IV
It was the missionaries and their allies in Britain who assumed the roles of moral watchdogs in India and they did as much, if not more than the memsahibs to restrict sexual contact between British men and Indian women. In the early stages of the Company’s rule, Christian missions were regarded as divisive, mischievous and capable of sowing discord among Hindus and Muslims. If, as was widely believed, British authority in India was never absolutely secure, then it would have been foolhardy to do anything which might arouse the religious passions of its people. Support for this commonsense view came from rumours that one of the causes of the 1807 Vellore mutiny had been fears that plans were in hand for the conversion of sepoys.64
The Company always strove to show even-handedness in all religious matters. The pattern was set when Admiral Watson was formally introduced to the Nawab of Arcot in 1756. The admiral presented his chaplain, dressed in Anglican canonicals, and, as a matter of courtesy, the nawab brought forward his faqir who was ‘wild and staring in his looks’. Brought together, ‘The two holy men congratulated each other on their respective office.’65 There were undertones of current Deist thinking in this meeting, for it assumed a kind of equality between the two religions and their gods. Such a juxtaposition would have been anathema to most Christians. While it was possible for contemporary scholars who studied Hinduism to appreciate the metaphysical and ethical truths contained in their sacred texts, they had no choice but to condemn a form of spirituality which existed without reference to Jesus Christ and His redemption of the world. Whatever the Hindus might own concerning the supreme being and the immortality of the soul, and however learned men might present contemporary Hinduism as priestly distortion of pure beliefs, for Christians it was a false and pagan creed. In the words of Britain’s most influential Evangelical, the anti-slavery crusader William Wilberforce: ‘Our religion is sublime, pure and beneficent. Theirs is mean, licentious and cruel.’66
Wilberforce was addressing the Commons in 1813 in support of a clause in the India Bill by which the Company would remove all obstructions to Christian missions. Its arguments were wholly pragmatic: commerce, government and harmony between rulers and ruled would be disrupted once missionaries were allowed to wander freely, found schools, set up churches and chapels and, if they were Dissenters, preach by the wayside and in the markets. These objections made no headway against the heavy guns of the Evangelical movement which thundered in the Commons and during meetings of shareholders and directors. Conversion of the heathen Indian was both a Christian and imperial duty. For those of Wilberforce’s mind, the Protestant faith was part and parcel of the civilisation that Britain was then spreading across the world. Enlightened Protestantism was the essential ingredient in Britain’s greatness; it provided the cement which held the nation together and released the genius and industry of its people. It was the partner of all human progress. According to the Evangelical vision, the conversion of India would bring unlimited benefits, for it would liberate the Indian mind and make it receptive to all the fruits of human reason. With a head purged of superstition and fancy, and applying newly acquired knowledge and patterns of thought, the Hindu would inevitably accept the truths of Christianity. Or so the Evangelicals believed.
The Evangelical lobby swept all before it in the Commons and the Lords. From 1813 missionaries of all denominations were free to trawl for converts throughout the Company’s territories so long as they possessed an official licence. Twenty years later, and after further intense lobbying, the Company forfeited the right to license missionaries and was bound by Parliament to give the Indian Christian the same civil and employment rights as those enjoyed by Muslims and Hindus. The various missions were quick off the mark and well funded by their British sympathisers, whether the philanthropic businessman or the Sunday School pupil with his or her weekly penny. By 1846, the major missionary societies had an annual budget of £425,000, nearly half of which was spent by the Anglicans and Methodists.67 Denominational rivalries were fierce and were imported into India: when, in 1815, the Church of Scotland began building a church in Bombay, there was a prolonged and vinegary row over whether or not it should have a steeple. The local Anglican bishop weighed in with an objection on the grounds that Scottish churches in London managed without these adornments. Prestige was at stake and the Scots got their steeple.68
Unable to agree over steeples and much else, the various denominations were united in their abhorrence of Hinduism. Letters home and journals brimmed with expressions of revulsion. Andrew Leslie, a Baptist, denounced ‘the horrors and abominations of Hinduism’ in 1825, and his contemporary, Elijah Hoole, a Wesleyan, was appalled by the ‘abominable figures’ which decorated the temples of southern India.69 Equally disturbing were the Hindu holy men, like those encountered by a traveller at Jaganeth early in 1814:
You see some standing for half a day on their heads, barking all the while for alms; some with their heads entirely covered with earth; some with their eyes filled with mud, and their mouths with straw; some lying in puddles of water; one man with his foot tied to his neck, and another with a pot of fire on his belly; and a third enveloped in a net made of rope.70
These reactions were transmitted back to Britain and became the staple of missionary tracts and sermons and a source of indignation. One church journal spoke for all when it declared in 1846 that India was ‘sunk in ignorance, idolatry and vice’.71 But remedy was at hand through the reforming work of the Company, which was complemented by that of the missionaries. Some had reservations about this stark view of India and Hinduism. Reginald Heber, appointed Bishop of Calcutta in 1822, was a humane and decent man who detected elements of spirituality among Hindu holy men and virtue among the Hindus. He advised missionaries against blanket condemnations and suggested that Hindus and their rites should always be treated with respect and courtesy.72
Many missionaries found restraint impossible and were inclined to aggressive evangelising. A Hindu holy man on a pilgrimage was accosted in 1823 by Elijah Hoole, who asked him the identity of a temple idol. ‘It is the image of God,’ answered the Hindu. ‘Impossible,’ retorted Hoole. ‘All adoration rendered to idols is an insult to God; by pursuing your present intention, you will provoke his anger.’ He then gave a tract to the pilgrim and went on his way. Another confrontation, this time with a zamindar, ended with Hoole being told that all gods were the same, whatever their names.73 A Baptist missionary at Santipur in 1843 spotted a crowd listening attentively to a pandit in a market place, and moved in to address the ‘stragglers’. His impromptu sermon provoked hoots of derision from an audience stirred up by a youth who insulted the preacher ‘with indecent gestures’. In 1850 another Baptist, asked by an ‘upstart lad’ to remove his shoes before entering a temple, told him and the other worshippers that ‘God’s curse would rest on their temples; and that their idols would soon be destroyed.’74
Such an outburst must have reinforced growing fears that the Company, in alliance with the missions, was secretly planning the mass and forcible conversion of all Indians. This was preposterous, but understandable in the light not only of the vehemence of individual missionaries but also of official Company policy. In 1827 Bentinck, after consulting with Hindu sacred writings, outlawed the custom of sati, claiming that it had no sound theological basis. The end of the voluntary burning or burial of Hindu widows was the first, direct affront to Indian religious beliefs and gave credence to misgivings about the imposition of Christianity.
Just how dangerous this apprehension might prove was shown by the Bangalore conspiracy of the winter of 1831–32. At the heart of the plot were men whom the Raj had made into losers: unpaid troops of the Raja of Mysore, deserters from his army and former members of his household. They were joined, alarmingly, by fifty Company sepoys. Other footloose characters were easily drawn in, for, according to the investigation later undertaken by the local superintendent of police, ‘every markam, chaultry, and other Public Building in the pettah was literally fi
lled with the discharged, unemployed, and discontented spirits in the country’. At the time, an ‘unaccountable excitement pervaded the minds of the lower classes of Muslims that their religion was in some danger, and that it was intended to convert them to Christianity’. Support was expected from Hindus in Mysore and Coorg once the uprising had begun. It was to be triggered by a contrived outrage in which a mosque would be defiled by placing in front of it a pig’s head surmounted by a cross. The plot misfired and the ringleaders were arrested, thanks to informers. Severely shaken, the Madras government dismissed the incident as another example of fanaticism by the ‘ignorant, bigotted and disaffected’. Terror influenced such minds and so the execution of the main culprits was contrived as a piece of grand guignol. In the presence of huge crowds and a large contingent of troops, and against the resonance of the Dead March from Handel’s Saul, the condemned men were led to an open space where some were shot, some hanged and some blown from cannon.75
V
The theatre of retribution did not allay Indian misgivings about religion. Friction increased when the Company found itself unable to ward off demands for its official disengagement from the Hindu and Muslim faiths. Until 1833, holy men of both religions had blessed sepoy regimental colours, British officers had joined in Hindu ceremonies and, as a gesture of goodwill, troops and cannon had been loaned for festivals. As successors to the Mughals and various native princes, Company officials found themselves involved as trustees for temple funds and collected pilgrim taxes. In Britain, Evangelicals were incensed; by associating with idolatry, the Company and its employees diminished the Christian religion in Indian eyes, even to the point where it might appear to be equal with Islam and Hinduism. Again the meddlers got their way. The directors were bulldozed into issuing instructions for the immediate severance of all official links with the two faiths.
The men-on-the-spot were uneasy and attempted to bypass these unwelcome orders. Compliance with them would distance the government from its subjects, and the sensible Tory pragmatist Ellenborough argued that if the Raj was universally perceived as a Christian government then it would alienate the Indian masses who were already perturbed by the activities of the missionaries. Many officers and administrators privately agreed and discreetly continued to show favours to Muslims and Hindus. Stories were soon circulating in Britain about British troops being kept from church by compulsory attendance at a Hindu festival, and of Company funds dispensed for repainting idols and repairing their carriages.76 In the end, officials were compelled to toe the line, although in Baroda government troops were still participating in Hindu ceremonies as late as 1875.77 During the 1840s, the Evangelical lobby turned its attention to the legal disabilities of Christian converts who, under the Hindu law upheld by the Company, were compelled to forfeit their inheritance when they forswore their religion. In March 1848 it was reported that a zamindar had evicted twenty-nine families from their holdings after they had converted.78 The law was amended in 1850, after considerable Hindu protests. Higher-caste Hindus had their customs overturned again six years later, when the Company legalised second marriages by Hindu widows and legitimised the offspring of such unions.
Seen from a Hindu perspective, this legislation appeared to be Christian-inspired and the result of external pressures by the implacable enemies of their faith. ‘Missionaries in India and their friends in England may be more worth conciliating than the Hindu population of the country,’ claimed a pamphlet directed against the change in the inheritance law.79 Muslims were also full of trepidation. Islam, once the faith of India’s ruling dynasty, was under a systematic assault in its northern Indian strongholds, and there were fears that unlettered Muslims might easily succumb. Particularly obnoxious was the spread of English-language mission schools, their extension of education to women, and the missionaries’ adoption and conversion of abandoned orphans.80
The mission schools were regarded as dangerous Trojan horses, even though many freely admitted non-Christian pupils. Visiting one in Calcutta at the end of 1847, Mrs Mackenzie was delighted to find that its Hindu and Muslim boys, once they had mastered the English language, were ‘instructed exactly as Christian boys would be’. This instruction was the crassest propaganda:
Dr Duff asked them who several of their Gods were? and how they were represented? ‘The God of War is represented riding upon a pig.’ ‘A pig! – that is a very warlike animal,’ said Dr Duff right merrily, whereupon there was such a display of white teeth, and such mirthful looks, as showed they had wonderfully small respect for the warlike deity. He then made them describe Durga, the consort of Shiva and Goddess of Destruction.
‘A very sweet and merciful goddess, was she not?’ This they denied laughingly . . .81
Earlier these astonishingly good-natured schoolboys had had an hour of Christian indoctrination which included minute examination of ‘Mundy’s Christianity and Hinduism Contrasted’.
These crude methods of conversion were adopted to compensate for the failure of more conventional evangelising. Missionaries were alternately dismayed by the immensity of their task and the resistance of the Indians. Elijah Hoole, reviewing thirty years’ work in 1844, calculated that he and his fellow Wesleyans had just under 4,000 ‘hearers’ (i.e. church attenders) and 342 communicants in India. The Anglican Church Missionary Society had fared much better, and had just under 19,000 ‘hearers’ and 1,639 communicants. The schools of both denominations were flourishing, with just under 7,000 pupils between them.82 Opponents of missions claimed that the mass of their converts were Untouchables, for whom any faith was preferable to one which condemned them to the bottom of the pile. Among Hoole’s first converts in 1822 were the Tamil wives of soldiers of the 69th Regiment. One wonders what they thought of Christianity when they and their children heard that they were forbidden to follow their husbands to Christian Britain on account of their colour.83 There was always the fear of apostasy; young Bengali and Eurasian girls visited by Mrs Mackenzie in a Presbyterian orphanage near Calcutta were not sent into domestic service for fear that they might be contaminated by the ‘heathen servants they would be obliged to mingle with’.
The popularity of their schools was one of the missionaries’ greatest advantage, and one that they imagined would eventually tell in their favour. By 1850 India appeared in the middle of massive, far-reaching changes and, while the pace of conversion was still slow, it was gathering momentum. This was the message preached in 1846 by William Wilberforce’s son, Samuel (‘Soapy Sam’), the Bishop of Oxford. He also, and this struck at the roots of the caste system (and, for that matter, the racial hierarchy which was being established by the British in India), saw Christianity as a force for human equality. ‘Am I,’ he asked, ‘the keeper of the Hindu, the Indian, the Hottentot? . . . Is the savage my brother? If all have sprung from the same parents then the wild wanderer, the painted barbarian, is thy brother, though civilisation may have separated you by so wide an interval that you can scarcely seem to belong to the same race.’84
The bishop was convinced that progress in India was unstoppable and the gap of enlightenment was narrowing thanks to dedicated men and women working busily in missions and schools across India. Whether or not the Indians wanted it to be closed was another matter which, when it was considered, was dismissed by references to their inability to know what was good for them. In many troubled Indian minds, eventual conversion appeared an integral part of the Company’s relentless programme of reform. The result was widespread suspicion and fear, combined with a feeling that the British were becoming less sympathetic and more distant in their everyday relations with Indians. Officers and officials may have lost more than sexual satisfaction when they began to drop their native mistresses.
PART FOUR
THE MUTINY:
1857 – 59
1
The Sahib
Paid No Attention:
The Raj Imperilled,
January – July 1857
I
Nemesis overtook the Raj in 1857, but it came slowly and its approach was hardly noticed. Wise and experienced officials like Sir Henry Lawrence sensed that something was wrong, although they could not say exactly what.1 Perhaps the passion for reform and change was out of control and Indians had had more change than they could absorb. ‘I am afraid the enlightenment of Calcutta and other presidencies is going too fast for our Upper Provinces and Central India,’ commented one administrator.2 Others felt that everything was normal and behaved accordingly. On 26 January the officers of the Ambala garrison challenged their Meerut colleagues to a cricket match, and for the next three months both cantonments enjoyed the weekly rituals of balls and horse races. At the beginning of May, Lieutenant Alexander Lindsay of the Bengal Horse Artillery said goodbye to what had proved an expensive social life and set off from Meerut for a six-month shooting and fishing trip in the hills of Kashmir.3
He left behind him a country full of murmurs. The grumbling had begun during the winter and continued, gathering intensity, as the new year unfolded. Indians were the hosts to a tangle of grievances: economic, religious, political, tangible and intangible. A few were old, but most were new, which was why they were more bitterly felt. At the top, and kept at the government’s expense in relative comfort, there were great men and women whose fortunes had been reversed by the Raj. Wajid Ali Shah, the ex-king of Awadh, grumbled in Calcutta where he and a reduced court had been exiled after the Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, had deposed him for misrule. Another victim of the new order was Nana Sahib, a Maratha nobleman, who held court at Bithur on the outskirts of Cawnpore. Despite official objections, he styled himself maharaja and would have liked to call himself peshwa, for he was the adopted heir of the last peshwa, Baji Rao. He had been refused this title and, after a six-year battle in the courts, had failed to secure the £80,000 annuity that the government had paid his adoptive father. Nana Sahib had fallen foul of Dalhousie’s doctrine of ‘lapse’, which overruled Hindu customs of adoption, and insisted that a state whose ruler died without a direct male heir was forfeit to the Company. Between 1847 and 1856, when he left India, the Governor-General had acquired Satara, Sambalpur, the Punjab, Jhansi and Nagpur by this legal stratagem. The kin of their former rulers were naturally disgruntled and, like Lakshmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi, had tried to assert their rights in the courts in Calcutta and London, but without success. Henceforward, there would be no dynastic security for any prince, however loyal and accommodating.
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