India

by John Keay

Muslim attendances at Congress were already falling away. Hume had assiduously wooed Muslim support but, with his retirement to Britain in 1892, the opposition of Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan became more pronounced. Anticipating the arguments which would eventually lead to the genesis of Pakistan, Khan insisted that representative government might work in societies ‘united by ties of race, religion, manners, customs, culture and historical traditions [but] in their absence would only injure the well-being and tranquillity of the land.’ The land in question he liked to portray as a bright-eyed bride, one eye being Hindu, the other Muslim, and each equally brilliant. Any cosmetic enhancement which had the effect of favouring one over the other would ruin the whole countenance.

  Resentment of Congress, and especially the elitist, ‘mendicant’ and Anglophone tone of its leadership, came also from non-Muslims. In the late 1890s, against a background of industrial unrest, more appalling famines and an outbreak of plague, the first signs of a polarisation in the Congress ranks began to appear in Maharashtra. Moderates who favoured constitutional methods, albeit backed by trenchant economic and political critiques, became identified with Ferozeshah Mehta and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, whose power base was amongst the Bombay intelligentsia. Meanwhile radicals gravitated towards the Marathi populism and the more experimental methods urged by Bal Gangadhar Tilak from his power base around Pune.

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  BRITISH VICEROYS

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  Gokhale, a lecturer at Bombay University, and Mehta, a Parsi lawyer, accepted the need for patience and moved easily between the presidency of Congress and membership of the viceroy’s council. Tilak, on the other hand, from the same brahman community which had furnished the Maratha state with its peshwas, experimented with a variety of mass-focus appeals through his editorship of a Marathi newspaper. They included the politicisation of fairs and festivals associated with the local cult of Ganapati (Ganesh) and a patriotic crusade based on the defiance of Shivaji. Tentative boycotts and exhortations to civil disobedience were also tried. In 1897 Tilak’s exposition of Shivaji’s most famous exploit, the disembowelling of the Bijapuri general Afzal Khan with those fearsome steel talons, was taken to have incited the assassination of a British official. Sentenced to prison, Tilak, the scapegoat for this first successful act of terrorism, duly became Tilak, the martyr for the nationalist cause. A repeat performance in 1908 would galvanise all Bombay. Tilak had made the important discovery that the consequences of extremist rhetoric could transcend its appeal.

  Bengali luminaries, including Aurobindo Ghose, the social and religious reformer, and Rabindranath Tagore, the poet, philosopher, educationalist and first Indian Nobel laureate for literature, also sought to broaden the base of the struggle. The former’s advocacy of passive resistance and the latter’s of psychological, educational and economic self-reliance were both, however, dramatically subsumed in the explosion that greeted the partition of Bengal in 1905. Courtesy of the British and the greatest of their proconsuls, rather than of the stridency of Congress, the first phase of the national struggle was about to peak.

  DIVIDE AND UNITE

  George Nathaniel Curzon, Baron of Kedleston, had equipped himself for viceregal authority like no other British viceroy. He had had India on the brain since his schooldays at Eton, and ‘as early as 1890 he had admitted at a dinner in the House of Commons that [the viceroyalty] was the greatest of his various ambitions’.13 Perhaps it had something to do with the familiar aspect of Government House in Calcutta. The viceregal residence, built by Wellesley a century earlier, had been modelled on the Curzon family’s Kedleston Hall. By design, as it were, a home from home awaited him in India.

  But characteristically he had recommended himself for the job by travelling and writing extensively not about India itself but about its landward frontiers and the central Asian wastes beyond. For to Curzon, India’s appeal resided in its status as the proverbial jewel in the imperial crown. ‘For as long as we rule India,’ he told Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, ‘we are the greatest power in the world.’ That made the viceroyalty the jewel of imperial patronage; and who better to wear it than George Nathaniel Curzon, that ‘most superior person’ (as one rhymester had put it)? By common consent Curzon was not only the most brilliant scholar-administrator of his day but also the soundest of imperialists. In words which would have dashed a few hopes in Congress, he told Balfour that it would ‘be well for England, better for India and best of all for the cause of progressive civilisation if it be clearly understood that … we have not the smallest intention of abandoning our Indian possessions and that it is highly improbable that any such intention will be entertained by our posterity’.14

  As viceroy, one of Curzon’s less controversial achievements would be the establishment of India’s Archaeological Survey, set up to revive the work of recording and preserving what he rightly hailed as ‘the greatest galaxy of monuments in the world’. India’s history fascinated him, and he was probably better informed about its languages and customs than any British ruler since Warren Hastings. But of its people as other than an administrative commodity and the decadent heirs of an interesting past he knew, and perhaps cared, little. Like the Taj Mahal to which he devoted much attention, India was a great imperial edifice which posed a challenge of presentation and preservation. It needed firm direction, not gentle persuasion. History, by whose verdict Curzon set great store, would judge him by how he secured this magnificent construction, both externally against all conceivable threats and internally against all possible decay. To this end he worked heroically and unselfishly; but his example terrorised rather than inspired, his caustic wit devastated rather than delighted. Even the British in India found him quite impossible.

  To the troublesome north-west frontier, where British India petered out amongst mountains swept by gusts of Afghan disquiet and strewn with the debris of unsatisfactory campaigns, Curzon did indeed bring order. British troops were withdrawn from the Afghan frontier and a buffer zone was created within which tribal levies under British command were to keep the peace. Responsibility for this zone and for the whole area west of the Indus was in 1901 transferred from the Panjab province to a newly-created North-West Frontier Province. Further north, in the high Hindu Kush, British expeditions operating in the name of the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir had already pushed the frontier up to that of Chinese Sinkiang. This practically doubled the size of Kashmir and pre-empted any Russian approach by way of the Karakoram route. It also established the near physical impossibility of any such ‘invasion’. Nevertheless, by way of a lookout post over this ‘roof of the world’, the Gilgit Agency was retained, nominally as part of Kashmir territory.

  East of Kashmir, the politically uncharted wastes of Tibet had frustrated repeated British overtures. To a mind as orderly as Curzon’s, the uncertainties posed by Tibet’s status and by the naivety and indifference of its monkish rulers were anathema. Doubtful rumours about a doubtful Russian spy in Lhasa were made into an imperative for intervention. With exasperation masquerading as policy, a military expedition commanded by Sir Francis Younghusband was despatched across the frontier in 1904. Militarily it fared better than Zorawar Singh’s frost-blighted invasion thanks largely to death-dealing inventions like the Gatling machine-gun. But the reports and, worse, the photographs of robed monks being mown down amongst the glaciers as they brandished hoes and fumbled with their flintlocks was a poor advertisement for imperialism. So much, noted nationalist critics, for ‘the cause of progressive civilisation’.

  If civilisation was supposed to be progressive, government was supposed to be efficient. More railways were built and ambitious irrigation projects were undertaken, especially in the Panjab. The drive for greater efficiency lay behind most of Curzon’s internal reforms, and nowhere to greater effect than with the bureaucratic leviathan that was the government of India itself. Famously in 1901 he ridiculed the year-long odyssey of a particularly important proposal. ‘Round and round, like the diurnal revolution of the earth,
went the file, stately, solemn, sure, and slow; and now, in due season, it has completed its orbit, and I am invited to register the concluding stage.’15 The file in question concerned another bit of territorial repackaging like the creation of the North-West Frontier Province. That alone was important enough to merit the viceroy’s early attention. But the file also mooted other such adjustments, including the break-up of Bengal.

  The partition of Bengal would be Curzon’s nemesis. It fatally discredited the unyielding imperialism for which he stood, it sparked the first nationwide protest movement, and it introduced direct confrontation, plus a limited recourse to violence, into the repertoire of British – Indian ‘discourse’. Only the tidiest of minds would have tackled such a thorny project, only the most arrogant of autocrats have persisted with it. But as the largest, most populous and most troublesome administrative unit in British India, Bengal posed a worthy challenge. With a population, twice that of Great Britain, which was predominantly Hindu in the west and Muslim in the east, the administrative case for a division of the two brooked little argument. Curzon therefore pushed ahead.

  He was not unimpressed by the view that Bengal’s highly vocal critics would also thereby be partitioned. ‘The best guarantee of the political advantage of our proposal is its dislike by the Congress Party,’ he told the secretary of state. But whether he understood the grounds for this dislike, or its intensity, may be doubted. In a 1904 speech in Dacca, the capital of the proposed new province of ‘East Bengal and Assam’, he assured Muslims that the new arrangement would restore a unity not seen since ‘the days of the Mussulman viceroys and kings’. This was presumably a reference to the heavily Persianised courts of the eighteenth-century nawabs; it may not, therefore, have had much resonance for East Bengal’s mainly low-caste converts to Islam. On the other hand it was certainly offensive to the mainly Hindu zamindars, patnidars, and their innumerable diminutives who were so well represented amongst the vocal Anglophone agitators of Calcutta.

  Stock accusations of a wider Macchiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu – Muslim animosity’ assume some premonition of a later partition. They make little sense in the contemporary context. ‘Divide and rule’ as a governing precept supposes the pre-existence of an integrated entity. In an India politically united only by British rule – and not yet even by the opposition which it generated – such a thing did not exist. Division was a fact of life. As Maulana Muhammad Ali would later put it, ‘We divide and you rule.’ Without recognising, exploring and accommodating such division, British dominion in India would have been impossible to establish, let alone sustain. Provoking sectarian conflict, on the other hand, was rarely in the British interest.

  Only ten years earlier the armies of Bengal, Bombay and Madras, which had been kept separate as a safeguard against another mutiny, had been quietly amalgamated. It was thought to be a more efficient arrangement; in that efficiency meant more effective deployment, this could be seen as a case of ‘unite and rule’. For similar reasons of imperial convenience the North-West Frontier Province had been carved out of the Panjab, and Bengal and Assam were now rearranged as West Bengal (with Orissa and Bihar) and East Bengal (with Assam). Arguably this partition should have reduced sectarian rivalry. More certainly, under a viceroy as committed to indefinite British rule as Curzon, there was no logic in stirring up conflict. At the time the nationalist challenge was being comfortably contained and Muslims were already boycotting Congress. More discord would merely defeat efficiency. It was costly to contain, it damaged British business interests, and it taxed the loyalties of the princely states and the now-united Indian army.

  Such reasoning would duly surface when in 1911 it was announced that Curzon’s partition had been reversed and Bengal was to be reunited. Instead, Bihar and Orissa would be detached to form a separate province, and likewise Assam. The ‘unity’ promised to East Bengal’s Muslims thus lasted just six years. Their resentment was understandable. Nor was it soothed by the simultaneous announcement that Delhi, the erstwhile seat of a Muslim empire to which Bengalis had rarely been reconciled, was to replace Calcutta as British India’s capital (and be graced with a new New Delhi). If this was an acceptable idea to the Muslim gentry of northern India, it was meaningless to the Muslim peasantry of what is now Bangladesh. More obviously, Bengali Muslim resentment over the reversal of partition scarcely squares with the popular idea that it was Bengali patriotism which forced this reversal. All communities in Bengal did indeed share the same language, the same rich literature, the same distinctive history and the same passionate attachment to a delightfully mellow land. But the explosion of protest which had greeted Curzon’s partition and which had rocked much of India while the partition lasted had other causes.

  Many related to the disadvantaged status and lost job opportunities which Bengali Hindus anticipated within a divided Bengal. In ‘East Bengal and Assam’ they would be a religious minority in a predominantly Muslim province; in ‘West Bengal with Orissa and Bihar’ they would be a linguistic minority amongst a non-Bengali-speaking majority. Wherever they lived they stood to lose by partition. Other grievances drew on the catalogue of demands being submitted by Congress and the negligible progress being made in their redress. But one outstanding objection, for which Curzon must be held directly responsible, was the appalling insensitivity with which the scheme had been imposed. As Gokhale apprised Congress at the end of 1905, no Bengali had been consulted, no objections entertained.

  The scheme of partition, concocted in the dark and carried out in the face of the fiercest opposition that any government measure has encountered in the last half-a-century, will always stand as a complete illustration of the worst features of the present system of bureaucratic rule – its utter contempt for public opinion, its arrogant pretensions to superior wisdom, its reckless disregard of the most cherished feelings of the people, the mockery of an appeal to its sense of justice, [and] its cold preference of Service interests to those of the governed.16

  Gokhale’s, it will be remembered, was the voice of moderation. Others preferred action to words. Mass rallies clogged the thoroughfares of Calcutta, Dacca and other Bengali towns. Pamphlets and petitions out-circulated the newspapers. Within a month of the government decree a popular proclamation had announced the extension of swadeshi protest to the whole of India. Swadeshi, meaning ‘of our own country’ or ‘home-produced’, expressed a determination to be self-reliant and included a strict boycott of imported products, most obviously British textiles. Those on sale were publicly destroyed and existing stocks became practically valueless; while Indian mills prospered and some hand-loom weavers resumed production, Lancashire manufacturers fumed.

  Significantly it was in 1907 and as a result of enthusiastic swadeshi investment that Jamshed Tata, a Parsi mill-owner, diversified into foundry work with the launch of his Tata Iron and Steel Company based at what became the ‘steel-city’ of Jamshedpur in Bihar. The plant would become one of the largest in the world and the Tatas the greatest of India’s, and Congress’s, industrialist backers. Reversing dependence on imported manufactures and developing indigenous production had entered the nationalist soul. Whether as Gandhian self-suffiency or Nehruvian ‘import-substitution’, it would continue to inform economic thinking long after independence.

  By pamphlet, press and word of mouth swadeshi protest was extended throughout India in a remarkable display of united and effective action which soon obscured the partition which had provoked it. The coincidence of Japan’s sensational victory over a major European power in the 1905 Russo – Japanese war fanned the movement and persuaded some that victory was nigh. In Bengal a more extreme form of boycott extending to government institutions, colleges and offices was widely urged, fitfully adopted, and brutally suppressed by cane-wielding security forces. It was also disowned by the rump of Congress, whose gradualism now appeared outdated. At the 1906 Congress a split was avoided by inviting the octogenarian Dadabhai Naoroji to take the ch
air for the third time and by some not very ingenious fudging; one resolution boldly but nonsensically called for ‘Swaraj [self-rule] like that of the United Kingdom or the colonies’. In 1907 at Surat the divisions between ‘extremists’ like Tilak and ‘moderates’ like Gokhale could no longer be contained. The Surat Congress dissolved into chaos and was aborted.

  Briefly an ‘extremist’ splinter group known as ‘Lal, Bal and Pal’ now made most of the running – as well as providing its youthful followers with a head-banging mantra. ‘Lal’ was otherwise Lala Lajpat Rai, the militant Arya Samaj leader from the Panjab; ‘Bal’ was the fiery Maratha revivalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak; and ‘Pal’ the radical Bengali leader Bipin Chandra Pal. Pal also edited the journal Bande Mataram, itself named after the patriotic Bengali anthem which, written by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, had been set to music by Tagore. Swadeshi ideals were extended to educational reform, labour organisation, self-help programmes and cultural activities. But in advocating a total boycott amounting to non-co-operation and including non-payment of taxes, ‘Lal, Bal and Pal’ invited a ferocious government clampdown. In 1907, fifty years after the last Mughal had been packed off to Burma, an untried ‘Lal’ trod the deportee’s road to Mandalay, and in 1908 he was followed by ‘Bal’. Tilak’s trial for incitement had brought Bombay’s industries to a standstill; for leftist nationalists this ‘massive outburst of proletarian anger … remains a major landmark in our history’.17 The even more explosive response to his six-year sentence brought troops onto the streets and sixteen reported deaths. In a quieter Mandalay, Tilak consulted his traditional inspiration. While awaiting the dawn ‘like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay’, he wrote a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita.

  His offence had been that of apparently condoning terrorism. ‘The sound of the bomb’, a spontaneous response to government repression according to Tilak, was first heard in Bengal in 1907 when the lieutenant-governor’s train was derailed. More tragically two Kennedys, a mother and daughter, were killed at Muzaffarapur in Bihar in 1908; a bomb had been lobbed into their carriage in the mistaken belief that it was that of an unpopular magistrate. The apprehending of the culprits led to the discovery of a munitions factory in the garden of the Calcutta home of the Ghose brothers. Aurobindo Ghose was amongst those brought to trial. Disillusioned, he, like Tilak, then found in religion a ‘royal road for an honourable retreat’.18 In Pondicherry (still under French rule) he also found a sanctuary from British rule and a site for his proposed ‘Auroville’, an urban experiment in internationalism and cross-cultural collaboration. Unlike Tilak in Mandalay, he would stay there.