The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  In Bengal, the work of creating this alternative system of power was conducted through a network of local societies which spread throughout the province’s countryside. The model was outlined by the poet Rabindranath Tagore in a lecture given at Calcutta’s Minerva theatre in July 1904. Entitled swadeshi samaj (‘our own society’), Tagore’s address urged Bengal’s middle classes to abandon English-style urban politics. Instead, they should tour the villages to revive traditional Indian festivals and folk dramas, songs and talks illustrated with magic lantern slides. Village life would be regenerated by activating old symbols, and using them to drive a range of local self-help initiatives.23

  Tagore’s lecture was so popular it needed to be delivered again eleven days later in, ironically enough, the Curzon theatre. It encouraged a flood of volunteers to put these principles into practice, some from Calcutta, others from district capitals scattered throughout Bengal. The societies they created offered physical and moral training, helped those in distress, organized craft production and arbitrated disputes. Swadeshi leaders tried to revive the village industries; the idea was that boycotted Western cloth would be replaced by traditional artisan crafts like handloom or silk weaving, not great industrial factories. A diary from the town of Pabna discovered by the historian Sumit Sarkar noted that in 1905 and 1906, the bazaars were full of Swadeshi goods, and the ‘town is busy with the medieval charka’.24

  By April 1907 about a thousand village samitis (societies) were working in Bengal; in the area around Barisal alone, the samitis claimed to have set up eighty-nine arbitration committees which settled 523 disputes in their first phase of activity. The police estimated that there were over 8,000 volunteers in eastern Bengal. By May of that year, the government had started to regulate public meetings, banning any large gathering. In many places, open-air folk entertainments like jatras and kathakalis took their place. The district magistrate of Bakarganj worried that these events ‘reache[d] all classes and spread seditious doctrines among them. At the same time, unlike a public meeting which could easily be banned, ostensibly cultural events were ‘very difficult to deal with’.25

  The nationalist campaign of 1904–8 was not, though, a movement of the masses; few peasants were involved. Most volunteers came from landed or local official classes. But the style of these middle-class-led ‘governments within governments’ varied dramatically. Some were led by prominent landholders, and were keen to push social change without disturbing the local social structure. Others were led by radical lawyers, teachers and clerks with less at stake in the rural hierarchy; a few were covers for revolutionary activity, and occasionally engaged in violence. Samiti members at Santipur, a small town sixty miles north of Calcutta, assaulted two missionaries in June 1906. A series of armed robberies were organized by Swadeshi activists from the same place two years later.26

  Educational initiatives briefly flourished alongside the samitis. Swadeshi volunteers opened schools throughout Bengal, the first in Rangpur in northern Bengal, the town where Rammohan Roy spent most of his career. In November 1905, a group of schoolboys from the government school were expelled for attending a Swadeshi meeting. Radical students from Calcutta University sped to the town to organize a rival school, which opened with 300 pupils within days. Hundreds of local schools opened in the following months. British authorities were particularly frightened about the movement’s attempt to ‘get hold of primary education’, and mould the minds of young children to take a hostile stance to British power. Some British officers worried that technical education would be used as a cover for bomb-making. But national schools grew less because of their ideological stance than because they met demand for a practical education among Bengal’s lower middle class; in some areas they educated lower castes, too. Hundreds of nationalist schools endured into the 1910s.27

  By contrast, the attempt to build nationalist colleges collapsed fast. A National College in Calcutta was founded under a National Council of Education, but no other colleges affiliated, and student numbers declined quickly. In a job market dominated by British capital, students worried about finding employment with a ‘national’ degree.

  As important in explaining the failure of the new colleges, government-funded institutions like Calcutta University had started to support efforts at exactly the kind of national regeneration Swadeshi campaigners called for. Successive Viceroys had failed to impose their authority against nationalist ‘sedition’. Universities had become the first imperial institutions in which Indian voices dominated. Teaching staff and governing bodies were predominantly Indian from the 1890s. After 1892, Bombay University only had a European Vice-Chancellor for three years, between 1912 and 1915. Calcutta University had an Indian Vice-Chancellor in the 1890s, and was then led by Indians from 1905 onwards. During the Swadeshi years Calcutta University’s Vice-Chancellor Ashutosh Mukerjee was a hostile opponent of the ‘national’ movement, criticizing its schools and colleges as ‘hotbeds of sedition’. But he introduced a compulsory paper in the Bengali language, and built a set of research centres in disciplines seen as essential for national renewal, particularly ancient history, applied psychology and industrial chemistry. Other institutions, Allahabad University, for example, became centres for nationalist history writing and political science. To many, it seemed that self-reliance could be developed in the loose structures of institutions created, initially at least, by the imperial state.

  Swadeshi capitalism

  The complicated relationship between nationalist institution-building and imperial power was most apparent in the world of business. The 1890s and 1900s saw the emergence of ideas about economic self-reliance, which encouraged the growth of Indian businesses to meet Indian consumer demand. But these firms rarely cut themselves off entirely from imperial structures.

  Explicitly nationalist businesses were founded in the decade before Swadeshi. The Punjab National Bank began trading in 1894. Bharat Life Insurance was founded in Punjab two years later to challenge the fact that Indians were charged ‘10% extra’ than Europeans for life cover. India’s first drug company, the Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works, was created in 1893 by the Edinburgh-educated chemist Prafulla Chandra Ray. But the Swadeshi years gave business a big impetus. The mood to buy Indian goods helped Bengal Chemicals increase its sales tenfold, allowing one British observer to describe it as ‘an object lesson to capitalism in the province’. Bengal Chemicals was joined by the Calcutta Pottery Works, which sold ‘swadeshi teacups, saucers, teapots’ after its manager returned from Japan in 1906 with training in glazing ceramics. New firms made cotton, soap, matches, cigarettes, cycles, cutlery and pen nibs. In Bombay the Cooperative Swadeshi Stores sold Indian-made goods to the western metropolis’s middle classes. In Madras, the Swadeshi Steamship Company challenged the British monopoly on coastal shipping, engaging in a price war with its rivals that dramatically cut the cost of transport during these years.28

  In Madras, too, a few months before Abdulla Haji Kasim opened his bank in Mangalore the Indian Bank was founded. Its creation was driven by a combination of Swadeshi sentiment and the rage of South Indian merchants at the collapse of British financial institutions amid scandal and suicide. The two British business partners in Madras’s largest agency house, Arbuthnot’s, had become overexposed to bad investments in London. They then lied about the scale of their debts. One killed himself, the other was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. The lawyer representing the house’s Indian creditors decided British businesses could not be trusted, and that local businesses needed their own bank.29

  The most powerful and enduring business to benefit from the Swadeshi upsurge was the Tata Steel Company, the firm that dominated (and still dominates today) the Indian metals industry. The Tatas were Parsi priests from the small town of Navsari in Gujarat. They moved into business and made money from trading opium and then cotton in the middle of the nineteenth century. The names of the mills which Jamsetji Tata first built indicate his hope for imperial patronage: fi
rst Alexandra (after the Prince of Wales’s new bride) then Empress Mills. But by 1905, the Tatas had turned to other forms of capital.

  Aware of India’s massive iron ore deposits, Jamsetji noted the country’s total dependence on British steel and wanted India to be more self-sufficient. Continuously after 1883, Tata petitioned the British government to be allowed to open an Indian steel factory. Tata was continuously blocked by the India Office which had placed a firm ‘interdict on a legitimate Indian industry’, ensuring that every single rail or sheet of steel in India needed to be shipped from Europe. But by the turn of the century the government in India was coming under relentless pressure from Indian political leaders to support domestic business. Britain’s steel industry could not cope with the demand coming from the continued growth of Indian infrastructure, particularly railways. The government was happier for the deficit to be supplied ‘by one of her own dependencies’ than from a competitor like Belgium or the USA.

  The strength of Indian opinion and competition from rival imperial states caused the ban on Indian-made steel to be lifted in 1899, and restrictions on coal and iron ore mining to be eased too. To begin with, imperial officials and likely Indian industrialists assumed the capital for Indian steel would come from Britain, so company law was changed to allow Indian firms to register on the London stock exchange. But British financiers were reluctant to invest. ‘[O]ld and tried industries were offered as more favourable and safer investment,’ as the businessman V. B. Godrej noted. Railways and agency houses soaked up capital available for investment in the subcontinent, with the City having no imagination to seek out other ventures. Indian steel was seen as too risky.30

  Jamsetji Tata died in 1904. To open India’s first modern steel factory, his son turned to a different source of money. Instead of relying on the London stock market, Dorabji Tata sought investment from middle-class Indians. Frustrated by their dependence on British power, enthused by the idea of supporting indigenous enterprise, thousands of small investments flooded in. The Tata Steel Company was launched in August 1907. It rolled its first steel in 1912, making train rails and the fishplates that link them together. In 1916, it diversified into making cases for explosive shells.

  Tata’s first major customer was the imperial state. Without a large domestic industrial sector, the only institution which had demand for heavy metals was the government. Yet Tata grew as the weakness of British imperial power coincided with Indian enthusiasm about creating self-reliant institutions. To meet the imperial regime’s demand for steel, Tata created a series of settlements and institutions beyond the reach of imperial power. With help from American geologists and steelmakers, Tata located India’s first modern steel plant in the Chota Nagpur plateau in eastern India, building the new town of Jamshedpur between 1908 and 1912. From the beginning, the town was administered by an Indian company not the government. It saw one of India’s earliest instances of national urban planning, with streets laid out in tree-lined boulevards, parks and recreation grounds.

  Economic growth and institutional dynamism occurred in the places that were furthest from the rule of British bureaucrats. India’s ‘native states’, where large areas of territory were ruled with minimal British involvement, pioneered research in science, technology and the growth of banking, for example. It was the Maharaja of Mysore, Sir Krishnaraja Wodeyar, not one of the Raj’s British provincial governors, whom Jamestji Tata persuaded to open India’s first Indian Institute of Science in 1909. India’s first large-scale electricity generating plant was built in Mysore, too. The state of Baroda launched one of India’s most successful nationalist banks.

  Before Swadeshi, large-scale Indian capital was restricted to a small number of industries and a small number of cities, particularly textiles in Ahmedabad and then Bombay. Coinciding with a moment of relative prosperity for India’s economy, energized by the spirit of national self-reliance, the second half of the 1910s saw the dispersal of Indian capital and the growth of Indian-managed organization in small towns and cities; in places like the new steel settlement of Jamshedpur, but also throughout small towns like Mangalore or Rajahmundry, with their new banks, industries and civic institutions. The local capitalists and political leaders who drove the expansion of Indian business in small-town India adopted a variety of different and shifting attitudes to British power. The founder of Corporation Bank Haji Abdulla Haji Kasim was a moderate supporter of the Swadeshi movement, but that did not stop him from taking the title of Rai Bahadur; nor did his imperial title stop him from hosting a visit by M. K. Gandhi in 1922. But their actions created a network of businesses independent of empire which did not rely on the formal assertion of British imperial power.

  Imperial recess

  In December 1911 King George V visited India. His main function was to preside over another massive display of imperial pageantry, the second Delhi Durbar. But while Curzon’s 1903 assembly had been designed to celebrate the intensity of imperial power, the King was in India to preside over a moment of retreat. By 1911, the mood among British decision-makers in London and Calcutta was against Curzon’s style of autocratic meddling. Under Indian pressure, the British government had decided to revoke the partition of Bengal. More importantly, the King announced that the Raj was moving its capital from Calcutta to Delhi, from a commercial metropolis with a vibrant and critical public sphere to a deserted city full of decaying monuments. Delhi’s entire population had been evacuated in 1857; its cultural and political life had been annihilated. Hundreds of miles away from centres of political activity, it was seen by officials as the safest place for the imperial state to rule India in dangerous times.

  The years before the outbreak of the First World War were a time of imperial recess. At a moment when they worried more about social reform in Britain and the possibility of war in continental Europe, British politicians imagined they could disentangle themselves from the commitments which administration involved while retaining some semblance of sovereign power. ‘It is certain’, the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, grudgingly wrote in the introduction to the report that transferred power to Delhi, ‘that the just demands of Indians for a larger share in the Government of the country will have to be satisfied.’ Hardinge thought India would end up being governed by Indian-run provincial administrations, ‘with the Government of India above all [of] them and possessing power to interfere in cases of misgovernment’ but otherwise having a vague coordinating role.

  This was a vision of the British government having a similar role as the eighteenth-century Mughal emperor: a distant, symbolically important authority with little role in the details of administration. Appropriately, the original plans for the new capital linked New Delhi to the old Mughal city of Shahjahanabad, through a long avenue that had the Jama Masjid at the northern end, Connaught Place in the centre and the Purana Qila in the south. Even this scheme was a victim of imperial retreat. To reduce budgets and prevent opposition from Delhi’s residents, the new city stopped abruptly to the north of the new railway station, leaving old Delhi unchanged. The government did not even have the will to shape the urban life of its own capital city.31

  This recessive mood was sharply criticized by Tory imperialists and retired imperial officers who thought empire could only be sustained by the forthright assertion of Britain’s conquering authority in India. Lord Curzon led the charge against the creation of the new capital. Calcutta was ‘English built’. It was the place from which ‘English statesmen, administrators and generals ha[d] built up to its present commanding height the fabric of British rule’. Delhi was ‘a mass of deserted ruins and graves’, a place ‘shut off from the main currents of public life’ where the government would become ‘immersed in a sort of bureaucratic self-satisfaction’. Curzon believed this decision to move from an ‘English city’ to ‘the dead capital of Mahomedan Kings’ was the sign of an empire in decline.32

  Obsessed as ever with image, Curzon tried to push forth the conquering power of the British state through his o
wn symbolism. As Viceroy, he built monuments which celebrated the rupturing violence of imperial conquest. In the ‘English city’ of Calcutta, Curzon commissioned a great memorial to Queen Victoria which had a belligerent angel of victory on its top. At the Plassey battlefield in northern Bengal, he commissioned an obelisk in tribute to the soldiers who fought Siraj-ad-Daula. He also ordered a statue of Robert Clive at Plassey to sit outside the India Office (now Foreign and Commonwealth Office) in London. This last figure is the only depiction of Clive as the direct author of violence: bronze panels around the base show cannons exploding into the Nawab’s army.

  After Curzon resigned as Viceroy in 1905, these projects slowed drastically, becoming increasingly distant from the official story which the government in London and India tried to tell about its empire. Curzon harried and cajoled over two decades, having to fundraise privately, and with the support of assorted retired colonels and Collectors eventually got his monuments built. He particularly drew upon the resources of disgruntled former Indian officials, including one or two related to people close to Clive. ‘We English’, one correspondent wrote, ‘seem to have a genius for injuring those who have done us great service abroad.’ Contributors to the Clive statue included Viscount Milner, two former Viceroys and Sir John Edge, the judge who had dismissed Sayyid Mahmood from the Allahabad bench. But beyond this community of retired imperial officers, there was no public enthusiasm in these efforts to celebrate conquest, or Britain’s empire in India at all, in fact. John Morley, Secretary of State between 1906 and 1911, wanted a statue of Garibaldi where Curzon wanted to put Clive, and to name the row outside the India Office Milton Street. None of Curzon’s memorial projects was completed until after the First World War.33