Raj
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Aurobindo was a mystic whose nationalism was metaphysical. Indian self-government was an essential part of a process of spiritual advancement which would transform the country into a moral force capable of influencing the entire human race. His philosophy was rooted in a study of Hindu scriptures which had taught him that the individual soul’s quest for perfection was paralleled by the struggle for nationhood. Both were inseparable and highly desirable ends. Above all, India’s journey towards self-government had to be undertaken on purely Indian terms, rather than those of her rulers. Western concepts of reason, scientific rationality, the supremacy of law and the pursuit of power were rejected in favour of ancient Indian ideals. Inner harmony, oneness with the universe, human intuition and a consciousness of the cosmic presence of God were the ingredients of what Aurobindo and his disciples believed to be a peculiarly Indian nationalism.
The boycotts of British goods became a soul-enhancing act of self-denial and, in 1908, Bande Mataram interpreted an upsurge in strikes in Bengal as the will of God. Aurobindo came to envisage India’s politics as a cataclysmic contest between the forces of good and evil, in which those who fought for the former were comforted by the presence of Krishna. ‘What is there that you can fear when you are conscious of Him who is within you.’ Or, in the words of Aurobindo’s poem ‘Vidula’:
O my son, believe me, he whose victory brings the common gain
And a nation conquers with him, cannot fail; his goal is plain
And his feet divinely guided, for his steps to Fate belong.26
The terrorist became sanctified as an instrument of a supernatural purpose which was wholly good. ‘We never believed that political murder will bring independence,’ one declared at his trial. ‘We do it because we believe the people want it.’ In this assumption, the Bengali terrorists had much in common with the contemporary Russian counterparts to whom they looked for technical help. Awaiting trial in 1908–09, Aurobindo allegedly had a vision of Krishna which confirmed his faith in himself as a warrior pilgrim, whose path to redemption lay in war against a government whose existence was an affront to the gods. A further source of encouragement for young terrorists was the defeat of Russia by Japan in 1905, which dramatically proved that Asians were not destined forever to be overcome by Europeans.
The mystical element in the terrorist creed represented a new departure for Indian political protest. Indian nationalists could now regard themselves as heirs of a Hindu tradition of resistance, like Tilak’s hero, the Maratha leader Shivaji, who had fought the Mughals. Hindu theology rather than Western political thought offered a basis for national identity and the struggle against an alien and, it was stressed, unholy government. Violent opposition to the Raj, even the murder of its officials, was justified because it was a tyranny which violated the motherland.
The rhetoric of the new nationalists was that of revolution and war. ‘Despotism reigns in India at this hour’ where an ‘incompetent government’ relied upon ‘Muscovite methods’ to hold down its subjects. ‘The plague and the famine are manufactured by British rule.’ The phrases were those of a British Socialist, H. M. Hyndman, and were approvingly quoted in Tilak’s Mahratta of 22 December 1907. Under these conditions, fighting back was the only way of gaining respite. For Tilak and those who hung on his words, the British were predators and the Indians their prey, a relationship which justified political assassination as a form of self-defence. This casuistry was employed by Tilak soon after the Kennedy murders in Muzaffarpur. Writing in Kesari, Tilak likened the terrorist to a deer which attacked a hunter, regardless of the odds, in order to save its own life. What happened at Muzaffarpur, or rather what should have happened if the terrorists had not bungled their attack, would serve as a warning for all Indian bureaucrats, whom Tilak saw as pitiless raptors.
Tilak was arrested on 22 July 1908 for this outburst, which was interpreted by the Bombay government as an incitement to further murders. The Governor, Sir George Clark, believed he was taking a risk, but that it was worth it, for the ‘violent movement’ would suffer a reverse if Tilak was found guilty.27 His trial coincided with a period of local economic distress and Clark, fearing popular unrest, moved additional troops into the city. They were soon needed, for Tilak’s adherents appealed to the masses, in particular workers in the cotton mills, for support on the streets. Between 17 and 29 July there was a sequences of strikes, riots and stonings of Europeans which gave the authorities a foretaste of the mass political protests which would convulse India for the next thirty-nine years. The disturbances started with factory walk-outs, in which Hindus who hesitated were told that they would lose caste and be considered as killers of cattle, or the offspring of sweepers, or Europeans. In one instance, when religious persuasion failed, a mill which remained working was attacked by rioters. There was also a hartal in which all work ceased, shops closed and crowds took to the streets bearing portraits of Tilak. Europeans were attacked and pelted during every demonstration. Limited force was used to keep order; no easy task when women and children were employed to shield crowds. Troops opened fire on several occasions when things got out of hand, and a marksman from the Northamptonshire regiment deliberately picked off the ringleaders of a mob.28 The trouble died down after Tilak’s conviction and six-year gaol sentence, but Clark regretted that the agitators had proved ‘too clever’ for the local police. Tension remained high for some weeks after the attempted rape and murder of a British nurse at Poona, and the governor feared that there might be further attacks on Europeans in remote districts.
A fresh novelty on the Indian political scene was the emergence by 1908 of networks of revolutionary cells in London, Paris and among Sikh immigrants in Canada and the west coast of the United States. The London cell was financed by a follower of Tilak, Shyamiji Khrishavarma, a businessman who funded an Indian students’ hostel, India House, in Highgate, which became a powerhouse for every kind of sedition, including smuggling guns into India. He also financed a newspaper, the Indian Sociologist, whose student readers were regularly inflamed by accounts of terrorism in India, the government’s measures to contain it and the punishment of convicted terrorists. In all likelihood, one of these reports inspired an engineering student, Madan Lal Dhingra, to purchase a revolver from a London department store (all that was required was a license from a post office, which cost £3 5 shillings [£3.25]) and improve his marksmanship at a shooting range on the Tottenham Court Road. On the evening of 1 July 1909, Dhingra shot dead Sir William Curzon Wyllie, a senior official at the India Office, as he left a meeting at the Imperial Institute, and mortally wounded a Parsi doctor who had attempted to administer first aid.
At his trial, Dhingra excused himself as an Indian patriot whose action was no different from that of an English patriot who fought Germans. In a garbled speech, he alleged that the British had murdered 80 million Indians during the past fifty years and had stolen £100 million from India. He also blamed ‘the Englishman who goes out to India and gets, say, £100 a month that simply means that he passes sentence of death on a thousand of my poor countrymen, because these thousand people could easily live on this £100, which the Englishman spends mostly on his frivolities and pleasure’.29 Revealingly, in October 1907, the Indian Sociologist had singled out Curzon Wyllie as one of the ‘old unrepentant foes of India who had fattened on the misery of the Indian peasant’.30 After refusing to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the court, Dhingra hoped for a death sentence which would be avenged by his countrymen. He got what he wanted and was hanged at Pentonville a month later.
IV
The activists of India House disturbed the Indian government. ‘We cannot control the spread of sedition in India,’ until its London connection had been eliminated, Sir George Clark admitted at the beginning of 1910.31 Minto was worried that not enough was being done to keep track of the London plotters, fearing that Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, whom he cast in the Inspector Lestrange mould, would easily be outwitted by ‘wily Asiatics’.32 The probl
ems of surveillance and detection were even greater in India, for resources were slimmer and not designed to counter a well-organised, underground terror movement.
The Raj’s coercive power over its 303 million subjects was limited. If, as Morley once suggested, the British government was confronted by a choice between political concessions or ‘Martial Law and no damned nonsense’, it would have to plump for the former because it lacked the wherewithal for the latter. The total garrison in 1911 was 231,000, of whom 156,000 were Indian troops. Of these, over 80,000 were recruited from the so-called ‘martial races’ of the north: Punjabi Muslims, Sikhs, Rajputs, Jats, Dogras and other Punjabi Hindus. There were 200,000 civilian policemen, who were often thinly spread in the countryside; there were just 21,000 spread across the Punjab which had an area of 99,000 square miles and a population of 24 million. In 1908, the turbulent Dacca district of East Bengal had one policeman to every 88,500 inhabitants.33 Unable for lack of numbers to govern by naked force, the Raj lacked the apparatus to rule by stealth and fear. Before 1905, the agencies for undercover surveillance of dissidents were few, scattered, undermanned and in some areas such as East Bengal, non-existent. Police special branches expanded quickly during the next ten years, but in Bengal their growth failed to match the increase in terrorist crime. Arrests and convictions did not keep pace with outrages and, from 1911, detectives and informers became terrorist targets. Efforts to step up police recruitment failed, and serving policemen often found themselves under pressure from friends and kinsfolk who sympathised with the nationalist movement. An overstretched police force managed just to contain political violence; between 1909 and 1914 there were an average of twenty-four political crimes each year, mostly armed robberies. Thereafter, the number rose so that by the end of 1915 ‘no fortnight passed in Calcutta without some anarchist crime committed by the revolutionaries’.34
There was at least one display of military muscle which, it was hoped, might cool Bengali tempers. A cavalry officer recalled that in 1913 his squadron was ordered to ride through villages near Dacca, since, ‘The Bengalis had been getting rather uppish and, as we had had no troops in Eastern Bengal for many years, it was thought to be a good thing to show the flag there.’ The cavalcade was warmly welcomed, and even when, as instructed, the soldiers visited those hotbeds of sedition, secondary schools, they were garlanded with flowers.35 More stringent measures demanded by the Bengal governments were denied by Morley, who was determined not to heap summary powers on those ‘hot-headed, high-handed folk, full of alarms and swagger, and clamour for more force’. He did, however, consent to exempting some offences from trial by jury, since too often Indian jurymen were unduly swayed by their political feelings rather than evidence.
The rapid growth of political terrorism and the discovery that the masses were susceptible to political agitation presented the Raj with its greatest challenge since the Mutiny. It responded with that characteristic blend of flexibility, pragmatism and cunning which had served it so well in the past. It had survived and flourished by convincing influential Indians that its interests were their own, and had reached a series of political accommodations with them. These arrangements were ideal in a multi-layered society split by race, religion, caste and sub-caste, and enabled power to be exercised unobtrusively. Wherever possible, the British had trod carefully, preferring to preserve old structures such as the princely states and systems such as revenue collection, even when they were far from perfect. There was also that legacy of the Mutiny which taught officials never to intrude into Indian religious life.
The Raj had amassed an army of collaborators: the princes and their administrations, the Indian army, the native police force and a cadre of such junior officials as deputy collectors and assistant magistrates, who were often its chief link with the masses. The cautious pragmatism and common-sense which guided the Raj made it inevitable that at some stage it would seek an accommodation with the small but growing ‘political class’ of educated Indians. A tentative move had been made in 1892 with the creation of Indian municipal authorities, elected by rate-payers and with councils carefully balanced so as not to exclude non-Hindu minorities. By 1911 there were 715 of these urban local authorities with a combined budget of £2.5 million, which was spent on public works.
By 1908 the question was how far to extend this principle of Indian participation in government. It was an urgent matter since recent developments in Bengal, the Punjab and Bombay had indicated that the Indian political class could in certain circumstances swing the masses behind them. The answer formulated by Morley was reforms contrived to detach members of the moderate wing of the nationalist movement and admit them to the inner corridors of power. The instrument of assimilation was the Indian Councils Act, more commonly known as the Morley–Minto reforms, which were announced in November 1908 on the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Victoria’s proclamation, a pointed reminder that ultimately it was the Crown in Parliament which decided India’s destinies. Sixty Indian representatives were to be elected to the Viceroy’s executive council, and between thirty and fifty to the provincial legislative councils, where they would contribute to the framing of laws and policy. Indian admission into these enclaves marked an end to their domination by senior members of the ICS, who had always claimed that they spoke for the silent masses of India. Electoral procedures were deliberately designed to achieve a balance of all minority interests, much to the regret of Congress, which otherwise welcomed the measures. No one was disbarred from standing for election, even extremist agitators such as Tilak.36 A further concession to Indian opinion was made at George V’s coronation durbar in December 1911, where it was proclaimed that Bengal was to be reunited.
The 1908 reforms were in keeping with the spirit of enlightenment and progress which the British believed lay at the heart of their government. Educated Indians en masse did not become collaborators overnight, but in time a substantial number did enter the legislative councils, where they believed that they could work for the interests of their countrymen. Opening the door for liberal nationalists isolated the extremists of all complexions, for whom the reforms were a cynical piece of legerdemain by an unnerved Raj. Co-operation equalled surrender; the struggle for full self-government on Indian terms continued, as did terrorism.
Many British administrators were disheartened by the changes, which diluted their power and introduced a democratic element into the government. Sir Bampfylde Fuller took up the cudgels for them when he dismissed Morley’s measures as ‘conciliatory sugar plums’.37 The future integrity of the Raj was at stake, for Fuller, along with many present and former Indian officials, believed that it was to them alone that the ordinary Indian looked for the fair play and honest government which his countrymen could never provide. Dispassionate judgement was beyond the capacity of an Indian who was unable to shake off completely ties of family and faith. The British alone guaranteed the peace and security of India; if ever they left or even contemplated leaving, anarchy would follow with inter-state and religious conflicts. The hillmen from the northern frontiers would sweep down from the plains and, in the phrase commonly employed by diehards then and afterwards, there would not be a rupee or a virgin between the Indus and Cape Comorin. Fuller’s views were typical and important, for they would be repeated in various forms during the next thirty years by those who considered that the sahibs and not India’s self-appointed tribunes knew what was best for the Indian people.
V
Adjustments to Indian government at the highest level had only the slightest impact on the everyday running of a country where more than nine-tenths of the population knew nothing of high politics. They were not, as some civil servants liked to think, utterly apathetic. The wave of protest against the Punjab settlements law proved beyond doubt that Indians would stand up for themselves if their immediate interests were imperilled. The same point was dramatically proved elsewhere. There were regular explosions of fury by railway and factory workers whenever management attempted to reduce
wages, increase hours or introduce disciplinary measures. In 1898 strikers on the Madras railways tried to derail a train, and in 1913 factory hands attacked Europeans with sledgehammers, smashed windows and destroyed furniture after the introduction of fines for lateness.38 Forestry laws which removed ancestral rights to slash-and-burn cultivators were also violently resisted. The docile Indian was a creature of myth, and in the future the government would have to strive to keep his loyalty in the face of nationalist agitation. The age when the Raj could depend upon what Lord Curzon called ‘the mute acquiescence of the governed’ had passed for ever by 1914.
On the other hand, political turmoil in India was still the exception rather than the rule. It was largely absent from the princely states, and even in East Bengal the mass of population seemed satisfied with the government. Recalling the first stage of his journey home in 1913, Major Casserly wrote:
Although I was in so-called disaffected Eastern Bengal I met no rudeness or black looks; for the sedition carefully fostered among the feather-headed young Bengali students has not affected the simple cultivators of the soil, who still respect the white man and look confidently to the Sahibs for justice.39