The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  ‘It is useless to rail against capitalism. Capitalism did not create our world; the machine did.’7 Just as it could be said that the arms race got out of control merely because technology was unbridled, not because politicians willed it to do so, it could also be said that the Imperial expansion was part of the technological revolution. Given the possibility of steamships and railways covering vast distances in previously unimaginable journey-times, or the advance of cable telegrams, or the development of the machine gun, it was inevitable that those who possessed this technology would feel bound to use it. Those cultures with no such technology could not resist the incursions of those with Maxim guns, telegrams, railways and steel-framed steamships. One way of looking at this would be to say that the technologically advanced culture was dominant or even (as nearly all Victorians would have believed) superior. Another way of viewing matters, however, would be to suggest that the notion of ‘control’ was itself a patriarchal illusion. If it was right to begin Part IV by quoting from Dostoyevsky’s The Devils and seeing it as a prophetic work, then much of the technological advance of the 1880s could be seen as a blind march to murder, arson, mayhem. In 1879 Alfred Nobel (1833–96) invented blasting gelatine – 92 per cent nitroglycerine gelatinized with 8 per cent of collodion cotton.8 The initial difficulties of manufacture were great, but by 1884, with the use of soluble nitro-cotton (rather than collodion), large-scale production could begin. The human race now possessed the capacity to blast quarries, mines and dams on an unprecedented scale, but it had also taken an irrevocable stride towards the capacity to obliterate itself altogether.

  The bard of the technological revolution, the artist who felt most instinctively, and understood with the most immediate intelligence, the connection between technology and imperial strength, was Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). His Browningesque dramatic monologue ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ – a glorious poem almost better than anything, even, than Browning wrote – puts into the mouth of an old Scottish ship’s engineer the bizarre thought:

  From coupler-flange to spindle-guide I see Thy hand, O God –

  Predestination in the stride o’ yon connectin’-rod.9

  And in ‘The King’ the poet sees Romance itself, the Boy-god who most poets teach us to suppose is vanished from the Earth, bringing up the nine-fifteen train.

  His hand was on the lever laid,

  His oil-can soothed the worrying cranks,

  His whistle waked the snowbound grade,

  His fog-horn cut the reeking Banks;

  By dock and deep and mine and mill

  The Boy-god reckless laboured still!10

  Kipling was also the first writer to admit the sexual appeal of imperial expansion. Whatever the political or economic motives of empire, its existence and its growth expanded the world for a great many people who could not conceivably have come into contact otherwise with races and cultures utterly different from their own. The ‘Burma girl’ who sits by the ‘old Moulmein Pagoda’ in ‘Mandalay’ offers delights which are not in the repertoire of the ‘fifty ’ousemaids’ dated by the common soldier-narrator since his return to London:

  When the mist was on the rice-fields an’ the sun was droppin’ slow

  She’d git ’er little banjo an’ she’d sing ‘Kulla-lolo!’

  With ’er arm upon my shoulder an’ ’er cheek agin my cheek

  We useter watch the steamers an’ the hathis pilin’ teak.11

  Kipling’s reputation is one of the most complicated in the history of literature. It would be an obtuse reader who did not recognize his brilliance as a short-story writer – ‘our greatest’ according to the poet Craig Raine … ‘our greatest practitioner of dialect and idiolect’.12 It would also be hard to think of anything but priggishness or intellectual snobbery which refused to see merit in Kipling’s enormous output of verse. Yet it is impossible to imagine the revisionist reader, however much under Kipling’s spell, who could endorse the views in ‘The White Man’s Burden’, with its picture of

  Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

  Half-devil and half-child.13

  (A reference to the American conquest of the Philippines.) When Kipling’s talent first shone upon the world, he was seen less as an imperialist than as an exotic. Those marvellous early stories in Plain Tales from the Hills opened up a world which many stuffier defenders of the Raj would probably have wanted concealed. He depicts in dozens of incomparable vignettes the silliness and triviality of English society in the hill stations, the casual adulteries and flirtations, and the continual allure, imaginative and sexual, of India itself. ‘It is the strength of this new story-teller,’ wrote Edmund Gosse, ‘that he reawakens in us the primitive emotions of curiosity, mystery, and romance in action. He is the master of a new kind of terrible and enchanting peep-show, and we crowd around him begging for “just one more look”.’14

  Perhaps the most terror, from the early collection, is to be found in the story called ‘Beyond the Pale’, in which an Englishman called Trejago wanders down a dark narrow gully in the city – Lahore, presumably – and peers through the grating to see who owns ‘a pretty little laugh’ coming from the darkened room behind. It is little Bisesa, a fifteen-year-old widow, and he woos her with singing the Love Song of Har Dyal in her own language.

  In the day-time Trejago drove through his routine of office work, or put on his calling-clothes and called on the ladies of the Station, wondering how long they would know him if they knew of poor little Bisesa. At night, when all the City was still, came the walk under the evil-smelling boorka, the patrol through Jitha Megji’s bustee, the quick turn into Amir Nath’s Gully between the sleeping cattle and the dead walls, and then, last of all, Bisesa, and the deep, even breathing of the old woman who slept outside the door of the bare little room that Durga Charan allotted to his sister’s daughter.15

  Trejago falls in love with Bisesa, and she believes that he will marry her; but when the rumour of their liaison gets out, Trejago returns to the window-grating through which he has previously crawled to his young lover to find her holding out ‘her arms to the moonlight. Both hands had been cut off at the wrists …’16 The next thing Trejago knows, a knife is being thrust out from the grating and cuts into his groin. The strong implication is that he is rendered impotent by the wound.

  If this is one of the darkest stories Kipling ever wrote, there is, throughout his work, a very strong ambivalence about the supposed superiority of whites over Indians. The unnamed subaltern who commits suicide because he feels he has disgraced himself with women and debt17 (‘Thrown Away’) hasn’t learnt the lesson that ‘India is a place beyond all others where one must not take things too seriously – the midday sun always excepted. Too much work and too much energy kill a man just as effectively as too much assorted vice or too much drink.’ There is multi-layered irony here, of course, and like so many of Kipling’s stories, it is cruel. The narrator and the major who help bury the Boy give out that he has died of cholera. They think of sending home a lock of his hair but ‘there were reasons why we could not find a lock fit to send’. (He has blown his head off.) They send a lock of the major’s instead and, hysterical on whisky, write back to the Boy’s mother ‘setting forth how the Boy was the pattern of all virtues, beloved by his regiment … it was no time for little lies, you will understand – and how he had died without pain’.18

  In what is Kipling’s most successful sustained evocation of Indian life, Kim, written when he had long since left India (1901), Kimball O’Hara, the son of an Irish colour-sergeant and (one infers) a Eurasian nursemaid, befriends a Tibetan lama and follows him on the religious pilgrimage to Benares and the river which will wash away sin. Contrasted with the lama and his essentially serious perception of things are the British intelligence agents who want to train Kim as a spy in ‘The Great Game’. The most memorable and moving characters whom Kim and his Tibetan friend encounter, and the most realistic, are all Indians – Hindu and Muslim and Sikh.

  The spies seem
to have wandered into the ‘felt life’ of a masterpiece from adventure stories on a railway bookstall. One feels that Kipling’s imagination has seen something to which his developed political brain is blind: namely the absolute inevitability that the Raj will one day end. In this story, everyone of course takes the Raj for granted. There are no Indian nationalists. Yet India itself in all its cultural abundance, in all its geographical varieties, its colours, lights and smells, comes alive in this book quite incomparably: larger and stronger than any temporary political system.

  Sixty years is not long under eternity’s eye. There must have been plenty of children alive in Kim’s Lahore who lived to see the end of the Raj. Lahore, no longer a city of Kipling’s India, is, like most of the Punjab, part of Pakistan. The Sikhs – about 4 million of them – found their homeland crudely divided down the middle in the territorial carve-up hastily contrived by Sir Cyril Radcliffe and Lord Mountbatten in 1947. (Sikhs had been largely eliminated from Lahore, as had Muslims, on the ‘Indian’ side of the border, from Amritsar.)19 Exile, migration and massacre were what awaited these people – at least half a million dead.

  Knowing this as we do might make us, if we are European, have some sympathy with the views of those Victorians who believed that the Imperial system was the only one beneath which multiculturalism could flourish.20 Modern Indian historians who see the Raj, probably correctly, as founded on notions of white racial superiority can quote letters such as Secretary of State Lord George Gordon writing to Lord Elgin (viceroy and son of a previous viceroy in the 1890s), ‘I am sorry to hear of the increasing friction between Hindus and Mohammedans in the North West and the Punjab. One hardly knows what to wish for; unity of ideas and action would be very dangerous politically, divergence of ideas and collision are administratively troublesome. Of the two the latter is the least risky, though it throws anxiety and responsibility upon those on the spot where the friction exists.’21 In other words, the British could be seen as operating a policy of divide and rule. No doubt the administrators did think like Lord George Gordon, but whether they deliberately fomented division between Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus is rather more questionable. In Kim everyone takes multiculturalism, and the Raj, for granted. India and Pakistan over the last fifty years have not offered the world a very perfect model of mutual tolerance.

  The tensions in British thinking about the Raj concerned themselves less with rival interest-groups in India, and more with the contrast between Liberal and Conservative administration. After Gladstone replaced Lord Lytton as viceroy with Lord Ripon in 1880, there were no more Conservative viceroys until the end of the century. The Liberal viceroys attempted to satisfy the ‘legitimate aspirations’ of Indians. The phrase is that of Sir Courtenay Ilbert, whose reform of judicial procedure – enabling Indian judges and magistrates to try Europeans in country districts – caused a storm of protest. Ripon backed down: in concession to the racists he allowed a provision whereby, in such cases, the white defendant could insist on a jury half of whom would be European.

  The Liberal viceroys encouraged the growth of an Indian professional class. Between 1857 and 1887, some 60,000 Indians entered universities.22 One third of the 1,712 Calcutta graduates in 1882 entered government service, slightly more became lawyers. Most of those who joined the Indian National Congress – ‘collaborators’ in the term of a modern historian – were Hindus.23

  The inevitability that self-government would come is obvious to the eyes of hindsight. Lord Curzon, in some ways the greatest of all the viceroys, who took up his post in 1899, was the most out-and-out Imperialist, believing that ‘through the Empire of Hindustan … the mastery of the world was in the possession of the British people’. Yet he sensed almost as soon as he got to India, in his fortieth year, that ‘The English are getting lethargic and they think only of home. Their hearts are not in this country.’24

  Curzon was one of the only viceroys with a deeply learned love of Indian language, lore, architecture and archaeology. In a speech to the Asiatic Society in 1900 he defined one of his roles as a guardian of India’s past. ‘A race like our own, who are themselves foreigners, are in a sense better fitted to guard, with a dispassionate and impartial zeal, the relics of different ages, than might be the descendants of warring races or the votaries of rival creeds.’25 One perfectly understands Indian distaste for the patronizing tone here, but any Indian antiquary has reason to be grateful to Curzon for preserving and conserving so much – including such bold innovations as attempting to take over Bodh Gaya, site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, which had been in the possession of a Hindu merchant since 1727, and hand it back to the Buddhists. (Political pressure made Curzon unwillingly back down here.) In his antiquarianism and taste for old Indian artefacts, buildings, philosophy and literature, Curzon seems, like the muse of Kipling, both imperialistically arrogant and culturally humble. A large part of him bowed before a great Asiatic past, and seemed to know by instinct that British imperial ambitions would never have the power, or importantly the will, to dominate it.

  ‘Right-wing’ critics of liberalism in the Raj looked with satisfaction to the journalism of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, who in 1883 famously said that the Raj was ‘founded not on consent but on conquest’. Obviously, after the quite horrifying trauma of 1857–8, this was in part true. The reform of the Indian army after the Mutiny raised the ratio of Europeans to Indians in the armed services to about half by the mid-1860s.26 But it must have been obvious to all that on another level, both the army and the ICS only functioned on a principle of consent. In the 1860s the army numbered 120,000 Indians and 60,000 Europeans, and it was the constant aim of penny-pinching laissez-faire British governments to cut these numbers. Once Indian nationalism became an even half-serious proposition, the Raj could not long endure. Racist, by any standards, it undoubtedly was; economically exploitative too, as nearly all modern historians wish to point out; but the British will to govern by force had its limits when consent was absent. The massacre of protesters at Amritsar by General Dyer – 379 killed and 1,200 wounded – on 13 April 1919, followed by a proclamation of martial law, was a disgrace from which the British Raj never recovered its semi-legitimate self-estimation for decency and justice. Thirty years before independence it sealed the Raj’s fate, but one can now sniff the obsolescence of the imperial ambition in the wind much earlier – in the closing decades of Queen Victoria’s reign.

  35

  Jubilee – and the Munshi

  TO THE CROWDS who assembled in London for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in June 1887, however, the British Empire was manifested as a visible pageant. As the Queen’s carriage was drawn to Westminster Abbey for the Service of Thanksgiving on 21 June, it was preceded by an Indian cavalry escort, each member of which was presented with a special medal at Windsor Castle before going home.1 The crowds gave rousing cheers to the brilliantly dressed Indian princes who attended the ceremonies in honour of their Queen-Empress. The Maharao of Cutch, his diamond-and-ruby-encrusted turban sparkling in the sunshine, received especially warm applause. The Maharaja Holkar of Indore was clad with equal magnificence. And there must have been gasps of wonder at the superb gold and silver trappings and saddle on the proud Arab stallion of His Highness the Thakor of Morvi. In fact the colonial princes and monarchs such as the Thakor Sahib of Limbdi or the Maharaja and Maharani of Cooch Bihar, or the majestic figures of Queen Kapiolani and her daughter Princess Liliuokalani of Hawaii, rather outshone the visiting European royalties – the men whiskery and uniformed, the women for the most part plain and long-suffering – who must have been more or less indistinguishable as they trotted by in their open landaus.

  One figure stood out from the grandees in their gilded epaulettes, sashes, uniforms, helmets, turbans. The Queen herself wore a black satin dress, and a bonnet trimmed with white lace. Many will have noted her corpulence, to which the previous day’s luncheon (the actual anniversary of her accession) amply contributed. With its Potage à la Royale, its Filet de Boeuf
au Macaroni, its Poulets, its Venison steaks, its lobsters, ducklings, jellies and Reis Kuchen mit Aprikosen, it was of a positively Hanoverian heaviness.2

  One witness to the Abbey service remarked how apt it was that the Queen dressed so simply – ‘she was mother and mother-in-law and grandmother of all that regal company, and there she was, a little old lady coming to church to thank God for the long years in which she had ruled over her people’.3 A comparable observation was made once when she was being driven through Dublin, and a woman in the crowd remarked, ‘Sure, and she’s only an old body like ourselves.’

  She was no such thing. Those admitted to her presence attested to her personal charm and strength of character, which was ‘both shy and humble … But as Queen she was neither shy nor humble, and asserted her position unhesitatingly.’ This could form no part of public perception of her character, however, since for most of the previous quarter-century she had been a recluse, squirrelling away the £400,000 per annum awarded to her as Head of State, and seldom seen. Journalists and those whose hobby was to ‘follow’ the royal family singled out particular members as ‘popular’, ‘scandalous’ and so on, but very little was publicly known about any of them, least of all about the Queen.4 Even those who might be expected to have come across Her Majesty – such as the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury – found her character a total surprise when actually encountered.

  The parade of the Queen’s children, grandchildren and in-laws was distinguished neither by its beauty or health, nor by its morals. It was widely agreed in the Abbey that the most impressive figure was the German Crown Prince (Fritz) – married to the Princess Royal. He had arrived at the ceremonies, with Vicky, arrayed in cuirass and silver helmet, from a hotel in Norwood where they were staying to conserve their strength for a summer at Balmoral.5 They had also consulted Dr Morell MacKenzie of Harley Street, who had confirmed that Fritz had cancer of the larynx. (He died in 1888.) Their son Willy (the future Kaiser Wilhelm II) had been damaged at birth – one arm was crushed and he was deaf. He had also inherited the strain of madness in the family. His relations with his parents were of the most painful. In some moods he was so Anglophobic that once when he cut himself he hoped he would lose every drop of his English blood. When he heard of Lord Frederick Cavendish’s assassination he said it was ‘the best news I have received today’,6 and he regarded Queen Victoria – at least when the fits of the most extreme Anglophobia seized him – as ‘an old hag’. Those who cheered the arrival at the Abbey of the governor general of Canada, the Marquess of Lorne, might have wondered why his wife, Princess Louise, had produced no heir. Did it have anything to do with the fact that she had been in love with the sculptor Edgar Boehm (a substantial figure – it was said a winch was necessary to lift him from his royal mistress when he died in flagrante) and that Lord Lorne was a promiscuous homosexual, much given to meeting guardsmen in Hyde Park until his exile to the land of the lumberjack? The Prince of Wales was a by-word for scandalous adulteries, and poor Prince Leopold was haemophiliac, a condition for which Princesses Alice (already ten years dead at the time of the Jubilee) and Beatrice were carriers – as was the Princess Royal. (They spread the disease through most of the royal houses of Europe.) This was no ‘old lady like ourselves’: it was an extraordinary matriarchy of medical and psychological oddities.