by John Keay
Wilberforce had never been to India. Nor had James Mill who, as a historian and then as an influential employee of the Company in London, subjected the theory and practice of government in India to the scientific analysis of Utilitarian political thought. Inexperience of India’s beguiling humanity and its bewildering diversity lent great clarity to such exercises. To Mill and his associates, including his son and successor in the employ of the Company, John Stuart Mill, it was axiomatic that ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ depended on the formulation of laws whose ‘utility’ and morality were to be judged by simple, quantifiable criteria of maximum benefit. In Britain the Industrial Revolution had sparked expectations of a steady steam-driven progress towards ever greater prosperity and betterment, in which all would be entitled to participate through social and electoral reform. Although a pre-industrial society such as India’s was clearly no candidate for enfranchisement, there too reform and modernisation were deemed the order of the day.
‘Light taxes and good laws – nothing more is wanting for national and individual prosperity all over the globe,’ declared the elder Mill. Bentinck concurred, and during his long governor-generalship he pruned expenditure, legislated furiously, and pushed through a variety of modernising reforms. But pruning expenditure was not without effect on the army, where allowances were reduced; nor did it lead to lighter taxes. Taxes being principally land revenue, a voluminous controversy was underway between advocates of the ‘Permanent’ revenue settlement introduced in Bengal by Cornwallis and those of the ryotwari system favoured by Munro in the south. The former, influenced by existing Bengali practice and by British ideas of a propertied aristocracy, made the major zamindars responsible for collection and payment; recognised as lords of the land, they became in effect landlords. The Munro system, influenced by the more self-sufficient traditions of south Indian villages, depended on direct collection from individual ‘ryots’, or peasant farmers, and regarded all superior intermediaries as parasites. Utilitarian thought naturally favoured the latter which, with considerable modification, was eventually applied in the Maratha lands and then in what the British called the ‘North-West Provinces’ around Delhi and Agra.
But in heated argument over the respective merits of the two systems, it was often overlooked that both rested on some novel assumptions of disturbing potential: revenue responsibility was taken to indicate actual ownership of the lands in question; default in payment was taken as grounds for dispossession by legal process; and enthusiasm for all such settlements presumed a maximum of assessment and a minimum of exception. The cultivator, unless he was also the revenue payer, thus became a mere tenant; and, by both tenant and landlord, security of tenure could no longer be taken for granted. Heavy assessments were no novelty, although they had usually been interspersed with periods of respite or relaxation. Under the British the demand was inelastic and inexorable. If debts incurred to meet the demand went unpaid, creditors foreclosed, and ‘properties’ were distrained by the courts, then sold on the open market. Although the accusation that the British Collector in alliance with the Indian moneylender undermined the country’s rural economy may be an oversimplification, government intervention on a continuous and disruptive basis could not but attract such criticism and occasion deep hostility.
This was heightened by a flurry of legislation in the name of Mill’s ‘good laws’. To assist Bentinck in their formulation, Thomas Babington Macaulay, the son of an eminent Evangelical leader, was sent to India as Law Member on the Governor-General’s Council. His model Penal Code was not introduced until two decades later, and his most telling contribution to the cause of reform proved to be in the field of education. The missionaries had identified literacy and education as essential to their promotion of Christianity. Macaulay, with a Utilitarian’s belief in European science and culture as the epitome of modernity and enlightenment, insisted that it be English literacy and a Western curriculum. His object was, as he put it, to create ‘a class of persons Indian in colour and blood, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect … who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern’.19 The available funds were paltry but the principle was accepted and, as of 1835, for government as for education, English became the officially recognised language. Instead of the British essaying a slender command of Indian languages and then venturing across the cultural chasm to accommodate India’s institutions and traditions, Indians were to be encouraged onto the rungs of Anglicisation and thence into the realms of Western thought and science.
It was a momentous decision which Indian opinion would eventually applaud. Demands for independence, when they materialised, would be couched in the language, and based on the principles, of Western liberal thought; the British would thus be hoist on their own petard. Arguably it also spared India the revolutions which would eventually overtake China and Russia. But it was not made without severing support for the study of Sanskrit and Persian, alienating those brahmans and maulvis (Muslim educators) who taught and cherished these languages, and savagely disparaging the arts, literature and traditions of ancient India. In arguing his case on the grounds that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’, Macaulay was betraying even the scholarship of his fellow-countrymen. His notorious tirade against ‘medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long, and geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter’, though meant as ridicule, now reads as merely ridiculous.
Just as with the Evangelical condemnation of India’s religions, so this assault on India’s literary heritage affected the rulers as much as the ruled. For the British the cultural chasm was no longer a challenge. Secure in the conviction that their own intellectual achievements, artistic tastes and moral precepts were infinitely superior and would, if assiduously practised, soon be emulated, they increasingly withdrew into a way of life that owed as little as possible to India. As communications improved, wives and daughters opted to join their menfolk not just in the cities but also in the garrison towns of the upcountry ‘mofussil’ (the hinterland, as opposed to the ‘presidency’, cities). Here gardens bloomed brightly behind thickets of prickly pear, amateur dramatics flourished, and the tailor turned dressmaker. But with memsahibs about, the servants had perforce to be removed to an outhouse; the club closed its doors to Indians; and the vicar often came to tea. The British were drawing apart, losing touch, becoming less approachable.
Although after Bentinck the cause of reform faltered as the Afghan, Sind and Sikh wars consumed the attentions of government, the conviction remained that British rule was indisputably the best on offer. That its benefits should therefore, in accordance with Christian duty and Utilitarian logic, be extended to as many Indians as possible seemed self-evident to Governor-General Lord Dalhousie. Under his vigorous direction, reform and modernisation were resumed in the 1850s. New laws protecting the rights of Hindu widows to remarry and of lapsed Hindus (mostly Christian converts) to retain their inheritance rights were eminently reasonable, but again ventured into the contentious domain of established practice. Meanwhile public works of undoubted utility, like surveys, roads, railways, telegraph lines and irrigation schemes, were bringing government into direct contact with the rural masses and dramatically demonstrating its power as an agency for change. On the new maps it looked as if India was about to be ensnared in a steel tangle of wires and railway tracks.
Caste taboos were not allowed to impede the march of progress, and there was much fuss over railway carriages not offering caste seclusion. To Dalhousie and his advisers it was equally obvious that the native states, or ‘those petty intervening principalities’ as he called them, should not interrupt the advance of the train and telegraph. Nor was there any reason why those who had had the misfortune to be born under a native dispen
sation should be excluded from the benefits of such progress and modernity. Hence Dalhousie’s insistence on ‘consolidating the territories which already belong to us by taking possession of States that may lapse in the midst of them’.
The doctrine of ‘the right of lapse’ held that the paramount power might assume the sovereignty of a state whose ruler was either manifestly incompetent or who died without a direct heir. Since the latter ignored the long-established right of an Indian sovereign to adopt an heir of his own choosing, and since the former was obviously a matter of opinion, the doctrine had hitherto been invoked rarely and with great caution. Now it abruptly became an obligation; the government, in Dalhousie’s words, was ‘bound to take that which is justly and rightly its due’. In fact he annexed seven states in as many years. They included Satara in the Maratha heartland, where Shivaji’s direct descendants had long reigned; the Bhonsles’ Nagpur, where insult was added to injury with a callous dispersal sale of the maharaja’s effects; and Jhansi, another albeit minor Maratha raj whose youthful rani exhibited something of the character of Ahalyabhai Holkar but to whom widowhood now merely brought the added pain of deposition and dispossession.
Other rulers were greatly alarmed. The Mughal emperor had already been demoted to ‘King of Delhi’ and his image had been removed from the coinage. Now it was being suggested by Dalhousie that his successor be recognised as no more than a prince and that the Delhi Red Fort in which he held court be handed over to the British. Similarly Nana Sahib, the heir adopted by the Peshwa Baji Rao II while in exile near Kanpur, found himself not only stateless but pensionless and title-less. Like other disappointed princes and pensioners, he appealed to London but received no satisfaction. Several senior British political officers, including the Residents at Satara and Nagpur, also raised strong objections and insisted that the deposed dynasties enjoyed the affection of their subjects. But Dalhousie, never a man to welcome advice from subordinates, was unimpressed. In 1856, on the eve of his departure from India, he delivered his masterstroke by annexing Awadh – or Oudh as the British insistently spelled it.
Nearly the largest, probably the richest, and certainly the most senior and the most loyal of all the native states, Awadh’s extinction seemed to call into question that good faith on which the British so prided themselves. Since the days of Clive, its rulers had been the Company’s allies, graciously accepting a succession of territorial and financial demands and providing much of the manpower for the Company’s Bengal army. It was true that latterly the nawabs – or ‘kings’ as the British now preferred, in a further blow to the Mughals’ pride – had set something of a record in irresponsible government. Lucknow (Laknau), Awadh’s adopted capital as of the turn of the century, had come to combine the monumental magnificence of Shah Jahan’s Delhi with the scented allure of Scheherazade’s Baghdad. In a final outburst of what used to be called ‘Indo-Saracenic’ architecture, the nawabs endowed their city with palaces, gateways, halls and mosques of riotous profile. The Great Imambara, fifty metres long and fifteen high, may be the largest vaulted hall in the world and is certainly ‘one of the most impressive buildings in India’.20 But if it dates from 1780, it is old by Lucknow standards; most of the city’s monuments are nineteenth-century and owe their distressed aspect simply to the intensity of the bombardment which Awadh was about to undergo, plus the chronic neglect which followed.
* * *
BRITISH GOVERNORS-GENERAL
* * *
No less sensational was Lucknow’s lavish lifestyle. As connoisseurs of the exquisite and the exotic, the nawabs supported the most celebrated Urdu poets, Persian calligraphers and Shi’ite divines. In the royal employ Hindu minstrels, dancers and impersonators mingled with English barbers, Scottish bagpipers and European clockmakers. Closer still to the royal person moved a swarm of eunuchs, courtesans, concubines and catamites. In short, to the best of their limited abilities the last nawabs fulfilled to the bejewelled hilt their role as the dissipated Oriental despots of European imagining.
But as the Company’s own directors had admitted in 1828, it was the British government which was largely responsible; for ‘such a state of disorganisation can nowhere attain permanence except where the shortsightedness and rapacity of such a barbarous government is armed with the military strength of a civilised one.’21 British troops not only guaranteed Awadh’s security; they also helped enforce the state’s revenue demands. Its nawabs therefore had little to do but spend the proceeds. Nor was their extravagance always objectionable. Loans extracted from the Awadh government had part-financed several of the Company’s wars, and in the case of the Gurkha War of 1814–16 had paid for the entire affair.
Under the terms of an 1801 treaty the nawabs were also bound to rule in the interests of their subjects and to accept British advice when tendered. In fact they did neither. Dalhousie’s decision to annex followed repeated warnings and was prompted by genuine outrage over ‘this disgrace to our empire’. Whether his decision was also ‘just, practicable and right’ as he contended is another matter. Legally it was doubtful, and the doubts were compounded first by the nawab’s refusal to sign the instrument of accession and secondly by Dalhousie’s decision to use limited force. There was also the question of Awadh’s very desirable revenue. Had this played no part in British calculations, and had the spendthrift habits of the nawabs been the main reason for annexation, some of this revenue might reasonably have been earmarked for investment in Awadh. In fact it simply disappeared into the Company’s coffers.
To the people of Awadh the whole affair was inexplicable, indeed indefensible.
Few could really understand why their weak, harmless prince, who had done the British no injury, but like his ancestors, had ever been faithful to them, should be thrust aside. He was not a cruel tyrant and his self-indulgence and careless neglect of his subjects’ welfare were not, in their eyes, such heinous offences as they were to the British.22
In place of ‘careless neglect’ and paternal exploitation the British signalled their arrival by introducing a radical hands-on reformation of the revenue collection. Based on experience gained in the neighbouring North-West Provinces of British India and informed by the principle of dealing direct with the cultivator, it instantly alienated Awadh’s influential aristocracy of rich hereditary revenue farmers, or taluqdars, while seemingly alarming the cultivating classes whom it was supposed to benefit.
Annexation also had the effect, as in the Panjab, of demobilising part of the Awadh army and, worse still, of undermining the privileges enjoyed by the forty thousand men of the Company’s Bengal army who had been recruited in Awadh. With their homeland reduced to the status of a British province, these men lost rights of appeal and redress, previously exercised through British influence with the nawab’s government, which had guaranteed to their families and kinsmen a certain security and immunity. Now they differed from all the other brahman and rajput sepoys recruited in the neighbouring British districts of Bihar, Varanasi and Allahabad only in the depth of their suspicions. They shared grievances over such matters as serving outside India; they shared fears about the intent of alien rulers who seemed increasingly indifferent to their religious beliefs; and they added something very like a national grievance resulting from the faithless treatment meted out to their hereditary ruler in Lucknow. Any of these might have provoked mutinous protests; some already had. Together they became grounds for rebellion.
1857 AND ALL THAT
‘The events of 1857 … have provoked more impassioned literature than any other single event in Indian history.’23 They generated much contemporary documentation and they have since often been taken to mark a watershed in both British rule and the Indian response to it. But the interpretation of these events remains controversial, and so does their title. Known to the British as ‘the Sepoy’, ‘Bengal’ or ‘Indian Mutiny’, to Indians as ‘the National Uprising’ or ‘the First War of Independence’, and to the less partisan of both nations simply as ‘the
Great Rebellion’, what happened in 1857 defies simplistic analysis.
For example, equating the rebellion with a traditional, even ‘feudal’, form of reaction whose failure would usher in the new age of nationalism and politically organised protest is no longer completely acceptable. Many different groups with as many different grievances became aligned with either side in the Great Rebellion. The rights and wrongs of British rule were not always a decisive factor and the frontier between the two sides sliced through both agrarian and urban communities, both settled and nomadic peoples, both high caste and low, landlord and tenant, Muslim and Hindu. Paradoxically there was thus something of a national character in the composition of those who opposed the rebellion as well as in that of those who supported it.
Of the insurgents’ various grievances, many were long-standing and had provoked earlier protests and mutinies. Some of these grievances had been, and continued to be, articulated in nationalist terms. But they lacked a pan-Indian dimension, and this mirrored the lack of overall cohesion in the British government of India itself, with each presidency (Calcutta/Bengal, Madras, Bombay) still having its own army and its own administration. Thus, although the Rebellion commanded support amongst most communities in much of northern India, and although recognisably nationalist rhetoric contributed to it, large parts of the future nation, together with the most important centres of British rule, were quite unaffected. Moreover, if ‘historians of the future will begin to define the content of nationalism much more widely and to date its origins much earlier’,24 no less surely will traditional forms of resistance based on hereditary leaders and local grievances be discerned long after 1857. The great ‘watershed’ of British – Indian relations, in other words, proves to be a broad plateau where the run of the rivulets is often contradictory.
