Empress
Page 34
Jai Hind
The tide of opinion in India turned resolutely against the imperial monarchy after the First World War. Not only did the Great War spell the end of the European dynastic system, of which the British royal family was a component part, its aftermath also saw republics carved out of old empires, most notably the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1922) and the Turkish republic (1923). Britain’s oldest colony, Ireland, did not get quite as far, but was granted dominion status as the Irish Free State in 1921. In India one episode, five months after the end of the First World War, pushed on Indian nationalism as nothing before: the Amritsar massacre, the shooting down by troops commanded by Colonel Reginald Dyer of hundreds of locals and pilgrims caught up in a security crackdown in the Punjab town. The killings on 13 April 1919 caused international outrage, hasty political reform in the shape of the Montagu–Chelmsford initiative, and set off the INC’s non-co-operation campaign.12 Less noticed is how the Government of India wielded royal authority and status to try and ease tension, a cack-handed manoeuvre with disastrous consequences. On 23 December 1919 a package of reform was announced in the name of the king-emperor. There would be new legislative councils and a new Chamber of Princes. The proclamation promised to send out the Prince of Wales in the following year to inaugurate the constitutional change. It also included a general amnesty releasing many of the Punjabi leaders who had been arrested in the wake of the protests that followed the killings at Amritsar.13 With the Indian National Congress due to hold its annual meeting in Amritsar four days later, the timing of the proclamation was crucial. There was more. Acting as warm-up man for the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Connaught (the king’s great uncle) inaugurated the new Legislative Council at Delhi by reading a letter from the king-emperor in which he described the new councils as instances of the Government of India’s own commitment to the principles of swaraj. When the Prince of Wales did arrive in India he went through the motions of appeasing Indian nationalism. He laid the foundation stone of a Shivaji memorial at Poona (a school, sponsored by the Maharaja of Kolhapur), speaking of Shivaji as ‘one of India’s greatest soldiers and statesman’, the founder of Maratha greatness.14 All without irony. As Motilal Nehru, INC stalwart, later observed, nationalist icons that were once considered seditious were now being given royal sanction.15
This time the old trick of dampening Indian dissent with a message from the monarch missed the mark. The Prince of Wales’s four-month tour was boycotted by the INC.16 Mohandas Gandhi led the opposition to the royal visit. He argued that the boycott did not represent a rebuttal to the person of the Prince of Wales, but rather condemnation of the actions of the British Empire that ruled in his name. Gandhi was quite clear in this distinction. For instance he advised against defacing portraits of the king-emperor as some of the boycotters wished to do: the monarch was ignorant of the actions that debased the empire. At the same time he refused to sing the national anthem any more: he wished the king a long life but not that of the Empire. He also questioned the patriotism of some boy scouts, asking why they wore a uniform spun from foreign yarn, and why they pledged to serve ‘king and country’, when ‘the King was an impersonal ideal existence which meant the British Empire’.17 Gandhi had come a long way from his pre-war loyalism.
Emboldened, other Indian nationalists now directed criticism at the monarch in person. From America, Ghadhars were unfettered in their attacks on George V and his emissary son. George RI (‘Rex Imperator’) was labelled the ‘robber of India’ and his son’s visit to India branded a failure, proving ‘beyond any doubt that India, Ireland and other countries are not going to coddle any longer these puppet princes and kings. Such a defiant attitude as the Indian people have shown should be hailed as a signal to confine king-sheep within the British Isles’. The way forward was clear for the Ghadars, at any rate, and it was not home rule, as ‘nothing short of a republic should satisfy India’.18 Within India too, loyalism faded fast. In 1921 Hasrat Mohani, a delegate to the INC meeting in Ahmedabad, called for complete independence from foreign rule, as opposed to swaraj within the Empire.19 Then in 1924 came the first mention on Indian soil of the republic. The ‘manifesto’ of the Hindustan Republican Association demanded a ‘federal republic of the United States of India’ to be achieved through ‘organised and armed revolution’.20
The new idea spread. At the end of 1927, as the British commenced an inquiry into Indian affairs (the Statutory Commission led by Sir John Simon), some Congress leaders came out in public for the republic, a milestone moment in the history of Indian nationalism. Jawaharlal Nehru returned from Moscow, where he had been to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, to tell the inaugural meeting of the ‘Republican Congress’ at Madras of a new phase in the struggle against British rule. The INC, urged Nehru, needed to turn to the ‘republican ideal’ and, he went on, ‘[t]he world had adopted Republicanism. Some countries had some kind of monarchy, but almost everybody realised that Republicanism was the only thing that was necessary for the future. Monarchies, wherever they existed now, were not likely to survive very long. Republicanism had come to stay’.21 A few months later it was the turn of Subhas Chandra Bose, general secretary of the INC. At the Maharashtra Provincial Conference in Poona in May, he described to delegates how India need not look to the west for democracy, for republics had been alive and well in ancient India. Drawing on the 1918 work of K. P. Jayaswal, Bose pointed out that originally there had been eighty-one Hindu republics.22 Bose’s discovery of old India was not new. Other INC leaders had already invoked these traditions, for example Lajpat Rai talked up the republics of the Buddhist period in his Political Future of India (1919). It was Bose, however, who turned it into an axiom of Indian nationalism, returning to the idea of the antiquity of the republic in India in his The Indian Struggle of 1935.23 So by the time the British finally committed to offering India dominion status in 1929, the ideal of the republic had entered the vocabulary of Indian nationalism.
But what kind of republic, and for whom? The idea of a ‘United States of India’ suggested a federation of equal partners. That seemed unlikely. By 1930, several of the princely states had already taken legal advice, and were persuaded that their status was guaranteed through treaty or sannad agreements with the Crown, not with the Government of India, so they might be excluded from any discussions about the future shape of India.24 Moreover, dwelling on the honourable ancestry of the republic in India did not offer much hope to Indian Muslims, for it was essentially a Hindu tradition of the republic that was being exhumed by the INC. Indian Muslims now began to imagine their own nation-state, most famously in Muhammad Iqbal’s presidential address to the Muslim League meeting at Allahabad in December 1930. Iqbal called for a separate Muslim state to be created in north-west India, within or outside the British Empire, but certainly free from the caliphate, from what he called ‘Arabian imperialism’.25 There were other problems too in the new republican ideal. Evoking the village community as the seed of the Indian republic, as Mohandas Gandhi’s closest followers tended to do, only alienated critics of the caste system, such as B. R. Ambedkar, who saw the village as the ‘Indian ghetto’, preserving social hierarchy and marginalising ‘untouchables’ and other groups.26 If republicanism had ‘come to stay’ in India, as Nehru claimed, it was clearly going to be a demanding guest.
Whatever their divisions, at least Indian nationalism could unite against the imperial monarchy. For once, however, the British had gone quiet on rolling out royalty in India. None of the king’s family had gone to India since the Prince of Wales’s ill-fated tour of 1921. No royal prince was on hand to cut the ribbon when the new imperial capital at New Delhi was unveiled in 1931, although the chief Indian princes – for example those of Baroda, Bikaner, Cochin, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kashmir, Patiala and Travancore – used the relocation of the seat of British power to cosy up to the viceroy by building their own annexes in Delhi.27 Understated did not mean forgotten. In Britain, the monarchy
was back in favour. From the right wing of the Conservative party – the so-called ‘diehards’ – the monarchy was restored to life as the figurehead of constitutional authority in India. A new battle line between monarchy and republic began to be drawn.
Cheered on by Winston Churchill, now a Conservative backbench MP, Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail and by the Indian Empire Society (est. 1930), the crusade to keep India as she was gathered momentum, just as the INC moved full swing into its campaign of civil disobedience. The monarchy played its part, as did the queen’s proclamation of 1858, as the idea developed that the Crown in India had always been a bulwark against fanaticism and partisanship.28 Ramsay Macdonald’s Labour government tried to rein in these runaway Raj veterans, preferring to use the monarch as conciliator. George V was enlisted to open in person in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords the first set of ‘round table’ discussions about the future of India in November 1930.29 For the next two years these negotiations continued, despite dwindling Indian representation, and from them emerged the Government of India Act of 1935.30 For the Conservative ‘diehards’ it went too far. In the Saturday Review Sir Michael O’Dwyer, lieutenant-governor of the Punjab at the time of the Amritsar massacre, claimed that the pledges of the ‘Great White Queen’ – the sobriquet was relatively new – were being broken by the British government.31 In India no one was really happy about the Act either, although the INC stormed into power across the country in the 1937 provincial elections.
With the new constitution for India came a new viceroy, Lord Linlithgow. Few people believed in royal India quite as wholeheartedly as the new viceroy. Born in the year of the golden jubilee, godson of Queen Victoria, he became an aide-de-camp to the king at the end of 1915. Now Linlithgow needed to make the new constitution work. Like many a viceroy before him, he believed the name and fame of the king-emperor could be enlisted in that task. Article 2 of the 1935 Government of India Act left intact the king-emperor’s powers over India. Inconveniently, the king was no more. Between the passage of the Act and Linlithgow’s arrival in India in April 1936, George V had died and his successor, Edward VIII, a reluctant king at best, was wary of his Indian responsibilities, having received such a rough ride on his visit in 1921. Undaunted, Linlithgow set about organising a coronation durbar for the new king-emperor. It did not happen, and so has been passed over by historians.32 Nonetheless the durbar that never was is revealing. Linlithgow planned that Edward VIII would arrive by air in Delhi, ‘descending from the clouds upon his Indian capital’, to inaugurate the new federation of India. Preparations had not got very far by the time of Edward VIII’s abdication later that year, but George VI was more in favour, and the durbar was announced in the king’s speech at the opening of Parliament in November, pencilled in for the cold season in either 1937 or 1938.33
Sixty years after Lytton’s Delhi Assemblage, when Queen Victoria’s new imperial title had been announced, the British were trying to conjure up the magic of monarchy once more. How times had changed. The INC passed a resolution opposing the coronation durbar. Nehru warned that the king-emperor’s life would be in danger if he came to India. By February 1937, Linlithgow had abandoned the idea. It was only a temporary setback. Buoyed by the enthusiasm he saw on display in India at the time of George VI’s coronation in June 1937, Linlithgow returned to his durbar project, moving it back to 1938.34 This time provincial governors warned of the costs, and the criticism that would provoke, especially from an expanded electorate. A final line was drawn under the idea in March 1938. Failure to bring off the coronation durbar was no surprise; that a viceroy could even imagine it might work as a riposte to Indian nationalism seems remarkable, a sure sign of the dogged resilience of British belief in the monarchy-Raj.
Nehru for one thought the days of the imperial crown were done. The coronation of 1937 was the last hurrah. As he told Suresh Majumdar, secretary of the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee, ‘[t]he recent abdication of ex-King Edward was a blow to the monarchy in England. Because of this it became necessary to shout even more loudly at the time of the Coronation.’ In India the INC boycotted the 1937 coronation.35 Nehru became even more dismissive of the scheme for federation and the special treatment being offered to the Indian princes. As he told the All-India States’ Peoples conference at Ludhiana in February 1939, the princely states were the ‘[o]ffspring of the British power in India, suckled by imperialism for its own purposes’. A year or so later, he was even fiercer, declaring that ‘[t]he Indian Princes have hitched their wagon to the chariot of imperialism. They have both had their day and will go together.’36 Not everyone thought that forging a united India was so simple. Subhas Chandra Bose used his presidential address to the INC meeting at Jaipur in February 1938 to call for ‘a federal republic in which the Provinces and States will be equal partners’, warning that the British Empire should heed the lessons of the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and not play off different states against one another.37 Others used the same analogy to draw a different conclusion. At Lahore in March 1940, Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s All-India Muslim League broke with the INC, condemning the prospect of a ‘Hindu Raj’, and pointing to the example of the Balkans – that is to say, the former Austro-Hungarian Empire – as a model for sovereign states sharing the same geographical region.38 As a coherent concept, the republic of India seemed as distant as ever.
Empire to Republic
During the Second World War the monarchy remained part of the solution for the Government of India until the very last. At one end of the political spectrum, the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, set the tone of defiance. India would only be offered dominion status if she committed fully to the war effort. For Linlithgow the Crown provided security for rule over an alien people: this was the special ‘virtue of kingship’ in India. In this way, George V, whose statue he unveiled in November 1939, two months into the war, had been ‘everybody’s king’.39 Back in London, the secretary of state for India and Burma, Leo Amery, fought hard to retain links with the Crown in any future settlement for India, even going so far as to suggest that George VI might still undergo a coronation ceremony in Delhi once the war was over.40 As for the king, he suggested to Winston Churchill that he undertake a royal visit to India on a morale-boosting mission to visit the troops.41 In India’s time of need, the British Conservative party still had the monarchy primed and ready to serve the Raj.
With the end of the war and change of government in Britain in 1945, Indian independence moved from dream to reality. The new Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, whilst a member of Churchill’s wartime coalition government, was appalled by Linlithgow’s attitudes as viceroy. Attlee suggested that a senior political figure be sent out from Britain to end the stand-off, bringing all the parties to the negotiating table and forging a settlement, much as Lord Durham – ‘radical Jack’ – had done in Canada in 1838 at the start of Queen Victoria’s reign, when Protestant British settlers and French Catholics were at war.42 Sir Stafford Cripps was chosen. Known as the ‘red squire’, partly because of his republican views, he was very much a modern-day Lord Durham. Cripps had been sent out in 1942, and now he was despatched again, along with two other colleagues, to negotiate an all-India settlement. The Cabinet mission failed, but at least one thing was now clear. As Cripps prepared to leave, George VI was solemnly informed that going forward he would no longer be known as king-emperor.43 The Labour party had no plans to shore up the Raj. The British Commonwealth, however, was a different matter. Keeping India inside the Empire was the Attlee government’s preferred end game in India. For that they turned to the royal touch.
There was one final outing for the monarchy in India. To arrange the independence and partition of India into two new dominions, the Labour government called on a member of the royal family, Lord Mountbatten, Queen Victoria’s great-grandson, who took over from Lord Wavell as viceroy in February 1947. Like Wavell he had seen military command outside the European theatre during the war, serving as supreme allied c
ommander of SEAC between 1943 and 1946.44 However, it was his royal credentials that recommended Mountbatten. Initially, his name had been mooted as someone who might undertake a worldwide tour of the Empire, encouraging colonies and dependencies into their new dominion status as part of the post-war British Commonwealth.45 In India, Mountbatten’s mission was more complex. He was required to set out all the alternative plans, including the partition of India, to the various parties. The goal remained to maintain dominion status.
Mountbatten oversaw the process of the partition of India into two new nations, a mainly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu India. The haste with which Mountbatten did this, and the tragic human loss of life that followed, lie at the heart of most judgements about his short viceroyalty. There were two other matters he had to settle, however. For both it mattered very much that he was of royal blood. He was tasked with coaxing the princely states into the new settlement, and in ensuring that both India and Pakistan accepted dominion status. The first job of persuading the princes required some sleight of hand. In February 1944, the Chamber of Princes had appealed for confirmation that their independence was protected by the Crown under the terms of the queen’s proclamation of 1858 as well as other agreements.46 In June 1946 Cripps had promised that the princely states would be able to choose between accession to or independence from a partitioned India and Pakistan. Mountbatten held out hope to the Indian princes. As late as May 1947 it was assumed that the British monarch would remain king of those parts of India that attained dominion status.47 At the same time several of the larger princely states, including Hyderabad and Bhopal, had opened up a dialogue with Jinnah about inclusion in the new Pakistan, whilst Awadh pressed Jinnah to undo its original annexation by the British from 1856.48 Although the Chamber of Princes was dissolved in July, Mountbatten still assured doubters amongst the princely states that they would retain their independence, only having to cede control over defence, external affairs and communications. Mountbatten told the Maharaj Rana of Dolhpur on 29 July that ‘[i]f you accede now you will be joining a dominion with a King as Head’.49 But Jinnah and Nehru held out, preferring to reserve dealing with the princely states until after independence. Mountbatten was left with only titbits to offer the princes: they could keep their Stars of India and other honorary titles.50 The protection offered by the Crown was going; only the ornaments remained.