Raj
Page 65
Ghul Khan’s plot is frustrated thanks to Carruthers’s vigilance, the courage of Azim and the timely arrival of a relief column. The new raja finally enters Tokut with his British friends, from whom he had learned the values of a Raj which prizes integrity, fair play and humanity. Filmed in technicolor and including location footage shot in Chitral, The Drum is visually stunning and the battle scenes exciting and authentic, as they ought to have been, for Korda had hired regular British and Indian troops.
The film is a strong apologia for the Raj, and was welcomed by British audiences at a time when the North-West Frontier was making headlines. On 17 November 1936 the Daily Sketch led with the story ‘British Column Ambushed’ and a sensational account of how a force had been ‘lured by treachery’ into a Waziri valley, where it had suffered heavy losses – in fact seventeen dead. This skirmish was part of large-scale operations then in hand against Haji Mirza Ali Khan, the Faqir of Ipi, a charismatic holy man who had been rallying the Wazirs with the well-worn but still potent slogan of ‘Islam in Danger’. Like Ghul Khan in The Drum, the Faqir was suspected of soliciting arms from Britain’s enemies, and, on 16 April 1937, the Daily Herald claimed that he was being assisted by Mussolini through the Italian embassy in Kabul. This was strenuously denied by the British government. Nonetheless, there was a secret anxiety that, in the event of a European war, Italy might actively foster unrest on the North-West Frontier.48 Italian and German propagandists used the frontier war as a device to blacken Britain’s name and somehow exonerate their own governments’ crimes. In November 1938 and in response to British press outrage at the horrors of the Krystallnacht, Volkische Beobachter alleged that Wazirs, fighting for their independence, had had their land invaded by tanks and aircraft and that thousands of women and children had been killed by bombs and shells.49 Sensitivity to such criticism may explain why The Drum did not include aircraft and armoured vehicles in the Raj’s armoury, even though the film was set in the present day.
What entertained British film-goers, enraged Indian. When The Drum was shown in Bombay and Madras, indignant audiences stormed out of the cinema and protested in the streets against what they considered to be British propaganda. The Indian government, which already had its hands full with communal and political unrest, ordered this fresh source of tension to be withdrawn from circulation.The Drum’s reception in India justified, after the event, a ban on the making of The Relief of Lucknow in 1938, which the Indian and British governments feared would exacerbate racial tension. Official censorship did not extend to the press, for, soon after, Picture Post did a feature on the Mutiny, illustrated by contemporary photographs. The text admitted that Indians were no longer ‘wholly satisfied’ with the Raj, but it still offered them ‘vast benefits – medical, sanitary, educational and economic’.50
Nervousness over the presentation of the Indian Mutiny for a mass audience was a symptom of a wider anxiety about how the empire was treated by film-makers. Ever since its foundation in 1912, the British Board of Film Censors had proscribed a number of subjects, which included misconduct by British servicemen and, from 1928, any hint of sexual attraction between coloured men and white women. The celluloid sahib had no choice but to behave impeccably, since film-makers were forbidden to represent, ‘White men in a state of degradation amidst Far Eastern and Native surroundings,’ or suggest that British overseas possessions were ‘lawless sinks of iniquity’.
Such interdicts were unneccessary, since Hollywood and British studios saw the empire through the eyes of Kipling and Henty as backcloths against which heroes could perform their exploits and keep audiences on the edges of their seats. The political message of 1930s films about India was favourable to a Raj which was always served by honourable, dedicated and gallant men.
VI
Cinema images and scripts confirmed popular perceptions of India which had their roots in the 1880s and 1890s. Images of India first projected by Kipling proved remarkably durable, even though their verisimilitude was sometimes questionable. ‘Rudyard Kipling made the modern soldier’ asserted Sir George Younghusband, who believed that rankers had deliberately modelled themselves on the characters in Kipling’s ballads and short stories.
My early recollections of the British soldier are of a bluff, rather surly person, never the least jocose or light-hearted, except perhaps when he had too much beer. He was brave always, but with a sullen, stubborn bravery. No Tipperary or kicking footballs about.
Afterwards, soldiers self-consciously adopted the demeanour and argot of Kipling’s Cockneyfied, chipper soldiers; or so Younghusband and his brother officers believed.51 Kipling’s picture of India certainly had a strong and lasting appeal for soldiers. His lines on the terrors that awaited the British fighting man who had the misfortune to lie wounded on the ‘Afghan plains’ chilled the hearts of Private Swindlehurst and men from the Lancashire Fusiliers in 1920, as they prepared to embark for India and a posting on the North-West Frontier.52
Everyone who went to India travelled with preconceptions gathered from reading, hearsay, the advice of those who had gone before, and, from 1920 onwards, the cinema. After a visit to the small princely state of Khairpur in 1916, Lady Lawrence listed her impressions:
Gorgeousness and squalor. Pageantry and over eating and making interminable state banquets. Intrigue, Red carpets. Rams fighting, fireworks, treachery and whispers of murder. Everything one is led to expect in a petty native state in fact.53
A trawl through other diaries and the contemporary reports of the Foreign Department would have revealed all these features, although randomly spread. Like everyone else who tried to portray India or make sense of it, Lady Lawrence fell back on generalisations or rough and ready syntheses.
Individual prejudice invariably dictated how India was interpreted. Between 1939 and 1947 the country came under closer scrutiny as thousands of British national servicemen were posted there. They brought with them assumptions about the country that had been picked up at home, and they did not always slip comfortably into traditional Anglo-Indian habits of mind. Captain Kingsford, a Marxist and an army education officer who arrived in 1944, was shaken by the degradation he witnessed and for which he was unprepared. He remembered his first impression of Bombay on a train bound for Peshawar:
Cocooned in my first-class carriage, I felt the oppression of body and mind lift. I might still shudder at the sight of the poor, skinny, spindle-shanked, emaciated, filthy, diseased; they would be everywhere. But is specially horrible on the city pavements. The day I walked to the dhobi’s [laundryman] quarters to get the washing as he had failed to deliver it, the wretched beings there, the old grey man, half-naked, emaciated asleep on the ground, and the small baby on a box, its thighs quite shrunken to a chicken’s wing, flies crawling over its penis; outside Lloyd’s Bank, a woman advanced in pregnancy lying prone on the pavement, her swollen belly fully exposed, her naked breast clutched by a baby spawling naked beside her. . . . Dirt prevailed everywhere, except in the expensive quarters. As you went along the street everyone seemed to be mixed up with the dust and refuse which the women scavenged for in the early morning, cool and golden before the heat came down. When the monsoon came the poor cowered and clutched their soaked flimsy rags to their skinny bodies. Those who were slightly better off struggled for places on trams, buses and trains, forcing their way into an already solid mass of bodies. The overwhelming impression of chronic poverty had depressed us and induced apathy in most of us as well. I had become convinced of the essential hollowness and rottenness of our existence in India.54
Black, East African askaris, who served on the Burma front in 1944–45 and had only encountered prosperous Indian traders at home, were astonished by the poverty and begging they saw in Bengal.55 United States servicemen (250,000 passed through India during the war) reacted in the same way, and soon transferred to Indians the same racial arrogance which they practised at home towards Negroes.56 American journalists took a similar line; one wrote at the end of 1942: ‘
India is a miserably poor, hungry, retarded country. Most Indians are half-starved and three-fourths naked.’57
British troops too were stunned by what they saw of India, which seemed to be at odds with what they had been told about a benign, progressive Raj. Conscripts of the 1st Cameron Highlanders, their heads full of left-wing press reports of British misrule, found themselves being converted from thinking ‘Why haven’t we done more for these people?’ to ‘What can you do with these people?’58 Les Blackie, a Tyneside national serviceman in the Tank Corps, concluded that the Indians were their own worst enemies. ‘Religion,’ he told his parents in 1946, ‘retards the advance of civilisation . . . How can a country get on,’ he asked, ‘where boys are married at 14 and girls at ten and under?’ The hucksters and beggars who hung around outside his barracks were ‘black chunks of laziness’ who, when not attempting to swindle British servicemen, did nothing but ‘beg, pray and squabble’.59
Public defecation, an indifference to elementary sanitary precautions, and women carrying heavy burdens or undertaking heavy labour were regarded with a mixture of ridicule and disdain.60 Such sights had aroused no adverse comments among soldiers a hundred, even fifty years before, because they would have been familiar to men raised in rural and urban slums. All that was different was the scale of deprivation. Britain had changed and was changing for the better, whereas India appeared to have stayed still, which was puzzling for a generation that had been brought up to believe that the peoples of the empire were making great leaps forward. In his last Empire Day broadcast before the outbreak of the war, George VI had spoken of an empire united by ‘freedom, just laws and mutual confidence’. Symbolic sculptures of ‘Science’, ‘Industry’ and ‘Health’ had adorned the 1938 Empire Exhibition at Glasgow. It was the last of its kind and, unlike its predecessors, eschewed the picturesque, preferring through futuristic architecture to advertise a forward-looking empire which was striding onwards and upwards. Seen from the standpoint of the transient British serviceman, India appeared exempt from this process.
The war eroded barriers in Britain, but they stayed firm in India. ‘The British civvies out here always classed the common soldier as scum!’, Les Blackie told his parents. ‘You see they have found that everyone does just as they order, due to the fact their servants etc are all “darkies’’.’61 Other hierarchies remained frozen: in his autobiography, Bugles and a Tiger, John Masters recalled how in the 1930s Indian army officers sat, quite literally, well below the salt in British regimental messes. As a Gurkha officer, he was repelled by ‘niggers’, ‘wogs’, ‘Hindoos’, and ‘black-bellied bastards’: terms which still held their place in the vocabulary of racial abuse among some British other ranks and officers, and did so, sadly, until the final hours of the Raj.62 ‘To me already, from evenings I had spent in the messes of Indian regiments in Razmak and on column, they were Dogras, Bengalis, Afridis, Konkani Mahrattas,’ he remembered.
As always with India, one impression is contradicted by another. Relations between Indians and men of the 9th Lancers stationed on the frontier in the late 1930s were friendly. James Squire, then regimental riding master, enjoyed polo chukkas with his opposite numbers from Indian cavalry regiments – ‘They were splendid chaps among whom I made many friends.’63 Touring the bazaars of Peshawar in the early 1920s, Private Swindlehurst of the Lancashire Fusiliers met an Indian with a shared interest in photography, which formed the basis for friendship. General Palit, one of the advance guard of Indian commissioned officers, thought that the social hurdles which separated him from some of his British colleagues were knocked away by the war, which brought with it an influx of young officers from Britain who were untainted by old prejudices.64
Understanding came through knowledge, and John Masters believed that where India was concerned his countrymen had little of either.65 Very few ever met Indians; in 1931 the census revealed that 95,000 people in Britain had been born in India, and nearly all of them were of British parentage. Most Indians who lived in Britain were students, birds of passage confined to the university towns and cities and predominantly middle-class. A few, mostly physicians and former Bengali seamen, had settled in the country. The latter ran a handful of Indian restaurants, most of whose customers were Indians or Britons who had lived in India and developed a taste for its cooking. Eating a curry was an opportunity to relive old times; British customers liked to be called ‘sahib’ and referred to the waiters as ‘bearers’.66
Ignorance of India was often collosal and inexcusable; Sir Zafrulla Khan, Minister of Commerce and a member of the viceregal council, once met a prominent British politician who believed that all Indians were Hindus. Newspaper reports of communal and political violence suggested that the entire country was convulsed with disorder, and literature, both fictional and factional, was often ill-balanced and misleading. He noted approvingly that in the wake of the outrage provoked by Miss Mayo’s Mother India, an Indian had travelled to the United States and had returned to publish Uncle Sham, a catalogue of American excesses and vice.67
The truth was that India, like the rest of the empire, was taken for granted by the man and woman in the street. Its problems and future were relatively insignificant issues for a people facing economic stagnation, mass unemployment and, from 1933, Britain’s relations with rising, virile, jealous and expansionist powers: Germany, Italy and Japan. In the latter context the empire did matter, for it made Britain a world power and was an invaluable asset in an increasingly hostile world. ‘The Empire true, we can depend on you’ ran a line in ‘There Will Always Be An England’, a rousing patriotic song which appeared in October 1939. In many respects its sentiments belonged to that era of flag-waving jingoism which had been brutally terminated by the mass slaughter of 1914–18. Inter-war imperialism had been soberer, concentrating on the serious responsibilities of empire, although the public’s taste for old-style imperial adventure stories remained as strong as ever. But those who read Kipling or thrilled to the derring-do of Lives of the Bengal Lancers or The Drum were also aware from the newspapers that Indians were becoming less and less satisified with the wise paternalism of the sahibs who, it had always been said, stood between them and anarchy.
4
A Great Trial of
Strength : Power
Struggles, 1922–42
I
After 1922 the Raj recovered its former composure, while its opponents fell temporarily into disarray. On his release from prison in 1924, Gandhi threw himself into preaching the gospel of cotton spinning to the peasantry. Congress was in eclipse, with its members quarrelling among themselves about aims and methods. Hindu–Muslim harmony evaporated after Turkey’s new president, Kamal Atatürk, abolished the caliphate and with it the reason for the Khalifat movement. Communal disorders increased in frequency and virulence.
Sectarian violence was one of the principal concerns of the new Viceroy, Lord Irwin (later Lord Halifax), a pragmatic Conservative aristocrat of immense height and Anglo-Catholic inclinations. His appointment in 1926 by Stanley Baldwin raised some eyebrows because Irwin knew little of India beyond what he had gathered during a tour twenty-two years ago, but, as the Prime Minister recognised, India needed a man whose mind was flexible rather than over-burdened with local knowledge or prejudices. Henceforward, British policy consisted in balancing the need to keep overall control at the centre at the same time as making concessions to Indians who were pressing for greater autonomy. The lines to be followed were those laid down by the Montagu–Chelmsford measures: Britain retained responsibility for India’s defence and foreign policies while Indians took care of some financial and all social and welfare matters through their elected provincial and national legislatures. A great deal of good was accomplished by these bodies, not least the acceleration of the programme for innoculation against cholera.1
Co-operation with the Raj had much to offer Indians. Success and honours were the rewards of those who worked with the British. M. R. Anand’s fictional Sir Todar M
al, Knight Commander of the Indian Empire, barrister, official prosecutor and a member of the Daulatpur municipal council, counted for something in his community. He wore a frock coat, carried a gold watch and chain and felt proud to ride through the bazaar with an Englishman in his carriage. Many envied his izzat (dignity), some thought him a ‘traitor’, and ‘everyone was afraid of him’.2 There were plenty of Sir Todars at the disposal of the Raj, and they served their country well and also themselves, their kinsfolk and friends, or so the jealous believed.
The system under which they worked was due for official assessment in 1929, the year of a British general election. If the Labour Party won, then the review of Indian constitutional arrangements might be favourable to Congress, which had long had close links with the British Left. This was the fear of the Secretary of State for India, Lord Birkenhead (formerly F. E. Smith) and so he brought forward the date of the commission. It was headed by Sir John Simon, a virtuous but lifeless political packhorse, instructed to visit India, discover how the Montagu–Chelmsford arrangements were working and suggest possible adjustments. With the exception of the Labour MP, Major Clement Attlee, the committee members were all undistinguished British Parliamentarians. The message, as read by Congressmen, was clear and harsh: India’s political future was to be shaped from above and without reference to its peoples’ wishes.