Jinnah had wanted to throw the Pakistani army into the conflict, but had been warned off by Auchinleck after some tense moments. The Auk’s most compelling argument was that Pakistan was too weak to engage India; according to the partition award, 36 per cent of the Indian army (140,000 men) had gone to Pakistan and 270,000 to India. The balance of arms, equipment and supplies had gone heavily in India’s favour and, most importantly, Pakistan had only received 17 per cent of India’s sterling balances. The £147 million released to it was soon gobbled up in arms purchases for the country, which was forced to spend 70 per cent of its income on its armed forces and a further 18 per cent on administration.100 Nonetheless, Pakistan pressed its claim to Kashmir, mounting a second invasion in the spring of 1948. The strategists’ nightmare had come true; until its highly profitable alliance with the United States in 1954, Pakistan was a fragile, militarily and financially over-extended buffer state. India, by contrast, looked sturdier, although it too was forced to increase its armed forces and spend some of its sterling reserves on armaments and aircraft. The first political repercussion of partition was an arms race which has lasted to the present day.
VII
At a meeting of the Imperial General Staff on 3 October, Field Marshal Montgomery expressed his displeasure with how Mountbatten had wound up the Raj. ‘He’s made a mess of things. I’ll write and tell him.’101 As early as 10 August, Ismay had been disturbed by how events were turning out; he wrote to his wife that the British were departing from India ‘with all our work destroyed and leaving behind anarchy and misery and measureless slaughter’. Two months afterwards, he had come to believe that Mountbatten had failed to show that quintessential viceregal quality – impartiality.102 The Viceroy’s relations with Auchinleck had been fraught since the end of July, when the former had sided with Nehru, who had accused the commander-in-chief of ‘dabbling in politics’. Rather than confront the Auk with the charge, Mountbatten had asked his subordinate Savory to deliver the reproof.103 An upright man, of formidable integrity, Auchinleck was totally dedicated to India and its army. Devotion to the public service overruled private emotion, but for once the Field Marshal let his feelings get the better of him. When Mountbatten offered him an honour for his part in ending the Raj, the Auk told him he would take nothing for what had been ‘the most painful and distasteful episode of my career’.104 When it was all over, he came to Montgomery’s conclusion that the Viceroy had made ‘a mess of things’.105
Even Attlee briefly succumbed to the general mood of censure on the man he had sent in to save the game in India. ‘Was it too quick?’ he asked Lieutenant-General Savory when they discussed Indian affairs at Number 10 on 23 October.106 The soldier did not record his answer. He had served gallantly with the Indian army since 1913, and his affection for the Raj was as strong as his faith in its virtues. On 15 August he had spoken sadly of the wretched state of India, cleft and sliding into anarchy. ‘Is this to be the culmination of the British rule in India and the fulfilment of our great mission?’ he asked colleagues at HQ.107 Savory left India in December in the same sombre mood. He believed that nine-tenths of Indians secretly wished to have the British back, but the Raj had ceased to ‘govern’ in 1935 and thereafter it had been merely a matter of time before its bluff was called. As for the events of March to August, the British ‘tried to make it appear to the Indians, the world and to ourselves that [we] were committing a Noble Deed’. Mountbatten had, he feared, ‘forced the pace too much’.108
Savory, like the rest of Mountbatten’s critics, was probably right to question his decision to end the Raj in seventy-three days and to stick unswervingly to a time-table which events revealed to be dangerously unrealistic. His treatment of the princes was shabby. Their new master proved tough and intolerant: the Maharaja of Jodhpur was ordered to cut down on whisky and women; the Raja of Faridkot was banned from going to Australia; various small states were annexed; and Hyderabad was occupied by the Indian army in September 1948. As for the slaughter in the Punjab, greater efforts should have been made to work out an adequate exigency plan in anticipation of a disaster which was plainly waiting to happen.
And yet to condemn Mountbatten for these oversights and underhand manoeuvres is to judge him by the vision and high moral standards of, say, Curzon or Irwin. They were architects and he was a demolition engineer, the nature of whose work demanded a very different outlook and methods. In so far as it is a capacity to get things done, political power had all but passed into Indian hands by March 1947. Quite simply, the last Viceroy lacked the prestige, authority and resources of his predecessors and, therefore, placed himself in the hands of those who possessed all these assets – Nehru and the Congress high command. He found them congenial partners and performed his duties according to his lights; the trouble was that he had too much to say for himself and no humility.
Epilogue
What had ended at midnight on 15 August 1947? Certainly not the Raj which Sir Winston Churchill had known fifty years before and had subsequently defended with all his emotional energy. This had withered away after 1919 and been replaced by a system of government shaped by Westminster politicians, run by Indians and supervised by a dwindling band of British officials. Whatever its final form, Churchill had nothing but praise for the Raj; it had been ‘a monument worthy of the respect of nations’ and the ‘finest achievement’ of his countrymen.
All this was true, up to a point. But the Raj also represented a bargain. For over a hundred years India had underpinned Britain’s status as a global power and provided it with markets, prestige and muscle. Ever since sepoys had been sent to Egypt in 1800 to evict the detritus of Napoleon’s army, Indian manpower had upheld British pretensions in the Middle East, East Africa and the Far East. Millions of Indians had volunteered to serve Britain in both world wars. Veterans of the Second, many of whom served in Italy and afterwards settled in Britain, are justly proud of their exertions in the cause of freedom. Their feelings were voiced by Sergeant-Major Rajinder Singh in November 1993, when he and his comrades were lamenting the election of a British National Party candidate in an East End council election. ‘I am a proud and loyal man,’ the veteran remarked. ‘We had much faith in this country. In the war, I thought it was time to help Britain to save democracy and fight fascism.’1 Like many other Indian ex-servicemen, he was sad that his and his comrades’ efforts have been largely forgotten in Britain.
India’s own liberation signalled the end of Britain as a world power. Its international standing had already declined beyond the point of recovery. The recent, Herculean war effort had only been possible thanks to American credit, and the loss of Singapore had shown in the most dramatic way that Britain could no longer uphold its claims to be a major Asian power. India had always been the keystone of the British Empire, and once it had been removed the structure swiftly fell apart, as Victorian statesmen and Churchill (who was one of them in spirit) had foretold. And yet in the quarter-century after Indian independence, British politicians, diplomats and strategists talked themselves into believing that their country was still a world power and behaved accordingly. In fact, it was downhill all the way with some awkward bumps: the British were successively evicted from Persia and Egypt and an attempt to reverse fate ended disastrously with the Suez débâcle in 1956. Within the next decade, Britain’s Far-Eastern and African empire had been dismantled with little heartache. Revealingly, the African National Congress had been modelled on its Indian counterpart, and many African nationalist leaders looked to India for example and encouragement.
The end of the Raj also marked the final settlement of a bargain. In return for its moment of greatness on the world stage, the Raj had offered India regeneration on British terms. It had been the most perfect expression of what Britain took to be its duty to humanity as a whole. Its guiding ideals had sprung from the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Evangelical Enlightenment which had dreamed of a world transformed for the better by Christianity and reason. The fo
rmer made little headway in India, but the latter, in the form of Western education and the application of science, did. No one could guess how long the task of India’s moral and physical regeneration might take, nor were there any illusions as to the obstacles in the way, not least of which was the reluctance of many Indians to have their world remoulded. For all their faults, and the worst were spasms of impatience and high-handedness, those who set about the remaking of India showed remarkable dedication to their ideals and the welfare of its peoples. Figures such as Metcalfe, Elphinstone, Sir Henry and Sir John Lawrence, Curzon and Irwin represent the highest ideals of public service, and they and many others deserve respect and admiration. In the course of the everyday administration of a country which many of its rulers found hard to comprehend, misunderstandings frequently arose, sensibilities were bruised and Indians were too often made to feel inadequate or patronised. Nanny may well have known best, but this did not make her monopoly of rectitude welcome or bearable. Moreover, by the beginning of this century, a small but significant body of Indians believed that they and the rest of their countrymen no longer needed her ministrations.
Today, the principles which underlay the Raj are unfashionable. We dislike the notion of one people assuming superiority over another and re-ordering their lives. Imperialism, however well-meaning it may have been (and it was not always), is a discredited creed and the benefits it brought are either overlooked or devalued. By contrast, and often in the teeth of much recent experience, national self-determination is considered to be a source of human happiness. The right of peoples to decide their own future is inviolate, irrespective of whether they choose wisely or whether the government which emerges is just, honest and humane. Late-twentieth-century political correctness has been added to post-colonial guilt syndromes and the residual Marxism which still lurks on many university campuses, with the result that hardly any British, Indian or American historians have a good word to say about the Raj, or, for that matter, any other type of colonial government. At their poor best, colonial régimes are portrayed as expressions of incompetent paternalism, and at their worst as oppressive, racialist, exploitative and the source of the Third World’s present woes. The balance is slowly being adjusted, not least because the recent history of so many of Europe’s colonies has been a saga of a decline into tyranny, chaos and internecine war from which they seem unable to rescue themselves.
A past shaped by foreigners, however well-intentioned, can be an incubus for the descendants of those who were once imperial subjects. It does not foster national pride and self-confidence because it is a reminder of submission and collaboration. This explains why, within days and sometimes hours of independence, Indians and Pakistanis emancipated themselves from their recent history by a systematic assault on the statues of British monarchs, generals and proconsuls which overlooked public places. Like the Romans, the British were addicted to setting the seal on their conquests with sculpture. The offending figures were hauled down and exiled to obscure places where they now crumble away. Fifty years on, the exorcism continues. In 1995, the Gandhi dynasty surplanted the House of Windsor in Delhi, where Connaught Place (named after the Duke of Connaught, one of Queen Victoria’s younger sons, also of London grill fame) became Indira and Rajiv Chowk (square). For some Indians the change of name was ridiculous. ‘What are we going to tell our children?’ one protester asked. ‘That the British never ruled here? Then how did the English language come here – from the Russians?’2
British monuments which owed their existence to the Raj have survived undisturbed, although fewer and fewer people now understand why they were erected. Havelock, the hero of Lucknow, still stands on his plinth in a corner of Trafalgar Square and Roberts, the hero of Afghanistan, sits astride his stone charger in Kelvingrove Park, Glasgow, although their deeds have been forgotten. Church memorials are a reminder of the human cost of the Raj. None more so than that in St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, which records how 488 soldiers, 47 wives and 124 children of the 78th Highlanders died from cholera on the ‘banks of the Indus’ between September 1844 and March 1845. And then of course there are the Indian words which have become embedded in the English language: words like bungalow, jodhpurs, verandah, gymkhana and pyjamas reflected the everyday world of the sahibs, while from that of the British soldier came ‘blighty’ and ‘doolally’. The former was a corruption of the Hindi bilati, meaning country; the latter derived from Deolali, where there was a hospital for the deranged victims of sunstroke.
Modern British perceptions of the Raj depend more on literature and cinema than history. Kipling, Forster, John Masters and Paul Scott command audiences made larger through the adaptation of their works for the cinema and television. The latter have generated a popular nostalgia, at least for the external trappings the Raj. This is not surprising, for the screen Raj is striking in its authenticity, bringing to life, as it were, those photographs of sahibs and memsahibs taking tea on well-groomed lawns with servants hovering in the background. Equally vivid are two post-imperial adventure films: an exciting version of Kipling’s short story, The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and Ismail Merchant’s visually stunning production of John Masters’s The Deceivers (1988). Perhaps the best, and certainly the most thoughtful, cinematic evocation of the Raj is Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players (1977), which chronicles the political legerdemain which preceded the deposition of the last king of Awadh in 1853. While the Company’s officials plot, two zamindars indulge their insatiable passion for chess to the point of forsaking their wives. They withdraw with their board and pieces to a village, squabble, and are suddenly made aware of how they and their fellow countrymen have been checkmated by an infinitely cunning and ruthless adversary. As the film ends, they watch, stunned and powerless, as the Company’s army advances into Awadh. The parable is simple but still potent: Indian divisions, particularly those of the ruling class, had facilitated British conquest.
Curiosity and a taste for the exotic draw more and more British visitors to India, but not to bask in the afterglow of the Raj or marvel at its works. The tourist is directed towards the architecture and artefacts which are the products of a purely Indian genius, created before the dominance of the British. Naturally Indians wish to draw attention to the achievements of their own rather than someone else’s civilisation. Nevertheless, the mark of the Raj can still be detected. The cast-iron railway bridge across the Jumma at Agra may not evince the same gasps of admiration as the nearby Taj Mahal, but it is a monument worthy of respect. More so, perhaps, because the mausoleum was a token of the self-indulgence of a Mughal emperor who was able to harness the resources and energies of his people to satisfy a whim. By contrast, the severely utilitarian bridge reminds us that the British set considerable store by using public funds for the public good, and acted accordingly.
The Raj did bring benefits to the Indian people, and its importance to the successor states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (former East Pakistan, which became independent in 1971) cannot be overstated. Whether they like the fact or not, these countries are what they are now because they were once governed by Britain and brought directly into contact with British ideas, values, learning and technology. The process of exposure and absorption was slow and uneven; old faiths, customs and habits of mind proved remarkably durable, and outlasted a Raj which lacked either the capacity or will to uproot them. There were enduring features of British rule, too. Attachment to the democratic idea remains strong in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Although this is not the place to chart the political and economic fortunes of the states which followed the Raj, it is worth saying that democracy has proved exceptionally popular and resilient. In Pakistan it has survived a series of military autocracies, and in India, eighteen months of Indira Gandhi’s personal rule, during which she earned the mocking title ‘the last viceroy’. None of these excursions into authoritarianism proved successful: Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis remain convinced that their country’s social and economic problems can only be
solved by elected governments. At the same time, there is a consciousness of what constitutes good and honest administration, and the periodic outbursts against corruption in all three countries are a reflection that their people judge their officials by standards laid down during British rule.
Any balance sheet of the Raj would not be complete without a reference to its public utilities. When it ended, the sub-continent possessed what today would be called a communications ‘infrastructure’ which included over 40,000 miles of railways. The last all-India census, undertaken in 1941, revealed that just under 8 per cent of the population was literate. By 1961 this figure had risen to 21 per cent in India, and in 199l it stood at 52 per cent in India and 34 per cent in Pakistan. Enormous headway has been made in education by the successor states, but it could not have been achieved without foundations laid down during the Raj, and the same holds true in public health. Likewise, the criminal and civil law codes of the entire sub-continent are a legacy of the Raj. When the British measured what they considered to be the physical and moral progress of India, they also revealed how much remained to be accomplished. During the war, British servicemen, among others, were dismayed by how little seemed to have been achieved: chronic poverty was endemic and famine always just round the corner.
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