The Chaos of Empire
Page 41
Administrative division
The events of the first five years of the twentieth century changed that. Then, the Indian politics of self-reliance came into conflict with the last incarnation of Tory imperialism in India, with its effort to impose and celebrate the violent power of the British state on Indian society. The official British attitude in these years agreed that India was made up of a multiplicity of communities. But it tried to deny Indians any but the smallest capacity to govern themselves. In place of local initiative and organization the imperial regime projected the power of India’s supreme ruler, the Viceroy.
Between 1898 and 1905, it was Lord George Curzon who occupied that role. Curzon celebrated both British ways of doing things and his personal capacity to put them into practice. ‘[T]he highest ideal of truth’, he said before an Indian university audience in 1905, ‘is to a large extent a western conception.’ During his seven years in India, Curzon tightened up British power over one institution after another, starting with Calcutta Corporation in 1899 and ending up with its universities in 1904. Described by the historian David Cannadine as a ‘ceremonial impresario’, Curzon thought Indians would not resist the consolidation of imperial authority if they were dazzled by spectacular displays of British sovereign majesty. His government was ruled by a catastrophically unrealistic idea about the capacity of the British regime to rearrange Indian society.14
Curzon’s idea of British power was displayed in 1903 at the Delhi Durbar. To celebrate the coronation of Edward VII as Emperor of India, Curzon gathered the princes and senior British officials of the Raj in Delhi. On 1 January, after marching with a line of elephants and thousands of troops through the city’s centre, the Viceroy arrived in the midst of a sixty-square-mile park. Laid out in front of him was a spatial representation of the way he thought power worked in India. The Viceroy, representing the Crown, was at the centre, with his council of British officers and the rulers of large native states close at hand and lesser princes radiating out. India’s middle classes were nowhere, peasants and workers only present as soldiers and camp followers. The reporter Valentia Steer called it ‘a panorama of Eastern splendor and of Western might’. Just like the Mughal darbars which it partially emulated, the ritual was supposed to bind the subjects of a ruler into his polity. ‘I want to make it a celebration not of officials alone but of the public,’ Curzon said. The Viceroy even talked about Indian ‘citizenship’ within the empire. But unlike noisy pre-British courtly gatherings, Indian participation occurred in silent ritual. In Curzon’s vision of empire there was no space for the kind of negotiation between ruler and subjects that had sustained Mughal power.
This was imperial order projected for the age of the photograph and silent film. Curzon’s display was captured and propagated using the very latest technology. The durbar ground was connected with electricity and festooned with lights. Photographers, amateur and professional, snapped pictures everywhere. Four film crews, two British, two Indian, worked at the site. Obsessed with detail, Curzon met with film crews and directed them to places where the event could be filmed to the best effect. Cinema presented a spectacular, moving image of the event, with no possibility of a response: the ideal medium of communication to convey Curzon’s idea of power. Staged only seven years after the Lumière brothers presented the first moving pictures in Paris, the durbar was India’s first film event. Films of the durbar were shown at makeshift screenings throughout the subcontinent. In reality, audiences thought the display demonstrated little more than the Viceoy’s own ‘inordinate love of pomp and show’. Less than two years after the end of a devastating famine the Indian press castigated the durbar as a vain and wasteful form of entertainment.15
A few nationalist leaders – Surendranath Banerjea was one – wondered in public whether the great show might be accompanied by a reconstitution of Britain’s empire in India based on Indian leaders having a more active role. In fact, exactly the reverse occurred. The supposedly unifying effect of the durbar was followed by the announcement of the British government’s decision to divide India’s most active, patriotic community exactly a year later. The partition of Bengal created the greatest anti-British upsurge in India since 1857.
The partition proposal began deep in the bowels of the British bureaucracy, in a series of trivial exchanges between bureaucrats engaged in the arcane detail of trying to rationalize provincial boundaries. The process by which it emerged tells us something about the nature of British power in India. A scheme with a big impact developed from a set of small-scale efforts to mitigate imperial anxieties. There was no unifying philosophy or ideology other than the effort to maintain British power. Decisions were made with no negotiation with the people they affected.
The initial impulse for partition came from the idea of moving all the districts populated by people who spoke the Oriya language into a single province, to save the costs of language-training. Different options were debated for months. Curzon was furious that plans were being developed without him hearing about it. In his most famous minute, the Viceroy complained about British officials ‘calmly carving about and rearranging provinces on paper, colouring and recolouring the map of India’ without anyone consulting India’s supreme ruler: himself. ‘Round and round like the diurnal revolution of the earth went the file, stately, solemn, sure, and slow’ before at the last stage Curzon was supposed to register his assent.
By the time Curzon imposed his authority on the scheme, it had developed into a plan governed by exactly the opposite principle from that which the discussion began with. A province where people spoke a single language was divided, and its eastern half merged with a region where people spoke a different language. Bengal would be split in half and merged with Assam to the northeast. The measure was justified with the claim that the boundaries of government units did not reflect the boundaries of real communities: ‘Mere administrative division does not produce social division, any more than administrative unity produces social union,’ the government said in public. But the desire to weaken the political voice of Bengal was one major factor behind the measure. As the author of the partition plan put it, ‘Bengal united is a power; Bengal divided will pull in several different ways.’ Herbert Risley, the official who masterminded partition, understood the need to keep the public and private arguments separate. When he was asked to explain his reasoning in one exchange of letters he wrote, ‘it is not altogether easy to reply in a dispatch which is sure to be published’, because ‘one of our main objects is to split up and thereby weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule’.16
Patriotic spirit
Soon after the partition plan was announced in January 1904, Curzon visited the city intended as the capital of eastern Bengal, Dhaka. There, he persuaded the area’s largest landlord, Khwaja Salimullah Khan, to support his scheme. Salimullah had initially been sceptical. A loan of 100,000 rupees (almost £1 million in 2016 prices) together with alterations in the plan to make the new province of Eastern Bengal bigger persuaded him to support partition. Like many aristocratic Muslims, Salimullah thought he could stop the decline in his influence by playing a leading role in a more emphatically Muslim-dominated province. But Dhaka, the planned capital of Eastern Bengal, was in 1904 a mixed city, home to a large Hindu population, whose economic and cultural life was closely tied to Calcutta and other centres further west. The response to Lord Curzon was vehement. The Viceroy was followed around by boys with placards lobbying him to abandon the idea of splitting Bengal. ‘[D]o not turn us into Assamese’, some said, articulating the fear many in eastern Bengal had about being united with people they saw as less civilized and inferior.
Throughout Bengal, partition created resistance on an unpredicted and unprecedented scale. Huge meetings were held at Calcutta town hall in February 1904 and then January 1905, uniting every part of Hindu Bengali society. Dozens of pamphlets were published within weeks of the announcement. Sixty-nine petitions were received from Dhaka alone within a month. Seventy thou
sand signatures were sent to London in July 1905.
Protest quickly turned from lobbying to non-cooperation, and expanded beyond Bengal. A motion to boycott British goods was passed at a public meeting near Khulna in eastern Bengal on 13 July 1905; a similar motion was passed three weeks later in Calcutta. Two thousand public meetings were held in every part of Bengal, with European products burnt at many. At Durga Puja, in October 1905, 50,000 gathered at Calcutta’s Kali temple, vowing not to buy foreign goods. A province-wide conference was held at Barisal in April 1906. Thousands of volunteers marched through the streets shouting nationalist slogans against police orders. Meetings at Khulna had been dispersed by force in December 1905, but British violence was stronger at Barisal, where students, sometimes school-children, were beaten. The Indian-managed press condemned the ‘tyranny’ of the police and army, although no protesters were killed. Lajpat Rai condemned a government ‘commanding 260,000 or 500,000 soldiers, stooping to strike us by striking our boys’. British rule had adopted ‘Russian models’ and ‘frightful’ tactics. The British empire had established ‘a reign of military terrorism’. Even the British-edited press worried that these ‘blunders’ would ‘only have the effect of manufacturing an army of martyrs’.
British violence helped protests spread far beyond Bengal, with meetings across India from the far south to Punjab in 1906 and 1907. Assemblies were held in district capitals throughout the subcontinent, from Madras to Punjab. Tens of thousands gathered to hear the Bengali radical Bipin Chandra Pal give lectures at Rajahmundry and then on the beach at Madras when he toured along south India’s coastline. Pal argued that the partition of Bengal proved the British had no intention of sharing power with Indians. Their government would always remain ‘despotic’. Pal talked of a ‘new movement’ and mass ‘upsurge’. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi began his first political pamphlet, Hind Swaraj, written in 1908, by noting the ‘new spirit’ that had swept through the whole of India. ‘The spirit generated in Bengal has spread in the North to the Punjab, and in the South, to Cape Comorin.’17
Wherever they spoke or wrote, opponents of partition contrasted the distant violence of the imperial state with the natural unities they saw in local society. Opposition to Curzon’s ‘administrative division’ was based on the community-minded approach to politics which had emerged during the previous years, with its focus on nation building and self-reliance. From this standpoint, nations were not made by the bureaucratic measures of government; they grew from the ‘common impulse’ which came from people living together. As Bipin Chandra Pal put it in his Madras lectures, ‘[a] nation is not a mere collection of individuals. . . . it has organic life’.
Some wealthy Indians opposed partition because it corroded their economic interests; the merchant Nalinbihari Sircar was worried that the development of the port at Chittagong would weaken trade in Calcutta. But few Swadeshi activists saw Curzon’s partition as simply an act which endangered their interests in a calculable way. It was seen as a moment of violence against an organic entity which had its own autonomous life. In Bengal the national community was often described in human, feminine terms, usually as the mother. ‘Let us turn’, the radical Aurobindo Ghosh urged his compatriots, ‘from these pale and alien phantoms (the instruments of British rule) to the true reality of our Mother as she rises from the living death of a century.’18
The apparent violence of this act of dismemberment pushed Indian political leaders towards new forms of political argument and action they could barely countenance before 1904. Some expected petitioning and public meetings to force the government to back down; others wanted to focus on non-confrontational ‘self-development’. But for the majority caught up in the movement of 1905–7, lobbying and institution-building needed to be combined with an active effort to undermine the sources of British power. ‘After the Partition’, Gandhi wrote, ‘people saw that petitions must be backed up by force, and that they must be capable of suffering.’ ‘People, young and old, used to run away at the sight of an English face; it now no longer awed them.’19
The year 1905 saw the first clear articulation of Indian arguments in favour of an independent national Indian state. These arguments were made most starkly outside India, among a diaspora of Indians in Germany, the USA, Britain, Japan and France. One important centre was India House, a student residence in Highgate, north London, organized by the Sanskritist and lawyer Shyamji Krishnavarma in 1905. Born to a petty merchant family in Gujarat during the 1857 rebellion, Krishnavarma was inspired by the Arya Samaj’s emphasis on the need to return to the principles of ancient Hindu society. After meeting Dayananda in his early twenties, Krishnavarma became the Arya Samaj’s key Sanskrit intellectual and head of its publishing house. To begin with, this did not lead to a direct contest with British power. Krishnavarma studied Sanskrit at Oxford in the early 1880s, then trained as a barrister, returning to India with letters of introduction to a collection of British officers including the Viceroy. Back in India, he helped the Arya Samaj grow while working as a minister in Indian-ruled states and developing an increasingly strong critique of British power. But his career was blocked by opposition from British bureaucrats. In 1897 Krishnavarma returned to London to counter imperial power through ‘a relentless propaganda effort directed at its imperial centre’, as historian Shruti Kapila notes.20
Like his contemporaries at home, Krishnavarma argued that Indian nationalism was an organic movement driven by unconscious spiritual forces which could not be marshalled by the violent forces of the state. But Krishnavarma’s location in London led him to develop a positive view of the benefits of sovereign political power. Some of his close allies embraced anarchism, arguing that nationalists needed to oppose all governments, not only the imperial government, with bombs and guns. Krishnavarma himself advocated ‘the ethics of dynamite’. He paid for lessons in bomb-making from a Russian revolutionary. But he was no anarchist, arguing instead that India needed its own form of national state power. Thinking only a few miles distant from the centre of imperial authority, the only form of national freedom Krishnavarma could imagine was an ‘absolutely free and independent form of national government’. India could only achieve self-reliance if it was a sovereign geopolitical entity, with its own bureaucracy, army and police, possessing ‘the same form of Government as now obtains in England’.21
Krishnavarma claimed to have coined the term swaraj, or self-rule, although the first public use of the term was variously attributed to Dayananda and to Dadabhai Naoroji as well. Whatever its origin, the meaning of swaraj was fiercely debated. Many argued that swaraj was about social renewal not the seizure of governmental authority. For political leaders engaged in the practical struggle with imperial power, Krishnavarma’s vision of independent state power was too abstract, and had too little to offer the practical challenges which faced Indian society.
Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj offered one version of this argument. Gandhi was born in the same province as Krishnavarma two years later. Both were from relatively humble backgrounds, but had made their way to London to study law at the Inner Temple. But soon after leaving London Gandhi took a job as a lawyer in South Africa, starting his political life protesting against discrimination against Indian migrants in Cape and Natal province. Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj on the ship from London to South Africa after a visit to the imperial capital had failed to persuade the British government to grant Indians in South Africa citizenship rights. Gandhi’s argument was influenced by this failure, but also by the Swadeshi movement. Gandhi had kept in touch with events in India, and was excited by the expansion of Indian political ambitions which followed the partition of Bengal. ‘All our countrymen appear to be pining for National Independence’, Gandhi noted.
Hind Swaraj had the same urgent desire for self-rule which drove advocates of revolutionary violence like Krishnavarma. But the pamphlet challenged both their creed of violence and their desire to emulate British political institutions. Violence lay at the heart of the moder
n state, Gandhi said. He thought its lawyers, railway systems and armies prevented people from having control over their own lives, creating counter-productive, self-destructive instincts. Violence had caused Indians to be overtaken by the same unbridled passions which drove British imperial power. It pulled its perpetrators into retaliatory spirals of fear and revenge that led them to be no better than the people they opposed. For Gandhi, swaraj was about moral and social regeneration in contrast to the modern system of power. It needed to start with individuals having mastery over themselves, ‘over our mind and our passions’, as Gandhi wrote. It was not about communities asserting power on a large geopolitical scale. ‘[T]he Government of England is not desirable,’ Gandhi argued. In its place Gandhi proposed a commonwealth of self-governing villages where individuals could take full, rational responsibility for their action.
With their focus on self-reliance rather than the capture of state power, Gandhi’s arguments connected to the mainstream of nationalist argument. Before 1905 the dispersed forces of India’s nationalisms had worked to renew the life of particular communities without confronting British authority. Afterwards, nationalist institution-building became a way to directly challenge the power of an imperial state seen as violent and immoral, to forcefully relocate power in Indian institutions in Indian hands. Institution-building was coupled with ‘passive resistance’, the positive correlation to a programme of ‘organized and relentless boycott’, as the Bengali-born radical Aurobindo Ghosh put it.
Nationalists repeated the argument Sayyid Mahmood had made thirty years earlier; that Britain’s ‘conquest’ of India had in fact relied on Indian collaboration. But while Mahmood used this argument to insist the British open their courts and councils to Indians, Swadeshi activists saw it as the basis of an anti-imperial political tactic. Withdrawing support for the institutions which conquest had created would force the Raj to collapse. As the journal Sandhya wrote in November 1906, if ‘the chowkidar, the constable, the deputy and the muniff and the clerk, not to speak of the sepoy, all resign their respective functions, feringhee [foreign] rule in the country may come to an end in a moment’. Speaking at Madras in 1907, Bipin Chandra Pal argued that the ‘new movement’ would not be able to force the British to leave India. But it could radically shrink the scope the imperial regime had for exercising its power. ‘By restricting the Government to its narrowest possible limits’, Indians would develop ‘the spirit of self-reliance’.22