A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  At the turn of the century, then, there was an extraordinary gulf between the rhetoric of the Diamond Jubilee, Pax Britannica – pompously self-righteous, architecturally swaggering, militarily Maxim-gunned – and the embittered disillusionment of its subject peoples. Over the mass graves of the loyal fallen, Chamberlain after the Boer War and Curzon after the First World War might pretend (or even actually believe) that the empire had never been more united; but they were both deeply deluded. During the first two decades of the 20th century the failure to make good on Macaulay’s, Disraeli’s or Curzon’s promises came home to roost, and in ways the makers of those promises could never have anticipated. Instead of the classical language of liberalism being used to advance an agenda drawn from English constitutional history, nationalists in India and Ireland repudiated the whole book and turned back to their own traditions (even when they had to reinvent them). Irish nationalism became coloured by the Gaelic movement, whose literary and political leaders such as Padraig Pearse developed a cult of peasant mysticism that was deliberately meant to move as far away as possible from the polite, reasonable ‘my dear chappishness’ of liberalism. Along with it, much less happily, went the development of a cult of violence and blood sacrifice that achieved its mythic consummation in the Easter Rising of 1916, with Pearse as one of its many victims.

  Precisely the same chronology was followed in India. The more Westernized, constitutionalist-minded leaders of Congress – Surendranath Banerjee and the Poona Brahmin Gopal Krishna Gokhale – lost ground to charismatic neo-traditionalists like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, also a Chitpavan Brahmin but much more invested in the history of Maratha resistance to the Raj. In orchestrating the cult of Sivaji, the Maharashtra Maratha prince, Tilak may have been heavily embellishing his actual history, but he was liberating India from an equally preposterous British historical mythology that represented the continent as a place of darkness, poverty and anarchy before the advent of the peace-loving Clive and Wellesley. Instead of invoking John Stuart Mill, Tilak used precisely the elements of Hindu culture that British imperialists deemed to be politically infantile – the Ganpati festivals – to mobilize a mass following. Instead of using Oxbridge English he played the vernacular presses like a sitar. Instead of ‘improving’ Western art, Tilak revelled in the modern iconology of Ganesh and Kali. He even had Lord Bentinck turn in his grave by resisting a well-meaning attempt to raise the eligible age of marriage.

  Most of all, Tilak knew exactly how to hit the Raj where it most hurt: in its pocket. Under swaraj, the demand for Indian Home Rule (for Tilak was, like the Irish revolutionary Eamon de Valera, prepared to accept dominion status), the Hindi equivalent of Sinn Fein (Us Alone), was pressed most brilliantly through the means of swadesh or, as they said in Ireland, boycott. (In fact, some of the more sensitive souls in the pre-First World War Congress worried about using the term ‘boycott’ because of its overtones of Irish intimidation!) The closure of shops (which, for example, greeted the implementation of Curzon’s partitioning of Bengal on 16 October 1906), the mass walk-outs and, above all, the ban on buying British goods, were a death-blow not just to the unequal commercial advantage of the home country but also to the transparently hypocritical cant of mutual prosperity that was still intoned by men such as Chamberlain. More aggravating still, three-quarters of a century of sneering at comically Westernized bhadralok, dressed up in their spats and starched collars, finally paid off in the campaign for homespun cloth. Jawaharlal Nehru’s father, Motilal, who had started his political career very much as a Westernized liberal and sent his son to Harrow and Cambridge, traded in his jackets and ties for a traditional long coat and cap not because he felt comfortable with them, but because he knew they were a symbol of his legitimacy as a nationalist.

  This embrace of neo-traditionalism as the form of resistance to British rule would have been surprising enough to the founders of the Raj. But they would have been even more unnerved and bewildered by the spectacle of British radicals – British women radicals – actually adopting the wisdom of the East, not the West, as the way forward for the national cause. Instead of deferential brown Englishmen the Raj now had to deal with troublesome white Hindus, Buddhists and other mystics. Annie Besant, co-defendant in 1877 with Charles Bradlaugh (another enthusiast of the Congress) in the 1875 obscenity trial for promoting contraception among the working classes, and organizer of the famous match girls’ strike of 1888, had gone oriental with a vengeance. When she went to India in 1893 Annie was still a devotee of Madame Helena Blavatsky’s religion of Theosophy. But she went on to plunge much more fully into Hindu religion and politics, founding a Hindu College at Benares – thus closing the circle that had begun with Bentinck and Macaulay’s decision to shut down the college of their day as a useless anachronism. And in 1916, as one of the most militant voices in favour of an accelerated drive for swaraj, Annie founded the Home Rule for India League and in 1917 became president of Congress.

  There were some even more unexpected outcomes. Emily Lytton, daughter of the late earl-viceroy and sister of Constance, the militant suffragette, was proposed to in Kensington in 1896 by an ambitious 27-year-old architect, Edwin Lutyens. One of his impassioned love letters bears a drawing of himself as a knight-errant, out in the imperial style to conquer ‘The World’. He briefly conquered Emily, but the union was a disaster. She was put off sex, and took up Theosophy instead under the guidance of the Indian teacher Krishnamurti. Edwin went on to build New Delhi just in time for it to be the epicentre of a dying empire.

  The hecatombs of the First World War, not to mention millions more who died from the influenza pandemic of 1918, did nothing, for all the pieties of imperial cenotaphs and war graves, to make the ties of empire closer. The ANZAC soldiers who managed to survive the death-traps at Gallipoli, the Canadians who crawled away from the carnage of Vimy Ridge, the Indians who were berated for surrendering to the Turks in Mesopotamia did not, by and large, treasure their military experience as a testimony to the wisdom and infallibility of the British officer-and-gentleman class. At least a million and a half Africans were conscripted during that war as labourers and porters of all kinds, leaving to white men the adult task of actually tackling the Germans. George V, whose strong suit was not tact, thanked them for acting in these lowly but essential supporting roles and thus ‘hurling their spears’ at the Teutonic foe. In Ireland, ‘England’s disadvantage’ was held to be the nationalists’ opportunity. Although hundreds of thousands of Irishmen volunteered in 1914, the mass slaughter removed masses of Unionist patriots from the fray; whilst Sinn Fein recruited tens of thousands more for the cause of breaking, not preserving, the imperial connection. In India, the Ottoman Turkish sultan’s declaration of the Khalifa (self-styled protectors of all Muslims) made huge inroads into the loyalty of the Muslim population, somewhat behind the Hindu community in their anti-imperialism (and alienated by its adoption of Hindu militancy). Both before and after the First World War the British government, with an eye to mobilizing the human, fiscal and military resources of the Raj, at last made some political concessions: forms of local government were created, elected by an Indian franchise and weighted to protect Muslims where necessary.

  But it was very much a case of too little, too late. It is unclear whether British governments anticipated in return expressions of loyal gratitude. If so, they were to be badly disappointed. By 1918 swaraj had become a mass movement; and strikes, boycotts and the hartal action of non-cooperation – by which not just shop and factory workers, but the masses of clerks without whom everything in India, from the post offices to the heavily fortified railway stations, was incapable of running, walked out – had made the omnipotent Raj virtually ungovernable. Every so often frustration boiled over into bloody violence, the most murderous in 1919 at Amritsar in the Punjab when General Reginald Dyer, under directions from the provincial governor, Michael O’Dwyer (a hard-line Irish loyalist), ordered his troops to fire on an unruly but unarmed crowd, killing 379 of them. Afterwar
ds Dyer regretted only that he had not been able to use heavier weapons.

  It was the genius of the charismatic Indian Congress Party leader Gandhi to pity not just the victims but the perpetrators of Amritsar for their blind, animal brutality. In resistance he offered not counter-violence but satyagraha, the truth – or love – force. With the Mahatma, the 100-year illusion of self-improvement through Westernization reached its final moment of bathos. He was, after all, someone who had briefly become exactly what Macaulay had in mind, a ‘brown Englishman’, a member of the Hindu Vaisya caste who had, through hard study, turned himself into a barrister of London’s Inner Temple. But that was as far as the metamorphosis went. Instead, after early civil-rights activity in South Africa, Gandhi returned to India in 1914 and turned himself into something like the opposite; a holy man dressed only in a homespun dhoti, who advocated a return to village self-sufficiency and wanted Indian freedom to herald not just a political and social transformation but above all a moral one. Gandhi’s hope was that this transformation could be extended from his own people to their benighted imperial masters, who seemed to know only profit and brute power. All his carefully calculated actions, therefore, were expressly meant as a refutation of Western styles of power. The ceremonial expression of imperial authority was the durbar procession, with its fanatical attention to the niceties of protocol, its glittering public bombast, its orgy of jewels and feasting. Gandhi’s reply was the fast; the embrace of the Untouchables; the pilgrim’s half-naked walk to the sea (to overthrow the government monopoly on salt), leading a slow march of millions indiscriminately jumbled together. The last message of the Raj was that it had brought ‘Western civilization’ to India. But when asked what he thought of that civilization, Gandhi’s famously wry reply was, ‘I think a good idea.’

  But then, of course, Gandhi was assassinated by one of his own countrymen at the very moment of the realization of Indian freedom; and millions more would die then and since in sectarian bloodbaths that continue, both in India and in Ireland, to this day. Neo-traditionalism has found it easier to create and perpetuate differences than to dissolve them. Might the English language, or at least Ameringlish, liberated from its role as the language of imperial sovereignty, have a future, after all, as the solvent of sectarian conflict – an agency of modernization without mastery, whether in Bombay or Bradford? For the one thing we can be sure of in this history is that, when Macaulay chirpily told the electors of his constituency in Leeds that he would be happy to see the products of their industry again in the East, he would not have meant the appearance of saris in east Leeds. But that, again, is the fate of empire.

  CHAPTER

  7

  THE LAST OF

  BLADESOVER?

  IT WAS IN Bangalore that Winston Churchill began to gorge on history. ‘In the long glistening hours’ of the afternoon, while his fellow officers were snoring away the tedium between heavy lunches and light polo, he surveyed the gorgeous debris of the late Roman Empire with Gibbon, or, courtesy of Macaulay, sailed on the Protestant wind with Dutch William in 1688. He had come to India in 1896 as a junior officer of the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars, thirsty for action. His head was full of the contemporary certainties, held especially by the young, that the British Empire was different; that it was, as Professor Seeley had promised in 1883, ‘free of that weakness which has brought down most empires, the weakness of being a mere mechanical forced union of alien nationalities’. It never struck the slight, sandy-haired, rosy-faced 22-year-old that here he was, ready – impatient, in fact – to take the Maxim guns and the cavalry to the ‘unruly Pathans’ (or wherever he would be sent) on behalf of an empire whose entire existence turned on the success or failure of ‘forced unions’.

  Force? How one winced to hear of so un-British a thing. Power, now, was something else again. The power, the attraction of the empire, was not brute coercion but the self-evident, manifold blessings the empire had brought: peace, security, liberty, prosperity. (This was 1897. Bodies were being picked over by kites not so very far away from the fragrant rose gardens of Bangalore cantonment.) Take his own regiment, for example. Were they there to dictate to the nizam of Hyderabad how he should govern? Not a bit of it. They were there with his blessing, at his invitation indeed, to ‘keep the peace’ as agreed; just as other regiments had been assigned to the territories of independent princely states to keep them … independent. And if there were more troops on the northwest frontier, or for that matter in northern Nigeria or southern Egypt, well, that was to ensure that these places did not collapse into the kind of anarchy that would be taken advantage of by powers altogether less civilized, altogether less friendly, to the advance of progress – Russians; dervish mullahs; those Sorts of People. Churchill never doubted that the mission of the empire was to ‘give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to plant the seeds of commerce and learning … what more beautiful idea … can inspire human effort?’

  And yet there was an awful lot of hanging around in the club, pending the accomplishment of these great goals. It was all very nice being waited on hand and foot in the pink and white bungalow he shared with two brother officers. Every month he rode back to the bungalow, tossed a bag of silver to the head manservant and then ‘all you had to do was to hand over all your uniform and clothes to the dressing boy, your ponies to the syce [groom] and your money to the butler and you need never trouble any more … for a humble wage there was nothing they would not do. Their world became bounded by the commonplace articles of your wardrobe … no toil was too hard, no hours were too long. … Princes could live no better than we.’ But for all the space of the subcontinent, how narrow this world of ponies and punchbowls was. The restive young Winston did things not quite pukka for an officer. He chased after gaudy butterflies, collected fleshy orchids and familiarized himself with all 150 specimens of the transplanted roses of Bangalore – passions that would stay with him for the rest of his life. And still it wasn’t quite enough.

  What then? He had always been impetuous, sometimes to his cost. Now he would buckle down to becoming wise – something his father believed was quite beyond him. Under the low-slung roof of the verandah, or inside with the punkah sailing to and fro, a glass of the weak whisky and soda that India had taught him to appreciate close by, Churchill read on and on in his self-devised remedial currriculum – Plato’s Republic, Adam Smith and, more adventurously, the philosophy of Schopenhauer. But it was always history to which he returned again and again; not as romantic entertainment, and still less as monastic devotion to the documentary truth of the remote past, but in pursuit of a credo. For him it was something to five by that was greater and better than the complacencies of the barracks, the ignorant nostrums exchanged at tiffin about how the niggers should be so damned grateful they were all there.

  So back, then, to Henry Hallam’s relentlessly upright Constitutional History of England (1827); and back, especially, to Macaulay. The noble lord, his remains reposing in Westminster Abbey, had been dead for 30 years. Oxford scholars now dismissed his work as tendentious, Whiggish self-congratulation at its worst. Although Churchill himself would later berate Macaulay for traducing the memory of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, in 1897 both his multi-volume History of England (1849–62) and the even more dazzling essays proclaimed Macaulay as the epitome of what a historian should be: an engaged citizen, a public teacher for the times, and, not least, an unapologetic best-seller. Macaulay wrote sentences as if they were speeches to be declaimed. Of the ex-Jacobin Bertrand Barère, who had had the impertinence to publish his memoirs, Macaulay declared: ‘Whatsoever things are false, whatsoever things are dishonest, whatsoever things are unjust; whatsoever things are impure, whatsoever things are hateful, whatsoever things are of evil report, if there be any vice, if there be any infamy, all these things we knew were blended in Barère.’ Churchill loved the rolling, gathering, accusatory force of the reiterations and made note of
it. Macaulay’s ghost, from the printed page, was in effect the first speech tutor of the lisping, stammering young aristocrat. But the History of England was far more than a tutorial in public style, literary and rhetorical. It gave Churchill the strongest sense he had yet had of his country’s place in the great Scheme of Things, and thus of his own. As he read Macaulay, the claim that British history was unique became to him something other than loose, vainglorious hyperbole. His mentor was unarguably right that 19th-century Britain, uniquely among European countries, had not suffered from the twin evils of autocracy and revolutionary civil war; that ‘while every part of the Continent, from Moscow to Lisbon, has been the theatre of bloody and devastating wars, no hostile standard has been seen here but as a trophy [that] the administration of justice has been pure … every man has felt entire confidence that the state would protect him in the possession of what had been earned by his diligence and hoarded by his self-denial. Under the benignant influence of peace and liberty science has flourished.’ And so on. Macaulay must, then, have also been right that the condition and cause of such a happy state of affairs had indeed been the preservation of Protestant England from a Catholic crown and its miraculous transformation into a constitutional monarchy. Everything that had followed, including the disinterested wish to extend the empire of liberty to remote parts of the world, was but the preservation and natural development of that original, momentous happening.