by John Keay
The issue of the offending cartridges had, of course, long since been resolved. The troops now greased them themselves with whatever lubricant they preferred; moreover in 1867 the whole procedure became unnecessary when the breech-loading rifle made its Indian debut. Other concessions which addressed the underlying causes of the ‘mutiny’ were much more significant. In recognition of the fact that the mutineers had genuinely feared conversion to Christianity, missionary activity was curtailed and the public funding of mission schools reduced. Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858 specifically disclaimed any ‘desire to impose Our convictions on any of Our subjects’ and ordered British officials to abstain from interfering with Indian beliefs and rituals ‘on the pain of Our highest displeasure’.
The reforming zeal of the Bentinck era was also repudiated. Already out of fashion in Britain, the presumed omniscience of Utilitarians and Benthamites was recognised as particularly inappropriate in India and the attempt to legislate away discriminatory traditions and eccentric practices was largely abandoned. An exception was made in respect of education; more schools were part-funded by government and the English language continued to be promoted. But the idea that extending the benefits of British rule to all Indians was a moral imperative lost favour. In particular the process of absorbing the Indian states and of eliminating hereditary revenue farmers was reversed. The taluqdars of Awadh, stigmatised as parasites in 1856 and rebels in 1857, had only to clear themselves of shedding British blood to emerge as faithful allies in 1858. Recognised as having a genuine hold on the loyalties as well as the remittances of their cultivating subordinates, they were confirmed in the hereditary possession of their rights and also co-opted into the British administration as local magistrates. Like Bengal’s zamindars and other rural aristocracies they joined the British Indian hierarchy as rajas and rais and became some of its most stalwart supporters.
Likewise their princely brethren of the Indian states. Although annexed states like Awadh were not restored, there were to be no further annexations. Existing treaties with India’s five hundred princes were now to be ‘scrupulously maintained’ while the detested ‘doctrine of lapse’ did just that; it lapsed. With few exceptions, the princes had remained loyal during the rebellion; in British eyes such loyalty now commanded a higher premium than enlightened rule.
The status of the princes was further enhanced by a new constitutional relationship between Britain and India. The royal proclamation of 1858 announced a decision of the British Parliament that all rights previously enjoyed by the East India Company in India were being resumed by the British Crown. Victoria thereby became Queen of India as well as of the United Kingdom, and India’s governor-general became her viceroy as well as the British government’s chief executive in India. The fiction of Company rule thus finally ended. Long as irrelevant as the Mughal, the Company now shared his fate as a casualty of the Rebellion. Instead of pining away in Rangoon, it would linger on for a few more years in a London office ‘unhonoured and unsung, but maybe not altogether unwept’.
So India had a new sovereign; and just as in Britain the monarch’s position was buttressed by a hierarchy of hereditary nobles and by the award of honours, so in India similar structures were created. The Star of India, a royal order of Indian knights, was introduced in 1861, and the first tour by a member of the British royal family took place in 1869. Meanwhile India’s aristocracy of ‘feudatory’ princes, chiefs, rajas, nawabs and so on was being further stratified and grouped to conform to British ideas of hierarchy. The grading of gun salutes and other minutiae of protocol provided a ready reckoner of status, status itself being assessed on the basis of historical and territorial credentials, good governance, charitable activities and, of course, demonstrations of loyalty.
Only when this structuring was complete was the keystone installed. In 1876, on the advice of Disraeli, the Queen announced to the British Parliament that, satisfied that her Indian subjects were ‘happy under My rule and loyal to My throne’, she deemed the moment appropriate for her to assume a new ‘Royal Style and Titles’. The style, it was later revealed, was to be imperial and the titles, in English, ‘Empress of India’ and, for the benefit of her Indian subjects, the rather unfortunate ‘Kaiser-i-Hind’.
In January 1877, in a vast tented city around the Ridge whence British forces had recaptured Delhi twenty years earlier, the new imperium was solemnised at an Imperial Assemblage. The official attendance of eighty-four thousand included nearly all of India’s ‘sixty-three ruling princes’ and ‘three hundred titular chiefs and native gentlemen’. Lord Lytton, the presiding viceroy whose arrangements would provide a blueprint for all future imperial durbars, took some delight in listing those present. Here were the princes of Arcot and Tanjore from the deep south, the principal ‘Talukdars of Oudh’, ‘Alor Chiefs of Sindh’, Sikh Sardars, rajputs and Marathas, ‘the semi-independent Chief of Amb’, ‘Arabs from Peshawar’, ‘Biluch Tommduis from Dera Ghazi Khan’, and envoys from Chitral and Yassin in the high Hindu Kush ‘who attended in the train of the Maharajah of Cashmere and Jammu’. Also included in Lytton’s litany were quite a few ex-princes like the grandson of Tipu Sultan, the son of the last Nawab of Awadh and ‘members of the ex-Royal family of Delhi’.
The presence of these descendants of the former great ruling houses of India imparted some of the flavour of a Roman triumph to the assemblage. The British conception of Indian history thereby was realised as a kind of ‘living museum’, with the descendants of both the allies and the enemies of the English displaying the period of the conquest of India.29
Conservation was now the order of the day. The riot of privilege and particularism, once seen as an indictment of British rule, was to be preserved as imperial pageantry. And with the British apparently disclaiming plans for the rapid transformation of Indian society, the initiative now slowly passed from these hereditary representatives of the old dynastic order to a new elite, English-educated and city-based.
18
Awake the Nation
1880–1930
TRAINS AND DRAINS
INDIA’S RURAL LANDSCAPE looks rather different from that of most tropical ex-colonies. In particular it lacks those bold and regimented patterns of cultivation associated with large-scale agri-business. Tousled hectares of banana and coconut, rows of pineapples receding over the horizon, or gloomy ranks of regulation rubber trees are comparatively rare. There are exceptions: tea estates muffle the hills of Assam and Kerala in what are major enterprises by any standards, and cotton in the Deccan monopolises the black soil for mile upon featureless mile. But for the most part, rural India is a patchwork of more intimate fields, often eccentric in their layout, not over-capitalised in terms of machinery, and devoid of that plantation logic which is the usual legacy of colonial agrarian development.
It could have been otherwise. Expectations of white settlement and European enterprise transforming Indian agriculture had surfaced in the blueprints of early-nineteenth-century reformers. In respect of two highly valuable crops, the opium poppy and the indigo vetch, they had been partially realised. British investment in the processing necessary to produce China’s favourite narcotic and to extract the blue dye for assorted European uniforms led to some contentious involvement in the supply and cultivation of these crops, particularly in Bengal and Bihar. But the East India Company had been generally opposed to European settlement, and the extortionate conduct of such quasi-planters had done nothing to change attitudes. In 1859–61, just as the British were congratulating themselves on having isolated Bengal itself from the traumas of the Great Rebellion (or sometimes the ‘red mutiny’), serious riots (known as the ‘indigo’ or ‘blue mutiny’) had broken out amongst the oppressed indigo cultivators of west Bengal. Championed by Calcutta’s press, which obligingly pointed out that the planters were mostly British, and not without some official sympathy, the rioting ryots duly won relief from their supply contracts. Thus by 1861 ‘the cultivation of indigo was virtually wi
ped out from the Bengal districts.’1 Elsewhere indigo cultivators had a longer wait for redress. In neighbouring Bihar it would be over fifty years before their cause was adopted by an eccentric outsider, lately arrived from Africa, called Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
Also in 1861, while the ‘blue mutiny’ was in progress, Mr J.W.B. Money, a Calcutta-born Englishman with interests in indigo, returned from a trip to the Netherlands East Indies. Nursing new thoughts on India’s colonial management, Money promptly wrote a book. The Dutch, according to his provocatively entitled Java, or How to Manage a Colony, had responded to the demise of their own East India Company by introducing a ‘Cultivation System’ whereby the cultivator was obliged to set aside part of his land and labour for the production of specified quantities of an export crop. These yields, usually of sugar or coffee, were then rendered to the government or its contractors in lieu of land rent. Natives, seemingly, did not want rights and legal redress. They wanted a chance to prosper, and that was precisely what the system offered in that it also guaranteed the purchase of any surplus. It thus encouraged the circulation of money, said Money, and improved native purchasing power.2
That the system was advantageous to the Netherlands was sensationally obvious. By 1860 a third of that state’s annual revenue derived from its East Indies colony. Domestic taxation was reduced and the entire Dutch state railway network was built on the proceeds. Why could India, cowed by the suppression of the Great Rebellion, not now be managed to mutual advantage in the same way?
But Money’s cheerful endorsement of the Dutch system overlooked the fact that most Javanese were not in fact enriched. Rather were they reduced to a state of rural bondage which was quite irreconcilable with either Munro-ite ideals of a sturdy peasantry or Cornwallis-ite ideals of a benign landed gentry. Mr Money also ignored the prevailing spirit of laissez faire which had earlier deprived the English East India Company of its trade monopolies and had since witnessed a steady withdrawal of government from many other areas of economic management. In the Americas and elsewhere, including even the Netherlands East Indies, British exporters and business houses were doing very well without the paraphernalia of empire; free trade, not state management, was the key.
Furthermore, and perhaps decisively, the idea of introducing a plantation economy was precluded by the extent to which in India land, and the extractive surplus/revenue rights to which it was subject, had become marketable assets. In Bengal, for example, the Raja of Burdwan had recently divided up part of his zamindari into lots, or patnis, on condition that the purchasers, or patnidars, paid the revenue on these lots. The patnidars then ‘sometimes sold lots to others known as dar-patnidars, and they too sold lots to others below them, known as das-dar-patnidars … By 1855 it was estimated that some two-thirds of Bengal were held on tenures of this sort, and there is a presumption that many of the purchasers had urban connections.’3 Inheritance laws encouraged a similar fragmentation; and city-based merchants, moneylenders and financiers were indeed prominent amongst the purchasers.
The ‘commercialisation of agriculture’, begun in late Mughal times, was thus an established fact by the mid-nineteenth century. Facilitated by the new railways, export booms in cotton during the 1860s (courtesy of the American Civil War) and in wheat from the 1870s onwards enriched and entrenched these middle-men as well as sustaining the mainly British business houses which handled overseas shipping and brokerage. Yet such was this superstructure of agents and rentiers, and such the extractive culture of the revenue system, that profits rarely found their way back into production other than as advances on the next crop. The actual cultivator thus became, if anything, even more indebted. Commercialisation only ‘led to differentiation without genuine growth’. In effect India’s rural economy was already experiencing the down-side of plantation economics, in terms of labour exploitation, without the usual up-side of capital investment. ‘The point is not that so many peasants suffered (they would have suffered under capitalist modernisation, too) but that they suffered for nothing.’4
The British preferred to emphasise their investment in infrastructure, especially railways and irrigation works (‘trains and drains’). They also pointed to the country’s generally favourable balance of payments. Critics, though, were less impressed by India’s theoretical prosperity and more exercised by Indians’ actual poverty. As early as 1866 Dadabhai Naoroji, the future ‘Grand Old Man of Congress’, had begun to wonder whom the trains actually benefited and whither the drains actually led. In fact he developed a ‘drain theory’ which, with ramifications provided by his successors, would run like an undercurrent throughout the nationalist debate.
This ‘drain theory’ maintained that India’s surplus, instead of being invested so as to create the modernised and industrialised economy needed to support a growing population, was being drained away by the ruling power. The main drain emptied in London with a flood of what the government called ‘home charges’. These included salaries and pensions for government and army officers, military purchases, India Office overheads, debt servicing, and the guaranteed interest payable to private investors in India’s railways. Calculated in sterling at an increasingly unfavourable rate of exchange, they came to something like a quarter of the government of India’s total revenue. With much of what remained being squandered on administrative extravagances and military adventures in Burma and Afghanistan, it was not surprising that Indians lived in such abject poverty or that famines were so frequent.
The theory also included an analysis of how the drain actually worked. The Secretary of State for India in London obtained sterling to meet his ‘home charges’ by selling bills of exchange to British importers. Presented in India, these bills could be converted into rupees out of government revenues and so used for the purchase of Indian produce. The private sector therefore played an important part in the drain since its exports from India constituted the drain’s flow. By the same token the export surplus was of little economic benefit to Indians; and worse still, since they consisted mostly of raw materials, exports gave no encouragement to India’s industrialisation. The classic case was cotton. In the days of the Company, British purchases had been mainly of finished piece-goods. Latterly, with Lancashire’s mills underselling India’s handloom weavers, British purchases switched to raw cotton and yarn. Now, when new and often Indian-owned mills in Bombay were at last in a position to compete, they were repeatedly frustrated by tariff policies which favoured British imports and by regulations which handicapped Indian production.
India’s embryonic industries – principally jute, cotton, coir and coal – needed protection; the British insisted on free trade. Their laissez faire attitudes extended even to the land revenue, where rising prices meant that fixed revenue assessments actually became somewhat less onerous during the latter half of the nineteenth century. But rather than adjust such assessments the government now preferred to explore other sources of revenue, like introducing an income tax. For the Great Rebellion, far from emboldening the British to remodel India’s agrarian economy along the regimented plantation lines suggested by Money, was seen to have demonstrated the extreme danger of intervention.
Such governmental conservatism did not mean that Indians were entirely spared the plantation experience. In regions of marginal cultivation, and especially on the tea estates which proliferated in the Assam hills from the 1850s onwards, indentured labour was widely employed. Further afield the abolition of slavery and the introduction of new crops created more exotic markets for indentured Indian labour in Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaya, Fiji, Mauritius, south and east Africa and the Caribbean. Mortality rates amongst these migrants were so high in the nineteenth century, and the terms of indenture so oppressive, that critics saw only another form of slavery. The plight of emigrant Indian labour would feature prominently amongst early nationalist grievances, and in Africa M.K. Gandhi would find a challenging field for his first experiments in satyagraha.
The young Gandhi had found his way to
Natal in south-east Africa in the employ of a Gujarati trading firm. India’s maritime and mercantile contacts with south-east Asia had been sustained ever since the Pala and Chola periods, but under Muslim, Portuguese and British dispensations had been considerably extended. They now reached round the Indian Ocean and the Pacific rim to Aden, Zanzibar, east and south Africa, China, Japan and even the Pacific coast of North America. Latterly small communities of Indian clerks, police, dock-workers and other service personnel had become as sure a sign of a British presence in these places as the Union Jack. From as far afield as Vancouver and Singapore, as well as Gandhi’s Natal, such expatriate groups would make a valuable contribution to the struggle for Indian independence. Conversely they, and the mass of indentured migrants, brought Indian issues to an international audience.
The accompanying diaspora of religious and social traditions established a score of ‘Little Indias’ from Singapore to Georgetown, Guyana, which were as much colonies of Indianisation as their parent settlements were colonies of Anglicisation. As in the long-forgotten days of Kanishka and the Karakoram route, India was successfully projecting its cultural influence just when politically it was in deepest eclipse. But, linked by the telegraph and the shipping line, such agents of outward acculturation now also served as antennae for inward politicisation. From Japan came word of Asian regeneration, from Europe came news of Ireland’s struggle against British rule, and from the white settler colonies of Africa and Canada came ideas of autonomy and dominion status. India was not alone. British rule was not immutable. Nor was it invincible.