Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  The relationship between the British and the Maharaja of Kashmir was therefore defined by trust, and the whole history of Britain’s involvement with the kingdom was marked by improvisation and personal interactions. It was a world of splendidly dressed native rulers, of elaborate etiquette, of garden parties and banquets, of makeshift compromises. The Maharaja’s character and habits played a considerable role in the Kashmiri political scene for a hundred years after the initial sale of the region in 1846. That land sale itself had profound effects on Kashmir’s future. In 1994, nearly 150 years after this event, the President of Srinagar’s Bar Association complained that everyone in Kashmir had been ‘purchased by the Dogra [the ruling dynasty] ruler for 3 rupees’.49 The sale was an improvised solution to a particular problem. It was opposed even at the time; it wasn’t a plan that was conceived in the corridors of Whitehall or in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. Kashmir, as a political problem, was the product of short-sighted individuals, often described as ‘men on the spot’, who were responsible to no one.

  6

  The World of Sir Hari Singh

  Sir Pratap Singh died in 1925 at the age of seventy-five. Hari Singh, his nephew and successor, was the man who would ultimately be responsible for the accession of Kashmir to India in 1947. His career shows the extent to which individuals shaped events in the British Empire. If Sir Hari Singh had decided to join Pakistan, the history of Kashmir might have been just as violent, but it certainly would have been different. Pakistan’s main complaint was that a Hindu ruler, without any democratic mandate, decided to attach his kingdom, which was 80 per cent Muslim, to India, a predominantly Hindu state. It was Hari Singh, a bullying, vain and pompous man, who determined Kashmir’s future; Whitehall, Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy, and the dying apparatus of the Raj ultimately had little say in the matter.

  Hari Singh was born in 1895, the son of Amar Singh, Sir Pratap Singh’s younger brother. The two brothers did not get on very well. Amar Singh had died in 1909 of what Sir Francis Younghusband described as a ‘syphilitic affliction of the brain’. As a boy, Hari Singh played with Eileen Younghusband, Sir Francis’s only daughter, who remembered the future Maharaja as a ‘most tiresome boy’ who persecuted her fox-terrier. As we have seen, Younghusband was initially appointed Hari Singh’s guardian, Amar Singh having declared that his wife was an ‘illiterate fool’ who could not be entrusted with the boy’s care.1 In 1908, Hari Singh entered Mayo College, which had been founded in 1875 in honour of Lord Mayo, the former Viceroy, who had been assassinated on a visit to the Andaman Islands by an insane convict in 1872. Mayo College was a self-consciously elitist institution, conceived from the outset as the ‘Eton of India’, where maharajas and nawabs would learn the manners of English gentlemen without the expense of travelling thousands of miles to England and spending five years in the Spartan world of the late Victorian public school.

  In December 1879, Lord Lytton, the Viceroy, gave the main address at the annual prize-giving day. He invoked the spirit of the English ‘system of education’ which aimed at ‘training, developing and strengthening not only the mind but also the body’. He ended his rousing homage to the ‘social and moral ascendancy’ of the aristocracy by pointing to a ‘very sensible’ report which had observed that what was needed for the ‘education of India’s young rulers and nobles was an Indian Eton’. ‘Ajmer [where the school was located] is India’s Eton,’ he said. ‘You’, the Viceroy declared, pointing to the rather bewildered boys, are ‘India’s Eton boys.’2 Lytton, the son of the writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, at least practised what he preached. He had been educated at Harrow School, but he sent both his sons to Eton.

  The education Hari Singh received at Mayo College would not necessarily have made him more understanding of the needs of his subjects. Snobbish and protocol-obsessed as the late Victorian age was, Hari Singh’s own innate pomposity aggravated any such traits he would have acquired at Mayo College. He was status-conscious and proud, but also shy, vindictive and quick to take offence at anything he perceived to insult or belittle him. After leaving Mayo College aged eighteen in 1913, he was bored and quickly fell out with his uncle, who loathed him. Indeed Sir Pratap had been reluctant to accept him as his heir. During the First World War, Hari Singh wanted to travel and see the world, but was nervous that, while he was away, his uncle would disinherit him, so he stayed in Kashmir to protect his position. In 1917, the young Prince nonetheless expressed a desire to travel to ‘England via Japan and America’, after which he planned to visit the front in France ‘if it could be arranged’. British officials realized that the matter needed to be sensitively handled, because if the Prince ‘went to the Front on someone’s staff it would be all right and not give rise to comment’, but if he went on a pleasure trip this would be ‘very unpopular with the Kashmir army’, who were fighting on the front line in the bloody fields of France and Flanders.3 Hari Singh’s mother and aunts were afraid that ‘something might happen to him’ on the trip, so in the end he had to stay in Kashmir, which left the British authorities wondering what to do with him. The problem was that Hari Singh was, like many rich young men, idle and pleasure-seeking. One report remarked that ‘military work, if he really would go into it thoroughly . . . would give him almost sufficient employment’, but ‘he does not go into any of the details’. He simply asked a ‘few questions’ and then affixed his signature to whatever documents needed signing.4

  Hari Singh, now aged twenty-two, was regarded by British officials –despite his tendencies to idleness–as a ‘man of very strong character, considerable ambitions and good intentions’. His uncle, at sixty-seven, was getting more eccentric, and insisted on keeping his nephew in a state of semi-permanent house arrest. A British report of the time described how the Prince had ‘neither friends nor assistants of his own standing’ but was kept in ‘a constant state of repression and aimlessness’. In Srinagar, the state capital, there was a permanent ‘atmosphere of intrigue’.5 The old Maharaja was surrounded by personal favourites and loved plotting and scheming. In a letter to his uncle, at the end of 1921, Hari Singh referred to ‘certain persons’ who occupied the ‘position of Your Highness’ confidential and trusted advisors’ undermining his own position in the state. That position was becoming ‘absolutely impossible and matters were getting from bad to worse’. In a characteristic fit of self-pity, the young man complained of the ‘misery’ of his predicament which was ‘having the most telling effect to the detriment of my health and peace of mind’.6 His aimlessness induced resentment and, on occasion, clouded Hari Singh’s judgement. After the First World War had come to an end, he finally managed to realize his desire of visiting Europe. It was there that his conduct aroused attention in the world’s media, when he was involved in one of the most celebrated scandals of the time.

  On 4 November 1919 a Victory Ball was held at the Royal Albert Hall in London. This event had been inaugurated the previous November and had started controversially, when Billie Carleton, a twenty-two-year-old dancer and singer, was found dead in her bed of a cocaine overdose, after attending the first Victory Ball. The 1919 event had some startling, though perhaps less fatal, consequences. Hari Singh had taken a box at the Albert Hall. Two attractive women, Mrs Robinson and Mrs Bevan, were in the box next to the Prince. He engaged them in conversation and showed an interest in Mrs Robinson. The next month she followed Hari Singh to Paris, where he was staying at the St James and Albany Hotel, an elegant seventeenth-century building opposite the Tuileries Gardens. One morning Mrs Robinson and the Raja were conversing in his room in the hotel when a man burst in claiming to be Mrs Robinson’s husband. The Robinsons appeared to argue, and Mr Robinson suggested that he would divorce his wife, citing the Raja, Hari Singh, as co-respondent in the divorce case. Hari Singh’s aide-de-camp, Captain C. W. Arthur, advised his master that the outlook was bleak, because being cited as a co-respondent would bar Hari from succeeding to his uncle’s throne. Arthur also suggested that the Prince s
hould buy off the furious husband. Terrified, Hari Singh signed two cheques for £150,000 made out to Robinson and sent Arthur that very day to dissuade Robinson from going to court.

  Eventually the truth came out: there was no Mr Robinson, as the episode had been an elaborate blackmail plot conceived by Captain Arthur. In order to spare his embarrassment, Hari Singh had been referred to as ‘Mr A’ when the blackmail case came to court in 1924, yet this veil of anonymity was ignored by the foreign press, particularly by French and American newspapers, which were not as deferential as British publications. The Raja was humiliated; his own counsel, Sir John Simon, a pompous politician who was a Fellow of All Souls College, a former home secretary and reputedly the highest-paid barrister at the London Bar, described his client as a ‘poor, green, shivering, abject wretch’. When he returned home after the case, the Maharaja, Hari’s uncle, banished him to a remote jungle estate for six months, where the young man had to perform ritual acts of penance.7

  The effects of this humiliation on the ebullient Prince were significant, and he became more secretive and suspicious, as well as more self-indulgent and introverted. By the time he finally became maharaja in 1925, he was thirty and had become fat through gluttony, while he pursued his passion for hunting accompanied by a dwindling circle of friends. His treatment of the rajas, who were local dignitaries, and minor officials round his court, was arrogant and often vindictive. He even crossed the British Resident a couple of times at the beginning of his reign.

  An example of Hari Singh’s insensitivity was his treatment of a Colonel Ward, who had been granted a post as honorary adviser to the old Maharaja in relation to agriculture and industries. Ward had created a retirement career for himself, ostensibly trying to improve Kashmir breeds of cattle and sheep. He enjoyed an estate, Pandrethan, just outside Srinagar, which had been supported by money from Sir Pratap Singh. Hari Singh, wishing to reduce expenditure, summarily evicted Colonel Ward from the estate. The Colonel, however, was eighty-four years old and the Maharaja’s hounding of the old man was a public relations disaster. From London, in January 1928, the Earl of Birkenhead, the former F. E. Smith, a swashbuckling lawyer and self-made Conservative grandee, wrote on the matter to the Viceroy, expressing the widely held view that Hari Singh was ‘young and bumptious and difficult’. He added that he did ‘not like the idea of throwing a British subject to the dogs’.8 Colonel Ward had been a friend of the Maharaja’s uncle and it was this friendship which had incurred Hari Singh’s resentment. The British Resident in Kashmir, E. B. Howell, observed that ‘His Highness delights in acts of generosity to those whom the late Maharaja depressed and the contrary to those whom he exalted’.9

  The incident showed the Maharaja’s tendency to bully and intimidate. The new Secretary of State at the India Office, Viscount Peel, remarked to the Viceroy, the liberal-minded Conservative Lord Irwin, who in the 1930s became an architect of appeasement as Lord Halifax, that the Maharaja had ‘a puzzling blend of good and bad qualities’. There was ‘an element of the bully in him’, although like all bullies he could be charming among people who were as strong and powerful as he. The Maharaja behaved ‘correctly enough when he is under your eye or among his fellow Princes’, but when he had only the Resident to deal with ‘he tends to assert himself in a domineering way’. The Secretary of State thought the Maharaja suffered from an ‘inferiority complex’.10 In late November 1928, Hari Singh was in London having lunch with Viscount Peel, who was notable as a tall, combative, athletic type with the ‘jaw of a fighter’. Now in his early sixties, Peel was ‘highminded, well meaning, zealous and able’.11 He was also tough, arrogant and very wealthy, having married the only daughter and sole heiress of the Ashton linoleum empire. Peel directly confronted Hari Singh about his treatment of Colonel Ward, which he described as ‘harsh’. Hari Singh claimed ‘he had never heard of the matter’. Peel acidly observed that the Maharaja was either being ‘rather disingenuous . . . or else his memory is a pretty short one’. The lunch, in Peel’s view, did not ‘augur very well for old Colonel Ward’.12 By April the next year, Hari Singh had sent a letter to Peel in which he backtracked slightly. He claimed that he had been unable to ‘acquaint’ the Secretary of State with the facts because he had not had his ‘papers . . . in England’. Ward had left the house, the Maharaja said, of his ‘own accord’ when it was decided to abolish the farm. The Maharaja, insensitive to the feelings of others, was very quick to take offence at Ward’s campaign against him and his government. The Maharaja even used Ward’s advanced age as an argument in favour of his having dismissed him: ‘I cannot see on what grounds Colonel Ward deserves any special treatment . . . [he] is about 80 years of age’; this meant that he couldn’t have any ‘possible grievance against being retired from service’.13

  The Maharaja was becoming a nuisance, but there was little the British government could do about it. The Resident complained of Hari Singh’s delusions of grandeur, his taste for independence, his growing ‘tendency towards extravagance’, especially the pomp and ceremony he indulged in at court.14 Hari Singh’s pettiness knew no bounds. At a formal dinner held on the night of 15 May 1931 at the Shalimar Bagh in Srinagar in honour of the Maharaja, he was greeted on arrival by a group of notables at the entrance to the garden. The Raja of Poonch, a minor chief in the Maharaja’s kingdom, remained in the pavilion and did not form part of the welcoming party. Hari Singh was infuriated by this and ordered that the Raja leave the garden ‘at once’; the unfortunate Raja was now to be banned from the Palace and all functions ‘until further orders’. The typewritten programme of ceremonials had laid down that, ‘on alighting from his motor at the door of the garden, His Highness would be met by the Raja of Poonch’. Technically, Hari Singh was right, but his overreaction was characteristic. The next day the Raja wrote a grovelling letter of apology, but the Maharaja remained implacable. British officials were talking of the possibility of the Raja’s ‘internment’. On 6 June, nearly four weeks after the dinner, the Maharaja passed an order that the Raja’s salute of thirteen guns should be reduced to nine. British officials looked on in bewilderment. Of course they would have ‘nothing to do with’ the quarrel, which continued throughout 1931. In late November the Raja was complaining to the Resident of the ‘consistent series of acts’ of ‘aggression’ on the part of Hari Singh.15

  The petty feuds and the endless disputes about precedence and protocol reveal the highly fraught, almost surreal conditions in which some of the Indian princes operated. This eccentric, even crazy atmosphere was a feature of the British Empire in India which has often been overlooked. The continual references to precedence and formality would astonish a world that has grown tired of such things. There was a precedent or tradition to regulate absolutely everything. In 1940, an issue at stake was whether ‘the Ruling Princes calling on His Excellency the Viceroy should write their names in the Viceroy’s Visitor’s Book or leave their cards only’. This question was referred to the Committee on Ceremonies, which had reported on just such matters in 1932, when it was decided that ‘writing names in the Viceroy’s Book is a universally accepted form of courtesy and no exception or modification seems desirable’. This dispute had been stirred by Hari Singh, who had simply left his card while visiting the Viceroy in Bombay and had complained of not having been invited to the garden party which was taking place during the visit.16

  In 1939 there had been a similar controversy about the issue of gifts being presented to the King and Queen in London by the various Indian princes. Again there was a clear protocol which had been established as early as 1861, but was still being referred to in 1939. Back in early 1860s, Queen Victoria had declared her appreciation of ‘every mark of the loyalty and affection of the Princes and Chiefs of India’, but it was not her desire ‘that they should give expression to these feelings by the presentation of costly gifts’. The Queen would be ‘most gratified by the receipt of a simple letter of friendship’. Of course, there had been certain exceptions in the eigh
ty or so years which had intervened. In 1925 and again in 1937, the Maharaja of Rewa had been allowed to send gifts of albino tiger skins, ‘mainly because of their rarity’. Messages from the Indian ‘chiefs and princes’ to the King Emperor in London were also regulated, according to the status of the prince: ‘messages of a purely personal and private nature can be addressed to the Palace direct by Rulers having salutes of 11 guns and over’. Since the lowest-ranked prince was entitled to nine guns and the highest to twenty-one, most of the chiefs and princes could, if they wanted, send Christmas cards, addressed to King George and Queen Elizabeth, directly to Buckingham Palace.17

  It was inevitable that this kind of formal environment would produce proud and difficult maharajas, who stood on ceremony and were punctilious about their dignity and honours. It was less inevitable that these people ultimately had the power to decide the destiny of millions. It is a tragedy that the fate of Kashmir was in the hands of Hari Singh at such a crucial time as the partition of India and Pakistan. His interests were largely sporting. He was bored by politics and had no desire to engage constructively in affairs of state. Any account of his pursuits is rapidly reduced to never-ending stories from the field of sports and gaming: shooting, fishing, hunting, polo, horse racing and, when he took time off in Cannes or Monte Carlo, a little gambling. His own son, Karan Singh, recalled that his father’s shooting parties were ‘meticulously planned, each guest provided with cartridges and a packed lunch complete with wine’.

  Duck shoots would begin early in the morning, at which time the Maharaja’s guests would ‘all drive out in a great procession, assemble on the banks of the lake’ and then row to the location of the shoot, where the ‘whole day would be spent massacring duck of various species’. The Maharaja himself was a superb shot. Black bears, wild boar and even the panthers which roamed the lush jungles of the Maharaja’s domain were all shot indiscriminately. His generosity as a host was not matched by even the pretence of sportsmanship. ‘Any small setback in shooting or fishing, polo or racing, would throw him into a dark mood which lasted for days,’ remembered his son. When this happened, it was best to stay out of the way. His Highness’s peevishness would lead inevitably ‘to what came to be known as “muquaddama”, a long inquiry into the alleged inefficiency or misbehaviour of some young member of the staff’.18 The Maharaja was known as the ‘King of the Indian Turf’, an ‘uncanny judge of horse flesh’ and an ‘outstanding horse-breeder’.19 His scarlet and gold colours were familiar to every ‘Bombay race goer’, and he was always much happier racing than governing his state.20 His own riding days were curtailed by his increasing obesity in middle age, but he had excelled at polo, a sport in which he was so anxious for his son to develop equal proficiency that he forced the boy to ride every day from the age of three. This regime didn’t work. Today, Karan Singh is a noted writer and academic whose skills at polo are limited.