An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

  Alarmed by their proliferation, and concerned that the Company’s critics and enemies (including conceivably the French) could use the press to the Company’s disadvantage, Lord Wellesley introduced the Censorship of the Press Act, 1799, which brought all newspapers in India under the scrutiny of the Government of India prior to publication. This Act was later extended in 1807 to cover all kinds of publications—newspapers, magazines, books and pamphlets. Some of the more obstreperous publications were closed down; the editors of Indian World, Bengal Gazette and Calcutta Journal were even arrested and deported to England for their intemperate criticism of Company officials and policies. It was not a propitious beginning for the idea of a free press in India.

  The draconian restrictions were eased soon enough, as the Company established its stranglehold over India and the threats to it from European rivals disappeared. The growing independence of the press in the mother country also began to be reflected in India. While many of the early newspapers faded away—sometimes with the death or departure of their publishers, sometimes because they were not commercially viable given their small readership base, and sometimes because the editors and staff simply ran out of enthusiasm for their task and adequate replacements could not be found—others not only survived but established a considerable following. The Times of India, established in Bombay in 1838, and the Calcutta Statesman (which began life in 1875, but incorporated the Friend of India which was founded in 1818) soon established themselves as reliable pillars of the establishment, solidly committed to British imperial interests but able to criticize the policies and actions of the government in a responsible manner. As the British expanded across northern India, The Pioneer established itself in Lucknow as the third in a colonial triumvirate of newspapers whose views could be taken as broadly representative of the British community in India.

  It must, therefore, be acknowledged that it was the British who first established newspapers in India, which had been unknown before colonial rule, and it is to their credit that they allowed Indians to emulate them in doing so both in English, catering to the tiny English-educated elite (and its aspirational imitators) and in Indian vernacular languages. The Bombay Samachar, in Gujarati, was founded in 1822 (it is still running, and proudly calls itself the oldest newspaper in Asia still in print) and a few decades later, two Bengali-owned newspapers followed suit in Calcutta, The Bengalee in 1879 (later purchased, and edited for thirty-seven years, by Surendra Nath Banerjea after he left the ICS) and the formidable Amrita Bazar Patrika in 1868 (which, after being founded as a Bengali-language publication, then became a bilingual weekly for a time, before turning into an English-language newspaper in 1878 to advocate nationalist interests. The Amrita Bazar Patrika became a formidable pro-Congress voice and survived till the late twentieth century, before closing in 1986).

  Other English-language, Indian-owned newspapers addressed themselves to Indian readers but in the awareness that their views would be paid attention to by the colonial authorities; this made them increasingly influential in the freedom movement. Arguably the most notable of these was The Hindu in Madras, established as a weekly in 1878 and converted into a daily from 1889, which the British came to regard for a long time as the voice of responsible Indian opinion. (The Hindu’s first issue counted a grand total of eighty copies, printed with ‘one rupee and eight annas’ of borrowed money by a group of four law students and two teachers).

  In the early twentieth century, Indian nationalists began to establish newspapers explicitly to advocate their cause: the best of these were the Bombay Chronicle, founded by former Congress president Sir Pherozeshah Mehta in 1910, Hindustan Times, which was started by the Congress-supporting Birla business family in 1924, and Jawaharlal Nehru’s own National Herald, which started publication in 1938. The Muslim League followed suit, when its political fortunes picked up during the war years, Muhammad Ali Jinnah establishing Dawn in Karachi and Delhi in 1941.

  By 1875, it was estimated that there were 475 newspapers in India, the vast majority owned and edited by Indians. They catered to the literate minority—less than 10 per cent of the population at that time—but their influence extended well beyond this segment, since the news and views they published were repeated and spread by word of mouth. The nascent library movement in India also helped, as did public reading-rooms, and each copy sold enjoyed at least a dozen readers. Though the newspapers were printed and published in the big cities, editions made their way, sometimes three days later, to the rural areas and ‘mofussil towns’, where they were eagerly awaited and avidly read. There is no doubt that the press contributed significantly to the development and growth of nationalist feelings in India, inculcated the idea of a broader public consciousness, exposed many of the failings of the colonial administration and played an influential part in fomenting opposition to many aspects of British rule.

  Inevitably, the British authorities began to be alarmed: Lord Lytton brought in a Vernacular Press Act in 1878 to regulate the Indian-language papers, and his government kept a jaundiced eye on the English-language ones. (It was the introduction of this Act that prompted the Amrita Bazar Patrika to convert itself into an English-language newspaper overnight, to avoid coming under the new law’s purview.) Still, outright censorship and repression would not have gone down well with the British public at home, and the authorities had to tread warily. While on certain occasions of grave danger to Britain, especially at times of war, and during periods of elevated nationalist resistance, the press was directly curtailed to protect imperial interests—the Rowlatt Acts come to mind—a wide range of criticism of British administration was permitted most of the time. Indeed, the Indian vernacular press was allowed to get away with crude invective: for instance, in 1889, a Bengali newspaper, Halishaher Patrika, colourfully described the British Lieutenant Governor Sir George Campbell as ‘the baboon Campbell with a hairy body… His eyes flash forth in anger and his tail is all in flames’. But had its anti-colonialism taken on a more explicitly political tone, for instance in questioning the very premises of British rule at all or calling for its overthrow, the authorities would not have been quite as tolerant.

  One of the most notable accomplishments of the Indian nationalist media, during a period of relative freedom, ironically has implications that haunt the subcontinent even today. In 1891, a journalist from the Amrita Bazar Patrika managed to rummage through the wastepaper basket at the office of Viceroy Lord Lansdowne. There he found the fragments of a torn-up letter, which with great enterprise he managed to piece together. The letter contained explosive news, revealing as it did in considerable detail the viceroy’s plans to annex the Hindu Maharaja-ruled Muslim-majority state of Jammu & Kashmir. To the consternation of the British authorities, Amrita Bazar Patrika published the letter on its front page. The cat was out of the bag: the newspaper reached the Maharaja of Kashmir, who promptly protested, set sail for London and vehemently lobbied the authorities there to honour their predecessors’ guarantees of his state’s ‘independent’ status. The Maharaja was successful, and Indian nationalists congratulated the Patrika on having thwarted the colonialists’ imperial designs. Had this exposé not taken place, Kashmir would not have remained a ‘princely state’, free to choose the country, and the terms, of its accession upon Independence in 1947; it would have been a province of British India, subject to being carved up by a careless British pen during Partition. The contours of the ‘Kashmir problem’ would have looked very different today.

  Nonetheless, the Lansdowne-Patrika episode was an exception: for much of the time, the Indian media operated under severe constraints. The revised Press Act of 1910 was designed to limit the influence of editors on public opinion; it became a key instrument of British control of the Indian press. Under its provisions an established press or newspaper had to provide a security deposit of up to five thousand rupees (a considerable sum in those days); a new publication would have to pay up to two thousand. If the newspaper printed something of which the
government disapproved, the money could be forfeit, the press closed down, and its proprietors and editors prosecuted. The Congress leader Annie Besant, for instance, had refused to pay a security on a paper she published advocating Home Rule, and was arrested for failing to do so and thereby violating the Act.

  It is noteworthy that only Indian publications were vulnerable to forfeiting the substantial bond they had posted with the authorities if they failed their undertaking not to publish inflammatory or abusive articles; the racism of the British-owned press was never subject to similar strictures. The British colonial governments in the provinces enjoyed the right to search any newspaper’s premises and confiscate any material they found ‘seditious’. The Indian press, in other words, was fettered rather than free, but that it existed, and could serve as a rallying point for public opinion, is to the credit of both the British authorities and the Indians who worked in the media.

  Indian papers—especially the vernacular ones which tended to be less retrained in their abuse of the colonial masters—were fined, suppressed, and shut down; their editors were frequently imprisoned, and several times given twenty-three months of hard labour for a piece of invective; and under the Press Act, their stock of type, without which they could not print, was liable to confiscation. But such threats were never focused on the pro-imperialist British papers in India. In no Indian newspaper, wrote the fair-minded British observer, Henry Nevinson, in 1908, ‘have I seen more deliberate attempts to stir up race hatred and incite to violence than in Anglo-Indian [i.e. British settlers’] papers, which suffer nothing’. Nevinson offers as an example ‘this obvious instigation to indiscriminate manslaughter by The Asian, an Anglo-Indian weekly in Calcutta (9 May 1908)’:

  Mr. Kingsford [a British magistrate in Calcutta whose court was the target of a bomb] has a great opportunity, and we hope he is a fairly decent shot at short range. We recommend to his notice a Mauser pistol, with the nickel filed off the nose of the bullets, or a Colt’s automatic, which carries a heavy soft bullet and is a hard-hitting and punishing weapon. We hope Mr. Kingsford will manage to secure a big ‘bag’, and we envy him his opportunity. He will be more than justified in letting daylight into every strange native approaching his house or his person, and for his own sake we trust he will learn to shoot fairly straight without taking his weapon out of his coat pocket. It saves time and gives the elevation fairly correctly at any distance up to about ten or fifteen yards. We wish the one man who has shown that he has a correct view of the necessities of the situation the very best of luck.

  Nevinson adds that ‘the tone of the Anglo-Indian press is almost invariably insolent and provocative. If “seditious” only means “likely to lead to violence”, it is seditious too.’

  The press, in other words, was free, but some newspapers (the British-owned ones) were freer than others.

  THE PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEM IN INDIA

  By the time of Independence, British India, and many other British colonies, had elections, parties, a more or less free press, and the rule of law, unlike their Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and Belgian counterparts. Democratization may have been slow, grudging and gradual, but it was also more successful in the ex-British colonies than elsewhere. The Indian nationalist struggle and its evolution through various stages—decorous liberals seeking legislative rights, ‘extremists’ clamouring for swaraj, Gandhi and his followers advocating non-violent struggle, the Congress, the Muslim League and other parties contending for votes even with limited franchise: all these pre-Independence experiences served as a kind of socialization process into democracy and helped to ease the country’s transition to independence.

  It is remarkable that when the Indian nationalists, victorious in their freedom struggle, sat down to write a Constitution for independent India, they created a political system based entirely on British parliamentary democracy. Was this simply because they had seen it from afar and been denied access to it themselves, and so wanted a replica of Westminster in India, or might it be that the British, through the power of example, actually convinced Indians that theirs was a system worth emulating?

  A digression here: Personally, I am far from convinced that the British system is suited to India. The parliamentary democracy we have adopted involves the British perversity of electing a legislature to form an executive: this has created a unique breed of legislator, largely unqualified to legislate, who has sought election only in order to wield (or influence) executive power. It has produced governments obliged to focus more on politics than on policy or performance. It has distorted the voting preferences of an electorate that knows which individuals it wants but not necessarily which policies. It has spawned parties that are shifting alliances of individual interests rather than the vehicles of coherent sets of ideas. It has forced governments to concentrate less on governing than on staying in office, and obliged them to cater to the lowest common denominator of their coalitions. It is time for a change.

  Pluralist democracy is India’s greatest strength, but its current manner of operation is the source of our major weaknesses. India’s many challenges require political arrangements that permit decisive action, whereas ours increasingly promote drift and indecision. We must have a system of government whose leaders can focus on governance rather than on staying in power. The parliamentary system has not merely outlived any good it could do; it was from the start unsuited to Indian conditions and is primarily responsible for many of our principal political ills. This is why I have repeatedly advocated a presidential system for India not just for the federal government in New Delhi, but a system of directly elected chief executives at the levels of villages, towns, states and the centre, elected for fixed terms and accountable to the voters every five years, rather than to the caprices of legislatures and the shifting majorities of municipal councils or village panchayats.

  The parliamentary system devised in Britain—a small island nation with electorates initially of a few thousand voters per MP, and even today less than a lakh of people per constituency—assumes a number of conditions which simply do not exist in India. It requires the existence of clearly defined political parties, each with a coherent set of policies and preferences that distinguish it from the next, whereas in India a party is all too often a label of convenience which a politician adopts and discards as frequently as a Bollywood film star changes costume. The principal parties, whether ‘national’ or otherwise, are fuzzily vague about their beliefs: every party’s ‘ideology’ is one variant or another of centrist populism, derived to a greater or lesser degree from the Nehruvian socialism of the Congress. But we cannot blame the British for saddling us with this system, though it is their ‘Mother of Parliaments’ our forefathers sought to emulate. First of all, the British had no intention of imparting democracy to Indians; second, Indians freely chose the parliamentary system themselves in a Constituent Assembly.

  Like the American revolutionaries of two centuries ago, Indian nationalists had fought for ‘the rights of Englishmen’, which they thought the replication of the Houses of Parliament would both epitomize and guarantee. When former British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, as a member of a British constitutional commission, suggested the US presidential system as a model to Indian leaders, he recalled, ‘they rejected it with great emphasis. I had the feeling that they thought I was offering them margarine instead of butter.’ Many of our veteran parliamentarians—several of whom had been educated in England and watched British parliamentary traditions with admiration—revelled in their adherence to British parliamentary convention and complimented themselves on the authenticity of their ways. Indian MPs still thump their desks in approbation, rather than applauding by clapping their hands. When bills are put to a vote, an affirmative call is still ‘aye’, rather than ‘yes’. Even our Communists have embraced the system with great delight: an Anglophile Marxist MP, Professor Hiren Mukherjee, used to assert proudly that British Prime Minister Anthony Eden had felt more at home during Question Hour in th
e Indian Parliament than in the Australian.

  But six decades of Independence have wrought significant change, as exposure to British practices has faded and India’s natural boisterousness has reasserted itself. Some of the state assemblies in our federal system have already witnessed scenes of furniture overthrown, microphones ripped out and slippers flung by unruly legislators, not to mention fisticuffs and garments torn in scuffles among politicians. Pepper spray has been unleashed by a protesting Member of Parliament in the well of the national legislature. We can scarcely blame the British for that either.

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  And yet the argument that Britain left us with self-governing institutions and the trappings of democracy fails to hold water in the face of the reality of colonial repression. Let me cite one who actually lived through the colonial experience, Jawaharlal Nehru, who wrote in a 1936 letter to an Englishman, Lord Lothian, that British rule is ‘based on an extreme form of widespread violence and the only sanction is fear. It suppresses the usual liberties which are supposed to be essential to the growth of a people; it crushes the adventurous, the brave, the sensitive, and encourages the timid, the opportunist and time-serving, the sneak and the bully. It surrounds itself with a vast army of spies and informers and agents provocateurs. Is this the atmosphere in which the more desirable virtues grow or democratic institutions flourish?’ Nehru went on to speak of ‘the crushing of human dignity and decency, the injuries to the soul as well as the body’ which ‘degrades those who use it as well as those who suffer from it’. These were hardly ways of instilling or promoting respect for democracy and its principles in India. This injury to India’s soul—the very basis of a nation’s self-respect—is what is always overlooked by apologists for colonialism.