The outcome of Montagu’s excursions and deliberations was the Montagu–Chelmsford reform proposals, which were first published in July 1918 and became law a year later. Two levels of elected government were established. The lower comprised eight provincial assemblies in which Indian ministers took charge of education, health, agriculture and the state budget; and the higher, a viceregal legislative assembly whose role was largely advisory. Both bodies operated under considerable restraints. The Viceroy and the provincial governors kept ultimate control over taxation and all security matters, and they could nominate a fifth of the membership of the assemblies and veto legislation. Indian representatives were chosen by an all-male electorate of five million, selected by property ownership, and officers and NCOs of the Indian army.42
The system was known as dyarchy and, in essence, was a natural extension of the Morley–Minto reforms, for, like them, it was contrived as a means of securing the co-operation of India’s middle classes. It was noted during the Commons debate on the measure that the property hurdle excluded five million literate Indians and nearly all ex-servicemen, both classes considered worthy by the left and the right respectively. Much decision-making was shifted from the centre to the regions and dyarchy further reduced the the power of the ICS. Montagu saw his act as a step towards Indian self-government, and so did his critics, who found the prospect alarming. The Spectator greeted the new arrangements as a ‘kind of Bolshevism’ and feared that the government was about to embark on a new and disastrous version of its Irish policy, which had placated a noisy minority by sacrificing the interests of the silent masses. In India the winners would be the Brahmins and the losers everyone else, including the peasantry who were deeply attached to the Raj.43 The Saturday Review lamented the replacement of the old pattern of authority with ‘debating societies’, and predicted fresh calamities would follow, for Labour MPs had been admitted to Parliamentary committees which overlooked Indian affairs.44
The Montagu–Chelmsford reforms opened up a rift in British political life. India’s future was now a contentious issue in the press and on the floor of the Commons, where a knot of right-wing Conservatives convinced themselves that the government was losing its nerve and allowing India to slip from Britain’s grasp. On the left, there were protests that the reforms did not go far enough in the direction of democracy. These differences were voiced in the debate on the bill in June 1919, when opponents stressed the diversity of India’s population and the fact that the peasant masses had no truck with political reforms, seeking nothing more than security of tenure and civil peace. The strongest denunciation came from Brigadier-General Henry Croft, the MP for Christchurch, who hinted at Montagu’s origins and untrustworthiness by references to his ‘Oriental fervour’ in promoting a ‘revolutionary measure’, which had been hastily framed without seeking the opinions of the loyal martial classes.45
V
The India under Parliamentary scrutiny in 1919 was not the country it had been five years before. Like every other participant in the war, it had suffered severe internal strains which had bruised and shaken old social and economic structures. Soldiers serving in Europe had had their eyes opened to new worlds and opportunities. In October 1917, Khan Muhammad Khan of Jacob’s Horse told his family that: ‘The people of Europe live in ease and comfort simply through education . . . I wring my hands with regrets, that I did not set myself to acquire learning.’ He promised himself that, if he returned home, his children ‘will fashion their lives according to my new ideas’.46 Others discovered new political insights. ‘Only the ruling class that thinks so much of itself . . . stands in the way of any Indian reform,’ a sepoy commented in November 1915. A Labour Corps coolie wrote home in January 1918 that the British government fully recognised the self-sacrifice of India and that Arthur Henderson, ‘chief of the Labour Party’, believed in Indian government and many other ‘great sahibs’ were of the same mind.47
Inside India, the war had quickened industrial growth. The expansion of the Jamshedpur works of Tata Iron and Steel Company was typical. Founded in 1907 with a workforce of 4,000, it was employing 30,000 in 1923 and production had risen a hundredfold. During the war its entire output had been consumed by the Middle East war effort.48 Like their counterparts in the rest of India’s fledgling industry, this company’s managers had had to submit to centralised, official control. The Indian Munitions Board, set up in February 1917 in the wake of the Mesopotamian muddles, supervised the production of all raw materials and manufactured goods and acted as a central purchasing and distribution agency. By October 1918 it had spent £48.2 million.49 As in Britain, wartime emergency conditions had forced the abandonment of traditional laissez-faire economic policies, and after the war the government planned to retain the board to oversee future investment and foster technical education, functions which were passed in 1919 to the new provincial assemblies.50
Wartime demands witnessed expansion in the production of such staples as cotton and jute and a rise of 6 per cent in overall exports over pre-war levels. Imports from Britain, hitherto India’s main supplier of manufactured goods, fell, but the shortfall was made up by new trading partners, the United States and Japan, whose exports to India increased by 400 per cent. A dramatic indication of the new pattern of trade were the statistics for cotton imports: in 1913–14 India took £37.9 million from Britain and in 1918–19 £27.2 million, while Japan’s share of the Indian market rose from £1 million to £9.6 million. Japan and the United States both accepted Indian raw materials, and in the final year of the war were taking over a quarter of India’s exports, slightly less than Britain’s share.51 The war had fractured Anglo-Indian economic inter-dependency and started a trend that would become increasingly pronounced over the next twenty years.
The chief beneficiaries of this economic revolution were Indian businessmen who, after 1918, ploughed back their wartime profits into new and developing industries. These were still delicate plants and needed protection from the strong winds of foreign, mainly British, competition, which was why the Indian commercial community pleaded for an end to the free-trade policy which favoured Britain. Opposition to free trade helped swing businessmen and their funds behind Congress, whose economic policy of swadesh (economic self-sufficiency) was protectionism in all but name.52 A step in this direction had been taken in 1917 when the Indian government agreed to take over £100 million of Britain’s war debts in exchange for the right to tax Lancashire cottons.
The impact of the war on the countryside and the poorer classes was uneven and hard to quantify. The burden of tax rose steeply from an average of one and a half rupees (12p) a head to two and a half (20p). A detailed survey of the village of Pimpla Soudagar, near Poona, undertaken in 1916, revealed that the ryots continued to live a precarious existence. This predominantly Hindu community contained 556 inhabitants, of whom a quarter were children, and whose total income was 22,500 rupees (£3,150). It was calculated that a family of five received, on average, 218 rupees (£30.50) a year, of which 200 rupees (£28) went on food and clothing. Between them the villagers owed 13,300 rupees (£1,862) on which they paid 2,600 rupees (£364) in interest payments, which averaged 24 per cent, and the annual land revenue assessment was 1,160 rupees (£162). With necessities representing 91 per cent of its budget, the average family had to find the equivalent of an additional 16 per cent to satisfy moneylenders and the government. There was some temporary relief in that eighty-nine men and boys were employed in a munitions factory in nearby Khadki, but their wages were not enough to keep sixty-seven families out of the quagmire of cumulative debt which was passed to the next generation.53
Matters were made worse for those already on a tight margin by wartime inflation and price increases. Both rose steadily during the war years, despite ample harvests, and spiralled after the failure of the southwest monsoon in June–July 1918. Using official figures and taking 1913 price levels as a base of 100, it was calculated that at the close of 1918 the cost of food had risen to 14
3 and clothing to 167.54 In Baluchistan and the Sind, grain and rice prices doubled and the United and Central Provinces were officially declared a famine zone in the autumn.
Food shortages coincided with the Spanish influenza pandemic. The virus came into India by way of a troopship which docked at Bombay at the end of May 1918, and was transmitted across the country by discharged soldiers, postal workers, railway passengers and the panic-stricken who fled from the countryside to the towns and cities. A second and more virulent strain arrived in the last week of August, and within three months had the whole of India in its grip. Within a year, influenza had, according to a conservative official estimate, killed 12–13 million, but the real figure was probably closer to 18 million.55 Women between fifteen and fifty and children were especially vulnerable. One immediate consequence was what the Punjabi legal authorities described as ‘the scarcity of women’, which they believed was one of the factors for the sudden increase in murders during 1919.56
The amount of crime in the Punjab and Awadh had fallen during the war and rose rapidly during 1919 and 1920. Among other things, this upsurge was ascribed to the ‘return of bad characters from abroad’ or ‘bad characters from the army’.57 The ferocious qualities which the army prized in the ‘martial classes’ were obviously a nuisance in time of peace, but, as in Europe, it may have been that men who had grown hardened to slaughter and mayhem found it hard to shed their moral callouses.
The army had stayed true to its salt. Indian troops had played a vital part in campaigns which had added Iraq, Palestine and German East Africa to the British empire and Syria and the Levant to the French. They had also behaved gallantly on the Western Front, and the sum of their sacrifice is set in the roll call of the dead carved on the sides of the triumphal arch designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and set, majestically, at the end of a sweeping avenue which leads to the government offices in New Delhi. More lives would be lost after November 1918. During 1919 and 1920 Indian units were deployed in wars on the North-West Frontier, against rebels in Kurdistan and Iraq and on ill-starred excursions against Russian Bolsheviks.
Indian soldiers who returned home from various fronts at the turn of 1918 found a country in a state of flux. It was entering the first phase of an industrial revolution and was distressed by food shortages, inflation, high prices and a devastating pandemic. Alongside the hunger and sickness there were their offspring: discontent and restlessness. In turn, these generated a feeling that great, perhaps catastrophic events were just round the corner. This unquiet mood of uncertainty was sensed by Lal Singh, a corporal returning from a prison camp in Germany in M. R. Anand’s novel The Sword and the Sickle. As his train carried him from Bombay to his native Punjab:
He felt himself in the presence of a new spirit, of something unusual, the echoes of some giant change, some great unrest, whose ominous waves spread out and hovered like a new doom, full of fearful expectations.
2
Strong Passion: Amritsar
and After, 1919 – 22
I
Nineteen nineteen was a decisive year in Indian history. For those who ran and guarded the Raj, it was the year when another mutiny was averted by strong men and hard measures. Both saved the Raj; but they lost it untold numbers of friends and severely damaged its reputation for wisdom and humanity. Indians were alternately stunned and enraged by the terrible events in the Punjab. The old exclusive Congress was reborn as a dynamic mass movement which embraced the peasantry and the growing class of industrial workers. The midwife of this new, popular nationalism was Gandhi, who gave Congress its new mission and led it in directions which unnerved many of its older, more conservative members. They had no choice but to follow, for 1919 was the year in which Gandhi stamped his personality and principles on Congress. Another figure who had convinced himself that he knew what was best for India’s future also occupied the centre stage that year: Brigadier-General Reginald (‘Rex’) Dyer. For Indians he was a devil incarnate, but for many, perhaps the majority of his countrymen and women, he was India’s saviour. The year which marked a turning point in India’s history also witnessed a parting of the ways between Britons and Indians.
It is hard to pass a historical judgement on Gandhi, let alone criticise a man who is still regarded in India and beyond as a saint. He towered over all those engaged in the struggle for Indian independence as a Mosaic figure, who led his people and fired them with a vision of themselves and their country, which most found impossible to fulfil. Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 added to his sanctity, transforming him into a martyr for his country and his principles; to censure them and him is tantamount to blasphemy. The film of his life, made in 1982 by a British director, Richard Attenborough, is pure hagiography, the late-twentieth-century equivalent of a mediaeval encomium of a remarkable saint rendered in words and illuminated pictures. Gandhi was a miracle-worker. A tiny, frail man, he took on the Goliath of the British Raj and overcame it through his own interior moral strength: humility and rectitude proved more than a match for arrogance and armed might. As a twentieth-century parable, Gandhi’s achievement was profoundly inspiring for the millions of individuals throughout the world who found themselves struggling against unyielding and all-powerful political systems.
And yet as an example of the triumph of the metaphysical over the physical, Gandhi’s success was misleading. It rests on the shaky assumption that the Raj was monolithic and omniscient and that its masters were determined to keep their monopoly of power come what may. Furthermore, those in authority exercised their powers of coercion sparingly and often with considerable reluctance.
As Gandhi fully appreciated, his opponents were peculiarly susceptible to the moral force of his arguments and actions. Proposing a toast to the British empire at a dinner of the Madras Bar Association in March 1915, he reviewed his recent campaign for Indian rights in the Transvaal:
As a passive resister I discovered that I could not have that free scope which I had under the British Empire. . . . I discovered the British Empire had certain ideas with which I have fallen in love [‘Hear, hear’] and one of those ideals is that every subject of the British Empire has the freest scope for his energies and efforts and whatever he thinks he is, is due to his conscience.1
This is extraordinarily revealing. With their traditions of liberty and respect for the individual conscience, the British were bound to be more receptive to moral arguments than the Transvaal Boers, with their unthinking, master-race arrogance. Evidence of this had come from the backing Gandhi had received from the Indian government, in particular Lord Hardinge, for which he was grateful.
When Gandhi spoke to his fellow barristers, he was forty-six and still an unknown force in Indian political life. His efforts on behalf of Indian immigrants in the Transvaal had won him widespread respect and opened many doors within the Congress establishment. Nonetheless, he was and remained something of an oddity, with idiosyncratic views which were the product of his private religious convictions and meditations. For him, religion, in so far as it concerned man’s knowledge of and relationship with God, was fundamental to the conduct of all human affairs. Gandhi’s opinions on every public issue from the prevalence of spitting (which he deplored) to the future of India, had their roots in his own metaphysical preoccupations and personal quest for enlightenment. Whenever he pronounced on a subject, theology intruded and became inextricably entangled with his economic and political theories. For instance, in 1916 Gandhi condemned British civilisation as reproduced in India as ‘decidedly anti-Christian’ and claimed that ‘England had sinned against India by forcing free trade upon her’.2 If, in his cosmology, the Raj was a sort of Antichrist, Indian efforts to terminate it had to be rooted in faith. The masses were the ‘living force of Indian life’, who knew from experience how to deal with oppression. Once they recovered their spiritual energy they would do so again, Gandhi predicted.3
His appeal to godly Hinduism as a counter force to a godless Raj was not novel. It had been forcefully p
reached by Tilak and adopted with violent results by various underground movements in Bengal. On the eve of Montagu’s visit in 1917, one Bengali cell called for a holy war:
First and last spread terror. Make the unholy Government impossible. . . . We ask you once more in the name of God and Country and all, young and old, rich or poor, Hindus and Muhammadans, Buddhists and Christians to join this war of independence and pour forth your blood and treasure . . .4
Such appeals disturbed Gandhi who, despite Mrs Besant’s efforts to silence him, forthrightly denounced the Bengali terrorist campaign during the 1916 Congress session. Murders and conspiracies soiled a noble cause, hindered rational debate and had so far accomplished nothing.
At this time Gandhi’s attention was focused on the Indian peasantry, whom he was already regarding as allies in the national movement. Then and later he had viewed them and their world through rose-tinted Tolstoyan glasses, imagining them to be possessed of instinctive wisdom and goodness. Hitherto, the ryots had been largely ignored by a Congress dominated by rich men of Western education. The rural peasants ‘recognise us not as much as they recognise the English officers’, Gandhi wrote. ‘Their hearts are an open book to neither.’5 He was prepared to read their hearts, and between 1915 and 1918 travelled across the country making speeches and, most importantly, listening to what the peasants had to say. His holiness impressed them deeply, as did his willingness to use skills learned in the Inner Temple to defend them against high taxes and overbearing landlords. It was the beginning of a relationship with the poor which, in time, gave Gandhi enormous prestige among the masses. Courting the peasantry was a brilliant manoeuvre, for it struck at the roots of a Raj that had always justified itself as the spokesman and guardian of the silent masses of India. Gandhi intended to usurp both functions.
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