The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  Mahmood’s father, the one-time Bijnor district officer Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, was very clear about that. It was impossible for an Indian to claim equal status within an institution so vital for maintaining British authority, he thought. In a newspaper article written soon after his son departed from the Allahabad court Sir Sayyid noted that the British might ‘brag about their impartiality’, but it was impossible for ‘the conquerors of this country’ to sit ‘together on the same bench’ in ‘equal terms of respect of honour’ with members of a conquered nation. As Sir Sayyid argued,

  If an Indian in such a position tries to preserve his self-respect which is concomitant to nobility and uprightness, the relations between him and his European colleagues get embittered. On the other hand, if utterly regardless of self-respect he makes himself quite subservient to the wishes of his European colleague, who because he belongs to a conquering race, naturally believes in his superiority, he is able to pull on pretty well. But this can never be expected from a man who wishes to remain true to his conscience, and in whose veins runs the blood of his (noble) ancestors. It is no secret that there is as much difference between the Englishman’s treatment of his own countryman and that of others as there is between black and white.

  For Sir Sayyid, tension in the court was the unavoidable after-effect of the violence that underpinned British sovereignty in India. He had not wanted his son to be a judge in the first place, or occupy any position involving proximity to Europeans. Mahmood was supposed to become friends with Europeans, but should not seek to exercise governmental power jointly with them. Echoing a longstanding Indian critique of British bureaucracy, Sir Sayyid was glad that Mahmood had been liberated from the demeaning clockwatching of the court and was now ‘the master of his own time’.

  Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan is often described as the foremost Muslim ‘loyalist’ in late nineteenth-century India, and seen as a fervent supporter of British rule. He was, after all, emphatically on the side of the British in 1857. But as historian Faisal Devji notes, Sir Sayyid’s politics were governed above all by the pragmatic sense that the Mughal regime’s former ruling class needed to acknowledge they had been defeated by Britain’s conquering violence.25 Sir Sayyid thought that resistance was futile, and that British power was the only possible source of stability and order. But Sir Sayyid’s argument was that defeat could be borne with dignity if Indians developed and renewed their own ways of doing things in walks of life which did not challenge British power. Indians could not jointly exercise judicial or executive authority. But they could work in the distant, subordinate offices of state power where contact with Europeans was minimal; and they could carve out a space for civilized life in religious, educational and cultural spheres. While Sayyid Mahmood believed Indians could participate as equals in the authority of the state, Sir Sayyid thought their regeneration would come through a retreat into spaces and institutions where they could have more autonomous power. Over the following decades the different positions taken by Sir Sayyid and his son were reflected in debates about the course of action Indians should take to recover their liberty, and act with a sense of autonomy and self-reliance.26

  The decisions of his antagonists have been forgotten, but Mahmood’s lengthy judgments are some of the few which continue to be cited in the legal practice of post-imperial South Asia. Nonetheless, the conflict in Allahabad seems to have broken him. For a few years he helped to run the college he and his father set up, the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh. Against his father’s better judgement, he tried to begin his legal practice again. But Sayyid Mahmood was by now drinking heavily, and becoming increasingly paranoid and often violently angry. At Aligarh, students were reported to have had to put up with ‘the degraded spectacle of a drunkard wandering around and shouting at them & everybody.’ Mahmood’s friends worried that he might be violent towards his wife, and called in the local magistrate. Mahmood never recovered. His drinking estranged him from his father before the old man died in 1898. Sayyid Mahmood himself was dead five years later at the age of fifty-three, broken, perhaps, by the contradiction between his faith in an Anglo-Indian legal order and his exclusion from the institutions of imperial power.27

  11

  THE GREAT DEPRESSION

  Between twelve and thirty million people were killed by starvation or famine-related diseases in India in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Millions died in the great famine years 1876–8, 1896–7 and 1900–1901, hundreds of thousands in smaller famines in between. Famine occurred when people found it impossible to ‘command the means by which grain may be purchased’, as a group of Indian famine observers put it in 1896. When famine hit, entire districts emptied as people left home looking for any way to earn money they could. When rains failed in 1876 in Indapur, an area ninety miles east of Pune, 10,000 of its 67,000 population left, and the same number deserted the same place twenty years later. Hundreds of villages throughout north, west and south India were left without a soul. Sometimes only local elites who had stores of grain stayed. Before mass migration between the new independent states of India and Pakistan in 1947, these famine years saw the greatest movement of people in Indian history.

  To begin with, people on the verge of starvation left their villages on long-established routes. Some went overseas. Hundreds of thousands moved to work in the plantations of Ceylon during the 1870s and 1880s. Others travelled to Mauritius or even the Caribbean. But most people walked to wetter, more prosperous parts of the Indian subcontinent. The Gujarat coast and the wooded region around Nagpur were common destinations, where coastal trade might provide work or forests provide fruits to forage.

  But as famine conditions grew worse, the destitute found a new destination: British-run work camps. In the 1860s and 1870s, district officers opened work schemes in a haphazard fashion. As famine became a definite reality in the minds of the British regime, famine relief became another way of life governed by imperial rules and regularities. Starting from the early 1880s, each provincial government wrote famine codes that calibrated exactly how much work each person was supposed to do and how much pay they should receive. The codes included details about where to dig latrine ditches (too far away for people to use them); where to bury the dead (in deep mass graves); what to do with children too young to work (put them in big nurseries with two overseers for every sixty children). Huts were to be laid out to make sure, as one observer put it, ‘the encampment has the appearance of a well ordered village’.

  Photography had become an obsession for many Britons in India during the late nineteenth century, and the famine camps became an early subject. The spread of the handheld Kodak No. 1 camera after 1888 allowed everyday scenes to be captured on film. Photographs were taken of clusters of the starving, queues of people receiving food or pay and neat lines of tents where they were accommodated. Bombay governor Sir Richard Temple wrote in 1877 that ‘[t]here is only one possible mode of escape [from famine], namely labour,’1 yet very few photographs of famine work survives in the public record. One of them, taken by Frederick Lechmere-Oertel, shows hundreds of bodies, squatting and leaning forward, the men clothed in nothing but plain waist cloths and the women in worn saris, with an overseer standing with a large stick in the foreground. The photograph was taken at a famine relief camp near Allahabad, probably in 1900, but the scene might have been anywhere in India during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The women and men sit in front of piles of small stones, breaking rocks.

  Born in Germany before moving to India to study at the engineering college at Roorkee which Thomas Cautley founded, Lechmere-Oertel wrote some of the textbooks used to train engineers. His photographs were, though, a record of the poor employment of late nineteenth-century India’s labour force. At the worst moments of famine in 1897 and 1900, six million were being fed by British relief, more than half in return for the kind of work depicted in the photograph. In these years, the imperial state employed eight times more people than all the factories o
f the subcontinent combined. Given the unmet needs of late nineteenth-century Indian society, this massive workforce was put to use very badly. India’s railway network was growing and in need of labourers; heavy industry was expanding and demanded workers. But instead of increasing India’s production or prosperity, the British government forced workers to sit on the ground, just as in Lechmere-Oertel’s photograph, breaking stone. Their task was to make gravel to lay roads, but the roads they made rarely went anywhere useful and were usually washed away with a few weeks’ monsoon rain.2

  These famine camps transformed the way Indians interacted with the British state. Before the late 1850s, ordinary Indian civilians encountered the imperial regime in brief moments, in court or revenue offices where officials made perfunctory decisions that were then poorly enforced. In the years after the rebellion of 1857–8 interaction increased, as the reconquest of north India placed more people in contact with British violence, and then labour was hired in larger numbers on public works. But still, in most places, the British regime was very distant.

  The famine camps that opened in the late nineteenth century initiated a direct encounter between British officers and unprecedented numbers of their subjects. This new style of mass imperial contact was partly stimulated by British compassion for India’s poor. But imperial bureaucrats treated famine victims neither as people whose welfare needed to be secured, nor as workers whose creative labour could be put to productive use. Instead, the poor were dealt with as potential trouble-makers and a possible drain on the imperial regime’s resources. Even confronted with mass death, the imperial regime’s instincts were to project British power and protect the livelihood of its agents. The purpose, as ever, was to ensure lines of control were sustained and imperial institutions not left open to challenge.

  The dramatic history of the world

  Famine occurred when there was not enough work for people to earn the money to feed themselves when climatic conditions turned bad. That breakdown happened as India’s workforce was exposed to greater competition from overseas, and India’s rulers were unable or unwilling to support alternative ways for people to earn money to buy food.

  The middle of the nineteenth century was a period of global economic dislocation. This was the world’s first era of globalization, when goods people used every day (food, ordinary clothes, household consumables) were shipped across continents for the first time. A global mass market emerged for wheat, opium, sugar and meat but above all for cotton. Indian consumers began to buy the cloth produced in Lancashire’s cotton mills in massive quantities. British-made textiles then flooded into India to clothe the empire’s expanding army from 1857 to 1858, and followed the reestablishment of British power. In the 1830s there were only sixty million yards of cotton goods exported to India each year. In 1858 the figure had grown to 968 million yards. Exports pushed a billion yards in 1870, three yards a year for every man, woman and child resident in the Indian subcontinent.

  The importing of British textiles did not simply annihilate the Indian manufacture of cloth and clothes. New products and expanded transport links created new opportunities for work. India’s connection to global markets was devastating in many places. But it had complicated effects, affecting districts which were well connected as much, often worse, than the isolated countryside.

  Take Bellary, for example, a town called ‘the capital of the famine districts’ by one observer in the early 1880s, at the centre of the district which saw the greatest mortality through India’s great famine years. Lying in the dry centre of the southern Indian peninsula, 130 miles from the west coast at Goa, 180 miles north of Bangalore and 240 miles south-west of Hyderabad, Bellary was never remote or isolated. Throughout the famine years in the second half of the nineteenth century, Bellary’s middle-class inhabitants saw it as the cultural centre of southern India, with vibrant theatres and a thriving literary scene. The lawyer and playwright Kolachalam Srinivasa Rao imagined Bellary as the place from which the cultural life of India could be regenerated. Rao’s Dramatic History of the World, written in Telugu in the 1890s and translated and printed in 1908, drew from a dizzying range of dramatic traditions, from ancient Greece to aboriginal Australia, to inspire a rebirth of Indian drama. In what one might call India’s middle south, the district was on the border between the Mughal-ruled provinces of the north and India’s far southern provinces. In the centre of the Indian peninsula, it stood at the junction of the Telugu-speaking east and Kannada-speaking west. Bellary’s cultural role grew from both its central place in global trade and from famine. It was the buying and selling of cotton over decades which linked Bellary to India’s coasts and then Europe, allowing Srinivasa Rao to think about the town in relationship not just to Asia and the Middle East, but the rest of the world. But the first modern theatrical groups in the town emerged out of charities created to provide relief during the 1876–7 crisis.

  Bellary town grew around granite rocks that provided a platform for armies defending the surrounding land. Coming under British rule in 1801, Bellary became an important cantonment town, the site of southern India’s largest army base. The town’s military role helped it grow to become India’s forty-first most populous settlement by 1871, with 51,766 inhabitants and, according to military surgeons, the greatest number of venereal disease cases in the Indian army. The military base supported the growth of imperial institutions: a church, a courthouse and a tax office were built around the fort in the early nineteenth century, as well as a market named the Cowl Bazaar, after the qaul, or promise, which soldiers made when they enlisted in the Company’s army. British officers focused on the needs of this urban settlement, but only a small fraction of the district’s population was drawn to the town. In the 1870s, the surrounding district had 912,000 inhabitants.

  The black, hard soil around Bellary town was bad for growing grain but good for cotton. For centuries, cotton from these fields had been shipped 130 miles directly west to Hubli and then on to the rest of the world from Karwar, the port where two of Katherine Cooke’s husbands had died, or to Bombay. But its greatest use was in clothing for local people to wear. Scattered throughout the region, villagers manufactured thread on spinning wheels or simply twirled cotton onto iron bars. This thread was woven into cloth on looms which were ‘in all essential points exactly similar to the common hand-loom of England’, except the shuttle was not moved by any ‘mechanical contrivance’. Perhaps a third of the income of most peasant households was earned by women spinning in their homes.

  This was hand-powered industry, diffused throughout the villages of India, but it existed alongside the beginnings of steam-powered manufacturing. Around 1865, Daniel Abraham, a Catholic Tamil whose family had moved from Madras in the 1820s, opened a cotton mill. A decade later, Sabapathy Muliyar, a Hindu merchant, opened twelve cotton steam presses, three ginning factories and a weaving factory. Part of the capital for both the Abraham and Muliyar enterprises came from the money each man’s family had respectively earned by selling goods to the army at Bellary: Abraham’s father had been a distiller who sold liquor to soldiers. Sabapathy Muliyar’s grandfather had been the cantonment’s commissariat. But both men also had British trading partners.3

  In the 1840s and 1850s, European-manufactured textiles were reaching Bellary by bullock cart. Over the next decades goods started to come by rail, as lines were opened in 1871 which linked Bellary to Madras and through the Bhor Ghat incline to Bombay. Although yarn, cloth and clothes came in great quantities from Lancashire, work in the local cotton industry did not disappear. Bellary’s highly skilled weavers concentrated on expensive patterned cotton and silk saris, with particular towns developing a reputation for specific colours and styles. Poorer weavers adjusted by making white, coarse khadi cloth that Lancashire mill-owners could not make cheaply enough. British officials still counted 23,293 looms in Bellary in 1869–70, one for every forty-three men, women and children in the district.

  Yet to survive against European products
, spinning and weaving became more specialized, more of a male occupation and more urban. The textile industry was no longer scattered throughout villages. To cut costs it was concentrated in towns like Bellary, in narrow alleyways where groups of men specialized in particular styles or colours of sari, or in the Abraham or Sabapathy factories. Global competition forced Indian textile manufactures to stop employing women who spun and wove in their homes while their husbands tilled the fields. The result was that peasants had fewer sources of income when the weather cut their agricultural work. Middle-class consumers could still buy Indian-made cotton and silk goods in the bazaars; but many of the people who had once produced them starved.

  New global connections opened up the possibility of other forms of work. There was a brief moment when a more balanced relationship between Britain and India’s producers and consumers seemed possible, but such moments did not last. In 1860, 80 per cent of Britain’s cotton industry’s raw materials came from America, but these supplies were cut by the civil war. Factory owners started to look to cotton-producing districts in India like Bellary to fill the gap in supply. ‘To India’, the radical liberal politician and inspector of public works Arthur Arnold wrote in his History of the Cotton Famine, ‘belongs the origin of cotton manufacture.’ The British mechanization of cotton-making had been spurred ‘by our envy and cupidity’ at the fabrics made by skilled Indian weavers, Arnold said. It would be a ‘strange, but a happy instance of redistributive justice’ if India became the main supplier for British looms. Men like Arnold imagined India would prosper by growing and processing primary products for industrial societies, as Australia, Canada and New Zealand did at the same time.