Raj

by Lawrence, James

  Mild intoxication could be obtained from the soothing and highly addictive hookah. A good hookah man could earn up to fifteen rupees a month, often more, for his arcane skills and, above all, a formula for a satisfying smoke. The hookah bowl required a blend of local tobaccos, some laced with molasses, ground fine, and the addition of minute quantities of plaintain leaves, raw sugar, cinnamon and other aromatics. Some gentlemen’s tastes ran to opium or cannabis, although Europeans usually consumed the latter in sweetmeats.71 According to Williamson, taken in this form it produced instant gaiety followed by nausea and headaches. Smoking hookahs (there were small ones for use in palanquins) went out of fashion in the 1820s, when they were supplanted by cheroots.

  Indulgence of any kind had to be balanced by exercise if an exile was not to succumb to distempers. Those who took medical advice seriously, and most did, lived their lives according to a routine which included a time set aside for riding. In the hot season men rode for an hour after dawn, or in the cold, two. Williamson then suggested a moderate breakfast without ghee or salted foods followed by an hour of language study. The hours set aside for work varied according to a man’s responsibilities. In 1811, William Home, an officer, worked between nine and three when he took‘a capital collation . . . called tiffin’ which might take up to two hours to consume. Afterwards he played billiards. Lieutenant Blackwell’s day in Calcutta in 1823 was even more leisurely: he rose at five, rode as the sun came over the horizon and then ate breakfast. Then he ‘lounged or idled the time away till tiffin, and did what he could to kill the enemy [tedium] from tiffin to evening parade’. Richard Cust, an official, followed a more rigorous regime in the Punjab during 1846. He was up by six, worked at his papers until midday, when he had breakfast. He read for the next three hours and then spent the next three going through his official correspondence. His main meal, dinner, was at eight. At Rangoon in 1854, Assistant Surgeon Oswald also began work at six, making his morning visit to the hospital. He breakfasted at nine and then read or shot crows or kites. At noon he made his second round of the wards, leaving an afternoon which was free until his final inspection of his patients at seven.72 One consequence of this abundant leisure and, of course, plenty of servants, was that military men and civilian officials had time in which to keep journals and write to their families and friends.

  Service in India offered unlimited time and opportunities for gentlemen to indulge in their ruling passion, hunting. In 1799, that compulsive huntsman, Arthur Wellesley, annexed Tipu Sultan’s cheetahs and leopards and hunted deer with them in the Mysorean fashion. An instinctive conservative in all things, he preferred to ride to hounds like an English squire, and so he had some foxhounds imported. Unused to the climate, they fell sick and died. The pack of the 16th Lancers survived and, with a spirit which would have delighted Jorrocks, officers of the regiment arrived in Kabul in 1839 with their hounds. The drainage ditches which criss-crossed the countryside provided a stiff test for men and horses and several ‘gentlemen sportsmen’ took a tumble as they pursued Afghan jackals.73

  War was never allowed to interrupt a gentleman’s sport. Off-duty officers during the siege of Bharatpur soon discovered that the shallow lakes and marshland south of the city abounded in game and wildfowl. On one occasion, fifteen elephants were borrowed from the army for a ‘grand shooting party’ which was joined by Gurkhas, who were welcomed, for they had a reputation for marksmanship.74 Elephants were essential for shooting in countryside where tall grass and low bushes made it all but impossible for the guns to see their targets. Beaters were hauled in from nearby villages (they were joined by pariah dogs during the fruitless pursuit of a rhinoceros in Awadh in 1809) and, directed by local shikaris, they fanned out through the bush. Behind came the line of elephants with howdahs on their backs which contained the huntsmen. As deer and wild pigs were flushed out and birds took flight, the guns opened up.

  Up-country hunting excursions had other attractions. In April 1857, Lieutenant Alexander Lindsay of the Bengal Horse Artillery reckoned that by undertaking a six-month hunting and fishing trip in Kashmir he could save enough to pay off all his debts. His must have been an expensive mess or else he was living beyond his means. In Calcutta, Madras, Bombay and the larger garrison towns and administrative centres there was a social life which in every respect mirrored that of British provincial cities. The diary of Lady Chambers, the wife of a judge, for 1784 might easily have been that of a gentlewoman taking the waters in contemporary Bath. She attended dinners and balls, took tea with her friends, worshipped on Sundays, went on boat trips on the Hughli and watched a production of Hamlet in the city’s playhouse.75

  The climate, particularly in the hot season, prevented the exact reproduction of the British social round. In turn-of-the-century Calcutta, formal dinner was eaten between four and five and afterwards ladies and gentlemen went abroad in their carriages until ten. There were after-dinner receptions, with cards for older guests and dancing for younger, and a handful were invited to remain behind for late supper. Customs changed by the 1840s, when the formal evening dinner became the focus of social life. Bachelor officers dined in their messes in the evening, as in Britain, and hostesses gave dinner parties. These were often something of an endurance test, according to the fastidious Sleeman. In the hot season, and he must have been writing from experience, ‘a table covered with animal food is sickening to any person without a keen appetite, and stupefying to those who have it’. If dinner was followed by a ball, the prospect was grim, for the entertainments would continue until early morning, which did not suit Sleeman, who liked to be in bed by ten. The Indian dinner party had other drawbacks, which were noted by Captain Williamson. It was the custom for each guest to bring his khidmutgar and maybe other servants, who stood behind his chair while he ate and flicked away the flies. These attendants formed ‘a living enclosure’ within the dining room, ‘tending by its own exhalations, added to those from their masters and from the viands’ to cause nausea.76

  British society in India was always narrow and exclusive. Newcomers would not be admitted easily without a friend, for as Captain Williamson noted, ‘he who knows nobody, him will nobody know’.77 It could also be stultifying and there was inevitably tetchiness among men and women thrown together by chance and with little or no relief from each other’s company. Trivial incidents would get blown up out of all proportion. One May morning in 1809, Captain Joseph Gordon of the 22nd Light Dragoons was about to inspect some lame horses on the parade ground at Arcot when he saw his dog being attacked by two or three others. Immediately he hurled some stones at the assailants, which fled. Soon after, Cornet Charles Ellis accosted Gordon with the words, ‘I’d thank you Sir, not to throw at my dog.’ ‘If your dog attacks mine, Sir, I shall knock him down if I can,’ answered Gordon. Enraged, Ellis spat back at his superior, ‘Then I shall knock yours down, and something else too. I can tell you that I will not allow you to throw at my dog or any man like you.’ Gordon rebuked him, ‘Mr Ellis, you are very violent this morning.’ Ellis stumped off, muttering. There was bad blood between him and Gordon, he admitted, when he excused his conduct to a court martial. He had heard his dog howl when hit by one of the captain’s stones and was determined to avenge what he imagined to be an insult, ‘from a gentleman with whom I have not been on an intimate footing for some time, who had slighted my acquaintance’.78 Not surprisingly, the army encouraged young officers to expend surplus energy in ‘manly’ games, such as cricket and fives.79

  And yet British society in India possessed a remarkable cohesiveness. It had to, if the Raj was to be preserved. The strongest ties were those of social background, shared attitudes and pastimes and a sense of common purpose. This was the widest possible advertisement of the superior virtues of British ‘character’, or, to be precise, the character of the gentleman. It was because of his interior strengths that the gentleman had found it possible to step naturally into the role of the Indian lord. The ease with which this authority was assumed str
uck Lieutenant Godfrey Pearse when he received the ceremonial oaths and homage of the frontier horsemen he was about to command in 1849:

  There is something very pleasing in their feudatory customs: to see a young scion of the Blood Royal of Afghanistan, a Suddozye [Suddozai], and the oldest Sikh general of the Khalsa army swear allegiance to a young boy and a foreigner is certainly an odd sight.80

  Such an experience was reassuring, for it reaffirmed the belief that the common culture of gentlemen warriors transcended race. By this date, and in large measure through the endeavours of the Marquess Wellesley, the tenor of the Raj was aristocratic. Its underlying philosophy was a form of romantic Toryism which imagined that every Indian had an almost mystical respect for the authority of a sahib, whom he knew instinctively would treat him fairly. It was a self-perpetuating dogma: in 1907, the governor of the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) assured the Viceroy, Lord Minto, that the Indian had always admired a true gentleman and despised ‘the lower-class, non-official European’.81

  2

  Utility and

  Beneficence: British

  Visions and Indian

  Realities

  I

  At some date in the 1770s, an English gentleman and child of the Enlightenment presented one of its instruments, a microscope, to a ‘liberal minded-Brahmin’ with whom he had become friendly. The Indian peered through the eyepiece at a piece of fruit and was astonished by the ‘innumerable animaliculae’ which he saw. Pleased by his curiosity, the Englishman gave him the microscope. Soon after, the Brahmin destroyed it, telling his friend that what he had seen had left him ‘tormented by doubt, and perplexed by mystery’ to the point where he imagined his soul was imperilled.1 Seventy years later, a Baptist missionary was exasperated by Indians who insisted that the earth rested on either the back of a tortoise or serpent, and refused to be persuaded that the world was round and had been circumnavigated by European sailors.2 The Hindus’ attachment to their ancient cosmography was a well-known example of their stubborn refusal to open their minds to the revelations of modern science and reason.

  Anecdotes like these became part of the folklore of British India. They illustrated the unwillingness of the Indian to comprehend, let alone engage with, the modern world, and the intellectual gulf between rulers and ruled. This widened as Indians came into contact with the marvels of British science and technology. New inventions appeared with a bewildering swiftness: in 1824 the paddle-steamer Diane chugged up the Irrawaddy, spreading terror among the Burmese; four years later a Company passenger and mail steamer appeared on the Hughli; and by 1836 four iron-hulled tugs were hauling boats up the Ganges as far as Allahabad.3 Within the next decade steamships became a familiar sight on the Ganges and the Indus and in every major port. The early 1850s witnessed the arrival of fresh tokens of Britain’s inventive genius: the telegraph and the railways. Indians were alternately impressed and apprehensive; a passenger travelling on the Calcutta line in 1860 noticed how villagers rushed out to see the engine and carriages pass by, looking on ‘in ignorant admiration’.4

  The steamship, railway train and the telegraph epitomised progress, that historical force which seemed to have been gathering momentum since the intellectual and scientific revolutions of the eighteenth century. Britain was in the forefront of progress, indeed the first industrial nation found no difficulty in identifying itself as the banner-bearer of civilisation, destined to transform the world for the better. India represented a stagnant nation, where progress had long ago ground to a halt and where minds closed to reason were filled with fairy tales. In theory, it could have remained in this condition, for the system of government set up in 1784 confined the activities of the state to defence, internal security and the collection of revenue. The Company possessed no mandate to act as a universal dispenser of improving knowledge, rather it existed to promote what successive governors called the ‘happiness’ of its subjects.

  In reality, the Company could not distance itself from the moral and intellectual welfare of its subjects. On a purely practical level its operations required a body of educated Indians to serve in junior administrative posts. More importantly, there was something within the contemporary British temperament which rendered it impossible for them to perpetuate a status quo in which the mass of Indians languished in a state of cataleptic contentment.

  The impulse to reform and elevate had various sources. Perhaps the most powerful was the Protestant tradition which regarded all ignorance as evil, if only on the grounds that it prevented men and women from understanding the word of God. The vast majority of Indians were Hindus and, therefore, pagans in need of conversion which, according to Evangelical orthodoxy was one of the highest duties set a Christian. From the beginning, the ultimate goal of all programmes for spreading Western education throughout India was the conversion of the Hindus. As the mythology of Hinduism withered under the blast of science and reason, its former adherents would automatically turn to the one, living God. ‘No Hindu, who has received an English education, ever remains sincerely attached to his religion,’ asserted Thomas Macaulay in 1837. A junior member of the Board of Control who had been seconded to the Governor-General’s council in 1834, he was a man of immense influence who drew up the blueprint for ambitious legal and educational reforms. The latter, he hoped, would eliminate Hinduism among the Bengali educated classes within thirty years. Indian civil servant and fellow reformer Charles Trevelyan predicted that technology would accelerate the decline of Hinduism. ‘Railways will also be the great destroyer of caste, and the greatest missionary of all,’ he told a Commons committee in 1853.5

  Evangelical ideals also contributed to Britain’s swelling self-esteem. After 1815, the British increasingly saw themselves as the inheritors of over two hundred years of scientific and intellectual enlightenment which they had been remarkably adept in harnessing to practical ends. The achievements of the Industrial Revolution, which had been gathering pace during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, together with the patriotic pride kindled by victories in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, created a powerful sense of national destiny. A godly, virtuous and industrious people appeared to be marked out for a special greatness which might easily exceed that of Rome and the empires of the Classical age.

  All these elements fused in an appeal, delivered in 1846, by a former Indian postal official in favour of a rail network across the sub-continent:

  The honour, the dignity, and the glory of Imperial Britain are concerned in it . . . a magnificent system of railway communications would present a series of public monuments vastly surpassing in real grandeur, the aqueducts of Rome, the pyramids of Egypt, the great wall of China, the temples, palaces and mausoleums of the Great Moguls – monuments not merely of intelligence and power, but of utility and benificence.6

  National greatness lay in the fulfilment of great tasks for the physical and moral regeneration of mankind. This concept of Britain as the engine of universal progress permeated the minds of politicians and administrators in London and Calcutta from the 1820s onwards. Indians were, in the words of Lord Auckland, ‘a people conquered and not yet reclaimed’.7 Their redemption was not just an exercise in lofty-minded altruism. The resuscitation of India made good commercial sense, for it would create customers for British imports and boost local industry and agriculture, creating additional income for the Company. Among those clamouring for an Indian railway network in the 1840s were British businessmen who saw the new lines thrusting inland as levers opening up new markets and sources of raw materials.

  II

  The British were confident that they were ideally fitted to supervise the rebirth of India, but they disagreed as to how it might be best accomplished. Opinion was divided over the pace of reform and how far the government could go in interfering with indigenous creeds and customs. There was also a profound difference of approach: those of a liberal frame of mind tended to diagnose India and prescribe often cathartic remedies for its ailments, w
hile conservatives chose to engage with the country and its peoples. Both factions recognised the abundant features of decay, but the conservatives never allowed this knowledge to blind them to the virtues of Indian society, religion and institutions.

  The conservative attitude to India was grounded in the experience of the French Revolution of 1789, which had demonstrated how high-minded experiments in remaking entire societies in the name of reason could go horribly awry. This had been the warning contained in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, which first appeared in Calcutta early in 1792 and was well received. His account of how France had been thrown into chaos by rationalist reformers and giddy Utopians struck a chord with administrators confronted with the job of ruling a people who had developed an ordered society and strong traditions. Burke reminded them that, like all societies, the Indian was a living organism which, however imperfect and irrational it seemed to outsiders, had evolved in response to special human needs. His veneration for the past and respect for whatever was rooted in it was shared by the Marquess Wellesley and the knot of young proconsuls who enjoyed his patronage – Charles Metcalfe, Montstuart Elphinstone and John Malcolm.

  All were also touched by contemporary Romanticism, which made them highly susceptible to the wonders of Indian architecture, history and literature. As in Britain, ruins attracted Romantics and stimulated their imagination. Looking over a dilapidated Muslim graveyard in 1802, Metcalfe fell into a melancholy reverie on the Mughals and those shifts of fortune that had led to ‘the fallen state of this race of beings who but half a century back ruled everywhere supreme’.8 Most of the picturesque Indian ‘scenes’ which were now being reproduced and sold by British print-sellers showed ruined temples and palaces, often half-covered in foliage, but still conveying a sense of past grandeur. Colonel James Tod, surveying Rajasthan during the 1810s, was often overcome by flights of Romantic fancy when he came across Rajput strongholds. His first sight of the fort of Ajmer brought to mind lines from Byron’s Childe Harolde and its vision of, ‘Banner on high, and battles passed below’.9 Reciting the region’s history, he transformed the Rajput warlords into Indian Peverils of the Peak, complete with castles, armoured retainers, feudal hosts, heraldic pennants and bards reciting ancient deeds of glory. The colourful and idealised Gothic past of Sir Walter Scott seemed to have survived in India. Scott himself wrote a novel set in India, The Surgeon’s Daughter (1827), with a plot set against the background of the struggle between the Company and Mysore forty years before. The sultan, Haidar Ali, is invested with the virtues of an ideal mediaeval king, displaying many instances of ‘princely generosity and, what was more surprising, of even-handed generosity’.