Day of Empire

by Amy Chua

  There followed two years of mutual slaughter and savagery. At Cawnpore, even after the British garrison surrendered, two hundred British women and children were killed, many hacked to death. In return, the British unleashed a barbarous vengeance. “Man-hunting” for mutineers became the “best sport,” and soldiers whooped it up as they plunged the regulation twelve-inch spike bayonet—renamed the Cawnpore Dinner because it went “straight to the stomach”—into Indian captives. It was at Peshawar that suspected rebels were tied to cannons and blown to pieces; back in London, cartoons depicted severed Indian limbs flying amid clouds of smoke. At Delhi, the British “hanged all the villagers who had treated [the] fugitives badly until every tree was covered with scoundrels hanging from every branch.” At Cawnpore, Muslims were forced to eat pork and Hindus beef before they were executed in front of jeering soldiers. Not only mutineers but young boys, old men, and faithful domestic servants were shot in cold blood. “I felt as if my heart was stone and my brain fire,” a British lieutenant later recalled of a day when he had killed twelve and was desperate to kill more.30

  The Mutiny provoked paroxysms of recrimination and self-questioning in England. The British, as had become unpleasantly clear, were not exactly universally adored by the millions of dark-skinned heathens living under British rule. So what exactly was Britain doing in places like India—or Jamaica, where in 1865 there was an almost equally vicious uprising of ungrateful freed black slaves?

  Fierce debates ensued, but by the 1870s one thing was certain. Far from retreating, the English would embrace the idea of imperial Britain. The East India Company was abolished, and India was placed under direct crown rule. In 1876, Queen Victoria, amid great pomp and fanfare, was declared empress of India. In a famous speech, Disraeli challenged his countrymen to choose between “a comfortable England” and “a great country—an Imperial country” commanding “the respect of the world.” The English chose the latter. More than ever, the empire became a defining source of national pride for Britons, working class and aristocracy alike.

  But what kind of empire? Britain's two primary political parties had different answers, both riddled with inconsistency. The Conservatives, or Tories, glorified hierarchy. They romanticized the Roman and Mughal empires and allied themselves with India's native princes and feudal landowners (zamindaars). At the same time, they often explicitly avowed white racial superiority. For many late-nineteenth-century British Conservatives, immutable racial differences—which became the subject of voluminous pseu-doscientific investigation—explained not only the inherent right of the British to rule over their darker Indian subjects but also the internal divisions within Indian society. Thus, H. H. Risley, ethnologist and India's census commissioner, developed a “nasal index,” which simultaneously vindicated white supremacy and India's caste system. If, he wrote, “we take a series of castes…and arrange them in order of the average nasal index, so that the caste with the finest nose shall be at the top, and that with the coarsest at the bottom of the list, it will be found that this order substantially corresponds with the accepted order of social precedence.”

  On the other side were the Liberals, who at least in their rhetoric were more reluctant imperialists. Unlike the Conservatives, the Liberals paid lip service to and in some cases genuinely sought to implement the principle of universal human equality. For them, British imperial rule was justified not because the Indians were racially inferior but because, for reasons of history and culture (and perhaps even climate), the Indians were backward, uncivilized, and unready for self-government. Like children, they were in need of tutelage. As the famous philosopher and India hand John Stuart Mill put it, self-government was not “suited” to all of Britain's subject peoples, some of whom ranked “in point of culture and development…very little above the highest of beasts.” The good news was that progress was possible for all races, and with help—primarily through education and law—Indians could one day (in the far distant future) be just like Englishmen.

  In the aftermath of the Mutiny there was at least one point on which Liberals and Conservatives agreed. Britain's great mistake had been “tampering with religion” and “introducing a system foreign to the habits and wishes of the people.” Instead of trying to Christianize India, Conservative statesmen like Disraeli joined with Liberal leaders in proclaiming a new commitment to religious tolerance and noninterference with local customs. (It was then that Queen Victoria issued her famous promise not to “impose [British] convictions” on any of Britain's subjects.) This commitment had the ring of principle, but it also played conveniently into a divide-and-conquer strategy. Nowhere was this clearer than in Britain's post-Mutiny restructuring of the Indian army.31

  The Indian army was deliberately reorganized to separate Indians of different regions, backgrounds, and castes into their own companies or regiments. New uniforms were designed to highlight the distinctions among the sepoys’ divergent religious or regional backgrounds. For example, Gurkhas, who tended to identify with the British more than other soldiers, were typically outfitted in Western-tailored rifle-green uniforms, while other sepoys were dressed in loose-fitting pantaloons. In many cases the British actually required their Indian soldiers to don distinctive traditional garb. As numerous historians have pointed out, British officers intentionally fostered a separate Sikh identity, requiring Sikh soldiers to carry their kirpans, or daggers, and to wear their traditional turbans. When Sikh sepoys did not have these accoutrements, the British supplied them; thousands of kirpans were manufactured in Sheffield and shipped overseas. In this way, the British were able not only to honor the diverse customs of their respective regions but also to rigidify and exploit India's internal divisions.

  At the same time, British officers took new pains to accommodate native rituals. Hindus were permitted to make sacrifices to the goddess Kali on the eve of battle. Brahmin sepoys were allowed to conduct their lengthy food preparation rites, even at the expense of slowing down a regiment on the march. “Everything should be done to secure the contentment and loyalty of the Native Army by a scrupulous regard for their customs and their religion,” urged Lord Roberts, the commander of the Indian army from 1885-93.

  These British accommodations and manipulations were largely effective. “Colonel Sahib has made excellent arrangements and takes great trouble for us Musalmans,” one Muslim soldier wrote during Ramadan. “His arrangements for our food during the fast are very good, and he has put us all together because during the fast it is not easy to live with Sikhs and Dogras. I cannot describe how good his arrangements are.” Similarly, a Sikh soldier expressed his appreciation that, under British protocol, “animals intended for the food of Sikhs [were] slaughtered by a Sikh by a stroke of a sword on the back of the neck, and those intended for Musalmans, by a Musalman in the lawful way, namely by cutting the throat.” A family member of another Sikh sepoy, upon learning that he had been allowed to celebrate the birthday of Guru Sri Nanak, wrote: “Thanks, a thousand thanks, to the Government under whose rule, not only we, but the members of every sect, are able to observe fittingly their holy days. May the Guru ever keep over our heads the shadow of this great King.”32

  At the same time, the British made a massive investment in education in India. By 1887, nearly 300,000 Indians were studying English; in 1907 the figure was over 500,000. This Anglo-educated elite, who would later play a central role in India's new nationalist movement, was at least initially deeply committed to the British Empire. Thus Dadabhai Naoroji, the “Grand Old Man” of Indian nationalism, published in 1871 a devastating critique of the Raj, but never argued for independence. On the contrary, he famously defended British rule, arguing that the colonial government was not living up to Britain's own principles of “fair play and justice,” adding, “It is only in British hands that [India's] regeneration can be accomplished.”

  In the decades following the Mutiny, the British enlisted men like Naoroji to serve as lawyers, magistrates, and bureaucrats in the Indian Civil
Service; indeed, British rule over India would have been impossible without this cadre of elite pro-British natives. Certainly without the allegiance of Indian sepoys and Indian bureaucrats a thousand British civil servants could never have governed a native population of hundreds of millions.

  Most Indian bureaucrats occupied lower or at best midlevel positions. But a handful were permitted to rise to the highest levels, even in the mother country. In 1892, for example, Naoroji was elected to the British parliament by voters from Central Finsbury in London, the same constituency that would later elect Margaret Thatcher.33

  British imperial policies during the ninety years of the Raj (1857-1947) were a contradictory, oscillating mixture of Liberalism and Conservatism. Neither camp could achieve dominance for long. First, the two political parties kept toppling each other in London. Moreover, even when Liberals were ascendant, their policies in India were repeatedly undermined by the nonofficial British community living there.

  These Anglo-Indians—consisting mainly of hard-driving, often Scottish merchants, traders, railroad men, and tea and indigo planters—were notoriously racist. After the Mutiny, out of genuine fear as well as bigotry, the Anglo-Indians retreated into an essentially apartheid system in which whites lived in insular, militarily protected enclaves separated from the “Blacktowns,” where the Indians lived. Most at home in their comfortable all-white social clubs—with names like “the Unceremonials” and “the Limited Liability Club”—these businessmen were not above beating their Indian workers for laziness or insolence. Between 1880 and 1900, no fewer than eighty-one recorded “accidental” shootings were recorded in which a sahib who had “bagged a coolie” went essentially unpunished.

  The Anglo-Indians reacted with fury whenever Liberal administrations sought to dismantle the racial barriers that protected them. In 1883, a Liberal viceroy tried to pass the ill-fated Ilbert Bill, which would have allowed Indian judges to try white defendants. The Anglo-Indian response was a grotesque explosion of racist protests all across the country. “Are our wives,” demanded one Anglo-Indian, “to be torn from our homes on false pretenses [to] be tried by men who do not respect women, and do not understand us, and in many cases hate us?…Fancy, I ask you Britishers, her being taken before a half-clad native, to be tried and perhaps convicted.” “Verily the jackass kicketh at the lion,” bellowed another orator to raucous applause. “Show him as you value your liberties; show him that the lion is not dead; he sleep-eth, and in God's name, let him dread the awakening.” Almost the entire white community in India swung against the government. Not long afterward, the Raj lurched back to Conservatism.34

  But when Conservatives were in power, their policies met with the increasing and much more violent resistance of India's growing nationalist movement. When the patrician Lord Curzon became viceroy in 1898, he pitted himself squarely against the corps of anglicized Indian lawyers and civil servants that a previous generation of Liberals had worked so hard to cultivate. With Calcutta as their power base, members of this educated elite had in 1885 founded the Indian National Congress, a party that quickly became the most important voice of Indian political aspirations. Cur-zon spurned these so-called Bengali Babus, with their emergent (and English-taught) ideas of equality and nationhood. Viewing them as a threat to British rule, Curzon pointedly excluded them from the highest posts of the Indian Civil Service and took measure after measure to undermine the Congress Party. Curzon's most draconian step was the 1905 partition of Bengal into two new provinces, gerrymandered to make Bengali-speaking Hindus a minority in both.

  Curzon's policies backfired. They fueled the rise of a revolutionary wing within the Indian National Congress, set off angry boycotts of British goods, and sparked a rash of bombings and assassination attempts. Curzon resigned in 1905, and the British eventually reinstated Liberal policies, which in turn did not last long.

  In the end, Britain's loss of India was once again—as with Ireland—a case of too little tolerance, too late. In the case of India, however, Britain had actively squandered decades of goodwill built up within its subject populations. Led by men such as Naoroji, the Indian National Congress in its early years had been staunchly pro-British. Its founding members had a penchant for quoting Shakespeare and referred to the queen-empress as “Mother,” cheering whenever her name was mentioned. Even the more extreme nationalist leaders, including the “terrorists,” were overwhelmingly members of the British-educated, privileged Indian elite, men who had tried to pursue the career paths the British set out for them, only to find their advancement blocked by British racism.

  As late as the eve of the First World War, many of India's leaders remained loyal to the crown. When Britain declared war on Germany in 1914, Gandhi told his followers: “We are, above all, British citizens of the Great British Empire. Fighting as the British are at present in a righteous cause for the good and glory of human dignity and civilisation…our duty is clear: to do our best to support the British, to fight with our life and property.” Hundreds of thousands of Indian troops were dispatched to fight in theaters all over the world, and more than one million Indians in all served the empire abroad in some capacity. In return, Indian leaders, encouraged by ambiguous promises from London, believed that the war's end would bring India self-government similar to that enjoyed by Canada and Britain's other “white” dominions.35

  Disillusion awaited. Instead of self-rule, India's post-armistice “reward” was a brutal crackdown and shocking repression.

  Postwar India was tumultuous. A growing spirit of national awareness and pride pervaded the country, as did mounting anger at the diversion of India's wealth to Britain's imperial needs. The global economy, too, was changing. Protectionism surged around the world. In India, urbanization and unemployment set in even as new Indian-owned industries began to emerge. British-style education had been a double-edged sword; more and more Indians demanded the freedoms they had studied or seen firsthand overseas. Waves of protests, marches, strikes, and political agitation swept the Indian subcontinent, punctuated by bursts of violence.

  For the Anglo-Indian community, all this change was profoundly threatening. Even as Whitehall continued to draft progressive Indian reform measures from afar, the British government in India enacted the repressive Rowlatt Acts, imposing curfews on natives and curtailing rights of protest, essentially extending martial law for three years after the war. In 1919, having banned public gatherings, Brigadier General R.E.H. Dyer ordered his men to open fire on some 10,000 unarmed peasants who had gathered inside a walled field in Amritsar in the Punjab, possibly to celebrate a Hindu festival. With no warning, Dyer's brigade fired 1,650 rounds of live ammunition into the helpless, trapped crowd. Hundreds of Indians were killed, and a thousand more were injured.

  Although recalled by London for “an error of judgment,” Dyer was unrepentant. Indeed, he initially received a hero's welcome back in England, where Conservatives gave him a jeweled sword bearing the motto “Saviour of the Punjab.” Over the next few months, British soldiers inflicted ever more brutal punishment on the increasingly restless Punjabis—flogging them, forcing them to crawl on hands and knees—“in defense of the realm.”

  The Punjab atrocities were the last straw for India's once loyalist leaders. In 1919, Sir Rabindranath Tagore, Asia's first Nobel laureate in literature, repudiated his knighthood in protest of the slaughter. He explained: “The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part, wish to stand, shorn, of all special distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen who, for their so called insignificance, are liable to suffer degradation not fit for human beings.”

  In 1920, Gandhi issued his revolutionary call for nonviolent noncooperation with the British government. The Indian National Congress followed Gandhi, finally abandoning decades of official support for the Raj.

  Public opinion in England swung against Dyer as well. Lord Montagu, secretary of state for India, demanded of
Dyer's defenders in Parliament, “Are you going to keep your hold upon India by terrorism, racial humiliation, and subordination?” Churchill called the massacre “monstrous”—“without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire”—and accused Dyer of destroying rather than saving British rule in India.36

  In a desperate attempt to stave off independence, the British government of India made one last-gasp effort to maintain power through strategic tolerance. In the interwar period, official Britain scrambled to “Indianize” the upper echelons of the Indian Civil Service and the officer corps of the Indian army, both former bastions of white authority. On the economic front, the new official buzzwords were “industrialization” and “development.” In the future, India would no longer just supply raw materials; it would become an economically impressive trading partner for Britain, with mutual advantages for all—or so ran the party line. Most crucially, the British government of India sought to enlist the cooperation of India's increasingly powerful indigenous business community, mainly Marwaris from Calcutta and Gujaratis from Ahmedabad who after the war had come to control huge chunks of the Indian economy.

  These concessions hardly stemmed from altruism. On the contrary, the first concern of the Raj was to marginalize India's radical nationalists. As the historian Maria Misra puts it, the government of India “was determined to concede as much economic power to Indians as was compatible with maintaining the imperial interest.”

  Unfortunately for Britain, the Anglo business community on the ground in India went in the opposite direction, toward increasingly extreme intolerance. Rather than racially integrate their firms as the government of India encouraged, these Anglo-Indians refused to allow well-connected, capital-rich Indians like the Mar-waris and Gujaratis onto their governing boards or to employ even highly qualified Indians for managerial positions. Whereas the East India Company in its most successful days had actively recruited and allied itself with entrepreneurial Indians, Anglo-Indians in the twentieth century stubbornly opposed collaboration with indigenous business interests. This strategy of aggressive intolerance proved spectacularly self-defeating. The Anglo-Indians’ blatant racism intensified resentment among the Indian elite, who increasingly allied themselves with the mass nationalist movement and its calls for the nationalization or expulsion of British business interests.37