Pax Britannica

by Jan Morris

  India was certainly a valuable piece of property, and mostly self-sustaining, for the cost of governing and defending it was borne out of Indian taxes, and even the Indian Army, constantly though it served in imperial causes elsewhere, cost the British scarcely a penny. The British had sunk a lot of money in India—more than £270 million, or a fifth of their entire overseas investment—and 19 per cent of their exports went there. In the more liberal years of the century the British had often looked askance at the authoritarian rule exerted on their behalf in India. ‘Public opinion does not know what to make of it,’ Seeley had written, ‘but looks with blank indignation and despair upon a Government which seems utterly un-English, which is bureaucratic and in the hands of a ruling race, which rests mainly on military force, which raises its revenues, not in the European fashion, but by monopolies of salt and opium and by taking the place of a universal landlord, and in a hundred other ways departs from the traditions of England.’ But political values were coarser now, India did not much disturb the public conscience at home, and the Viceroy was seldom plagued by radical questions in the House of Commons, or worse still radical parliamentarians on his doorstep. He knew that public opinion now overwhelmingly supported absolute British rule in India: there were, after all, parts of Calcutta worth £40,000 an acre, and one did not play fast and loose with such stakes.

  Protecting the Indian stakes, indeed, was one of the prime purposes of British foreign policy. British Governments were no longer afraid that their representatives in India would break away from Whitehall’s control altogether, to set up some astonishing republic of their own. They were, though, always afraid that another Power might grab the country, or cut it off from London. Lord Rosebery once declared that British foreign policy was essentially an Indian policy, ‘mainly guided by considerations of what was best for our Indian Empire’. Certainly the creation of the new Empire in Africa was largely impelled by anxiety over the routes to India. The military planners in Simla were perpetually obsessed with the safety of this immense dominion, so thinly ruled and guarded, and in particular with the menace they supposed to come from the Russians along their northern frontiers.

  Much of Victorian imperial history had depended upon the fear of Russian intentions—it was Russia, you will remember, that the music-hall audiences had in mind when they first sang the Jingo song. The most vulnerable frontier point of all lay in the north-west corner of India, in the tangled country around Afghanistan—Alexander’s gateway to India. It was a double anxiety. Afghanistan itself was a very unreliable neighbour, and the frontier area was inhabited by lawless Muslim tribes owing no very definite allegiance to anybody, and making it exceedingly difficult to establish a firm line of defence. This was the country of the Great Game. Behind it, or so the British supposed, the Russians were moving inexorably east and south, absorbing one after the other the Khans of Central Asia, and preparing the encirclement of India. They were already building a railway across Siberia to the Far East, and rumour had them railway-building in Turkestan, too, and planning an annexation of Tibet—whose southern frontier, theoretically drawn along the summits of the Himalaya, ran actually within sight of Simla. Twice Britain and Russia had almost come to blows—in 1885 the Stationery Office had gone so far as to print documents declaring a state of war. Twice the British had launched campaigns against the Afghans to secure the gap. Repeated scares and crises kept the north-west always in their minds, and rumours of Russian mayhem among the tribes percolated constantly through Simla.

  The search for a ‘scientific frontier’ was endless. In the east the British had now taken all Burma, and would perhaps have moved into Siam, too, if it were not for the French in Indo-China. In the west they had wavered between standing firm on the line of the Indus, well within India proper, or pursuing a ‘forward policy’ and posting their troops as close to the Russians as possible. Sometimes they had thought the actual possession of Afghanistan necessary. Sometimes they had settled for a policy that would merely keep the Russians out of Kabul, too. They alternately occupied and withdrew from several remote outposts in the Hindu Kush: and the legend of British arms in India, fostered so brilliantly by Kipling, was born out of the rocks and wadis of the north-west, where the savage tribesmen lay in ambush behind the next rock, the Afghans brooded behind the tribes, and behind all stood the Russians.

  Since 1893 the Indo-Afghan frontier had been demarcated, and the British were building up Afghanistan as a buffer State, with gifts of arms and money. At the same time they were trying for the first time to subdue the tribes who lived in semi-independence on the Indian side of the line. Roads were built, boundary posts set up, forts established throughout the territories of the Afridis, the Mahsuds, the Waziris, the people of Swat, Gilgit and Chitral. Once content with controlling the plains at the foot of the mountains, the British now intended to hold the heads of all the passes, and since 1895 Chritral, far to the north in the Hindu Kush, had been permanently garrisoned.

  All this offered many excitements to the British—Anglo-Indians were often accused of fostering Russophobia at home, in order to keep the Great Game alive. The tribespeople, though, deeply resented the new interference. A holy man known to the British as the Mad Fakir, and described by Winston Churchill as ‘a priest of great age and of peculiar holiness’, travelled around inciting them to rebellion. He was helped by the news just reaching those distant provinces of Muslim triumphs elsewhere in the world: the Sultan of Turkey had proclaimed himself Caliph, the Turks had defeated the Christian Greeks in war, the British themselves were having a difficult time against the Mahdi. There were wild stories of imperial reverses—the Suez Canal was said to have been seized by the Turks and leased to Russia—and the Mullah claimed that the Faithful could never be hurt by British bullets, and used to display a mild bruise on his own leg which he said was the only result of a direct hit from a 12 pound shell. Serious trouble was brewing on the frontier. British reinforcements were already on their way, punitive expeditions were common, dark rumours of Russian conspiracy or intervention flowed freely down to Simla.

  There was a man living in the town called A. N. Jacob, a curiosity dealer, a mesmerist and a conjurer. He had been rich in his time, but had been ruined by an action he brought against the Nizam of Hyderabad, who had refused to pay for a diamond brooch Jacob had sold him. As a result he was boycotted in all the Indian States, the source of his wealth, and was reduced to a modest business with the Anglo-Indians, living in a house partly furnished with pieces from the Brighton Pavilion (the Nizam had bought them from the British Government).1 Jacob was a mysterious man, immortalized by Kipling as Lurgan Sahib in Kim, with his eyes whose pupils eerily closed and dilated, his genius for disguise, his strangely foreign English, his unexplained contacts with princely house and underworld, his curio shop cluttered with devil-masks, Buddhas, prayer-wheels, samovars, Persian water-jugs and spears. The simpler Indians naturally assumed this queer figure to be a magician, but the British, no less baffled, placed him in a category just as self-evident: Russian spy.2

  9

  It was a bad year in India, and the Jubilee celebrations in Simla were sadly muted. In Calcutta, the Viceroy’s other home, there had been a terrible earthquake, causing many deaths, and so weakening the structures of the city that they dared not fire a Jubilee salute, nor even thunder out a hymn on the Cathedral organ. In Bombay there was plague. In Orissa there was famine. The frontier was aflame with tribal violence. India had just abandoned the silver standard, and was in economic difficulty. In Bengal and in Bombay there was political trouble, remote enough from the Abode of the Little Tin Gods, but serious enough to disturb the more far-sighted of the seers. There was not much air of festivity in Simla that June. Only a few parades, church services and processions of notables marked the occasion of Jubilee, and perhaps a few of the memsahibs quoted to each other, with indulgent giggles, Targo Mindien’s Diamond Jubilee Rhyme:

  Arise! fair Venus, my dream in Beauty; refulgence! forth


  from Father Time’s liquid silver sea,

  In all thy dazzling splendour, with thy magic wand from

  Love, it is the Empress-Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

  Lord Elgin, the Viceroy, was frankly bored. He had never much wanted to be Viceroy, and in this he was not alone, for oddly enough eager Viceroys were hard to find. The significance of the office was almost beyond ambition. The Viceroy of India had few peers in Asia. The Tsar of Russia, the Emperor of China were scarcely his superiors, the Shah of Persia and the King of Siam trod carefully in his presence, the Amir of Afghanistan and the King of Nepal were frankly at his mercy, the Dalai Lama would be well advised to respect his wishes and the King of Burma was actually his prisoner.1 He occupied the throne of Akhbar and Aurangzebe, he stood in the conquering line of Alexander, and he was officially said to reign, like a king in his own right. Yet it was a kind of exile for an Englishman. The most able men generally preferred to pursue greatness at home, living in gentler palaces in greener fields, and few Viceroys had been of the very first rank, as statesmen or even as administrators.

  For all that pomp, all that subservient respect, the State balls and the bodyguards and the obsequies of princes—it was all a kind of charade. The Viceroy was only a temporary Civil Servant, on a five-year term, and would presently go home again. The rules of British India were inescapable, and exact. When a Viceroy sailed out to assume his dignities he was entitled to a grant of £3,500, to cover his travel expenses and equipment. When he returned to England at the end of his service he was allowed a ship of the Indian Marine as far as Suez, the limit of his power: but once there, he and his Vicereine were all on their own, could claim no more divine appurtenances, and must seek the help of Thomas Cook’s for their onward travel, paying their own fares.

  1 When Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944) went to India in 1913 to build the new imperial capital at Delhi, he inspected Simla first and was appalled. ‘If one was told the monkeys had built it all one could only say, “What wonderful monkeys—they must be shot in case they do it again….”’

  1 Prinsep (1838–1904) was the son of a well-known Indian administrator, and a nephew of James Prinsep of Prinsep’s Ghat. Born in Calcutta and destined for the I.C.S. himself, he took up art instead, returning to India only to paint, on Government commission, a picture of the great Durbar of 1877, when Victoria was proclaimed Queen-Empress.

  1 Simla, now the capital of a hill province called Himachal Pradesh, has changed surprisingly little, though it has not been the summer capital of India since the Second World War. Its size is much the same, and there are still no wheeled vehicles, rickshaws excepted, in its central streets. The Viceregal Lodge is now the Indian Institute for Advanced Studies. The great Government buildings are military headquarters of one kind or another, or provincial offices. The Tibetans in the streets have been augmented by hundreds of refugees from over the mountains, and most of the tea-shops, tailors, gunsmiths and Crown jewellers have vanished with the Raj. The greatest change, though, has been the arrival of the narrow-gauge railway, which reached Simla in 1903: this is still served, in 1968, by a truly Viceregal motor-carriage, painted a spotless white, and looking like an elegant cross between a snow-plough and a beautifully maintained Vintage Rolls—shiny leather seats, spade-handles on its doors, and on the front an enormous brass starting-handle. Only the imperial crest is missing.

  1 Jaipur is now the capital of the Indian province called Rajasthan, though its Maharajah is still rich and powerful. There are few signs that it ever owed allegiance to the British, beyond the Albert Hall and the photographs of polo-playing princes in the best hotel (itself one of the Maharajah’s properties). Perhaps, in a place of such fiery character, the suzerainty of the Raj was more flimsy than it seemed in 1897. When Bishop Heber the hymn-writer visited the State earlier in the century, he was given a present by the Maharanee consisting of two horses and an elephant. The elephant was so vicious that nobody could go near it, and of the horses one was ‘as lame as a cat’ and the other at least thirty years old.

  1 Some of them may now be seen in the Victoria Memorial Museum at Calcutta.

  2 The wide experience of the Indian security services in dealing with the dangers of Russian subversion was for long reflected in the counter-espionage organization at home, whose agencies employed many former Indian police officers at least until the Second World War.

  1 He had been since 1885, when King Thebaw, his two queens and his mother-in-law were taken prisoner at the end of the third Anglo-Burmese war, and sent to live at Ratnagiri, an old Portuguese fort on the west coast of India. The more forceful of his wives, a bloodthirsty woman called the Supayalat, was known to the British soldiery as Soup-Plate.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Consolations

  Oh, I’ve seen a lot of girls, my boys, and drunk a lot of beer,

  And I’ve met with some of both, my boys, as left me mighty queer,

  But for beer to knock you sideways and girls to make you sigh,

  You must camp at Lazy Harry’s on the road to Gundagai.

  We camped at Lazy Harry’s on the road to Gundagai,

  The road to Gundagai! Five miles from Gundagai!

  Yes, we camped at Lazy Harry’s on the road to Gundagai.

  Australian Bush Song

  15

  THE New Imperialism was born out of a medley of moods and circumstances, not all of them happy, some of them distasteful. It emerged a boisterous credo, full of swank, colour and sweep. On the face of it the British seemed to be having a marvellous time, bathing in the glory of it all, swathed in bunting and lit up with fireworks. The late Victorians were not half so strait-laced as their reputation was presently to imply. Their young men were full of dash and energy; they revelled in the stimulations of the outdoor life; the pleasures of Empire lay not only in national pride, duty performed and dividends paid, but also in the particular consolations a people could devise for itself, when placed in a position of absolute command in an alien land and climate.

  2

  Sport was the first. The British took their games with them wherever they went. Sport was their chief spiritual export, and was to prove among their more resilient memorials. They took cricket to Samoa and the Ionian Islands, and both the Samoans and the Ionians took it up with enthusiasm. They went climbing in the Canadian Rockies, and by 1897 the Canadians had their own Alpine Club. They introduced football to the aborigines of Australia, and wherever in the world the ground was flat enough they seem to have built a tennis court. The highest golf course in the world was made by the British at Gulmarg, in the Himalaya, 8,700 feet high: the highest cricket pitch was near by, at Chail. In Salisbury, Rhodesia, the pioneers were already playing cricket matches between the Public Schools Boys and the rest, and a chief qualification for a job on the administration was said to be a good batting average. The first American golf course was laid at New York in 1888, but the British had been playing the game at Calcutta since 1829. Boxing was compulsory in the British Army, ‘Open order, march!’ the order ran. ‘Front rank, about turn! Box!’

  Above all the British took with them everywhere their taste for equestrian sports, inherited as it was among their friends the Indian princes from the warlike tendencies of their forebears. In those days the horse and the gentry still went together, racing and hunting were the passions of the English upper classes, and horsiness was more than a social phenomenon; it was an historical legacy, too. The thoroughbred horse went with them always, and there was scarcely a town in the Empire which did not have its race-course—a scrubby little ring of beaten-out turf on the veldt, or splendid arenas like Calcutta’s or the Curragh in Ireland, with their glittering grandstands, brilliant white rails, club-houses and sprinkled lawns. They used to have race dances at Calcutta, with public breakfasts, and curious alternations of sweepstake and country dance, and at Madras the sportsmen of the East India Company had built themselves a delightful set of assembly rooms beside the track, a tall big-wind
owed building with fine wide terraces and flagstaffs, and emanations of punch and nosegay. As early as 1891 Lord Randolph Churchill was complaining that his horse had been nobbled at a race meeting at Salisbury, Rhodesia, a charge that rings all too true: and when Queen Victoria sent four envoys from the Royal Horse Guards to visit Lobengula in his kraal, almost the first thing they did was to arrange a race meeting, including the Zambesi Handicap and the Bulawayo Plate.

  The race-course at Simla was on the high plateau of Annandale, surrounded by tall pines and deodars, and deliriously secluded. The race-course at Colombo was in the middle of the city, like a bullring in Spain.1 The race-course at Hong Kong was in Happy Valley, separated from the Chinese cemetery only by a fence of bamboos. The Poona race-course was inside the General Parade Ground. The Badulla race-course ran all the way round a little lake. An artillery range straddled the Lucknow race-course. The Darjeeling race-course was said to be the smallest in the world, and the Calcutta race-course was claimed to be the largest. In many parts of the Empire the climax of the social season was a big race meeting. From every part of Australia the graziers made their way to Melbourne in October, to ensconce themselves and their families in the comfortable old-school hostelries of the city, and show themselves off at the Melbourne Cup: often the whole year was remembered by what happened that day, and Australians would refer to the past as ‘the year Newhaven won the Cup’, or ‘the year Wait-a-Bit lost by a head’.1 The great day of the Calcutta year was the day of the Viceroy’s Cup race, for a cup given annually by the reigning Viceroy. ‘The grandstand is filled’, wrote G. W. Forrest in the nineties, ‘with noble dames from England, from America and all parts of the world, who have come with their spouses to visit the British Empire. In the paddock is a noble duke, a few lords, one or two millionaires from America, and some serious politicians, who have visited this land to study the Opium Question, and feel ashamed of being seen at a race-course. The air resounds with the cries of the bookmaker, and an eager crowd surges around the totalizer—for on the Viceroy’s Cup day even the most cautious bank manager feels bound to have one bet.’ After the church and perhaps the law court, the race-course was the principal landmark of a British imperial city—as prominent as the amphitheatre of Rome, and with much the same meaning.