The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  At one point in the meeting an audience member suggested the people gathered ‘should demand redress of their grievances’ from ‘the Sirkar’s representative’. According to old Indian political idioms Du Boulay should have done exactly that, to listen to complaints, then use his personal authority to mitigate distress himself. But both Sathe and Du Boulay shared a more abstract and bureaucratic concept of political power. Sathe recommended peasants wait a few days before submitting a request for a rent reduction on an official form; the Bombay government complained about being flooded with identical documents, blaming the avalanche of paperwork on cunning Brahmin agitators corrupting the minds of the rural masses. At Khattalwada, there was certainly no question of negotiation. The senior government officer present at the meeting thought his job was to ensure order was preserved and British power maintained safely, not to listen to complaints. If anyone in the British government had responsibility for the subsistence of the poor it was not him. ‘Mr Du Boulay had attended the meeting that day with quite a different object,’ Sathe told his audience. At the end, the Assistant Collector ‘bade a polite, though conventional adieu’ to the speaker and left with his armed guard.

  British guns stayed silent at Khattalwada, but they were used fifty miles south against Indian protesters. In the 1890s, the strip of land along the coast north of Bombay quickly becomes heavily wooded, and its forests had long been a refuge for Indian peasants in times of crisis. A place for foraging for fruit, collecting wood or making alcohol from tree sap, the natural, lush resources of India’s woodlands offered subsistence in times of drought. In the late nineteenth century, commercial forestry created profits for Indian timber merchants but undermined the livelihood of forest-dwellers and peasants who saw the forest as a haven in times of tribulation.

  Conflict between famine victims and forest managers grew from November 1896, when 5,000 people gathered at Bassein, near Bombay, to protest against rules banning the fermentation of toddy and the collection of wood. A riot occurred in early December at Kelve-Mahim, when peasants broke into the forestry department’s office and burnt government records. Their aim was to make sure British regulations banning toddy manufacture could not be implemented. Even though the attack was on buildings and records rather than people, frightened imperial officers ordered the crowd to be dispersed by firepower. ‘The attempt to rule on the strength of the force of arms only ill becomes a civilized Government of the nineteenth century,’ the liberal Indian Spectator said in response.

  The sensitivity of the imperial state to any small sign of disaffection drove the suppression of all efforts to criticize the British policy towards the famine. The imperial regime carefully monitored the language and actions of Indian political associations, ready to act forcefully if there was any hint that ‘agitators’ were ‘attempting [to] incite disaffection’. Contrary to the intention of the Indian National Congress and its allies, there was no attempt to create a conversation, still less to countenance any kind of negotiation. Arrests and prosecutions happened quickly if there was any hint of illegality. Achyut Sitaram Sathe, the young lecturer who had spoken at Khattalwada, was briefly arrested for suggesting forest-dwellers should cut wood or tap palm trees to brew toddy in violation of increasingly stringent forest rules. Sathe was released, but his colleague Govind Vinayak Apte was imprisoned for a year, and the Pune Sarvajanik Sabha ceased ‘to be recognized as a body which has any claim to address Government on questions of public policy’. From then onwards its petitions were not even answered. The Pune Sarvajanik Sabha attributed this response to the anger of the British authorities, and castigated the ‘curt replies; abuse and threats’ it was subject to. This was, the Sabha’s journal noted, the inevitable response whenever ‘official high-handedness meets with popular opposition’.23

  The government’s high-handedness ended up putting the dominant nationalist figure in western India, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, behind bars. The 1896–7 famine was followed by a devastating plague in the Sabha’s stronghold of Pune. When half the population deserted the town, the British employed draconian measures, forcing entry into private houses and destroying personal property. The officer in charge of anti-plague measures, W. C. Rand, quickly became a figure of hate in the town. While they were travelling to celebrate Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee, he and his military guard were assassinated by members of a secret society founded to protect the Hindu religion from alien attack. The Bombay government thought Tilak was behind the killings. ‘There is’, it stated, ‘the clearest possible connection . . . between the continual incitement to disaffection’ in Tilak’s writings and meetings, and the killings. Tilak was charged with inciting disaffection. In a hasty trial, he was convicted by a split, mixed-race jury and sentenced to eighteen months in prison in Burma (after a campaign by British officials in London, his sentence was reduced to eleven months). The prosecution’s case rested on no more than Tilak printing a modern Marathi poem in which the great leader Shivaji awoke from death to complain about the ruin of the country under British rule. Tilak’s conviction depended on the British judge reinterpreting the word ‘disaffection’ in the penal code to mean ‘absence of affection’. Tilak himself insisted that he had cooperated with the government throughout the famine and plague in a manner ‘wholly inconsistent with the charge of sedition’. He would never have been convicted, he said, if the judge or any of the jurors had been able to read the poem in its original language.24

  Throughout the famine, the Sabha spoke a language that the imperial authorities did understand though. In these years, the Sabha drew from their network of local informants to publish reports that mirrored the imperial regime’s own inquiries. These texts noted the state of each village, the price of grain, the number of people who had fled and the sources of income. Their aim was to collect information about ‘things which subordinate Government officers cannot know or will not report to their superiors’, which the agents of ‘a popular body like the Sabha who move and work among the people alone can observe’. They then politely badgered every outpost of the imperial regime to put its explicit commitments into practice. They proposed that roads, railway lines and bridges be built with unemployed labour, grain shops opened, revenue remitted, orphanages started, government forests be thrown open. ‘Relief works need to be started for 1000 people. . . . Suggest the construction of a bridge on the Sukee river,’ the reporter from the village of Kerhala in Khandesh wrote. The purpose was to channel the ‘general cry for relief’, as the Pune Sarvajanik Sabha put it, into specific pressure points, based on very particular information.25

  Even in the midst of famine, British officers thought visible concessions to Indian criticism was a sign of weakness. The most important demands of rural leaders and urban radicals were fiercely resisted: there were few reductions in revenue, even when remissions were permitted under the famine code. The ‘very small suspensions and remissions of land revenue’ which occurred were ‘the most questionable feature of the scheme of relief’ according to even the imperial regime’s own report into the famine operations during 1896–7. The report explained the reason for the regime’s harshness in this way: ‘the Government felt it necessary to be rather harder in the matter than it would have otherwise been in consequence of an agitation originating in Poona’.

  Yet where they could act without seeming to negotiate, where a response to Indian pressure could be interpreted as the consolidation of imperial power not a concession, British bureaucrats did respond. The action of those responsible for shaping policy was – without them being willing to admit it – guided by the comments of their Indian critics. In its journal in January 1897, the Sabha was ‘glad to note that its influence is felt even in the dark chambers of the Council’. The hope that its work would ‘silently mould the future policy of Government’ was not entirely groundless.26

  Pressure from the Sabha and others meant the government’s response to the famine of 1896–7 was quicker and more effective than it had been twenty years befo
re. A hundred and sixty-seven thousand people were employed on relief works in the worst affected areas as early as November 1896. Six and a half million people were given relief at the peak of the crisis throughout India, 4.6 million receiving money in exchange for work. In Bombay presidency, the principle that relief should only be given to able-bodied people who would work was followed through, with work only offered at large-scale residential relief camps from March 1897. But policies to reduce the dependence of the supposedly ‘undeserving’ poor were quickly abandoned. The government found it impossible to apply a ‘distance test’ that refused relief for anyone who lived within ten miles of a work site. Attempts at introducing piecework were quickly dropped. After pressure from campaigners, kitchens were opened at famine camps to feed children and immobile dependants of the working poor.

  The result of the British regime’s silent recognition of Indian criticism was that death occurred on a smaller scale than two decades before. The famine of 1896–7 was still catastrophic, and was followed by another great famine in 1900–1901. The extension of railway lines and the improvement of roads meant famine prices and famine conditions spread more quickly to regions where crops had not badly failed, but as demographer Arup Maharatna notes, famine mortality was lower in these later crises than in previous years. In Bombay presidency’s famine-affected districts, there was an average 250 per cent increase in the number of deaths in 1877 compared to non-famine years. In 1897, the same famine districts saw an increase of ‘only’ 148 per cent in mortality. Throughout the whole of India, there were at least a million deaths that would not have occurred without famine in each of the crises of 1896–7 and 1900–1901, and death came in the largest numbers where protest was the least. But those numbers were probably a fifth of the total killed by the far less serious ecological and economic crisis of 1876–8.27

  The famines of these years set the pattern for the British response to Indian political action over the next half-century. Dissent was vigorously suppressed, but concessions were made as long as the British could persuade themselves that they were augmenting the power of the imperial state. The British government failed to reduce India’s poverty – it did not even try to – but its aim was to ensure the very poorest did not die in large numbers. For the first time, the imperial government was serious about ensuring the survival of the people it ruled. The changing pattern of famine relief shows the beginning of what might be described as India’s welfare state, a system of rule which presupposed that the state had a responsibility to act to protect and improve society.28

  This was a strange and peculiarly hands-off approach to state intervention. For the most part, the government refused to ensure the local economy was capable of sustaining a decent livelihood for people through bad times, by reducing taxation or providing loans to tide people over, for example. Suffused with an attitude of anxiety, imperial bureaucrats worried that subtle interventions would hand power to people it could not trust. There was, for example, nothing to ensure loans went to the right place; or that reductions in revenue would help the poor. Instead, the government created its own centres, which it could control entirely on its own terms, to ensure people’s survival. The British built a feeding machine which, for the most part, was physically distant from the homes of the people it tried to help, dependent on the massive migration of the destitute from their homes. As some of its critics argued, when this most laissez-faire of states intervened in Indian society, it acted with the most bureaucratic form of ‘state socialist’ power.

  Progressives must not be given their heads

  As centres for the employment of poor Indian workers, the famine camps were rivalled only by India’s great cities, but these grew slowly and sporadically compared to the changes taking place in the rest of the world. The years after the great rebellion of 1857–8 saw village-dwellers move to and from India’s metropolitan centres according to the staccato rhythm of India’s globalizing economy. The total population of India’s ten largest cities grew from three to four million people in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. Calcutta, easily India’s largest city, expanded by almost 250,000 people to reach a population of a million in 1901. But urbanization was uneven, sporadic compared to what was happening in Europe, America or Japan. The overall numbers of people moving to India’s cities were a fraction of the population moving to urban centres elsewhere in the world. During the same years, London grew by 2.3 million, greater New York by 2.5 million, Berlin by one million and Tokyo by more than 500,000. When much of the rest of the world was rapidly urbanizing, Indian remained a largely agricultural society. In Britain in 1900, 45 per cent of the population lived in settlements of more than 50,000 people. Britain was exceptionally urbanized; but perhaps 15 per cent of the world’s people lived in cities. Only 3.5 per cent, or eight million of India’s population of 283 million, lived in towns, making India perhaps the most rural society in the world.

  In India, the fastest growing cities were places where yarn was spun and cloth woven: Calcutta, Bombay, Kanpur, Ahmedabad and, outside the area of direct British control, Hyderabad. Yet in 1901 there were still only half a million factory workers in the whole subcontinent. Even by 1917 that figure had only doubled, leaving more than 90 per cent of the population directly dependent on agriculture for their livelihood. Most of the world’s demand for manufactured goods was met from Europe and America. The puzzle is why India’s cheap, often starving labour force was not put to use on a large enough scale to industrialize Indian society.

  One important answer is a lack of capital. Dadabhai Naoroji was right to argue that India’s producers were starved of resources, but his precise line of argument is not convincing. The problem was not that Britain sucked resources from India to Britain. In reality, the amount transferred in pensions and ‘home charges’ was relatively small, and money sent from India to Britain was returned in capital investment from the UK. The problem, rather, was that the institutions which governed India’s economic life were geared to support a narrow range of industrial activities, mainly those focused on processing primary produce for export. There were long-established lines of financial support for managers of businesses in European-managed enclaves; but these European firms were not interested in expanding to produce goods for India’s domestic markets or employ large numbers of Indian workers. Beyond those enclaves, large-scale industry was too risky for most Indian entrepreneurs to contemplate.29

  In the commercial life of the British empire in India, the European-owned managing agency house held sway. These grew out of the shipping companies and railway contractors that supported the mid-nineteenth-century East India Company. After British domination was emphatically asserted in 1858, these firms developed a sprawling web of interests, taking over coal mines and tea plantations, steamship companies, paper factories and jute mills. Between 1885 and 1895, agency houses even controlled a swathe of territory in East Africa, including the Arab-dominated port city of Mombasa. By 1900, European firms owned three-quarters of the industrial capital of India, perhaps £200 million in total.

  These were businesses concerned with maintaining British status and order, not with maximizing profits in the long term. Ruled by a class of perhaps a thousand British managers, the agency houses saw themselves as the commercial equivalent of the Indian Civil Service, maintaining British power and profitability in what they saw as a hostile economic environment. They had limited interest in the economy beyond India’s big port cities and a few European-dominated commercial towns. They emphasized the importance of personal networks and status instead of knowledge or ambition. ‘Engineers and specialists must not be allowed to run away with themselves,’ one manager wrote in the 1920s. ‘Optimists and progressives must not be given their heads.’

  The agency houses oversaw a pessimistic and fearful business culture, which was reluctant to invest in new ventures. With no knowledge of India’s domestic markets, agency houses stuck to the old export staples of jute or tea, or relied on governmen
t contracts. The great missed opportunity was the development of products to sell in India’s domestic market. Yet they were wary even of investing enough to ensure existing industries remained profitable. Even in the export trade, machinery was not replaced, the skills of employees uncared for and premises dilapidated. An observer of Calcutta’s jute mills at the beginning of the long depression in the 1870s was appalled by the run-down state of the factories, ‘large repairs and replacements were urgently needed . . . the words “depreciation” and “wear and tear” not finding their place in the Indian mill-owners vocabulary’. In 1880, six out of eleven Calcutta jute mills had no reserve funds to pay for the replacement of worn-out equipment.30

  More so than imperial bureaucrats, the agency houses insisted on maintaining racial barriers. Astonishingly, there was only a single case of an agency house creating a formal partnership with an Indian manager, in 1892. The agency houses blocked the route for Indian entrepreneurs to access capital in global money markets. The only way to access money from outside India was for entrepreneurs to work with lone European investors, working beyond the agency house system, as Daniel Abraham did in Bellary. But the sources of overseas capital were limited and sporadic.31

  British business leaders blamed India’s poverty on the supposed absence of a spirit of industry among the country’s population, thinking Indian entrepreneurs were ‘wanting in enterprise’, as E. W. Collin, author of the Report on the Existing Industries in Bengal, wrote in 1890. More accurate was the comment by the Bombay mill-owner Manmohandas Ramji in 1916. The problem, Ramji said, was an absence of capital; ‘many a commercial and industrial enterprise is nipped in the bud just because there is no bank to foster and develop it’. Until the twentieth century at least, the rigid racial hierarchies of the agency houses blocked Indian access to global capital markets. Many Indians saved money, but the British-dominated banking sector did not invest in Indian enterprise.