The answer was a revision of frontier policy undertaken by Curzon in 1901. It was largely an exercise in cost-cutting, with the replacement of Anglo-Indian garrisons by a locally-recruited tribal militia and gendarmerie under British command. The region became the North-West Frontier province and was split between a ‘settled’ area to the north and east, and a tribal, adjacent to the Afghan frontier. Overall political control was in the hands of a commissioner in Peshawar who led a team of political officers. As before, their mandate was to prevent the pot from boiling over through a mixture of firmness, forebearance and strength of character. Short-term tranquillity would lay the foundation for a metamorphosis which would allow the region to be assimilated fully into the Raj. Sir Michael O’Dwyer, who worked in the area between 1901 and 1908, believed that, as in the Punjab, its everyday government was best undertaken by soldiers who naturally understood how to handle ‘a virile and martial population’.
Old habits died hard, and British and Indian troops still had to be summoned to deliver the occasional clout. In 1901–02 they were employed to extract unpaid fines from the Mahsuds and destroy the fort of a persistent robber, Sailgi. He died during the fighting, and afterwards O’Dwyer, who had watched the siege, heard how he had considered shooting down a British officer with whom he was negotiating. He was forestalled by his mother, who told Sailgi, ‘The sahib has given you no cause. He has spoken to you fair.’ ‘He was a brave man and not without a sense of honour,’ O’Dwyer concluded, and Kipling would have agreed. There was romance even in the reality of the frontier.
There was also a dark side to the frontier, although it was kept out of the papers. After the 1877–78 punitive campaign against the Jowaki Afridis, there were mess rumours that irregular troops had burned alive some women during the destruction of one village.42 During another expedition in 1888, houses were looted before they burned, although this was officially forbidden.43 Fears that the new .303 ammunition was less effective against charging fanatics than its predecessor, the .457, led to a series of secret tests during the Chitral operations. Captured mullahs were executed by firing squads using the two types of bullet and comparative post mortems were then undertaken; the army thought it advisable that this investigation was kept out of the press.44 The use of Dum Dum bullets in the Tirah campaign was made public, prompting questions from Irish MPs who pressed the government on the precise nature of the wounds they caused.45
The Indian vernacular press and Liberal and Irish anti-imperialists were always on the look-out for some incident which could be used to tarnish the army and the Indian government. The frontier cause célèbre was that of Colonel Hooper, Provost Marshal in Mandalay during pacification operations there at the end of 1885 and a zealous photographer. According to an eyewitness report in The Times of 21 January 1886, he had been responsible for ‘ghastly scenes’ during executions, when he had set up his tripod and camera to take pictures of condemned men the moment they were struck by bullets. He did, in fact, photograph firing squads, but none of his surviving images show men dying. The report outraged Liberal and Irish MPs, who demanded an explanation from the Secretary of State for India, Lord Randolph Churchill. The local authorities quickly responded and Hooper was obliged to resign from the army. There were other Parliamentary questions about the extension of martial law and intimidation of prisoners, who were offered a choice between becoming informers or facing the firing squad.46 Thereafter, officers in Burma trod carefully. In November the local commander, Colonel Sir George White, warned his subordinates to avoid ‘anything repugnant to public opinion’ during sorties against rebels.47 His caveat was probably unnecessary, for press interest in Burma had waned; there were few exciting stories to be found in what had become a tedious war of attrition.
IV
India’s largest north-eastern campaigns were directed against the kingdom of Burma for familiar reasons: infractions of treaties and its rulers’ mistreatment of British subjects. Conquest was undertaken piecemeal and in three phases. In 1824–26 and 1853 expeditionary forces nibbled away at the coastal regions and, in November 1885, the British soldier first came to Mandalay. He was virtually unopposed, for the rump of the Burmese state fell apart from the top downwards, with King Theebaw quietly going into exile. Resistance in central and northern Burma flared up spontaneously in the following months among jobless soldiers and other sections of a racially fragmented society. They had no ‘national’ programme beyond an antipathy towards an alien régime, and no central leadership. The British called the insurgents ‘dacoits’, but perversely the Burmese regarded them as freedom fighters, even though they preyed on their villages. Local sentiment and fear of reprisals made finding collaborators difficult. White complained that: ‘It is evidently against the instincts of the Burmese, as it is against the feelings of the Irish, to turn informers.’ The only answer was to hit them hard, and column commanders were ordered to ‘kill as many of them as you can’, particularly the leaders.48 It was grinding work in a countryside of rain forest criss-crossed by rivers, and losses from fever were high, with over 1,700 soldiers being invalided home during the first eight months of 1887.
Matters got so bad that Roberts, the commander-in-chief, spent some time in Rangoon sorting them out during the winter of 1886–87. He recommended more cash for spies and native trackers and a special gendarmerie, largely recruited from the Punjab, to take over from soldiers for whom the climate was too much.49 Operations dragged on until 1892, after which the Burmese hinterland was officially declared pacified. Thirty years after, George Orwell, on joining the Burmese police, discovered that the old antipathy towards the British was as strong as ever.
Resistance, or rather a refusal to renounce ancient customs, persisted among the tribes who lived along the Indo-Burmese border. Like the Burmese, they were confident that high hills and dense jungle gave them an immunity from punishment, and they were correct up to a point. The going was so rough and the climate so unkind that only Indian troops, mainly Gurkhas, could be deployed for pacification, with, of course, British officers, who were expected to be fit and undeterred by geography. The latter had hindered all attempts to extend administrative control over the Lushai hills in north-eastern Bengal until 1888, when the government’s interest was involuntarily aroused by the murder of two British officers attached to a survey party. It was alleged that they had been killed by a chief who required their heads as ransom for his wife, who was being held hostage by a neighbour.50 Two campaigns were needed to subdue tribal opposition and there were two uprisings in 1892 and 1895–96. Thereafter, government was minimal, with district officers co-operating with the headmen of nomadic tribes who were, in effect, the sole representatives of the Raj.
The Raj had made virtually no impact on the Abor country, by the headwaters of the Brahmaputra, north-east of Assam. It was a wilderness of narrow, wooded gorges and bamboo undergrowth, heavy rainfall and determined leeches which slid through soldiers’ bootlace holes or dropped from trees and slithered down their shirts. To these obstacles were added malaria, dysentery and the Abor tribesmen, who were good bowmen and skilled at rolling down rocks on their enemies’ heads. There were four attempts to bring them within the Raj’s pale between 1858 and 1894, and each failed. A fifth was ordered in July 1911 after they had murdered Noel Williamson, an assistant political officer, and his bearers. He believed that he had won the Abors’ trust and had, therefore, gone on his tour without an escort.
The 2,000-strong detachment, as usual nearly all Gurkhas, was well dosed with quinine before and during the campaign, and each man carried an antidote to the aconite poison with which the Abors tipped their arrows. After a few days in their homeland, Major A. B. Lindsay told his grandmother, ‘Personally I would give the frontier to the Chinese if they want it, I have never seen a more awful spot.’ He saw very few Abors, who hid deep in the bush, occasionally emerging for an ambush. After one, Lindsay observed: ‘I hate shooting a man who is on the run and that is what they are. They are curs o
f the first water, but extraordinarily adept at concealing themselves.’ Others were less squeamish. One Gurkha officer was ‘so determined to kill his man’ that he chased him into the bush, firing his revolver and momentarily masking his own platoon’s fire. Deprived of a stand-up scrap, the troops looted and then burned abandoned villages – Abor goats and chickens providing welcome fresh meat.51
The Abor expedition’s baggage had been carried by hundreds of Naga coolies, each carrying a spear and hoping to return home with an opponent’s head as well as his pay. Another north-east border tribe, and clearly no friends of the Abors, they also had a remarkable record for keeping the British at bay. A year before the Abor campaign, they had required ‘severe punishment’ for continuing to practise domestic slavery and making slave raids on their neighbours.52 Official policy towards the Nagas was the traditional one adopted for backward and isolated animists: gradual conversion to more settled, civilised habits.
It was a painfully slow, uphill task and recidivism was all too common. As late as 1926–28 political officers accompanied by small parties of troops were travelling from village to village, freeing slaves and extracting promises from chiefs to abandon the sacrifice of children. Each chief bit on a tiger’s tooth and declared that, if he broke his vow, he would be eaten by a tiger. The senior political agent, H. E. Mitchell, altered the ceremony by substituting a bullet, after having given the oath-taker and his warriors a demonstration of Lewis machine-gun fire. It was, he claimed, a valuable ‘eye-opener’ for people whose only firearms were flintlock muskets. In one village, a priest who sacrificed children was encountered and told that ‘he might be clever enough to play on the imagination of his ignorant, opium-sodden villagers, but he could not succeed with the government’.53 Coaxing and coercing in this manner had some effect, for in 1928 only two human sacrifices were reported. There may well have been more, for many Naga villages had yet to be included on official maps and had never been visited by a white man.
It is still surprising that, within twenty years of its demise, the Raj had made only the slightest impact on some areas of India. Admittedly they were all but inaccessible and, thanks to the nature of their inhabitants, needed cautious treatment. The frontier tribes were never in any sense a political danger, for their suspicion of the Raj was based upon a defence of tradition and a desire to keep Britain at arm’s length. Indeed, when the government began to make concessions to Indian nationalism, Pathans were puzzled and asked, ‘Who but the weak would wish to abdicate power?’54 All these men wanted were favourable terms which acknowledged their way of life, and the Raj was prepared to offer them in return for relative tranquillity. Total peace was unobtainable when, as Lord Salisbury observed, ‘A barbarous mountain population [exists] by the side of a civilised population dwelling in the plains.’ The best and only policy was a mixture of persuasion and chastisement, never overdoing the latter: ‘We must gradually convert to our way of thinking in matters of civilisation these splendid tribes.’55
This approach fitted well with the broad philosophy of a Raj which saw itself as paternal and benevolent, preferring reasoned argument to intimidation. Moreover, it liked to think of itself occupying a moral universe superior to that of its subjects. This was why Curzon was appalled when a senior officer suggested that the problem of illicit rifles on the frontier could be solved by covertly flooding the area with doctored ammunition which, when fired, would explode in a tribesman’s face.56 The alternative to the carrot and stick was outright conquest, and with it the prospect of extended operations of the sort which had been seen in Burma. The cost would be unbearable, the chances of success on the North-West Frontier very slim and, in any case, civilians were never happy devolving power to soldiers. Nor would the British government back such a course; there were fears that frontier operations in 1895 and 1897–98 had got out of hand and their value had been criticised in the Commons.
Henceforward extreme caution was the order of the day. When Lord Minto, the Viceroy, visited the frontier in April 1906, he found the tribesmen calm. His wife noted in her diary that they ‘fight for the love of fighting, and though at the moment they are contented and peaceful, they say openly that they must soon relieve the monotony by having a rising’.57 The tedium soon proved too much and during 1907 the Mohmands stepped up their raids on their neighbours. Official patience snapped early in the following year, and a punitive force was ordered into their country with strict instructions from London not to stay too long and avoid annexation at all costs. General Sir James Willcocks, an old hand at this sort of business, took command and delivered the necessary blows within a few weeks, much to the relief of Lord Morley, the Liberal Secretary of State, who had an aversion to warfare of any kind.58 But there was more fighting in the offing; of this Willcocks was sure. After watching eight swordsmen engage a party of sepoys and kill and injure five before being wiped out, he commented: ‘Surely a religion which breeds such men can never perish!’ Nor, it appears, could the way of life of the frontier tribesman.
6
Conciliatory Sugar
Plums: Compromise and
Coercion, 1906 – 14
I
Curzon’s departure for home at the close of 1905 had marked the end of an era in Indian history. Henceforward, the Raj he had tried so hard to strengthen was thrown on to the defensive against mounting pressure from a growing minority of its own subjects and left-wing politicians in London, whose natural sympathies lay with underdogs of all kinds and for whom empires, however benevolent their intentions, were essentially despotic. The tempo of political activity within India increased and found new channels, most significantly the enlistment of the masses. The geography of dissent was also changing; hitherto confined to Bengal and the hinterland of Bombay, it spread to the United Provinces, now Uttar Pradesh (Awadh and Agra), and the Punjab. At the same time, the impatient, mostly young men and women, discarded the constraints of the older generation of nationalists who had always kept their activities within the letter of the law. The strain proved too much for Congress, which split in December 1907 between moderates and extremists, the latter led by Tilak, who wanted to extend the Bengal boycott of British goods to the rest of India. He also urged a campaign of non-co-operation, designed to hinder day-to-day administration.
The task of coping with this rising discontent fell to a new Secretary of State, John Morley, and a new Viceroy, Gilbert Elliot, the fourth Earl of Minto. He was a Unionist while Morley was a Liberal who took office after his party’s landslide victory in January 1906. Congress applauded its success in the expectation of concessions from the party that backed Irish Home Rule, many of whose members were sympathetic to Indian aspirations. Twenty years of Conservative rigour tempered by kindness were over, and a period of far-reaching reform appeared imminent. Morley’s arrival at the India Office was particularly welcomed; he was a Liberal of the old school, who took his philosophy from J. S. Mill and his political ideals from his old mentor, Gladstone. Like him, Morley was ‘an old man in a hurry’, for he was sixty-seven and anxious to make his political mark in what was his first senior ministerial post. Like many intellectuals in politics, he was vain, willful and determined that his ideas would prevail come what may. From the start, he behaved like a master of India, and for the next four years he was.
Minto was, therefore, nudged into the role of a junior partner, which peeved him greatly. He was an open-minded paternalist, a Whig grandee who, like so many of his kind, had fallen out of love with Liberalism when it had embraced Irish Home Rule. He was an experienced and diligent proconsul who had served in the 1878–80 Afghan war, and had been a successful Governor-General of Canada. By no means blind to the faults of his underlings, he was prepared to stand by them when the going got hard, a loyalty which set him on a collision course with Morley. The Secretary of State distrusted India’s men on the spot, whom he suspected were Caesarian by instinct and prone to regard coercion as the only solution to political restlessness. In his autobiography
he recalled an exchange with one of his staff about the flogging of ‘political offenders’. The official explained that ‘the great executive officers never like or trust lawyers’. ‘I tell you why,’ snapped Morley, ‘’tis because they don’t like or trust law: they in their hearts believe before all else the virtues of will and abitrary power.’ Like Edmund Burke over a century before, Morley feared that his countrymen succumbed easily to the virus of authoritarianism the moment they landed in India. There was, he once wrote, ‘a great risk of our contact with barbarous races reducing our methods to theirs’. On another occasion he confessed that he thought it would have been better for his countrymen’s souls if Clive had lost Plassey.1
History could not be reversed, and so Morley saw his duty as promoting in India the principles cherished by the great Whig–Liberal luminaries seventy years before. ‘Slowly, prudently, judiciously’, the Raj would spread ‘those ideals of justice, law, humanity, which are the foundations of our own civilization’.2 What India needed was an end to the British monopoly of power which ensured that Europeans dominated every area of administration from the running of the railways and post office to the provincial and viceregal councils. Admission of qualified Indians to these enclaves would eliminate the sense of racial humiliation so deeply felt by the better educated, and quicken the pace of progress. Democracy was not part of the way forward for Morley, who believed that it was a system which flourished only in temperate climes inhabited by Anglo-Saxons.3 This was not racial arrogance but an admission that it was impractical, possibly dangerous to apply democratic principles to a people fragmented by religion, race and caste. If they were, minority groups and interests might be overridden and a large section of the population could find itself perpetually alienated from the government. When the time came for framing reform, both Morley and Minto took deliberate steps to see that peculiar interests were specially catered for. Of these, the largest was the 62 million-strong Muslim community, which was already becoming anxious about its future.
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