The ancient Westminster Hall, where Charles I had faced his accusers and been sentenced to death, was packed. The doors opened at 9.00 a.m., but crowds had been gathering since six o’clock, some of the would-be spectators having slept in coffeehouses to be sure of getting a seat. As the imperial historian Macaulay described it (although he had not been born at the time), ‘there were gathered together, from all parts of a great, free, enlightened, and prosperous Empire, grace and female loveliness, wit and learning, the representatives of every science and of every art.’ The queen sat in the royal box, in a light-brown satin dress, surrounded by a retinue of children and nobles. One hundred and seventy lords in gold and ermine processed into the chamber, followed by the Prince of Wales. Two hundred MPs had crammed inside, and in the gallery sat the president of the Royal Academy and society portraitist, Sir Joshua Reynolds, for whom Hastings had once posed as the high-minded orientalist, wearing an embroidered silk waistcoat and clutching a handful of documents in Persian. Near by in the gallery the theatrical superstar Sarah Siddons gazed down, as did Edward Gibbon, who had recently completed his monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. What resonances would he hear today?
It was worth waiting for. Burke’s opening speech was spread over four days, was packed with horrific detail and steamed with moral disdain. He was a man possessed, claiming to have ‘brought before you the head, the chief, the captain-general in iniquity; one in whom all the frauds, all the peculations, all the violence, all the tyranny in India are embodied, disciplined and arrayed’.
He charged Warren Hastings with betraying the trust of parliament, dishonouring the character of Britain and subverting the rights of Indians, ‘whose country he has laid waste and desolate’. He talked of ‘oppressed princes, of undone women of the first rank, of desolated provinces, and wasted kingdoms’. The way the Company collected taxes was a disgrace. Burke claimed that enforcers employed by the local officials to whom Hastings had delegated tax collection behaved grotesquely. Fathers were flogged to extract money from them. Sometimes their children were beaten before their eyes. Virgins were brought into court where they were ‘cruelly violated by the basest and wickedest of mankind’. There was more. ‘The wives of the people of the country only differed in this; they had lost their honour, in the bottom of the most cruel dungeons … but they were dragged out, naked and exposed to the public view, and scourged before all the people … they put the nipples of the women into the sharp edges of split bamboos and tore them from their bodies.’ He was, he said, ashamed to go on. Even Hastings admitted later that listening to it had made him feel ‘the most culpable man on earth’. When Burke’s colleague Richard Sheridan took up the demolition job, people were said to be paying 50 guineas a time for tickets. Sheridan wasn’t a dramatist and impresario for nothing. After several days his speech culminated in the assertion that ‘the condemnation we look for will be one of the most ample mercies accomplished for mankind since the creation of the world!’ And then, with the words ‘My lords, I have done,’ he collapsed backwards into Burke’s arms.
After this melodramatic start, the trial dragged on for seven years, constantly interrupted by other Westminster business of one kind or another, and the public grew increasingly bored with the spectacle, especially when, across the Channel, France erupted into revolution. Eventually the trial petered out. The twenty-nine peers who claimed to be competent to pass judgement did so, and acquitted Warren Hastings by generous margins. He retired to the country estate at Daylesford which his Indian gains had allowed him to recover and lived out the rest of his days as a Cotswold squire.
What had really been on trial, said Burke, was the honour of the entire nation. His own motives seem mixed – he resented the ghastly nabobs buying up seats in parliament, acquiring country piles and marrying the daughters of indigent gentry. But the impeachment of Hastings marked the point at which Britain became the first of the modern empires to mount a detailed interrogation of what was being done abroad in its name. It was part of a wider moral awakening in the dying years of the eighteenth century, of a piece with a growing revulsion at the cruelties of the slave trade. But unlike slavery, which was wrong in principle, what was on trial with Hastings was merely the practice of imperialism. The British were too in love with their empire to challenge its expansion, which continued apace – by 1823, just about all of India was under either direct or indirect British authority. The proposition that Burke laid out – that the colonizer had a moral duty to those he colonized – became the central ethical tenet of the British Empire. Of course, it was better than the opposite principle, which had underlain piracy and slavery. But there was something inherently nonsensical about it: would not the moral duty have been better exercised by not seizing the land in the first place? How could the ultimate purpose of colonization be freedom?
The touchstone issue for the new morality of empire became the question of religion. Charles Grant was another young Scot who had embarked for India intending to restore his family fortunes: he had been named after Bonnie Prince Charlie, a short time before his own father was cut down at Culloden. (The son did well enough in India to buy an estate on Skye and to take a seat in parliament when he returned.) But during the family’s time in the subcontinent Grant’s two young daughters had been carried off by smallpox. Tragedies like this were very common, but Grant considered their deaths to be divine punishment for his way of life. The experience turned him into an evangelical Christian, convinced not merely of the injustice of slavery but that it was the duty of the British Empire to turn India Christian. Without the influence of Christian missionaries, the land would be left to idolatry, immorality, dishonesty, depravity and general wickedness. His attempt to get a ‘Pious Clause’ inserted into the renewal of the Company’s charter in 1793 failed. But he found a ready ally in William Wilberforce, then labouring to persuade parliament to legislate against the slave trade. Wilberforce saw a readiness to continue to allow ‘our fellow subjects in India’ to wallow ‘under the grossest, the darkest and most degrading system of idolatrous superstition’ as ‘the foulest blot’ on the moral character of the country.
The East India Company was unenthusiastic about having Christian missionaries tramping about the place telling its troops that their misguided religions would see them all destined for hell. This was not because it was especially concerned about freedom of religious belief, merely that it cared a great deal more about making money. As long as the local holy men raised no objections to what the Company traded, the Company would raise no objections to what they preached, so was perfectly happy to see them blessing the colours of sepoy regiments. Christian missionaries declaring the whole lot of them to be heathens was not likely to be conducive either to a peaceful country or to good trade. But Wilberforce and others had their blood up. The caste system (‘a detestable expedient for keeping the lower orders of the community bowed down in an abject state of hopeless and irremediable vassalage’, he called it in parliament) was a form of hereditary slavery. The weapon to destroy it was Christianity. ‘Our religion is sublime, pure and beneficent,’ he went on. ‘Theirs is mean, licentious and cruel.’ Against this tide of moral self-confidence the Company’s restrictions on missionary activity would simply have to yield. The India Bill of 1813 obliged the East India Company to license missionaries to travel the country preaching Christianity and imperial destiny.
There was an immediate opportunity to do good with the practice of sati, a tradition in which widows threw themselves (or were thrown) on to the funeral pyres of their newly dead husbands. Here was a custom grotesque enough to appal even the fiercest advocate of cultural tolerance. Nonetheless, it still took until 1829 for the Governor General, Lord William Bentinck, to act. The Governor General held the splendidly paternalist belief that India was ‘a great estate, of which I am the chief agent’, and he ruled as a clumsy, unpopular autocrat. (There were even made-up rumours that he planned to knock down the Taj Mahal, so that he could re
cycle the marble.) But he was sufficiently affected by the new mood of empire that he reformed the education and judicial systems, replaced Persian with English as the official language, built roads and bridges and established a college to teach western medicine. On the memorial erected to honour Bentinck in Calcutta was inscribed the judgement of Macaulay, that he ‘infused into oriental despotism the spirit of British freedom’, an expression only really comprehensible in the context of British India. It was under Bentinck that sati was finally suppressed, his self-confidence finding an echo in General Sir Charles Napier, who was reported to have replied, when facing down a defender of the practice of tossing women on to funeral pyres, ‘It is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and hang them. Build your funeral pyre and beside it my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your national custom – then we shall follow ours.’
There is no evidence that sati was practised all across India. But its prevalence was not the point. Its suppression was a dramatic and emotional demonstration of the ethical purpose of empire. Soon, there was another dragon to slay, when one of Bentinck’s subordinates, William Sleeman, began a campaign against the Thugs, a secret sect, he revealed, who worshipped the goddess Kali by falling on travellers and strangling them with a silken cord. After robbery, the bodies were buried in graves dug with a sacred pickaxe. This, too, became a practice Bentinck determined to stop: hereditary lord confronted hereditary murderer. Again, the precise scale of thuggee will never be known – no doubt many different groups of murderers, from muggers to discharged soldiers, also had their crimes attributed to the cult. Indeed, there are some who noisily claim that the whole cult thing was got up by the British to justify their ‘civilizing mission’. What is unarguable is that when Sleeman was given charge of a force to eradicate highway murder he was remarkably successful. By deploying decent detective methods – including the assiduous collection of evidence, the cultivation of informants and the offer of rehabilitation to those who would turn queen’s evidence, thousands of alleged murderers were brought to justice, to be hanged, imprisoned or transported. It was an achievement spoken of in the same breath as the abolition of slavery.
In 1857, the 10th of May fell on a Sunday. As the sun began to sink in the sky, British officers and their families at the military camp at Meerut, about 40 miles from Delhi, prepared for evening prayers at the garrison church. Boots and belts were being buffed when suddenly, soon after five in the afternoon, the place exploded in shouts, shots and screams. Indians, both civilians and sepoy soldiers of the East India Company army, burst through the cantonment, setting fire to buildings and looting weapons from the armouries. A few officers found their horses and rode out to confront the furious mob as it rampaged around, only to be hacked down or chased away. The pregnant wife of an infantryman was disembowelled by a rebel butcher, a patient sick with smallpox was set alight. By night-time much of the military compound was ablaze, about fifty men, women and children were dead, and the rioters had set off on horses for Delhi, intent on spreading the mutiny against foreign rule across the country.
The following morning, the Mughul emperor was disturbed by the sound of shouts outside the Red Fort in Delhi. The current tenant hardly matched the grandeur of his surroundings. His palace had been designed as an earthly reflection of the delights after death promised in the Koran. But Bahadur Shah Zafar was a feeble, hen-pecked valetudinarian, under the impression that he possessed magical powers. Although his ‘court’ still issued bulletins each day, the emperor’s dominions had shrunk to the point where they extended scarcely further than the rooms of his palace, around which the old man would shuffle, leaning on a stick and stroking his waist-length beard. The Company paid him courtesy and a large annual allowance in exchange for his staying inside the palace composing poetry and painting the occasional miniature, leaving it free to go about its business. The angry mutineers now planned to ask this eighty-two-year-old poet to be the figurehead for a campaign to throw the British out of India. Bahadur Shah Zafar’s first reaction was to send the commander of his personal guard, a Colonel Douglas, to see what was up. The mutineers killed him. More and more rebels poured into the city. Shops were looted. More Europeans were hunted down and killed – neither gender nor age was any protection. The angry soldiers had no plan: the uprising was an incoherent expression of anger, and in the long term it was destined to fail. But in the meantime the revolt’s enormous, merciless energy terrified the British. It was one of the biggest shocks the empire ever experienced, and it changed it for ever.
In the shorthand version of history, the trigger for what the British called the Indian Mutiny – and what patriotic Indians prefer to term the Indian Rebellion or the First War of Independence – was a decision to issue locally recruited troops with a new paper cartridge, the tip of which had to be bitten off before the powder could be poured down the barrel of the Enfield rifle issued to Company soldiers. To keep the powder dry, the cartridges had to be covered in a waterproof coating and the rumour flew around the soldiery that the impermeable substance chosen was pork and beef fat. If it was true, this was the worst possible choice, outraging both Muslims, to whom the pig was unclean, and Hindus, to whom the cow was sacred. The decision about which type of fat to use was never intended as a deliberate insult – in fact, the manufacturers at the arsenal at Dum Dum, near Calcutta, would have been perfectly happy to have the cartridges coated in some substance like beeswax, just as long as the covering kept the powder dry. The problem for the British was that the sepoys were inclined to take it as a deliberate snub, because they were already unhappy. All armies live with a background chorus of belly-aching, but the sepoys had genuine anxieties – about their pensions, about the limited chances of promotion, about service overseas – as well as feeling a growing unease at the increasingly high-handed behaviour of the Company. (Its latest device for extending territory was the invention of a ‘Doctrine of Lapse’, by which it claimed ownership of any principality being incompetently administered or where the ruler died without a natural heir.) Many Indians were additionally troubled by the series of reforms bringing railways, ports, telegraphs and new roads, while Christian missionaries were ever more obvious in towns and countryside. (The missionaries were not particularly effective, but they made quite a lot of noise about the evils of Hinduism and Islam.) Barrack-room stories went around about how the Company was trying to undermine the ancient religions of India by adding cow’s blood to salt and by grinding pig and cow bones into the soldiers’ flour. It was hard to still rumours like these when growing numbers of junior officers were choosing to spend their time drinking in the officers’ mess instead of forming a bond with their men, and it looked increasingly as if, not content with removing their wealth, the British now also wanted to remove the Indians’ way of life.
Someone remembered a Brahmin prophecy that British rule would last for only a hundred years after the battle of Plassey: the centenary fell in June 1857.
At the end of March that year, Mangal Pande, a young soldier with the 34th Native Infantry, had emerged on to the parade ground at Barrackpore from a session of cannabis-smoking and taken a wild shot at one of his European officers. In the tussle which followed, Pande turned his gun on himself. The unfortunate man failed to take his own life, was dragged before a court martial and publicly hanged. In what became an established pattern of behaviour when a unit showed signs of restiveness, his regiment was disbanded. A few weeks later, in the British base at Meerut, eighty-five troopers with the 3rd Light Cavalry were ordered to load their weapons with the new cartridge. When they refused, all were court-martialled, sentenced to ten years’ hard labour and, in the middle of the parade ground, under the eyes of the rest of the garrison (and the guns of European soldiers) stripped of their uniforms and riveted into shackles and chains. Some of them wept with shame, one soldier crying out, ‘I was a good sepoy. I would have gone anywhere for the service.
But I could not forsake my religion.’ In the commotion of the evening of 10 May, some of their comrades broke into the gaol and freed them. The uprising had begun.
The rebellion never enveloped the whole of India. But it spread with amazing speed and occurred in the hugely important area around the Grand Trunk Road, the old Mughal route from the Afghan border through the north of India to Bengal. This was the heart of British military might in the subcontinent. The rebels found a merciless leader in the Nana Sahib of Cawnpore. According to contemporary accounts, when he first heard about events 250 miles distant in Delhi, Nana Sahib told a British officer that he ‘lamented the outbreak’, and offered to provide protection for European wives and families. But Nana Sahib – a fleshy, middle-aged man – was the adopted son of the previous king, and therefore a victim of the Company’s new Doctrine of Lapse which decreed that only natural-born sons could succeed to their fathers’ lands. When the mutineers contacted him he decided to take their side. On 6 June he laid siege to the British encampment, which was now packed with refugees who had poured into Cawnpore as news of the uprising spread. For nearly three weeks the rebel forces pounded the British with cannon and sniper shots. The medical supplies were destroyed by fire. Unable to move, unable even to bury their dead, the British were soon also ravaged by thirst, hunger and disease. Survivors later talked of how some of the besieged were blinded by shellfire and shrapnel or broken by despair. Under the constant bombardment, some went mad. Women did their best to comfort the children, but both suffered at least as badly as the men. The British commander, General Sir Hugh Wheeler, smuggled a desperate call out to the British garrison at Lucknow – ‘Surely we are not to die like rats in a cage?’ But no help came. When his own son was decapitated by artillery fire (‘Here a round shot came and killed young Wheeler,’ someone later scrawled at the site; ‘his brains and hair are scattered on the wall’), the general’s spirit broke.
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