Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  Kashmir was a classic case of extending the empire by franchise, a way of allowing local rulers the freedom to do what they wanted so long as everything was quiet externally and trade routes remained safe and secure. The family of Gulab Singh, in the meantime, were becoming very rich. They had a policy of making ‘every product of the Valley a state monopoly’. Even prostitutes were taxed, for which they were divided into three classes, ‘according to their gratifications’, which were taxed at 40, 20 and 10 rupees a year respectively.26 According to Walter Lawrence, a British official in the Indian Civil Service (ICS) writing in the 1890s, ‘everything except air and water was under taxation’. This policy not only killed initiative and enterprise, it also led to social unrest in Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir.27

  The hopelessness of the franchise system was exposed during the great famines which crippled India in 1877–9. In Srinagar, a population of 127,000 was reduced to 60,000. ‘Oil cake, rice, chaff, the bark of the elm and yew, and even grass and roots were eagerly devoured by the starving people.’28 The famines ravaged the whole of India, particularly affecting the southern part of the subcontinent. In London the Lord Mayor of London received large donations from businessmen and City financiers anxious to help alleviate the crisis. The Times recorded in August that N. M. Rothschild and Barings gave £1,000 each. Truman, Hanbury, Buxton, the brewers, gave £210, while P&O, the shipping company, gave £105. This shows the relative standing of these companies at the time. By October the Lord Mayor’s fund stood at £415,000, roughly £41.5 million at today’s values.

  In Kashmir, however, it was felt that the Maharaja hadn’t done enough. Ranbir Singh was under scrutiny, and his death in 1885 gave Britain its opportunity to influence events in Kashmir more directly. The British government immediately told the new Maharaja that the Officer on Special Duty would be replaced by a full-fledged resident.29 The Resident would be able to keep a watchful eye on the Maharaja, particularly in connection with intrigues with the Russians. It was even suspected that the new Maharaja, Pratap Singh, had been engaged in treasonable correspondence with representatives of the Russian Tsar.30

  The relationship with the Indian princes is complicated and even now historians are often confused about the degree to which Britain allowed them to be independent. To understand the status of the princes, we can start by looking at certain aspects of British society of the time. British local government had always depended on the resident aristocracy and gentry. In India, the British officials transplanted the status, the petty snobberies and the fine gradations of rank and privilege which prevailed in Britain itself. The class system was replicated in India. The Raj, it seemed, was happiest when dealing with a ‘feudal order’. One-third of India was ruled ‘indirectly through the princes’.31 No one has ever been sure of exactly how many princes there were. There were certainly over 500, perhaps nearer 600, and they varied greatly in status and wealth. There were three categories of Indian princely state: at the top there were about 140 large states; then came a little more than 100 or so middling states, followed by about 300 minor states, which were really just landed estates.

  The obsession with the princes, their genealogy and the precedence due to each culminated in the publication of a book, entitled The Golden Book of India, in 1893. The title was modelled on The Golden Book of Venice (the Libro d’Oro), which contained the official list of the Venetian nobility, whose members alone could vote and hold office; the Libro d’Oro had essentially been closed since 1297. The Indian version, which described itself as a ‘Genealogical and Biographical Dictionary’, listed in exhaustive detail more than 190 Indian titles of honour, some of which were inherited and others merely honorific. Some of the titles read like something out of One Thousand and One Nights: the ‘Shams ud-daula’ means the ‘sun of the state’ in Arabic; ‘Gambir Rao’ means ‘sagacious chief’. The standard title was ‘raja’ for a Hindu prince or ‘nawab’ for a Muslim. ‘Maha’ means ‘great’ in Hindi, so ‘maharaja’ simply means ‘great raja’.32 There were seven grades of title, like ‘the steps of the British Peerage’, starting with ‘rao’ at the bottom, which means ‘chief’, and ending up with ‘maharaja’ and ‘maharaja bahadur’ at the top. This last title was rather formal (‘bahadur’ means ‘brave’ in Persian), and distinguished men of this rank were often simply referred to as ‘maharaja’ for short. The maharajas were at the apex of an elaborate social hierarchy unrelated to democracy or liberalism, but shamelessly aristocratic and deferential. The princes, the top people, seemed to the British to epitomize martial virtues; they were a warrior elite, who rode and hunted. They were Indian society’s ‘natural leaders’.33

  In this hierarchy, Kashmir was near the top. Kashmir, or more properly ‘Jammu and Kashmir’, and Hyderabad were the largest princely states of British India. Kashmir was comparable in size to Great Britain, although it was much more sparsely populated. There was a mystique and a glamour surrounding the princes which greatly added to their mere snob-value. There was also an obsession with protocol, which determined the number of guns they received in salute. At the head of the system was, of course, Queen Victoria, the Queen-Empress herself, who had a salute that rose to 101 guns. Her viceroy would receive a thirty-one-gun salute while the rulers of the five biggest states, Hyderabad, Kashmir, Mysore, Gwalior and Baroda, each had twenty-one guns; the most minor princes could enjoy only a nine-gun salute.34 Years later, General Wavell, as viceroy between 1943 and 1947, even invented a mnemonic to remind himself of the order of precedence of the five biggest princely states: ‘Hot Kippers Make Good Breakfast.’35

  The relationship between the ‘paramount power’, that is Great Britain, and the Indian princes changed over the years. Like many things in the empire, it was essentially a relationship which depended on individuals and circumstances. There were no hard and fast rules. The example of Pratap Singh, who succeeded his father Ranbir in 1885, shows just how flexible the relationship was. On his accession, the man appointed resident in his kingdom was Oliver St John. The installation of a resident where there hadn’t been one before was a bad sign if you were an Indian prince, implying a lack of trust between the British and the native ruler. Kashmir had enjoyed a great deal of autonomy. The resident was often a schoolmasterly figure, a ‘paternalistic guide’ to an errant ruler.36

  Pratap Singh was now thirty-five years old. He had never really got on very well with his father, and was suspicious of his younger brother, Amar Singh, who, it was well known, their father would have liked to succeed as maharaja. In March 1888, just two and a half years after Pratap had taken over his kingdom, Oliver St John decided to pay him a visit. The British Resident was not impressed. ‘I do not believe he is loyal,’ St John observed. Although very polite, the Maharaja, in St John’s eyes, was incompetent. The government of India should be ‘under no illusion as regards Maharaja Pratap Singh. From first to last I have failed to discover in him any sustained capacity for governing his country, or any genuine desire to ameliorate its condition.’ This was a standard complaint that residents made. After all, it was only natural for them to want to increase their power.37 Yet in this case, the Resident may have had a good case.

  Pratap Singh was a strange man. The British might complain of his ‘notorious weakness of character and purpose’, but his own subjects found his behaviour odd. To modern eyes, he may well have been a ‘story-book Indian Prince, vacillating and oppressive, bedecked in silk pyjamas, pearls and a diamond-encrusted turban’;38 to his contemporaries and to the British he was simply a nuisance, an eccentric who was not cut out for the role he sought to play. An opium addict, he was a devoutly orthodox Hindu who in obedience to caste restrictions concerning the crossing of the deep seas would never leave India. He took the Hindu faith so seriously that he kept a dozen cows tethered in the garden outside his bedroom window so he would be sure to see the holy creatures when he woke each morning.39

  The eccentricity wouldn’t have been such a problem if the British had actually trus
ted him. Throughout his forty-year reign, he was treated in a variety of ways; now threats were made against him, now a more conciliatory approach was tried, but he was always treated as a schoolboy. Lord Curzon, who was viceroy from 1898 to 1905, met Pratap in Peshawar at the end of April 1902. A small dispute had arisen about the coronation of King Edward VII which had been expected to take place that June, but instead was postponed until August. The Maharaja’s younger brother Raja Amar had been invited, but the Maharaja had refused permission for his brother to go. The Maharaja had requested the interview because he wished to make his case. He knew that the Viceroy had, in the diplomatic language of the period, expressed ‘surprise that he had not allowed Raja Amar Singh to accept the invitation to the Coronation in England’. This was, in Curzon’s view, ‘almost in the light of a command’.

  At this teatime interview (the meeting had started at 4 p.m. sharp), Curzon was curious about the role of the Resident. He wanted to know why a resident had been imposed, and why the Maharaja had lost some of his independence. The Maharaja pleaded that he should be allowed more freedom on the grounds that he was now older and wiser than he had been when the Resident had been appointed in the 1880s. Curzon made no promises about restoring the powers of the Maharaja. In the end, Amar didn’t get to visit London. The Maharaja received a sound rebuke from the Viceroy, who would not ‘hesitate for a moment to take away any powers conceded’ to him if ‘anything went wrong’. The Maharaja reacted like a weeping schoolboy. He offered to resign his throne ‘in favour of any member of the family whom the Government might select, if he failed to administer to the satisfaction’ of the British Raj. Even more humiliatingly, he offered, without being asked, to put his commitment to withdraw ‘into writing’.40

  This little teatime interview demonstrates something of the informal power Britain had over the princely states. There was no real constitution or legal framework. Powers were given and then taken away on a case-by-case basis, as the viceroy or resident saw fit. The residents sometimes liked the princes and got on with them. By the time Francis Younghusband became the Kashmir resident in 1906, Pratap Singh had the measure of his British masters. He would do as his grandfather had done so successfully: he would play the fawning sycophant and would protest everlasting loyalty to the British Crown, while resolutely trying to preserve what little independence he enjoyed.

  Younghusband himself has been described as the ‘last great imperial adventurer’, though many could probably lay claim to that title.41 He was one of those oddballs who crop up again and again in imperial history. The son of a military family, educated at Clifton College and Sandhurst, he had a passion for travel and adventure. In 1886–7, while still only twenty-four, he had crossed the Gobi Desert and became the first European to go through the Mustagh Pass, where K2, the world’s second-highest mountain, is situated. For this achievement, he was elected to the Royal Geographical Society, as its youngest ever member. In his energetic style, Younghusband led the expedition in 1904 to Tibet, which was effectively an invasion of that country. His later career espoused all kinds of causes from ‘free love’ to a ‘religion of atheism’, to which he turned after rejecting, in middle age, the muscular Christianity he had so lustily espoused at Clifton College.

  Younghusband’s time as resident in Kashmir was the most stable period of his adult life. In Kashmir, he did not, as he did in later years, fantasize about his lover giving birth to a ‘God-child’ who would combine the intense spirituality of its parents and would manifest ‘God more completely even than Jesus did’.42 In Kashmir he lived with his wife and daughter, leading the life of a respectable British civil servant in India, with the endless rounds of garden parties and tea parties. He even espoused liberal views about Britain’s imperial mission. In a moment of self-righteousness, he wrote ‘Guiding Principles for Conduct as Resident in Kashmir’ when he took the job in 1906. It is not clear for whom this little tract was intended; it may have been purely for his own private consumption and it was certainly never published. In this solemn document, he declared his wish ‘to allow native talent the means of development’. He ‘desired’, in his own words, ‘to give them [the natives and his own staff] fullest scope for their energies and the gratification of their inclinations’. He wanted to be a paternalistic headmaster; he did not want to ‘initiate new measures’ or ‘assume an autocratic role’. He would be merely a ‘guide’; he would ‘supervise’ the Kashmiris and the young civil servants in his office.

  To do all this effectively, Younghusband felt he needed to be ‘thoroughly in touch with the Maharaja’ as well as being ‘very intimately informed of all that goes on’. He wanted debate; he wanted to hear ‘matters discussed and thrashed out’. He needed to make himself ‘accessible’, to get out of the office and ‘be out among the people’. That was his choice. Other residents had played things differently; they had been shy or aloof or bookish types who didn’t like the endless socializing. The point was that, as in so much to do with the British Empire, there was no right way or wrong way. The empire, as can be seen by the career of the likes of Francis Younghusband, was remarkably tolerant of eccentric characters and misfits who could find no place for themselves in civilian life in Britain. That, in many ways, was the point of the whole thing. Eccentrics were attracted to serve in it, because it allowed great freedom.

  Younghusband clearly enjoyed himself in Kashmir. He was a proud imperialist and got on with the ruler. He was briefly made guardian of the Maharaja’s nephew, Hari Singh, when the boy’s father died in 1909. He gave grand speeches at the state banquets, which he wrote out carefully in his neatest handwriting. At the state banquet given on 26 June 1908, Younghusband issued the imperialist’s warning throughout the ages: ‘work with us, and all will be well. Oppose us and we will crush you.’ The British, in his view, were invincible; sensible native princes and local lords would make peace and work with Britain. He praised Sir Pratap Singh’s grandfather, the wily Gulab: ‘When others were attacking the British Government and were suffering the consequences which all who beat their heads against stone walls have to expect, Raja Gulab Singh was making terms with them and reaping a reward for his sagacity and foresight.’ He contrasted Gulab’s wisdom with the folly of others, notably the family of Gulab’s erstwhile master, Ranjit Singh, the Maharaja of the Sikh kingdom. ‘For crossing the British the family of the powerful Ranjit Singh . . . disappeared from among the great ruling families of India.’43

  The Maharaja of Kashmir, according to Younghusband, was the ‘possessor of the most beautiful country in the world’. During the Mutiny in 1857, which marked the end of East India Company rule and led to more direct control from Whitehall, with the appointment of a secretary of state for India, the Maharaja had come down ‘unhesitatingly . . . on the side of the British’. The British government and people were the best guardians of Kashmir’s future. Those Indians and Kashmiris who opposed British rule had ‘no practical experience’ of governing men ‘on the grand scale’; they could not ‘be expected to appreciate the exceptional qualities which are essential for men who have to keep three hundred million human beings at peace’. The British had the ‘grit and nerve and fibre’, ‘the resolution, energy and strength’ to govern India. He didn’t stop there. He praised the British for their mental qualities. They had the ‘sagacity, foresight and resource, which are required in those who have to keep India free from internal chaos’.

  The confidence which Younghusband displayed was extraordinary. In his mind the empire had absolutely nothing to do with politics. It was really an arena for character, in which the unique qualities of the British could be displayed and brought to bear to the advantage of the subject Indians. Younghusband was a visionary in so many ways. He saw Kashmir’s role as being the ‘model Native State of India’. As early as 1908, he spotted the potential of Kashmir in developing new forms of energy: the kingdom was a ‘great Power reservoir of Northern India’, where its ‘vast stores of water power’ were ‘to be converted with
electric power’ and sold ‘all over the Punjab’.44 At the end of 1909, Younghusband’s last year as resident, the Maharaja gave a farewell dinner for Sir Francis and his wife. In response to Younghusband’s own farewell speech, he outdid the Resident’s fulsome praise of empire of the previous year, describing himself as Edward VII’s ‘faithful vassal’ lifting his hands ‘to the Providence that His Majesty’s [Edward VII’s] paternal protection may continue over us forever’. The dinner had been preceded by an elaborate garden party. To the strains of Wagner and Viennese favourites Schubert and Lehár, played by the Maharaja’s orchestra, Younghusband and his wife said their fond farewells.45

  The goodwill and the entertainment masked the unease that the Maharaja felt. He was always trying to obtain more power and autonomy. Even after the First World War, his status was still under discussion. A secret internal memorandum from 1919 showed that the British still felt that the ‘habit of intrigue’ was ingrained in ‘His Highness’ character’ and that it would ‘be fatal to give him a free hand’.46 The Germans had even approached him in 1915 inviting him to resist British rule.47 The Maharaja, despite his protestations of friendship, was not trusted. The Resident had to be in charge, ‘particularly in the matter of financial control’. That authority would be exercised in ‘a manner least likely to hurt the Maharaja’s feelings’. The Resident would be ‘in the background as much as possible’. As a sop to the Maharaja, in 1919 his allowance from the British government was increased from £100,000 to £120,000 a year.48