A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  Selective promotion was not, of course, the same as genuine cultural cohabitation. The rhetoric was about engagement; but the reality was separation. The sahibs and memsahibs of the Victorian 1840s and 1850s – the heirs of the Company Raj of Trevelyan and Bentinck – looked back on their orientalist predecessors, depicted in late-18th-century paintings lounging on divans or smoking hookahs, with undisguised distaste. Their closeness to Indian habits, they thought, had made them soft, corrupt, effeminate – there were few worse words in the moral vocabulary of the early Victorians. They had clad themselves in flimsy muslins and gaudy turbans; gone to their cockfights and horse-races; soaked themselves in oriental liquor; ogled the nautch dancers; prowled the brothels. Some of them had even kept Indian mistresses and fathered mixed-race children. Occasional eccentrics had even been known to marry them! But if the British were to be serious about their imperial vocation, all that had to be a thing of the past. Was India not built on hierarchies? Well, then, aloofness was the precondition of authority. It was an issue of moral, as much as physical, sanitation. Of all the diseases that had to be kept at bay, the delusion of ‘mixing’ was the most serious.

  Some concessions, to be sure, had to be made to climate and circumstances. Small children must be entrusted to Indian servants and even wet nurses, with the likelihood that they might, unless vigilantly monitored, be infected with the notorious softness and languor of vaporous Bengal. In its Child’s Wreath of Hymns the Calcutta Review warned that ‘a child brought up in this country [presents] a fair prospect of becoming in afterlife a lover of eating and of all other bodily indulgences … yes even little girls are entrusted to native men!’ Then there was the food problem. Given that this was still before the age of steamships or the Suez Canal, which speeded up the sea passage from the home country, an amazing amount of British food – jams, potted meats and sauces – was to be found on European tables in India; but there was no avoiding bhindi or black dal, often referred to in the same oleaginous terms as the natives – ‘slippery’, ‘slimy’ and the like.

  This was the age when ‘bungalow’ and ‘verandah’ entered the English language, and houses were built for the burrah (senior) sahibs that maximized shade and ventilation with high ceilings and cool, dark basements. But except for their single-storey height, the bungalows of the 1840s were not remotely similar to the dwellings of even the wealthier merchants and local patricians of the north Indian towns. Indian houses, the haveli or manzil, had no lawns laid out like a green rug back and front with a grand carriage driveway to their door. Instead, their walls faced directly on to the street and were pierced by a single gateway. At each of the three other corners of the quadrangle enclosing an open courtyard were the only function-specific rooms – storehouse, kitchen and latrine. The remainder of the rooms were simply divided by gender – zenana for the female quarters (used also for the children); mardana for the men. Apart from the yard the great common space was a flat roof used for dovecots, for the drying of clothes and spices, for entertaining friends and neighbours, who reached the roof through connecting passages, and for sleeping on hot nights.

  This, to put it mildly, was not the way the white sahibs and memsahibs lived in their bungalows. Their roofs were often pitched; the houses solid pavilions with functionally divided spaces – receiving room, dining room, library or smoking room and bedrooms – all giving on to the verandah, which wrapped around the entire building. Vigilantly guarding access was the critical manservant – the chokidar watchman – who decided who could be let into the grounds, which tradesmen might be permitted on to the verandah and which might penetrate the inner sanctum. There, they would be greeted by much the same décor as in a country house back home – if more obviously made of tropical materials like bamboo and teak, and with the walls decorated with pig-sticking lances rather than ancestral portraits. Still, there would be the deeply upholstered sofas and settees; big wooden wardrobes and sideboards full of Wedgwood and Leeds Creamware; and heavy printed curtains – all of it imported. The most conspicuous concession to India was the punkah fan with its hanging cloth sails, pulled by the punkah wallah to and fro. Kitchens, with their unavoidable smells, were isolated from the main house along with resident servants, who were often spoken of as a comparably pungent but unavoidable nuisance.

  An enormous amount of labour went into the creation and cultivation of the feature that most spoke of as the stamp made by the white sahibs on their conquest: their gardens. The British took pride in integrating tropical species – like the prickly aloe, which often served as a daunting hedge – into the design of their bungalow gardens, but laid them out as if they were in Hampshire, with lawns back and front, ornamental fishponds, herbaceous borders, pergolas and, of course, roses. When little Harriet Earle (later the wife of Captain Robert Tytler of the 38th Bengal Native Infantry) was taken to Barrackpore House, the country residence of the Governor-General 16 miles from Calcutta, she marvelled at its gardens. The military cantonment – always set at a distance now from the pullulating heap of the old Indian towns – was famous for its setting of green freshness. Comparisons were invariably made with the home counties. The crowning moment of imperial possession ought to have been the presentation to Governor-General Auckland of the first two strawberries to be successfully grown in Barrackpore gardens, had not Harriet been so overwhelmed by temptation that she stole them and popped the delicacies into her greedy little mouth. Just 20 years later, in March 1857, hardly a stone’s throw from the strawberry beds, a very different event would take place on the Barrackpore parade grounds. A sepoy of the 34th Native Infantry called Mangal Pande, dressed in regimental jacket above the waist and only his dhoti below, would take a pot-shot at his British adjutant and his sergeant-major before trying to blow his own head off. Pande was hanged, and when the rest of the regiment were disbanded as a precaution, they took their caps off and trampled them in the dust.

  There had, in fact, been trouble at Barrackpore before, when a mutiny broke out in 1824. But by the time Macaulay went home in 1838, together with his brother-in-law Trevelyan, his assumption was that the British position in India was invincible. After just four years in Calcutta, Macaulay fancied himself an authority on India, past and present, and quickly burst into print with reflections on the 18th-century careers of Robert Clive and Warren Hastings. The essays were studded with predictable stereotypes about the constitutional softness and languor of the ‘Bengalees’, living as they did ‘in a constant vapor bath’. Presumably Macaulay was not thinking of the languor of the bearers who had carried him on their shoulders in palanquins, or the bargemen who poled cargoes down the river Hooghly, or the peasants who bent themselves double in the indigo fields. But all of them, he thought, more than any people who had ever existed, were ‘thoroughly fitted by nature and habit for a foreign yoke’.

  Trevelyan, whose experience, linguistic erudition and discernment were several notches above those of his brother-in-law, and who was temperamentally a lot more pessimistic, settled into his next job in London as assistant secretary at the treasury (where he remained for 19 years), thinking much darker thoughts about the fate of the empire. While Macaulay had been all for the introduction of a free press, as an indispensable instrument in the diffusion of ‘useful knowledge’, Trevelyan and many others had noticed how quickly the Indian vernacular press in particular had been used to voice grievances rather than expressions of gratitude. ‘We are, I fear,’ he wrote, ‘notwithstanding all our efforts for the good of the people an unpopular domination.’

  There was, after all, much to complain about. It was precisely during the years when the Westernizers were bragging about the benefits brought by Britain to India that the Indian economy had become deeply depressed. Once the East India Company lost its monopoly of the indigo trade the major houses supplying it crashed, devastating precisely the most modern sectors of the economy that were supposed to blossom in the liberal dream. Exports – except opium – dwindled, while imports from Britain poured in.
Traditional craft industries like Indian printed silks and cottons – the staple that had brought the British to India in the first place – were now all but destroyed by the astonishingly quick and complete penetration of the Indian market by Lancashire-manufactured textiles. Despite the occasional efforts of British entrepreneurs, like Thomas Wardle, who tried to invigorate Indian production, towns like Allahabad, Surat and Dacca, which had owed their fortunes to the Indian textile industry, stagnated or worse. Entire local infrastructures, based on the thriving ‘little courts’ of local, semi-independent nawabs which had driven the prosperity of late Mughal India, collapsed when those states were liquidated by the British policy of ‘lapse’ – annexation into the Company territories when there were no direct male heirs. The modernizing ‘political economists’ of the West saw this as the inevitable, and healthy, replacement of anachronisms by the modern reality of the international market. But there was, in fact, nothing inevitable about it. Even if they were not industrially mechanized, local industries and trade had boomed for generations as part of the new, not the old, India. Multitudes of weavers, dyers, printers, jewellers, silversmiths, tailors, furniture makers, cooks, musicians, palace guards, courtesans and shopkeepers were left without patrons; many of them were thrown back into an already stressed countryside.

  British visitors in the late 1830s and 1840s who arrived in the port cities of Bombay, Madras or Calcutta, which were better able to insulate themselves from this rolling economic demolition job, seldom saw the true extent of the damage. Until, that is, they took a trip up country. In late 1837 and early 1838, as Macaulay and the Trevelyans were getting ready to go home, largely satisfied that they had done their best by India, Emily Eden from Beckenham, Kent, along with her brother George, now Lord Auckland, Bentinck’s successor as Governor-General, embarked on a long journey northwest to the Sikh court of Ranjit Singh. On the Hooghly they travelled in what Emily called ‘a simple way’: the governor’s barge Sonamukhi (Golden Face), painted gold, green and white, complete with marble baths, was rowed along the river and followed by a fleet of boats carrying the 400 servants needed to wait on Auckland and his entourage. On land progress was even more stately, by carriage, buggy, tonga, hackery (bullock cart), palkie (native-borne palanquin litter), horse and elephant slowly up the Ganges valley. Stretching behind was a procession of 850 camels, 140 elephants, hundreds more horses, bullocks and wagons, extending a full 10 miles to the rear. Occasionally George – not much of a sportsman, if the truth be told – would take a shot at hare and quail from his lurching howdah, because that was what governors-general were supposed to do. Emily, a gifted artist patronized by Queen Victoria, would sketch and paint and write entries in her journal, which oscillated between trembly exhilaration at the jangling, dazzling, peacock brilliance of India and exhausted nausea at the assault on her senses (a literary motif that would get repeated all the way to E. M. Forster and Paul Scott). On Christmas Day 1837, when she evidently missed the hoarfrost and the plum pudding, Emily wrote to her sister that she was ‘particularly Indianly low to-day. There is such a horrid mixture of sights and sounds for Christmas. The servants have hung garlands at the doors of our tents, and (which is very wrong) my soul recoiled when they all assembled, and in their patois wished us, I suppose, a happy Christmas. Somehow a detestation of the Hindustani language sounding all round us, came over me in a very inexplicable manner.’

  Compassion jostled for attention with disgust. Moving further east through Awadh (Oudh), towards Kanpur (Cawnpore), Emily couldn’t help but be exposed to the overwhelming reality of a raging famine. In the camp stables she found a desperately famished baby ‘something like an old monkey, but with glazed, stupid eyes, under the care of another little wretch of six years old’. She took the infant under her wing, and, with his mother’s consent, fed him milk every day in her tent as if he were a pet. But the horror of the famine, born of a failed monsoon, closed relentlessly in on the huge caravan, together with the hordes of beggars and walking scarecrows who descended on it as it lumbered through the drought-stricken countryside: ‘You cannot conceive the horrible sights we see, particularly children; perfect skeletons in many cases, their bones through their skin; without a rag of clothing, and utterly unlike human creatures.’ Auckland fed a few hundred every day, but the outriders and local magistrates brought reports of three or five villagers dropping dead daily of starvation. ‘We can do no more than give what we do …’, Emily wrote, ‘and the sight is much too shocking. The women look as though they had been buried, their skulls look so dreadful.’ She was a long way from the lawns and flower borders at Barrackpore, ‘so fresh and green’, which she herself had re-landscaped and which would be renamed Eden Gardens.

  Emily’s distress at the spectacle of famine was genuinely heartfelt, but relative. When her pet flying squirrel died after eating a cholera-infected pear in August 1839 Emily became really upset. But then, as she confessed, ‘my own belief is that as people in India are uncommonly dull, the surplus share of sense is “served out” to the beasts, who are therefore uncommonly clever.’ The Westernizers of the 1840s had a mixed reaction to the shocking spectacle of mass starvation in India. The gung-ho improvers like James Thomason in the Punjab, or the new Governor-General Lord Dalhousie, who succeeded Auckland in 1842 after the catastrophic Afghan war in which just one army surgeon from a force of 4000 survived a winter retreat over the Hindu Kush, were strengthened in their belief that the gifts of the West, like new roads, railways and irrigation canals, were the long-term answer. A great Ganges canal was built, expressly to avoid a repetition of the famine of 1837–8. But there were other voices for whom famines were the inevitable, if regrettable, pangs of a difficult transition to the modern world economy. In a country of too many mouths to feed, with plots of land that were too small to be viable producers for the cash market, there were bound to be some casualties of the process of rationalization. In due course their labour would be absorbed by a booming urban sector, just as had happened in industrial Britain. But nothing of this magnitude happened without suffering. What was more, the obstacles to modernization were as much social and cultural as structural. Peasants were accustomed to an easy-going, unambitious seasonal round in which long periods of sloth were punctuated by frantic activity. If they were to be profitable producers they had to be made self-reliant, persevering and, above all, regular in their labour. A cursory glance at an ant-hill would give them the idea.

  This, at any rate, was what Charles Trevelyan believed, not just about India but also about Ireland, where the most horrifying of all modern western European famines occurred between 1846 and 1850. During those years Ireland lost a quarter of its population: 1 million died of starvation or famine-related diseases, and another million turned to emigration as their only chance of survival. In the worst-hit regions of the west, like County Mayo, nearly 30 per cent of the population perished. It was Charles Trevelyan at the treasury who had been responsible for direction of relief operations, but who believed, without malice yet without sentimentality, that the ordeal had been inflicted by Providence to bring Ireland through pain to a better way of life. His bleak conclusion was that it had all been ‘the judgement of God on an indolent and unself-reliant people, and as God had sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated: the selfish and indolent must learn their lesson so that a new and improved state of affairs must arise’. The Times was even more brutal in its insistence that the famine had been a blessing in disguise. Where no human hand or wit had been capable of getting Ireland out of cycles of poverty and dependence, all knowing Providence had supplied a ‘check of nature’. ‘Society’, the newspaper announced like a Greek oracle, ‘is reconstructed in disaster.’

  Although, on the face of it, the cases of India and Ireland seem separated by more than oceans, there is no doubt that they were closely connected in much of the most serious Victorian thinking and writing about the intractable problems of over-population and under
-production. Thomas Malthus, of course, had taught at Haileybury, the East India Company college, and Charles Trevelyan had been his star pupil, steeled for life by Malthusian doctrine against the spectacle of famine in either India or Ireland. One of Malthus’s disciples, William Thomas Thornton, published his Over-Population and its Remedies in 1846, exactly at the moment when the enormity of the Irish disaster was becoming plain, and his proposals for thinning the density of cultivators, partly by voluntary birth control, partly by emigration, had a direct impact on contemporary debates. Anti- or non-Malthusian liberals who directed their fire at British governments for tolerating the practices of absentee landlords, determined to extract the last penny in rent from the maximum number of peasant plots, also made a habit of talking about India and Ireland in the same breath. The philosopher John Stuart Mill, in one of the series of articles he wrote on the Irish land problem between 1846 and 1848, insisted that ‘those Englishmen who know something of India are even now those who understand Ireland best’. George Campbell, a district commissioner for provinces in central India, wrote the book on Ireland that, more than any other single source, moved William Gladstone to grasp the nettle of land reform in the 1870s. Reports of poverty and insecurity in County Mayo or County Cork, Campbell wrote, ‘might be taken, word for word, as the report of an administrator of an Indian province’.