The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  The East India Company was finally abolished as the institution for governing India in October 1858. Day-to-day direction of the Britain’s government in India would be carried out by a new Secretary of State, advised by a council of old imperial bureaucrats. Formal sovereignty lay with the monarch. Officially, Victoria was merely declared India’s Queen. But as historian Miles Taylor shows, in practice she used the title of Empress long before this was formally granted in 1877, particularly when she was standing with the monarchs who used imperial titles on the European continent. The royal couple wanted to create a style of regime in India which emulated the absolutist monarchies with which Prince Albert was familiar in Austria and Germany. Before his death in 1852, the foremost British influence on royal thinking about India was Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, a man who always insisted on the need to uphold centralized, authoritarian and military power. Before and during the rebellion Victoria tried to present herself as warrior-queen, harassing and cajoling her ministers to send more troops, trying to impose the forceful authority of a single homogeneous British army. Once the war was over, the Queen was presented as Victoria Beatrix, the peacemaking despot who would heal the wounds of a fractured society once Britain’s absolute authority had been restored.39

  The British government’s post-mutiny strategy was to suppress opposition, try and assert absolute authority, then conciliate the Indian elites whose reasons for loyalty critics like Disraeli doubted. Conciliation occurred partly through symbolism, partly through practical shifts in policy. The first move was a proclamation from Queen Victoria in November 1858 asserting that India would be ruled with the same sense of obligation as ‘all our other subjects’ and that the British state had no desire to alter Indian ways of life. Positions in Britain’s imperial bureaucracy would, Victoria promised, be ‘admitted to offices in our service’. The next move was not, of course, a massive opening up of the civil service to Indian talent but the creation of a new Indian order of chivalry. In the early 1860s, the Queen, the Prince and the new Chancellor of the Exchequer created the order of the Star of India which Albert envisaged as a kind of aristocratic Indian parliament in which ancient rulers were represented in the same fashion as the imperial German diet. More pragmatically, landholders in northern India were allowed to return to their landed estates, as long as they submitted to the authority of the new Royal British Raj. The Government of India recognized it could not rule without the acquiescence of a large proportion of the country’s regional magnates. Massive violence had eradicated the idea that large-scale opposition to British power had any chance of success. But the government’s purpose was to ensure the submission of Indian nobles was not as humiliating as it might otherwise have been.

  For large numbers of northern India’s landed elites, submission to British authority was the only way to end the chaos and violence which had raged over the previous eighteen months. There does not seem to have been great enthusiasm for British power. In most cases India’s elites simply saw that India’s new Queen and her local officers were on the side of order and peace. An address submitted by landholders to British officers in the war-torn province of Awadh in October 1859 drew no great moral distinction between British and rebel violence. The British as much their opponents had initially been authors of disorder. ‘[I]n one direction’, they narrated,

  the pile of the fire of rebellion blazed high and consumed the plain of the citizens. On the other side, the storm of the water of the swords of the troops of the Commander-in-Chief, coming in waves to extinguish the fire, turned the whole kingdom into chaos.

  The peace-loving subjects of the province had been squeezed between the destruction of both rival armies, the taluqdars and ordinary people ‘overwhelmed by destruction’ until Victoria’s new government ‘drew the reins of the horse of anger, and spread the carpet of [the] counsel of friendship’. The nobles of Awadh ended their comments with optimism about their future under the British. The British had undoubtedly conquered India. Their ‘house’ was emphatically ‘founded by the sword’. But, at last, with the proclamation declaring that Queen Victoria would rule by seeking the friendship of her subjects, the British seemed to have recognized that ‘the perpetual stability of that house depends on the love of the people’, and that ‘The basis of empire is strengthened by the ties of affection.’ Explicitly placing British rule within the lineage of good Mughal governance, the taluqdars noted that the Emperor Akbar had ‘followed that course’. By returning the estates of landholders, involving talqudars in maintaining local law and order and opening the imperial bureaucracy to Indians, the ‘re-established English power’ acted upon the same foundations.40

  With their talk of consolidating conquest by seeking the affection of subjects, the taluqdars spoke a long-standing political language which emphasized the importance of conciliation and balance, sometimes even affection and love, in maintaining the bonds between ruler and ruled. The petition intended to offer counsel to India’s British rule, suggesting that their regime would only thrive if they gave up the arrogant and high-handed ways that had caused the mutiny. Some British officers, Lord Canning among them, tried to follow this advice. But over the next few decades, the same language of love and affection was spoken by Indian interlocutors with greater despair, as negotiation between the imperial bureaucracy and its Indian subjects proved to be impossible.

  The great rebellion of 1857 created what historian Francis Hutchins described as ‘an illusion of permanence’, an idea that British power in India could withstand a challenge on any scale.41 For many Indians, it killed off the idea that this strange, aloof regime was a temporary anomaly. It forced serious thinking about how practically to cooperate, accommodate or resist it. But one of its most important effects was on the psychology of the British practitioners of empire in India. Eighteen fifty-seven was followed by new efforts to justify the exercise of British power in the Indian subcontinent, by the first serious efforts to seek legitimacy through ‘improvement’. Most of these efforts were directed at a British public, particularly British parliamentarians, who wondered whether the attention, lives and money of their compatriots should be spent governing a society that so obviously did not want British rule. But for the cadre of imperial bureaucrats themselves, many of whom came from families whose Indian careers stretched back three or four generations, 1857 removed the need for any kind of justification at all. For official families, the ‘mutiny’ was simply the most extreme moment in the continual cycle of resistance and conquest, of humiliation and then vindication, which governed Britain’s empire in India. After 1858 British power was asserted, violently and permanently, not to benefit Indians nor to pragmatically advance British interests, but to undo the dishonour of 1857’s tragic defeat.

  Shaista Khan, Mughal Governor of Bengal, 1664-1688)

  Company ships ready to sail at Deptford, London, painted in 1683, the year William Hedges sailed to Bengal

  The pepper fort of Anjengo, 1772

  The conqueror of India and – briefly – Mughal emperor, Nader Shah

  East India Company soldier posing in the decade of conquest, c.1760

  Crowds pack into Westminster Hall to watch the trial of Warren Hastings, 1789

  The Afghan warlord and eventual subject of British power, Amir Khan

  Skulls and bodies at the Bada Imambara at Lucknow after the 1857-8 rebellion

  Masons working on a bridge section of Bhore ghat incline, between Bombay and Pune, 1855

  Bellary town centre from Bellary fort, taken in the 1860s, the decade before the famine

  Labourers at a relief camp during famine, Allahabad 1900

  King George V processing through Delhi on the way to Coronation Park, 1911

  India’s empty new capital, New Delhi from the air in 1935

  Indian terrorism sensationalised, a French picture of the assassination attempt on Lord Hardinge, 1913

  Moving Curzon’s statue of Clive of India, King Charles Street London, 1916

>   A picket of British soldiers in Amritsar, 1919, defending imperial institutions in the wake of the Jallianwalagh Bagh massacre

  Workers at the Birla Jute Mill, Calcutta, 1929

  Nationalist crowds gather on the streets of Peshawar, May 1930

  Riot Police in Peshawar, May 1930

  New Wealth. Imported cars outside Bombay races, 1932

  US Air Force base at Sadiya in the far north-east of India, 1944

  Congress Interim Government, August 1946

  Muslim refugee camps in Delhi, 1947

  Monuments to the Raj and the Indian nation-state, Coronation Park, Delhi, 2015

  9

  THE MAKING OF MODERN INDIA

  Looking across Bombay harbour before the fog of industry clouded the view, a nineteenth-century observer would have seen a wall of mountains thirty miles to the east. Rising from sea level to 800 metres in a few miles, this landscape of forts and forests, with its narrow plateaus and steep canyons, was described by an 1859 travel guide as ‘the most picturesque and beautiful in the world’. These, the northernmost hills of Western Ghats, are rich with historical associations. One peak is supposed to have been the Maratha leader Shivaji’s lookout. Another is named after the Duke of Wellington. But for a group of British men in the middle of the nineteenth century they were simply an engineering challenge.1

  Starting during the early 1840s, merchants, engineers and entrepreneurs in Calcutta, Bombay and Britain cajoled and lobbied the East India Company to let them lay railway lines throughout India. These were men with interests in cotton manufacturing, connections to business throughout the British empire and an often evangelical enthusiasm for machine-building. By the early 1850s they had built an experimental line and secured the provisional backing of the Governor-General to lay tracks elsewhere. Their toughest challenge was to force railways through the hills that acted as the west coast of India’s retaining wall, to link the Arabian Sea with the cotton-producing Deccan plateau and eventually Calcutta and Madras. The route they chose, through the Bhor Ghat, needed a fifteen-mile track to be driven through mountains, in some places built on the edge of vertical slopes, in others blasted through solid rock. Eight viaducts and twenty-five tunnels needed to be constructed. The cost of the two routes through the Western Ghats was £2 million, nearly one-tenth of the total amount spent on railways in India before 1870.2

  The construction of the Bhor Ghat incline marked a new kind of modern mass enterprise in India. Europeans hired Indian workers in unprecedented numbers. An average of 25,000 men worked on the ghat with the workforce peaking in January 1861 at 42,000. These numbers included 2,500 skilled masons and tens of thousands of unskilled earth carriers alongside trumpet players to call people to work and interpreters to explain what they had to do. Railway works also saw the arrival of a new class of British overseer, as hundreds of civil engineers and construction contractors on short-term contracts shuttled back and forth from Britain to direct construction. Work for Europeans in India was no longer reserved for a tiny elite of government officers, a scattering of merchants and working-class soldiers. The Bhor Ghat incline marked the incorporation of Britain’s empire in India into the lives of middle-class Britons, as artisans, mechanics, contractors and ‘the gentlemen of the engineering staff’ came to India, together making up what the Governor of Bombay called ‘a small army of Englishmen’ no longer bound ‘to the mere dictates of authority’ as their predecessors had been. For these new arrivals, Britain’s Indian empire was a physical landscape which needed to be mastered, not a place with a people and history.3 James Berkley, the engineer who mapped the railway route through the Bhor Ghat, returned to Britain with nothing but a series of geological specimens. George Clark, the first engineer on the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, published numerous books on the castles in his adopted South Wales but the Maratha fortresses he built his railway lines around elicited not a flicker of interest.4

  The decades that straddled the great Indian rebellion of 1857 saw the emergence of a new kind of British power in India, based not on violence against people but the capacity to shape the physical environment of the subcontinent. These were years when men like James Berkley and George Clark were given large amounts of money to spend on public works. They saw the construction of irrigation canals and dams, telegraph lines, roads and eventually railways, all attempts to impose British authority on Indian rock and soil with brick, stone and steel. Later imperial bureaucrats and historians suggested this kind of geological imperialism was driven by the effort to improve a society they believed was backward. Others see it as part of the integration of India into global markets, to create what the historian John Darwin calls ‘the British World-System’. In fact, it began as little more than the limited British attempt to shore up their shaky grip on power.5

  The assertion of the empire’s infrastructural power in India was driven by zealous advocates of technological improvement in close contact with the rapidly growing engineering culture in Britain. The second quarter of the nineteenth century saw ‘progress’ become a rallying cry for large sections of Britain’s upper and middle classes, and was associated with the physical sciences, with engineering and commerce. The Institute of Civil Engineers had been founded in 1818. The first university engineering department opened at King’s College London in 1838, and had James Berkley, the engineer who laid out the route through the Bhor Ghat, among its first students. Enthusiasm for engineering was celebrated in public at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Technological modernity had its critics, of course. Thomas Carlyle scornfully castigated Britain’s new ‘metallurgic cities’ and believed the railway and extension of the franchise undermined the valves which civilisation relied on. But these were years when many argued that the spread of industry and machinery demonstrated ‘man’s triumph over the great physical forces by which the conditions of the universe are determined’, as one celebratory catalogue for the Great Exhibition put it.6

  The technological vision of modernity propogated by the new British prophets of improvement allowed them to imagine they could sweep away existing patterns of Indian life. India was seen as an unpeopled landscape to be reshaped by low-paid India labour. This was the first time Britons thought they could work in India without enlisting the support of anything other than Indian muscle. James Berkley initially thought it was possible to build India’s first railway line with only British contractors. Scientific measurements, universal rules for assessing how different materials acted under pressure and the possibility of British engineers arriving on quick steamships made local knowledge redundant, he believed. The British vision of an economy built on profitable public works threatened to sweep away the complicated networks of Asian enterprise, and replace centuries-old commercial relationships based on friendship and trust with an economy driven by steel and machines.

  Of course it did no such thing. As ever, the power of British officers was limited. India’s landscape and population offered resistance to the imperial designs of British engineering. The most important force shaping the pattern of public works in imperial India was not British capital or Indian collaboration, but the political sensibilities of the imperial regime. Imperial bureaucrats were concerned most of all to protect their authority in India as cheaply as possible. Financial security and political safety were the greatest priorities. The men who ruled India were often willing to give their rhetorical support to physical ‘improvement’, but in practice they only supported public works when they were persuaded they were an effective response to some kind of crisis.

  In the 1840s, physical infrastructure was only supported when it could mitigate the loss of revenue caused by famine. In the 1850s, public works were only backed when they could strengthen the British military position in times of possible war. After the great rebellion of 1857–8, public works became an indelible part of a new story about the power of British rule. Instead of asserting violence against people, power was asserted by imposing British authority in inert materials, provi
ng the strength of the Raj by manipulating stone and iron. The story officials told was directed at the British themselves as much as their Indian subjects, offering self-justification to an anxious imperial hierarchy and a worried public that their recently humiliated regime was efficient and powerful. Funding of public works edged up in the early 1850s. It jumped dramatically in the years after 1857, up by a quarter to 1860, then doubling again by 1870. But despite new resources to put the vision of engineers and construction contractors into practice, the coalition between Victorian Britain’s prophets of technological progress and the imperial regime was always wary and fractious. The pervasive political anxieties of the imperial regime shaped the direction of the Raj’s technological enthusiasm in practice.