by Jon Wilson
Discussions in the early Congress did not challenge British imperial sovereignty. The loyal delegate from Masulipatam called its English-educated attendees ‘the children of our beloved mother Empress’. But they did demand the inclusion of Indian voices within imperial institutions. ‘[P]assing through a long minority’, it was time for Indians to be treated like adults, and given a say in their own government, the man from Masulipatam stated. The institutional reforms which Congress proposed would have radically challenged the character of British rule. The first meeting called for the abolition of the London-based Council of India, for the inclusion of ‘a considerable number’ of elected Indians within the Raj’s legislative councils, for the opening of the Indian Civil Service to Indian talent and the creation of a Royal Commission, ‘the people of India being adequately represented thereon’, to reform the workings of British power. Representation was the central issue.
Later radicals and historians accused the early Congress of being a group of self-serving public apparatchiks, desperate to do no more than secure their own advancement. It was certainly an elite body. But delegates argued that they needed to be represented not only for their own good but in order to articulate the voice of the poor. They were able to compare the fate of other parts of the British empire – Australia or Canada as well as British India – where the fact that large sections of the population had a voice in political institutions ensured that governments responded quickly to economic hardship. When the American civil war brought the Lancashire cotton industry to a standstill for example, the local journalist Edwin Waugh published stories of the ‘home life of the Lancashire cotton folk’, with local dialects, individual characteristics and names: Ann, Sarah, Martha, John. The Times published letters from ‘a Lancashire lad’ in the same idiom. The result was a nationwide campaign for action. In the late 1870s, the Pune Sarvajanik Sabha had started to print records of the plight of different districts under famine conditions, trying to use the experience of India’s masses to put pressure on the government. But the Sabha recognized that something more forceful than publishing reports in journals was required.
At the first meetings of the Congress, the delegates were united by a common critique of the poverty of India, and a common sense that British rule was at fault. During the second half of the nineteenth century the leading figure in articulating this challenge was the statesman Dadabhai Naoroji, perhaps the best known figure at the Bombay gathering. Born near Bombay in 1825, Naoroji was the son of a poor Parsi priest. In his early career he mixed a long-standing western Indian interest in mathematics with both commerce and the British regime’s obsession with counting things. Naoroji started a newspaper at the age of twenty-six, helped found a political association in Bombay at twenty-seven, and was then appointed to a chair in mathematics and philosophy at the age of twenty-nine. A year later he left for London to set up the English branch of the Indian firm he worked for. Like Sabapathy Mudeliar he quickly set up his own cotton-trading firm, but supplemented his income with the salary of Gujarati Professor at University College London. Naoroji lived in England for thirty years with only ‘transient . . . sojourns in India’.
Naoroji’s main argument was that ‘the present system of British administration’ sucked resources from India to Britain. His style of analysis owed much to a long-standing tradition of statistical inquiry in western India, which began when a Major Vans Kennedy calculated that India was less crime prone than Britain in the 1820s, and Naoroji Furdonjee surveyed Kabul Bazaar a decade later. During the first years of India’s great depression and famine Naoroji used his mathematical background to build a statistical model of the total production and consumption of India’s population, creating the subcontinent’s first ever numbers for national income. He argued that India’s poverty was caused by the annual transfer of resources from India to Britain. This ‘drain of wealth’ had, he argued, deprived India of the capital required for it to thrive.15
Naoroji argued that British rule was a system that redistributed wealth from poor Indian peasants to prosperous sections of the British elite. Indians worked for poor wages to produce crops sold cheaply to the rest of the world. Between 1835 and 1872, he argued, India had exported an average of £13 million goods each year with no corresponding return. The labour of Indian taxpayers was also used to pay different groups of British notables, from railway company shareholder to retired imperial civil servants, making up a total loss of £30 million annually. The limited investment that returned to India benefited imperial rather than Indian interests, Naoroji maintained. His own wealth came from the cotton industry, and like other cotton capitalists Naoroji was initially a supporter of investment in infrastructure which would speed raw cotton from fields in places like Bellary in exchange from British manufactured goods. In the early 1870s Naoroji was enthusiastic about the railways. A decade later, he joined the growing chorus of Indian political leaders critical of the way India’s railways were used to protect Britain’s power and military might rather than India’s prosperity, arguing that a system which should have diffused prosperity in fact spread hardship.16
With a keen eye for historical comparisons, Naoroji suggested Britain’s drain of wealth was far worse than anything that had happened before in Indian history, worse than the plunder of India by Mahmud of Ghazni or Nader Shah. Its most important effect, Naoroji argued, was to deprive India of the resources needed to maintain its resilience in different conditions and grow. India was ‘depleted’, ‘exhausted’ and ‘bled’, so Indians found themselves pushed to the edge of subsistence when flood or drought came. The drain meant there was a continuous, ‘chronic state of famine’.
Naoroji felt the imperial regime was too tightly bureaucratic to listen to Indian opinion in India itself. In the more open and argumentative political context of the metropole, he believed the British public would respond to the arguments, and could be persuaded to reform their country’s financial relationship with India and staunch the flow. It was to achieve that purpose, and to act as the ‘representative of India’, that this ‘man of strange name and race’, as he described himself to his voters, stood three times for Parliament. Naoroji was elected as the Liberal MP for Finsbury on the second occasion in 1892. In Parliament, the white-haired, gold-bespectacled Naoroji spoke wittily in favour of Irish Home rule, as much as India.
During his thirty English years Naoroji’s money, charisma and connections allowed him to become the nodal point in a network of Indians coming to London to study or practise law. Many of the leaders who travelled to the first gathering of the Indian National Congress had been introduced to each other by Naoroji in London. Brought together by the Grand Old Man’s personality, the meeting’s purpose nonetheless departed from Naoroji’s political strategy. Naoroji thought the only opening for Indian representation lay in London. Most of the rest of the leaders who gathered in 1885 doubted whether lobbying in the metropolis was capable of changing anything in the subcontinent. If there was an overarching argument in the delegates’ speeches it was that ‘the centre of the practical work of Indian administration should be shifted from England to India’, as Bombay’s K. T. Telang put it; and that localizing power would undo India’s poverty. Sabapathy Mudeliar fiercely condemned the Famine Commission’s British-appointed members for their inability to understand local conditions. He criticized British administration for being top-heavy and British-based, and for wasting money that could have been spent on famine relief. The Council of India, the body of retired bureaucrats that guided Indian policy from London, would have the ‘advantage of making the government more local than now’.17
The early Congress did little to mitigate famine or poverty in India. British responses to the motions it submitted were curt, or nonexistent. There was no grand parliamentary inquiry into the iniquities of British rule. The Indian empire’s councils were not opened up to large numbers of Indian voices, at least not until the 1920s. The army, rather than the economic development of the country, conti
nued to be the main drain on imperial finances. The imperial regime did not officially or publicly concede to the demands of early nationalists, but Indian political organization did have an impact on both the direction of British policy and, as we shall see in the next chapter, Indian enterprise. But on its own Congress did nothing.
The country is ruined by treachery
The annual meetings of the Indian National Congress were the result of the growth of new urban political associations during the late nineteenth century. At the same time, new forms of organization and protest began to emerge in the countryside. From the 1860s, peasant campaigns struggled against the dislocation of rural society caused by the complicated impact of India’s connection into newly global markets. These movements had different causes, and took different forms, leading campaigners to make very different kinds of alliances with other social groups.
Some campaigns, like the Indigo Riots in eastern India in 1859, occurred in response to the effort by British investors to extend the cultivation of cash crops for export to Europe by force. With British power as a target, the ‘Blue Mutiny’ became a popular cause for Calcutta’s middle-class critics of the Raj, as well as British radicals. The event was dramatized by the Bengali postmaster and then railway inspector Dinabandhu Mitra in the play Nil Darpan (‘the blue mirror’), one of the first great productions of modern Bengali theatre. The Irish missionary James Long printed the work in English and spent a month in prison for slandering plantation owners. Despite their victory against the supporters of the revolt, the government was too worried about the spread of insurgency to back their compatriots wholeheartedly. The result was the Indigo Act of 1860, which outlawed the British planters’ attempts to force peasants to grow indigo.18
Others, like the Pabna rebellion in the same region of northern India in 1873, saw protest directed against local Indian landholders. As a result, the response of middle-class Indian opinion was more complex. The Pabna uprising was sparked when landlords increased rents dramatically in line with rises in the price of grain. In years gone by, peasants would have mobilized through caste councils and clan groups, gathering in large numbers with lathis to force landholders to negotiate. At Pabna, buffalo horns and drums were still beaten to summon villagers to meet. But old techniques were translated from sound into print and developed for the age of litigation and circulars, ‘So and so projas [peasants]!!’, one printed paper said in Pabna, ‘as soon as you see this circular hasten over to the side of the insurgent party. If you fail to come over within a day, we will hasten to fish in the pond by your lake.’
The biggest change, though, was the creation of permanent associations for rural workers to assert their rights. Peasants claimed to be part of the imperial constitutional order, responding to the effort to increase rent by declaring ‘themselves to be ryots [subjects] only of the queen’. To assert this status, cultivators started to organize, collecting money to fund court cases when peasants were faced with large increases, so peasants could outspend their landlords in lawyers’ fees in many cases. At the same time, alliances were made with leaders in the cities, particularly Calcutta. The imperial officer Sir William Hunter, a man considered by many to embody the official British mindset, described the rebels as having ‘fought with keen persistence but with few ebullitions of violence’, ‘conducting before our eyes an agrarian revolution by due course of law’.19
The 1873 protests opened up sharp divisions in rural Indian society. ‘Class feeling’ extended as far as people’s dress. A British officer noted that wearing a chaddar (shawl) and carrying an umbrella was a sign that someone was ‘a landlord’s man’. A man ‘merely clad in a dhoti and gamcha . . . was at heart a unionist’. Middle-class urban opinion was divided as well. Many owners of rural property lived in imperial India’s capital, and were anxious when their domination of the countryside – and hence their livelihood – was challenged. Calcutta’s Ananda Bazar Patrika, a paper set up ‘to give voice to the growing sense of irritation of the English-educated community of the province’, enthusiastically backed the Indian National Congress and sided with landholders. The newspapers compared rioters to Genghiz Khan. The aim of the rioters, the paper said, was ‘to insult and destroy the caste of respectable men, to violate the chastity of females of gentle blood, to break into pieces the images of idols’.
Other leaders, whose incomes were less dependent on landed estates, supported the peasants’ cause. R. C. Dutt, the second Indian to be appointed to the Indian Civil Service, championed the peasant cause, as did Bengal’s leading novelist, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. Both men’s argument was that the hands-off approach of British authorities had allowed landholders to become local despots, wreaking chaos in rural Bengali society. The police were too weak to restrain local notables; the courts did not guarantee peasants their rights; the state simply collected useless paperwork. ‘The country is ruined by treachery, tenants die due to exploitation. What to do with reports’, Grambarta Prakashika, a paper which focused on rural matters, wrote in 1880.20
These claims were not only repeated in print, but led urban associations to make links in the countryside. In the early 1880s, Bengal’s most powerful political association, the Indian Association, sent agents into the rural provinces to convene meetings and ‘inaugurate’ new Ryot’s Unions. In years of dearth and near-famine in Bengal, 1884, 1886–7 and 1889, for example, surveyors travelled around linking up with local activists, recording details of agrarian conditions and pressuring landholders and district officers for relief. By 1888 these campaigns meant the Association had 124 branches throughout India, most in Bengal. Yet in eastern India the connection between rural political and city leaders was limited by class differences. A position that emphatically sided with peasants against their landholders would undermine the livelihood and status of too many members of Calcutta’s upper middle class. In the west and south of India, things were different. In Bengal, the umbrella carriers and dhoti wearers were often in conflict. In Bombay and Madras, in the lands hit most badly by famine, they claimed to be on the same side.21
The people should be made to understand
On the afternoon of 13 December 1896 a meeting was held in the public square of the coastal village of Khattalwada, a hundred miles north of Bombay. Two thousand anxious men listened to a speech surrounded by police officers with loaded guns. The meeting had been called by the Pune Sarvajanik Sabha to inform peasants about their rights in another year of devastating famine. Since its role in calling the first meeting of the Indian National Congress, the Sabha had shifted in a more radical direction, especially since 1890 when the nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak took over the organization. Like Bengal’s Indian Association, the Sabha had moved beyond writing reports of famine conditions and holding meetings of regional notables, and begun to draw large crowds to protest against the British failure to mitigate famine. In places like Khattalwada, the Sabha managed to mobilize peasants on a large scale only by connecting to the surge of rural political association. Tilak’s local agents befriended the leaders of rural societies where peasants and minor landlords united to campaign against high taxes and the exorbitant rates of interests charged by moneylenders.22
The speaker at the meeting was Achyut Sitaram Sathe, a 22-year-old law student sent from Pune to gather information about conditions in the countryside and help peasants organize the prevention of mass death. Since the last great famine in 1876–8, the government had published its famine code, a set of rules theoretically supposed to prevent starvation. These promised to reduce taxes and to employ the poor in public works when times were hard. At Khattalwada, Sathe was teaching this crowd of peasants the rights they had under the code, explaining how to apply to the Collector for a discount on their revenue payment. The crowd were ‘awed’, according to newspaper reports, by the imperial regime’s firepower. Sathe reassured them that ‘they were engaged in a loyal proceeding and need fear nothing’. But the English officers at the scene thought he was teetering on
the verge of subversion.
Throughout the long meeting, Sathe asked the Assistant Collector to take a seat on the stage. The British officer in charge, James Houssemayne Du Boulay, insisted on standing mute, aloof, with a ‘severe’ expression on his face. Aged only twenty-eight Du Boulay was a third of the way through his career in India. He came from a family that started off in the Church and the City of London, and came late but emphatically to empire. Du Boulay’s father was a housemaster at Winchester College; his brothers and sisters were scattered through every part of the empire, from China to South Africa. James himself joined the Indian Civil Service in 1888, eventually rising to become private secretary to the Viceroy of India Lord Hardinge. His career throughout these years was dominated by a concern for keeping the machinery of British rule going, avoiding unnecessary commitment but acting with force where necessary. Du Boulay was ‘straight and taciturn’, a man of reserve embarrassed by a handshake that lasted too long, who even wrote home to his children in a reserved style. At Khattalwada, such distance was a tactic of rule.
