by Jon Wilson
British civil servants were nostalgic for the authority and calm they supposedly enjoyed in days gone by. The Collector whom Venkatachar first worked with ‘reminisced of the idyllic life he had led as a junior officer, playing polo’; but having weathered the ‘Gandhian storm’, he was desperately trying to leave India. Arthur Collett his second Collector, was from a family of British officers who had served in southern India, but chose himself a posting in the United Provinces because he was fond of pig-sticking. Collett had been the Collector of the district where the burning of Chauri Chaura had taken place. The revolution of 1921 caused him to leave India, too; he was persuaded back by the governor of the province to hold the British line, but retired early. These men were nostalgic for ‘a wholly bureaucratic system, unexposed to criticism or interference on the part of representatives of the people’, as a 1924 report into the conditions of the civil service put it. What they did not notice was the quiet erosion of British power in the countryside, as peasants and small landlords increasingly supported leaders hostile to imperial authority.21
Venkatachar was being trained to occupy the post of District Collector, the central figure in the imperial iconography of power. The position of Collector began with Lord Cornwallis’s reforms of the 1790s, when East India Company officials were sent into India’s district capitals. By the late nineteenth century the district officer had accumulated the titles of Collector and Magistrate, and was the conduit for every form of imperial power at the lowest scale of government ruled by European officials. He was the chief magistrate, head revenue collector and primary coordinator of all functions of government in the district he presided over. British bureaucrats were used to thinking that the silent and largely unaccountable working of imperial chains of command was the epitome of efficiency. As a district official – he first acted as Collector at the age of twenty-nine, in 1927 – Venkatachar described his time being taken up by routine scrutiny. The main job was to make sure the work of myriad local functionaries, from the village accountant to the keeper of arms licences to the local irrigation officer, was being done according to rules passed down from the apex of imperial power. British rule did little that was active; there was no ‘development’ work in the 1920s. In its local work the British regime ‘possessed a remarkable uniformity of procedure, forms, technique and thought’. Ultimately, the administration worked through a ‘show of force’, and the ability to bribe and bludgeon enough local notables to support British power.
The Montagu–Chelmsford reforms created new, official structures of authority to rival this imperial hierarchy. Much of the district officers’ work was now directed by Indian ministers who held power at a provincial level. Policing and finance were ‘reserved’ for imperial bureaucrats; but most public works, education and agriculture were administered by elected politicians, based not in the district but the provincial capital. Collectors were no longer the sole point of visible power in a district. ‘The politician now stood forth as the mediator and had displaced the district officer,’ as Venkatachar put it; ‘the decline in the influence of the collector’s position was visible.’
Before 1923, Congress was unanimous in boycotting elections to the new provincial and all-Indian councils so the British needed to rely on other political groups. After the first election to the new provincial councils, in 1921, ministerial office was occupied by a mix of local aristocrats and liberal political leaders put off by Congress’s radical turn. Irritated by the corrosion of their authority, British officials almost universally castigated the actions of these newly elected Indian leaders. Officials in one province noted that ‘great strain was thrown on the permanent officials by the tendency on the part of Ministers to carry out popular wishes (based on ignorance) without careful consideration.’ British officers criticized Indian representatives for failing to ‘properly’ connect with voters, for refusing to ‘educate’ the electorate about the realities of power, for their ‘mediocre’ intellect together with their ‘fanatical views’.22
In practice, in many places newly elected politicians pushed the expansion of publicly funded services as quickly as provincial finances would allow. After decades during which publicly funded primary education was extended very slowly, Indian ministers passed laws which made school attendance compulsory for the first time. Primary school was mandatory in Bombay province in 1923 (excluding Bombay city, where mill-owners did not want children to go to school) and Bengal in 1930. In the United Provinces, where Venkatachar was posted, the decision was left to the newly elected district boards; most made primary school compulsory in 1926. Even before these legal changes, the number of children attending school grew quickly throughout India: 2.9 million pupils were enrolled in the first year of primary school in 1916–17; 5.3 million in 1926–7. Alongside schools, the new ministers built irrigation projects and hydro-electric schemes, land banks and agricultural cooperatives.
The clash between British officers and Indian political leaders within and outside the new institutions meant the capacity of imperial administration collapsed in the early 1920s. British India’s governments were vulnerable to financial crises, as peasant protesters and nationalist campaigners blocked the collection of revenue. Land revenue and excise duties were controlled by British finance officers in provincial governments, so their payment was often resisted. If an area ‘can organise itself sufficiently it can resist the introduction of a revised settlement’, the Governor of Bombay admitted in 1929.23 Congress-backed temperance campaigns cut the collection of taxes levied on the sale of alcohol. In Madras, these had a devastating impact, cutting the province’s income by eight million rupees in 1921–2 (8 per cent of the province’s total expenditure that year). When the provincial assembly refused to increase other taxes, the government needed to cut personnel: 4,765 constables and 7,000 village staff lost their jobs. British control of the commanding heights of the imperial state meant the incomes of Europeans were kept safe, but officials in Madras complained that the crisis ‘contributed not a little to the sense of alarm and insecurity which has pervaded the services’.24
In many cases, it was local councils in towns and districts, not the new provincial government which most aggressively pushed public improvement. Many of the mundane functions of government had been administered by these institutions from the 1860s. By the 1920s India had 752 urban municipalities, and an elected board in every district. Imperial bureaucrats initially saw ‘local self-government’ as a way for the imperial government to offload the costs of things like roads and municipal waterworks onto local elites. As long as the enclaves of European power – the cantonments and civil lines – remained in the hands of the military, the authors of the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms were happy to hand these local resources over to ‘popular control’. Beyond the places where they themselves resided, British administrators thought the destiny of imperial power was not to be determined by who ran the sewage system.
Congress’s boycott of imperial institutions did not extend to local government. In many parts of India during the 1920s and early 1930s, local government became a nationalist stronghold. In Calcutta directly elected mayors controlled a budget of more than twenty million rupees after 1923. Calcutta’s voters chose radical critics of British rule, first Chittaranjan Das, then Subhas Chandra Bose, to run their city. In Fatehgarh, Venkatachar noted that nationalist political leaders ‘took a great interest’ in local elections even when other institutions were boycotted. In many towns and districts, public offices flew Congress flags and ensured that government-funded schools taught anti-British curricula. When the imperial regime introduced new rules banning teachers from ‘political agitation’, they were often simply ignored. It was, after all, the local elected district board which had responsibility for the discipline of school employees.
The result was a renaissance of local Indian power in the cities and districts of India, and the creation of another organizing centre for nationalist practice and ideas. Even the British hierarchy admitte
d the productive effect of local Indian political leadership. ‘There has been a very general and very marked growth in the interest taken in the extension of education and of medical facilities’, the British government’s 1929 report into the working of the new constitution noted. The report’s authors thought the extension of elections to the province of Bihar and Orissa’s district boards led to a fall in ‘efficiency’ but had no choice but to report a big expansion in the province’s medical infrastructure; since the reforms had come into effect, the number of medical dispensaries increased from 178 to 319, ‘a substantial achievement’.25
While more institutionally-minded Congress politicians spread throughout local government, Gandhi’s allies concentrated on ‘constructive work’ instead, focusing on the practical task of ‘nation-building’. The Gandhians placed particular emphasis on encouraging everyone to spin their own cotton. Spinning, weaving and wearing plain, rough, white khadi cloth was a rejection both of Western dress and the idea of India as a collection of communities separated by their own sartorial traditions. Unlike election to imperial or local assemblies, this allowed women to work as equal participants in the creation of the nation. As Gandhi wrote, khadi ‘binds all brothers and sisters into one’. In the five years which followed the massacre at Amritsar, white cotton and the Gandhi topi (hat) became a uniform for nationalists and a visible but peaceful sign of confrontation with British power.
Lost Dominion
The various confrontations and crises which seemed to beset imperial power in the early 1920s led British men interested in the continuity of their regime to pressure for tough, forceful action to restore imperial authority. Anxious British officers and their backers in London called for a return to the spirit of conquest in order to undo the weakening of British power they had seen since the end of the war. In Fatehgarh, C. S. Venkatachar noted the circulation of one such call, a book published in 1924 in the name of A. L. Carthill. The Lost Dominion was a publishing ‘sensation’, according to Lala Lajpat Rai. The book stood in a long line of imperial texts lamenting the contemporary weakness of the Raj and urging Britons in India to stand forth as benevolent, violent despots.
Carthill was a pseudonym for Bennet Christian Calcraft-Kennedy, the son of a clergyman who served as Collector, magistrate and judicial commissioner in western India, and retired as a judge in 1926. Calcraft-Kennedy’s experience in government led him to believe in the centrality of force to sustain British rule. He criticized the British government for handing power to ‘literary Indians’, and ‘clever politicians’ whose rule, he thought, would bring down stable government and order. Britain’s ‘mission’ in India was ‘high and holy’, he argued, but could only be maintained by a policy of ‘constructive repression’, which denied the Indian public any role in their own rule. Calcraft-Kennedy’s book caught the imagination of a good proportion of British officers. Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the hardline governor of Punjab and supporter of General Dyer, liked it so much that he structured the last chapter of his own, 1926, memoir around the argument of the book. India was not ‘lost’ to Britain, O’Dwyer argued, but it could only be preserved by ‘broad, firm and consistent statesmanship’, backed up by physical force.
From the small outpost of British rule at Fatehgarh, Venkatachar thought the book expressed the ‘doubts and misgivings’ of the British about the future of British rule. The book was the catalyst for the newly appointed Indian civil servant to discuss the philosophy of imperial power with his disillusioned English superior. The English Collector Arthur Collett thought that men like Calcraft-Kennedy and O’Dwyer were right in thinking violence could keep India under some kind of British rule. For Venkatachar as much as British officers, the working of the British regime depended on the display of violence from day to day. Force was displayed in different ways; by the placing of gangs of armed soldiers in visible places to prevent ‘trouble’; by the arrest of political leaders who challenged imperial power; or by officers dashing off on their motorbikes to shoot dangerous wild animals, as Collett’s replacement the ‘dare-devil’ Michael Nethersole did. But ‘the whole concept of government by force had been metamorphosed by the Amritsar massacre’, Collett thought. Extreme acts of violence were difficult to justify in the eyes of the British or Indian public. Coercion was continually criticized by a range of official and non-official bodies, from local Congress committees and town bar councils to speeches made in the House of Commons. The Montagu–Chelmsford reforms had helped to create pockets of official power which directly challenged the will of the imperial hierarchy.26
The result was that the contradictions present within India’s post-war political settlement became even more marked. British sovereignty could only be retained if more power was handed away. But coercion was also intensified. To avoid the humiliating spectacle of set-piece battles with Congress politicians in court, the imperial regime tried to avoid using the regular justice system to suppress its opponents. The government became a more actively political force, trying to enlist allies and punish its enemies, turning district towns into battlegrounds between the supporters and opponents of British power. When its critics displayed themselves in public, it used its police and soldiers to move protesters away from public spaces. Mass arrests, the tactic used in the early 1920s, treated protesters as individuals, but opened the imperial state to public humiliation in court. Instead, the police and army treated protesters as nameless members of crowds, trying to restrain and move masses of people away from places associated with British power. In place of the mass arrest, the lathi charge became the most common coercive strategy.27
The game we have to play
By the mid-1920s, the failure of India’s new constitution to create a stable form of imperial power led to a spate of parliamentary reports and inquiries; the Lee Commission reported into the Raj’s failure to recruit enough British officers; the Mudiman Commission into deadlock within India’s diarchic constitution; the Linlithgow Commission into the crisis of Indian agriculture. The crisis was bad enough for Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government in Britain to appoint a full inquiry into the working of the Montagu– Chelmsford constitution. The original act insisted a review take place within ten years, but in November 1927 King George V issued a royal warrant to a committee of seven men to inquire into ‘the development of representative institutions in India’. The commission was led by the liberal Sir John Simon, and included three soldiers, two lords and representatives from all the main British political parties, including Labour’s Clement Attlee. But it was an all-British body. To ensure British interests were protected, perhaps to ensure unanimity, no Indian was asked to deliberate on his or her own country’s future. When they saw the scale of hostility to the appointment of this all-white body, the commissioners tried to compensate with the idea of Indian politicians electing a committee of their own, and then holding a ‘joint free conference’ in Delhi to shape India’s political destiny. That did not stop the Simon Commission from facing uproar when it arrived in India for the first of its two visits, in February 1928.
One response came with the appointment of a rival, Indian committee. Faced with Indian hostility, the Secretary of State for India had encouraged the ‘malcontents to produce their own proposals’. Motivated by the provocation that they would be unable to agree a constitution, political leaders from widely different perspectives came together to try to frame the political future of India. Deliberations were led by the liberal, one-time loyalist leader Tej Bahadur Sapru and the Congress lawyer Motilal Nehru. Nehru’s son, the then 38-year-old Jawaharlal, acted as secretary. Defying Lord Birkenhead’s taunts, the Nehru committee quickly framed a constitution for a self-governing India. The document included a bill of rights, a declaration that all authority lay with the people, and a reconfiguration of administration so that power lay not with India’s communities and provinces but with central government.
Written with the aim of gaining the widest Indian support, the Nehru report was a conservative
document. It emphatically refused to discuss the dispossession of propertied elites, for example. It was also clear in retaining the imperial distribution of authority between different tiers of government, in many cases merely replacing British command with Indian deliberation. In that sense, the report marked an important shift in the politics of Indian nationalism. Its structure was a sign that leading figures within the nationalist movement were moving away from the politics of bottom-up nation building and community self-reliance. Since the late nineteenth century, an important source of political energy lay in local institution building; it was this kind of politics which dominated the regional movements of the late nineteenth century, the practical work of the Swadeshi movement, even non-cooperation with its emphasis on spinning as a counterpart to the boycott of British cloth. The Nehru report showed that this style was being eclipsed by a politics which had elections, law-making and the ability to command the bureaucratic machinery of state as its end goal. The aim was to take over instruments of imperial state power and use them for nationalist ends.
That shift transformed Gandhi’s role from that of a major figure shaping the direction of Congress politics into a symbol of and talisman for a movement whose purpose was shaped by others. Gandhi initially refused to attend the deliberations of the Nehru committee, and then asked to ‘be excused’ from presiding at the conference held to ‘uphold and popularise’ the report. In a letter replying to Motilal Nehru’s plea for Gandhi to attend, he asked, ‘what shall I do there?’ Instead of ‘constitution-building’, Gandhi wanted to concentrate on ‘constructive work’; not only spinning and weaving, but working to quell the violence between Muslims and Hindus which was increasingly breaking out. The end of the non-cooperation movement saw the emergence of a different kind of crowd, about whose potential for violence Gandhi was equally concerned. A serious riot occurred in Calcutta in April 1926; during the next twelve months forty riots caused 197 deaths and injuries to 1,600. Riots occurred as economic dislocation increased stress, local religious assertion increased tension and a foreign government offered no cross-communal leadership. Gandhi tried friendship, fasting, writing and a peace conference to stop the violence. In September 1928, the aftermath of riots at Godhra in Gujarat attracted his attention more than a conversation among liberals and lawyers about how to operate state power.28
