Glimpses of World History

by Jawaharlal Nehru

  So, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Europe bore a pleasant and prosperous aspect, and it seemed, on the surface at least, that this mellow culture and civilization would endure and progress from triumph to triumph. But if you peeped below the surface, you would see a strange commotion and many an unpleasant sight. For this prosperous culture was largely meant for the upper classes of Europe only, and it was based on the exploitation of many countries and many peoples. You would see some of the contradictions that I have pointed out, and the national hatreds and the grim and cruel face of imperialism. You would not then be so sure about the permanence or charm of this nineteenth-century civilization. The outside body was fair enough, but there was a canker in the heart; there was a great deal of talk of health and progress, but decadence was eating at the vitals of this bourgeois civilization.

  The crash came in 1914. After four and a quarter years of war, Europe emerged indeed, but with terrible wounds which have not yet been healed. But of that I shall have to tell you afterwards.

  109

  Wars and Revolt in India

  November 27, 1932

  We have had a good long survey of the nineteenth century. Let us now look more closely at certain parts of the world. We shall begin with India.

  I told you some time back of how the British triumphed over their rivals in India. The French were definitely eliminated during the Napoleonic wars. The Marathas, Tippu Sultan in Mysore, and the Sikhs in the Punjab, held the British for a while. But they could not resist them for long. The British were obviously the strongest and best-equipped Power. They had better weapons and better organization, and, above all, they had sea-power to fall back upon. Even when defeated, as they often were, they were not eliminated, as they could draw upon other resources owing to their command of the sea routes. For the local Powers, however, defeat often meant a disaster which could not be remedied. The British were not only the better-equipped fighters and the better organizers, but were also far cleverer than their local rivals, and took every advantage of their mutual rivalries. So inevitably the British power spread and the rivals were knocked down one by one, and often with the help of others whose turn to go down came next. It is surprising how shortsighted these feudal chieftains of India were at the time. They never thought of uniting against the foreign enemy. Each fought a lone hand and lost, and deserved to lose.

  As the British power grew in strength it became more and more aggressive and truculent. It made war with or without excuse. There were many such wars. I do not propose to weary you with an account of them. Wars are not pleasant subjects, and far too much importance is paid to them in history. But the picture would be incomplete if I did not say something about them.

  I have already told you of two wars between Haider Ali of Mysore and the British. Haider Ali was largely successful in these. His son, Tippu Sultan, was a bitter enemy of the British. It took two more wars, in 1790-92 and 1799, to put and end to him. Tippu died fighting. Near Mysore city you can still see the ruins of his old capital, Seringapatam, where he lies buried.

  India at the Time of the Great Revolt, 1857

  The Marathas remained to challenge British supremacy. There was the Peshwa in the west and Scindia of Gwalior and Holkar of Indore and some other chiefs. But the Maratha power went to pieces after the death of two great statesmen, Mahadaji Scindia of Gwalior who died in 1794, and Nana Farnavis, minister of the Peshwa, who died in 1800. Still the Marathas took a lot of beating, and there were British defeats before the final overthrow of the Marathas in 1819. The Maratha chiefs were defeated separately, each watching the other go down without helping. Scindia and Holkar became dependent rulers acknowledging the suzerainty of the British. The Gaikwar of Baroda had even previously come to terms with the foreign Power.

  Before taking leave of the Marathas I should like to mention one name which has become famous in Central India. This is the name of Ahilya Bai, a ruler of Indore for thirty years from 1765 to 1795. She was a young widow of thirty when she came to the gaddi, and she succeeded remarkably well in administering her State. Of course she did not observe purdah. The Marathas have never done so. She attended to the business of the State herself, sat in open durbar, and raised Indore from a village to a wealthy city. She avoided wars and kept peace and made her State prosperous at a time when the greater part of India was in a state of turmoil. It is not surprising that she is still considered a saint and is revered in Central India.

  A little before the last Maratha war, the British had a war with Nepal from 1814 to 1816. They had great difficulties in the mountains, but they won in the end, and this district of Dehra Dun, where I sit in prison writing this letter, and Kumaun and Naini Tal came under British rule. You may perhaps remember my telling you, in a letter on China, of the amazing exploit of a Chinese army which crossed Tibet and walked over the Himalayas and beat the Gurkhas in their homeland, Nepal. This was only twenty-two years before the British-Nepal War. Ever since then Nepal formally acknowledged China’s suzerainty, but I suppose it does not do so now. It is a peculiar country, very backward, very much cut off from the rest of the world, and yet, from all accounts, a delightfully situated place, full of natural wealth. It is not a dependent State like Kashmir or Hyderabad. It is called independent, but the British people see to it that this independence is kept within bounds. And the brave and warlike people of Nepal—the Gurkhas—are enrolled in the British army in India and are used to keep down Indians.

  In the east, Burma had spread right up to Assam. So there was bound to be conflict with the ever-advancing British. There were three wars with Burma, each time the British annexing some territory. The first war in 1824-26 resulted in Assam coming under the British; in the second war, in 1852, South Burma was annexed. North Burma, with the capital at Ava near Mandalay, was completely cut off from the sea and left high and dry, at the mercy of the British. The end came in 1885, when there was a third Burma War, and the whole of the country was annexed by the British and joined on to the British Empire. But Burma was in theory a vassal of China; and indeed it used to send tribute regularly. It is curious to note that the British, when annexing Burma, agreed to continue this tribute to China. This shows that even in 1885 they were sufficiently impressed by the power of China, although China was so involved in her own troubles that she could not help her vassal when Burma was invaded. The British paid the tribute to China once after 1885, and then discontinued it.

  The Burma Wars have taken us to 1885. I wanted to deal with them all together. But now we must go back to North India and to an earlier part of the century. In the Punjab a great Sikh State had risen under Ranjit Singh. Right at the beginning of the century Ranjit Singh became master of Amritsar. By 1820 he was master of nearly the whole of the Punjab and Kashmir. He died in 1839. The Sikh State weakened and began to break up soon after his death. The Sikhs illustrate the old maxim that one rises in adversity and falls after success is attained. It was not possible even for the later Moghals to suppress the Sikhs when they were a hunted minority group. But with political success, the very foundations of success were weakened. There were two wars between the British and the Sikhs, the first in 1845-46 and the second in 1848-49. During the second there was a severe defeat of the British at Chilianwala. In the end, however, the British triumphed completely and the Punjab was annexed. It may interest you to know—because you are a Kashmiri—that Kashmir was sold by the British to a certain Raja Gulab Singh of Jammu for about seventy-five lakhs of rupees. It was a bargain for Gulab Singh! The poor people of Kashmir of course did not count in the transaction. Kashmir is now one of the States dependent on the British and the present Maharaja there is a descendant of Gulab Singh.

  Farther to the north, or rather north-west of the Punjab, lay Afghanistan, and not far from Afghanistan, on the other side, were the Russians. The spread of the Russian Empire in Central Asia upset the nerves of the British. They were afraid that Russia might attack India. Almost right through the nineteenth century there was
talk of the “Russian menace”. As early as 1839 the British in India made an entirely unprovoked attack on Afghanistan. At that time the Afghan frontier was far from British India, and the independent Sikh State of the Punjab intervened. Nonetheless, the British marched to Kabul, making the Sikhs their allies. But the Afghans took signal revenge. However backward they may be in many respects, they love their freedom and will fight to the last to preserve it. And so Afghanistan has always been a “hornets’ nest” for any foreign army that invaded it. Although the British had occupied Kabul and many parts of the country, suddenly there were revolts everywhere, they were driven back, and a whole British army suffered destruction. Later another British invasion took place to avenge this disaster. The British occupied Kabul and blew up the great covered bazaar of the city, and the British soldiery plundered and set fire to many parts of the city. It was clear, however, that Afghanistan could not easily be held by the British without continuous fighting. So they retired.

  Nearly forty years later, in 1878, the British in India were again unnerved by the Amir, or ruler, of Afghanistan becoming friendly with Russia. To a large extent history repeated itself. There was another war, and the British invaded the country and seemed to have won, when the British envoy and party were massacred by the Afghans and a British army defeated. The British took some measures of retribution and again withdrew from the “hornets’ nest”. For many years afterwards the position of Afghanistan was peculiar. The British would not allow the Amir to have any direct relations with other foreign countries, and at the same time they gave him annually a large sum of money. Thirteen years ago, in 1919, there was a third Afghan War which resulted in Afghanistan becoming fully independent. But this is outside the scope of the period we are discussing now.

  There were other little wars also. One of these, a particularly shameless one, was forced on Sindh in 1843. The British Agent there bullied the Sindhis and goaded them to action, and then crushed them and annexed the province. And as a profitable sideline, prize money was distributed to the British officers for this deed; the Agent’s (Sir Charles Napier) share being about seven lakhs of rupees! It is not surprising that the India of that period attracted the unscrupulous and adventurous Britisher.

  Oudh also was annexed in 1856. It was in a frightful state of misgovernment at the time. The rulers for some time past had been the Nawab-Viziers, as they were called. Originally, the Nawab-Vizier had been appointed by the Moghal Emperor at Delhi as his Governor of Oudh. But with the decay of the Moghal Empire, Oudh became independent. But not for long. The later Nawab-Viziers were thoroughly incompetent and depraved, and even if they wanted to do any good, they were unable to do it because of the interference of the East India Company. They had no real power left, and the British were not at all interested in the internal government of Oudh. So Oudh went to pieces, and, inevitably, became part of the British dominions.

  I have said enough, and perhaps more than enough, of wars and annexations. But all these were just the outward indications of a great process that was going on, and that was bound to go on. In India the old economic order was already breaking up when the British came. Feudalism was cracking up. Even if no foreigners had come to India then, the feudal order could not long have survived. As in Europe, it would have given place slowly to a new order under which the new productive classes had more power. But before this change could take place, when only the break-up had occurred, the British came and, without much difficulty, stepped into the breach. The rulers they fought in India and defeated belonged already to a past and vanishing age. They had no real future before them. The British were thus, under the circumstances, bound to succeed. They hastened the end of the feudal order in India; and yet strangely, as we shall see later, they tried to prop it up outwardly and thus put obstacles in the way of India’s progress towards the new order.

  Thus the British became the agents of a historical process in India— the process which was to change feudal India into the modern kind of industrialized capitalist State. They did not realize this themselves; and certainly the various Indian rulers who fought them knew nothing about it. An order that is doomed seldom sees the signs of the times, seldom realizes that it has fulfilled its purpose and its function and should retire gracefully before all-powerful events force it into undignified retreat, seldom understands the lesson of history, and seldom appreciates that the world is marching on, leaving it behind in the “dustbin of history”, as somebody has said. Even so, the Indian feudal order did not realize all this and fought unavailingly against the British. Even so, the British in India and elsewhere in the East today do not realize that their day is past, the day of empire is past, and that the world marches onward relentlessly pushing the British Empire into the “dustbin of history”.

  But the feudal order that prevailed in India, when the British were spreading out, made one more final effort to recover power and drive out the foreigner. This was the great revolt of 1857. All over the country there was a great deal of dissatisfaction and discontent against the British. The East India Company’s policy was to make money and to do little else; and this policy, added to the ignorance and rapacity of many of its officers, had resulted in widespread misery. Even the British Indian army was affected, and there were many petty mutinies. Many of the feudal chiefs and their descendants were naturally bitter against their new masters. So a great revolt was organized secretly. This organization spread especially round about the United Provinces and in Central India, and yet, so blind are the British people in India to what Indians do or think, the government had no inkling of it. Apparently a date was fixed for the revolt to begin simultaneously in many places. But some Indian regiments at Meerut went ahead too fast and mutinied on May 10, 1857. This premature outburst upset the programme of the leaders of the revolt, as it put the government on their guard. The revolt, however, spread all over the United Provinces and Delhi and partly in Central India and Bihar. It was not merely a military revolt; it was a general popular rebellion in these areas against the British. Bahadur Shah, the last of the line of the Great Moghals, a feeble old man and a poet, was proclaimed by some as Emperor. The Revolt developed into a war of Indian independence against the hated foreigner, but it was an independence of the old feudal type, with autocratic emperors at the head. There was no freedom for the common people in it, but large numbers of them joined it because they connected their miserable condition and poverty with the coming of the British, and also in some places because of the hold of the big landlords. Religious animosity also urged them on. Both Hindus and Mohammedans took full part in this war.

  For many months British rule in North and Central India hung almost by a thread. But the fate of the Revolt was settled by the Indians themselves. The Sikhs and the Gurkhas supported the British. The Nizam in the south, and Scindia in the north, and many other Indian States, also lined up with the British. Even apart from these defections, the Revolt had the seeds of failure in it. It was fighting for a lost cause, the feudal order; it had no good leadership; it was badly organized, and there were mutual squabbles all the time. Some of the rebels also sullied their cause by cruel massacres of the British. This barbarous behaviour naturally set up the backs of the British people in India, and they paid it back in the same coin, but a hundred and a thousand times multiplied. The English were especially incensed by a massacre of English men and women and children in Cawnpore, treacherously ordered, it is stated, after promise of safety had been given, by Nana Sahab, a descendant of the Peshwa. A memorial well in Cawnpore commemorates this horrible tragedy.

  In many an outlying station the English were surrounded by crowds. Sometimes they were treated well, more often badly. They fought well and bravely against great odds. The siege of Lucknow stands out, coupled with the names of Outram and Havelock, as an example of British courage and endurance. The siege and fall of Delhi in September 1857 marked the turning-point of the Revolt. Henceforth and for many months afterwards the British crushed the Revolt. In doing so
they spread terror everywhere. Vast numbers were shot down in cold blood; large numbers were shot to pieces from the mouth of cannon; thousands were hanged from the wayside trees. An English general, Neill, who marched from Allahabad to Cawnpore, is said to have hanged people all along the way, till hardly a tree remained by the roadside which had not been converted into a gibbet. Prosperous villages were rooted out and destroyed. It is all a terrible and most painful story, and I hardly dare tell you all the bitter truth. If Nana Sahab had behaved barbarously and treacherously, many an English officer exceeded his barbarity a hundred-fold. If mobs of mutinous Indian soldiers, without officers or leaders, had been guilty of cruel and revolting deeds, the trained British soldiers, led by their officers, exceeded them in cruelty and barbarity. I do not want to compare the two. It is a sorry business on both sides, but our perverted histories tell us a lot about the treachery and cruelty on the Indian side, and hardly mention the other side. It is also well to remember that the cruelty of a mob is nothing compared to the cruelty of an organized government when it begins to behave like a mob. Even today, if you go to many of the villages in our province, you will find that the people have still got a vivid and ghastly memory of the horrors that befell them during the crushing of the Revolt.