Inglorious Empire

by Shashi Tharoor

  But their lifestyles, for the most part, separated them from the masses they sought to rule. The British in India created little islands of Englishness, planting ferns and roses and giving their cottages nostalgia-suffused names like Grasmere Lodge (in Ooty) and Willowdale (in Darjeeling). By the early nineteenth century, the British had established themselves as a ruling caste, but at the top of the heap: they did not intermarry or inter-dine with the ‘lower’ castes, in other words, the Indians; they lived in bungalows in their own areas, known as cantonments and ‘civil lines’, separated from the ‘Black Towns’ where the locals lived; they kept to their clubs, to which Indians were not admitted; their loyalties remained wedded to their faraway homeland; their children were shipped off to the British public-school system and did not mingle with the ‘natives’; their clothes and purchases came from Britain, as did their books and ideas. At the end of their careers in India, for the most part, they returned ‘home’. As the English writer Henry Nevinson observed in the first decade of the twentieth century: ‘A handful of people from a distant country maintain a predominance unmitigated by social intercourse, marriage, or permanent residence’. ‘India,’ wrote another sympathetic Englishman in 1907, ‘is, in fact, now administered by successive relays of English carpet-baggers, men who go out with carpet-bags and return with chests, having ordinarily as little real sympathy with the natives as they have any deep knowledge of their habits and customs.’

  The Indian Civil Service, peculiarly, insisted that all ICS men remain bachelors until after the age of thirty. This made them ripe for capture by the ‘fishing-fleet’, as the boatloads of Englishwomen who came over to India to trawl for husbands in the mid- and late-nineteenth century were known. These ladies were usually the rejects of the British upper and upper-middle classes, women who were too smart or too plain to find a ‘good husband’ and were in their late teens or early twenties. Once you were deemed too old for the English marriage-market, it was either the boat to India or a spinster’s life as governess at home—and tales of the comforts of British life in the colonies certainly made the boat a more attractive option. ICS officers (and other civilians, for that matter), forbidden to consort with local women, bored, lonely and frustrated by thirty, were ripe for the picking. At English clubs and tennis matches, elegant balls and tiger shoots, the women of the ‘fishing-fleet’ allowed themselves to be reeled in by eligible civilians. Insulated from India by their upbringing and new social circumstances, waited upon by a flotilla of servants and ignorant of contact with any other Indian, and susceptible to the prejudices of white Victorian England, these women were often the most guilty of racism and disdain for the country. They were responsible for turning British society prim and proper and rather priggish in its attitudes to relations with Indians.

  That was the life of the ICS men. Then, after twenty-five or more years in the subcontinent, as we have seen, they would retire to Cheltenham or South Kensington, to English suburbs that became known as ‘Asia Minor’ or ‘the Anglo-Indian Quarter’, surrounded by reminders and relics of the land they had ruled. One civilian settled in Teddington on the Thames and named his last home ‘Quetta’, for the capital of Baluchistan. Another, William Strachey, set his watch to Calcutta time even in England, ‘eating breakfast at tea-time and living most of his life by candlelight’. It is a poignant image. But the candlelight has dimmed: the places named for the British have mostly been renamed. Lyallpur, in Pakistan, has been renamed Faisalabad, for a Saudi king. The old ruling caste no longer takes precedence.

  Indians in Imperial Service

  The very element that indicts this system in the eyes of an Indian—its foreignness and its disconnection from the Indian people for whose benefit it was supposed to govern—was, however, seen as a virtue in English eyes. The promised admission of Indians to the ICS was resisted at every level of the British government, and it had to be prised from the British grasp like the last gold nugget from the fist of a dead prospector. Even a moderate civil servant like H. Fielding-Hall (who, after retirement, wrote books about India that were suffused with sympathy for Indians though leavened by imperial attitudes), had this to say in objecting to the admission of Indians into the covenanted civil services: ‘the Government of India is not Indian, it is English. It is essentially English, the more so and the more necessarily so because it is in India… England has made herself responsible for India, and she cannot shirk or divide this responsibility’. He added: ‘Government must do its work in its own way, and that is the English way. No Indian can tell what this is.’

  The result was that there were more statues to Queen Victoria on Indian territory than Indians in the higher reaches of the civil service. There was always, of course, the excuse of a substantive, as opposed to merely racialist, argument: ‘It would be impossible to place Indian civilians in places where co-operation with military or military police-officers would be essential’. But the essence of the problem emerged soon enough. The whites in India would never accept an Indian in a position of real authority. Fielding-Hall insisted in 1913: ‘That an Indian should rule Europeans, and that it should be to an Indian they looked for the maintenance of peace and order and for the administration of justice, criminal and civil, is unthinkable. The stability of the administration is due to its being English, and any threat to that stability would not be borne.’

  In substantiation of his case, Fielding-Hall recounted the experience of an early Indian in the ICS, a ‘Mr Chetty’, who after an English education at Wren’s and Oxford, ranked high in the civil services examination and was posted to a district in India. But there the club—the centre of all social life for officialdom and other English civilians—refused to admit him as a member. This was more than a personal privation: it was an absolute handicap in his career, since so much official work, and so many professional relationships, were dealt with and processed over a drink at the club. Fielding-Hall, who did not disapprove of the racial discrimination practised by his fellow Englishmen, blamed it on the unwise policy of recruiting Indians for jobs only the English should do. He muses about ICS officers like Chetty: ‘Socially he belongs to no world. He has left his own and cannot enter the other. And you cannot divorce social life from official life. They are not two things, but one.’ He adds: ‘In the end Chetty shot himself. It was a sad end for a man gifted and likeable. And although such an end was unusual, the causes which led to it are universal. I have known several civilians who were Indians, and… I think they were all unhappy.’

  This reads chillingly to any modern mind, but Fielding-Hall was by no means the worst of his tribe: reading him, you realize he was more broad-minded and humane than most of his peers. Racial discrimination was pervasive in the ICS. While Indians were theoretically entitled to senior positions in the Indian Civil Service, and Satyendranath Tagore (elder brother of the great Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore) broke into its elite ranks as early as 1863, most applicants were turned down and only a handful succeeded him for decades afterwards. Satyendranath Tagore and the ones who came after him suffered the most appalling racial discrimination and personal humiliation in their careers. After thirty years’ ICS service, in a series of insignificant posts, Satyendranath, who was a brilliant linguist, lyricist and social reformer, could only retire as a judge in the provincial Maharashtrian town of Satara.

  Lord Lytton, writing confidentially as viceroy in 1878 to his superiors in London, was frank about the betrayal of ‘educated Indians whose development the Government encourages without being able to satisfy the aspiration of its existing members; every such Indian, once admitted to Government employment in posts previously reserved to the Covenanted [i.e. the senior civil] Service, is entitled to expect and claim appointment in the fair course of promotion to the highest posts in that service. We all know that these claims and expectations never can or will be fulfilled. [emphasis in original] We have had to choose between prohibiting them and cheating them, and we have chosen th
e least straight-forward course.’

  The cheating continued in awful ways for several decades more. Another of the very early Indian entrants into the ICS, the second after Satyendranath Tagore, Surendra Nath Banerjea, was initially barred from the service he had entered in 1869, on allegations of misrepresenting his age. He appealed this successfully and was posted to a minor position in Sylhet, but not forgiven, and was dismissed from the service altogether in 1874 for a minor infraction (an inadvertent procedural irregularity in requesting accommodation in the civil lines equal to that given to Britons, that might not have earned an English officer even a reprimand). He went on to become a distinguished academician, journalist, editor, orator (one English journalist hailed him as the finest orator he had heard in English since Gladstone) and twice president of the Indian National Congress, but it is noteworthy that an individual of intellectual and administrative ability far in excess of most of his contemporaries should have been seen by the British not as a talent to be made use of in the government’s interest, but as an element to be eliminated by dismissal from its employment. (After nearly four decades of struggle, though, Banerjea, who memorably had urged his countrymen to ‘agitate, agitate, agitate—you have yet to learn the great art of grumbling’, accepted a knighthood. Perhaps, as disappointed nationalists argued, he had changed but by then, to some degree, so had the British. The path carved and hacked against such impossible odds by the first two ICS Indians was now trodden somewhat more easily by larger numbers of their countrymen.)

  Similarly, Aurobindo Ghosh—then named Ackroyd Ghosh—after studying at Manchester, St Paul’s School, and Cambridge University, also ranked second out of several thousand candidates in the examinations for the Indian Civil Service but unlike Banerjea, was not selected because he was deemed to have failed the riding test. (This may well have spared him the experience of being dismissed later on like his illustrious predecessor, since his temperament would have sat ill with British overlords. He went on to achieve worldwide renown and immortality as Sri Aurobindo, founder of a global spiritual movement that still flourishes in Pondicherry.)

  It was only when World War I drove thousands of young British men to officer duty in the trenches rather than service in the Empire that the British grudgingly realized the need to recruit more Indians, and the numbers of Indians in the ICS slowly inched upwards in the last three decades of the Raj.

  But till then, Indians may have had positions, but no real authority. A rare Cambridge-educated Indian judge appointed on the bench of the Allahabad High Court in 1887, Justice Syed Mahmud, suffered daily discrimination and prejudice, especially from Chief Justice Sir John Edge, who Mahmud felt treated him like a conquered subject rather than a judicial equal. As a young man freshly returned from England enthusiastic about Empire, Mahmud had dreamed of a day when ‘the English people are known to us more as friends and fellow subjects, than as rulers and foreign conquerors’. That was not to be. On the verge of being dismissed, Mahmud—the second son of the famous reformer Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, whose support was so crucial for the British among Indian Muslims—resigned in 1892, unable to reconcile his faith in British law with his exclusion from the high table at the institutions administering it, turned to drink and depression, and died a broken man at the age of just fifty-three.

  His father, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, the founder of the Anglo-Mohammedan College and a famed advocate of British rule in India, wrote at the time of his son’s forced resignation as a judge of the Allahabad High Court:

  If an Indian in such a position tries to preserve his self-respect which is concomitant to nobility and uprightness, the relations between him and his European colleagues get embittered. On the other hand, if utterly regardless of self-respect, he makes himself quite subservient to the wishes of his European colleague, who because he belongs to a conquering race, naturally believes in his superiority, he is able to pull on pretty well. But this can never be expected from a man who wishes to remain true to his conscience, and in whose veins runs the blood of his (noble) ancestors. It is no secret that there is as much difference between the Englishman’s treatment of his own countryman and that of others as there is between black and white [emphasis in original].

  Black and white, night and day: the differences were rubbed in at every level. I have touched upon how well compensated British bureaucrats in India were, but what made things worse was how imbalanced their salaries were when compared with their local counterparts. In the first decades of the twentieth century, J. T. Sunderland observed that the difference in salaries and emoluments was so great that 8,000 British officers earned £13,930,554, while 130,000 Indians in government service were collectively paid a total of £3,284,163. The Indians were shown their place in their ranks, authority, positions assigned, lack of career advancement—and every month when their salary slips arrived.

  The long-term consequences of this included the failure to build up human capital in India, as Dadabhai Naoroji argued in 1880: ‘With the material wealth go also the wisdom and experience of the country. Europeans occupy almost all the higher places in every department of Government directly or indirectly under its control. While in India they acquire India’s money, experience, and wisdom; and when they go, they carry both away with them, leaving India so much poorer in material and moral wealth. Thus India is left without, and cannot have those elders in wisdom and experience who in every country are the natural guides of the rising generations in their national and social conduct, and of the destinies of their country; and a sad, sad loss this is!’

  Imperial Racism: Only Disconnect

  But this was deliberate policy. William Makepeace Thackeray spoke of the need to suppress ‘haughtiness’, ‘deep thought’ and ‘independence’ of spirit in India: ‘they are directly adverse to our powers and interest. We do not want generals, statesmen and legislators. We want industrious husbandmen’. The result, of course, was racist discrimination in every sphere. As a tract put out by the ‘Indian National Party’ in London in 1915 argued: ‘It is not the Roman System of thoroughly Latinizing and assimilating the subject races that is tried by England, but the system of exploitation and degradation of a race by another for the material benefits of the latter.’

  This racism infected every aspect of the Empire, and not just its civil service. Racism, of course, was central to the imperial project: it was widespread, flagrant and profoundly insulting, and it worsened as British power grew. It is instructive to note the initial attitudes of whites in India when they were not yet in a dominant position. William Dalrymple has described well how the rule of the East India Company, in the first two centuries from 1600 to 1800, was characterized by a remarkable level of interaction between the colonized and the colonizer. This included not just business ties and political and financial relations, but friendships, love affairs, and, quite frequently, marriage. During the eighteenth century, Dalrymple writes, ‘it was almost as common for Westerners to take on the customs and even the religions of India as the reverse. Contrary to stereotype, a surprising number of company men responded to India by slowly shedding their Britishness like an unwanted skin and adopting Indian dress and taking on the ways of the Mughal governing class they came to replace’. Salman Rushdie has called this ‘chutnification’; Dalrymple dubs the practitioners of this approach ‘White Mughals’.

  Between 1780 and 1785, Dalrymple says, ‘the wills of company officials show that one in three were leaving everything to Indian wives, often accompanied by moving declarations of love asking their close friends to care for their “well beloved” Indian partners, or as one put it, “the excellent and respectable Mother of my two children for whom I feel unbounded love and affection and esteem”. Family portraits from the period are remarkable for the ease with which two races and religions cohabit, with British men dressed in turbans and kurta pajamas, while their Indian wives sit in the European manner on European furniture. One official, the Boston-born Sir David Ochterlony, wh
o every evening used to take all thirteen of his Indian consorts around Delhi, each on the back of her own elephant, went so far as to build a Mughal garden tomb for himself and his chief wife, where the central dome was topped by a cross and flanked by a forest of minarets. A note from Ochterlony gives a measure of the surprisingly multi-religious tone of this period. “Lady Ochterlony,” he reported to Calcutta, “has applied for leave to make the Hadge to Mecca.”’

  The contrast with the later half of British rule, with the assertion of incontestable British political and military dominance and the arrival of the ‘fishing fleet’, as well as the fear and rage that multiplied after the Revolt (or ‘Mutiny’) of 1857, is striking. Sir John Malcolm, later Governor of Bombay, wrote in 1832, ‘our Eastern empire… has been acquired, and must be maintained, by the sword’. Not only was there no pretence of ruling with the consent of the governed (‘a passive allegiance’, Malcolm added, ‘is all [Indians] will ever give to their foreign masters’); there was, in essence, almost complete apartheid, a profound belief in racial differences, ‘and little friendship or marriage across strictly policed racial and religious boundaries.’

  This became apparent again as late as 1942 during the disastrous British retreat from Malaya, Singapore and Burma. As Mahatma Gandhi wrote in his newspaper column in August 1942: ‘Hundreds, if not thousands, on their way from Burma perished without food or drink, and the wretched discrimination stared even these miserable people in the face. One route for whites, another for blacks! Provision of food and shelter for the whites, none for the blacks! India is being ground down into the dust and humiliated even before the Japanese advent.’ Bitterness at racial discrimination even in defeat played no small part in Gandhi’s decision to launch the ‘Quit India’ movement that month, calling for Britain’s departure from India.