by Simon Schama
Very little of the feudal flummery was remotely authentic. The armorial bearings; the punishingly heavy, 5-foot-square, farcically unwieldy banners; the specially minted decorations were all the production of British heraldic enthusiasms, as peculiar and artificial a synthesis of orientalism and 19th-century Gothic Revival as the ‘Indo-Saracenic’ architectural style, then in fashion, which too was supposed to represent the recovery of a common tradition. And the Punjab – because it was somehow deemed the most ‘manly and martial’ of the provinces – played a large part in this spurious east–west hybrid. Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard’s father, assigned the unenviable task of making decorations for the 220-square-foot viceregal dais, was principal of the Mayo School of Art in Lahore. The Pre-Raphaelite-influenced artist Val Prinsep, son of Macaulay’s old orientalist enemy, was commissioned to paint the event but flinched at the abomination (even while taking the job). ‘Oh horror! What have I to paint? A kind of thing that outdoes the Crystal Palace in hideosity. … The Viceroy’s dais is a kind of scarlet temple, eighty feet high. Never was such a brummagem ornament … the size gives it a vast appearance like a gigantic circus.’
Lytton was less fastidious. A week before the climactic elevation to the dais, he and Lady Lytton processed for three hours, on the silver elephant’s howdah made for the Prince of Wales, through Delhi to the Indian camp. This could not have been comfortable for the pile-stricken viceroy. At the stroke of noon on New Year’s Day 1877 he made his entry to the march from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, sounded by trumpeters in medieval livery. Following the national anthem there was a 101-gun salute, so shattering that some of the elephants stampeded and killed a number of spectators. Unperturbed, the celestial viceroy, 80 feet up, spoke in the name of the queen–empress, claiming that Providence had chosen the British to succeed the evidently moribund empire of the Mughals. The Indian Civil Service was thanked for its ‘public virtue and self devotion unsurpassed in history’; princes and chiefs were thanked for their loyalty, and – eventually – the people of India were instructed (in no uncertain terms) that ‘the permanent interests of this Empire demand the supreme supervision and direction of their administration by English officers’. The only concession to the liberal vision was that natives too might be allowed to share in the administration but that they should know there would have to be a place for the ‘natural leaders’ – the aristocratic grandees assembled in their tents. Finally, a message from the new empress was read, promising (as usual) to rule through liberty with justice and to promote ‘prosperity and advance welfare’.
The major famine zones in India, 1876–1908.
There was at least one British official, the governor of Madras, Richard Grenville, the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, who was very uncomfortable to be in Delhi in the first week of 1877. The monsoon had largely failed in southeast India, and famine had already engulfed the region. In the circumstances the governor had asked the viceroy whether he might be excused from attending. But he got short shrift from Lytton, who told him that his presence was mandatory since, in the long run, the ‘failure’ of the durbar would be more damaging to India than the failure of the monsoon. The duke duly showed up; and in that same week, according to an English journalist, 100,000 were estimated to have died of starvation and cholera in Mysore and Madras.
Although the implicit promise of British rule in India ever since the Mutiny had been the delivery of better times in return for loyalty, each decade was scarred by devastating famine in some region of the country. In 1860, 2 million had died in the Punjab. In 1866 nearly 27 per cent of the population of Orissa, some 800,000, had died; in 1868 a quarter of the population of Ajmere. In 1877–8, during Lytton’s administration, the famines have been responsibly calculated to have cost over 7 million lives. One understandably indignant early Indian nationalist reminded the British that, while there had been some hand-wringing over the loss of an eighth of the Irish population during the Hunger of 1845–9, the equivalent of nearly the entire population of Ireland had died in India in 1877–8.
The rulers of the Raj were not indifferent to the calamity. But, as in Ireland, most of them, in obedience to the non-interventionist orthodoxy, had decided it was a ‘natural’ or ‘Providential’ event that it was beyond the powers of government to ameliorate. But there were, of course, things that the government could do, even negatively, to help. Its own officials, for example, often recommended a temporary suspension or at least postponement of land taxes. But when this was suggested for Orissa in 1866, the commissioners of the Board of Revenue in Calcutta dismissed the idea. Instead, the advice was uncannily similar to that given to Ireland in 1846–9: ‘Don’t let the people get downhearted … set the people to help themselves – a somewhat difficult matter in Orissa. But there is nothing like trying.’ This was rich, coming from a government that by systematically destroying the production of salt in Orissa – not merely taxed out of existence by discriminatory tariffs but actually prohibited by law – had removed precisely the local income that made it possible for the poor to feed themselves, especially in years when shortages sent prices sky-high. Then, of course, it might have been possible for the government to import grain, at the very least to stabilize or reverse price inflation. This, again, was suggested in 1866 in the case of Burmese rice. Back came the reply in February: ‘Your message received … the Government decline to import rice. … If the market favours, imported rice will find its way into Pooree without government interference which can only do harm.’
Mindful of the infamous disaster that ensued when there had been a serious threat of famine in Bengal and Bihar, in 1873–4 Sir Richard Temple had purchased rice from Burma and distributed it as free rations to the neediest. But he had been violently attacked by those who, in the Trevelyanite vein, had judged this an unconscionable interference with the free market. Lytton was one of them and, sensing Temple’s need to make amends for his lapse, sent him as famine delegate south to Madras and Mysore, where both governors were indulging in suspiciously prodigal efforts at public relief and private philanthropy. An Anti-Charitable Contributions Act (something that should modify our assumptions about the ubiquitous philanthropy of the Victorians) was passed expressly to prevent aid coming from Britain and the Indian cities, which was said to be delaying the necessity of ‘soft’ Indians being made to stand on their own two feet. The regime that Temple put in place, in the face of angry opposition from Buckingham and his Bombay counterpart, Sir Philip Wodehouse, was a more draconian edition of Irish relief in the 1840s. In return for punishing coolie labour – usually breaking rocks for roads (again!) or laying railway tracks – a modest daily allowance of 1.2 lb of rice was given plus a small allowance of dal. This was altogether too lenient for Lytton, who struck millions from the rolls, banned relief for the adult able-bodied, and decreed that none of it could be given to anyone living within 10 miles of the work camps. Desperately malnourished people, therefore, had to walk long distances to be given severe physical labour – and, under Temple’s new rules, only 1lb of rice a day and no lentils at all.
The results were predictable. One official described a roadworks in the Bombay Deccan as resembling ‘a battlefield, its sides strewn with the dead, the dying and those recently attacked’. Destitute and starving weavers pleaded to be arrested since they had heard (correctly) that gaol was one of the few places where some sort of sustenance was guaranteed. At the same time, grain depots in Madras and Bombay were full of imported rice, heavily guarded by troops and police to prevent thefts or riot. The famished, as horrified journalists like William Digby (who published a two-volume history of the famine) testified, dropped dead in front of the fenced stockpiles. By a bitter irony, by the end of the century it was evident that it was those areas of India that had the most railway mileage and the most commercially developed economies that suffered most brutally in famine years, because of the ease of transporting grain to markets where it could be hoarded to maximize the profit from price rises.
In Augu
st 1877, with much of south and south-central India turning into a charnel house, the viceroy deigned to descend from the coolness of Simla for a few days to tour the most stricken areas around Madras with Buckingham. Of the relief camps he wrote to Lady Lytton, back at Viceregal Lodge, ‘You never saw such “popular picnics” as they are. The people in them do no work of any kind, are bursting with fat … the Duke visits these camps like a Buckingham squire would visit his model farm, taking the deepest interest in the growing fatness of his prize oxen and pigs.’ Missionaries, and appalled local officials and reporters, had a different view: cholera victims crawling to cemeteries and lying down between graves with crows and kites hovering above them; huge armies of the desperate trudging out of British India into territories like that of independent Hyderabad, where the nizam was prepared to hand out free rations. ‘Recently,’ wrote one of the missionaries, ‘the corpse of a woman was carried along the road slung to a pole like an animal, with the face partly devoured by dogs. The other day, a famished crazy woman took a dead dog and ate it, near our bungalow.’ Such scenes were becoming commonplace in the India of the queen–empress. But they didn’t stop the young Cecil Rhodes, then an undergraduate at Oxford, being confident enough to write that same year, with the messianic voice of the new imperialism, that ‘the more of the world we occupy, the better it is for the human race’.
Not everyone felt the same way. Florence Nightingale, the most revered woman in Britain after the queen, read the reports of missionaries and journalists like Digby and pronounced them a ‘hideous record of human suffering and destruction [such as] the world has never seen before’. But aside from grieving for the millions of dead, what could be done to prevent future miseries on a similar scale? Lytton, who had actually cut back on funding for water storage and who had derided the schemes of those whom he called ‘irrigation fanatics’, now made a show of supporting them. He also moved to establish a famine fund, financed of course (as in Ireland) by the disadvantaged country. Lytton’s secretary of agriculture, Allan Octavian Hume, son of the Scottish founder of the Radical party, Joseph Hume, argued strongly that a progressive income tax should be levied so that those who could best afford it contributed most to the financing of the relief fund. When the viceroy vetoed the idea, preferring to increase already onerous taxes such as those on salt, Hume resigned, to become one of the most eloquent critics of British economic policy in India and ultimately the founder of the Indian National Congress! In fact an entire cohort of the early supporters and leaders of Congress – some British, some Indian – had washed their hands of the empire of good intentions precisely because famine policy seemed always to have been sacrificed to military power and naked economic self-interest. William Digby, whose history of the famines is one of the most damning, founded the journal India to counteract the usual ‘India hand’ stereotypes about the unfitness of Asians for self-rule. Dadabhai Naoroji, the Bombay Parsi who in 1892 became Britain’s first Asian MP (for Finsbury Central) and who was also three times elected president of Congress, set out his bitter disillusionment in the classic Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901).
The problem, as Naoroji and many others recognized (and as Amartya Sen points out, it indeed remains today in cases of global famine), is one of income, not of gross food supply. The argument was over the means to raise Indian livelihoods to a level at which food would be obtainable even in years of shortage. Defenders of the imperial record insisted that the classical economic system – the markets themselves and their stimulus for India – would eventually do the trick. Critics like Hume and Naoroji pointed to the hypocrisy of a policy that purported to be free trade but was in fact unscrupulously interventionist. Tariffs were nakedly manipulated to favour British imports and disadvantage Indian products; millions of tons of grain were shipped out in 1877–8 to stabilize British home prices, while Indian prices were allowed to soar in Bombay and Madras to levels that guaranteed starvation. Lytton had even enacted a cut in the tariffs on imported British cottons at the precise time when the Gujarati weavers were suffering more than most urban populations in India. And still could be heard the reiteration of the ancient, sanctimonious nostrums: let them stand on their own two feet.
What was in the process of utterly breaking down was the original liberal axiom of reciprocal prosperity. Prosperity at home in Britain seemed to be bought at the expense of the accumulation of wealth in India. Only those in India who collaborated with this institutionalized and legislated economic inequality, such as grain shippers and textile importers, got their due rewards. Three particular circumstances in the 1870s and 1880s made this unlikely to change. First, Britain itself was in an economic downturn and very unlikely to feel charitable towards India at the expense of its own recovery, or to raise not just prices but the spectre of working-class unrest at home. Second, the home economy was feeling the pinch of competition from the United States and European rivals like Germany; exports were shrinking and once again Britain was unlikely to sacrifice its captive imperial markets for the sake of long-term economic maturity. (By the end of the century India was easily the biggest of all Britain’s export markets, taking fully 10 per cent of total exports – overwhelmingly cheap manufactured Lancashire cottons, the product that more than any other had destroyed the Indian textile industry.) Of all the facts to refute the ‘benevolent development’ thesis of British imperialism, this is perhaps the most irrefutably damning. Finally, revenues for investment in infrastructure that would actually benefit Indian peasant producers (rather than import–export merchants) had to compete with what, for viceroys like Lytton, was the supreme and over-riding interest – that of strategic military expansion on the northwest frontier lest the Cossack hordes come pouring through the Khyber Pass. The Indian taxpayer paid the full price for British strategic paranoia.
What was worse, the paranoia often led directly to fiasco (and thus another round of penal taxation). In 1878, Lytton finally succeeded in engineering the Afghan war, for which he had been manoeuvring since the very beginning of his tenure as viceroy. The pretext was the emir’s refusal of British ‘help’ in repelling what Lytton insisted was an immediate Russian military threat – although in fact it was nothing more than the appearance of a Russian diplomatic mission in Kabul. The usual British invasion was followed by the equally time-honoured local uprising and wholesale slaughter of the British mission, which as usual required a second, punitive campaign – in this instance punitive for the British in the losses of both men and money. Pyrrhic victory in Afghanistan was made no more palatable when it transpired that the famine-relief fund so piously established had been pillaged for the campaign.
Disraeli had been against the Afghan strategy from the beginning and had only been persuaded to support it against his better judgement by a new Secretary of State for India and Lytton devotee, Lord Cranbrook. When the news of the expensive disaster came in the prime minister was appalled, but put a brave face on it. In the same year, 1879, another British imperial army was torn to pieces by the Zulu king Cetawayo at Isandhlwana. By the time the damage was contained in South Africa another £5 million had gone down the drain and Britain had – just as it had often done in India – destroyed one of the few viable African nations in the name of bringing peace and security. Perhaps this is what Lord Beaconsfield (as Disraeli became in 1876) meant when he spoke in the Lords of the ‘millions bound to us by military sway [a nice euphemism for coercion] because they know they are indebted to it for order and justice’. Increasingly, however, Gladstone felt bound to retort, what ‘order’? What ‘justice’? And he got very angry indeed at the cant of ‘liberty’: ‘Liberty for ourselves,’ Beaconsfield might have said, ‘and empire for the rest of the world.’ Gladstone’s increasing irritability and contempt for the extravagances of empire signified a new turn in the politics of liberalism. There had always been, of course, an element among the Liberals, especially orthodox free traders like the MPs John Bright and Richard Cobden, who were suspicious of expensive imp
erialist adventurism. But it was only in the late 1870s that a more self-consciously crusading anti-jingoism found its most eloquent voice in Gladstone himself. With Disraeli in the Lords and a shadow of his former self, it was Gladstone who for a moment – though just an opposition MP and not even the leader of his party – had the moral theatre all to himself; between 1876 and the election of 1880 he used it to put on the greatest one-man show in the whole of Victorian political history.
Gladstone’s political crusades drew their power not just from moral fervour, but from thorny self-interrogations and exhaustive reading and reflection. At the beginning of his premiership in 1869 he had read a weighty discussion of the Irish land problem by an Indian civil servant, George Campbell. As Fenian (republican) militancy was becoming more serious, Campbell had visited Ireland and been startled to discover how closely the problems of its peasant tenants resembled those seen in parts of India. There, too, peasants who could not produce hard, English-style legal contracts of ownership were written off as ‘tenants-at-will’, subject to summary rent increases and eviction for default, without any compensation for the improvements they had made. Cultivators who had farmed the same plot for generations were turfed off and turned into pauperized, landless labourers. As the British had become more educated in Indian land customs they had come to recognize that, in much of India, occupation over the generations was equivalent to a kind of ‘moral co-proprietorship’ that protected the peasants from being treated as mere tenants-at-will. This, Campbell felt (along with John Stuart Mill, who had written in much the same vein), ought also to be the case in Ireland. Although Campbell had grown up very much in the hands-off school of Trevelyan, he none the less believed that there was a place for government to act as the guardian of the defenceless. True liberalism would be honoured, not violated, by such an engagement. The alternative would be yet more cycles of bitter violence.
