The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  The followers of Dayananda who joined the Arya Samaj included a large proportion of the Hindu middle classes of Punjab. Ambitious and concerned for their children’s careers, they quickly founded a school in Lahore. One of many new educational institutions created to regenerate indigenous society in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Dayananda Anglo-Vedic College offered an English education and the prospect of an official career safe from Christian influence; there were no European teachers. By the early twentieth century the school had 900 students. Punjab’s Arya Samaj branches had 250,000 members. Their aim was to build self-reliance by creating a powerful national force in the midst of imperial institutions. British observers noted that the majority of the ‘active citizens’ of the province, minor civil servants, lawyers, schoolmasters, belonged to ‘this modern movement’. In some districts 90 per cent of Indian government officials were members.3

  The worldly orientation of the Arya Samaj’s leadership created a backlash in the 1890s. A rival group, nicknamed the ‘Mahatmas’, wanted greater focus on personal conduct even if that meant withdrawing from the ‘bodily comfort’ of the city. The greatest point of controversy was whether Arya Samaj members could eat meat, the Mahatmas insisting on strict vegetarianism. Eventually, they withdrew to set up their own residential school, or Gurukul, at Kangri in the foothills of the Himalayas. In an austere set of buildings, boys from seven to twenty-one years old lived in seclusion and self-discipline, learning ancient Indian philosophy and literature and training as Vedic preachers. The founders of the Gurukul did not intend to isolate their pupils from Western influence. They wanted to incorporate ‘the best’ of ‘Occidental thought’, as the first principal put it, into the Hindu curriculum. But self-reliance and ‘independence of character’ needed to be developed in places the conquering imperial state could not reach.4

  The debate between the two sides reflected many of the tensions and oppositions created from the attempt of people in India to assert their autonomous power in a conquered society. The violence of the imperial state had destroyed most of India’s political institutions, in Punjab as elsewhere. The 1857 rebellion demonstrated the futility of rallying to pre-British, Mughal or Maratha authority. If people were to restore a sense of their dignity, power needed restoring on a new basis, in spheres of life which would not constantly be challenged by the imperial state. But where so many walks of life were now influenced by imperial systems and regulations, knowing where to draw the line was hard. ‘Public work’ to raise living standards or nurture self-respect was impossible without compromises with imperial power. Self-affirming asceticism allowed the soul to stay pure but had little immediate impact.

  Even though both factions of the Arya Samaj tried to build Indian self-reliance without directly confronting British power, they still faced British hostility. ‘The foreign rulers of India have never been happy about the Arya Samaj’, the political leader Lala Lajpat Rai noted. ‘They have always disliked its independence of tone and its propaganda of self-confidence, self-help and self-reliance.’ Lajpat Rai had no doubt the Arya Samaj was creating a rival form of power. He went on: ‘[the British] cannot look with favour on an indigenous movement which, according to them, can do big things without their help and guidance, and which has established a sort of Government within the Government.’5

  Lajpat Rai was one important architect of the ‘government within the government’ created by Indian patriots in Punjab and beyond. The son of a Hindu teacher of Urdu, he was born in a small town between Delhi and Lahore in 1865, and became a successful lawyer while also helping to organize the Arya Samaj. In his mid-twenties, Lajpat Rai was part of the group that built the Dayananda Anglo-Vedic College. He then worked on a range of projects, founding orphanages to rescue destitute Hindu children from the grip of famine and Christian missionaries, working to relieve hilld-wellers made homeless by earthquake, and helping create India’s earliest nationalist insurance company and bank.

  This latter work of ‘co-operative endeavour’, as he called it, was Lajpat Rai’s most enduring legacy. Like other political leaders in late nineteenth-century Punjab, Lajpat Rai noted that money earned from the province’s expanding agricultural society ‘was being used to run English banks’, instead of being ploughed into Indian enterprise. The solution was to create Indian-run financial institutions which would encourage moral regeneration as well as support the wealth of the province. At the insistence of a friend, Lajpat Rai sent a memorandum to a group of leading men in Punjab – lawyers, educationalists and government officers, Sikhs, Parsis and members of the religious organization founded by Rammohan Roy in Bengal, the Brahmo Samaj, as well as Arya Samajists – urging them to deposit capital with a new financial institution. The Punjab National Bank started business on 19 May 1894, with Lajpat Rai’s brother as its first manager. Its name expressed the complicated relationship between nation and region in the politics of late-nineteenth-century self-reliance; national work should be directed to develop one’s own region or community first; creating a bank just for Punjab was work that would benefit the whole Indian nation. The result was an institution that has endured to the present day and is now India’s third largest bank.

  Lajpat Rai believed this peaceful style of institution-building would supersede the violent, warmongering politics he associated with the British regime in particular and the west in general. ‘Europe was in constant war right up to the nineteenth century,’ Lajpat Rai thought. Europe had exported its violent ‘men of genius’, its ‘men of daring and dash’ who ‘cared little for the wrongs which they thereby inflict on others’ to India. In contrast to the cathartic violence unleashed by the British, Lajpat Rai thought India needed to celebrate its history of peaceful ‘civilization’ and rational social development. Long before M. K. Gandhi had begun to dominate the public stage, nationalists like Lajpat Rai based their arguments for Indian self-reliance on a critique of the place of force in politics. ‘Their general spirit’, Lajpat Rai said of his compatriots, ‘is opposed to all kinds of violence.’ In place of the aggressive sovereign power of the British regime, Lajpat Rai celebrated the peaceful self-organizing capacity of India’s many different societies.6

  This critique of the logic of conquest led Lajpat Rai to sharply challenge Indians who celebrated the martial prowess of their own communities, including Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. Sir Sayyid criticized the newly founded India National Congress for its lack of martial honour. Mughals and Rajputs, he said, ‘who had not forgotten the swords of their ancestors’, were being encouraged to submit to Bengali clerks ‘who at the sight of a table knife would crawl under [their] chair’. Sir Sayyid thought the warrior aristocracy of north India needed to acknowledge its defeat by British armies and submit to British authority, but should still be proud of their martial history. By contrast, Lajpat Rai argued that the literature, philosophy and science of the Mughal past needed to be celebrated, not war. India was the land of peaceful improvement, of reason rather than passion and conflict, he thought. ‘No race ever complained of its having been ruined by a Rajput invasion.’ ‘It is time’, he argued, ‘that the followers of the Prophet should be proud of their ancestors, not on account of their conquests, but on account of their great efforts in the dissemination of knowledge in the world.’

  Paradoxically, these criticisms of the self-appointed guardian of the Mughal empire’s martial glory might have been influenced by Mughal traditions of thought. There is a direct line of influence. Lajpat Rai’s father taught the language of Mughal government. His ancestors worked as Mughal officials. Lajpat Rai himself was always himself more comfortable writing in Persian characters rather than in the Devanagari script now used for Hindi. Like Mughal writers, Lajpat Rai saw India as a community of communities. His thinking linked up with the idea of preserving the distinction between different communities so central to the resistance of 1857’s rebels to British power. But he stressed the importance of compromise and balance between the interests of different groups.r />
  Unlike the rebels of 1857, Lajpat Rai thought India’s plural communities could form a single nation. Centuries of peaceful co-existence meant India’s different societies collectively formed a single ‘geographical, cultural and historical entity’, he said. But Lajpat Rai’s nation was a composite entity, made up of the half-merged aspirations of different sub-nations. Each needed to develop on its own terms. A country, he wrote, ‘consisting of Hindus, Mahomedans, Christians and others cannot be said to be progressing unless all the component parts of it contribute to the progress of the whole.’

  What mattered was that the moral and social life of each part of the nation grew in their own way together. Solidarity should not be forced by the coercive powers of the state. Like many early nationalists, Lajpat Rai was far more interested in social organization than state power. He was very flexible about the type of government which should rule India. Until the end of the First World War Lajpat Rai thought India’s national regeneration could occur within the British empire, although imperial power needed to be radically transformed so Indians had more autonomy. After the war, he became an early advocate of a total break with Britain. When religious violence wracked the subcontinent during the 1920s, Lajpat Rai was the first prominent nationalist to call for India to be split up, arguing that the division of India into four or five states would allow India’s different communities to co-exist and develop together. Peaceful separation could create more lasting unity than enforced homogeneity. The important thing was to work to uplift one’s own community, not to seize control of the state.

  Self-reliance

  Lajpat Rai’s practical work and writing reflected the dominant mood of Indian nationalism in the thirty years before the Swadeshi movement. Throughout India, leaders shared a common critique of the conquering power of the British state. They tried to displace it by building the self-reliance of different communities rather than capturing the machinery of government. In this politics of self-reliance, ‘community’ was defined in thousands of different ways. Sometimes it coincided with the geographical borders of British India or was even larger. Sometimes it was tiny. The work of regeneration occurred in different styles. Sometimes it took a political form. Most commonly it focused on social, economic, cultural or religious renewal. In some times and places, assertion by one group occurred in peace with others; otherwise it led to conflict.7

  These were decades that saw currents of religious revivalism become more intense, as Indians latched onto religion as one sign of their autonomy. These efforts often involved an attempt to purify religious customs, as in the Arya Samaj’s effort to give greater definition to a core of Hindu belief. In the process, private, family or neighbourhood-based rituals were pushed into the public domain. In Pune and Bombay, a group of nationalists including Bal Gangadhar Tilak took up local, family-based rituals which celebrated the Hindu elephant god Ganesh, turning them into a major public ceremony. Ganesh was chosen because he could unite Hindus from different backgrounds and stand as a symbol of the Hindu Indian nation. Parading the figure through the centre of British-ruled cities asserted indigenous ownership of public space.8

  Religion provided a focus for the assertion of autonomy among Muslims, too. Here, domestic religious revivalism connected with opposition to the expansion of European power in Arab-speaking Muslim lands, with the French occupation of Tunisia in 1881 and British occupation of Egypt the year after. The call for Islam to strengthen itself was global, often linking to a new-found belief in the leading role of the Ottoman Turkish sultan, or khalifa, as leader of global Islam. The late 1880s and early 1890s saw the apotheosis of pan-Islamism, as figures such as the cosmopolitan radical Jamal Ud-din al-Afghani travelled between India, Persia and the Middle East encouraging Muslims to unite in opposition to British power. But global movements had a local life. Pan-Islamism inspired riots on the border with Afghanistan in the 1890s, and strikes among Muslim jute mill-workers in Calcutta.9

  In practice, pan-Islamism did little more than heighten British anxieties about plots to expel them from Asia. A more significant response came from Muslims trying to create autonomous pockets of Islamic authority within British-ruled India. Many leaders criticized Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s emphasis on the need for Muslims to submit before Britain’s conquering power. Sir Sayyid wanted to educate Muslims to occupy junior positions in the imperial hierarchy, arguing they could serve and protect the Muslim community while collaborating with the British. His critics saw cooperation with the British as corrosive and advocated seclusion and the regeneration of Islamic customs with little Western participation. In doing so, they nonetheless transformed Islamic forms of education and religious practice.10

  That was the approach adopted by the founders of the institution that grew into one of the world’s most important centre of Islamic learning. Founded in 1867 in a small north Indian town, the Darul Uloom (‘house of knowledge’) at Deoband aimed to renew Islamic traditions of learning and offer a modern education for religious leaders. It replaced the informal relationship between master and pupil that had previously characterized Islamic learning with the bureaucratic style of the European classroom. Deoband had printed curricula, ranks of desks and chairs, timetables and rule-based systems of decision-making and fund-raising. By the end of the nineteenth century, Deoband had become the most important centre of Muslim scholarship in the world after Cairo’s Al-Azhar. But this impressive instance of institution-building did not only try to replace Western education, it tried to displace imperial justice. Deoband produced legal opinions, or fatawa, offering authoritative opinions on legal matters for India’s Muslims. Just like the institutions that grew from the Arya Samaj, Deoband created a ‘government within a government’. It built a new form of power based not on the sovereignty of the conquering state but the shared energies and feelings of members of the same community.11

  The assertion of this new kind of communal power created tension. Active hostility to members of other communities was rare. But conflict emerged as rival groups acted out their communal loyalties in public spaces, and came across others with different allegiances. Tilak’s cross-neighbourhood Ganesh festival sharpened religious dividing lines in Pune and Bombay, with riots breaking out between 1893 and 1895. Campaigns organized by Hindus to protect the holy cow had a similar impact, causing fifteen major riots in Punjab between 1883 and 1891. A major wave of violence occurred in Awadh and Bihar in 1893. In each case, fighting escalated because British authorities were too distant and disengaged to negotiate a settlement between rival groups. Without political representation in public institutions, differences could only be negotiated by force on the streets. But in the 1890s violence did not represent deep-rooted antagonisms between communities. One hundred and seven people were killed in riots in 1893, a fraction of the number who died in the riots which accompanied the partition of India half a century later. Nonetheless, killing on this scale frightened the organizers of cow-protection campaigns and led them to pull back from actions that might create more conflict.12

  There was much more to the Indian politics of self-reliance than conflict between Hindus and Muslims. The growth of nationwide organizations such as the Arya Samaj and Darul Uloom at Deoband occurred alongside the creation of institutions to support the life of much smaller groups; the residents of a town, the members of a caste or sub-caste, the followers of a particular profession. In each case, the community mindedness of the late nineteenth century did not aim to seize control of the state for the benefit of a particular group. Its purpose was to regenerate South Asian society from within its own divisions and categories on many different scales.

  Looking at what happened town by town, district by district allows one to see the importance of local efforts to build the self-reliance of particularly communities beyond the power of the imperial state. Along the Andhra coastline, for example, the 1890s saw the growth of district associations, concerned with social reform and the development of the Telegu language. In this, a region whi
ch had seen a British presence since the 1740s, there was no English-language newspaper until 1920 but plenty printed in the vernacular. In Mangalore, on India’s west coast, a leading member of the Gaudi Saraswati Brahmin community opened a high school to challenge the dominance of missionary education in 1891. A hostel for Bunts, the warrior-peasant community which dominated village life in the region, was opened a few years later to house students from the countryside staying in the district capital, and became a centre for Bunt culture. In Bengal in the east of India, intellectuals created a sense of the province’s autonomous cultural identity; but they did so by founding societies which reconstructed the distinct history of particular sub-regions. An assembly to study the history of the town of Murshidabad was established in 1887, for example. In south-east Bengal, revivalism was more practical. There, in the town of Barisal deep in the Bengal delta, Ashwinikumar Dutta sent 40,000 signatures to the House of Commons in London demanding India be governed by an elected legislature in 1887. But his volunteers also created a ‘government within a government’ in the region, complete with schools, arbitration courts and financial support for the poor. Their aim was to develop what Dutta called atma-sakti, or self-reliance. These efforts, just like nationwide institutions created by the Arya Samaj or Darul Uloom, were designed to assert a kind of practical autonomy against Indian’s imperial conquerors.13

  This late-nineteenth-century politics of self-reliance was not necessarily incompatible with loyalty to British power. Sometimes loyalism was actively professed. The largest cow-protection rally of 1892, of 10,000 people at Benares, ended with three cheers being given for the true Hindu religion and for Queen Victoria. Even where leaders resisted submission to British power, the challenge was limited. The 1890s saw the creation of a few secret societies which offered physical training and whispered vaguely about armed uprising. But violence was very rare. In practice, critics of empire were reluctant to confront British power.