The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  Many, Britons and Indians, experienced 1921 as a year of revolution. The Governor of the United Provinces described the year’s strikes, anti-rent campaigns and riots as ‘the beginnings of something like revolution’. The socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan spoke throughout his life of ‘the tradition of 1921’, calling it ‘the most glorious page in the living history of our national revolution’.

  Nineteen twenty-one saw the national emergence of many figures who would lead Indian politics for the next generation: Rajendra Prasad, Abul Kalam Azad and, most of all, Jawaharlal Nehru, to name three. Thousands of young men and women abandoned the prospect of an education or a good career for the sake of the national movement. Some were from elite backgrounds; Jawaharlal’s father was a wealthy nationalist lawyer who could provide an income if he didn’t have a job. Others were not. Jayaprakash Narayan was a recently married nineteen-year-old, the son of a minor clerk in the canal department, when he left Patna College to join the nationalist movement twenty days before his exams. He had no resources to fall back on if the revolution failed.14

  But in many places, peasants and workers, not lawyers and clerks, drove the uprising. Their protest was fuelled by the declining economic condition of India in the years after the end of the First World War. The war expanded the demand for crops and other consumer goods while decreasing production for everything not directly connected with the war effort. India’s £100 million war loan needed to be paid for by Indian peasants. In many places, landlords keen to ingratiate themselves with the authorities pressured peasants to subscribe. Crops were exported to feed men and horses in the Middle East, and these exports put pressure on agriculture. ‘[F]odder is being exported while the Deccan starves,’ the Governor of Bombay candidly admitted to the Governor-General in private. If there was ever a moment when wealth was drained out of India, this was it.

  As a result, the cost of consumer goods spiralled during the war, with the price of rice trebling between 1911 and 1920 in many places, for example. Famine returned in some places, and, coupled with influenza, killed millions in 1918–19 and 1920–21. Demographers calculate that there were eleven to thirteen million excess deaths in these years compared with the average. Hardship came late to India’s cities, but hit in 1921. Investors’ India Year Book described it as ‘the greatest and most widespread period of depression that has ever been experienced’. A rapid decline in both rural and urban living standards created anger directed both at landlords and British power. As one British intelligence officer put it, peasants thought ‘that they supplied the men and the money and [the Government] issued them with bits of paper instead’.15

  Congress’s 1921 non-cooperation movement was a ‘chameleon campaign’ as Judith Brown calls it, channelling thousands of different local campaigns and approaches into an onslaught against the British on a scale not seen since 1857. It linked with the grievances of tea garden workers in Assam, cattle grazers in Bihar, Sikhs trying to re-establish control of temples from unorthodox factions, prosperous peasants protesting against increasing taxes in coastal Andhra, poor Muslim peasants in Kerala. The rural area between Lucknow and Benares in Gangetic north India was a strong centre for the movement. There, peasant associations had been organizing from the end of the war in far greater numbers than ever before; 100,000 joined the peasant associations in the first months of 1920, before nationalists from outside the region arrived, with tens of thousands at demonstrations. Peasant leaders thought their protests would have more chance of success if they linked up with Congress’s campaigns. As one organizer in Awadh put it, ‘if we could link our Kisan [peasant] movement with some established organization, or gain the support of well-to do groups and lawyers, then this movement would become the future of India.’

  The non-cooperation movement involved some of the wealthy and powerful. Ahmedabad industrialists and rich Calcutta lawyers were reluctant to quit their expensive clubs and abandon their imported whiskies but took part. Many of the latter were worried that ‘the country is running amuck after the Sainthood of Mr. Gandhi’, as a pro-nationalist British observer put it, but performed token acts of sacrifice for the sake of appearances. Gandhi was aware of the different shades of opinion the campaign needed to incorporate and adjusted his message depending on the audience. On 19 August 1920, on a journey which ended up in Kerala, Gandhi visited Mangalore, speaking at a meeting chaired by the merchant and founder of Corporation Bank, Haji Abdulla Haji Kasim. By then Haji Abdulla was a member of the Madras legislative council and had accepted the imperial title of Bahadur Khan. Gandhi gave a speech challenging the chairman’s willingness to accept imperial trophies. It would take ‘only a little self-sacrifice’, he suggested, if ‘your Khan Bahadurs and other title-holders were to renounce their titles’. Men like Haji Abdulla could take a stand while surrendering ‘no earthly riches’. In fact, the resignation of titles was the least successful component of the non-cooperation movement. Rabindranath Tagore famously renounced his knighthood in the aftermath of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, refusing a badge of honour ‘in the incongruous context of humiliation’. But by January 1921, only twenty-four out of 5,186 Indian titleholders had resigned. The government chronicler of the movement suggested that those honoured ‘were not the kind of people to be carried away by the Non-Cooperation agitation’.16

  The movement was most successful where it connected with people’s interests, or where campaigns were linked to prior patterns of nationalist institution building. The boycott of British cotton was championed by small-scale Indian traders and manufacturers, and saw the import of cloth almost halve between 1920–21 and 1921–2. Bonfires of foreign cloth were lit in every city. Khadi, the homespun white cotton championed by Gandhi, became the uniform of politicians; the campaign saw a surge in retailers branding themselves as khadi-sellers, as well as the resurgence of Swadeshi manufacturing. Support for the non-payment of taxes was overwhelming, in the small number of districts where Gandhi approved this most dramatic form of civil disobedience. School and college students quit government teaching institutions in large numbers although most eventually returned. In Bengal alone, 24,000 students left them. As in 1906, national schools, colleges and local volunteer associations flourished. Non-cooperation created a massive, nationwide body of nationalist political organizers for the first time, with thousands of volunteers and money to finance its work. Some 14,582 delegates attended the annual Congress at Nagpur in November 1920, the session where the full non-cooperation programme was agreed. Ten million rupees (£129 million in 2016 prices) were collected in the three months between April and June 1921.17

  But the non-cooperation movement did not see India’s middle classes abandon the institutions which upheld British power. The number of resignations by Indian government officers was ‘infinitesimal’, as the Viceroy put it, with scattered resignations of police officers and honorary magistrates. A hundred and eighty lawyers quit, but most returned to their practices after a few months. Very few academics left government universities.

  This failure of elite non-cooperation partly occurred because middle-class government workers were worried about the breakdown of law and order which might accompany an administrative collapse. A few were actively loyal to the Raj, but many were loyal to the effective working of modern governmental authority, whoever happened to be in command. In some spheres, employees did not leave because government institutions were already Indianized. By the 1920s, the judiciary was largely Indian. There were only a tiny number of non-Indian teachers and administrators in Indian universities. Indian universities were part of worldwide research networks. Physicists and chemists were denied political citizenship in their own society, but participated as equal members of the global enterprise of science. University departments of history and political science were free to construct narratives about India’s sophisticated and self-governing national future and past. The new universities of Allahabad and Dhaka saw a flourishing of research on ancient and medieval Indian history showing
how the prosperity and political order of a plural society were maintained before the British conquest. Nationalist leaders who built autonomous organizations within the often loose matrix of imperial power were equally sceptical. Lala Lajpat Pai criticized the movement, for example, because students at his Dayananda Anglo-Vedic College in Lahore were asked to join the boycott. The institution taught boys in order to renew Indian skill and honour, but it was affiliated to the University of Punjab and received government funding. For many lawyers, academics and educationalists, the scope for nation-building in nominally imperial institutions made non-cooperation seem a futile enterprise.

  The government’s story depicted the non-cooperation movement as a battle between order and chaos. In their narrative, the rational order represented by the British government was overcome by the irrational passions of India’s illiterate masses. One version of this narrative, commissioned by Parliament and approved by the Secretary of State for India, was written by the imperial government’s Director of Public Information and fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Rushbrook Williams. Williams described Gandhi as a charismatic but naïve idealist, caught up in a movement he could not control. He noted that Gandhi himself saw swaraj as ‘the government of the self’, and aimed at the creation of a society where individuals had far greater self-mastery, not political independence. Williams thought his aims were laudable. But Gandhi’s vagueness about his political goals, and his refusal to exclude anyone from his political coalition, ‘sowed the seeds of disruption within his movement’.

  Williams narrated the events of 1921–2 as a ‘tale of anarchy and disorder’. Chaos spread throughout northern India, with sporadic instances of arson, looting and riot. Most seriously, ‘[t]he terrible Moplah Outbreak’ in Kerala saw largely Muslim peasants attack the British government and Hindu landlords on a massive scale. Riots broke out in Bombay when the Prince of Wales visited in November; a city-wide strike brought Calcutta to a standstill. By November 1921, the Government of Bengal wrote that the non-cooperation movement ‘has built an organization of very real power’; ‘this it will be necessary to break if decent administration is to be restored’. The government ‘found themselves obliged’ to institute a more repressive approach. The Congress’s volunteer organizations were banned; volunteers in large numbers were arrested. Baton charges became common. The greatest violence occurred when the Kerala uprising was suppressed by a full-scale military occupation by Gurkha soldiers, with forty-three imperial troops and 2,000 rebels killed. In the most savage incident, not mentioned in Williams’s account, sixty-seven prisoners died of suffocation when they were crammed into a train wagon on their way to gaol.18

  Like other British and some Indian observers, Rushbrook Williams thought violence was naturally present in the Indian crowd. Gandhi and other senior Congress leaders told a different story. Their version of events placed the violent forces of British imperialism squarely as a protagonist. For Gandhi, it was the forceful passions of imperial power which elicited the undisciplined response of Indian protesters. Violence was, for him, linked to the passionate desire of people to achieve instant emotional gratification. But Gandhi thought a regime based on conquest was peculiarly prone to create violent situations: ‘Let it be remembered’, he wrote in an article in July 1921, ‘that violence is the keystone of the Government edifice.’ Gandhi thought violence occurred in cycles, as one act created a more violent retaliation and events spun out of control. The July article criticized a moment at Aligarh in north India when a crowd committed arson. Their fault, though, lay in responding to the provocation of British force, a failing which led to greater repression. The same process took place in Kerala. The Moplah rebellion began as a response to the police raiding a mosque; the Indian failure to eschew violence when responding to repression led to a massive government crackdown. Events such as these proved that the imperial state ‘had rendered itself almost immune from violence on our side’, as acts of violent protest would be used as an excuse for imperial authorities to assert greater force.

  This was the logic which led Gandhi to suspend the noncooperation movement in February 1922. Gandhi’s decision came in the midst of another cycle of violence, which began in the small town of Chauri Chaura near the border between Indian and Nepal. On 2 February, a crowd gathered in the marketplace demanding a reduction in high meat prices. They were beaten by the local police, and several leaders locked up in the police station. A well-organized protest was instigated; the police fired shots in the air and beat up a Congress volunteer; protesters threw stones; police retaliated by shooting into the crowds, killing three and then, disastrously, retreated into their station. This retreat led an impassioned crowd to burn the building down, killing the twenty-three policemen trapped inside. Within two days, a cycle of protest that began with shouts in the marketplace against the cost of mutton had escalated into a massive military clampdown. The government imposed martial law and raided houses throughout the town. Two hundred and twenty-eight people were tried. One hundred and seventy-two people were initially sentenced to death, although eventually only nineteen were hanged.

  Gandhi thought the cycle could only be broken by stopping the campaign and performing an act of penance. He fasted for five days and announced the suspension of all activities which challenged British authority. By February 1922, the imperial government faced a clamour of criticism from officers and Conservative politicians demanded a crackdown. The nationalist decision to call off the non-cooperation movement gave the imperial government the opportunity to respond to its overenthusiastic allies. With no nationwide organized challenge to British power, the government finally had the courage to arrest Gandhi. On 10 March he was sentenced to six years for sedition, but was released after eighteen months when his health made the British authorities fear he might die in gaol.19

  Some of Gandhi’s more radical colleagues complained that the suspension of the non-cooperation campaign saved the British Raj. It is impossible to predict what would have happened if the campaign had not been brought to a quick end. One scenario is that escalating violence on both sides would have pushed potential nationalists to side with the British. Until the 1920s, the empire’s anonymous systems of modern power, its law courts and irrigation canals and railway lines involved many of India’s middle classes without forcing them to choose sides for or against the British empire. Many were quiet nationalists, who wanted to see Indians ruling every tier of government in the subcontinent before too long. But a protest movement that to many would have looked increasingly like a chaotic mob might have caused substantial numbers to side with imperial order. Congress’s campaign had made only a small dent in the submission of Indian soldiers to imperial command; after the Bombay riots of November 1921 industrialists in that city backed off from confrontation. Even at the height of the movement, British authorities had enough Indian tax collectors and police officers, railway guards and sub-magistrates to maintain their limited but functioning command over Indian society. If violence continued, many more middle-class Indians would have reluctantly chosen to side with imperial forces they associated with order rather than anarchy. A regime whose force always lay in its capacity to assert violence would have had an opportunity to shore up its fragile administration. Perhaps the relative peace of the years after 1922 allowed imperial power to collapse quietly but more emphatically than it might have done otherwise.

  The decline of the Collector

  C. S. Venkatachar arrived at Fatehgarh, a district capital situated on the Ganges eighty miles to the north of Kanpur, in January 1923, eleven months after Gandhi’s suspension of non-cooperation. Then twenty-two years old, Venkatachar had recently returned to India after two years in Britain. Born in Bangalore, he studied at Madras University and had been offered a place at Manchester University to study the new science of chemical engineering. While in London he chose instead to sit for the Indian Civil Service examinations. Venkatachar’s year saw the wartime slump in British recruitment into the ICS cont
inue. Talented British university graduates were put off by the diminished prospects of needing to share authority with Indians, together with the loss of purchasing power caused by Indian inflation. A hundred and fifty candidates sat the ICS exams in London, with thirteen Indians and only three British passing. The heavy Indian bias of Venkatachar’s batch led to a flurry of imperial hand-wringing among the Tory defenders of empire in Britain. These criticisms culminated in David Lloyd George’s speech in the House of Commons celebrating the permanence of India’s ‘steel frame’. Venkatachar noted in his memoir that Lloyd George’s words were a sign that ‘the imperialist legend’ of the Indian Civil Service ‘had abruptly come to an end’. As the report commissioned by a worried British government in 1924 into the mood of the ‘superior civil services’ put it, ‘an Indian career occupies a position in popular estimation in England decidedly inferior to the position it occupied in 1902.’20

  On the last stage of his journey to Fatehgarh, Venkatachar shared a carriage with a man who had resigned as superintendent of the local post office, in belated response to Gandhi’s call to boycott imperial institutions. ‘Here I was,’ he wrote in his memoir, ‘entering the portals of the Raj; this odd fellow was leaving it.’ At Fatehgarh the new imperial official found a British regime in a state of unease, fearful that the actions of men like Venkatachar’s travelling companion would force them to quit India.