Raj

by Lawrence, James

  O Muslim ladies. You have, to this day, lived your lives without enjoying the rights of womanhood. You have been conceiving that you were created only to serve men. No, this is not the case . . .64

  A government which was traditionally highly sensitive to the slightest hint of Russian meddling in Indian affairs was bound to be frightened by this sort of material. Moreover, it took little imagination to link present convulsions and the recent Afghan invasion with the secret machinations of a régime which was, incidentally, fighting a series of campaigns against British-backed anti-Communists in southern and northern Russia. During the winter of 1918–19 the former had been receiving direct assistance from India through Persia. In a situation which, in certain respects, resembled the Cold War, both sides were resorting to subversion. A thrilling and revealing account of India’s brief participation in the anti-Communist movements in Central Asia was written by one of the agents involved, Reginald Teague-Jones, who died in 1988, having lived for over sixty years under an assumed name. He had been compelled to do so to escape the notoriety he had achieved in Soviet mythology for his supposed part in the execution of twenty-six commissars near Baku in September 1918.65

  Fear of the partially known is as unnerving as fear of the unknown. In the months before and after the disorders in the Punjab, officials from the Viceroy downwards had been bracing themselves for possibly widespread, Russian-inspired subversion. Added to this preoccupation were older anxieties about the Raj being overturned by some bolt from the blue, of the sort which had appeared in 1857. And then there was the recent example of Russia, where a small but determined knot of revolutionaries had overthrown an outwardly powerful and monolithic state. This fearfulness had recently been increased by wartime conspiracies, which explains O’Dwyer’s reactions and, to some extent, Dyer’s. There appears to be no doubt that during the crucial second fortnight of April 1919, both men had diagnosed the symptoms of an insurrection whose ferocity might equal, possibly excel that of 1857. Each reacted in the customary manner: by a precipitate resort to the aggressive use of overwhelming force. In Dyer’s case, loss of control over Amritsar and the psychological effect this might have had elsewhere in the Punjab might have justified limited firing on a demonstration whose purpose was deliberately to goad authority. But his use of firepower in what was tantamount to a test of the Raj’s resolve was neither salutary nor surgical; it was, as he subsequently made plain, vindictive. Vengeance rather than pacification also underlay the subsequent measures taken in the Punjab.

  In defence of his snap decision, Dyer stated many times that his mindset was that of a soldier. There seems no doubt that he subscribed to that persistent martial creed that the Raj had been created by the army and would always be sustained by force. In an emergency soldiers knew what had to be done and were not hamstrung by precedents and rules, unlike civilian administrators. Many soldiers believed that Dyer had done his duty and were bitter about his treatment by a pusillanimous government. ‘They let those sweltering down in the plains do the dirty work and then censure them for doing it,’ wrote Lieutenant-Colonel M. H. Morgan, who had been with Dyer at the Jallianwala Bagh.66 Men of this stamp simply believed that condign remedies were the only ones understood by Indians. After the 1919 disturbances there, the local commander at Delhi had described the rioters as ‘the scum of Delhi’. He added: ‘ . . . if they got more firing so much the better. It would have done them a world of good . . . as force is the only thing that an Asiatic has any respect for.’67

  Of course, there were officers in India who did not think in this way; the trouble was that one who did was sent to Amritsar. The result was described in a speech delivered by the Duke of Connaught in February 1921, when he opened the first session of new legislative council: ‘I have felt around me bitterness and estrangement between those who have been and should be friends. The shadow of Amritsar has lengthened over the fair face of India.’68

  V

  There were very few Indian faces in the crowd when the Duke unveiled a statue of his elder brother, the King Emperor Edward VII, in Calcutta, where shops were closed throughout the city. Cold-shouldering a prince was part of a wider campaign of non-co-operation which had been under way since the Congress’s annual meeting at Nagpur in December 1920. Gandhi had dominated the proceedings by the sheer force of his personality, his ability to bind together Hindus and Muslims, and the persuasiveness of his arguments. He persuaded 1,855 present to vote for his programme, giving him a majority of just under a thousand over those who were uneasy about an alliance with the masses and the disruption of government. Having recovered from his dismay at the violent consequences of the 1919 satyagraha campaign, Gandhi won over Congress to his principles and their use in a new contest designed to make India ungovernable. If this was accomplished, Gandhi predicted that swaraj (self-government) would follow within twelve months.

  His political strategy was called non-co-operation. Participants were instructed to hand back their titles and decorations, stay away from official levées and ceremonies, remove their children from government schools, boycott the courts, withhold taxes, shun imported goods and have nothing to do with the elections to the new legislative assemblies. In October 1921 Congress asked all government servants to leave their posts. This was an audacious initiative which, if successful, would detach from the Raj those Indian collaborators whose assistance was vital and, simultaneously, starve it of cash. As well as jamming the machinery of government, Gandhi was eroding its moral base by promoting Congress as the friend of and spokesman for the peasantry who, like Chesterton’s people of England, had not yet found their voice. There were, of course, practical objections to this campaign. Many lawyers and businessmen were unwilling to bring about their own ruin, and middle-class parents refused to impede their children’s education. Gandhi himself had to reprimand some over-zealous followers whose hartal included cutting off the water supplies of Barisal.69

  Perhaps the most dynamic feature of the 1920–22 satyagraha campaign was Congress’s recruitment of the ryots into the new kisan (peasant) organisations. One of those deeply involved was Jawaharlal Nehru, then in his early thirties, a Harrow- and Cambridge-educated lawyer and son of another Congress barrister, Motilal Nehru. In June 1920, the hot season, he passed through the remote rural backwaters of Awadh, holding meetings and discovering for the first time a wretched India, previously hidden from the sight of people of his background. Country people flocked to his impromptu meetings:

  They were in miserable rags, men and women, but their faces were full of excitement and their eyes glistened and seemed to expect strange happenings which would, as if by a miracle, put an end to their long misery.

  They showered their affection on us and looked on us with loving and hopeful eyes, as if we were the bearers of good tidings, the guides who were to lead them to the promised land. Looking at them and their misery and overflowing gratitude, I was filled with shame, shame at my own easy-going and comfortable life and our petty politics of the city which ignored this vast multitude of semi-naked sons and daughters of India, sorrow at the degradation and overwhelming poverty of India. A new picture of India seemed to rise before me, naked, starving, crushed and utterly miserable. And their faith in us, casual visitors from the distant city, embarrassed me and filled me with a new responsibility that frightened me.70

  Nehru listened to long recitals of the misfortunes of the ryots: high rents and taxes, evictions and maltreatment by taluqdars, their agents and those eternal bugbears, the moneylenders. What struck him most forcibly was how the peasants imagined that his arrival might mark the beginning of a new era in which their burdens would somehow miraculously vanish. This sense of being in the process of moving forward, even if there was no clear destination, permeated a contemporary peasants’ demonstration in M. R. Anand’s The Sword and the Sickle. The crowd marches along, shouting various slogans (‘Relief to the Peasants! Down with Sarkar [government]!’) in a sort of trance:

  Religion mixed with
politics and the name Gandhi completed the curve in a natural flow, so that a completely new spirit of accumulated hatred and some concentration of purpose [appeared], for what the purpose was beyond being flogged no one seemed to have questioned, through obedience to a leader which was a remnant of their spineless acceptance.71

  Anand, who at the age of fourteen had been flogged during the 1919 Punjabi disturbances, afterwards drifted towards Marxism, which made him believe that Gandhi was luring the peasantry away from the only goal which would end their suffering: social revolution.72

  Paying off old scores, rather than an impulse to create a new order, drove some Awadh peasants to loot the property of a taluqdar, shouting pro-Gandhi slogans as they did so. Nehru investigated and discovered that they had been put up to the crime by another landowner, who had persuaded them that this was what Gandhi would have wished.73 After explaining to them that satyagraha ruled out such behaviour, the culprits owned up and were arrested. Their misdeeds were used as the excuse for a systematic official campaign against the kisan movement in the area, and many of its members ended up in gaol. As in 1919, it was impossible to restrain crowds of protesters for whom the morality of satyagraha was incomprehensible. Violence erupted spontaneously in different regions at different times when those at the bottom of the pile snatched the opportunity to plunder or take revenge. The Bombay hartal which marked the arrival of the Prince of Wales at the end of November 1921 turned into a four-day riot in which shops were pillaged and Europeans attacked. In all, fifty-three demonstrators were killed and hundreds wounded when police and troops opened fire.

  Zamindars and moneylenders were attacked in Rangpur, where social tension had increased in consequence of the meeting of the North Bengal Ryot conference, held there at the end of August 1920.74 According to a plain-clothes detective, some of its sessions ‘smelt high of Bolshevism’, an understandable judgement given the tone of one speech: ‘The aristocracy roll in luxury, but the ryots die in poverty; the wealthy man wears fine clothes, but the wives and daughters of the ryots wear rags and tatters.’75 Elsewhere in Bengal liquor and ganja stores were broken into, and Santal tribesmen convinced themselves that wearing the distinctive Gandhi hat gave them immunity from police bullets, a nice merging of old magic and modern politics.76 Outnumbered, and thinly spread, the local police were paralysed in many rural districts.

  By the beginning of 1922 the civil disobedience movement was careering out of control. Confirmation of this came in February with the Chauri Chaura incident, in which a mob, waving swaraj banners, stormed a police station, beat to death twenty-two policemen and burned their bodies. Recognising that he could no longer restrain his followers, Gandhi called off the campaign, advising them to concentrate on spinning, educating the masses and forming local committees. His prestige now stood so high that his adherents acquiesced, although Nehru and many others were bitterly disappointed, believing the movement had been steadily gaining ground. It had, but slowly, and there had been no progress whatsoever in the princely states. It was less easy to work up a head of steam against administrations which were run by Indians than against a government in which white men dominated.

  One outstanding feature of the 1920–22 agitation had been Congress’s ability to exploit localised discontent and amalgamate it with the broader campaign for home rule. In the traditionally volatile and unruly Malabar region, Congress activists had won converts through taking on board the long-standing grievances of the Muslim Mapillas against the largely Hindu landlord class. The Khalifat movement was strong in this region and, during 1920, Congress membership rose from a handful to over 20,000. Gandhi was warmly welcomed during a brief visit in August, although he was uncertain whether the thousands of Muslims in their Khalifat green hats who turned out to cheer him would stick to non-violent forms of protest.77 As was now happening so often throughout India, nationalist agitation was a catalyst for the release of long pent-up resentments and frustration whose mainsprings were regional, social and economic.

  Mapilla rage was directed in more or less equal parts against an infidel government, its local representatives – mainly policemen – and Hindu landlords. It simmered during the first half of 1921 and boiled over in August, when a crowd armed with spears and swords expelled a party of policemen from Pukkotur. One act of defiance spawned others and, within a fortnight, the government’s control over much of Malabar had snapped. The rebels had few firearms, and encounters with the growing number of British and Indian troops summoned to the district were one-sided. At the very end of October, the Mapillas changed their tactics to guerrilla warfare, which prompted a staff officer to liken them to Sinn Féin in Ireland. The answer was to call in specialists in jungle warfare – Gurkhas and Chins and Kachins from the Indo-Burmese borderland.78 It was less easy, however, to find local policemen to take charge of areas which the army had cleared of insurgents. There were, however, captured ‘mops’ who were willing to act as police spies, leading patrols to gangs.79

  Among the rebels’ aims was an independent Muslim kingdom in Malabar, and the process of bringing it about involved the forcible conversion, including circumcision, of nearly 700 Hindus; those who refused, or who happened to be landowners, were murdered.80 At the end of a brief campaign, British losses were 43 dead and 126 wounded. Mapilla casualties were 2,339 dead, 1,652 wounded and just over 6,000 taken prisoner. A further 39,400 surrendered, among them 67 who were later suffocated to death in a closed railway carriage. It appeared that the ventilators had been inadvertently papered over. Inevitably in such a campaign there were charges and counter-charges of atrocity; in one report a police officer cynically noted that a local headman ‘has made no complaints but he has probably been publicly buggered and his women raped’.81 It was a strange irony that one of the detachments that took part in these operations was the Leinster regiment from Southern Ireland, a country which, in 1922 and after a three-year partisan campaign, had won a form of independence from Britain.

  Gandhi and many other senior Congress figures were encouraged by what had happened in Ireland, as were nationalists in Egypt. Hopes that India might achieve what Ireland had were premature; in 1922 the Raj was still firmly in the saddle, although its officials had suffered some nerve-wracking moments during the past two years. The commander-in-chief, Lord (‘Rawly’) Rawlinson, had no difficulties in allocating troops to meet emergencies. Like many others at the top, he believed that Gandhi was ‘manifestly incapable of leading the “frankenstein” which he has created’.82 The view from below was different: Jawaharlal Nehru thought that its ancient mainstay, prestige, was withering in the face of the satyagraha protests. He and his father, Motilal, were arrested at the end of 1921 and given brief prison sentences, he by a court in a native state, Nabha. So far, the protest movement had made virtually no headway in the princely states, whose governments had taken a firm line with agitation. Their loyalty did not prevent some of their rulers, including the Raja of Nabha, from expressing disquiet over what had occurred at Amritsar and in the Punjab during 1919.83 In the November of that year, Chelmsford took the precaution of giving an address to the princes in which he emphasised the need to smother sedition and reminded them that those behind the present agitation would not respect traditional authority.84 It was a message that was taken to heart. In M. R. Anand’s Confessions of a Lover, set in the early 1920s, the student hero is warned to steer clear of nationalist politics because his college is funded by the Maharaja of Patiala, who was pro-British.

  The Raj’s coercive machinery was able to cope with the restlessness without resort to the methods of O’Dwyer and Dyer, although the prison system was briefly shaken by the influx of thousands of protesters. There was also the bonus that flare-ups tended to be short-lived and, of course, sporadic. Moreover, it was common for non-violent protests to run out of steam, especially in the face of official determination. Bombay’s protest movement collapsed after the riots and shootings at the end of November 1921, and many of its working-class supporters
from the docks and mills turned to Trade Unionism.85 It was also impossible to obtain solidarity among what might be termed the ‘official and semi-official’ nationalists, who refused to jeopardise their positions and salaries by withdrawing from government. For them to stick rigidly to the principles of non-co-operation was impossible: if they did so within government departments and legislatures they would harm the welfare and interests of their countrymen.