The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  The response to the Nehru report was structured by this growing mistrust and fear of violence. Muslim political leaders helped to write the report, but many felt that its focus on the authority of the central Indian state did not pay enough attention to the interests of minorities. Too much room was left open for the Hindu majority to elect politicians who would oppress Muslims, they thought. Many in the Muslim League thought that giving more power to India’s provinces, some of which had Muslim majorities, would ensure India’s diversity was taken into account in post-imperial decision-making. But these were years when organizations representing the rival interests of different religious communities quickly grew. The Hindu Mahasabha, for example, founded in 1915, developed into a major political force. Lobbied by increasingly vocal Hindu politicians, the Nehru committee was reluctant to concede to Muslim arguments, refusing to recommend the separate representation of minorities throughout India. According to Muslim League leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah, India’s putative constitution-makers had adopted ‘a narrow-minded policy’ which would ‘ruin the political future of the Muslims’.

  Later on, Muhammad Ali Jinnah described the Nehru report as the ‘parting of the ways’ between Congress and the Muslim League. But in 1928, the cycles of Indian protest and British reaction were more significant than Hindu–Muslim tension in shaping the political life of the subcontinent. The all-white Simon Commission did not have any trouble recruiting committees of Indian political leaders to offer it advice in every province. But its arrival saw the return of organized street protests, and the politics of boycott and non-cooperation. When they arrived at Bombay in February 1928, the committee members were greeted by a national strike. Thousands lined their route with black flags. When the committee toured again in October 1928, it was met by throngs of nationalist volunteers protesting in the streets of every city it visited. At Lahore in Punjab, protests were led by Lala Lajpat Rai. These were years when elite political leaders and British officials alike were gripped by fear of the ‘Indian mob’. Lajpat Rai was a figure described as having ‘a soothing effect [o]n the fury of the crowd’ by an Indian political scientist a few years later. ‘Even crowds’, Ilyas Ahmad wrote in 1940, echoing the view of the Indian members of the Hunter Commission twenty-one years before, ‘can be influenced to discipline and to the idea of consequences.’29

  After playing a central role in the Swadeshi movement, Lajpat Rai had been deported in 1907, then went into voluntary exile to the United States during the First World War. There, he built up an India Information Bureau, read political philosophy and increased support for Indian nationalist causes. Initially denied permission to return to India in the aftermath of the Amritsar massacre, he was granted a passport in February 1920 and, like Gandhi, returned to be greeted by crowds. Lajpat Rai led the walkout of students from government institutions in Punjab and was then jailed during the non-cooperation movement in 1921. He was elected to the Imperial Legislative Assembly once non-cooperation was suspended in 1923. It was Lajpat Rai who moved the motion in the assembly urging a boycott of the Simon Commission.

  Even in the late 1920s, Lajpat Rai’s politics were still concerned with undoing the ‘fact of conquest’, as he called it, by building Indian organization and self-reliance. His continual aim was to force the imperial state to hand power over to the institutions of Indian society. ‘The duty of every Indian patriot’, he wrote in 1922, ‘consists in educating his people to formulate their will and to acquire the training, the discipline and the power of imposing it on their foreign masters.’ But, like many of his compatriots, Lajpat Rai’s thinking had taken a more statist turn. ‘It is’, he wrote in the months before the Simon Commission protests, ‘the duty of the State to see that its people are not illiterate’; it was ‘the responsibility of the State in equipping the citizen properly for the race of life’. While Gandhi always saw the state as an institution founded on violence, for Lajpat Rai it was something far greater than the capacity of the government to tax and coerce. According to the latest political philosophy, Lajpat Rai argued, ‘[t]he state is no longer a sovereign power issuing commands’; it was made up of the collective duties which citizens who shared some kind of common feeling owed to one another. A regime which tried to issue commands based on the threat of violence had no effective power, he argued.30

  Leading protesters against the Simon Commission on 30 October 1928, Lajpat Rai came up against British officers who believed the power of the imperial state would only survive through the use of force. Congress organized a strike in Lahore for the day the commission would arrive in the city. British officials were worried that crowds would stop the committee from stepping off their train, so set up a barricade around the railway station. Lajpat Rai led a march to confront the blockade. Seriously outnumbered, police commanders responded by ordering their men to march forward beating protesters with lathis. There were no arrests. The idea was simply to drive protesters away, and avoid the public and laborious process of being confronted by nationalists in court. Lajpat Rai was surrounded by minders, but police broke through and injured him on the left chest and shoulder. Hearing about the attack, Gandhi’s response was to telegram immediate congratulations to the Punjabi leader. Lajpat Rai’s injuries were a moment of ‘good fortune’. By demonstrating courage against force, the attack held out the prospect of a ‘full transformation of authority’ and the conversion of ‘government by the sword’ into government ‘based on popular will and confidence’. The ‘assault’, Gandhi said, was ‘part of the game we have to play’. ‘Swaraj’ would only come when Indians were willing to die.

  Lajpat Rai did die of a heart attack eighteen days after his beating, his doctor claiming the sixty-three-year-old’s death was brought on by the assault. He became Indian nationalism’s greatest martyr. His death brought 100,000 silent mourners onto the streets of Lahore for his funeral; in his death at least, Lajpat Rai did have a restraining effect on the crowd. But it also catalysed calls for a more aggressive campaign to break British power. Pressure mounted from Bombay and Bengal as well as Punjab for a return to civil disobedience. The talk beforehand had been of India becoming a self-governing dominion within Britain’s empire. After Lajpat Rai’s death, it was increasingly about the complete renunciation of any form of imperial sovereignty and independence. Gandhi tried to be a restraining force, arguing that Congress needed to confine itself to ‘constructive work’, boycott and the redress of ‘specific grievances’, thinking independence was unimaginable if the divisions between different groups of Indians were healed. But the mood was for a complete break, and an unprecedented onslaught on the institutions of British state power.

  14

  CYCLES OF VIOLENCE

  As the great fascist powers conquered mainland Europe, a mild-mannered academic gave a speech looking forward to a time when public life would be ‘dominated not by passion but by reason’. Beni Prasad was still only forty-five in December 1940, but had been head of the Allahabad University politics department for over a decade. As one of India’s best-regarded observers of politics he had been asked to give the presidential address to the third session of the newly formed Indian Political Science Association. Prasad argued that the self-governing future of India lay in a regional federation. For Prasad, fusing the passions of national identity with the power of the state was the kind of outdated politics which had caused the outbreak of the Second World War. The war proved it was impossible to shoehorn the world’s ‘divergent languages, religions and cultures’ into a series of absolutely independent nation-states. Instead, Indians would choose to govern themselves in a ‘composite state’.

  Prasad’s talk expressed a view common among India’s thinkers and politicians about the future of India. ‘Federalism’ was the buzzword. From M. K. Gandhi to the Maharaja of Mysore, observers spoke of India as a coordinated series of self-governing communities, not a nation-state. For Gandhi, the village was the basic unit of self-government; India, he thought, was a ‘congeries of village r
epublics’ each of which was the centre of ‘a series of ever-widening circles’ with little power imposed from above. For Prasad, as for others, religion and region provided the basic units. The focus, though, was on creating a form of politics which ensured that the relationship between India’s plural groups was maintained by ‘reason’ and ‘balance’. Most Indian observers shared a common critique of British rule as a system driven by forceful, acquisitive passions. They thought India could produce a form of politics to better reconcile potentially violent antagonisms.1

  Prasad did not live to see his hopes and predictions so dramatically contradicted by the turn of events. He died in 1945, two years before Britain’s Indian empire collapsed amid the kind of violent passions he lamented throughout the rest of the world. In August 1947 a single realm was split into two states, each of which claimed to rule on behalf of homogeneous, unified nations. For a few awful months everything – land, houses, movable property, culture and people – was defined as the property of Hindus and Sikhs or Muslims, imagined to belong either to the state of India or Pakistan. This division drove millions away from their homes, dispossessing them from their ways of life and memories. Hundreds of thousands died in partition violence. The first war between India and Pakistan quickly followed, when 7,500 soldiers were killed fighting opponents who weeks earlier had been members of the same imperial army.

  Few expected a catastrophe on this scale. Why did events so emphatically contradict the predictions of so many? By 1947, a series of overlapping crises made millions of people destitute. Used as a buffer for the British economy in the 1920s, India had not recovered from the downturn after the First World War when the global depression struck in 1929. Then, after 1939, India was confronted with the unprecedented mobilization needed to fight a world war. But India’s domination by a distant, fragile and quickly collapsing imperial power meant there was no force capable of coordinating production and holding society together. Nationalists articulated ideas of unity, of course, but amid the ruins of empire they failed to provide unity in practice. Depression and war led to political fragmentation, and saw the failure of any single organization to offer effective leadership. They led a frightened population to retreat so as to be with others they thought were their own kind. By the 1940s, the cycles of embittered and embattled violence which had shaped imperial power extended throughout many sections of Indian society. Large numbers of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim men believed they needed to conquer or suffer the humiliation of conquest themselves.

  The devastation of the post-war subcontinent and the failure of its political institutions means the scale of violence should not surprise us. What is remarkable is the speed with which the actions of ordinary citizens and political leaders made sure it came to an end. In 1946, most observers predicted British India would descend into a civil war which could last decades. In 1950, the Raj seemed to have been succeeded by two poor but democratic and quickly developing successor states.

  Burning money

  Imperial India’s last catastrophe started with the onset of the world’s worst economic crisis. The crash of the New York stock market in October 1929 sparked a loss of confidence in global credit. It was felt in India immediately. By 1929 even the poorest Indian peasant had become enmeshed in a global chain of lending, and was vulnerable to the actions of distant bankers. The production of wheat, rice or millet relied on local grain traders borrowing from moneylenders in small towns, who borrowed from city bankers. The crunch of 1929–30 pulled money back to the centres of global banking, New York and London. A similar chain of events took place from the wheat prairies of the American Midwest to the millet fields of the Indian Deccan: farmers had crops but their usual buyers did not have cash. The prices which peasants were paid for their crop collapsed, first wheat and millet, then rice, but village dwellers faced the same tax demand.

  Poverty was compounded by the government’s decision to restrict the supply of money in India’s economy. Bankers and civil servants in London were worried that any devaluation of India’s currency would lead to the quick decline in the value of British assets in India. London insisted the rupee stay at one shilling and sixpence in sterling, and forced the government in New Delhi to take coinage and paper money out of circulation to keep the value of the currency high. The Viceroy and his chief finance officer resisted, knowing that restricting the money supply would make the economic crisis worse and reduce their own quickly shrinking tax take. The Viceroy’s entire council threatened to resign unless the rupee was allowed to float freely on the currency markets. But in this last great moment of metropolitan imperial power, it was London not Delhi or Simla which controlled the currency; and the psychology of embattled defence reached imperial finance. Sir Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, told the Raj’s government to have a bit of backbone, insisting devaluation would be an act of ‘defeatism’ in the face of the ‘enemy’. Following Norman’s orders, the Indian government secretly melted down silver rupees and burnt paper notes and treasury bills. The total amount of cash circulating fell, from five billion rupees in the late 1920s, to four billion in 1930, to three billion by 1938. Sir Homi Mody, chairman of the Bombay Millowners Association, suggested British policy would ‘leave them without a friend in the country’. He was not wrong.2

  The global economic crisis caused India’s connections to the rest of the world to shrink back. The fall in Indian prices allowed wages to drop, and made Indian products more competitive than overseas goods. British goods and money were withdrawn from India. They were given an added push by the resurgence of swadeshi sentiment, and the return of campaigns to boycott European goods in the early 1930s. The unexpected result was that the total output of Indian industry increased, with textile mills upping production by 23 per cent, for example. It was British industry which suffered, as the export of cotton piece goods from the UK fell dramatically, from 1.25 billion yards in 1930 to 376 million two years later, ending up at 145 million yards in 1939–40. As well as cotton, by the late 1930s India had become largely self-sufficient in steel (less than 30 per cent of its requirements were imported in 1936) and entirely self-reliant in sugar. The only way European industrialists could make money from South Asian markets was by opening factories in India themselves. Where India did consume goods from overseas, they increasingly came from Asia – particularly Japan – not Europe, further disconnecting Indian business from empire.3

  The collapse of agriculture and the expansion of Indian industry drove hundreds of thousands into India’s cities. Calcutta grew from 1.2 to 2.1 million between the censuses of 1931 and 1941; Ahmedabad from 270,000 to 590,000. India’s largest ten cities saw the arrival of three million people. These largely male and poorly paid workers were forced to make a home for themselves in cities which did not have the infrastructure to accommodate them. British and elite Indian efforts to improve living conditions ended up creating pristine new enclaves for the better off. They were concerned more to protect the middle classes from the supposedly disordered, disease-ridden mob than to improve living standards for all. Perceived as dangerous, the poor were governed through coercion. Hardly surprisingly, they themselves were quick to resort to violence when they felt under attack.4

  But political opposition to British rule in these depression years tended to come from the countryside not the town. The collapse in agricultural prices particularly affected more prosperous usually upper-caste peasants who sold a significant proportion of their crop on the open market. These groups, often imagined by the Raj to be supporters of British rule, turned to Congress, becoming the core of the organization’s political base for a generation.

  Country-wide protests had begun to escalate once again since the arrival of the all-white Simon Commission to India and the death of Lajpat Rai. The agrarian crisis gave them added fuel. As ever, Congress tried to channel existing local protests into a single movement. In the forested areas of Gujarat and central India hundreds of thousands flouted laws restricting pasturage and gl
eaning in forests. In the south and west millions refused to pay land revenue. In Punjab, foreign cloth was boycotted particularly successfully in cities and small towns. In many places protest merged into social banditry, and crops were seized from landlords by the poor. But north India’s Gangetic plain was the heartland of protest, where day-to-day life was dominated by the political battle between Congress and the government for the support of local peasant leaders. Congress won the battle for support in most places, creating an infrastructure often more effective than the British state’s.5 In one district, Rae Bareli, the Congress had 8,040 members, 13,081 volunteers, 32 offices and 1,019 villages which publicly flew Congress’s flag even when the organization was banned.6

  The early 1930s saw the return of oscillation between crowd protest and repressive violence, both sides believing they needed to show their strength, but both also reluctant to let violence spiral out of control. Thoughtful political strategist as ever, Gandhi tried to channel protest by encouraging defiance against the government’s salt laws. Salt was a commodity everyone used. The government had a monopoly and refused to reduce the price. Gandhi himself spent three weeks marching from Sabarmati in Gujarat to the coast at Dandi, where he symbolically boiled a beaker of sea water and was then quietly arrested. Following Gandhi’s lead, nationalists marched to beaches across India, fighting with the police to keep the Congress flag flying on Calicut beach and suffered lathi charges in Madras. Despite Gandhi’s emphasis on non-violence, the campaign ‘thrived upon the violent eruption of the masses and the violent repression of the police’, as historian David Arnold puts it. By the beginning of 1931, Gandhi was once again concerned that crowds were being provoked to act violently by police brutality.7