Conservatives found much in India to admire and cherish. The caste system appeared a natural and ordered hierarchy and a valuable social cement. Metcalfe was particularly struck by the resilience of the Indian village, which had so miraculously survived the catastrophes of drought and civil war. He called these communities ‘village republics’ and wanted them to become the bedrock of the British Raj. They had proved their usefulness by standing the test of time, and for this reason deserved every encouragement. India’s aristocracy also needed to be preserved and persuaded to become active partners with the Company. Elphinstone regretted the decline of the Bengali zamindars after the government had stripped them of their judicial powers and given them to callow English-men who knew nothing of local languages or culture.10 In 1821, he was willing to perpetuate the fiscal privileges and legal powers to the Kathiawar nobility in return for their future co-operation with the administration. Another conservative, Alexander Walker, predicted that a dispossessed and dishonoured Indian nobility was bound to chafe against what he called the ‘British Yoke’.11
Walker held the classic conservative view that gradual assimilation was far preferable to the imposition of change by decree. He believed history supported him:
It is now upwards of 2,000 years since Alexander proposed to civilise the wild tribes he subdued, by building cities among them and reclaiming them from their savage customs by inducing them to relish the comforts of Social Intercourse. The same plan was followed by the Romans in Gaul and Britain.12
Assimilation required a degree of tolerance which many officials, including Walker, found all but impossible. He was rightly repelled by the Hindu custom of killing new-born baby girls and, in 1807, started a one-man campaign against it in Gujarat. Using moral persuasion, the force of his own personality and promises wrung from local chiefs, he made some headway. Success came slowly, although when he rode through the region in 1809 he was gratified to be greeted by mothers who stood by his stirrup and presented their infant daughters to him.13 Montstuart Elphinstone kept up the pressure, but found that in many areas religious prejudices remained strong. In 1828 he regretted the persistence of this abhorrent custom, but like Walker shrank from direct ‘intrusion’ into what he described as the ‘private lives of the superior castes’. In time, the spread of ‘tranquillity and good order’ would, he believed, make the people amenable to ‘reason and morality’.14
At the heart of the conservative view on how India should be governed was the acknowledgement that its religions and culture were sacrosanct. In its extreme form, this opinion was expressed by Wellington during the Lords debate on the 1833 India Bill. Calling for the rejection of the clause which banned slavery throughout the sub-continent, the Duke argued that it was the supreme duty of the British administration to ‘uphold the ancient laws, customs and religion of the country’. All sanctioned slavery and he knew from experience that slaves were decently treated by their owners. ‘Violent innovations’ such as the abolition of slavery would inflame Indians and possibly provoke an uprising. None occurred, but Wellington was right when he predicted that the abandonment of a live-and-let-live policy towards certain Hindu rites was bound to provoke resentment and possibly rebellion.
III
Policies based upon patience and a faith in the gradual mutation of Indian society and habits of mind were less easy to apply after 1832. A profound political upheaval in Britain had brought to power men of liberal views. They were reformers who believed that the tests of reason and usefulness should be applied to all institutions and that nothing could be justified solely on the grounds of antiquity and tradition. There was no fixed liberal ideology; rather its exponents blended their own doctrines from contemporary theories of individualism, Evangelical Christianity, Free-Trade and Laissez-Faire economic theories and that Utilitarian philosophy which pronounced good whatever promoted the happiness of the majority. Liberals took a systematic and rational approach to politics: first investigate and then legislate on the basis of thorough knowledge.
India was already undergoing a close examination. It had begun in the 1780s when the Company initiated the first of many surveys to discover and record the races and castes in its possession: their languages, religions, history and culture. Knowledge equalled power since the more the government knew about its subjects, the better it could exercise authority over them. For instance, in 1855 a district magistrate with an intimate understanding of purification rituals was able to detect vital inconsistencies in the testimony of several Hindus accused of murdering a woman and throwing her corpse in the Ganges.15 Widespread misgivings about the honesty of munshis, babus (clerks) and courtroom advisers on Hindu and Muslim law made it imperative that British officials mastered Sanskrit, the language of the law and literature, and Persian, the language of diplomacy.
There was also a need to uncover the sources of India’s wealth, its potential for development as well as its natural features. In 1784, a group of ‘curious and learned men’ gathered in Calcutta to found the Asiatick Society of Bengal. In imitation of the Royal Society, its members collected, exchanged and published their research on Indian tongues, history, science, mathematics, zoology and meteorology. Their work supplemented that of government officers, like Major Colin Mackenzie, who traversed Mysore in 1800 with instructions to catalogue its human and natural resources. Geography became the servant of altruistic paternalism, for he was told that what he discovered would assist ‘the amelioration of the state of the Native Subjects’ and deliver ‘the means of conciliating their minds, of exciting habits of industry, and cultivate the Arts of Peace under the milder influence of a fixed rule’.16
The expanding encyclopaedia of India provided the raw material for liberal theorists. The most influential was James Mill, a philosopher and political economist, who became an examiner of official correspondence in the Company’s London office in 1819. A year before, he had produced a lengthy, plodding and unimaginative history of British India, in which nearly everything Indian from religion to farming methods was either condemned or given the thinnest praise. Today, Mill’s judgements on India appear presumptuous, for they rested upon an assumption that the Britain of his time represented a perfect model of a civilisation on course for perfection and infinitely superior to that of India. Indians had failed to move up what Mill called ‘the scale of civilisation’ because their minds were shackled by superstition and an exaggerated veneration for the past. Moreover, in one characteristically condescending passage, he observes that while ‘our ancestors, however, though rough, were sincere, but, under the glosing exterior of the Hindu, lies a general disposition to deceit and perfidy’. The Muslim was another moral delinquent, possessing, ‘The same insincerity and perfidy; the same indifference to the feeling of others, the same prostitution and venality.’17
Nothing short of a complete educational and moral reformation could rescue India from continued degradation was Mill’s conclusion. Macaulay agreed both with this analysis and the cure. Like his mentor, Macaulay was intellectually conceited to the point of arrogance, once observing that the entire literature of the Middle East and India were not worth ‘a single shelf in a good European library’. But the Indian mind was not beyond redemption, as he explained to the Commons during the debate on the India Bill in the summer of 1833. India, he predicted, would be transformed into ‘the imperishable empire of our art and morals, our literature and laws’. Its dismal present would be replaced by the glowing future:
I see bloody and degrading superstitions gradually losing their power. I see the morality, the philosophy, the taste of Europe beginning to produce a salutary effect on the hearts and understanding of our subjects. I see the public mind of India, that public mind which we found debased and contracted by the worst forms of political and religious tyranny, expanding itself to just and noble views of the ends of government and of the social duties of man.
In essence, this was the liberal view of how India could be reborn, or, to be more exact, how Indians
might be moulded into liberal Englishmen. The agent for this metamorphosis was the Company, which Parliament deprived of the last vestiges of its trading monopoly, making generous allowance for stockholders and subscribers to its loans. Henceforward, the East India Company was to devote itself solely to the government and improvement of its subjects along the lines suggested by Macaulay.
An autocratic state like the Company’s was superficially well suited to undertake what was, in effect, a revolution from above. No one imagined that the process would be speedy or that reform could be achieved by a sheaf of edicts. In 1832, James Mill, who had now learned something of the realities of Indian administration behind his desk in Leadenhall Street, warned a Commons committee of the risks involved in pressing ahead with reform too quickly. High-caste Brahmins found the British concept of equality before the law distasteful and so its introduction would have to be gradual and piecemeal.18 Nonetheless, he and Macaulay had provided the moral justification for the Company to interfere with, even forbid ancient customs and rites.
The political mandate had been given by the 1833 India Bill, and there were plenty of keen, bien pensant young officials on hand to fulfil it. One of them, Charles Trevelyan, was approvingly described by his future brother-in-law, Macaulay, after their first meeting in 1834:
He has no small talk. His mind is full of schemes of moral and political improvement, and his zeal boils over in his talk. His topics, even in courtship, are steam navigation, the education of the natives, and the equalisation of the sugar duties, the substitution of the Roman for the Arabic alphabet in the Oriental languages.19
India was about to be engulfed in a tide of progress and swept forward. But what was its eventual destination? Macaulay imagined that, at some distant date, its emancipated people would announce themselves as qualified for self-government and claim Britain’s birthright of individual freedom and democracy for themselves. The prospect pleased him, as it did the conservative Alexander Walker, who also believed that when Indians had absorbed the morality and sense of responsibility of their rulers, they would be qualified to rule themselves ‘with fidelity’.20
IV
For all their enthusiasm and faith in scientific methodology, men of Trevelyan’s stamp were bound to have limited success. Their zeal was not shared by all their colleagues, many of whom inclined towards cautious pragmatism. Indians understood despotism and welcomed it, if it was sensitive and worked in their best interests. This was why Sir Henry Lawrence sent his magistrates across the Punjab, holding impromptu, open-air courts in the villages and delivering rough and ready judgements which were firm and seen to be fair. For these men, the elaborate codes contrived by men like Macaulay were of little value.
And yet, even if everyone concerned with the administration of India was inspired by uniform dreams of reform and renewal, they would have found it well-nigh impossible to surmount the hurdles which stood in their way.
To start with, there were two British Indias. There were the annexed areas, such as Bengal, which were directly under Company rule and where the laws were made by governor-generals and their councils under the supervision of Parliament. This strictly British India was in many ways suited to the social and political experiments planned by the reformers, for the government enjoyed absolute power and could overrule objections from those who failed to recognise what was in their best interests. In other words, conditions were ideal for a benevolent despotism. But, as Mill appreciated and regretted, there were also large swathes of India ruled by hereditary native princes, who were technically ‘allies’ of the Company and bound to it by what were called ‘subsidiary’ treaties. In 1830 the largest were Travancore, Hyderabad, Baroda, Awadh, Gwalior, Indore and the Rajput states of present-day Rajasthan. The population of all the princely states was estimated at about 181 million in 1857, while that of British India was just over 123 million.
In theory, Britain as the paramount power could exert pressure over the princes through official residents, even to the point of deposing a recidivist raja. This was what happened to Bharmalji, the Rao of Kachchh, who was dethroned in 1819 for persistently making war on his neighbours. The laws of inheritance were upheld and he was replaced by his infant son, who would presumably learn how to govern in a manner acceptable to the Company.21 This procedure was a final resort, undertaken reluctantly and rarely. Alexander Walker had warned in 1810 that the princes would not be bridled by ‘intolerable’ restraints on their power and could easily be turned into active enemies the Raj could do without.22 Provoking the princes was a foolhardy enterprise when, at least before the final defeat of Sikhs, they were needed as allies. During the first Sikh campaign, the Company was specially indebted to the Maharaja of Patiala, whose lands were adjacent to the Punjab. His friendship and refusal to get drawn into any anti-government plots was rewarded with a grant of land worth £4,000.23 Religious and political figureheads for millions of Indians, the princes were a power to be reckoned with, as Bengali Hindus reminded the government in 1850, when they protested against changes in the law which were ‘odious’ to their beliefs.24
This point was understood by Lord Auckland who, in 1836, shrank from over-zealous meddling in Awadh, where the day-to-day administration was in a parlous state thanks to an idle and dissolute king. This merry sybarite had told the resident ‘that nothing in the treaties stopped him from having “Hip, hip Hworah” as he pleased’, which was right, according to the letter of law. The Governor-General had to agree, and prescribed a policy of ‘moderation and respect for right’, rather than one of ‘ambitious appropriation and the extinction of the last spark of Mahomedan splendour and power in India’. Unseating this powerful prince would arouse the hatred of what was left of the ‘native power’.25 Likewise, everything possible was done to avoid a head-on collision with Man Singh, the Raja of Jodhpur, when he refused to co-operate wholeheartedly with the government’s campaigns against thagi (ritual robbery and murder) and dakaiti (armed robbery) in 1833. After six years of obstruction, Calcutta’s patience was exhausted and a small force was sent to Jodhpur to compel the raja to do as he was told or face deposition.26 He chose to toe the line.
Well-intentioned reforms were by and large unwelcome in the princely states. They were unasked for and often appeared to both rulers and their subjects as interference from above which threatened popular customs and rituals. Such objections were dismissed out of hand by impatient officials. One, reporting on the progress of administrative reorganisation in Awadh during 1836, blamed opposition on prejudice and what he took to be ingrained hostility to any form of innovation.27 He may well have been right, but it was unwise to awake too many sleeping dogs. Many were allowed to slumber for years to come; in the early 1870s an investigation into the affairs of the Gaikwar of Baroda revealed the prevalence of the official use of torture, abduction and illegal imprisonment.28
There were also severe financial constraints on what the government could do. The total revenue for the year 1852–53 was £20.4 million, of which £13.8 million came from Bengal and the north-western provinces, £3.27 million from Madras and £2.8 million from Bombay. The biggest charges on the presidencies’ budgets were military expenses, and there were additional charges for Company pensions, the bill for regular British troops and interest on the Company’s debts (£2.7 million), which totalled £5.3 million. The overall surplus for the year was £424,200, with Bombay having a deficit of £113,000. There was no escaping the outlay for security, between a third and a half of the annual budget, more in wartime. This left the narrowest margin for those public works and educational measures which were vital if India was to be regenerated. The allocation for non-English schools in Bengal during the early 1850s was £15,000, while the annual military expenditure was over £5 million.
Funding large-scale public projects was difficult. The Company had to operate within boundaries laid down by current economic dogma. This excluded government agencies from capitalist enterprises, such as railways, but permitted official inve
stment in public works which would augment revenues or facilitate administration. Within this framework, it was possible for the Company to fund the construction of the roads and telegraph lines which linked the three presidencies. The latter, undertaken during the early 1850s, cost £110,250. Road-building costs in the 1840s consumed an average of £400,000 a year from the public works allocations, with the largest sums on the great trunk road between Calcutta and Delhi. It had, unusually for India at the time, a Tarmac surface, cost £1,000 a mile and required £50,000 a year to maintain.29 Metalled roads had an obvious military value, and they also facilitated and expedited internal trade. Purely economic advantages flowed from the Ganges and Punjab irrigation canals, for which £2 million was set aside in the 1840s. Both increased the amount of land available for cultivation and protected farmers from the vagaries of the monsoon, benefits that were translated into higher revenues from land taxes.
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