The white man’s omniscience was not just a matter of administrative capability, although this was obviously important. It was his mystique which sustained the Raj. ‘Prestige of race’ alone upheld British rule, thought William Horne, who served in the Madras government between 1882 and 1914. How else, he reasoned, could millions whom had never seen a British soldier and rarely a sepoy submit so passively to alien rule? Unwittingly he provides a part of the answer in his description of how police shot down over thirty spear- and lathi-armed tribesmen, the followers of a messianic swami, after an uprising in a remote district in 1899. Nevertheless, for Horne it was the British character, not the force which lay behind it, which underpinned the Raj. Indians responded to their immediate master, the Collector or his equivalent – ‘the ruler whom most of India knows, the man whom, if he is worth his salt, she fears and respects, often even loves’. His and the Raj’s prestige were easily bruised. In the early 1880s it was considered ‘unthinkable’ in Madras for ladies to appear on stage and dance in an amateur Gilbert and Sullivan production. If skirts went up, prestige would drop.15
Prestige involved more than outward dignity. Sir Michael O’Dwyer, whose Indian career began in 1885, believed that he and his kind were revered by the masses as ‘protectors of the poor’, perpetually defending them from the rich.16 It was a self-image which particularly appealed to O’Dwyer, the son of a Catholic Irish squire and an instinctive paternalist. He and others like him provided Indians with ‘peace, security, good government, and orderly progress’. By temperament they were autocrats, but, as Horne recalled: ‘We were trained to rule, not to serve, though in ruling we served.’ This might easily have served as the motto for their caste, the Indian Civil Service (ICS), an élite of about 1,000 mandarins. They enjoyed a near monopoly of all the senior administrative posts within India and, according to one member, formed ‘one vast club’.17
Since 1854, admission to this club had been by competitive examination. To start with, the examination syllabus, framed by Macaulay, was contrived to select young men with a liberal education and a broad understanding of the world, gained from wide reading. This concept did not suit current academic fashions and was soon abandoned in favour of tests, which measured what was then being taught in public schools and universities. By 1890 the assessors were allocating a mere 500 marks to English language and literature, the subjects Macaulay had cherished, and 1,150 to Classical subjects, with a heavy emphasis on style rather than textual content. These changes opened the way for what Macaulay had dreaded, cramming, and success went to those who could memorise, retain and regurgitate knowledge. Inevitably, the ICS came to be dominated by men more at home with facts than ideas, and whose intellectual strengths were an ability to collect data and argue from it convincingly. As a result what the ICS did best was the compilation of vast, thorough official reports which examined in minute detail every aspect of a problem and the possibilities of action. Statistics became an obsession, perhaps because they offered irrefutable evidence of progress, and time was no object: the famines of the 1870s had spanned two years, but it took three to investigate them.
A fee of £5 was charged for the two-week examination which ensured that the bulk of applicants were public schoolboys from professional and upper-middle-class families. Of the 333 successful entrants between 1874 and 1884, 227 were the sons of landowners, army and navy officers, home and Indian civil servants, clergymen, lawyers and doctors, and 84 came from commercial and farming backgrounds.18 Originally, applicants were expected to be under nineteen, but the age limit was extended to include university graduates. Over half the graduate entrants between 1880 and 1883 were from Scottish universities and five from Oxford and Cambridge. As with all public examinations, there was an element of chance which hung on the numbers of candidates and available places; between 1854 and 1874 the odds varied from three to eight to one.19
From 1878 onwards, apprentice administrators undertook a two-year course at Balliol College, Oxford, where they studied Indian vernacular languages and culture in preparation for a second test, which was taken after their arrival in India. An Indian Institute was set up in Oxford in 1884 which, it was hoped, would become both a powerhouse for Indian studies and a hall of residence for Indian students. Instead, it became a rather musty museum of Indian artefacts. It was also hoped that the future ICS men at Oxford would develop a keen sense of their responsibilities, something which was cultivated by the master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett. He once, revealingly, told his acolytes that they had a far greater opportunity to do good in India ‘than in any department of administration in England’. Moreover, the salaries were far higher than at home: the lowest grade of the ICS, assistant commissioner, got £300 a year; judges and collectors £2,700; and a lieutenant-governor, £8,000. After twenty-five years’ service, every official qualified for an official pension of £1,000.
Too much philosophy and any kind of intellectual flair were generally frowned upon in India, where character counted more than brains. When he was commissioner for the Punjab, Sir John Lawrence had threatened to break in pieces a piano which was owned by a newly appointed young official. Playing an instrument of any kind did not accord with Lawrence’s view of an ideal administrator, because it was an indication of the lack of the ‘grit’ which he expected from his acolytes. ‘We want well-educated gentlemen rather than first-rate scholars,’ he wrote in 1858.20 When scholars or intellectuals set foot in India, they faced a dusty welcome from colleagues and superiors. ‘All head, no physique and a hundred theories’ was how Kipling summed up the hero of his ‘The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin’, a brilliant young ICS greenhorn who talked about Comte and Spencer in the club. He gets his come-uppance and is told that: ‘His business was to obey orders and keep abreast of files.’ William Horne concurred; he believed that the muscular, sporting official mixed easily with Indians and was the sort of fellow who ‘gets into the minds of the country people’.21 This was just as well, for ICS men were invariably the products of an education system which went to extraordinary lengths to promote the cult of athleticism.
The post-Arnoldian boys’ public schools and their imitators were the nursery of the ICS. The late-Victorian and Edwardian public schoolboy was relentlessly urged to take on board a code of values which exalted selflessness and loyalty to team and institutions. Dogged perseverance was more laudable than cleverness, playing the game well mattered more than winning and displays of emotion were to be avoided at all costs. To its credit, this creed encouraged a sense of fair play, chivalry and altruism; to its discredit it fostered philistinism, conformity, the suppression of individuality, a reverence for rules and an unthinking obedience to authority. As Sir Walter Lawrence, a senior ICS mandarin, observed, the virtues prized in a school prefect or captain of games and those of an ideal Indian administrator were interchangeable.22 And yet, in many respects, these qualities were similar to those which the Marquess Wellesley had wanted to instil in his embryo proconsuls at Fort William College at the beginning of the century. But there were significant differences: the late-Victorian administrator tended to lack imagination and flexibility of mind. Intellectually unadventurous, he was happiest following lines laid down by those above him or those who had gone before, and distrusted innovation.
This is the impression given by Horne and O’Dwyer, the former resigning in 1914 rather than continue service in a country where the natives were being allowed more say in the government. He, O’Dwyer and other officials of the same generation were inclined to look back on their time as a golden age of the sahibs’ rule over a contented people. Each was, in Sir Walter’s Lawrence’s phrase, ‘a sun-dried bureaucrat’, over-free with advice for the newly disembarked official and, as it were, a curator of the Raj’s tradition of government. Of course, there were recruits who refused to conform to antique codes and dismissed some or all of the wisdom of their elders. Malcolm Darling, who joined the ICS in 1905, quickly realised that he and his blue-stocking wife, Josie, were outsiders
in a turgid, self-centred community where life revolved around sport outside and games of bridge and billiards indoors. Conversation was confined to gossip and banality. The memsahibs were worse, almost universally disgruntled and hostile to the Indians. Once, over the teacups, Mrs Darling told one matron that she looked forward to her husband’s posting in Rajasthan, which was ‘real old India’. ‘Then I hope I’ll never go there [if] it means meeting natives. Hate the brutes!’ her hostess snapped back.23 Malcolm Darling’s new position in a distant, desert region was in fact a form of punishment for his refusal to conform to the mores and habits of his colleagues.
A product of Eton (where Arnoldian cant was less prevalent) and King’s College, Cambridge, Darling was a sophisticated aesthete and high churchman who was deeply disturbed by the racial aloofness of his countrymen. It was at his house that his friend, the novelist E. M. Forster, found it possible to have close contact with educated Indians during his 1912–13 tour. Darling dreamed that he might, almost single-handedly as it turned out, bridge the many gaps between cultured Indians and British. An earlier generation believed such an undertaking was impossible and futile. In Kipling’s imaginary poetic dialogue between two viceroys, Lords Dufferin and Lansdowne, the former remarks:
You’ll never plumb the Oriental mind
And if you did, it isn’t worth the toil.24
Sir Walter Lawrence agreed: ‘No one can boast that he really understands the Indian. The more that is learned about him, the more the student is aware of his ignorance.’ Nevertheless, Lawrence told potential ICS recruits that they should always master the languages and customs of their district and take care never to undermine an Indian’s self-respect. It was ‘a fatal mistake to be satirical or superior’. Part demi-god and part godfather to his charges, the ideal official was sympathetic without inviting intimacy. If his club was exclusive, and in fairness not all were, it was because he, his colleagues and womenfolk preferred to relax in their own company.
This apartness was emphasised by what Lilian Ricketts, the wife of an Indian army colonel, saw as the exaggerated Englishness of the decorations and pastimes of the club. It was a temporary sanctuary for a community whose members were perpetually moving from station to station which, Kipling believed, was why casual flirtation was so common in India. There was, however, more to the ritual of balls, bridge parties, evening drinks, racquets, badminton and cricket matches. Mrs Ricketts believed that these helped to keep ‘men and women upright and hard-conditioned’ and ‘in training for all eventualities’.25 A contemporary, reviewing Kipling’s Kim in 1902, detected another reason for this obsessive drive to re-create England in India. The English, he wrote, ‘defend themselves from the magic of the land by sport, games, clubs, the chatter of fresh-imported girls, and by fairly regular attendance at church’, because, if they did not, ‘the empire would be lost’.26
This was a trifle far-fetched, although a reminder of the power and durability of the belief in India’s capacity to seduce the unwary. A more plausible explanation of British exclusiveness lay in the philosophy which guided every white servant of the Raj. They were, the élite of the ICS in particular, the equivalents of Plato’s philosopher princes, men of education, integrity and wisdom whose talents fitted them to rule fairly and honestly. Distant and dispassionate, these men convinced themselves that they alone could maintain peace and impartial justice in a land where Hindu and Muslim mistrusted each other and where there were more than 2,000 castes and over 200 languages. Moreover, there was the ever-present sense that the British were genetically and temperamentally a master race. During his voyage to Bombay in 1876, the newly appointed Viceroy, the second Lord Lytton, was struck by the warlike appearance of Sikh and Pathan cavalrymen whom he met with their commander, General Probyn. Afterwards, he wrote: ‘You felt that the Englishman was the finest man of the three, fitted in all respects to command these stalwart hill-men, not only par droite de conquête, but also par droit de naissance.’27
III
As Viceroy of India, Lytton was, superficially, one of the greatest autocrats on earth. In fact, he was ultimately responsible to Parliament through the Secretary of State for India. In theory the two men worked in tandem, but, if one had a stronger personality, he was, in effect, master of India. As in the time of the Company, Parliament’s interest in India was perfunctory, with routine debates taking place in a sparsely attended house. When things went spectacularly wrong, as they did for Lytton in Afghanistan in 1879, or, when the tempo of nationalist agitation increased, as it did after 1905, then the interest of MPs was aroused.
Furthermore, changes in the British franchise in 1885, which extended the vote to the bulk of the working classes, produced a breed of radical Liberal and, later, Socialist politicians keen to expose what they took to be injustices in the daily administration of India and reprimand those responsible. Some made it their business to tour India in search of iniquities, and they and their stay-at-home brothers were bitterly resented. In ‘Pagett, M.P.’ (1897), Kipling adopts the persona of a district officer who is host to one of these Parliamentary tourists (‘travelled idiots who duly misgovern the land’) and relishes his miseries during the hot season:
Pagett was dear to mosquitoes, sandflies found him a treat,
He grew speckled and lumpy – hammered, I grieve to say,
Aryan [Indian] brothers who fanned him, in an illiberal way.
At the end of the 1911 Abor frontier campaign, Colonel Alban Wilson chuckled to himself about how furious left-wing MPs would have been had they known that ‘sticks and opprobrium’ had been used to force tribesmen to erect a monument to a murdered officer.28 Had the incident been reported, there would certainly have been a Parliamentary rumpus and trouble from above for the Viceroy.
Mischief could also come from below, stirred up by the elder statesmen of ICS, the specialist departmental heads who sat on the viceroy’s council. With the authority of experience, they imagined they always knew best, as Kipling recognised:
You’ve seen your Council? Yes, they’ll try to rule,
And prize their Reputations.29
The collective influence of the executive council was appreciated in London, which was why the government preferred to select viceroys from politicians with a sound administrative record. They had to be prepared for what the cosmopolitan diplomat Lytton called ‘the incessant grind’ of a daily routine that involved poring over sheaves of telegrams, reports, statistics, committee minutes and memoranda. These were spewed out by subordinate secretariats which generated an average of least 100,000 separate documents a year, many of them lengthy. Besides, the Viceroy had to correspond with the Queen, the Secretary of State, his councillors, provincial governors and residents. Before the general introduction of the typewriter in the 1890s, these exchanges were handwritten. When not in his residences at Calcutta, or, during the hot summer season, Simla, the Viceroy was undertaking cross-country progresses.
Common-sense and custom dictated that he saw as much of India as possible and met his servants at every level to find out about their work and encourage them. The bland viceregal public face was recalled to E. M. Forster by Sir Clement Hindley, who worked for the railways: ‘All Viceroys are alike – all affable: Curzon, Hardinge, Minto – if I shut my eyes I shouldn’t know which I was listening to.’30 It was a hard act to sustain and, in private at least, Lansdowne let the mask slip. He moaned about princely durbars in which he was ‘smeared with their [Indian] attar of roses’, listened to the National Anthem played off-key and once, during a state visit to the Raja of Bharatpur, being badgered by photographers. A valetudinarian, he was perturbed by tours of the Bombay leper asylum (‘ghastly array of noseless faces and feet and hands without toes and fingers’), a veterinary clinic and a hospital. ‘I ought to pick up something unpleasant as a souvenir of my visit,’ he complained afterwards.31 But, as an aristocrat he had, like Trollope’s Duke of Omnium (who would have made an ideal viceroy), to suppress private feelings and perform his pu
blic duty.
Stamina was a further viceregal qualification. Hard work in an unkind climate was debilitating, more so for vicereines than their husbands. Lady Canning died in India while her husband was in office, and Curzon’s first wife a year after he left India. Lady Elgin’s frail health deteriorated during her husband’s viceroyalty and local distempers contributed to the premature death of Lady Hardinge. On her arrival in Bombay at the end of 1888, Lady Lansdowne was overwhelmed by the heat. In her first moment of privacy, she stripped to her underwear and flopped on to a sofa, where she was fanned by a native woman who told her she was too thin!
Those who accepted the viceroyalty, Curzon apart, had no illusions about what they were letting themselves in for, nor were they tempted by the glamour of riding on elephants and being fêted by princes. Hard work and plenty of it was all they could expect. ‘Labour steadily,’ Gladstone advised the Marquess of Ripon on his appointment in 1880. His successor, Lord Dufferin, told an audience of his fellow Ulstermen in 1884 that, ‘The days when great reputations are to be made are, happily perhaps, as completely past as those in which great fortunes are made.’ He prayed for an ‘uneventful’ time in office and hoped all he needed to do was maintain a ‘low and steady pressure’ on the engine of government.32 On the eve of his departure in 1888, the next Viceroy, Lord Lansdowne, told his ambitious mother that he was about to take a ‘responsible and honourable’ post which presented a chance to undertake ‘useful work for my country and improving the prospects of my children’. Moreover, and this had helped persuade him to take the position, what he could save from his salary would help pay off mortgages on his estates. He would return with ‘something to my credit’ that would further his political career.
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