Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

185 / ‘Un-British rule’ in ‘Anglo-India’

the British had been alarmed by the threatened disintegration of the

Ottoman Empire exposing their sea communications with India to Rus-

sian and French interference. In the 1880s, the advance of Russia into

Central Asia had produced a crisis (over Penjdeh in 1885). In the 1890s,

the impact of Russia’s colonial presence there began to sink in: the threat

of a Tsarist encirclement of Persia east and west of the Caspian Sea; and

a forward move towards the Persian Gulf and India’s maritime frontier.

As the risk of Anglo-Russian confrontation over China grew greater,

so did the danger of a Russian jab towards India. When ‘[Russia’s]

Siberian railway is ready’, argued Lord Salisbury in 1900,

she will want to be mistress of the greater part of China:

and if Afghanistan is unprotected she can force us to give

way in China by advancing upon India. She won’t try to

conquer it. It will be enough for her if she can shatter our

Government and reduce India to anarchy.

The meaning for Anglo-Indian relations was clear. India must

play a larger but also more obedient part in imperial strategy. It must

take up the burden of forward defence in Persia and the Himalayas –

but not in ways that risked a great power conﬂagration.

It must

reorganise its ramshackle armies, concentrate them in the Northwest

and recruit from the Sikhs, Punjabis, Pathans, Baluchis and Gurkhas

who were suited to the northern climate.

It must acknowledge its

function as the strategic reserve of the British Empire in the East.

must contribute to the costs of the Royal Navy.

Its diplomatic agents

in the Middle Eastern borderlands must faithfully echo the shifts and

twists of London’s European diplomacy – especially the intermittent

search for an accommodation with Russia pursued by Salisbury and

Lansdowne. And it must guard against the political disruption of its

military system. ‘I dread the day’, the Secretary of State warned Viceroy

Elgin, ‘when the northern or ﬁghting races from who we draw recruits

take to reading the vernacular press.’

This steady tightening of the economic and strategic bond

between Britain and India was symptomatic of a deeper force for inte-

gration whose effects were not so easily managed. Like other parts

of the extra-European world, India became more and more accessi-

ble to European inﬂuences as the frequency, speed, volume and cost

of communications with the West were transformed by the telegraph,

railways, steamships and the opening of the Suez Canal.

Information

186 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

from, or about, India became available in Britain in greater quantity,

and from a much wider variety of unofﬁcial sources, especially the

English-language newspapers owned by private British interests in the

sub-continent. Political, scientiﬁc and literary ideas from Europe cir-

culated more rapidly and much more cheaply in India, reaching – and

disturbing – wider audiences. Christian notions of religious commu-

nity and personal ethics posed a sharper challenge. European styles –

in speech, humour, dress, deportment, leisure and family life – became

more widely known and imitated. But the results of all this were not

simply to make India more culturally attuned to Britain. Far from it.

Instead, three contradictory tendencies were at work. First, the larger

ﬂow of news and information back to Britain, much of it originat-

ing in the Anglo-Indian press, helped entrench in ‘Home’ opinion a

negative view of Indian political aspirations and a condescending atti-

tude towards the ‘exotic chaos’ of Indian society. This was the outlook

of the British settler community writ large. Secondly, it heightened

the sense of destiny among Western-educated (or ‘anglo-literate’) Indi-

ans about their role as the intermediaries between India and Europe,

as the standard-bearers of modernity and as the natural legatees of

British rule whenever it might end. For who could doubt that India

must adapt, and be adapted to, a West-centred world? Thirdly (how-

ever), the ﬂood of European attitudes, ideas, images, habits and preju-

dices pouring into India evoked an anxious, angry, defensive response

from those who feared that the social and moral foundations of Indian

society – Muslim or Hindu – would be washed away in the process.

For a wide section of the traditional educated class (including some who

had acquired an ‘English’ education) the close encounter with imperial

Britain was the signal for a campaign of cultural rearmament. Religion

must be renovated; social discipline reinforced; moral order reasserted;

language reformed; literature reinvented; history rewritten; the nation

(or nations) remade. It was in this uneasy atmosphere that the terms

of India’s connection with the emerging British world-system became

the object of a subdued (by later standards) but ﬁerce political struggle

between 1880 and 1914.

The Civilian Raj

At bottom, this was a question of how far the ‘Civilian Raj’ would be

diluted by the admission of Indians into its executive and legislative

187 / ‘Un-British rule’ in ‘Anglo-India’

branches. The ‘Civilians’ were members of the Indian Civil Service,

recruited by an examination held in Britain and almost exclusively

British in origin. They formed an administrative cadre that numbered

around 1,000 who had signed the ‘covenant’ of faithful service, and

for whom the 700 or so most senior posts in the central and provincial

governments were reserved, including the key position of district ofﬁ-

cer in the 250 districts of British India.

The Civilians were a bureau-

cracy whose medium was the ofﬁcial minute, memorandum, report and

inquiry. But they bore only a superﬁcial resemblance to civil servants

at home. In practice, they formed a ruling oligarchy whose authority

was limited only (and in theory) by the oversight of the India Ofﬁce

in London; and by the presence in India of a Viceroy, two governors

(in Bombay and Madras) and one or two members of the Viceroy’s

executive council, all habitually appointed from outside the ranks of

the Service and (supposedly) immune to its prejudices. In pay, status,

prospects and pension, the Civilians (whose name in print was invari-

ably followed by the honoriﬁc letters ‘ICS’) stood at the summit of the

European ofﬁcial hierarchy: above the army, medical service, police,

forestry service and education: and far above the lowly Railway and

Public Works departments.

In the thirty years that followed the end of Company rule in

1858, the Civilians had consolidated their power. Their internal soli-

darity had been reinforced, not least by the virtual exclusion of qualiﬁed

Indians. Their authority was enhanced by the new emphasis on admin-

istrative and ﬁnancial stability rather than the forcible annexation of

princely states – a practice that had given Company rule its aggressive,

militaristic character. Through the census, the Imperial Gazetteer of

India completed in 1881, the great Statistical Survey with its 114 vol-

umes and 54,000 pages, the ethnographic studies of ‘tribes and castes’,

and the district ‘histories’ compiled by energetic ofﬁcials, the Civilian

Raj extended and codiﬁed its administrative knowledge and imposed

its categories on an untidy social reality.

More fundamental, per-

haps, was the virtual demolition of supra-local political ties between

Indians, partly achieved by Company expansion before 1857,andcom-

pleted after the Mutiny with the ﬁnal abolition of the Mughal throne

(the surviving princely states were closely supervised and political con-

tact between them forbidden). For thirty years thereafter, British India

resembled the Agraria imagined by Ernest Gellner:

a congeries of dis-

tricts without horizontal connections (for the provinces were merely

administrative confections without economic or cultural rationale).

188 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

Their only links were vertical: through an alien bureaucratic hierarchy

with whose high culture, language and ethnic origins they had nothing

in common – but whose authority they could not hope to challenge.

It was this localisation and differentiation of Indian politics that was

faithfully recorded in the Civilians’ gazetteers, surveys and censuses:

indeed, they were the warrant and charter of the Civilian Raj.

Entrenched in India, the Civilians were protected in the rear by

political sympathy in Britain. Unofﬁcial information from India upheld

the necessity of authoritarian rule, at times with hysterical urgency.

The mild extension of judicial powers proposed for Indian (i.e. non-

British) ofﬁcials under the Ilbert Bill in 1883 produced an explosion of

settler rage that soon found an echo in the British press. British com-

mercial interests in India, with their City connections, had little love

for the Civilian Raj but even less for any alternative. The new regime

established in London to supervise the Indian government after 1857

saddled the Secretary of State for India with a ‘Council of India’, largely

composed of retired Civilians. It formed the centre of an extended net-

work of ‘Old India Hands’ whose mandarin scholarship and constant

intervention in the correspondence columns largely informed ‘public

opinion’ on late-Victorian India.

Then, at a crucial moment in the

1880s, the intellectual basis of Gladstonian Liberalism was challenged

by a powerful phalanx of Liberal thinkers, including several, like Henry

Maine and Fitzjames Stephen, with Indian experience. Their part in the

Liberal split over Irish Home Rule in 1886 eventually helped to turn

the authoritarian bureaucracy of British India from an embarrassing

exception to Liberal practice into an authentic (though not uncontested)

expression of the Liberal ideal.

These benign conditions strengthened the Civilians’ claim to

be the ideal ‘collaborators’ of British imperialism in India. Of course,

no contemporary would have used such a term. What makes it appro-

priate in historical analysis is that the Civilians did not see themselves

as, nor were they in reality, mere agents of the British state. They

were ‘Anglo-Indians’

– the political hinge between Britain and the

indigenous communities of the sub-continent. ‘Anglo-India’ had its own

interests, its own ethos, its own patriotism, its own shrines (at Lucknow

and Cawnpore) and martyrs, its own ideology, its own state. Its self-

image was energetically disseminated by the late-Victorian Civilians

who piled up an astonishing literature of antiquarian history, socio-

logical enquiry, ethnographic description, political commentary and

189 / ‘Un-British rule’ in ‘Anglo-India’

biographical memoir, as well as the vast collective labour of the dis-

trict gazetteers – a literary self-creation as remarkable as that of any

conquest state in history. In a standard text on Indian administration,

Sir George Chesney’s Indian Polity,

Anglo-India’s claim to political

autonomy was stridently asserted. ‘The Indian administration’, said

Chesney, ‘must not be placed at the mercy of the erratic dictates of a

chance majority in the House of Commons.’

India ‘should not . . . be

subjected to treatment which the . . . Commons would not venture to

adopt towards the smallest self-governing colony’

– a claim that

anticipated the later demand of the Indian National Congress for self-

government on the model of the ‘white dominions’. From retired Civil-

ians poured a stream of reminiscence proclaiming India’s incapacity for

self-rule and the Civilians’ role as the platonic guardians of the peasant

mass. In 1899 came the ﬁrst volume of Sir William Wilson Hunter’s

History of British India. Hunter was, with Sir Alfred Lyall, one of

the great scholar-mandarins of the late-Victorian Raj. He had master-

minded the Imperial Gazetteer. He became Curator of the Indian Insti-

tute in Oxford, founded to prepare trainee Civilians for life in India.

He wrote for The Times. In planning his history on a monumental

scale, Hunter confronted head-on the issue of India’s place in the impe-

rial story. The aim, he told his agent, was to show that the growth of

British India ‘stands out as an epic of the British nation – the ﬁbre of

its ﬁbre, the express image of its innermost character . . . [I]t will make

the world understand the British race – adventurous, masterful, patient

in defeat and persistent in . . . its designs.’

These qualities had made

England ‘the residuary legatee of the inheritance painfully amassed by

Europe in Asia’.

It was, perhaps, no accident that, as the Civilians came under

challenge in India, the value of their rule to Britain’s imperial system,

and its legitimacy as an authentic expression of the British genius, were

reiterated more and more vehemently by the ofﬁcials themselves and

by their political allies at home – and by no one more eloquently than

Lord Curzon whose The Place of India in the Empire (1909)wasa

sustained plea to acknowledge that Britain without India would be a

third-class power. In retrospect, we can see that this whole vast literary

enterprise was part of the secret of Anglo-India’s tenacious grip on the

British imagination, unmatched by any other dependency. Of course,

it had also its unofﬁcial laureate of genius in Kipling. And ironically

its tropes, values and categories exerted a persistent fascination for

190 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

Indians themselves. Yet, ultimately, its political survival depended upon

brokering the rival demands of the British at home and its indigenous

subjects. The Civilian Raj had to persuade British opinion that it was

indispensable and Indian opinion that it was irremovable. But, as India’s

imperial value rose and the stresses of its commercial, strategic and

cultural entanglement with Britain were felt more deeply in the sub-

continent, the position of this foreign ruling elite was bound to grow

more vulnerable to criticism and more open to attack.

For the moment, however, ‘Anglo-India’ seemed an essential

partner in the late Victorians’ imperial enterprise. Indian unity was

becoming more urgent, for commercial and strategic reasons. The Civil-

ian Raj looked its best guarantee. Tariff-free access was becoming

more vital. The Civilians would, grudgingly, maintain it. Indian rev-

enues must be driven up to match the rising cost of imperial defence

and expenditure in the localities held down. What other regime would

match the ﬁscal parsimony of the Civilians’ localised despotism? For

their part, the Civilians resented the escalating demands imposed by

London on their brittle system. They contested the issue of tariffs and

the burden of military costs – but only so far.

The concession they

won in return was to be free to fashion a political system that paid scant

regard to the shibboleths of Liberal Britain. They repudiated represen-

tative government (except in a grossly bowdlerised form), the market

economy (through restraints on the sale of land) and liberal individual-

ism (in favour of caste, religious or tribal identity). To some disgruntled

observers, the Civilians’ aim was to make parliamentary control from

Britain a nullity and rule without restraint. And, to some, they had

already achieved this goal. For William Wedderburn, himself a former

Civilian, but now a supporter of Congress and an MP, the Secretary

of State, far from being the master of the ofﬁcial hierarchy in India,

was only its ‘mouthpiece and champion . . . the apologist of all ofﬁcial

acts’.

The political struggle in India between the 1880s and the out-

break of the First World War thus had implications that went far

beyond conceding greater representation to the gentlemanly nation-

alists of the Indian National Congress. It was really a struggle between

rival groups for the support of imperial Britain in ruling India. It was

a struggle between the Civilians’ ‘Anglo-India’ and the ‘British Indians’

of the Congress who were determined to supplant it. For the Civilians

it was vital to maintain their status as the indispensable collaborators,

191 / ‘Un-British rule’ in ‘Anglo-India’

and to preserve the wide freedoms this had brought them. To dissuade

their London ‘partners’ from any backsliding, they must meet Britain’s

requirements in India and pay the ‘imperial dividend’. They must pol-

ish the image of Indian contentment and repress disorder. Above all,

they must discredit any rival claiming a real share in governing the sub-

continent. They had, in short, to ﬁnd a means of adapting India to its

changing place in the imperial system without pulling up the roots of

their Civilian Raj.

Indian politics

Before 1880, the main threat to the Civilian Raj seemed to lie in the

princely states and their aristocratic sympathisers in British India: great

landowners like the taluqdars of Oudh (modern Awadh). They alone

had the means to challenge British rule. It was against this danger that

the army was partly deployed. It was to strengthen the Raj’s hold on

princely allegiance that the British Queen became ‘Empress of India’ in

1876.

It was to conciliate this ‘traditional elite’ that the Raj adopted

a neo-feudal public style and ‘Indianised’ some of its outer trappings –

like army uniforms. But, by the 1880s, a more insidious challenge was

beginning to threaten the Civilians’ power.

From its very outset, British rule had relied heavily upon Indian

manpower, military and civil. To ﬁll up the lower ranks of its bureau-

cracy government had gratefully recruited Indians equipped with a

Western education. It smiled upon the English-style schools and col-

leges that sprang up by local initiative in Calcutta and Bombay. It was

convenient to appoint a handful of Indian notables with an ‘English’

education to the central and provincial legislative councils where the

executive was temporarily transformed into a law-making body. In this

way, an Indian element was assimilated into the highest level of the

autocracy without threatening the local arrangements at district level

where the revenue was derived and patronage distributed. After 1880,

however, the gravitational pull drawing India into the world econ-

omy and the British world-system steadily undermined this post-Mutiny

settlement.

It did so in two ways. The more obvious was through a dou-

ble revolution of rising costs and expectations. A combination of the

falling value of silver and the upward trend of defence expenditure,

192 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

exerted, as we have seen, a continuous strain on the Indian budget

after 1880. At the same time, government also came under pressure to

play a more active role in developing the economy and providing for

social improvements. In Bengal, for example, in the forty years after

the Mutiny, the provincial administration acquired sixteen new depart-

ments, among them those for forests, mines, factories, vaccination and

municipalities. To meet these new needs, government had to borrow

more and tax more. But its room for manoeuvre was limited. Land

revenue (calculated on the productivity of the soil) formed the bulk

of its income. It was notoriously difﬁcult to increase. An income tax

was risky.

One hopeful solution lay in raising more revenue at the

local level for local improvements. Even here, if British rule was not to

seem more oppressive, it was desirable that new levies should be made

as far as possible on Indian initiative and with Indian support. That

pointed towards wider participation by Indians on district boards and

municipalities. On the other hand, if the principle of elective authority

was conceded there, and Indians organised themselves to compete for

it, how long would it be before they pressed for the extension of that

principle to the provincial or even ‘All-India’ level?

This was only one side of the late-Victorian coin. India’s deep-

ening association with Britain was, as we have seen, cultural and intel-

lectual as well as material. By the 1880s, it had thrown up a local

class literate in English, familiar with British ideas and deeply loyal

to the new educational and social institutions that had shaped its

outlook and opportunities. Though small by Indian standards, this

anglo-literate community (700,000 adult males could read and write

English by 1901)

dwarfed the non-military British population in India

(c.100,000). It ﬁlled the highest bureaucratic ranks to which Indians

could be promoted. It quickly overran the senior profession open to

talent – the law – and expanded sideways into education and jour-

nalism. Because it depended not on local patronage or district-level

politics, but on the expansion of government, education and trade at

the provincial level and above, it was quick to form associations that

spanned the provinces. For the tiny group of Indians resident in London,

it was natural to think on an All-Indian scale. The East India Associa-

tion, founded in 1866, was the ﬁrst approximation to a national body

for Western-educated Indians – though it was dominated by Bombay

merchants and largely ignored in Calcutta and Madras.

Behind all

this clubbing together lay a bid for inﬂuence over government and a

193 / ‘Un-British rule’ in ‘Anglo-India’

claim for recognition. The climax of this gradual mobilisation was the

founding of the Indian National Congress in Bombay in 1885.

Historians have been disdainful of this ‘early’ Indian national-

ism and condescending towards its achievements. The outward defer-

ence of its leaders to their British masters is easily ridiculed. Their ambi-

tions seemed modest compared with later demands for ‘purna swaraj’

(complete independence) or ‘swaraj in one year’. They were mocked

by their British critics as a ‘microscopic minority’ greedy for jobs and

inﬂuence. It was true of course that the Congress nationalists seemed

obsessed with equal access for anglo-literate Indians to the Indian Civil

Service, and with getting seats on the legislative councils, where, it was

alleged, they would promote the dominance of urban commerce over

the rural cultivator. It was true, no doubt, that self-interest helped hold

the Congress together. But the timidity of its demands has been exag-

gerated, and the shrewdness of its ‘moderation’ misunderstood. The

Civilians would have had little to fear from a disparate collection of

job-hunters and ‘wire-pullers’. What they did learn to fear about the

early Congress was the dual onslaught it launched on the ideological

basis of the Civilian Raj and on the Civilians’ claim to serve the best

interests of Imperial Britain. As the tougher and more percipient of the

Civilians acknowledged, ‘early’ Indian nationalism presented a deeper

and subtler challenge to Anglo-India than the hufﬁng and pufﬁng of

an alienated intelligentsia. It pointedly reafﬁrmed its imperial loyalty

to disarm the Civilian tactic of dismissing all opposition as subversive.

It insisted that the apparatus and institutions of British India were the

foundation of any future Indian state. But it claimed that the Civilian

Raj was a dangerous perversion of the imperial purpose in India and a

betrayal of the Queen’s Proclamation of 1858 with its promise of no

discrimination. The ‘un-Britishness’ of Civilian rule was an affront to

Victorian liberalism, a dangerous experiment in authoritarianism and

a bar to India’s becoming a commercially progressive and politically

contented member state of the Empire.

This was a seductive appeal to British opinion at home, though

one that was ﬁercely contested by the ofﬁcial and unofﬁcial propaganda

of Anglo-India. But the more insidious threat that the early national-

ists posed derived from their local roots in Indian society. For they

were not an isolated anglophone elite vying for colonial preferment but

part of a larger movement of educated opinion. There was a close if

ambivalent relationship between those who insisted that membership

194 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

of the legislative councils and the Civil Service was all-important, and

those who drew on Western ideas for a broader project of cultural or

national renewal. This wider ‘cultural’ nationalism, diffused through

educational institutions and charged with religious and historical sym-

bolism, was the vital link between the hyper-elitist preoccupations of the

Congress leadership and the far wider constituency of Indians literate

in the vernacular languages (like Bengali, Marathi, Tamil or Hindus-

tani) rather than English. But, as we shall see, right up to 1914 this

connection was often fraught and unmanageable, an embarrassment to

Congress leaders as well as a source of strength.

Bengal had been the bridgehead of British power in India and

the pivot of their expansion across the sub-continent. Not surprisingly,

it was also there that the British impact was felt most deeply. The Bengal

Presidency (as the province was called) was a huge multi-ethnic terri-

tory stretching over three modern Indian states as well as Bangladesh.

Illiterate cultivators formed the bulk of its population. Many of them

were Muslims. Many were Oriya or Assamese, not Bengali. Many in

wooded or hilly tracts were ‘tribals’ who did not follow the rituals and

conventions of Hindu caste society. Political consciousness in this vast

conglomerate was concentrated in the literate elite or bhadralok (the

‘respectable people’). The Hindu bhadralok was neither princely nor

aristocratic. It had little in common with the pre-conquest ruling class.

In many ways it was the stepchild of colonial rule, a social group that

had sprung up to service the colonial state and exploit its opportuni-

ties. Its badge of membership was higher education. It had made Bengal

society, in the sardonic words of an ofﬁcial report, ‘a despotism of caste

tempered by matriculation’.

The bhadralok were concentrated in Calcutta, the imperial

capital of British India and its commercial metropolis, where some

60 per cent of British investment in India was managed. Calcutta domi-

nated Bengal, commercially, administratively, educationally. There the

bhadralok could supplement the rentals of absentee landownership

by a career in the literate professions: administration, law, journal-

ism and education. The city was a forcing-house for the bhadralok’s

belief in itself as a vanguard class, the makers of a new Bengal liber-

ated (in the past) from Muslim rule and (in the future) from Civilian

power. Their ethnic consciousness was sharpened by the presence of the

Calcutta Europeans, the large non-ofﬁcial community dominating the

city’s commercial life and virulently hostile to ‘babu’ ambitions through