This is what occurred in Manipur in 1891, with disastrous consequences. Hitherto, relations between Calcutta and the state had been cordial; at the end of 1885, its ruler had provided useful assistance in operations against neighbouring Burma and, by way of thanks, had been presented with a handful of breech-loading rifles for him and his family and four rifled cannon for his army. A palace coup in September 1890 replaced Sur Chandra Singh by his brother, Kula Chandra Singh, with real power in the hands of their sibling, Tikendrajit Singh, who was also commander-in-chief of the army. Frank Grimwood, the political agent, saw no cause for alarm, informing his superiors that the new régime was sound and widely based, for Tikendrajit Singh enjoyed great popularity. Furthermore, he quickly proved an energetic administrator, launching a programme to repair roads and bridges throughout the state.21 Tikendrajit was distrusted in Calcutta, where he had a reputation for cruelty and anti-British sentiments.22
After some debate, the Foreign Office decided to recognise the new raja, but, invoking a well-used law of 1818, insisted on Tikendrajit’s arrest and exile as a subversive influence. The Raj might condone a palace revolution, but it could never tolerate an alternative source of power within a native state, especially when it enjoyed the backing of the people. An ultimatum was delivered to Kula Chandra Singh by J. W. Quinton, the Chief Commissioner for Assam, backed by over 400 Gurkha riflemen. He was confident that there would be no resistance and so he did not bother with the added insurance of a battery of mountain guns. The column reached Manipur on 22 March 1891, and the raja and his brother were immediately summoned to a durbar at the residency. Both turned up and, after a wait, Tikendrajit went away. He may have heard rumours that Quinton intended to flout hallowed custom and arrest him at the durbar. The following day Quinton called another durbar, insisting on Tikendrajit’s presence. When he did not appear, a detachment of a hundred Gurkhas were ordered to storm his house and seize him. The attack went awry, and the badly-mauled unit was forced to withdraw to the wooden, thatched residency, which was now under siege by between five and six thousand Manipuri troops and the recently-acquired modern cannon.
Faced with an unequal fight, Quinton, Grimwood and four British officers accepted Tikendrajit’s offer of negotiation. Decoyed into the palace, Grimwood was speared by a soldier and the rest beheaded. Afterwards, their blood was sprinkled on stone dragon idols in the palace forecourt and their dismembered bodies displayed in the city; there were gruesome tales that they had been tortured, but these turned out to be untrue. Believing their position untenable, the 270 survivors abandoned the burning residency and, accompanied by Mrs Grimwood, made their way across rough, wooded country to find safety in the form of a small British column. Tikendrajit, having slain the representatives of British power, turned his attention to a ritual purge of all British influence from Manipur. A procession marched through the streets to what was left of the residency, which was demolished. Telegraph offices and lines were destroyed, telegraphists murdered, a sanitorium burned down, and British graves desecrated.23
The machinery of retribution was soon in action. Within a fortnight, British forces, mainly Gurkhas, were converging on Manipur. Resistance was hopeless against mountain guns and disciplined firepower. In one fight close to the city, 80 Gurkhas threw back 3,000 Manipuri troops for the loss of one man killed. Manipur was occupied on 27 April and those responsible for the outrages were rounded up, tried and executed. The raja’s palace was looted before it and the citadel were razed to the ground to make way for a permanent military camp. The final act in this reversal of fortune was the public hanging of Tikendrajit on a scaffold erected on his polo field. The execution of a prince, albeit a villainous one, upset Queen Victoria, who protested to Lansdowne, suggesting that, in general, residents and political agents were overbearing. The Viceroy was adamant on the matter, believing with good reason that the Queen had obtained her opinion from her munshi, Abdul Karim. There were further reverberations of the Manipur affair in the Commons where the government faced charges of perfidy, for it was widely believed that the original durbar had been a device to abduct Tikendrajit. The allegations were strenuously denied both in London and Calcutta, but the mud stuck, as it usually does when it has been thrown with good reason. One officer who had taken part in the campaign remarked afterwards: ‘Because this man was a useless rogue is no reason why we should have resorted to underhand trickery; it never pays.’24 Not only had the Raj’s integrity been called into question, its reputation for unflinching resolution had been compromised. This was to some extent restored by the courts martial and subsequent cashiering of the two officers who had advised retreat from the ruined residency. As usual when governments blunder, scapegoats were selected from among the middle and lower ranks.
The sequel to the Manipur incident gave the Raj an opportunity to restate its faith in princely government. Annexation was ruled out, wisely perhaps for there was strong evidence that the British connection was disliked by a wide section of the population. A new maharaja, Chura Chand Singh, was chosen and given the status of a ruling chief with entitlement to an eleven-gun salute. He was the nephew of his predecessor (who had been exiled) and six years old, which gave the resident the opportunity to guide the affairs of Manipur for the next sixteen years. During part of this regency, Chura Chand was groomed for his future role at Mayo College, a government academy for princes.
The twists and turns of court in-fighting always needed to be monitored, and princes needed occasional reminders that they were not above the criminal law. Allegations that Madhava Singh, Maharaja of Panna, had been party to the murder of his uncle, Rao Raja Singh, led to swift and decisive action during the late summer of 1901. The source of these charges was the dead man’s two widows, who had written to Curzon with an account of the events leading up to their husband’s death. It appeared that three years before, the Hindu maharaja had become infatuated with a Muslim prostitute, Hydree Jan, who became his mistress. He was thirty, childless and, in April 1901, his wife died. Soon after, his mistress was found to be pregnant and he prepared to marry her. His uncle, who had already condemned his nephew’s dissolute way of life, objected strongly. At the end of June, Rao Raja became seriously ill and feared, rightly, that he and his three sons were being poisoned by food prepared by the maharaja’s cook, Shimbu. Rao Raja’s death at the end of the month, the cook’s flight and forensic evidence confirmed his family’s suspicions.
The weight of evidence compelled the government to intervene. On 12 September, Captain Beville, the political agent in Bundelkhund, rode to Panna with a small force, assumed control over the government and arrested the maharaja. Investigations were undertaken by an officer of the Thagi and Dakaiti Department, which uncovered a conspiracy involving the maharaja, who had tested the efficacy of the arsenic and strychnine on hunting dogs, a courtier and the fugitive cook. The courtier was executed, the maharaja deposed and imprisoned. His former income had been £50,000 a year and, to make incarceration bearable, he was given an annual allowance of £2,400. Jadrendra Singh, the eldest son of the murdered Rao, was nominated maharaja and packed off to a princes’ college, leaving the government in the hands of the political agent.25
III
Curzon had dreamed of making men like the Maharaja of Panna ‘a colleague and partner’, which was why the Viceroy was so disheartened by instances of princely immorality and indolence. At the end of his viceroy-alty, he explained to an audience in London’s Guildhall that he wished the princes to be treated ‘not as relics, but as rulers; not as puppets, but as living factors in the administration’.26 He was repeating a well-established principle of Indian government which had always been attractive to Conservatives like himself, who saw aristocracies as a natural governing class. In India they were something more: natural allies of a government dedicated to stability and the sanctity of property. This had been proved during the Mutiny when the loyalty of the majority of princes had been one of the decisive factors in ensuring the restoration of the
Raj. Their trust was amply rewarded: in December 1860 Baji Rao, the Maharaja of Gwalior, received a grant of lands worth 30,000 rupees a year and assignments on the revenues of Jhansi, whose rani had joined the rebels.27 Most important of all, Dalhousie’s ill-judged doctrine of lapse was jettisoned and the right of princes to adopt heirs discreetly restored.
The shift in official thinking was also felt in Awadh. In the summer of 1858 the Tory Secretary of State, Lord Ellenborough, halted the confiscations of taluqdar estates on the grounds that, in the future, stable government would depend on their co-operation. Owners of two-thirds of the land in Awadh, their interests were accommodated, even at the expense of the peasantry. The 1868 Awadh Rent Act gave them the power to raise rent at will, which they did, causing enormous hardship. Nearly forty years later, a senior civil servant, Sir Thomas Holderness, described the landowners of Awadh as ‘a natural aristocracy’ and ‘a most useful auxiliary to an alien government such as ours’.28 Their support was more and more valuable as nationalist agitation was gaining momentum, and with it undercurrents of protest against the land-owning class in general. In 1907 many Bengali zamindars were disturbed by the lack of a firm crack-down on dissidents.29
Transforming the princes into active and effective props to the government demanded a revolution in their collective outlook. Partnership, as defined by Curzon and the Foreign Office, involved sharing the objectives of the Raj. Translated into action this meant the princes had to devote themselves to the betterment of their subjects, ploughing back into their states some of the taxes they collected. The metamorphosis was cynically described in Kipling’s poem ‘A Legend of the Foreign Office’ (1897), in which a prince plunges into a far-reaching programme of reform spurred on by the hope of a reward:
Rustum Beg of Kolazai – slightly backward Native State –
Lusted for a C.S.I. – so began to santitate,
Built a Gaol and Hospital – nearly built a City drain –
Till his faithful subjects all thought their ruler was insane.
Strange departures made he then – yea, Departments stranger still,
Half a dozen Englishmen helped the Rajah with a will,
Talked of noble aims and high, hinted of a future fine
For the State of Kolazai in strictly Western line.
Unhappily for Rustum Beg, toeing the government line yields an inferior honour and, in a spleen, he commands all innovation to cease. Down come the new police stations, the hospital is turned into a zenana for his wives and concubines and he reverts to his old ways – over-taxing his subjects and over-straining his liver. Rustum’s recidivism receives Kipling’s implicit approval, for he had a romantic attachment to the old India.
The new India would be created by new Indians, princes educated in the British manner with a strong emphasis on the development of character. Nothing less than the complete remoulding of the aristocracy was the aim of a constellation of officially subsidised, Indian public schools, scattered across the country for the education of the sons of the landowning classes. At the opening of one of the first, Rajkumar College, Rajkot (Kathiawar), in 1870, the local political agent predicted that its alumni would be a ‘manly set of youths . . . burning with emulation to outstrip each other in the glorious task of elevating humanity’.30 In another speech that day, Sir James Peile, director of public instruction within the Bombay presidency, gave pupils a hint of what lay in store for them: ‘We shall discipline their bodies in the manliness and hardihood of the English public schoolboy.’31 His words were taken seriously by Chester Macnaghten, the first headmaster, who believed that muscle and character were best hardened by relentless games playing. He would frequently read to the princes that chapter in Tom Brown’s Schooldays in which Tom, captain of the cricket XI, sustained his team through a match crisis and saved the day. At the end, there was a homily: ‘In hours so spent you will learn lessons such as no school instruction can give – the lessons of self-reliance, calmness and courage, and of many other excellent qualities, which will better fit you to discharge the duties and face the difficulties, which the future must bring.’32 In other words, they would pass through that mill which produced the sahibs who ruled British India and, it was hoped, would have absorbed their values and codes of behaviour. In time, all of India’s rulers, native and British, would share a common attitude.
The same message with slight variations was preached at Mayo College, Ajmer, which served Rajputana, and other colleges which sprang up during the 1870s and 1880s. It was not one which was particularly welcomed; at Rajkumar College Macnaghten found his pupils initially recalcitrant and unreceptive. Matters were not helped by their habit of bringing with them trains of armed servants and old family animosities. But Macnaghten battled on, as had Dr Arnold at Rugby, and in the end the boys knuckled down and absorbed the physical and moral benefits of cricket, which became very popular. Elsewhere, the prospect of long hours in the nets proved unappealing both to fathers and sons, and they voted with their feet, chosing traditional Hindu and Muslim schools where the curriculum was centred on literature, logic, law and, in the latter, Persian and Arabic. The intake of the pseudo-public schools remained disappointingly low; in 1894–95 only 68 of the 150 places at Mayo College had been taken, which was about average, and in 1902 only twelve of Kathiawar’s thirty-two chiefs had passed through Rajkumar College. Characteristically, Curzon took action. He re-organised the colleges and made them more attractive by revising syllabuses to include politics and economics and introducing a leaving examination. More British masters were recruited and boarding houses set up under European housemasters. Thereafter, the colleges began to flourish, with Mayo College becoming particularly fashionable among the Indian aristocracy.
Behind these efforts to produce Indian versions of Tom Brown was a desire to wean the princes away from domestic influences, which Victorian and Edwardian officials imagined to be morally corrosive. Consider the illuminating tale of Miss Moxon, governess to the young rajas of Akalkot and Sawantvadi during the first years of this century. In the words of the governor of Bombay she gave the boys ‘what is, I believe, almost unique, namely the associations of a pure, wholesome, refined British home, and all the tenderness, watchfulness and care of a good British mother’. This was accomplished despite the ‘intrigues’ of ‘ill-disposed relatives and corrupt and corrupting servants’ who sought to mislead the boys. But the high and single-minded Miss Moxon got her way, so that when the Raja of Akalkot entered Rajkumar College he was found to be ‘much better equipped intellectually and morally than many British boys who proceed to public school’.33 A high accolade which earned Miss Moxon the Kaisar-i-Hind medal, second class.
IV
Another, larger-scale triumph in princely regeneration was achieved in Baroda, although its sequel proved embarrassing for the Raj. It was a middle-sized state whose two million population was highly taxed, paying £2 million each year into the gaikwar’s treasury in the early 1870s. The people of Baroda were also misruled; investigations undertaken by the resident exposed cases of murder, torture and extortion which were sufficiently outrageous to force the Viceroy to unthrone Mahhar Roy, the gaikwar, in 1874.34 He had no direct heir and so, according to custom, the dowager maharani was instructed to ‘adopt’ a successor. She chose Sayagi Rao, the twelve-year-old son of a village headman who was a distant kinsman of the ruling dynasty. He was provided with an English tutor and an enlightened diwan (chief minister), Sir Madawah Rao, a former university lecturer in Mathematics and Philosophy.
In 1882, when the young gaikwar was on the eve of his majority, the resident reported enthusiastically to the Viceroy about a progressive government which was reforming the state with the help of Indian professional administrators hired from outside. The diwan explained that the objective of his government was to be ‘like the English without the sahibs’.35 Sayagi Rao developed into a humane, cultivated and conscientious prince. His day began at six in the morning with prayers, after which he spent a few hours r
eading; his favourite authors included Bentham, De Tocqueville, J. S. Mill and Shakespeare. At eleven he took breakfast with his family, a meal which, like dinner, consisted of English and Indian dishes. At the time of their arranged marriage, his wife had been fourteen and illiterate. Her husband immediately arranged for her education so that they could enjoy an equal partnership; many years later he wrote: ‘An educated lady in the house is more able to shed the light of happiness than one who is ignorant.’36 During the afternoon, the gaikwar proceeded to state affairs, examining files, consulting with his ministers and considering appeals from his courts. As the evening approached, he would make his daily excursion through Baroda city, travelling in a carriage escorted by a bodyguard of lancers. During these drives and his twice-weekly open audiences with his subjects the gaikwar accepted petitions and pleas. By the standards of his peers, Sayagi Rao was not unduly reckless with money, although he had spent £1.5 million on a new palace, named with unintentional irony, ‘The White Elephant Palace’. He also possessed a troop of performing parrots who had been trained, among other things, to walk tightropes and ride miniature silver bicycles.
A sufferer from neurasthenia, the gaikwar had made visits to Europe for treatment in 1884 and 1899 and intended his sons to go to Eton and Balliol, for he had the highest regard for English education. This plan was not to Curzon’s liking; he was convinced that at public school and university an Indian would develop a contempt for his own people and possibly be tempted to neglect them by remaining in England. This is what had happened to Ranjitsinjhi Vibhaji, Maharaja of Nawanagar, although his reason for staying was entirely innocent; after leaving Cambridge in 1895 he spent the next nine years playing cricket for Sussex and England and was twice champion batsman of All England. However laudable this might have been, Curzon was determined to restrict Indian princes in their peregrinations in 1899, an imposition which the gaikwar told him was intolerable.37
Raj Page 42