A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  But the great rebellion had been contained. It could only grow or die away and it never succeeded in spreading beyond the heartland of Awadh, the northwest provinces and northern Rajasthan. Although this was itself a huge area – and took the British until the end of 1858 and in some cases well into 1860 to pacify completely – it was decisive for the fortunes of the empire that both eastern Bengal, notably Calcutta at one end and the recently conquered Punjab at the other, remained loyal. The relatively speedy recapture of Delhi in September 1857 was also crucial in persuading undecided peasants and townsmen to stay neutral. And there were some native soldiers who were actually eager to fight the rebels: not just the Gurkhas from Nepal but the Sikhs, who were delighted to return the punishment they had received at the hands of the Awadhi sepoys during the Sikh wars of 1845–6 and 1848–9. Despite the relatively good relations between Hindu and Muslim sepoys (carefully cultivated by Bahadur Shah), some traditional ethnic and regional feuds remained a much stronger force than any kind of embryonic anti-colonial pan-Indian solidarity.

  Before he got to Kanpur, James Neill had undertaken a lightning march from Calcutta to pre-empt serious trouble at Benares. Neill’s savagery in burning villages and ordering mass executions of those suspected of collaborating with the rebels worked. The terrorized countryside around Benares remained quiet, and the holy city became the forward station for advances on Allahabad and Kanpur. If the telegraph had been the wrong kind of listening device to pick up early signals of discontent (listening to the mullahs, the native postmen and the gossips and fortunetellers in the markets would have been more to the point), the cables did now make a difference to containing the damage. Governor-General Canning was able to wire the home government about his critical manpower shortage quickly enough for Palmerston to divert a regiment intended for China (where of course it was going to punish the Ch’ing coastguards for insulting the flag) to the Indian theatre.

  After the relief of Delhi in September, Bahadur Shah, a pathetic fugitive, was found together with his two sons and grandson by Major William Hodson, a cavalry officer, in the beautiful tomb of his ancestor Hummayyun, 16 miles from the centre. A very unlikely arch-villain, in his incarceration he quickly turned into a pitiable anachronism: stared at, photographed, ridiculed, certainly not forgiven for what had been done in his name.

  The euphoria inside the Residency that greeted the arrival of Havelock and Outram was short-lived: the sepoy army closed in around them once more, making it apparent that this had been not so much a relief as a new stage of imprisonment. An attack on the Baillie Gate by the Maulvi came perilously close to success. In November a second relief attempt was made to break the siege, under Sir Colin Campbell, heralded by pipers playing ‘The Campbells Are Coming’; he managed to hold an exit route open long enough to evacuate the civilians. After six months of extreme privation the 400 surviving women, children and male civilians, including Katherine and Bobby Bartrum and 1000 sick and wounded soldiers, finally left the compound. Over the winter, however, fresh rebel troops mobilized by taluqdars closed in again. Ahmadullah led a series of attacks on the walled defences from December right through to the end of February. It was only when Campbell brought a huge army of 25,000 in March 1858 that the city was finally taken and what was left of the Residency liberated. On 15 June 1858, Ahmadullah Shah was killed in action, then beheaded; his ashes thrown in the river. Even when all the major cities in the Ganges valley had been restored to British rule rebel rajahs held out in their small but heavily armed forts; some of them were never, in fact, subdued. Hit-and-run raids were staged on isolated outposts by mounted partisans belonging to the irregular armies of Raja Beni Madho, who was rumoured to have died in November 1859 fighting the Gurkhas in Nepal along with the orchestrator of the Kanpur massacre, Nana Sahib. The already legendary Rani Lakshmi Bhai of Jhansi, said to have been surprised while resting her horses and drinking sherbet, was shot in the back as she was charging back into action, a sword in each hand, the reins of her pony held in her teeth. She died in a mango grove after giving her gold anklets and pearl necklace, taken from the Maharajah of Gwalior, to her soldiers.

  Just before Katherine Bartrum was due to take ship back to England from Calcutta her son, Bobby, became seriously ill: nothing that a four-month sea voyage wouldn’t take care of, the doctors assured her. The day before she sailed, Bobby died on board the Himalaya. Katherine went home alone, remarried, had three more children and died of tuberculosis in 1866.

  As the fighting petered out, the debate about how to treat the rebel provinces, and more generally India altogether, heated up. In Britain, the bloody dramas of Delhi, Kanpur and Lucknow had already been relayed by reporters like William Howard Russell, but then sado-masochistically embellished to feed the publishers’ need for sensationalism. For some years it was generally believed that lily-white Victorian women, the ‘angels of Albion’, had been raped and sexually mutilated, although there was no evidence whatsoever of such abuse. The Royal Academy show in 1858 included a painting by Sir Joseph Noel Paton called In Memoriam, showing a group of the Lucknow heroines and babes in pallid, pink-eyed distress (but otherwise in remarkably good shape) with ‘maddened Sepoys hot for blood’ about to penetrate their refuge. Some of the critics thought the painting too indelicate for the public gaze; others believed it was a modern icon that merited a memorial chapel to itself. But in response to protest, Paton overpainted the dusky assailants with kilted Highlanders coming to the rescue.

  Photographers, too, very rapidly got into the act. Robert and Harriet Tytler, both keen photographers, took pictures of some of the scenes around Lucknow with which they illustrated Harriet’s account. But the most commercially savvy photographic reporter was the Italian Felice Beato, who, even before it was physically safe, rushed to Delhi, where he took 60 pictures and then went on to Lucknow, where he followed Sir Colin Campbell’s assault on the city and took another 60 images – some of them among the most extraordinary albumen silver prints of the 1850s. The sites were chosen for their familiarity to the avid Mutiny-readers both in Calcutta and in Britain: the Kashmir Gate in Delhi; the well of the martyrs at Kanpur; the ruined room at Lucknow in which Sir Henry Lawrence had been fatally wounded; the massively pitted walls of the Lucknow Residency. Most shockingly of all, Beato took elaborate pains to construct a photograph of the courtyard of one of Lucknow’s fabled walled pleasure gardens, the Secundra Bagh, where 2000 rebels were slaughtered during Campbell’s first attack. To reconstruct the scene Beato disinterred bones to scatter them about the yard, although some seem to have been those of horses and bullocks rather than humans. All these places acted as the Via Dolorosa of the passion play of the Mutiny. Although enormous areas of Indian Lucknow, including many of its old pleasure gardens, palaces and mosques, were brutally razed so that oversized boulevards could be built (not least for easy access by troops), the half-destroyed remnant of the Residency was to be preserved for imperial posterity, the Union Jack flown (until midnight on 14 August 1947) over the shattered, blackened ruins.

  All these images stoked the fires of retribution. At the Cambridge Union, Charles Trevelyan’s son, George Otto, heard an undergraduate orator brush away suggestions of clemency by proclaiming ‘when the rebellion has been crushed out from the Himalayas to the Comorin, when every gibbet is red with blood, when every bayonet creaks beneath its ghastly burden, when the ground in front of every cannon is strewn with rags and flesh and shattered bone, then talk of mercy [may be heard]. This is not the time.’ He was roundly applauded by the undergraduates. The first wave of British troops, along with their generals, were prepared to satisfy this demand for revenge, blowing sepoys from cannon and giving no quarter. But given the intensity of the passions, the race hatred against the ‘damned niggers’ and the genuinely dreadful things that had actually befallen the British in Kanpur, Delhi and Lucknow, it is surprising that more were not dealt with so savagely and sadistically. Much of this was due to Canning’s own creditable determination to mas
ter the instinct for indiscriminate revenge. He was horrified, for example, when he learned that William Hodson, who commanded a troop of irregular Sikh horsemen, had murdered the two sons and the grandson of Bahadur Shah after they had surrendered to him. Although he suffered ridicule in both Calcutta and London as ‘Clemency Canning’ for ordering local officers to stop arbitrary and summary executions and the burning of villages, he believed this was the pragmatically, as well as morally, correct response. Throughout the trauma he had agonized behind walls of dispatch boxes on what had gone wrong; whether there was some point that might not have been reached, something that might have been attended to, that would have avoided the butchery. Once it had happened, his concern had been to contain the rebellion within the Ganges valley; and this had happened. Now he had no intention of jeopardizing the future stability of the empire by alienating all of India. When he was severe – declaring the whole of Awadh to be forfeited land, for instance – it was only so that he could promise taluqdars who made submission in a timely fashion that they would have their lands, titles and districts back again. Punishment was the prelude to reassurance and restoration. As it happened, he had two allies in Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, who wrote to him: ‘Lord Canning will easily believe how entirely the Queen shares his feelings of sorrow and indignation at the un-Christian spirit shown – alas! to a great extent here by the public towards Indians in general and to sepoys without discrimination!’

  The proclamation of 1 November 1858, which ended the existence of the East India Company and put British India under the direct rule of the queen’s government, with a viceroy, a council and a secretary of state, made a special point of promising to respect the religions and traditions of India. Canning took the proclamation seriously enough to embark on a long progress through the subcontinent, accompanied by a retinue of military magnificence, holding canopied durbar assemblies, distributing the newly created Star of India to local notables and doing everything in his power to make a personal viceregal bond with the rajahs, nizams and maharajahs. More importantly, he restored the right of childless native rulers to adopt heirs, even insisting that the Maharajah of Mysore do so at once.

  The Mutiny, then, produced an extraordinary about-face in the official attitude of the British towards the most important colony in the empire. Instead of dreams of Westernization a more frankly conservative principle was now followed, which conceded that India would not and could not be modernized in a generation or two; and that the first obligation of a government was to make sure that its own society and institutions were healthy and above all free from sedition. The change of mind was more than a little schizophrenic. Trevelyan, who returned to India in 1859 to be governor of Madras and immediately get himself into trouble protesting at the attempt by the new central government to impose income tax, had established the principle that positions in the Indian Civil Service would be open to competition without distinction of race. The reality, of course, was that no Indian, however hard he tried to turn himself into the ‘brown Englishman’ of Macaulay’s fantasy, however well he learned his Milton and his Shakespeare, ever got near any of the responsible (as distinct from menial) judicial, police or fiscal appointments for many generations. The universalist assumption of the Enlightenment that all men, given the right education, could become much the same had been replaced by the harder, ‘scientific’ fact of incommensurable difference; it was put most brutally in the 1890s by one viceroy the Earl of Elgin, who jovially complained what ‘a terrible business [it is] this living among inferior races’.

  Although the success stories of British India in the second half of the century were mostly urban ones, the prevailing attitude of its rulers, from successive viceroys after Canning (with the significant exception of the liberal Lord Ripon) right down to district collectors, was that cities like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, with their swarms of clerks, merchants, doctors and over-literate, under-employed intellectuals, had become mongrel places, neither of one culture nor the other. The ‘real’ India, on the other hand, was out there in the countryside with the water buffalo. Urban India was beginning to run by the clock; a tick-tock India full of all those ‘little’ men (they were always ‘little’ in sahib-speak) in steamy, sweaty, monsoon-muddy, busy-busy Bombay and Calcutta with their spectacles, fob watches and umbrellas, always fretting about timetables, the post, the trains and the ferries – and always being late; the clerks with grimy collars; the doctors who knew too much for their own and their patients’ good; the yappy ‘little’ journalists with their self-important third-hand parroted liberal opinions; the jumped-up johnny book-lawyers who made themselves such damned nuisances in the magistrates’ court. ‘Out there’, ‘up country’ and ‘in the hills’ was ‘timeless’ India (the one thing India has never been, in fact, is timeless). They called it primordial, ‘immense’ and ‘magnificent’ – another favourite word used with equal passion for the moustaches of a maharajah or the Himalayas seen from Simla.

  The main chance for commercial photographers, like the inexhaustible Samuel Bourne (of the famous Bourne and Shepherd studio), was now not the documentary record of cities smashed by shells but the creation of what they themselves called the ‘Indian picturesque’ – exactly akin to the English ‘discovery’ in the late 18th century of noble ethnic remnants in the remote corners of Britain. The topography of this tropical picturesque was just the same as it had been in the Hebrides and the Peak District: dramatic waterfalls and ancient eroded cliffs, with jungly temples taking the place of ruined abbeys and the scenery generally edited to exclude the actual people who lived there – skinny things who failed to live up to the Romantic idealization, but might occasionally be included as indicators of scale. Where once the ‘savage’ races of India had been seen as target opportunities for the civilizing and Christianizing mission they were now looked on by ethnographers as treasures to be preserved in all their wild and, in the notorious case of the Andaman islanders, naked innocence. Uncovered breasts began to appear in photographs of tribal women in the 1880s. Most spectacular of all were the portrait studies, many of them dramatically executed, of the Indian nobility: boy princes in jewelled turbans; swarthy Rajput warriors; plump and perfumed sybarites swelling luxuriantly against the silk. Many of them sported the insignia of the Star of India, the symbol of the queen’s compact to preserve them in all their finery on condition of their absolute loyalty. A generation or two earlier, this was precisely the India that British reformers had declared must be roused from its ‘sloth’ and ‘inertia’. After the energy of the Mutiny a little inertia didn’t seem such a bad idea. Let India move at its own tempo: the speed of an elephant’s walk. Let us do the bustling.

  Seen from the cool distance of a century and a half, it is easy to spot an extraordinary self-deception on the part of the sahibs in this turn towards neo-feudal exoticism. The reality of British power in India was coming to depend more, not less, on the world of the great port cities they had created; on the ruthless exploitation of plantation economies in Assam and Burma for teak, mahogany, tea and the always tempting though seldom reliable indigo (with chemical dyes it would fade altogether); on the mesh of connections that brought together Indian entrepreneurs with the British bankers, shippers and insurance men who made the import-export businesses tick along. The ‘jumped-up’ urban babus and bhadralok whose pretensions the sahibs found so offensive or comical were precisely the people on whose custom the booming British export business was coming to depend.

  But then, that self-deception was exactly of a piece with the way that late Victorian Britain – or some of its most powerful spokesmen – reacted to their own industrial society. The empire that had been designed as an integral piece of the economic design of greater Britain now became culturally something like its opposite just at the moment when that heavy investment was at last beginning to pay off. This disconnection between economic reality and social perception was one of the defining peculiarities of modern Britain. Those who ran the empire, es
pecially the new Indian Raj, were no longer the orientalists and knowledge technicians who had come from Fort William and Haileybury in the first generations. They were now the ‘manly’ (the most over-used term of the imperial elite) and chivalric products of the Rugby headmaster Dr Thomas Arnold’s school of modern altruism: sworn to inflexible justice and military self-sacrifice. Over-intellectualism was despised and suspected, whether among Their Own Sort or (especially) among the subject races. Their ethos was of fatherly, headmasterly sternness.

  The politician who – though certainly neither fatherly nor head-masterly himself – did most to perpetuate what was essentially a fantastic, rather than realistic, vision of modern Britain was Benjamin Disraeli. It is often said that Disraeli was a cynic; but if so he was the most formidable kind, one who at least half believes the fantasies he manipulates. Take a look at his Buckinghamshire country house, Hughenden Manor, with its stupendous over-decoration (unerringly like Osborne House); imagine its terraces full of peacocks, and the sense of Disraeli the sorcerer – or ‘magician’, as his friends and enemies liked to say – becomes more plausible. One of the worst things his enemy, William Gladstone, thought up to say about Disraeli was to call him ‘Asiatic’, by which he meant constitutionally irresponsible, amoral and shamelessly devoted to pleasure, self-indulgence and dandyism. But the real magic of Disraeli’s public as well as private personality was to make precisely these human foibles and imperfections the mark, not of the foreigner but of the deep-dyed Englishman. It is easy to overdo the stereotype of his exoticism. After all his father, Isaac, lived the life of a country gentleman with literary pursuits; and one of Benjamin’s brothers was a gentleman–farmer. If Disraeli himself was happy in town, he was equally happy strolling through the grounds and gardens of Hughenden, relishing his view of the Chilterns. It was not just as the aristocracy’s pet Jew – so clever, so amusing – that he returned the favour by sentimentalizing them. He genuinely believed (against what we now know to be the historical truth) that amidst what he called the ‘wreck of nations’ England’s aristocratic constitution had survived because it had always been permeable to those who sought to live by the ‘principle of our society, which is to aspire and excel’.