The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  War increased British concern about their security in India. The insurrection of 1857–8 still cast its shadow. British soldiers based in India were sent to Europe, too, but ‘natives’ were sent more quickly to avoid the chance of their mutinying. ‘[T]he more that go to war the less danger there is at home,’ the Viceroy Lord Hardinge suggested when war broke out. In every other society, the nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai complained, people were being trained to defend their homeland, even African Americans and Indians in the United States. ‘[B]ut the Indians of India cannot keep arms.’ British paranoia was so extreme that a thirteen-year-old boy was ‘marched off’ and sent to trial for showing his five-year-old friend how a cap gun worked.4

  Underlying this paranoia was the fact that India had become, briefly and uniquely, vital to Britain’s global geopolitical power. Britain itself massively outnumbered the rest of the empire in supplying troops to war. But 60 per cent of all non-British imperial soldiers fighting during the conflict were recruited from India. India became a source of money and materiel as well as men. India, with a tiny pre-war manufacturing industry, supplied 60,000 rifles and seventy million rounds of small arms ammunition. Large parts of India’s railway network were broken up and shipped to Iraq and rebuilt there to transport troops. In 1917–18 alone, 1,800 miles of track, 13,000 feet of bridging, 200 engines and 6,000 other rail vehicles left India. The sandbags that walled the trenches on the Western Front were made of Bengal jute. Annual military expenditure quickly grew from £20 to £30 million. Indian taxpayers provided the British government a ‘war gift’ of £100 million, almost twice the Indian government’s annual revenue. In addition, the British Indian regime subscribed to £100 million in war loans from American banks. Even the Viceroy complained of India being ‘exploited by the war office’.5

  The experience of war for most Indian soldiers was grim. Life on the Western Front tended to be better than the Middle East. But even in Europe, soldiers lived in wet trenches, ate poor food and were not trusted with machine guns for fear of mutiny. Better treatment occurred when they were wounded, when they were sent first to Southampton, then Brighton. There, a few injured Indian soldiers were treated in the luxurious surroundings of Prince Albert’s orientalist architectural concoction, the Pavilion. Most were housed in a converted workhouse. In the Middle East, work often consisted of hard physical labour, supplies were poor, and even the injured were badly cared for. Most importantly, troops saw mass death and injury close at hand, when soldiering in India in the years before had rarely exposed troops to violence. In letters that were increasingly censored, soldiers wrote home expressing their rage at the horror of war. ‘For God’s sake’, one Punjabi Muslim wrote to a friend, ‘don’t come, don’t come, don’t come to this war in Europe.’ Some letter-writers accused the British of putting Indians in the front line before Europeans. News of bad conditions spread, making recruitment in some places difficult. In Amritsar, for example, women followed recruiters for miles trying to persuade recruits not to fight.6

  The war changed the shape of British rule in India. It quickly led to a crisis in the recruitment of Britons into the imperial civil service, as young men destined for India were drafted as officers to command troops on the Western Front. As historian David Potter puts it, ‘1914 broke for ever the measured regularity of previous ICS recruitment. Others already in post left to fight. The result was a quick promotion of Indians to act as collectors, magistrates, police inspectors to fill the gap.’7

  British officers believed they had no choice but to involve Indians more in day-to-day administration. In Punjab, where 60 per cent of soldiers were recruited, British officers conceded authority in the countryside to local aristocrats who acted as recruiting sergeants. War committees involved landholders, the leaders of local institutions and Indian government officers in the coordination of recruitment efforts. In many cases, these turned into local panchayats, taking on responsibility for welfare and dispute resolution. In the west of the province near the frontier with Afghanistan, local saints, or pirs, were enlisted to persuade tribal Muslims to support the war effort. Expanding the scope for ‘Indian initiative’ helped the recruitment of troops, and reduced support for anti-British revolutionaries.8

  These local forms of cooperation overlapped with moves by senior officials and British politicians to allow more involvement of Indians in government. These moves were driven by fear, particularly that opposition to British rule might spread throughout India and dent the war effort. British officers were always frightened by revolutionary violence. A short-lived campaign of Indian terrorism in Punjab was suppressed in 1915, with forty-two people executed. But peaceful protest grew in 1916, as organizations campaigning for ‘Home Rule’ held meetings and sold pamphlets in every part of the subcontinent. In November, a joint meeting of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League in the city of Lucknow proposed a programme of constitutional reform, which would have handed the government of India’s provinces to elected Indian representatives. Officers in their cantonments and collectorates were scared of marches and petitions, and saw Indians campaigning for constitutional reform as seditious extremists, intent on causing revolution. Provincial governments and district officials urged repression. Sir Michael O’Dwyer, Governor of Punjab, wanted widespread arrests. Some Home Rule campaigners were interned, but the central government in Simla and Delhi did not think Home Rule campaigners were intent on revolution; and they did not believe they had the capacity to suppress a revolt even if there was an all-India plot, particularly not during war. The Viceroy urgently pressed the government in London to make quick concessions to prevent protest from escalating.

  British fear culminated in a liberal moment. On 20 August 1917, the Secretary of State, Edwin Montagu, declared to the House of Commons that the government wanted the ‘increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration’, with the long-term aim of India possessing ‘responsible government within the British empire’. By 1917, Britain was governed by a coalition between Liberals and Conservatives. The precise words that Montagu spoke were written by the arch-imperialist Curzon, who had come to believe the empire would only be safe if power was given to Indian elites in the provinces. Nonetheless, Curzon’s text insisted that the power of determining the pace of change lay with the British Parliament. This was ‘the language of the schoolmaster’, as one British critic of the imperial bureaucracy put it, willing to ‘loosen the bonds of discipline’, but insistent that further progress depended on ‘good behaviour’. The words ‘liberty’ and ‘self-government’ were carefully avoided in the final text. Motivated by an imperial government in India desperate to uphold its authority but realistic about its capacity, the empire’s liberal moment was part of an effort to bolster Britain’s sovereignty in the subcontinent. As India’s new Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, wrote to O’Dwyer, the declaration was made ‘for the purpose of allaying the political situation existing in the country’. Its intention, Chelmsford said, was to create ‘a political truce’.9

  The declaration connected to the increasingly liberal language British politicians used to talk about their aims in fighting the war. In August 1914, Britain had entered a war to defend its position as the world’s greatest imperial power. By 1916, it had begun to justify its involvement with the language of liberty and justice. Joining the war in 1917, the American President Woodrow Wilson claimed the U.S.A was fighting ‘against autocratic power’ throughout the world, and for the ‘liberation of its peoples’. As Lala Lajpat Rai noted, Wilson’s pronouncements ‘raised hopes in the minds of Indian Nationalists of justice being done to India in case the Allies came out victorious’. The southern democrat’s ideas of liberation and democracy were highly racialized; Wilson certainly did not imagine Asians or Africans would be able to govern themselves. In reality, the last year of the conflict had expanded empire massively, extending British domination throughout the Middle East and Africa. But once the war was over, Britain had no choice but t
o put some of its rhetoric of liberty into practice in its autocratically ruled dominions, or else face a crisis that could threaten its existence. The Russian revolution in 1917 seemed to presage the fate of regimes which tried to eradicate dissent by coercion alone. British regimes were challenged in Egypt, Palestine and Ireland as well as India. ‘There is’, the reform paper noted, ‘a spirit of liberty in Asia, and India cannot be left behind.’ Unbridled autocracy was dead.10

  Something like revolution

  This liberal moment created a brief sense of optimism among many Indian political leaders. It instilled in them the possibility that imperial institutions might not be incompatible with Indian efforts to create self-reliance and self-rule. In doing so, it created strange allies and challenging ideas. For a short period, for example, Mohandas K. Gandhi became both a supporter of imperial power and military force.

  Gandhi had returned from South Africa in 1915. His first political work in India was to investigate increases in rent and land tax in two distant parts of the subcontinent, Champaran in Bihar and Kheda in Gujarat. In both places, Gandhi helped channel ‘upward pressure from the rural masses themselves’, as historian Jacques Pouchedepass puts it, into campaigns to improve living standards. Seen first by many nationalists as a strange religious crank, Gandhi gained a reputation for courage after refusing to leave Champaran when the British ordered him to do so in April 1917. A British officer wrote of him ‘daily transfiguring the imaginations of ignorant men with visions of an early millennium’. But Gandhi’s power did not come from his religious aura. It was based on an ability to persuade landlords and British officers as well as peasants to negotiate settlements; rent increases were cancelled in both districts. Gandhian politics involved ‘a constant process of mediation’ between groups of people who were antagonistic to one another, but who Gandhi and his fellow workers treated as friends or even brothers.

  By the end of 1917, Gandhi’s relationship with the British had been strengthened through his assistance in recruiting men for the war effort. To help his work in Champaran, Gandhi offered to recruit a corps of labourers from the local railway depot at Ranchi to build railways in Mesopotamia. Then, when he had moved back to Gujarat in early 1918, he volunteered as a recruiting agent for the British army, attending the British government’s war conferences in Delhi in April and May. Gandhi wrote to the Viceroy saying that he would ‘make India offer all her able-bodied sons as a sacrifice to the Empire at its critical moment’ if he could. By that act, he thought ‘racial distinctions would become a thing of the past’. Gandhi believed enlistment would teach nationalist volunteers the courage they would need in non-violent protest. ‘Swaraj’, he said, ‘is not for lawyers and doctors but only for those who possess strength of arms.’ ‘Fight unconditionally unto death with the Briton for the victory and agitate simultaneously unto death, if we must, for the reforms that we deserve.’ Reluctant to alienate their most popular recruiting sergeant, district officers agreed a compromise, and let peasants make reduced revenue payments in Gujarat.11

  Towards the end of 1917 Edwin Montagu was quickly called to India, and there, jointly with the Viceroy Lord Chelmsford, wrote a set of reform proposals intended to stave off nationalist protest. The British cabinet debated the proposals five months before the war was over, in June 1918. Parliament passed them into law in December 1919. The 1919 Government of India Act introduced a ‘democratic’ element into every level of India’s government, from local boards to the Viceroy’s council. At the smallest scale, India’s urban and rural councils became elected bodies, with Indian chairmen. In Delhi, a two-chamber imperial legislature was created to debate the actions of the central government. The Viceroy retained a veto and the power to push forward rejected bills. The architects of India’s new constitution thought power was going to be concentrated at the provincial level. Here, a system of ‘dyarchy’ was established, where some matters became the responsibility of ministers accountable to elected provincial assemblies, and others of imperial bureaucrats ultimately accountable only to the Viceroy and British government. The idea was to replicate the relationship between the imperial Parliament in London and the white self-governing dominions in a miniature form. ‘Local’ issues like education, health and agriculture would be administered by elected politicians while ‘imperial’ questions such as taxation and defence were governed by central bureaucratic power.

  The reforms were fiercely criticized by many nationalists. The electorate was small and had a say over limited matters; only 5.5 million property-holders were able to vote in the provincial assembly elections, one-tenth of the male population. Indian politicians had no real power because they did not control the budget. Many felt the reforms demonstrated that ‘the bureaucrats were not prepared to give up materially any fraction of the power which they have enjoyed’, as one Bombay newspaper complained. But before the brutality of the Amritsar killings started to sink in, most elite nationalist leaders were willing to think seriously about working within the new structure. Gandhi argued that the reforms could be ‘considerably improved’, but needed ‘a sympathetic handling rather than a summary rejection’. In particular, he saw the reforms as the British abandonment of the right to rule India by force. The only case Britons had to stop Indians from taking over the government was the ‘right of conquest’, Gandhi said. But the reforms’ authors had abandoned ‘any claim’ by that right. To begin with, Gandhi thought ‘the old spirit of fear, distrust and consequent terrorism was about to give place to the new spirit of respect, trust and goodwill’.12

  Gandhi’s optimism was misplaced. Montagu and Chelmsford’s new constitution introduced a ‘democratic’ element to government without challenging the instincts of a conquest state. Their constitution did not challenge the authoritarian instincts of the imperial bureaucracy. There was no revision of the structure of administration; no attempt to alter the mentality of the Raj’s functionaries, with its emphasis on protecting British enclaves of power first, by force if need be. Indeed, elections and responsible ministers were introduced while the power of the imperial regime to coerce in times of crisis expanded. The Viceroy, the surprisingly radical soldier and cricketer Lord Chelmsford, only managed to persuade the hardcore of British provincial governors and district officers to support the reform scheme by continuing wartime coercive legislation into the peace. The Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act of 1919 extended the government’s right to detain suspected terrorists for two years without trial, and allowed the police to arrest anyone they wanted without a warrant. It was this piece of legislation that sparked the political campaign that ended up with army violence in Punjab, including the Amritsar massacre.

  The fate of India’s new constitution was shaped by the actions of its potential Indian participants, in particular their response to two forces: to government coercion and the economic crisis which followed the war. British violence in Punjab created widespread scepticism about the government’s desire to involve Indians in the structure of power. It was Gandhi who went to Punjab to lead the Indian National Congress’s inquiry into the Punjab disorders. To begin with, the prospect of an official inquiry into disorders gave Gandhi hope that the British government was willing to recognize and atone for its wrongs. But Gandhi, like the rest of Congress, saw the Hunter Commission’s report as a shameful whitewash. The government’s failure to prosecute and dismiss anyone other than Dyer for the ‘misdeeds’ in Punjab convinced him the government had become ‘dishonest and unscrupulous’. The government’s actions in Punjab were ‘humiliating’, and India’s honour needed to be restored Gandhi agreed.

  Nationalist frustration at the ‘abominable despotism of the bureaucracy’, as Tilak called it, was coupled with distrust of the British government’s autocratic actions in the Middle East. There, the scale of British attempts to rearrange the borders of the Muslim world were slowly becoming apparent in India. Britain was supporting the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire and creation of an independent, secular Turkey
as well as a separate monarchy in the Arabian peninsula. Britain was secretly carving the rest of the Middle East between its own French imperial power. For many Muslims, the Ottoman Sultan was the khilafah, ruler of the Turkish empire, but also spiritual leader of global Islam; many were outraged by his demise. A campaign against the partition of the sultan’s lands had emerged among young Muslims in India during the war. Gandhi saw the abolition of the khilafat as an act of ‘humiliation’ for Muslims throughout the world. Joined to the Punjab atrocities, it was the issue on which he could build unity between Hindus and Muslims in India. ‘I can no longer retain affection for a Government so evilly manned,’ he said.13

  Late in 1919, the Indian National Congress was still intent on participating in the new councils. Within a year, Gandhi had successfully persuaded his nationalist colleagues that they needed to restore their honour against a government that had acted dishonourably, and pull out. From maintaining ‘friendly’ terms with British officers in the districts he worked in in 1917, Gandhi had become the leader of nationwide mass protest against British rule. A general strike was called for 1 August 1920. People were urged to withdraw from government schools and law courts, to refuse to stand or vote in India’s new constitution, and to court arrest. Gandhi’s plan was to ‘deliberately oppose the Government to the extent of trying to put its existence in jeopardy’. At the December 1920 meeting of Congress, Gandhi argued that a disciplined, India-wide campaign of non-cooperation would lead to swaraj, self-rule, within a year, whether within or outside the British empire.