There was a sinister side to the British memory of the Mutiny, and one which would have repercussions in India and in other parts of the empire. Racial arrogance had been on the increase in India for at least a decade before the Mutiny, its spread being reflected in the everyday use of the word ‘nigger’ for Indian, a term which, during the Mutiny, regularly appeared in print. From what they had read in the newspapers, supplemented by the more-or-less instantaneous memoirs and histories of the Mutiny, the British were presented with a story in which a people, hitherto believed capable of improvement, turned against their helpers in the most vicious manner imaginable. It was not just the Raj which been attacked; the revolt was an onslaught against everything the mid-Victorians cherished. Firing cannon balls at railway engines symbolised a wilful and irrational rejection of technical progress. The killing of women and children was a calculated assault on national moral values. Both suggested, at least to the cynical, that efforts at uplifting Indians had been misguided and were doomed, if not to failure, then to very limited success. ‘The CHILD and the SAVAGE lie very deep at the foundations of their being,’ one commentator observed. ‘The varnish of civilisation is very thin, and is put off as promptly as a garment,’ he continued, placing Indians in roughly the same evolutionary place as had been occupied by the English in the Dark Ages.46
But the work of the civilising had to go forward. Two alternatives offered themselves. One was to ‘rule our Asiatic subjects with strict and generous justice, wisely and beneficently, as their natural indefeasible superiors, by virtue of our purer religion, our sterner energies, our subtler intellect, our more creative faculties, our more commanding and indomitable will.’ The other was to shed the mantle of omniscience and accept Indians as what they had now become, subjects of the Queen, ‘fellow citizens’ who could be tutored in the arts of government in preparation for ruling themselves. In this they were, in many respects, like the British working class, who were slowly moving towards enfranchisement.47 Not everyone subscribed to this patronising view of Indians. In 1868 the Spectator broke ranks from the consensus and reminded its readers that the Indians were a sophisticated people with much to be proud about. ‘They say they have governed a continent for three thousand years, have filled it with beautiful cities, have erected buildings which European architects regard with longing admiration, have covered provinces with works of irrigation, have organised armies, carried out policies, invented arts . . .’48 A race with such achievements and memories was not likely to be contented with ‘permanent degradation’.
PART FIVE
TRIUMPHS AND
TREMORS: 1860 – 1914
1
Low and Steady
Pressure: The Exercise
of Absolute Power
I
Twenty-two railway carriages conveyed various dignitaries and their entourages to the gala opening of the Empress bridge across the >Sutlej in June 1878. It was an occasion for fulsome self-congratulation. Sir Andrew Clarke, representing the lieutenant-governor of the Punjab, declared that the iron bridge would have astonished Alexander the Great, whose armies had been halted by the Sutlej. No obstacles could stand in the way of British willpower and genius. Next, the Bishop of Lahore hailed the bridge as ‘a temple of science’, a monument to the Christian virtues of faith, patience and hard work. Those who had undertaken much of the latter, between five and six thousand Indian labourers, were then treated to a feast of sweetmeats. Afterwards, the Allahabad Pioneer described the bridge as ‘exactly the kind of work that makes the natives look up to and feel the superiority of the English, who are able to control and bridge the wildest rivers’.1
The bridge over the Sutlej was a perfect metaphor for the new Raj. It was chosen and elaborated upon by Rudyard Kipling in his short story ‘The Bridge Builders’ (1898), which describes the completion of ‘the great Kashi Bridge over the Ganges’. It has been the creation of a hierarchy presided over by Findlayson, a government civil engineer and absolute master of the project. Immediately below him is Hitchcock, another engineer who has recently arrived from Britain, and for whom the construction work is an apprenticeship and an immersion in the ways of India, for he is also temporary magistrate, ruler of the thousands of Indian labourers and their families. He handles outbreaks of cholera and smallpox and is distracted by the day-to-day headaches of every junior official: ‘Death in every manner and shape, violent and awful rage against red tape frenzying a mind that knows it should be busy on other things; drought, starvation, finance; birth, weddings, burial, and riot in the village of twenty warring castes.’ Findlayson and Hitchcock represent the brains and will of the Raj, applying superior wisdom, common sense and forebearance to the physical and moral problems of India. Working under them as foreman and major domo is Peroo, an intelligent Hindu seaman, who has seen something of the world which has made him more sceptical than the rest of his countrymen who dig and carry. Rivetting the girders and other skilled work is done by a gang of European artisans, borrowed from the railway workshops.
Building the bridge involves overcoming primordial India. This is the river, which has to be dammed and channelled, and its deity, Mother Gunga. The natural and the supernatural combine to produce a great flood which threatens to sweep away the earthen banks and shatter the piles that support the bridge’s ironwork. Forewarned in the nick of time by a telegram, Findlayson and his team hurriedly prepare for the onrush. Peroo offers the engineer some opium to ward off fever and, in a trance, the two men witness a nocturnal gathering of the Hindu gods. Mother Gunga, a Ganges mugger, supported by Kali, demands that this affront to her power is destroyed, for every conquest of nature weakens the gods’ hold over men’s minds. In a lively exchange, Ganesh, the elephant-headed diety of wisdom, defends the railways: ‘I know only that my people grow rich and praise me.’ The debonair Krishna, who moves among ordinary Indians and can ‘read the hearts’, tells his audience to bow to the inevitable. The old cosmography dominated by him and his fellow gods is doomed; they cannot survive in the world of the ‘fire-carriages’ and will, very slowly, disappear from the Indian consciousness, leaving only Brahma, the eternal god spirit.
The bridge is saved, thanks to the assistance of a steam yacht of the local prince, Rao Sahib. He represents a hybrid India, suspended between the traditional past and the modern future with his ‘tweed shooting-suit and a seven-hued turban’. He prefers to spend time with Findlayson rather than attend a temple dedication – ‘They are dam-bore, these religious ceremonies.’
‘The Bridge Builders’ is a revealing parable. Natural barriers to human progress are overcome by tough, single-minded men using modern technology. In the process, the more formidable obstacles of prejudice and ignorance are being eroded; the old gods know that they and their lore will disappear. For Kipling, who accepted wholesale the values and aspirations of those who ran the Raj in India and did all within his power to make them comprehensible to their countrymen at home, the bridge stood for a future that was infinitely better than the past. What mattered above all was the dynamism and energy of men like Findlayson and Hitchcock, who made possible the spanning of rivers. Writing to his sister from Lahore at the beginning of 1886, he insisted that in India ‘every thing is done by personal influence – the personal influence of Englishmen’. Whenever there was a crisis, every Indian looked for and to the nearest Englishman.2 He repeated the point in his short story ‘His Chance in Life’ (1888) in which a Eurasian telegrapher outfaces a mob in the remote Bengali township of Tibasu after two Indian functionaries, a police inspector and a babu have scurried off. For Kipling it is the man’s ‘white blood’ which makes him bold and, for a few vital moments, ‘the Government of India in Tibasu’. In ‘The Head of the District’ (1891) a Bengali babu, Grish Chunder Dé, MA, deserts his post as a magistrate and precipitates a crisis. Kipling’s opinion of Indian shortcomings in government was widespread; in 1900, the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, argued that from his experience native officials commanded little respect
and were prone to absent themselves whenever there was an emergency.3
There was very little that was novel in Kipling’s exposition of the philosophy of the new Raj. It derived in considerable part from those principles which had been current during the closing years of the Company’s rule and rested upon a faith in the British way of doing things and its superiority to the Indian. The process of transformation and enlightenment was carried with a new vigour and sense of mission. Bridges, real or imaginary, were, therefore, fitting symbols for its purpose and achievements.
Overcoming obstacles like the Sutlej and the Ganges was part of a wider struggle against nature. Together, the bridges and the railways they carried were part of an ambitious programme to free India from those accidents of climate which brought periodic droughts, crop failures and famines. Like the floods which nearly swept away Findlayson’s bridge and much else in India, monsoon failure could not be predicted, but, with foresight and ingenuity, its impact could be lessened. How this might be accomplished was a matter of the greatest urgency at the time of the opening of the Empress bridge. In 1876 and 1877 there had been two successive seasons of inadequate rainfall which had affected a swathe of the country, stretching from Mysore to the Punjab, in which 58 million people faced chronic food shortages. The government’s efforts to cope with this disaster had failed, partly because of under-funding, partly because of current laissez-faire dogma which forbade interference with market mechanisms, and partly because there were not enough railway lines to convey foodstuffs from unaffected regions to those of dearth.
There had also been administrative myopia and bungling. It was worst in Madras, where the authorities had adopted a system devised by Sir Richard Temple, a Bengal official, who had calculated that every man receiving official relief could survive on one pound of grain a day, the ration per prisoner in Bengali gaols. On this thin and imbalanced diet, a destitute man was expected to undertake heavy labour, digging and carrying soil as part of a programme of public works financed by the government. The work camps were often sited far from the areas of greatest scarcity, and thousands collapsed and died as they tried to reach them. In all, between 3.5 and 4 million perished in the Madras presidency alone, over a quarter in Mysore, where the relief arrangements were the most slipshod.4 Disease went hand in hand with malnutrition: in Mysore the death rates from cholera, malaria and intestinal distempers rose from 41,000 in 1876 to 189,000 the following year.5 The actual totals were probably far higher, for uncounted thousands died unrecorded where they fell by roadsides.
This catastrophe could have been avoided by technology, planning and cash. This was a conclusion of a committee of officials and experts who analysed the disasters of 1876–78 and suggested ways in which they might be prevented. Irrigation schemes and accelerated railway building offered the best long-term solutions to famine and, incidentally, to the slow but steady growth in India’s population. Despite intermittent droughts, this increased from 255 million in 1871 to 285 million in 1901, although infant mortality rates remained stable at between 50 and 55 per cent. Railway building was stepped up and, by 1900, the network had almost doubled in size to 25,000 miles, of which 5,000 had been laid in the past five years. Irrigation projects also went ahead swiftly and, by 1891, it was estimated that new canal systems had made over 10 million acres available for cultivation and an eighth of the population was dependent on them for survival.6 In the short term, the government allocated emergency funds and prepared a blueprint for a public works programme in which the hungry would be paid in return for labour on roads, wells and tanks (reservoirs). On no account was the administration to resort to handing out cash; a policy which would create overnight a class of paupers wholly dependent on state hand-outs and, therefore, unwilling ever to seek work. The social and economic orthodoxies which had given Britain the workhouse and transformed the Irish potato famine into a human catastrophe were upheld in India.
The test of these measures came with the delayed and sparse monsoons of 1895 and 1896. The scale of the calamity was marginally greater than that of twenty years before: 53 million Indians faced starvation and, in April 1897, 33 million were being kept alive at government labour camps.7 Here the indigent gathered, were given spades, hoes and baskets to carry earth and stones, and then set to work, for which they were given grain with which to make chapattis. There were difficulties in persuading those in remote, jungle districts to leave their homes and epidemics spread rapidly in the crowded camps. Sixty-eight million rupees were available to finance the relief programme and there were contributions from charities in India, Britain, America and Russia. Revenue collections, even if reduced according to circumstances, continued; in Kashmir the ryots lamented:
Batta Batta
Tah piyada patta.
[We are crying for food
And the tax collector is after us.]
Ultimate responsibility for directing this operation lay with the Viceroy, the ninth Earl of Elgin, a lustreless administrator noted for his silences, which some, perhaps unkindly, took to be an indication that he had little worth saying. He was, however, very voluble when it came to resisting pressure from Queen Victoria and others who urged the government to buy up local supplies of grain and supplement them with imports. Elgin repeatedly argued with some passion that state interference in the free market was an ‘extreme measure’ which no emergency could ever justify. Nor was he willing to forbid the hoarding of supplies, claiming that dealers would not cling to their stocks for ever. He forgot, of course, that many were only prepared to open their granaries after the shortages had driven up prices to the highest possible level.8 In spite of Elgin’s unshakeable faith in the market, his management of the crisis had some success, although the annual death-rate in Awadh more than doubled and at least 90,000 of the Queen Empress’s ‘poor Indian subjects’ succumbed in the Central Provinces, many of them in the relief camps.9
The shift from centralised work camps to relief distributed through villages cut the spread of infections and losses during the 1899–1900 drought in central India. In western areas, where there was a good rail network, the local official response was tardy and half-hearted. There was also an unbelievable complacency; the chief commissioner for Gujarat blamed the high death-rate there on the ‘soft’ habits of its people which prevented them from subsisting on a reduced diet.10 Despite the efforts of the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, to inject large sums into the relief programme and ginger into those managing it, about 800,000 died in the Bombay presidency. Matters improved considerably after the failure of the monsoon in the Punjab in 1907, thanks to a willingness of local officials to jettison the rule books and economic dogma and adopt flexible methods tailored to local conditions. Losses were far less than had been expected. From then until 1942 nature was kind to India and there were no further large-scale droughts.
How the Raj treated the famines of the 1870s and 1890s says much about its character. Original prognoses about railway and canal expansion were probably correct, although there is no exact method of calculating precisely the numbers saved by food distributed by rail. Many more would have died if there had been no extension of the rail network; of this we can be certain. Likewise, as Curzon appreciated in 1903 when he initiated a new, ambitious policy of digging more canals, artificial irrigation saved lives. But humanitarianism was always balanced by pragmatism and the Raj never lost sight of the need to pay its way. Technical improvements which made Indians less vulnerable to the wayward forces of nature were also contrived to enrich them and, through taxation, the government. The waterways which rendered hitherto arid regions of the Sind and the Punjab fruitful added to the government’s revenue. A Punjabi district which had been assessed at £15,000 annually before irrigation was rated at £24,000 afterwards.11
Increasing acreage of land under cultivation involved elements of political and social engineering as well as hydraulics. The £3 million Chenab canal scheme, begun in 1887, was designed to make fertile an arid region, relieve population pressure i
n the cities of the Punjab and produce a model agricultural community which would inspire imitation. Its members, largely Muslims and Sikhs, were selected for their quietism and loyalty.12 The settlements were intended to provide a prosperous bedrock of support for the government and a valuable recruiting ground for its army. Moreover, this and similar projects served to strengthen ties between the Raj and local men of influence. Day-to-day supervision of the canals and collection of fees for their use were undertaken by an amin, who wore a distinctive uniform and was paid between five and ten rupees (35–70p) a month. According to regulations, he had to be ‘an intelligent peasant’ who was literate, numerate and approved by the local headman, which offered plenty of opportunities for nepotism.13 The corruption of low-ranking native officials employed in the Chenab settlements contributed towards unrest there in 1907, and there was a tendency to blame the breakdown of famine-relief operations on the venality and slackness of Indian staff.14
II
The anecdotal shortcomings of the tens of thousands of Indians who served the Raj as clerks, policemen, and petty functionaries were well understood by Rudyard Kipling. As a young journalist between 1882 and 1889, he absorbed the gossip and the tales of the Raj, which he shaped into highly successful short stories, and he believed that he knew better than most its inner mechanisms and secrets. The value of the Eurasians and Indians in government offices was one. In ‘Wressley of the Foreign Office’, a Eurasian clerk at the Pay Office announces that, if he removed one line from a document, he would ‘disorganise the whole of the Treasury payments’ for an entire presidency. Possibly so; but he was a cog in a machine whose engine was driven by British officials.
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