzon’s mind, was harder to maintain. Kipling, in one of his more awful poems, ‘The Lesson’, wanted to admit:

  It was our fault, and our very great fault – and now we must turn it to use.

  We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.

  So the more we work and the less we talk the better results we shall get.

  We have had an Imperial lesson. It may make us an Empire yet!26

  The South African situation had demonstrated the weakness in the imperial idea, and the potential weakness of the Empire. One of the Indian orderlies, a member of the Indian Ambulance Corps, at the battle of Spion Kop in 1900 had been a young barrister, born in Porbandar, western India, trained as a lawyer at the Middle Temple in London, named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He had gone to South Africa in 1893 to work on a single case, and he little by little found himself drawn into politics, defending the interests of Indians in Natal. The Boers had told the Indians: ‘You are the descendants of Ishmael and, therefore, from your very birth bound to slave for the descendants of Esau.’ Things did not much improve for Indians in South Africa when the British had won their war. Every Indian was a ‘coolie’. Indian schoolmasters were ‘coolie schoolmasters’. Gandhi was a ‘coolie barrister’. One of the British officials in the Transvaal said many years later to Gandhi that it was the virtues rather than the vices of the Indians which had aroused the jealousy of the Europeans and exposed them to political persecution. Gandhi stayed on in South Africa to fight for basic political rights for the Indian people of Natal and the Transvaal, but these years were to have the profoundest effect upon India.27

  The power of Gandhi’s remarkable career stemmed from the fact that it could be seen as, and in some aspects actually was, apolitical. Gandhi’s interests were genuinely religious and spiritual. One of the greatest influences upon him was Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You, a pacifist classic which argues for the anarchic idea of following the precepts of Jesus not to resist violence violently. Gandhi drew his inspiration from the Bhagavad Gita, from the Gospels, from Tolstoy and from Ruskin. It was on a railway journey from Johannesburg to Durban that he first read Ruskin’s Unto This Last. With money made as a barrister, Gandhi purchased a 100-acre estate near Durban where the ideals of Tolstoy and Ruskin, manual work and prayer, could be practised. At the same time he and his followers found themselves being arrested by the British authorities for defying such rules as those which forbade Indians to enter the Transvaal without permits. He developed the notion of satyagraha (Sanskrit: firmness in truth), a word which derives from sadagraha, firmness in good conduct – and which became the foundation stone of his policy of passive resistance.

  I remember how one verse of a Gujarati poem, which, as a child I learned at school, clung to me. In substance, it was this: If a man gives you a drink of water and you give him a drink in return, that is nothing. Real beauty consists in doing good against evil … Then came the Sermon on the Mount. It was the New Testament which really awakened me to the rightness and value of Passive Resistance. When I read the Sermon on the Mount, such passages as ‘Resist not him that is evil, but whoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek turn to him the other also.’ … I was simply overjoyed and found my own opinion confirmed where I least expected it.28

  The factors which were to undermine British imperial power were multiple and complex. Though more and more Britons, and Asians, came to doubt the Empire’s raison d’etre in the early decades of the twentieth century, there was only one nation in the world that could see it as a serious political or economic rival. This was the United States. Though Curzon feared the incursions of Russia in India, and though the Germans, French, Dutch and Belgians might regard the British as rivals f
or control of individual slices of African territory, the existence of a British Empire did not in itself cramp Russian, French, Dutch or Belgian style; it did not prevent them from being world dominators because it was never their ambition to be the supreme power over the rest of the world – what we now call the Third World. As Kipling half saw, in ‘The White Man’s Burden’, the crucial political development for the British was to be their relationship with the United States, and further, the crucial fact in British imperial history would be whether, post-1900, the Americans would choose to emulate Britain in carrying imperial responsibilities.

  When history began to show that American ambitions were rather different from Kipling’s imaginings – that for some American statesmen and politicians at least, the expansion of their power seemed to depend on the diminution of the British – then the United States would be forced to make specific decisions, and take specific steps, to undermine and destroy British hegemony. But for a large, rich, patient nation like the United States of America, ready to bide its time, there were very many factors which could help their purposes. Sometimes it would be necessary to shake the branches, sometimes ripe fruit would simply fall of its own accord.

  Gandhi’s strength in helping to undermine British power lay in the spiritual simplicity of his appeal. British justification for their Indian Empire, their belief that they were in India to ‘improve’ it, derived largely from a strange alliance between Utilitarian economists and evangelical missionaries. The extent to which practical economics, or Christian piety, predominated varied from decade to decade and from administrator to administrator, but both were evident. The extremist Christians in the early to mid-nineteenth century had dreamed of converting India, but Utilitarian common sense made it clear that Hindus, Jains, Muslims, Sikhs and Buddhists were unlikely ever to become Anglican en masse, however clean British drains, however excellent British schools, however extensive British railway systems might turn out to be.