by Simon Schama
One of the first selected targets of the rebels at Delhi, as well as at Meerut, had been the brand-new electric telegraph. The cutting of the lines and the killing of the operators was an apt beginning for the revolt: it represented not just a shrewd tactic but, more emblematically, the rejection of the gifts of the West – its technology, its science, the whole package of its ‘civilization’ – that Macaulay and Trevelyan had been so sure would bind India and Britain together in close and mutually beneficial imperial connection. The rank ‘ingratitude’ of the natives – a word repeated often both in India and in Britain – seemed especially iniquitous given that the 1840s and 1850s had witnessed the bestowal of so many blessings on this ‘inert’ and backward country. Those decades had seen the first railway lines; the introduction of Western medicine; the arrival of the lithographic printing press, adapted for publications in vernacular languages; and an acceleration of the reforming impulse of what the brisk new style of governors-general, especially the young Marquis of Dalhousie, characterized as ‘decadent’ courts and governments, ‘sunk in sloth and luxury’, as the standard phrase prefacing an annexation had it. The pretext for such annexations was the ‘doctrine of lapse’, by which the absence of a male heir was deemed to end the ruling line. But for as long as anyone could remember, native rulers without male issue had been entitled – and expected – to adopt heirs to take care of the succession. Riding roughshod over that ancient principle seemed yet another violation of the understandings by which local rulers had submitted to British paramountcy in the first place. In Jhansi, a Rajput Marathan state in northeast Rajasthan, the 18-year-old Rani Lakshmi Bhai made a personal protest to Dalhousie when her husband the rajah died childless in 1853, but was contemptuously brushed aside. Four years later, during the uprising that followed the Mutiny, she became one of the most formidable of central India’s horseback guerrilla leaders.
The alienated native rulers were not fools. They knew that the annexations were more often than not driven by British strategic and financial interests, rather than by any high-minded commitment to ‘improved’ government. The massive exercises in data-gathering, like the Great Trigonometric Survey of India, were intended in the first instance to supply military intelligence. The railways and trunk-road extensions would make not only the penetration of Indian markets but also the deployment of troops easier and faster.
Which is not to say that a new missionary push did not provoke trouble. Under the over-assertive Dalhousie, whose term of office lasted from 1848 to 1856, the new lithographic press was used more aggressively than ever before to publish missionary literature. The suspicion – exaggerated or not – that a new campaign of conversion was under way was not allayed by the British policy of taking Muslim and Hindu children orphaned in the famines of 1838 and bringing them up as Christians. (It was no accident that a civilian unlucky enough to be called Mr Christian would be one of the first to be shot in cold blood, along with his wife, by the rebels at Sitapur.) In December 1858, trying to rally the insurgents against the British, Hazrat Mahal, the Muslim Begum of Awadh (Oudh), listed all the reasons why the revolt had been, first and foremost, a holy war, an Islamic jihad. The British had, she said, not only defiled Hindu and Muslim sepoys by making them bite cartridges greased with cow and pig fat; they had also deliberately tried to make Indians lose caste by making them eat with Europeans as a requirement of a particular job. The British had arrogantly destroyed temples and mosques in the pretence that they needed to widen roads; had allowed clergymen to go into the streets, alleys and bazaars to preach Christianity; and had established English schools to take young Hindu and Muslim boys from the path of the faithful.
Proclamations were issued by the Delhi rajah, Feroze Shah, in 1858, justifying the rebellion by warning that the English were going to prohibit traditional physicians from participating at childbirths and to make the attendance of Western doctors compulsory; that no marriages would be legal unless at least witnessed by Christian clergy; and that Muslim and Hindu sacred books would be burned. This long list of outrages was, of course, a fantasy but the relatively new conspicuousness of missionaries and Christian literature, as well as the systematic derision of Ayurvedic medicine, was enough to give them credence. (To the Western campaign of smallpox vaccination, Hindu doctors responded quite rightly that they had popularized cowpox swabs among the poor of the villages before Dr Jenner had been born.)
Indian vernacular documents make the jihadi backlash quality of the revolt – part of a trans-regional mid-19th-century Islamic Wahabi (Muslim purist) messianic revival that stretched all the way from the western Sudan to northern India – unmistakable. As early as November 1856 the Maulvi (Muslim law teacher), Ahmadullah Shah, a Sufi itinerant preacher called the ‘Dauka shah’ or ‘Maulvi with a drum’ because a big drum preceded his palanquin, preached the jihad in Lucknow. As the holy man was carried through the streets accompanied by 1000 chanting disciples, some of whom swallowed burning coals, the message of a holy war was carried to a huge crowd. In Faizabad in February 1857, Ahmadullah – the epitome of a Wahabi messianic warrior – was so incendiary that he was arrested and imprisoned. When mutineers freed him on 8 June, his first act was to take a crowd of his armed disciples with him to Lucknow. And Ahmadullah was not alone. Liaqat Ali in Allahabad and Fazal Huq Khairabadi in Delhi were preaching much the same inflammatory message, and another self-proclaimed imam, Qadir Ali Shah, whose following was said to number as many as 11,000, was confident enough to fix a date for the uprising – the 10th and holiest day of the month of Muharram – which, in the Western calendar, was 11 September! The war ‘began with religion’, the Begum of Awadh flatly stated – and she should have known – ‘and for religion millions have been killed’. Yet somehow the religious ferment that gripped the Muslim community in particular from the autumn of 1856 to the spring of 1857 seems to have been completely discounted – or just misunderstood – by the British authorities, for whom the cartridge-grease issue was the only source of concern.
It was not only religious sensibilities that had been alienated. When educated, urbanized Indians looked at what were supposed to be the economic benefits of the British modernizers, they saw things that seemed to be designed more for the interests of the rulers than for those of the ruled. The beginnings of railway construction in India, for example, made it easier for grain to be exported (in years of dearth as well as plenty) in order to stabilize grain prices in Britain. One of the triumphs of British ‘engineering’ in India was the building of the ‘Great Hedge’, a staggering 1500-mile barrier of thorns and acacia designed to prevent Orissa salt from being smuggled into Bengal to compete with imported salt from Cheshire; any that did get through was subject to penal tariffs. As many as 13,000 men were employed by the customs police to enforce this discriminatory practice, even as the pieties of free trade were being trumpeted in London and Manchester.
And although the showcases of imperial trade at the Great Exhibition of 1851 were meant to promote the idea of mutual advantage, most of those who enjoyed them were white. It was in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the southern African Cape Colony that the liberal vision of exchange between colonial producers and home manufacturers was beginning to be realized, along with measured doses of self-government. The ‘natives’ who were being ‘improved’ under this arrangement were not, of course, the indigenous population – unless one counts dispossession and decimation from disease as improvement; they were the white settlers, whether ex-convict or free emigrants. Any account of the successful operation of free-trade colonialism in these countries needs to see the immense dislocation of native cultures not just as an unfortunate sideshow, but as the precondition of that success. If securing huge areas of grazing pasture for Australian merino sheep meant moving on or slaughtering the occasional tribe of Aborigines, so be it. A bloody and prolonged ‘Kaffir’ war was fought against the Xhosa to overcome their resistance to cattle ranges in the Cape. What was it that Palmerston had said about the march o
f peace and prosperity going hand in hand?
There were ‘peripheries’, too – Ottoman Turkey and Latin America – which were not part of the formal British Empire but whose governments were persuaded that modernization was in their national interest. Once they were so persuaded, capital would flow in from British banking houses such as Baring’s and Rothschild’s. Harbours would be built or improved to take the new steam-fired, steel-hulled ships that would sail to and from the mother country; railways laid down and supplied with rolling stock engineered in the Midlands; warehouses and processing centres constructed; commercial consuls and agents planted in strategic locations to connect producers with shippers, to pressure local authorities to lower customs barriers and to give traders immunity from local courts. Before long ladies’ academies, opera houses and racecourses would follow; tea would be taken at five, sherry at seven; and big copper pudding moulds would begin, ominously, to appear in whitewashed kitchens from Smyrna to Montevideo.
With the most unapologetically bullish of ministers, Palmerston, at the Foreign Office, for 15 years between 1830 and 1851, and later at 10 Downing Street, from 1855, the pretence was that by sheer force of commercial ingenuity and energy the world’s markets had become Britain’s oyster. But the truth was that Palmerston and Lord Grey at the War Office hadn’t hesitated in West Africa or lower Burma (where teak forests were being coveted) to use the knife to prise them open and get at the pearls. Unaccountably, for example, the Chinese were defying the logic of the global economy by refusing to open their ports to British trade, or to give British traders the customs-free, extra-territorial legal protection they said they needed to function safely and effectively – even, or especially, when their inventory consisted almost entirely of narcotics. The Scottish house of Jardine and Matheson, for example, whose elders were capable of pounding the Bible in indignation against the cruelty of heathen Chinese justice, footbinding and kowtowing, were also shameless in putting the rhetoric of ‘British justice’ and ‘fair and free trade’ to the service of narco-imperialism. If the Ch’ing empire for some reason wanted to close its upstream rivers to the traders who were busy turning millions into opium addicts, then they had to be given a lesson in commercial ethics by the surgical use of gunboats. That lesson was beaten into them in two wars – in 1839–42, and, together with France, in 1856–61, when the allied armies burned the Summer Palace in Beijing, partly as a convincing demonstration of the price to be paid for spurning the joys of commercial cooperation. The conclusion of the First Opium War was the seizure of Hong Kong and the extortion of treaty ports with their own system of local government and justice, immune from Chinese policing, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The pretext was always that opium was merely the thin end of the wedge that would open obscurantist ‘mandarin’ China to the embrace of Western modernity. Addiction today, John Stuart Mill tomorrow. Before they knew it, the hundreds of millions would be wearing broadcloth and eating with Sheffield knives and forks – lucky things. But of course the British and the rest of the Europeans were not arresting, but accelerating, the destruction of imperial China; and then, as the century wore on, making the resulting ‘anarchy’ a pretext for further military and political intervention. It was as if the doctors who had brought the disease in the first place were decent enough to show up offering – at a price – the cure.
And India was the major supplier of the dope. By the year of the Great Exhibition, opium accounted for fully 40 per cent of Indian exports; and there was no commodity traded within the British Empire that was, pound for pound, remotely as lucrative. Just 20 years after Trevelyan and Macaulay had envisaged the peaceful diffusion of benevolent Western culture throughout India, the reality was a self-perpetuating military juggernaut that, especially under Dalhousie, just couldn’t stop expanding. There was, of course, always the justification of the ‘unstable’ frontier, a fear gingered up by neurotic Russophobia and visions of Cossacks pouring through the Caucasian khanates of Central Asia, into Afghanistan and down the Khyber Pass to descend in hordes on the defenceless Indus-Ganges valley. Anxieties about the vulnerability of buffer regimes and the promise that their incorporation into British India would make them safer managed to justify, usually retroactively, what would otherwise have been naked imperialist adventurism on the northwest frontier, first in Sind (annexed in 1843) and then in the Sikh kingdom in the Punjab (annexed in 1849).
The case of the Punjab was especially egregious. The death of its formidable old prince, Ranjit Singh, removed the last native ruler the British were prepared to trust as a dependable barrier against a Russian-influenced Persia and Afghanistan. Dalhousie’s predecessor, Viscount Hardinge, did the usual thing, installing a convenient puppet maharajah, but when his army rebelled a full-scale military campaign was launched. Dalhousie subsequently converted a punitive war into one whose object was the all-out extinction of the Sikh state. After an initial embarrassing reverse, the huge sledgehammer of the Bengal army was applied with predictable results. Along with the enormous, mountainous territory of the Punjab that now passed into direct British control came the legendary treasury at Lahore, whose contents were summarily removed. Dalhousie took personal charge of its most fabulous prize, the enormous Koh-i-noor diamond, ordering a custom-designed belt to be made for him to carry the treasure safely to Bombay, from where it would be shipped to England and presented as a personal tribute to Queen Victoria. With it went the dethroned surviving boy-prince of Ranjit Singh’s family, Duleep Singh, his dynastic pedigree carefully discredited to pre-empt accusations of British usurpation. Although Duleep was miffed at discovering the confiscation of ‘his’ diamond (it had actually been taken from Persia in an earlier history of war and plunder), he was allowed custody of it on the understanding that he could make a personal presentation to the queen. This he did and in return became a court pet, painted in turbaned finery by the German portraitist Franz Xaver Winterhalter, promised the life and income of a gentleman and encouraged to convert to Christianity, which he eventually did.
It was not surprising, then, that the gluttonously annexationist Dalhousie should also have cast greedy eyes on Awadh, the broad, rich territory between the Ganges and the Himalayas that since 1819, encouraged by the British, had declared itself to be an independent kingdom. Under its 18th-century Muslim nawabs, originally provincial revenue-collecting governors attached to the Mughal Empire, Awadh, with its fertile valleys and populous towns, had been one of the most prosperous and successful regions of all India. Lucknow, its capital, with a population of around 650,000, had been famous for the lushness of its pleasure gardens, the noise of its peacocks, the sumptuousness of its palaces; for its golden-roofed mosques and minarets, its delicately spiced, voluptuous cuisine, its profusely wrought silverware and jewellery, the strength of its fighting rams, the sensuality of its poets and the frightening empire-building of its courtesans. Earlier generations of more open-minded British travellers and official agents – the Residents – loved it; sometimes, as in the notorious scandal of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, who took an aristocratic Muslim woman as lover and then as wife, a little too much for the company’s sense of prudence and propriety. Then there were Awadh’s soldiers, who made up almost three-quarters of the manpower of the Bengal army, which by 1850 was 240,000 strong with only 40,000 of these troops British. Patronized by the British as ‘manly’, in contrast to the ‘soft’ and languidly androgynous Bengalis, the Awadhis were regarded – especially on the strength of their conduct in Sind and the Punjab – as the toughest and most dependable of the native regiments. Officially, the Awadhi sepoys were seconded to the company army as part of an agreement with the still ostensibly independent kingdom, which meant that as serving in ‘foreign territories’ they were entitled to double batta or allowance, and, more importantly, when they returned home to Faizabad, Salon, Sitapur or Lucknow they could strut around in their scarlet coats enjoying doubly special status and flaunting their immunity from the usual depredations of Awadhi
officialdom.
By Dalhousie’s day Lucknow, once one of the most gregarious and socially mixed cities of India, was becoming more divided between its native and Western quarters. But it was still nothing like so sharply segregated as Calcutta, with its ‘black town’ and white riverside villas with gardens, or as Madras. At Lucknow, the packed, old city stretched south from the Gomti river with the ganj market bazaar at its centre; each of its districts marked, as it is to this day, by a specific community of artisans – silversmiths, millers and bakers, and tanners. The town houses of courtiers and nobles, the mosques and pleasure gardens were mostly situated at the southern and western rim of the conurbation. And at the northern edge, separated by a little clear ground and the beautiful Kaiserbagh garden, was the 34-acre compound of the Residency, raised on a small plateau. At its heart was the Residency itself, built in thick, dusty rose brick, with Doric columns, a verandah, a little flag tower and a cool underground swimming bath. Scattered about the gardens were a church, post office, treasury, the financial commissioner’s house and the Begum Kothi, which had once been the quarters of the nawab’s European wife. The cantonment proper, with its barracks and bungalows and racecourse, were some miles off, north of the Gomti and the Faizabad road. Further to the west was the prodigious neo-Baroque pile of a school known as La Martinière, designed and endowed by the French soldier of fortune and hot-air ballooning polymath Claude Martin, who had served the nawabs and then the East India Company. The school was now the epitome of the Macaulay educational mission, drilling its pukka schoolboys in Thucydides, Milton and musketry.
