by Jan Morris
‘Considering the long intercourse with India,’ wrote Arthur Burnell, who expanded the book after Yule’s death, ‘it is noteworthy that the additions which have thus accrued to the English language are, from the intellectual standpoint, of no intrinsic value. Nearly all the borrowed words refer to material facts … and do not represent new ideas.’ This was perhaps because so few Englishmen, under the influence of Macaulay and his school, had taken the native civilizations seriously: the word Hobson-Jobson itself, a flippant Anglo-Indianism for any sort of native festivity, was taken from the terrible wailing cry of the Shia Muslims—Ya Hussein, Ya Hassan!—when they grieve for the death of Ali’s sons at Karbala.
Many Anglo-Indian words—caste, cuspidor, mosquito—had been inherited by the British from their Portuguese predecessors in the East. When the planter bawled ‘Boy!’ sending an indignant shiver down the spine of the visiting liberal, who was generally not quite outraged enough, all the same, to forgo his chota-peg for his principles—when that hunting-cry of sahibs went up in the club, the thirsty imperialist was really only shouting, as the Portuguese had before him, ‘Bhoi!’—the name of a Hindu caste of palanquinand umbrella-bearers. Char, the British soldier’s name for tea, reached the army via the East India Company, but really originated in Japan, where the early British merchant venturers transcribed the Japanese word for tea as tcha. Rickshaw came via India from Japan, too, and was originally jin-ri-ki-sha—‘man-force-car’, the name the Japanese gave to a conveyance invented for them by an ingenious missionary, W. Goble, about 1870. The word gymkhana appears to have been coined by the British in Bombay, and was based upon the Hindustani gend-khana or ball-house—what the Indians called an English squash court. The word catamaran was simply the Tamil for ‘tied trees’, and the original Juggernaut was Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu, who was dragged in hideous image through the streets of Puri in Orissa, its devotees throwing themselves beneath its wheels to be crushed. British soldiers in India had their own cheerful use of Hindustani. A thief was a loose-wallah, a nail-wallah was a manicurist, the Good Conduct Medal (‘for 20 years of undetected crime’) was called the Rooty Gong, meaning the Bread-and-Butter Medal. Old India hands pride themselves on their ability to ‘sling the crab-bat’—swear in the vernacular.
An astonishing number of Indian words had slipped into the language without anybody much noticing, as the following self-conscious sentence shows: ‘Returning to the bungalow through the jungle, she threw her calico bonnet on to the teak table, put on her gingham apron and slipped into a pair of sandals. There was the tea-caddy to fill, the chutney to prepare for the curry, pepper and cheroots to order from the bazaar—she would give the boy a chit. The children were out in the dinghy, and their khaki dungarees were sure to be wet. She needed a shampoo, she still had to mend Tom’s pyjamas, and she never had finished those chintz hangings for the veranda. Ah well! she didn’t really give a dam, and putting a shawl around her shoulders, she poured herself a punch.’1
A little slang had come bouncing back to Britain from the Antipodes—‘up a gum tree’, for instance—and perhaps the oddest adaptation of all was cooee! which was originally the signal-cry of Australian aborigines, imitative perhaps of the dingo, perhaps of the wonga pigeon, but was by the nineties the habitual call of the Kensington Garden nannies, when they wished to recall recalcitrant charges from the Round Pond—‘keep within cooee, dear’, they used to say, as they settled for a gossip on the bench. Charles Thatcher, the Australian poet, once wrote a poem about a digger who had made his fortune in Australia and brought his wife to London, leaving her at ‘Hodge and Lowman’s splendid shop’ while he strolled down the street:
She laid out fourteen pounds or more
And the shopman saw her to the door.
Down Regent Street she cast her eye,
But his old blue shirt she couldn’t spy.
Says the shopman he’s gone, I do declare,
Will you step inside and take a chair?
Oh no! I’ll find him soon, says she,
And she puts up her hand and cries Cooee!
At this extraordinary cry
He ran up in the twinkling of an eye
And to the wondering crowd did say,
That slews you, and then they toddled away.
6
In 1882 there appeared in the lists of English cat breeds an elegant and patrician new-comer called the Abyssinian. Its genesis was mysterious. Cynics were of the opinion that it was not Abyssinian at all, but only a rarified British tabby, and some people preferred to call the breed the British Tick or the Bunny Cat. The truth seems to be, though, that this beautiful creature was first brought to Britain by soldiers returning from Lord Napier’s expedition to Ethiopia in 1867. The troops had passed near the ancient Ethiopian capital of Axum, where numbers of sacred cats were kept as acolytes to the cathedral of St Mary, and it is likely that some enterprising fancier whisked one into his kit-bag and shipped it, Amharically mewing, home.1
Exotic animals had traditionally figured in the trains of conquerors, and in the second half of the nineteenth century the zoos and private collections of Britain had been wonderfully enlivened by spoils of Empire. Within the confines of the Pax Britannica almost all zoological regions were represented. Every living kangaroo was born a British subject. So was every kiwi, every koala, every duck-billed platypus—and every Dodo, if any sad survivor still lurked in the forests of Mauritius. There were British tapirs and British okapis, and even the giant panda was almost within a British sphere of influence.2
The London Zoo was accordingly much the best in the world, and possessed a grander collection of weird living trophies than ever pranced in a triumph of the Romans. Lions, tigers, monkeys, snakes, elephants, rare bats and unimaginable birds were sent home to London by every expedition, spluttering and spitting in their crates, and whenever a royal personage visited some tropical possession he came home with a little menagerie of his own. When the Prince of Wales returned from a visit to India in 1876 the cruiser Raleigh accompanied the royal yacht with a cargo of two tigers (Moody and Sankey), a leopard (Jummoo), and large numbers of smaller animals and birds: as the royal squadron steamed up the Solent, to the cheers of crowds lining the shore, this collection of animals howled in response to the signal guns, and on each paddle- box of the royal yacht itself there was to be seen standing an Indian elephant.
7
A shifting population of colonials moved through London. The white colonials were unobtrusive. The dialects of England were so varied then, and the impress of colonial origin was generally so recent, that an Australian, a Canadian or a South African could often merge into English life unremarked. Numbers of Australians and New Zealanders still came to England to be educated: many Englishmen who had spent half a lifetime in the colonies came home in the end to die. It was difficult still to know just where a colonial began and an Englishman ended. All carried the same passport, and while many British people thought of the self-governing colonies as extensions of the Mother Land, many colonials thought of themselves simply as Britons overseas.
People from the coloured empire were rarer and mostly grander. The coloured servant, once so common in England, was now almost unknown, and most of the coloured people to be seen about were rich or powerful, courted by Authority for political reasons or sent to be moulded in the manners of the ruling race. For years there had been a small Indian community in London, with an active and often dissident intelligentsia: from 1892 to 1895 there had even been an Indian member of Parliament—Dadabhai Naoroji, the Parsee member for Central Finsbury, formerly Prime Minister of Baroda. Ranjitsinjhi Vibhaji, claimant to the throne of Nawanagar, was one of the most popular and successful cricketers in England, playing for Sussex, and for thousands of Englishmen his quick and stylish batting offered a first comprehensible image of the dream that was India. The Hindu ban on sea travel still limited the numbers of young Indians coming to English schools and universities, but since 1890 fourteen undergra
duates with Indian or African names had been admitted to Oxford—two were princes, one was a sheikh, and six were at Balliol, adding substance to the legend that all black men preferred that college. When Queen Victoria drove home through Windsor after her Jubilee junketings, waiting in attendance at a ceremonial arch were four Etonians—the sons of the Maharajah of Kutch Bihar, the Prince of Gondal and the Minister of Hyderabad, all resplendent in Indian dress.1
8
If the physical imprint of Empire was slight, in 1897 its gusto was inescapable. A vigorous kind of brain-washing was in full swing, conducted by the popular Press, the Government and several active pressure groups. Imperial monuments might be hard to find, but imperial sentiments were deafening. All the energies of the nation seemed at that moment to be directed towards imperial ends; almost no subject of public interest was discussed outside an imperial context; the Empire was an infatuation.
It must have been almost impossible for the untravelled Englishman to resist this ceaseless publicity, and it is easy to see why men like Elgar, in the tractable society of the English provinces, uncritically absorbed it. The vast new readership of the Daily Mail was intoxicated by stuff like this piece from Steevens (himself then 28 years old): ‘We send a boy out here and a boy there, and the boy takes hold of the savages of the part he comes to, and teaches them to march and shoot as he tells them, to obey him and believe him and die for him and the Queen … and each one of us—you and I, and that man in his shirt-sleeves at the corner—is a working part of this world-shaping force.’ Over and over again the bulk and wealth of the Empire was emphasized, from soap-box and from pulpit, day after day in the newspapers and edition after edition in the popular imperialist books. The weekly full-page feature of the Illustrated London News was repeatedly devoted to imperial topics: The Punitive Expedition to Benin, The Massacre in the Niger Protectorate, The Indian Famine, The Plague in Bombay, Lord Roberts on his Arab Charger, Prospecting for Gold in British Columbia, Dervish Fugitives Fleeing Down the Nile, On the Way to the Klondike, Fighting in a Nullah on the Tseri-Kandao Pass.
Since 1868 the Royal Colonial Institute1 had been assiduously grinding imperial axes. So were the Royal Geographical Society, the Imperial Federation League, the United Empire Trade League. In the schools the glory of Empire shone through every curriculum, interspersed with All Things Bright and Beautiful: it was the duty of every father and school manager, Sir Howard Vincent2 once said with a genuinely imperial turn of phrase, to ‘inculcate the study of Empire on all within their spheres of influence’. In the very month of the Jubilee a schoolboy ran away from Haileybury, the former college of the East India Company, and committed suicide, apparently because the other boys were persecuting him for his opinions about Crete. He disapproved of British intervention in the affairs of the island, where imperial troops were committed to keep the Turks out, and the newspapers dwelt at length upon a tragedy caused by such quixotic views. ‘That anyone with our present knowledge of Turks and Cretans should be enthusiastic about them’, commented the Illustrated London News, ‘is amazing … It is probable that his mind was unhinged.’
9
The New Imperialism was potent politics. The Conservative-Unionist Government certainly owed its confidence to its staunch imperial views, even Salisbury paying lip-service to the cause, and the ringmaster of the Jubilee was Joe Chamberlain, ‘Minister for Empire’.
Fifteen years before Seeley had observed with satisfaction that the political influence on Britain of India was nil. In those days the Empire was not an electoral issue, and the wise politician did not bother his head with it. Seeley was delighted that this was so. He had in mind the situation which might have arisen if Warren Hastings had not been impeached for alleged corruption in India in 17881—an unhealthy domination of Parliament by wealthy vested interests of the Empire. In 1782 Pitt had said, during a debate on Parliamentary reform, ‘We now see foreign princes not giving votes but purchasing seats in this House, and sending their agents to sit with us as representatives of the nation. No man can doubt what I allude to. We have sitting among us the members of the Rajah of Tangore and the Nawab of Arcot, the representatives of petty Eastern despots.’
The worst, though, had never happened, and by 1883, when Seeley wrote, it was unthinkable. On very few occasions in the nineteenth century had imperial affairs vitally affected domestic politics. The Afghan War of 1878 contributed to Disraeli’s fall, the failure to relieve Gordon, coupled with the Irish issue, in the end defeated Gladstone. Ireland was a running sore, Egypt was once described by Milner as ‘the football of English polities’—during the three years after Tel-el-Kebir there were ninety-eight Blue books about the country. But it was only now, in the late nineties, that imperial affairs much mattered at the hustings. Now even Liberals found it necessary to beat the drum, and poor Gladstone, who once told a confused audience that the Liberal Party was opposed to imperialism but devoted to Empire, watched sadly from his last retirement in Hawarden as member after member of his shattered party fell into the moral error he himself had dubbed Jingoism.
Now, in hindsight, imperialists began to claim that Britain owed all her success to the existence of her Empire. ‘Our great Empire,’ Lord Rosebery once declared with satisfaction, ‘has pulled us out of the European system. Our foreign policy has become a colonial policy.’ The spirit of the nation, it was said, depended upon the responsibilities of Empire: Britain’s triumphant position in the world was a response to the imperial challenge. Having our heroes in India, reasoned Sir Charles Crosthwaite, elevated every Briton, and indeed without the Anglo-Indian champions of the Victorian era there would not have been many. The grandest military funeral since Wellington’s had been given to Lord Napier, who never fought a European enemy, and the other exemplars Crosthwaite offered were Henry and John Lawrence, John Nicholson, John Jacob, Herbert Edwardes, Donald Stewart and ‘Bobs’—few of them likely to remain for long in the upper ranks of the British pantheon.
With Chamberlain at the Colonial Office, and this temper of thought politically fashionable, the official attitude to Empire was distinctly braced. A series of new institutions was planned or founded, intended to apply the latest British technology and scholarship to the colonial possessions—the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, the London School of Oriental Languages, the Imperial College of Science. Oriental scholarship in England, long overshadowed by German work, began to revive. Imperial development was considered systematically, as a whole. New life was breathed into the old idea, and all its buds, shy or gaudy, were bursting into flower.
10
But cause and effect were often muddled: some of the buds were unseasonable, and some went instantly to seed. Nobody had yet made any thorough study of the advantages of Empire, and the general hullabaloo of 1897 was in some ways deceptive. In particular the assumption that the Empire made Britain rich, that the more imperially she behaved the wealthier she would be, was a misconception. It was partly an honest delusion, based upon insufficient evidence, and partly a kind of fraud, devised by men who stood to gain from aggressive national policies.
The colonial trade, which looked so heart-warming portrayed in thick black arrows on diagrammatical maps, was not so important as it seemed. It was arguable that the original flow of imports from India, under the East India Company, had contributed some of the capital for the Industrial Revolution a century before. It was obviously true that individual firms and families, like Hawkins the rubber man, had been enriched by imperial enterprise. But the staggering wealth which was being celebrated in 1897 had been accumulated above all by Free Trade—that economic philosophy, amounting almost to a dogma, for which the British had abandoned their old system of tariffs and trade restrictions half a century before.
For the Empire had once been virtually a British mercantile monopoly. Preferential tariffs protected the colonial trade, foreign ships were banned from colonial ports, colonies might only export their products to Britain, and in British bottoms. This sy
stem had been progressively destroyed during the first half of the century, as Free Trade ideas gathered strength. The repeal of the Corn Laws had preceded by three years the repeal of the Navigation Acts—the one repeal admitting foreign corn into Britain without duty, the other ending the British monopoly of direct shipping routes within the Empire. Free Trade had triumphed, and the old economic meaning of Empire was lost.
To the really dedicated free trader any restriction on commerce with any nation was almost irreligious. Imperial favouritism was incompatible with the creed at its most fervent, and the narrower cause of imperialism seemed almost petty beside the transcendent virtue of the Open Door. Besides, it worked. The British adopted the doctrine more whole-heartedly than anyone, and stuck to it longer, and it could be demonstrated by statistics that Free Trade rather than imperial expansion had made them rich. The Empire was in no way an economic unity, and it was far from self-sufficient. In 1896 Britain had imported 64 million hundredweight of wheat—30.7 million from the United States, 17.2 million from Russia, and only 3.6 million from Canada. Only in potatoes, cheese, apples and fresh mutton was the Empire Britain’s chief food supplier: other foodstuffs came overwhelmingly from foreign countries, the Empire generally providing less than 10 per cent. The Empire’s total foreign trade in 1896 was worth £745 million: the total inter-imperial trade was worth £183 million. What was more, even in that high summer of imperialism, while trade with foreign countries was increasing still, trade with the Empire was almost static. The explosion of the British Empire in the preceding twenty years had little effect on Britain’s prosperity. Trade scarcely flourished in the enormous new African territories: in 1897 the whole of tropical Africa took only 1.2 per cent of British exports. Each year the colonies bought a larger proportion of goods in foreign countries, and a smaller from Britain. The horse-drawn trams of Bombay were made in New York, and ships of all nations profited from the imperial trade, as Kipling recognized in his ballad of a Calcutta boardinghouse: