Working within the administration was already securing advantages. Under pressure from the Indian members of the Viceroy’s legislative council, the Indian government refused to augment its military budget to satisfy London. In particular, the Indians objected to the deployment of sepoys in support of Britain’s newly acquired pretensions in the Middle East. If Indian soldiers were to guard British oil wells in Persia, then Britain rather than India should foot the bill. The alternative was raise the military allowance to £60 million a year, two-fifths of India’s revenues, something which in the present state of affairs was unthinkable. The ultra-imperialist Chief of Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, grumbled that Montagu and Chelmsford were ‘terrified of taxing India’. Maybe so, but they got their way.86
Dismayed by this response, Sir Henry Wilson gloomily wondered whether the Cabinet was already secretly thinking in terms of giving up India.87 It was a thought which crossed the minds of Dyer’s supporters, who detected a faltering of the will to rule in London and Delhi. What they had failed to recognise was that the India of 1922 was not that of 1919. The events of the intervening three years had revealed that the political opponents of British rule were now capable of mobilising considerable public support. India was not yet ungovernable, and there were still large areas barely affected by Congress agents, but the spread of unrest was a sharp reminder of that old truth: India could not be ruled without the co-operation of a substantial portion of its population.
This attempt to shift what was, in effect, the balance of political power within India had been undertaken by Gandhi. For those who dealt with him he was a perplexing phenomenon: the charismatic leader of a mass movement who, unlike his counterparts in Europe during the second quarter of the twentieth-century, abhorred violence. Furthermore, he had turned his back on those forces which were transforming the contemporary world: industrialisation, international trade and collectivism. In an age of secularism, he insisted that politics could not be separated from religion, and that metaphysical thought was the only guide to political action. On the face of it, he had nothing with which to appeal to the élite that had hitherto guided Congress and he never held any office within the movement. Nonetheless, he convinced the bulk of its members to swallow their prejudices and follow him along a path which seemed extremely hazardous. It was; but at the same time, it produced results. The combination of satyagraha, populism and non-co-operation seemed the only way by which the Raj could be made to yield. As Gandhi had repeatedly claimed, the British were susceptible to moral pressure, but they had not buckled. He had given the Raj a rough passage, but it had not given ground: the Rowlatt laws remained and swaraj had not been achieved by 1922.
For all his public humility, Gandhi was at heart a vain man who wanted Indian freedom on his own terms and through his own methods. When both had failed, he stepped down and turned his attention to spinning and Hindu education, giving the impression that he considered these equally important as the achievement of Indian nationhood. They were, for both were part of Gandhi’s programme of national redemption, which was a vital part of the struggle for independence. So was he; his semi-monastic retirement in February 1922 was followed by six years in which Congressional energies were largely consumed by sterile internal debate. The Raj breathed again.
3
This Wonderful Land:
Anglo - Indian
Perspectives
I
On 7 January 1922 readers of the Sphere were presented with two starkly contrasting images of India. The first showed a burning hut, the home of a ‘loyal’ Hindu who had been victimised for the help he had given the security forces in the bush war against the Mapillas. They were ‘fanatical and malevolent’ rebels and dacoits, preying on the Malabar Hindus, who were a ‘gentle, peace-loving people, clean and courteous’. The photograph and its accompanying story were a vivid reminder that the Raj kept the peace and protected the weak. Its service to the progress of India was revealed by the second image, which showed the Prince of Wales conferring degrees on Indian graduates at the University of Lucknow. The same issue contained other, more glamorous scenes from the royal tour: the gorgeously robed Maharaja of Bikaner, his mailed lancers and exotically dressed sword dancers. The prince was lavishly received in every state he visited and the colourful ceremonies of greeting were ideally suited for what are now called ‘photo-opportunities’. There were also plenty of excuses for journalistic hyperbole. After the Prince’s reception at Udaipur, Reuter’s correspondent wrote: ‘Here indeed was the shining East – the mystic East – the East whose call conjures fancy with magical and fantastical spells.’1
The royal tour during the winter and spring of 1921–22 was designed to reassure the British people that the heart of the Indian empire remained sound and steadfast in spite of the past two years of protest and disorder. Glimpses of the prince shaking hands with grey-bearded and medalled veterans, riding on an elephant, posing beside one of the many tigers he had shot or with well-stuck pigs that had fallen to the royal spear indicated that he was a man fit to become King Emperor. A newspaperman noted that the future Edward VIII’s sportsmanship won over even the Awadh nationalists. Congress hats disappeared from the urban crowds, and in the countryside, ‘Natives completely won by a fleeting smile from the Prince would prostrate themselves to kiss the dust over which his car had passed.’2 And then there was the glittering assembly of fifty princes at Delhi who, according to the Graphic, ‘with manifest sincerity testified their fidelity to the Throne’.3
This was all very comforting and just what the the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, had in mind in 1919 when he had proposed a series of royal peregrinations around the empire. Young, handsome and with a breezy informal manner, the prince would win hearts and stiffen that attachment to the monarchy which was the principal bond that held together a scattered and disparate empire. This was emphasised by the prince at the political highlight of his tour, the dedication of the huge statue of his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, in Calcutta. He recalled how the Queen Empress had had ‘the peculiar power of being in touch with all classes on this continent’ and that now her dreams were being fulfilled as India moved towards responsible government. Genuine affection for the Queen Empress had to be transferred to her successors. ‘I want to know you and I want you to know me’ the prince told British and Indian grandees as he stepped ashore at Bombay. But the human touch which worked so well in Canada and Australia was unsuited to India, or so the prince’s father, George V, imagined. On his advice his son was hedged with protocol and guided by officials who equated regality with stiffness. For them, the Prince of Wales was in India to remind its people that they were the subjects of the King Emperor, which was why Gandhi and Congress had appealed for a boycott of all royal ceremonies. The British press claimed that this attempt to shun the prince was an abject failure, citing the crowds which turned up to see him as evidence. It was not; the urge to witness a splendid public spectacle did not mean that all who succumbed to it were simultaneously converted to supporters of the Raj. A Congressman could and did enjoy watching the prince play polo, which he did well, without shedding his political opinions. Among the sheaves of press photographs of Indian crowds is one in which an onlooker wears the distinctive Gandhi skullcap.4 Prince Edward himself was astute enough to observe that Indians ‘found it hard to resist the great public shows being organised in my honour’. As his father had reminded him before his departure, ritual and pageantry impressed ‘the Oriental mind’.5
The British mind was also open to such forms of persuasion. Newsreels, press reports and pictures in the weekly illustrated journals regularly presented the public with the magnificent façade of the Indian empire. Princely India was always in the forefront of public consciousness, thanks to the appearance of princes as guests at coronations, royal jubilees, weddings and funerals. Ever since the Golden Jubilee of 1887 these had been essentially imperial celebrations contrived to proclaim the empire’s unity and strength. Martial India wa
s much in evidence. Indian ADCs and orderlies in striking uniforms and festooned with medals earned in their service attended Queen Victoria, Edward VII and George V, and Indian cavalrymen were regular performers in state pageantry of the new, imperial monarchy. The Queen Empress expressly asked that Indian horsemen escorted her carriage on its journey through London to St Paul’s Cathedral for the Diamond Jubilee thanksgiving service on 22 June 1897. As the Bengal lancers trotted up Ludgate Hill, a voice in the crowd shouted, ‘Three cheers for India,’ and there was a hearty response. The spectators were watching more a display of imperial muscle, for among the contingents were Sikhs, once Britain’s fiercest enemies and now some of the Queen’s most loyal subjects and bravest soldiers. In India and elsewhere, Britain conquered and then embraced the defeated, winning their respect and friendship.
The enthusiast who had invited hurrahs for India may well have visited the spectacular Empire of India Exhibition, which had been staged between August and October 1895 and, in response to popular demand, between May and October 1896. It was the creation of Imrie Kiralfy, an impresario, and was a combination of pageant, staged at the 6,000-seat Empress’s Theatre, Earls Court, and an instructive and entertaining exhibition nearby. The stage show was a sequence of scenes illustrating a thousand years of Indian history. There were grand spectacles, melodramatic incidents and a lively script in verse. The tableau which showed the Maratha hero Shivaji included some faqirs:
Cursing, crying, flesh chastising,
See us Fakirs, martyrising;
All the world despising.
The climax came with ‘The Glorification of Victoria, The Empress Queen’ and was marked by an imperial ode:
Mother, crowned of East and West!
Thou, for us, art proved the Best;
India, nestling at thy Knee,
Hath thy peace, and praiseth thee;
In their Heaven our Gods recline,
Well content that we are thine,
Jai! Jai! Victoria! Be this seen:
Eastern Empress! Western Queen!
Before or after the show, the audience could stroll through an Indian wonderland which, in many ways, resembled the great pleasure gardens of the eighteenth century. There were Indian streets, chowks (open town centres), mosques, a curry house, shops inhabited by native craftsmen, faqirs, snake charmers and jugglers, and Indian plants and shrubs grew in the gardens by the walkways. The site and theatre were on the newly-opened District Railway and proved an immense attraction for family excursions: about half a million saw the pageant and twelve million attended the exhibition.6
What they experienced both entertained and informed. The Victorian Raj represented the consummation of India’s history: a golden age in which enlightenment was triumphant and for which all Indians were grateful. Within a few years the actual splendour of the Raj appeared on cinema screens, with newsreels of the 1903 and 1911 durbars. In the latter year there was another India Exhibition at Crystal Palace, complete with a raja’s palace, a bazaar and a jungle in which animals wandered around. Like its predecessor, it was immensely popular with predominantly lower-middle and working-class day trippers.7 For a substantial part of the British population, India was not a remote, unknown region, but a pictureseque wonderland peopled by quaint but loyal people, glad to be ruled by Britain.
Spectacular imperial festivities, whether royal celebrations or exhibitions, were part of a process by which the public interest in the empire was aroused. On the whole governments approved, although the more serious-minded late-Victorian and Edwardian imperialists were uneasy about the empire becoming associated with nothing more than a cheery day out or a music-hall chorus. They could, however, take some comfort from the fact that there were other, more didactic but still palatable ways in which the imperial message could be transmitted to the masses. There were the lantern-slide lectures which were popular diversions before and for many years after the advent of the cinema and wireless. Among the many Indian subjects was George V’s 1911 Delhi durbar, which offered a colourful evening’s entertainment with pictures of the King Emperor riding into Delhi and receiving the homage of the princes. The notes, supplied with the slides, drew the audience’s attention to the ‘frank enthusiasm’ of the Delhi crowds whose ‘excitement rose to fever pitch’ as the royal cavalcade approached. The King Emperor’s meeting with the Mutiny veterans was singled out. ‘One is glad to see the breasts of these noble old fellows covered with medals, which ensure them the highest respect in their villages and among their neighbours, as evidencing the fact that they are men whom the great British Raj delighteth to honour.’8
Through its public-service broadcasts, the BBC developed the traditions of the lantern-slide lecture. The continuing political turmoil and the fact that the British Parliament was having to decide the country’s political future made India a favourite subject for short, educational talks by experts. During the first part of 1929, Professor H. G. Dalway Turnbull outlined the tenets of India’s principal religions in a series of lectures which, while largely factual, included some personal comments. Hinduism, he observed, was a powerful social cement in times of upheaval, but its doctrines drained men of any ‘spirit of adventure’. It was also, as it had been for nineteenth-century reformers and missionaries, an impediment to progress. Describing Hindu festivals and pilgrimages, the professor remarked that India was still ‘a regular jungle of popular superstitions . . . much like those of the Dark Ages in Europe’.9
Modern, enlightened India was given its voice by Dhanvanth Rama Rau, who spoke on the women of India during the autumn of 1936. She described everyday chores undertaken by the Indian housewife and the increasing part women were playing in their country’s public affairs. As well as being the pivots of their households, Indian women were becoming moral watchdogs, campaigning to raise the age of consent and reduce prostitution. The educated classes now universally condemned child marriages, but she defended arranged unions, which usually turned out happily, unlike so many entered on by free choice in Britain.10 Older Indian marriage customs were described by Miss Mira Devi, who spoke about life inside the zenana in October 1937. She emphasised that women hidden from the eyes of men enjoyed an agreeable existence, in which considerable time and money were devoted to the purchase of clothes and ‘on making themselves beautiful’. British women may well have been envious, but there were drawbacks, since the mother-in-law traditionally was mistress of the Indian household and the husband had to be obeyed unquestioningly as ‘lord and master’.11 Other, less contentious subjects covered by the BBC Home and Empire services during the 1920s and 1930s included peasant life in the Hunza district, Indian wildlife, and the language of Assam.
Recent political changes were occasionally explained. A former chairman of India’s legislative council, Sir Frederick White, discussed the difficulties faced by the new elected ministries. The greatest of these was what he called ‘the devil of feud’ which prevented harmony between mutually resentful religious and racial groups.12 A veteran Indian newspaperman, Sir Stanley Reed, used a talk on the opening of the new official buildings in New Delhi at the end of 1936 for an impassioned defence of the Raj. The great legislative and administrative complex was, he told listeners:
. . . the symbol of our crowning work in India – a work which rescued this wonderful land and its generous peoples from anarchy, established the rule of law, implanted the seeds of human freedom, and now has passed the main responsibility of governance into the hands of a United India, retaining only certain essential powers until she reaches her destined status, a self-governing Dominion freely knit in the British Commonwealth.13
Like the Prince of Wales some years before, the speaker portrayed India’s tentative steps towards self-government as a significant milestone on a journey towards national advancement, whose direction had been preordained by a wise and benevolent Raj. This was an optimistic gloss, for in India the recent reforms had been seen as too slow and timid, and in Britain a substantial lobby had denounced t
hem as too fast and reckless. Whenever possible, the BBC always endeavoured to be positive and impartial.
II
By the standards of the time, the broadcasters’ approach to India would have been regarded as too ‘highbrow’ and, therefore, unlikely to engage the masses. For them, India remained what it had always been in the popular imagination, a land of adventure, romance and mystery. In this form it continued to provide the scenarios and background for popular fiction, and, during the 1930s, movies. Although he died in 1902, G. A. Henty remained perhaps the greatest source of Indian lore for his countrymen. His was a narrow but attractive vision of a country filled with bold and resourceful young men serving the Raj with their wits and their swords. His tales of derring-do captured the imagination of the young, and their impact cannot be underestimated. Hugh Martin, the son of an Indian official who joined the ICS in 1938, recalled:
From an early age I had been attracted by the idea of Empire, one of my favourite authors was G. A. Henty and I knew as much about the acquisition of the Indian Empire as I did about the Carthaginian War. I had enjoyed Kipling too, particularly when my mother read him aloud. Greek and Roman History seemed to lead in the same direction.14
The distinctive flavour of Henty’s India lingered on in the North-West Frontier until the end of the Raj. It can be savoured in a lance corporal’s memories of campaigning there during 1937: ‘Razmak to me was as soldiering should be, a tough soul-stirring experience, something that I as an eager young NCO really enjoyed, each and every column a story unto itself.’15 The same sense of excitement and love of adventure surface in the memoirs of officers like John Masters, who served on the frontier between the wars.
For all his often creaking plots and wooden characterisation, Henty offered an enthralling picture of the fighting man’s India, with which he had a brief acquaintance as a correspondent covering the Prince of Wales’s tour in 1874–75. His nine Indian novels were about various stages in the country’s conquest, and their heroes are all athletic, often harum-scarum boys just out of school and ready to take on the world. Their exploits are intermingled with the deeds of actual heroes such as Clive and Sir Arthur Wellesley and, from time to time, Henty delivers a history lesson to explain the intricacies of high politics and strategy. Morality is clear-cut: the British stand for humanity and justice and their adversaries are either parasites or rogues, or both. This is a land where the strong get what they want and are admired for it, as Percy, the hero of Through the Sikh Wars, discovers when he enters the Company’s service and is told: ‘What do the natives care for our learning? It is our pluck and endurance and the downright love of adventure that have made us the masters of the great part of India, and ere long will make us the rulers of the whole of it.’ Indians rarely intrude into this world, save as faithful servants or villains, and when not outwitting Marathas or dacoits, the heroes stay within the boundaries of the sahibs’ India, usually shooting tigers and spitting pigs with a bravado that earns the admiration of their superiors.
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