The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  The slow pace of Curzon’s imperial monumentalization was a sign of British pessimism about their empire in India. The Swadeshi agitation was followed by years when plots appeared to be everywhere. British officers were murdered and conspiracies to kill Governor-Generals seemed commonplace. Imperial bureaucrats and politicians were paranoid about Indians linking up with India’s archenemy, Germany. An attack on the judge of Muzaffarpur killed two British women in 1908; the Collector of Tirunelveli was killed in June 1911; Lord Hardinge himself was badly hurt by a bomb blast in 1912. Worried texts were once again published from British presses with titles such as Indian Unrest (1910), England’s Problem in India (1912), and India in Travail (1918), each proposing measures to sustain the endangered power of the British that ranged from granting full self-government to massive coercion. But beyond Curzon’s band of supporters, imperialism had few allies.

  For the first time since 1858, some Britons even started to doubt the physical possibility of sustaining British domination in India. The 1910s saw the high point of official racism, but it was more often used to explain Britain’s imperial failures than to justify the empire’s spread across the globe. Medical experts imagined that Europeans were biologically superior to Indians, but thought they were incapable of sustaining their ‘brain power, or the civilization due to it’ in Indian’s tropical climate for long. Sir Richard Havelock Charles, the Irish-born Professor of Anatomy at Lahore Medical College, then chief medical officer of the Government of India between 1913 and 1923, argued that ‘white races cannot permanently colonize the tropics and remain white’. Charles believed the sun and heat caused European men and women to develop a ‘congeries of mental and sensory disturbances’ and morally to degenerate. In time they became irritable, short-tempered, overly introspective and unable to sustain the confidence and clarity of mind he believed marked the superiority of the ‘white race’. More likely caused by the ‘monotony of life in remote stations’ or their anxiety about challenges to their power, the mental condition of ‘tropical neurasthenia’ was frequently diagnosed among Europeans. Often, the condition was used as an excuse by perfectly fit men and women to escape the worsening political conditions for Europeans in India and go home. But complete mental breakdowns were not rare. ‘Brain fog’ was commonplace. Fear of the collapse of British authority was compounded by a belief that Britons were losing the psychological character to hold on to power.34

  Before 1914, India played little significant role in Britain’s projection of power overseas. Neither economically nor militarily did Britain rely on the subcontinent. After the failure of efforts to increase supplies of raw cotton in the 1860s, India exported few useful raw materials for Britain’s manufacturing industry. India was (just about) the largest market for Lancashire cotton, but textiles did not dominate the British economy. Indian saltpetre exports had been eclipsed by Chilean sodium nitrate in the 1860s and then chemically made explosives in the 1890s. From then to 1914 India was the supplier of very little military hardware. The purpose of the Indian army was to suppress internal opposition and protect British India from external powers, not extend British interests outside India. The only large involvement of Indian troops outside South Asia before 1914 was against Chinese forces in the first Opium War of 1839–40. After then, in all but a few minor skirmishes, Indian troops only fought in India or on its borders. Despite Curzon’s repeated offers, Indian soldiers were not used in the conflict in South Africa between 1898 and 1901 as generals and politicians tried to keep the fight with Transvaal ‘a white man’s war’. ‘The primary job of India’s soldiers was the defence of India’, as military historian Hew Strachan puts it. The ‘possession’ of India was a source of pride and a place for Tory imperialists to play out their fantasies about hierarchy and absolute power. It provided a livelihood for thousands of British officers, soldiers and ancillary staff. But beyond this narrow spectrum of the population, Britain’s domination of India had little practical use to Britain itself.35

  In India by 1914, British power was being subtly challenged by thousands of institutions through which people exercised their will to shape their own social, economic and sometimes even political lives. Sometimes the growth of these institutions was resisted, sometimes they were grumpily accepted by the British regime; occasionally they were co-opted by imperial officers to help the British maintain power. But throughout the subcontinent the Indian energy for institution-building contrasted with the recessive mood of Britons in government. India’s early twentieth-century nationalist enthusiasms diminished the British state’s commitment to empire. Many in India imagined that with little interest or zeal, British power would fade away. That is not, of course, what happened. The surprising importance of India to the First World War effort wrought dramatic change to Britain’s imperial ambitions and created a powerful indian backlash.

  13

  MILITARY LIBERALISM AND THE INDIAN CROWD

  Sometime in the early 1820s a sailor from Devon in south-west England arrived in Calcutta to work as a river pilot. He met an English girl and they married in Calcutta Cathedral. John and Julia started a family that stayed in India until Indian opposition to British rule forced them to leave. The Indian careers of its members allowed the Dyer family to climb the social ladder. The couple’s three sons became technicians and surveyors. Their four daughters married into East India Company service families. Their second son was on track to become an engineer before he noticed the demand for beer from European soldiers. At Kassauli, a military town in the foothills of the Himalayas, Edward Dyer founded India’s first modern brewery, two years before the great insurrection of 1857. There, he made the beer that would be India’s bestseller for a century, naming it ‘Lion’ after the animal which symbolized British power. Edward’s children continued the pattern of becoming ancillary staff in the imperial regime, building careers based on positions of small-scale domination over local Indian populations. Some became engineers. Most joined the army. So, when John Dyer’s grandson Reginald arrived to violent protests in Amritsar on 11 April 1919, he faced a challenge to his family’s way of life, not just a movement resisting the British state.

  The First World War had left India in a state of economic crisis and political upheaval. To suppress dissent, the government extended wartime restrictions on civil liberties. The Indian National Congress declared a general strike. Indian leaders called for protests to be peaceful, but, as demonstrators were killed and arrested, rioting started to spread. Imperial troops fired on crowds in Delhi on 30 March. Aircraft machine-gunned people from the air at Gujranwala the following week. At Ahmedabad rioters killed European officers and crowds were fired on.

  Dyerism

  The worst violence, on both sides, occurred in the city of Amritsar in Punjab. Motivated by economic hardship and the government’s anxious suppression of dissent, crowds gathered to protest against everything from the refusal of the railways to allow platform tickets to the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire. At the beginning of April 1919, the imperial authorities accused Congress activists of bringing ‘the Government established by law in British India into hatred and contempt’. Police arrested two of the most prominent Congress leaders. The newly famous political leader M. K. Gandhi was blocked from travelling to Punjab. Violent protests spread through the city. On 10 April public buildings were stormed and gutted. Two banks and a missionary school were looted. Five Englishmen and ten Indian protesters were killed. A crowd pushed a female missionary off her bicycle, beat her and left her for dead. Europeans retreated to the enclaves of the city’s fort and cantonment but enemies of British rule ran riot in the rest of the city. On the evening of 11 April, hundreds gathered at a public meeting declaring that ‘the British Government had been overthrown’, and decided to cut the railway line. Posters appeared calling on ‘the Indian nation’ to ‘Kill and be killed’ and ‘Conquer the English monkeys with bravery’.1

  Reginald Dyer was born near his father’s brewery in Punjab. Dyer spent
the first eleven years of his life in India, but was sent to school in Ireland to preserve a sense of his separateness from Indian society. From there, he joined the army, helped suppress riots in Belfast and ended up back in India in 1887. By 1919 he had risen to become a temporary brigadier general, and had charge of the Jalandhar division of the imperial army. On 11 April the city’s civilian Deputy Commissioner authorized General Dyer to use whatever force was needed to impose British order on a city which had been taken over by crowds. Two days later, just before noon, Dyer’s troops marched around the city announcing by drumbeat that all public meetings were banned.

  Early the same afternoon, Dyer learnt that a crowd had gathered at the public waste ground where many of the ‘seditious’ public meetings of the past few months had been held, the Jallianwala Bagh. It was a mixed crowd of between 10,000 and 20,000. Some were there for a protest meeting, others for the Sikh festival of Baisakhi. General Dyer entered the ground with fifty Indian soldiers carrying .303 rifles, forty Gurkhas armed only with swords, and the European chief of police. With no warning, his troops started shooting, firing 1,650 rounds into the crowd. Official figures said 379 people died. The Congress inquiry into the shootings counted more than 1,000. By a long way, this was the worst use of military force against a civilian crowd in British history.

  Dyer was briefly lauded by his superiors in Punjab for quickly stopping the collapse of imperial power, and was sent to command troops in Afghanistan. ‘Your action correct and Lieutenant-Governor approves,’ Dyer was told when he first reported his action to the head of Punjab’s government. But as news of the Amritsar killings spread to London his conduct began to be criticized by his compatriots. The British government’s liberal Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, insisted on a public investigation into the Punjab violence. Within months, Dyer was summoned to appear before a Disorders Inquiry Committee in the Punjab capital of Lahore.

  The committee consisted of a mild-mannered Scottish judge, Lord William Hunter, four other Britons and three Indian lawyers. The commission’s proceedings were irritable and anxious. Dyer and its British members agreed that coercion was needed in Punjab. The arrest of 3,200 ‘rebels’, the shooting of massed gatherings and bombing from the air were seen as ‘difficult’ but necessary nonetheless to ‘hold on’ to British imperial power if done in the right way. The committee approved of thirty-seven cases of firing and censured only one. Their belief in the use of violence to preserve British power placed the Britons at odds with their Indian colleagues, eventually leading to a total breakdown between the two sides. ‘You people want to drive the British out of the country,’ Hunter shouted at C. H. Setalvad, a moderate lawyer on the inquiry committee, in one particularly tense exchange.

  The Hunter inquiry marked the arrival of a new force in Indian politics: the crowd. Up until 1919, British officers thought about Indian politics in terms of potentially seditious political leaders. The mass of India’s population existed off-stage. As passive subjects, they were the occasional target of government action. In government reports, the ‘mob’ was sometimes described as being brought into play by scheming political leaders, sporadically excited by religious passion, but the masses had no political life of their own. From the events in Punjab in 1919 onwards, ‘the crowd’ began to be seen as a political actor in its own right. The Indian government’s report on the disturbances used the word ‘crowd’ 150 times in seventy pages; the Hunter report 280 times in 175 pages, and the text’s narrative began with a mass ‘outbreak’. The fear, throughout, was that the escalation of crowd violence might cause the collapse of the Raj’s power. Hunter was not sure middle-class revolutionaries were a great threat, but the report’s authors feared that ‘a movement which had started in rioting and become a rebellion might have rapidly become a revolution’.

  Dyer and his British critics disagreed about the best response to this new politics of spontaneous crowd violence. The government in London and the Viceroy believed the quick and firm use of force against rioting needed to be accompanied by concessions to India’s political elites. They wanted Indian nationalists to help them control the crowd. They had started to believe that British sovereignty in India relied on conceding pockets of power to Indians in an otherwise despotic regime. By 1919, the British government had started to frame reforms to include a liberal element in India’s autocratic constitution.

  Dyer, by contrast, thought any act of retreat would quickly cause the Raj to unravel. For him, British power in India was based on conquest, and conquest could only be maintained if violence was continually asserted against a population which could quickly turn into a mob. Any kind of equality entailed a dangerous lack of respect for India’s conquerors. After a crisis, such as those of 1857 or 1919, authority could only be restored if Indians were forced to submit themselves, sometimes humiliatingly, before their masters. So, after the initial disorders in Punjab, barristers in Amritsar were forced to do menial work. Every resident of Gujranwala was ordered to salute and salaam when they passed a British officer. Any Indian passing along the street where the missionary Miss Sherwood had been attacked was commanded by Dyer to crawl on their bellies.

  Given in a packed Lahore assembly hall in November 1919, Dyer’s testimony before the Hunter Commission used the language of personal triumph and humiliation. Dyer treated his cross-examination as a series of insults and slights. He often lost his temper. The ‘rebel’ meeting at the Jallianwala Bagh was, he argued, an act of ‘defiance’ against his authority that needed to be ‘punished’. ‘It was’, Dyer famously argued, ‘no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd.’ The shooting was calculated to produce ‘a moral effect’, to reduce ‘the morale of the rebels’, and in the process, force Indian subjects to submit.

  Dyer’s response to riots in Amritsar was a retaliation to an existential challenge. The way of life he had been brought up in was wrapped up with the idea of Indian obedience to British commands. If those commands were not obeyed, Dyer would not be able to consider himself a dignified human being. When asked why he did not just shoot to disperse the crowd, Dyer said the people who gathered ‘would all come back and laugh at me’. Without the killing, he said, ‘I considered I would be making myself a fool’.2

  Dismissed quickly by his Commander-in-Chief, in poor physical and mental health, Dyer travelled to Bombay without a hotel reservation and was forced to stay in a dirty dormitory before taking a troopship back to England. The Army Council banned him from any further employment in the armed forces. Back in Britain support for him grew in some quarters, and his actions at Amritsar were debated in Parliament. There Dyer became a political cause célèbre for die-hard Tory and Unionist politicians who believed Britain’s global power was acquired and retained by conquest not partnership; they saw every act of concession as a humiliating desertion of the embattled bastions of imperial power before the insurgent crowd. The Irish Unionist, one-time First Lord of the Admiralty and staunch opponent of Irish nationalism, Sir Edward Carson, was Dyer’s most fervent advocate. In his speech before the House of Commons, Carson portrayed Dyer as the defender of English values and imperial power against the international revolutionaries manipulating crowd violence in Egypt, Ireland, Russia and India. ‘It is all one conspiracy, it is all engineered in the same way, it all has the same object – to destroy our sea power and drive us out of Asia.’3

  Dyer’s British defenders and critics were united in their desire to sustain British sovereignty in India against new forces of resistance and rebellion. Theirs was a passionate, sometimes vicious debate: some of Dyer’s critics accused him of being ‘unBritish’ and on the verge of insanity; some of his defenders accused the Jewish Secretary of State of being part of a global conspiracy of Jews against British power.

  The intensity of these arguments was partially caused by the deep-rooted commitment which the everyday operators of imperial power had long felt towards empire. But it was partly caused, too, by the fact that empire in India had rece
ntly become important to Britain in a new way. In 1919, India was no longer merely a self-sustaining, self-justifying outpost of British power that mattered only to families like the Dyers who ruled it. The First World War briefly turned British India into a vital source of British geopolitical power, a recruiting ground for soldiers and a base for materials and cash. World war forced Britain’s political leaders to adopt a more liberal attitude towards the Government of India. But it also created forces that ensured liberal imperialism could not last.

  Military liberalism

  The First World War transformed Britain’s purposeless imperial sovereignty in India into a vital source of global power, in the process mutating the ideas Britons had about how to hold onto the Raj. The Raj’s liberal moment was caused by the anxieties of war.

  When George V declared war in August 1914, few imagined India would play a big role in the conflict. But within weeks politicians in London ordered a mixed division of Europeans and Indians to East Africa, and two divisions to be sent to the Western Front. Two more of India’s nine divisions were sent to Mesopotamia and Egypt. Indian soldiers sailed abroad and quickly died in battle: 525 Indian men were lost in one week on the Western Front in October 1914; 3,889 were killed in a single night at Ypres in April 1915, many from poison gas; 1,700 Indians died in the eight-month struggle at 1915 at Gallipoli. By the end of 1915, the two Indian infantry divisions in France were moved to the Middle East, where they besieged the Kut-al-Amara, and then captured Baghdad. For two and a half years, the Middle East was an exclusively Indian theatre. By 1918 there were a quarter of a million Indian troops in the Mesopotamian Command. Sixty-two thousand Indians were killed in total. To fill the rosters, the pace of recruitment increased. In 1914 the Indian army had been made up of 80,000 Britons and 230,000 Indians. During the war, an additional 800,000 Indian soldiers were recruited, and were joined by 400,000 non-fighting men.