It was also a misunderstanding that had marked the Raj since its inception following the terrible violence of 1857. The Indian Mutiny, or the First War of Independence as some historians refer to it, was notable for two things. First, it took the British almost entirely by surprise and, secondly, for the murderous violence shown first by the mutinous Indian soldiers, the sepoys, and subsequently by the British in their subjugation of the uprising. It had been caused, ostensibly, by conditions in the army, traditionally because the sepoys had been issued with cartridges that were greased with pigs’ fat. In fact, the real grievance was a change in the soldiers’ pay and conditions, a reduction in their batta, the money they drew for being in the field, but this was really a reflection of a breakdown of trust between the British officers in the East India Company’s service and their men, as the Company’s army changed from an army of expansion to an army of occupation. Deeper than this ran dissatisfaction at the British ignoring long-established Indian interests and at their forsaking the easy relationships and mutual respect, which had allowed them to be so successful in the eighteenth century, and replacing it with a more distant attitude of racial and religious superiority.
It was the Mutiny that led in 1858 to the East India Company losing its remit to govern India, which was assumed by the British crown. A Secretary of State for India was established as a Cabinet post in Westminster and the governor general in Calcutta added the honorific ‘Viceroy’ to his title, becoming the monarch’s representative. He had a Legislative Council of twelve, half of whom were to be non-official posts, which acted like a Cabinet. There was also a major overhaul of the Indian Army. The main recruiting effort was switched from Bengal and Oudh, where the mutinous Brahmins had largely come from, to the Punjab, which had remained loyal, and to the Jats, Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims, Garwahlis, Gurkhas and Marathas. They would henceforth form the main ‘classes’ from which the Indian Army was recruited. One British regiment was now brigaded with two Indian regiments or battalions, thus ensuring a core of British troops throughout India, and all artillery was to be kept in British hands. The poor communications and transport system, which had meant that the Mutiny took fourteen months to suppress due to the East India Company’s inability to concentrate and move their soldiers, was radically overhauled, with a railway grid now laid out so that troops could move rapidly around the country. The princes, who had largely remained loyal throughout the Mutiny, were rewarded by being drawn closer into the Raj, no longer merely living in uneasy coexistence but becoming an active part of its structure of governance with a complex hierarchy of privileges. Over the coming ninety years, many of the princes came to believe that supporting the Raj was the most effective method of safeguarding their interests.
Yet although the British learned the military lessons of the Mutiny, and learned them well so that the Indian Army grew to be a reliable and efficient body that would serve the Raj loyally until its very last days, they failed to understand the deeper lessons. Although it is fair to argue that the Mutiny was not a national war of independence, it being largely restricted to the north and east and there being few Indians at the time who would have described themselves as being members of an Indian nation, it was undeniably a major revolt against British rule. However it is judged, the Mutiny should have made the British realise that large parts of their regime were both insensitive and unwanted, and that an objective study of British interests in India, which were ultimately largely commercial, should have led to an appreciation that they could best be safeguarded by greater Indian participation in government. But this was the age of Imperialism when Europeans, and the British in particular, thought it their duty and their right to govern less civilised countries. ‘Hardly any Victorian doubted that the British could govern India much better than anyone else and that British rule was for India’s good’,29 wrote Philip Mason. Curzon thought of the British role as being like ‘the prolonged trusteeship for a ward in court’ rather than as any preparation for ultimate self-government,30 although there were those who thought like Evan Maconachie, who retired from the Indian government in 1921, that it was absurd that a race like the British should
claim superiority to peoples that gave the world a Buddha, an Asoka and an Akbar, religions, and philosophies that embrace every religion that has ever existed, an epic literature perhaps unrivalled, and some of the greatest masterpieces in the realm of human art. It is absurd to suppose that a handful of foreigners from across the sea can continue to rule indefinitely over hundreds of millions of Orientals on the patriarchal lines pursued.31
But men like him were in the minority.
There was a strong racial undertone to this imperial self-confidence. While it was acknowledged that one of the causes of the Mutiny had been a lack of engagement with leaders of Indian society, efforts such as having Indians on the Viceroy’s Legislative Council were really only window-dressing. Queen Victoria’s 1858 proclamation notwithstanding, the Raj operated on a strictly racist basis, with Indians excluded from British clubs and institutions and from any really effective role in government save in the Princely states. From 1857 until 1909, in what has been described as the Imperial Heyday, the Raj ruled India with minimal Indian participation despite a few Indians being a little grudgingly admitted to the ranks of the Indian Civil Service, and making very little progress towards addressing the issues that had caused the terrible events of 1857. This was the age of maharajahs and elephants, of tiger hunts and magnificent state gatherings, the famous durbars. It was an age when the viceroy’s train had ten carriages and its own staff of 142, and when ten coolies arrived in the vicereine’s sitting room because she said she thought a chair should be moved. It was the age that gave the Raj its enduring glamorous image and which encouraged so many young British men to serve it.
The Indian reaction to the failure of the revolt was very different. The typical British officer saw it as a rude interruption to the logical progress of their civilising influence, soon solved by tightening their monopoly of force, and they believed British rule would last indefinitely. The Indian reaction, both Hindu and Muslim, was, by way of contrast, initially one of intellectual reflection. How had the Mutiny failed? How had hundreds of millions of Indians failed to dislodge a tiny number of foreigners and had to suffer so much indignity in the process? Many of the rebels had been Muslim sepoys, and as far as there had been any figurehead it was the King of Delhi, the descendant of the Muslim Mughal emperors who had been the last rulers of anything approaching a united India before the British conquests. The Muslim reaction was to question why God had allowed them to be defeated and to ask whether it was because they had drifted away from true Islam. A group of scholars in Deoband founded the Darul Uloom School, dedicated to ensuring rigorous adherence to the correct path, in their case Hanafi Sunnism, and to oppose the corrupting influence of the British. The Deobandi movement, which is still so important in Islam today, not least in the United Kingdom, believed that Hindus and Muslims should unite in opposing the British and many of them would oppose the Muslim League’s calls for Pakistan.32
The Hindu reaction was rather different. Up until the Mutiny it could be argued that although Hinduism ordered almost every part of Indian life, it had not been connected to nationalism. That was to change. Much as the Muslims went back to their religious routes, prominent Hindu scholars like the Gujarati Brahmin Swami Dayananda, who founded the Arya Samaj movement, looked to the Vedas, the original Hindu scriptures, for inspiration. He argued that Hindus had also drifted too far from their routes and advocated returning to the religion’s absolutely pure form, rejecting all later additions such as caste and the seclusion of widows. He developed a particular following in the Punjab where his intolerance of other faiths, particularly Islam, would have repercussions later in 1947. More generally, however, Hindu scholars looked at the West and saw that there was nothing to stop them adapting what was successful and attractive in Western learning and lifestyle while still retaining the core elements of Hind
uism, including caste. It was ‘the dhoti at ease, the western suit on duty’33 approach, an important result of which was the enthusiastic uptake across India of Western education.
Yet these movements would take time to progress and the lack of any strong Indian reaction in the years following 1857 served only to strengthen the Raj’s self-confidence. They now formalised and strengthened a system of governance that, however impressive the quality of its servants, was to prove of questionable relevance to the majority of the Indian population. Each province was run by a governor, answerable to the viceroy who supervised a series of districts. In the larger provinces these districts were grouped into divisions so, for example, the United Provinces had forty-eight districts divided into nine divisions. The size of each district varied considerably, but a typical one would be about the size of several English counties and have a population of about 1 million. An official with three different functions ran a district. He was first the deputy commissioner, charged with local administration such as public health and education; secondly he was the district magistrate, responsible for law and order, with a large measure of control over the police and also required to spend a considerable amount of time hearing court cases. Thirdly, he was also the Collector, responsible for gathering the land tax; for revenue purposes a district was subdivided into a number of tahsils, themselves comprising of collections of villages, with the village headman being required to pay the land tax to the local tahsildar.
The men who came to staff this system were the Indian Civil Service, perhaps one of the most successful British public institutions ever created for the quality and commitment of its staff, although ultimately one of the most frustrated. Typically ICS men were recruited from the British public school system via university, usually Oxford or Cambridge, on a fiercely competitive basis; the ICS demanded a higher pass mark in its examinations than its British equivalent. Its recruits had not only to master Indian law and languages, but also to be hardy outdoor types who could spend hours in the saddle and who were happy to live much of the year in a tent as they toured their vast districts. They also had to be prepared to dedicate themselves to a lonely and sometimes dangerous career when they would go months without seeing another European and where family life was difficult. If they were successful they could end up as the governor of a province or as a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, knighted and with a generous pension; if they were unlucky they would die of malaria. These were the men who, like Wavell, developed a particular love of India and whose work on her culture and her history showed a dedication far beyond what their career demanded. There were never very many of them, their numbers restricted by a parsimonious budget; by the end of 1919, when the ICS had largely recovered after the First World War, there were only 760 British ICS officers, a tiny number compared with the 13,500-odd British officers who served in the British Indian Army. Admittedly the ICS would have considered many Indian Army officers of insufficient quality to join their ranks, although every Indian Army officer was required to speak a local language and had a natural understanding of local affairs from interaction with his soldiers.
This lack of numbers, and the bewildering variety of their responsibilities, meant that it was impossible for ICS officers ever to be on top of their briefs, a problem compounded by the curiously illogical system of government they had to implement. The governors and administrators of the East India Company had, when drawing up Indian law and practice, relied heavily on the Mughal system of land tenure they had inherited. Successive early nineteenth-century governor generals, such as Cornwallis and Dalhousie, had added to this what they undoubtedly thought to be the best parts of British landowning practice, effectively consolidating the rights of the landlords. The result was that by the second half of the nineteenth century the Indian landowning system – and the vast majority of the population relied on the land for their livelihood – was largely feudal with a highly developed landlord and tenant structure. With this system came inherent indebtedness because it gave the peasant land rights against which he could borrow, and, given the frequent shortages created by an unpredictable climate and an ever-increasing population, most peasants found they borrowed regularly and on disadvantageous terms. The result was that those who thrived were the landlords, the zamindars, and the moneylenders, the bania. It was a system the British introduced because they were themselves the greatest bania, said both Indian and British critics,34 and the so-called reforms of Cornwallis and Dalhousie had in fact led to the peasants being worse off.
The British legal system that formed the basis of the Indian legal code was equally perplexing. Even the great Governor General Warren Hastings thought it a ‘monstrous injustice that Indians should be subjected to laws designed for quite different social conditions’ and Macaulay wrote that ‘All the injustice of former oppressors, Asiatic and European, appeared as a blessing when compared to the justice of the Supreme Court’.35 By the 1930s it had become ‘systemized perjury’, thought Penderel Moon, one of the more thoughtful members of the ICS, with a procedure far too complex for litigants to follow in a language that they did not understand and with lawyers who were generally corrupt.36 It was also a system that, because it had got rid of the old Mughal practice of village elders, the panchayats, deciding on minor cases, meant the courts were flooded with petty personal quarrels. In 1942 in the Punjab alone, with a population of just 25 million people, 277,004 cases were brought to court. Those incredibly well-trained and motivated ICS men would consequently spend long hours hearing evidence on cases that were almost totally irrelevant to maintaining law and order and on which they were highly unlikely to be able to reach a satisfactory judgement.
It did, however, serve to show that the British system of government, however thinly spread and however unintelligible to the average Indian farmer, was fair, and even the most trenchant nationalist critics of the Raj would admit that the ICS was fairly incorruptible, something worthy of comment in India prior to 1947. Inder Malhotra, the well-known journalist and later editor of both the Statesman and The Times of India, and who was seventeen in 1947, summed it up when he said that there were ‘some odd bad hats amongst the Brits – but by and large they were seen as just and impartial’.37
Yet the real problem with the officers of the ICS, enthusiastic and dedicated as they were, was that the way they operated meant they only ever scratched the surface of India. Apart from the sterility of their time in court, much of an ICS officer’s working life was spent in touring his district. He would ride round the villages, holding council under banyan trees, assessing land for revenue purposes and settling disputes so long as he could understand what they were about. It was personally fulfilling work in many ways, and no doubt reminded them of life in the rural idylls of the classics, which had formed such a large part of their education. They saw themselves as the moral upholders of an oppressed peasantry, with a duty to protect them from moneylender and landlord, but, despite Gandhi’s warming exhortations, the peasantry remained largely irrelevant to India’s politics and anyway their very state was the result of British policy in the first place. These extraordinarily able men would have been more profitably employed in the cities, engaging with India’s rising middle classes and producing proper development plans rather than in assessing liability for a land tax that fell disproportionately on the already indebted rural poor.
It was this lack of development that is probably the most difficult legacy of the Raj to justify. Unpopular as it was when a much-respected ICS officer and Indian historian, W. H. Moreland, produced the figures, the average Indian income per head in 1932 was shown to be the same as it had been in 1605 under Akbar. When compared to the comparable growth in the quality of life in Great Britain, and allowing for relative increases in population, India had stood still. The English population had in fact increased eight times over the period while India’s had increased just under four times but per capita GDP in Great Britain had grown six times.38 Even as late as 1944 half the
population of India was under twenty years old, which is a damning comment on the lack of improvement in life expectancy under the Raj.39
A look at the government of India’s revenue and expenditure for 1934 explains why – 26 per cent of its revenue went to the military, 14 per cent to the railways, 10 per cent to the police and jails and 6 per cent to government and administrative expenses including 3 per cent to official pensions. By contrast 1 per cent was spent on public health, 1 per cent on agricultural development and only 6 per cent on education. In revenue terms, revenue from income tax was only 7 per cent, compared to 45 per cent in Great Britain, with India’s revenue coming largely from indirect taxes, which again fell most heavily on the poor. Customs duties produced 23 per cent, the salt tax 3 per cent and the hated land tax, whose collection preoccupied the ICS, produced only 15 per cent, about the same income the government earned from the railways. The continuous land tax reassessments conducted by the ICS touring officers had in fact raised it to roughly 25 per cent of disposable assets by the mid-1930s, with every holding above one acre or producing over 20 rupees liable to pay.40 It was onerous, unpopular and unfair.
There had of course been some development. The Indian government was justifiably proud of its canals, which had made a major difference to the productivity of the Punjab, and of the railways. Yet the railways were laid out primarily so that troops could be moved quickly, and were also something of a cash cow for their British backers. Each investor was guaranteed a 5 per cent coupon regardless of how much money the railways actually made, any deficit being made up from government revenue, which meant that unsurprisingly the railways made a loss until 1900, effectively being subsidised by the wretched payers of the land tax. However, the general population did benefit from them; by 1930 there were 41,500 miles of railway along which 620 million passengers and 85 million tons of freight travelled every year.41
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