by Miles Taylor
Of late, historians have not been sympathetic to these early generations of Indian nationalists. Their place in the pantheon of patriots and martyrs of the modern Indian republic is uncertain. Not only was theirs the voice of an elite, but they modelled their political aspirations on a western European version of nationalism.7 Conditions for nationalism in India were there – through the expansion of education, urbanisation and the opening up of the public sphere – yet it was a slow-burning process, not least because its leaders were so wrapped up in playing the game the British way.8 Such a way of writing the early history of Indian nationalism throws out the baby with the bath water. There was nothing automatic about devotion to the Crown. It was there for a reason. The proclamation of 1858 was the only statement of its kind in the world, in which a monarch made a pledge to a subject population. Loyalism was deployed as a political device, a language of politics, enabling Indian reformers to push back the envelope of colonial power as much as possible.
After 1858 the queen became more important than the British Parliament for many Indian reformers. The language of the queen’s proclamation of 1858 had asserted a direct relationship between monarch and Indian subject: were not Indians and Britons in India therefore entitled to expect a royal remedy to their problems? Such a claim was tested in 1871 when a petition of grievances was sent from India. Co-ordinated from Kanpur, the petition had been signed by hundreds of townspeople, Indian and European, from across the North-West Provinces.9 Although the petition was discussed in Parliament, it was addressed to the queen. She was requested to set up a commission to investigate a long list of concerns: the Indian financial deficit, the public works programme, the income tax, the powers of the viceroy and the composition of his Legislative Council, and the state of the Indian army. Despite a powerful speech by Henry Fawcett, the radical MP for Brighton, the House of Commons refused the request for a Royal Commission on India. Liberals – Fawcett’s own party – argued that as a parliamentary select committee on Indian finances had just been established, there was no need for a Royal Commission. It was a significant rebuke. Despite the transfer of power, Parliament jealously guarded its privileges, and, in Britain, that meant restraining the prerogative powers of the Crown. There would be no royal initiative.
Here lay a curious paradox, one that would dominate Anglo-Indian radical politics until independence in 1947. The most doughty proponents of Indian reform in Britain were themselves no lovers of royalty. As the honorific title of ‘MP for India’ transferred from one radical to the next – John Bright to Henry Fawcett to Charles Bradlaugh – it passed from the mildly republican end of the spectrum to the most extreme. A dialogue of the deaf ensued. Much of the explicit loyalism to the Crown that was a marked feature of the reform movement in India became diluted in the metropole. The cause of India was pressed into the mould of domestic radicalism, or it was hitched to the cause of the Irish Home rule, which was much further than most Indians wished to go. The queen’s proclamation of 1858 was never mentioned by British friends of India. So when the first Indians came forward as candidates for Parliament in Britain, they did so under the auspices of advanced radicalism, their loyalism to the queen held in check. The first campaign came in 1885 – that of Lalmohan Ghose at Deptford. Then, in 1886, Ghose stood once more, and was again unsuccessful, as was Naoroji. Naoroji made his credentials clear – ‘I am an Indian subject of the Queen’ – and stated his aspiration to be the representation of 250 million people. But in his campaign he stuck to English issues, home rule and the like, and made no reference to India.10 To be taken seriously as radicals in Britain, Indians left their loyalism at home.
Back in India, however, loyalism and radicalism remained in tandem, even when a more critical tone developed during the years of Lord Lytton’s viceroyalty. Take, for example, the Poona Sarvajanki Sabha, founded in 1878, and often seen as the birthplace of Indian nationalism. The Poona Sabha’s starting point was the ‘broken pledges’ of the 1833 Charter and of the 1858 proclamation regarding Indian entry into the Civil Service. It also condemned the way in which Lytton’s famine policy had deviated from the paternalistic promises made in the queen’s speech at the opening of Parliament in 1877. In 1880 the Poona Sabha issued an ‘Address to the free electors of the United Kingdom’, decrying the Government of India’s ‘contravention of Parliamentary Statutes and Royal proclamations’, and, when a Liberal parliamentary majority was secured, the Sabha issued another address, including amongst its many demands a ‘royal’ commission of inquiry into Indian affairs.11 The Bengalee took imperial loyalism to a different level, stating in 1877 that, if only Queen Victoria would visit India, she would awaken a semi-dormant ‘loyalty to her person as distinguished from loyalty to the throne – such as has rarely been witnessed since the day when Germans, Magyars, Croats and Slavs exclaimed with one voice that they would stand by their King [sic] Maria-Theresa, an Empress Queen like ours?’12 Loyalism did not come more effusive than this.
Muslim leaders in India also pledged allegiance to the queen after 1858. At the time of the 1857 rebellion, there was a widely held British view that the uprising was an Islamic jihad, not least because the mutineers placed the last Mughal king, Bahadur Shah, back on his throne at Delhi. In that context, loyal Muslims had a steeper hill to climb than Hindus, for, not unlike English Catholics in the same era, they needed to demonstrate that their loyalty to the head of their faith could coincide with their allegiance to the Crown. The most eloquent and persistent proponent of Muslim loyalism during Queen Victoria’s reign was Syed Ahmed Khan, a lawyer and educationist, who had worked for the East India Company before 1857, and whose father and grandfather had both served in the Mughal court at Delhi in its twilight years. In the aftermath of the 1857 uprising Syed Khan took on the leading English historian of the mutiny, John Kaye, and challenged his claims that Muslim disloyalty lay at the heart of the revolt. Syed Khan’s privately printed pamphlet pointed up the causes of rebellion: ignorance, neglect, interference by the British, misunderstanding by Indians, but not disloyalty founded on Islamic ideology. Syed Khan welcomed the queen’s proclamation of 1858. It was ‘merciful and considerate’, possibly even of divine origin, he wrote.13 A decade or so later, at the height of the Wahabi panic in the early 1870s, Syed Khan restated the grounds of Muslim loyalty to the Crown. William Hunter, stalwart of the viceregal administration, had written a provocative pamphlet questioning whether Muslims could ever be loyal subjects of the queen. Hunter argued that Sunni Muslims owed their loyalty to an extra-territorial power, the Sultan of Turkey, head of the Islamic caliphate. Syed Khan carefully unpicked Hunter’s argument, demonstrating that there was no contradiction in Indian Muslims being faithful to their own religion as well as to Queen Victoria.14 The same case was put even more strongly by the Mahomedan Literary Society of Calcutta two years earlier. Speakers at one of its monthly meetings concluded that India was a true state of Darul Islam despite the Christian Queen Victoria being the sovereign. Under the queen’s protection Muslims were free to worship according to their faith. Moreover, Queen Victoria was the staunchest ally of the Sultan of Turkey. She had received him at her court, and on more than one occasion her government had taken his side against Tsarist Russia. To undertake jihad against the British in India would therefore be to break faith with the caliphate.15 In this way Muslim loyalty was far less conditional than that of Hindu nationalists: it sought fuller inclusion in the Raj, rather than further constitutional reform.
Indian Muslim associations looked to the queen as their guardian. Education and not political activity became their route to imperial citizenship. Syed Khan led a campaign to set up college at Aligarh for young Muslim men, an enterprise that he declared would be under the ‘protection of the Empress’. Funding came in from the Government of India, and from the leaders of several princely states, Muslim and Hindu alike: the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Nawab of Rampur, the Maharajas of Benares and Vizanagram, amongst others. On 8 January 1877, the new Mohammedan Anglo-O
riental College opened its doors, the ceremony performed by Lord Lytton, en route back to Calcutta from the Imperial Assemblage, giving the queen’s new title of empress its first official outing after the proclamation a week earlier. Twenty years later the college was going strong: twenty-four staff, across the college and its school annexe, with over four hundred pupils.16 Here was loyalty to the Crown based on working with, and not against, the Raj. At the opening ceremony of the College, Syed Khan described Indian Muslims as ‘useful subjects of the Crown’, their loyalty stemming not from ‘servile submission’, but because of a ‘genuine appreciation of the blessings of good government’. His son went further – for him there was no distinction between the government and the queen: ‘British rule in India and the person of the Empress were one and the same thing.’17
So there was a gulf of difference between Hindu and Muslim loyalism in the quarter-century after 1858. In each case, however, the queen was central and not incidental to their schemes. For Hindu nationalists the queen, in the shape of the 1858 proclamation, provided the very justification for political activity. For Muslims, the queen offered protection as they ventured into the public sphere through educational reform. Performing loyalty to the Crown became a tried and trusted means of asserting an Indian presence in the civic spaces allowed by the Raj. At no time was this better exemplified than in the outpouring of sentiment at the time of Queen Victoria’s escape from assassination in March 1882. Aside from the two jubilees of 1887 and 1897 this was the single largest volley of memorials sent to Queen Victoria from India.18 They came from all over India, without official intervention, mainly from princes, chambers of commerce and municipal associations. Conspicuous amongst the memorialists were two associations from the vanguard of Muslim and Hindu associational life: the Mahomedan Literary Society of Calcutta, and the residents of Poona, seedbed of Hindu nationalism.19 To understand the wave of loyalism to the queen-empress at this particular moment, we need to turn to the viceroyalty of Lord Ripon.
Ripon engel appan20
There were not many radical viceroys in the British Raj. Arguably, there was only ever one: George Robinson, the 1st Earl of Ripon. Sandwiched between two Tories, Lords Lytton and Dufferin, and selected by William Gladstone, whose own tiptoeing towards radicalism had by the 1880s become a sprint, Ripon’s appointment ‘astounded’ Queen Victoria. Never before had she had to contend with such a clean slate: a new Liberal government at home and a new Liberal government in India. Elevated to the House of Lords in 1871, Ripon’s politics and his faith seemed to take one unconventional turn after another, as he converted to Catholicism, embraced the co-operative movement, and supported the moderate strain of Irish nationalism.21 Arriving in India in June 1880 he made it clear that he had come with his liberal baggage intact. The new viceroy told the Poona Sabha that he would honour Lord Canning’s treaty sannads granted to the Indian chiefs in the 1860s. He promised the Corporation of Calcutta that he would treat the queen’s subjects in India ‘with the same equal justice, the same consideration, and the same regard for their interests’ as ‘the Englishmen who dwell most near to her throne’. And he assured the Mahomedan Literary Society of Calcutta that he would act ‘strictly upon the Queen’s Proclamation’ in regard to religious impartiality.22 Ripon quickly got down to work, undoing some of Lytton’s legislation, and introducing much of his own. Out went the unpopular (and largely ineffective) Vernacular Press Act of 1878. In came India’s first factory legislation. Commissions were tasked with reforming agricultural conditions in Bengal, and improving education. Ripon tampered with the Arms Act, another Lytton measure of 1878, and the bane of Indian nationalists. Fighting off the views of his own council, he reduced the salt tax.23
Two measures in particular cemented Ripon’s reputation as a reformer. Firstly, in May 1882, Ripon’s council introduced an elective element to local government in the provinces of India, devolved responsibility for public works, education and financial administration, and gave further tax-raising powers to municipal, district and local boards.24 It was the first major concession of representative institutions by the British in India, although over time the process of adoption was drawn out and choked by official resistance. ‘Ripon’ town halls and other municipal edifices were erected, most strikingly at Madras, but also at Multan in the Punjab. Secondly, and more controversially, Ripon attempted to resolve the issue as to whether native Indian judges could preside over the trials of Europeans in the district courts. The Criminal Procedure Amendment Bill, or the ‘Ilbert bill’ as it quickly became known, denoting the name of the legal member of the Viceroy’s Council, Courtenay Ilbert, who was charged with drafting the legislation, broke with tradition. Since Thomas Babington’s Macaulay’s ruling of 1836 – the so-called ‘Black Acts’ – native magistracy had operated in civil cases in the provincial or mofussil courts, although not in the presidency towns of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. But native judges were effectively excluded from criminal courts with jurisdiction over Europeans. By 1883, it was clear that action needed to be taken. The first qualified Indians had now completed the twenty years of Indian Civil Service required before they were eligible for appointment to the higher grade of magistrate, and there was now no legal bar to them judging all cases. It all seemed quite straightforward. Ilbert, a doyen amongst parliamentary draughtsmen, the viceroy’s legal adviser, was asked to prepare an amendment that simply adjusted the judiciary to the passage of time.25 The most civil of civil servants, Ilbert cannot have expected to go down in history as the instigator of legislation that triggered the loudest European backlash of the Raj.
Opposition to the Ilbert bill was fiercest in Calcutta and across Bengal more generally. In March 1883, the European and Anglo-Indian Defence Association was formed in Calcutta to co-ordinate petitions and other pressure-group opposition. The queen’s proclamation of 1858, and native Indian faith in its promises, came under fire. The language of the proclamation, declared the anti-Ilbert bill memorialists, had only been ‘guarded’, leaving everything to political expedient, and to the ‘unfettered discretion of the Government’. It was a ‘specious sophism’ to change the law just because Indians held the queen’s words in such high regard. Besides, Englishmen in India had a Magna Carta of their own, that of 1215, and it spelled out the inalienable rights of the Englishman before the law.26 As during previous moral panics, European women were deemed to be at peril, with much attention drawn to a recent case of a white women being raped. Most highly prized within the agitation of Calcutta Europeans was the petition to the viceroy from the English ladies of Bihar, who pointed out they that too ‘had been confided to the care of the Queen’. The appeal from women to their queen, suggested Som Prakash, a Bengali newspaper published in Changripotta (Shubhashgram), might influence her unduly.27 Indians pleaded that their patriotism was more powerful, claiming that the Ilbert bill fulfilled the pledges of the queen’s 1858 proclamation, a far more important ‘Magna Carta’ than the document of 1215, which only applied to England.28 A neat irony: the 1858 proclamation was, after all, exclusively designed for India.
Simultaneously, criticism came from Britain as well. One of Ilbert’s predecessors as legal member of the Viceroy’s Council and now a High Court judge in London, James Fitzjames Stephen penned a series of letters to The Times. He queried Ilbert’s credentials for the job, and stated that the queen’s proclamation had ‘no legal force whatever’.29 The leader of the opposition, Lord Salisbury, stepped in too, warning a Birmingham audience at the end of March of the danger of a man of colour judging a white person. Salisbury’s Conservative party went on to compile a dossier against all of Ripon’s policies to date, bundling in local government reform and the Bengal land commission.30 Ample publicity was given in Britain to the Calcutta campaign, with most of the missives being republished in London. In turn, the radical wing of the Liberal party leaped to Ripon’s deference.31 So, by the time the Viceroy’s Council returned to its business in May, there was a full-blown reaction against t
he Ilbert bill in India and a partisan free-for-all raging in Britain. For Ripon and Ilbert it was the opposition in India that weighed most heavily. Ilbert knew that changes were necessary but he wished to keep the principle of the bill.32 Eventually, a compromise was reached, with white defendants retaining the right to have a jury with at least half its membership comprising fellow Europeans. Ilbert and Ripon, as well as some of the Indian members of the Legislative Council, held out for the principles of the queen’s proclamation, but they were in the minority.33 The colour bar was restored.
Queen Victoria watched on with increasing ‘alarm’ as the Ilbert bill unravelled: ‘so contrary’, she informed Ripon, ‘to the expectations which were entertained beforehand of it’. In her first response in late April, Ponsonby told Ripon on the queen’s behalf that she did not think he had brought forward the bill ‘rashly’. However, she havered over whom to blame. Lord Kimberley, the secretary of state for India, had suggested to her in May that it was an ‘injudicious’ measure, and she herself told Ripon that the feelings of the European community might have been ascertained before Ilbert made his proposal. She hoped Ripon might modify the bill ‘so as to prevent the bitter antagonism of races’, feelings that had recently shown a ‘decided improvement’.34 As the bill was being revised during the autumn Queen Victoria wrote again to Ripon, sharing her hopes that the Duke of Connaught’s impending visit to Calcutta might ‘smooth feelings of antagonism and bitterness’. At the same time, Ponsonby made discreet enquiries about whether her executive power in India might definitively settle the question. ‘Kindly explain to me the Indian constitution,’ he asked an official at the India Office; if the Viceroy’s Council passed the bill, did it still need to go to the secretary of state or to Parliament, so that ‘[t]he Queen does not approve or do anything?’35 Ponsonby rarely pushed without a nudge from the queen. It was as clear an indication as any of her desire to assert her prerogative and see through Ripon’s reform.
