By this date, a rift had opened up between the government and a prince who had hitherto been a pliant, well-intentioned anglophile and earned himself elevation from a nineteen- to twenty-one-gun salute. Sayagi Rao was seriously flirting with Indian nationalism. His administration contained two prominent Indian National Congress members: Aurobindo Ghose, who worked for the gaikwar’s government from 1893 to 1908; and, as revenue minister from 1904, Romesh Dutt, a former member of the ICS and Congress president. Sayagi Rao was open about his sympathies: he informed Curzon that he paid 1,000 rupees to Congress funds and had, in 1892, given £1,000 to help secure the election of a leading Congress man, Dabhadi Naoroji, as MP for Holborn.38 This conversion to liberal nationalism was not surprising in an intelligent man who had been deliberately brought up in the British liberal tradition and who studied political thought.
However unwelcome it might have been, Sayagi Rao’s conversion to Indian nationalism was insufficient reason for his removal. Moreover, given the current political climate in Britain and India, such an act would have been extremely provocative; evicting a prince who had been found guilty of murder was one thing, deposing one merely for his opinions was another. The gaikwar was officially dismissed as an eccentric, somewhat vain weathercock who was easily swayed and not to be taken too seriously. His personal idiosyncracies rather than his political opinions were used to explain publicly, if not excuse, his snub to the King Emperor at the 1911 Delhi durbar.
In private, officials were worried. Eight months after his show of independence, Sayagi Rao called on students at Baroda College to show their loyalty to India. No mention was made of allegiance to George V, which left the resident to conclude that the gaikwar was ‘at heart a nationalist’. He now represented a distinct danger, for his political inclinations and those of the men close to him might easily transform Baroda into a sanctuary for extreme nationalists and terrorists.
Successive residents were, therefore, ordered to keep him and his subjects under the tightest surveillance. During 1912 and 1913 Sayagi Rao’s arm was twisted to make him enforce the new anti-terrorist and sedition laws and expel all ‘anarchists and political agitators’ from Baroda. He was also asked to deliver a public address against anti-British subversion at his durbar, and instruct his diwan, B. L. Gupta, to dimiss all state employees who were hostile to the British government or associated with clandestine presses. With the approval of the resident, the mail of known Baroda dissidents was intercepted and opened, and two Baroda teachers were tracked by Madras police officers when they made a journey through India during which they made contact with Aurobindo Ghose. The gaikwar refused to sack them and procrastinated over the imposition of the gagging laws, but in the end he buckled under sustained pressure.39 In 1913 he was allowed to visit Europe again, ostensibly for medical treatment, but with a stern warning not to make contact with those exiled nationalists he had met on a previous tour.40 Instead, he had an audience with George V, confirming the official view that he ran with the hare and the hounds. At the end of April 1914 the resident reported that sedition in Baroda was on the wane. When he returned home in December, the gaikwar dutifully made cash contributions to the government’s war effort, but kept his views on the conflict to himself.41
Neither the gaikwar nor the officials who chivvied him seemed to have been aware of the irony of their situation. Here was an Indian prince who had lived up to the ideal set by the British and made himself an active partner with the Raj, ruling over what a British journalist described in 1902 as a ‘thoroughly well-governed Native state’.42 But Sayagi Rao’s concept of modernisation was not confined to the provision of proper drainage or funding a public museum, it embraced new ways of looking at India. This placed him beyond the pale as far as the British were concerned, for he was, after all, a ‘subordinate prince’. He was also exceptional; all but a tiny handful of princes remained aloof from the nationalist movement that was emerging during the 1880s and 1890s. As its nature became clearer, the great majority became apprehensive and drew closer to the government, often doing all in their power to quarantine their states from nationalist agitation.
Princely conservatism was welcomed by many of their subjects. When Jafar Ali Khan, the young Nawab of Cambay, and his diwan, a Brahmin lawyer, plunged into a programme of improvement in the 1880s the result was a peasant insurrection. Elementary public utilities cost money and taxes had to be increased. The rising was suppressed with the help of troops hurried from Bombay.43 Elsewhere, the pace of change was measured, sometimes to the point where it was scarcely noticeable. In turn-of-the-century Sirohi, a Rajput state of 2,000 square miles, the inhabitants ‘generally go abroad armed’. There was one school, one gaol and one dispensary for its population of 191,000, nearly all of whom were poor. As elsewhere in Rajputana, the most striking indication of British rule was a widespread enthusiasm for cricket.44
3
We are British Subjects:
Loyalty and Dissent,
1860 – 1905
I
One of the greatest puzzles about British India was the extent to which Indians felt affection for their rulers. There were strong bonds of attachment between Indian soldiers and their British officers; of this there can be no doubt. Men from warrior castes and martial races were instinctively drawn towards gallant officers who respected their traditions and cared for their welfare. But what about the great mass of Indians? Of course many rarely saw a European of any kind, and knew of them only by reputation. At any one time during this period there were seldom more than 100,000 of them scattered among a population of over 300 million, and most were British soldiers who lived in cantonments concentrated in the northern half of the country. In any case, as British officials frequently pointed out, there was no such thing as public opinion in India, despite rapid spread of the telegraph, railways and postal system and an explosion in the number and circulation of newspapers. Not that this mattered greatly; by 1900 total newspaper circulation was 150,000, serving a literate population of between four and five million. The remaining 298 million Indians could not read and had no way to make their collective feelings known, a fact which did not prevent British administrators and Indian nationalists from claiming that they were the authentic voice of India.
There was some anecdotal evidence as to how Indians felt about their white rulers, and it was not comforting. They ‘like our laws but hate us and would like to be independent’, Lieutenant James Whitton noted in his diary after he and his brother officers of the Royal Scots had spent an evening discussing the virtues of the Raj with the Nawab of Trimulgharry and his guests in December 1867. There was some consolation in that one of the nawab’s kinsmen had observed that British rule was infinitely preferable to Russian, which he feared might prove too ‘harsh’.1 George Yule, a Calcutta businessman sympathetic to Indian aspirations (he was unanimously elected president of the Indian National Congress for 1888–89), was convinced the natives had no attachment at all for the Raj: ‘It creates in them no enthusiasm, evokes no warmth of liking, produces no healthy desire for permanence or good fortune.’2 According to Man Ghose, a Calcutta barrister, the fault lay with individuals. Presumably writing from experience, he claimed in 1868 that ICS recruits ‘hate and despise the natives with all the true “damned nigger” fervour of speech and energy of action’.3 One man’s generalisation cannot stand as an indictment of an entire community, but in 1876 Lord Salisbury, the Secretary of State for India, cited British ‘arrogance’ as the main obstacle to warmer relations with the princes.4
The above judgements reflected directly or indirectly the view of well-to-do Indians who nursed private grudges against the British. Within princely circles there was residual resentment against a race which had curtailed the independence of the states, and a member of Bengal’s extremely touchy educated élite was bitter because the British denied him and his kind what they believed was their proper place in the administration. But what of the masses, the rural peasantry of India?
; As might be expected, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the voice of the old-guard ICS, claimed that all British officials were revered by the people of the countryside as ‘the protectors of the poor’, a phrase he had heard them use many times.5 This was not just the wishful thinking of an old man looking back to an imagined golden past. Peasants in arms against their landlords at Pabna in Bengal in 1873 described themselves as ‘ryots of the Queen of England’ and believed that the government would defend them from grasping landlords. Two years later, peasants in the Deccan imagined that the lady who appeared on the silver rupees, Queen Victoria, would come to their assistance against local moneylenders.6 This simple faith in a benevolent authority which, once it knew of injustice, would move to eradicate it was not exceptional, although it must have been hard to preserve in the face of annual tax demands. But then, under the infinitely more oppressive régime in contemporary Russia, the peasantry believed that the Czar was their friend and would act immediately to reduce their suffering – that is, if he knew of it. During the next century their descendants would say exactly the same of Stalin.
The official mind imagined that the masses would render loyalty in return for good government. Lord Lytton rejected this contract, believing that the peasantry was an ‘inert mass’ which could only be stirred by its natural overlords, the princes. ‘The only political representatives of native opinion are the Baboos, whom we have educated to write semi-seditious articles in the native Press,’ he told Salisbury in 1876. The minister concurred, and warned Lytton that the babus, a term with undertones of condescension which embraced all educated Bengalis, were a potential threat. They would, he predicted, act as ‘the opposition in quiet times [and] rebels in times of trouble’.7 Not long after, he observed, ‘I can imagine no more terrible future for India than that of being governed by Competition Baboos.’ Indians, lettered or otherwise, were psychologically and temperamentally unfit to rule themselves. In 1892, when he was Prime Minister, Salisbury insisted that: ‘The principle of election or government by representation is not an eastern idea, it does not fit eastern tradition or eastern minds.’8 This doctrine was accepted by Conservatives and formed the bedrock of their policy towards India for the next generation. As for the Raj, it would flourish so long as it never faltered. Indians, Salisbury believed, were capable of asking only one political question, ‘Which is likely to win?’ If it was the government, then they would support it.9
In so far as it represented the collective views of a tiny educated class, Indian opinion could either be treated with cordial condescension or overlooked. British public opinion could not be ignored. In 1888, John Gorst, the Conservative Under-Secretary of State for India, asked Lansdowne to send him vital reports as quickly as possible so that he was always prepared to answer any awkward Commons questions on India. Secretaries of State had now to tread warily and project an image of the Raj as ‘progressive and reforming’, if they were to keep Parliamentary confidence.10 Criticism and needling queries came almost exclusively from the Liberal and Irish Home Rule party benches, where there were always MPs ready to expose an Indian injustice or administrative anomaly. During the spring session of 1901, Swift McNeil, the member for Donegal South, wryly exposed the utter lack of Indian experience of the newly appointed Governor of Madras, Lord Ampthill, and expressed outrage against Curzon’s restrictions on the princes’ foreign travel. In the same spirit, W. S. Caine, the Liberal MP for Camborne, asked why 85 per cent of the land revenue from Surat had been paid by moneylenders and not the famine-stricken ryots? He also suggested that India’s memorial to Queen Victoria might take the form ‘of some permanent benefit upon the suffering masses in India’.11 The implications of these and many other similar enquiries was that India was a far-from-benevolent despotism in which the impoverished masses suffered from hunger and over-taxation.
Interest in Indian affairs had grown steadily since the 1870s. This increase was paralleled by the emergence of Gladstonian Liberalism as a force in British political life. Its backbone and chief beneficiary was the middle class, for it was a creed which prized men who had raised themselves through hard work and natural talent, qualities which also marked them out for political responsibility. Liberals were, therefore, susceptible to appeals from the nascent Indian middle class which, in large part, shared their outlook. There was also within Gladstonian Liberalism a strong vein of libertarianism that made it deeply distrustful of imperialism and all forms of autocratic government. If India was to have this type of government, then it should acknowledge the promise of equal rights for all made by the Queen in 1858. As for the Irish Home Rule party, its members instinctively opposed British imperialism and equated the denial of political rights in Ireland with their suppression in India.
II
Indian political consciousness was the direct result of an educational revolution in India which had been under way since 1860. In 1855 there had been 47 English schools in Bengal, in 1882 there were 209 and in 1902, 1,481. In that year there were roughly 250,000 pupils taught by 12,000 teachers. One third of these schools were private, enjoying no government subsidy and sometimes employing badly-qualified staff. Nonetheless, these and the other schools were enthusiastically patronised by prosperous families keen for their sons to move on in the world. In his parents’ eyes, the ‘good boy’ was a pupil who dutifully walked to and from school and devoted all his time and energy to his studies.12 His introduction to the English language and, through it, the literature, science and philosophy of Europe, would provide him with what one senior civil servant called ‘the priceless intellectual gift of Rome . . . the conception of law as the governing power’.13 Another official, of the muscular persuasion, feared that the Indian schoolboy suffered from a dangerous obsession with book-learning. Long hours of reading deprived him of ‘public school manliness’, with the result that many educated Indians were ‘without true strength, character and with ill-balanced minds’.14
Very few girls joined this quest for knowledge and qualifications. In 1870 the government was spending £5,645 on their education out of a total budget of £316,500. These figures reflected the numbers involved: out of 1.1 million Indians (0.5 per cent of the population) undergoing secondary schooling, only 50,000 were girls. Six women graduated from Indian universities in 1881–82 and they, in common with other educated Indian women, had got where they had through unusually enlightened parents rather than official policy. Even among the more Westernised Hindu and Muslim families, old shibboleths about the ornamental and domestic role of women still held true.
Five universities had been founded in 1857 and they grew swiftly, planting ‘colonies’ in the form of outlying colleges in the manner of London University, which had been the model for Indian higher education. Calcutta led the way, becoming by 1900 the largest university in the world with over 8,000 students, just over a third of all those in India. Entry was not easy and depended on a mastery of English as well as a knowledge of Greek, Latin, History, Indian Geography, Geometry, Algebra and Arithmetic. In 1865 Calcutta’s entry paper required candidates to explain such phrases as ‘Aonion Muses’, ‘Elijah’s burning wheels’ and the meaning of words like ‘talisman’, ‘polyglot’ and ‘laity’. The following year entrants were expected to know the meaning of the vernacular statement: ‘German horses are weak and washy, they are inferior in bottom.’15
University study was intense and failure rates high. Nearly all students lived in cramped lodgings, ate poor food and were married, which, their lecturers thought, prevented them from philandering.16 Study was often undertaken in gloomy rooms and there was excessive cramming. One Calcutta tutor observed:
Examinations exercise a tyranny over the lives of most college students. The extraordinary prevalence of ‘keys’, with model questions and answers and such like meretricious aids to a degree, sold by every bookseller and advertised by every post.17
Arts subjects predominated at Indian universities. Between 1857 and 1882 Calcutta produced 1,589 arts graduates and 176 doctors of
medicine. Of the arts graduates, 581 entered the law and 526 public service, which were the ultimate goals of all students.18 The system responded to students’ aspirations, but whether at the time India needed a plethora of lawyers and arts graduates is open to question. Medicine certainly lagged behind. In 1912 there were only 269 doctors within the Central India Agency, an area with a population of 9.3 million. In that year they treated 1.72 million patients. Matters were improving thanks to a new regional medical college, largely financed by local princes, which had just under a hundred students.19
What appears with hindsight to have been a neglect of scientific and technical subjects with a practical value was a reflection on the nature of the Raj. It was strong on vision, but weak when it came to turning dreams into reality. Financial considerations always outweighed all others, which was why India, unlike Britain after 1870, lacked a system of universal education. English-language schools were confined to cities and towns and they, like the universities, were allowed to develop their own curriculums which reflected the career hopes of students rather than national needs. Most important of all, there was never an attempt to create a nationwide primary education programme of the sort which was being introduced in contemporary Japan.20 Instead, the government transferred available funds to urban secondary schools where places were taken by boys whose parents were rich. As a result, India’s peasantry remained untouched by the new learning.
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