Putting aside potentially tendentious issues of social reform, Congress turned its attention exclusively to securing a say in India’s government. It had two main functions: as a lobby exercising pressure in Calcutta and London, and as a forum for Indian opinion – or, in the words of one Congressman, ‘the germ of a Native Parliament’. ‘We are British subjects,’ insisted Naoroji, and if the Raj denied Indians their rights as such, it was no more than another Asiatic despotism.41 The quest for these rights was pursued along conventional political lines through resolutions, petitions and lobbying. During the past thirty years Indians who had visited Britain found that there was a knot of British MPs who sympathised with their aspirations and were willing to promote them. Naoroji, whose business regularly took him to London, was among the first to cultivate these friends. Converts were drawn from radical Liberals and Irish nationalists who agreed that Indian interests would be best served if an Indian could speak for them in the Commons.
In 1884 Naoroji was offered an Irish constituency and in July 1886 he contested the London seat of Finsbury (Holborn) as a Gladstonian Liberal. He lost heavily, a casualty of the public reaction against the former Prime Minister’s conversion to Irish Home Rule. Naoroji tried again in the July 1892 general election, this time as candidate for Finsbury Central, and won by three votes. His Conservative opponent alleged he had illegally hired cabs to convey his supporters to the polls and demanded a recount. The charges were repudiated and after the second count Naoroji’s majority was raised to six!42 He lost his seat in the 1895 general election, as a result of the national swing to the Conservatives. Naoroji had made his point; henceforward, Congress would conduct one part of its campaign within the House of Commons. Its support there was growing, thanks in large part to its London branch which had been started by a former ICS official, Sir Charles Wedderburn. Through newspaper and journal articles and lobbying MPs, he estimated that after the January 1906 general election there were at least 200 members sympathetic to Congress.43
Congress carefully nurtured its British allies. Charles Bradlaugh, the notorious atheist MP for Northampton, who had invited Naoroji and another prominent Congressmen to address his constituents on the misfortunes of India, was, by way of return, asked to attend the 1890 annual meeting of Congress. Proud of his honorary title as ‘the member for India’, he visited the country. ‘The poor Hindoo folk’, he wrote afterwards, ‘seem to worship me’, but he noticed that Rajputs, Parsis and Marathas appeared hostile to Congress.44 Four years later, Congress invited the firebrand Irish MP, Michael Davitt, to become its president for a year, but he declined. There were also a small group of British Congress supporters, most notably Wedderburn and another retired ICS member, Allan Octavian Hume. They added their weight to a systematic propaganda campaign in India and Britain which was designed to outline Congress’s campaign for political reform and highlight the shortcomings of the Raj.
IV
The failures of the government and the misdeeds of its servants were the stock-in-trade of the Indian newspapers. When, in 1883, Hume had urged Ripon to stick by the Ilbert bill because it had the backing of ‘public opinion’, he had in mind the burgeoning Indian press. It was one of the most remarkable by-products of British rule and, as it turned out, one of its most influential gravediggers. Newspapers in India had a long history which stretched back to the 1790s, and there was an equally long history of official attempts to control them. The Marquess Wellesley had done so, as a wartime measure, and restrictions remained until the 1830s, when the Whig Governor-General Bentinck removed them. In Britain a free press was regarded as the cornerstone of national liberty and an unfree press was the hallmark of tyranny. This laudable application of a principle of British freedom to India was part of that wider Whig programme of uplift and liberalisation. It had unforeseen repercussions.
From the 1860s Indian newspapers and journals proliferated. Most were in native languages with small print-runs and a local circulation, although the expanding rail network and an efficient postal system made it possible for weekly journals to command an extensive readership. By 1885 there were 319 vernacular titles with a total circulation of 150,000, and 96 English language papers with a circulation of 59,000. Most of the native papers were cheap weeklies costing a quarter of anna (less than 1⁄2p). Setting up and running such a newspaper was inexpensive, with 2,000 rupees (£160) covering the costs of a hand-operated press and other essentials. Muhammad Ismail Khan, whose Moradabad news-sheet had a circulation of 200, made sixty rupees a month from his enterprise, paying his printer nine.45 There were a handful of journals with a big readership; in 1895 the Bengali edition of the Calcutta Bangabasi was selling 20,000 copies a week and the Hindi 10,000, putting them far ahead of their rivals.
Like its competitors, the ultra-nationalist Bangabasi depended heavily on stories taken from other journals and comment, most of it knockabout polemic against the government, although, in its case, shafts were also launched against Congress for its lack of spirit. Typical was the following from another Calcutta paper, Sahachar, of 25 August 1890:
PUPIL: Sir, in what relation do Englishmen stand to the people of India?
TEACHER: The same in which a tiger stands to a lamb . . . the Englishman broke the necks and drank the blood of immeasurable Indians.46
Personal abuse of officials was commonplace and usually crude. In 1889 the Punjabi Hasicher Patrika described the province’s Lieutenant-Governor, Sir George Campbell, as: ‘The baboon Campbell with a hairy body . . . His eyes flash forth in anger and his tail is all in flames.’47 The English language press with a predominantly European readership answered in kind. Kipling’s old paper, the Allahabad Pioneer (circulation 5,000) and the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette (circulation 4,000), both mouthpieces for British and official opinion, never missed a chance to slate Congress. When Naoroji stood for Parliament, the former quoted Sir Lepel Griffin’s comment that he ‘no more speaks for Indians than a Polish jew settled in Whitechapel represents the people of England’.48
A robust, adversarial press had an enormous impact on Indian politics since the educated classes were avid newspaper readers and, like their counterparts elsewhere in the world, tended to believe what they saw in print. Unrelenting criticism of government policy, jeers at officials and allegations of abuses (several papers claimed that Tikendrajit Singh had been tortured before his trial in Manipur) were corrosive and undermined the prestige of the Raj. It had no choice but to live with this evil. Any attempt to fetter the press would have caused a ruckus inside India and in Westminster. There was, however, an Official Secrets Act in 1888 which forbade the unauthorised publication of government papers.
A waspish native press made it less and less easy for the Raj to implement policies which impinged on Indian sensibilities. Moreover, and this added immeasurably to the government’s difficulties, the telegraph carried news fast from one part of the country to another and was impossible to control. The new official predicament was illustrated by reactions to the measures adopted by the Bombay authorities to stem an epidemic of bubonic plague which began in the autumn of 1896. Science had not yet identified the precise cause of an infection which passed into the human bloodstream by way of fleas whose normal hosts were rats. Nevertheless, informed medical opinion believed disease could be arrested by a strict quarantine of the plague-ridden areas, the isolation of victims and disinfecting their homes with limewash. This was extraordinarily difficult in Bombay, where the centres of contagion were tenement blocks of between five and seven storeys which housed as many as 1,000 people, and the city’s three public and thirty private hospitals were overwhelmed by the numbers of patients. Interestingly, the best was one of the latter, run by the Parsi community.49
At first, the official handling of the epidemic had been feeble. A jittery Elgin feared that over-zealous implementation of the anti-plague code would antagonise Hindus and Muslims, but as the death toll rose and under pressure from Hamilton, the Secretary of State, a more rigorou
s approach was adopted.50 In February 1897 a ban was imposed on the annual haj (the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca) and railway passengers were forced to take disinfectant baths at stations. Existing procedures were stringently enforced and tension increased as search parties, often including British troops, scoured Bombay looking for fresh victims. Purdah was disregarded and Hindu women were distressed by being forced to strip to the waist so that their armpits could be examined for the swellings which were the first symptom of infection. Across the country there was an outcry which was taken up by the press. In May, Bal Gangadhai Tilak, the owner-editor of the local Maratha weekly Kesari (circulation 13,000), denounced W. C. Rand, one of the co-ordinators of the anti-plague measures, as ‘suspicious, sullen and tyrannical’. Seven weeks later, Rand and Lieutenant C. E. Ayerst were shot dead by a pair of Hindu youths in Poona.
The murders shocked the British community and many Congress supporters, including Romesh Chandra Dutt. No senior British official had been assassinated since 1872 when the Viceroy, Lord Mayo, had been killed by a Muslim fanatic during a tour of the Andaman islands penal colony. In London, Hamilton believed that the outrage was directly linked to the anti-government press which, he believed, was encouraging terrorism as it had done in Ireland in the 1870s and 1880s.51 His apprehension had some substance. Tilak was a Maratha, a chitpavan (high-caste Hindu) and militant nationalist. A member of Congress, his nationalism looked back for inspiration to Hindu resistance against the Mughals and forward to complete swaraj (self-rule). Violence justified this end and Tilak had been the moving force behind the revival of Hindu festivals and the cult of Shivaji, a seventeenth-century Maratha warrior hero who had fought for independence against the Mughal empire. His association with the Hindu past had brought him into contact with local militant Hindu secret societies. This underground movement had been the nursery for the assassins, the Chapekar brothers, who were subsequently arrested, tried and hanged. Chitpavan Brahmins, they represented a new, violent strand in Indian nationalism, for they cast themselves in the mould of the old heroes whom Tilak had exalted. Damodar Chapekar had once written: ‘We shall risk our lives on the battlefield in national war, we shall spill upon the earth the life-blood of the enemies [who] destroy [our] religion.’52 The brothers soon attracted a cult following among young Hindus. Tilak was charged with sedition on the grounds that his attack on Rand had been an incitement to violence, found guilty and given eighteen months. The three Indians on the jury dissented from the verdict but were outvoted by their European colleagues.
The Bombay plague measures led to further trouble. There was a hartal (strike and closure of all shops and businesses) against them and in October a crowd of Muslim mill-workers attacked an army doctor, murdered two British soldiers and burned down a hospital. With or without the encouragement of a hostile press, the Indian peasantry became suspicious of all efforts to improve their health. There were rumours that inmates were tortured in hospitals, that innoculation would make a Muslim abandon his faith, and in Cawnpore in 1900 a mob demolished a hospital, killing several attendants.53 For the men striving to combat disease and the English-language press, these acts were manifestations of gross ignorance and bigotry. In Indian eyes they were gestures whose roots lay in a sense of powerlessness in the face of an authority which could ride roughshod over them whenever it chose.
V
When Curzon disembarked at Bombay on the very last day of 1898 he was determined to reassert British power in India and revitalise the Raj. He was approaching his fortieth birthday and possessed a self-confidence and intelligence which marked him out from his immediate predecessors. Unlike them, he had welcomed an appointment which he had been seeking for the past nine years, for he believed his intelligence, vision and temperament made him an ideal Viceroy. His career had followed the almost natural path of a talented young grandee: Eton, Balliol, a seat on the Conservative backbenches, Under-Secretary of State for India and then, in 1895, an under-secretaryship at the Foreign Office. In between his public duties, Curzon had travelled. Between 1887 and 1890 he had toured Canada, the United States, the Far East, India, Persia and Russia, where he visited its newly subdued Central Asian provinces. In 1894–95 he undertook a more ambitious and dangerous excursion which took him into the heart of that remote and turbulent region where the frontiers of the British, Russian and Chinese empire met amid the Pamirs. He then passed through Afghanistan to Kabul for an audience with the amir, for which he purchased a pair of gold epaulettes and some foreign orders and borrowed a large sword.
What he saw of the empire strengthened Curzon’s imperialism and taught him to respect the character and work of the proconsuls who ruled in Britain’s name. He detected the hand of Divine Providence behind the creation and expansion of an empire which was a supreme force for good in the world. The forces of destiny which had given Britain the mastery of India also demanded that the British remake and uplift its people. It was a duty that could only be performed properly by men of Curzon’s patrician cast of mind. Recent experiments with diluted Gladstonian Liberalism had been a recipe for drift and confusion in a country where there was no internal coherence beyond that provided by the state. Essays in democracy would bring chaos; to be effective, power had to flow downwards in India.
Before his departure, Curzon had been urged by the Queen Empress to treat her Indian subjects with tenderness, listen to their grievances and do all in his power to remedy them.54 He needed no such instructions for he saw himself as a model of an enlightened autocrat and possessed what one of Congress’s founding fathers, Surendraneth Banerjea, believed was a genuine love for the Indian people. They did not reciprocate this affection because, in Banerjea’s words, it took forms that ‘they did not appreciate [and] which excited their resentment’.55 Nonetheless, there was applause for Curzon’s release of the Natu brothers, who had been detained without trial under a regulation of 1827 for unproven association with terrorism. Injustice of another sort regularly attracted Curzon’s attention and aroused his anger: the impunity which British subjects appeared to enjoy whenever they assaulted Indians. So long as Europeans who attacked and even murdered natives got off scot-free or with minimal sentences, Indians would dismiss the Raj’s boast that its courts were impartial.
Early in his viceroyalty Curzon’s attention was called to two horrific cases which received considerable coverage in the Indian press. The first involved the mass rape of an elderly Burmese woman by a party of soldiers from the West Kent regiment in Rangoon. Their officers did nothing to apprehend the culprits and so Curzon stepped in and had the regiment posted to ‘the barren rocks of Aden’ for two years, with home leave banned. A second outrage occurred at Sialkot in April 1901, when a pair of drunken privates of the 9th Lancers kicked to death an Indian cook after he had failed to procure them prostitutes. Before dying, he identified his assailants, but the regiment refused to charge them. The commander-in-chief ordered the regiment’s winter leave to be cancelled, a mild rebuke for the calculated obstruction of justice. The lancers, who fancied themselves as an élite corps, blamed Curzon and mobilised their friends in the army’s high command and at court. But the facts of the case spoke for themselves and Curzon was vindicated, although not by diehards. When the 9th Lancers rode past the Viceroy during the 1902 Delhi durbar they were wildly cheered by a sympathetic crowd of Europeans. Curzon was philosophical about this demonstration, which said so much about the attitudes of his countrymen. Unperturbed, he recalled feeling ‘a certain gloomy pride in having dared to the right’. A few days later, after seven Welsh soldiers had murdered an Indian policeman on the Delhi ridge, Curzon remarked: ‘It is a pity we cannot have another Review for them to receive a popular ovation.’56
In fairness to the military authorities, they were not universally lax in dealing with soldiers who maltreated Indians. A gunner found guilty of striking an Indian woman and using insurbordinate language in 1878 was given just under a year’s detention, and two soldiers who assaulted natives during 1884 re
ceived sentences of 14 and 112 days’ hard labour. All the accused were drunk at the time of their offences.57 Casual violence of this kind seems to have been common on the railways, where a passenger’s ability to pay rather than the colour of his skin dictated which compartment he occupied. Racial friction was the result; in April 1896 a Punjabi entered a carriage to be greeted by a shout of ‘Out, you nigger’ from a Eurasian. A fight followed, which spilled on to the platform, where a European station master joined in, repeatedly thumping the Eurasian.58 Incidents like this, and the often exaggerated tokens of respect demanded by some Europeans, were reported in the native-language press, adding to a general impression that the British considered themselves a master race.
And some clearly did. Describing one of his many tiger shoots, Colonel Alban Wilson recalled how he demanded the services of a cowherd. The man refused, claiming that if his beasts were unattended they might be attacked by a leopard. Wilson then summoned another cowherd, ordered him to watch over both herds and warned, ‘If any of them are killed, I will send a big man from my camp who will beat your head into a jelly with his shoe.’59 Another keen sportsman, T. W. Webber, who joined the Forestry Department in 1861, remembered that some of his contemporaries regularly used the word ‘nigger’ and beat natives. He confessed to having twice struck an Indian and may have regretted it.60 Curzon imagined that such tolerance was rare among Europeans and blamed what today we call ‘racism’ for the fact that there was ‘no justice in this country in cases where Europeans and Natives are concerned’.61
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