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

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

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

its newspapers (like the Englishman), clubs and associations. Bhadralok

solidarity was rooted in its schools, colleges, newspapers and societies,

and voiced by the cadre of new professionals that had formed in a

maturing provincial society. By the 1870s, a vigorous literary and reli-

gious movement was imparting a keener sense of cultural identity and

social purpose. Bhudev Mukerji, Bankim Chandra Chatterji (the ﬁrst

modern Bengali novelist) and Swami Vivekananda showed how for-

eign ideas could be scrutinised, annexed or rejected in the creation of

an up-to-date literary and religious tradition.

The most inﬂuential ﬁgure in Bengali politics between the 1880s

and 1914 was Surendranath Banerjea. Banerjea became the hero of

bhadralok nationalism and the scourge of the Civilian Raj. Famously,

he had overcome the barriers of prejudice and secured appointment in

the Indian Civil Service only to be dismissed a few years later on what

was widely seen as a trumped-up charge. Instead, Banerjea became an

educator – with a devoted student following – and a journalist whose

paper, the Bengalee, was the organ of bhadralok aspirations. Banerjea’s

programme perfectly expressed the ambivalence of bhadralok nation-

alism towards British rule. Like many educated Bengalis, Banerjea was

deeply dissatisﬁed with what he regarded as the tainted legacy of the

Indian past. In a speech on ‘England and India’ in 1877, he denounced

the effects of caste, the practice of child-marriage, the customary ban

on the remarriage of widows, and the zenana system (the seclusion

of married women).

England’s mission in India, he declared, was to

help eradicate the evils of Indian society, to help ‘in the formation of

a manly, energetic, self-reliant Indian character’, and to introduce the

‘arts of self-government’. This was a liberal programme, to be enacted

with British encouragement by Indian prot

es – the Western-educated

class (the exact audience to which Banerjea was speaking). It was meant

to ‘regenerate and civilise’ (Banerjea’s phrase) India as a liberal soci-

ety. Self-government, he insisted, would not mean separation. When

Britain, ‘the august mother of free nations’, conferred self-government,

it would clear the way for the ‘perpetual union of the two countries’.

Abolishing race distinctions and ‘conferring on us . . . the franchise of

the British subject [would] pave the way for the ﬁnal and complete

assimilation of India into the Empire of Britain’.

The precondition of this happy outcome was, of course, recog-

nition by the British of the claims of the bhadralok elite. This was

Banerjea’s cause. In the 1870s, his ‘Indian Association’ pushed aside the

196 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

landlord-dominated ‘British Indian Association’ to become the largest

political movement in Bengal. When the Calcutta city government

became elective in the 1870s, the Indian Association quickly moved

in. By the late 1880s, it had over 100 branches in the Bengal Presi-

dency and beyond. Bhadralok resentment of European racial arrogance,

painfully visible in the furious outcry against the proposal in 1883 to

allow Indian magistrates to try European defendants, helped fuel the

movement. So did the growing anxiety that educated Bengalis would be

frozen out of bureaucratic employment elsewhere in North India as the

British began to favour local regional elites instead. The dominance of

European ﬁrms in Bengal’s main industries – tea, jute, coal and cotton –

and export trades was bound to make public employment and its polit-

ical control the focus of bhadralok concern.

This was where Banerjea’s nationalism came full circle.

Bhadralok loyalty and the achievement of a liberal India bound to

Britain in ‘perpetual union’ could only be guaranteed if the Civilian Raj

was broken and its administrative citadel surrendered to a new local

garrison. ‘All India is of one mind on this great question’, Banerjea

had declared in 1878.

But how was he to overcome the entrenched

resistance of the senior Civilians and the bitter hostility of the Calcutta

Europeans and their vociferous press? Neither he nor his bhadralok

followers had any taste for mobilising the masses – so much of them

ethnically, culturally or religiously alien. If mass politics did come to the

vast, unwieldy Bengal Presidency, how long would a Calcutta-based,

anglo-literate and privileged Hindu ‘vanguard’ stay in control? To ﬁght

the Civilian Raj, it seemed better to spread wide rather than dig deep. It

was hardly surprising, then, that, when the chance came to join forces

with like-minded Bombay politicians in an All-India national ‘congress’,

Banerjea and the Indian Association quickly signed up.

Dadabhai Naoroji, the pioneer of an All-India political move-

ment, was a merchant from Bombay and a member of the small Parsi

community that stood apart from the Hindu majority. The Parsis were

a cosmopolitan business elite, conscious of their wealth and culture

and determined to share in the government of Bombay City and the

Presidency. The rapid growth of the city as its railway system reached

deeper into the hinterland, the expanding trade in raw cotton and the

new textile industry, helped create a conﬁdent business class largely free

from the commercial dominance of European ﬁrms so evident in Bengal.

Shrewdly, the Parsi elite founded its claim upon its Indianness, but was

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

equally careful to insist that its object was partnership in what Naoroji

had called the ‘Imperial ﬁrm’. British supremacy, declared Sir Pheroze-

shah Mehta, the Parsi godfather of Bombay city politics as also of the

early Congress, was ‘the indispensable condition of Indian progress’.

Like the bhadralok politicians of Bengal, Mehta and his friends had

little time for populism. But he was just as determined to overthrow

the Civilian Raj. ‘The English ofﬁcial’, pronounced Mehta caustically,

‘moves among the natives, isolated even when not unsympathetic, igno-

rant even when inquisitive, a stranger and a foreigner to the end of the

chapter.’

The advantage that Mehta and the Bombay group enjoyed over

Banerjea was their alliance with an inland elite whose hold on popu-

lar sympathy could be used as a tactical weapon against the Civilians.

On the plains north of Bombay city and behind the Western Ghats on

the Deccan plateau lay a different cultural world, the Maratha country

or Maharashtra. Here the elite were Chitpavan brahmins, the scribal

class that had been the mainstay of the Maratha Confederacy organ-

ised by Sivaji against the Mughals in the seventeenth century, and only

defeated by the British in 1818 after a bitter struggle. For the Maratha

brahmins, the British Raj was a conquest state in a much fuller sense

than for the bhadralok. In the 1870sand1880s, cultural nationalism in

Maharashtra meant coming to terms with the ubiquity of British insti-

tutions and practices while re-establishing contact with the Maratha

past. For the new cadre of anglo-literate Marathas, thrown up by the

expansion of English-language education, cultural revival and social

cohesion demanded a new view of the Maratha past, freed from the

condescension of Civilian history where the Confederacy was cast as a

predatory banditti. The pre-conquest polity was now imagined as the

prelude to a new Maratha nation, in which the language and concepts

of European liberalism would be selectively grafted onto the indigenous

stem. The master-mind of this project was the historian and philosopher

M. G. Ranade, described by a British ofﬁcial in 1880 as the ‘Parnell of

the Deccan’.

The Maratha brahmins were far better placed than the Ben-

gal bhadralok to mobilise a wider following against the Civilians.

Ranade and his protege, G. K. Gokhale, were cautious. They preferred

to emphasise the loyalty of the elite to British ideas of government

and Western notions of social progress, and, in Gokhale’s case, to

build bridges towards the Parsi ‘nationalists’ in Bombay city. But, to

198 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

B. G. Tilak, like them a Western-educated brahmin, a more drastic

confrontation with the Civilians seemed necessary. Tilak was later por-

trayed as the champion of traditionalism, the ‘trusted and accredited

leader of Conservative and religious India in the paths of democratic

politics’.

In fact, Tilak’s attitude to caste rules and orthodox piety was

perfunctory.

He sent his daughter to an English-language high school

and corresponded with British academics on Sanskritic literature. His

ultimate goal was not, perhaps, very different from the liberal model of

nation-state favoured by Banerjea or Mehta. But he was more willing

than they were to experiment with popular religiosity and folk patrio-

tism as the building blocks of a political movement. In the 1890s, he

agitated against raising the age of consent for marriage; promoted the

cult of Ganapati, a regional deity; and evoked the Marathi folk hero

Sivaji – all in the effort to ground the arm-wrestling with the Civilians

in a wider sense of cultural grievance. None of these campaigns went

very far. But the hostility with which the Civilians regarded him (Tilak

was gaoled for sedition in 1897 and exiled for six years to Burma in

1908) was matched only by the nervousness of his political compatri-

ots. To them, Tilak’s appeal to religious conservatism, his baiting of the

British and his championing of a Maratha hero regarded elsewhere in

India as a barbaric freebooter

threatened to wreck their fragile inter-

provincial coalition and destroy the mantle of respectability on which

their dealings with the Civilians (and their credit in Britain) depended

so heavily.

Elsewhere in British India, especially in the vast southern Pres-

idency of Madras, we can see a similar pattern of provincial politics

bringing to life movements that, for all their local differences, were

broadly united behind the common demand for a real voice in the

provincial legislatures and the appointment of Indians to the Civil Ser-

vice. The new political leaders were deeply conscious of the need for

social and cultural renovation. They accepted much of the British cri-

tique of an atomised Indian society lacking the beliefs and institutions

for social progress. But they fought shy of popular politics fearing

a religious backlash against their reformist project and the Civilians’

accusation that they were accessories to a second Mutiny. They pre-

ferred to concentrate on a constitutional and administrative platform

that would maximise their power and inﬂuence. The radicalism of their

strategy should not be disparaged. Diluting the Civilian oligarchy with

anglo-literate Indians would have broken the back of the Civilian Raj

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

(not least by choking off its British recruitment). The new politicians

were neither imperialist poodles nor the protagonists of full-blooded

independence. Instead, they favoured the making of a self-governing

‘middle nation’

in which the institutions and structures of the con-

quering power would be manned and moulded by the representatives of

a revitalised indigenous culture. The object was not rebellion nor sep-

aration from Britain but partnership in a reformed and decentralised

imperial association. Indeed, there was much to be gained, they thought,

from an alliance with the strongest liberal power, the richest commer-

cial state and the great entrepot of progressive culture. This was the

programme of ‘British Indian nationalism’, a bold assertion of India’s

rightful place in a new imperial order. Its struggle with the Civilian

Raj occurred at a critical moment in the shaping of the British world-

system, in whose ultimate fate British rule in India was to be so deeply

implicated.

The struggle

It was the resentment of anglo-literate Indians at the racial arrogance

of unofﬁcial Europeans in their campaign against the Ilbert bill that

triggered the formation of an ‘All-India’ national congress. The Ilbert

agitation had shown how vulnerable the Viceroy’s government was

to lobbying by a handful of European residents. The Congress would

redress the balance. The Congress was just that: an annual meeting

of the provincial associations representing the anglo-literate elite and

voicing its distinctive (and elitist) demands. It had no mass support –

and no desire for it. On the face of it, this ‘microscopic minority’ held

no fears for the Civilians. Yet, within a few years, the Civilian Raj had

been partly reconstructed to appease its demands.

Three arguments forced the Civilians to take ‘babu politics’

more seriously in the 1880s. First, it was well understood that the

Raj needed more cooperation from local men, and those who repre-

sented their interests, if the growth of government was not to stall. Like

many governments of the period, the Raj found itself pressed to regu-

late more closely and intervene more frequently in the cause of social

and economic improvement. More rules must be made; more revenues

raised. As a result, it needed to cultivate local notables and secure

the endorsement of the educated elite. The Civilians might dislike the

200 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

‘babu’ politicians: but, in the project to govern India more closely, to

impose codes for famine relief, forest management, irrigation works or

plague control, they were vital allies through whom progressive opin-

ions would trickle down into the vernacular world of the mofussil.

Secondly, the obverse was just as important. The Civilians could coerce

disorder; but they were poorly armed against public criticism. In a

regime whose security was stretched thin, and where prestige seemed

the key to obedience in the army, police and bureaucracy, unrelenting

hostility from the newspapers was a corrosive force. Smothering it by

any means short of outright censorship (which London was expected

to veto) became a Civilian obsession. That too pointed towards some

accommodation with the Congress politicians whose links with the

Indian press were invariably close. Thirdly, by the mid-1880s, the Civil-

ians had become increasingly nervous of ‘Home’ opinion. The advance

of the radicals, whose threat to British power, Lord Salisbury (a for-

mer Secretary of State for India) had excoriated,

did not bode well

for the Civilians and their political autonomy. The artful campaign of

Naoroji, Banerjea and Ranade, with its appeal to ‘Gladstonian’ values,

and its reassuring loyalism, was bound to trouble Liberals conscience-

stricken by interference in Egypt and coercion in Ireland. More repres-

sion in India might bring down London’s wrath and end by clipping

the Civilians’ wings. It was an apt coincidence that the Indian Viceroy

at this uneasy moment was an Anglo-Irish landowner, the Marquess

of Dufferin. Dufferin knew better than most how the shifts of mood in

Westminster could subvert the oligarchies of the Empire.

The Viceroy and his advisers decided that bureaucratic discre-

tion was the better part of imperial valour. Two enquiries probed the

limits of concession. One committee of senior Civilians considered the

Congress demand for a reform of the legislative councils. A second

committee under Sir Charles Aitchison took up the question of Indian

appointments in the Civil Service, the arcana imperii of Civilian power.

On the ﬁrst issue, the Civilians found some scope for compromise. After

all, they calculated dourly, enlarging membership of the councils, and

adopting less restrictive rules about what could be discussed, queried

or debated, could be worked to their advantage. New allies might be

recruited and, in a larger forum of public discussion, the ofﬁcials would

be able to rebut the criticisms levelled against them in the press. But,

on the second question, the Aitchison committee returned a telling neg-

ative. With minor qualiﬁcations it rejected any change in the rules of

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

the entry competition or in the numbers of senior posts reserved for

members of the Indian Civil Service. Indian ambition would have to

be content with a larger provincial service – the intended instrument of

bureaucratic expansion. To the Congress leaders, however, even half a

loaf was welcome. With larger legislatures in the provinces, and modest

advances in scrutiny, interpellation and debate, they hoped to follow

the path to self-government carved out by settler politicians in Canada,

the Cape Colony or New South Wales. When the proposals gained

London’s approval in 1892, the Congress reacted with joy.

In fact, of course, the 1892 Councils Act was not the end

of the Congress campaign but the beginning of its political struggle.

In 1895, Surendranath Banerjea, presiding over the annual Congress

meeting, laid out its political programme: ‘the goal of our aspira-

tions, the promised land of equal freedom and equal rights with British

subjects’.

There should be more elected members: Bengal had only

seven for 70 million people. Debate and scrutiny should be wider and

freer. The military budget should be cut down. And (the old cry) the

employment of a ‘foreign element’ in the public service (the British Civil-

ians) was ‘morally wrong, economically disastrous and politically inex-

pedient’. British rule, declared Banerjea, must be liberalised so that India

could ‘ﬁnd its place in the Great Confederacy of Free States, English

in their origins, English in their character, English in their institutions,

rejoicing in their permanent and indissoluble union with England’.

The educated class in his province, wrote the lieutenant-governor of

the North-West (after 1900 ‘United’) Provinces, were thoroughly dis-

contented – not because they wished to overthrow British rule but

because they wanted to administer it themselves.

On their side, the senior Civilians were just as determined that

the act should be the end of concession and the start of stricter polit-

ical discipline. As usual, London devolved the detail of reform to the

Indian government. The Civilians took full advantage. Their own view

of India as a jumble of conﬂicting castes, communities and interests

formed the working principle of the new representative system. The

enlarged legislatures were not to represent territorial constituencies but

sets of ‘interests’ deﬁned and approved by the Civilians. Their members

might be chosen by the interests concerned, but they sat in council as

the nominees of government, not by popular vote. The councils met

only brieﬂy: that of Bengal (the largest province) for nine days a year.

Discussion and questions were permitted (up to a point) but without

202 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

control over ﬁnancial supply, and faced by an irremovable executive,

the scope for collective action was minimal, and the formation of par-

ties a dream. In the last resort, the deck of interests could always be

shufﬂed to throw up a different ‘hand’ of members. But, for all these

administrative safeguards, the number of Congressmen on the councils

crept steadily upward.

Reform was thus the goad for Civilian reassertion. Sir George

Chesney, one of the committee that had drafted the councils scheme,

made a blunt avowal. In the third edition of his Indian Polity (1894),

he rejected the schemes of Congress as ‘absurd’.

His book was a

forceful restatement of the need to entrench the autonomy of the Civil-

ians, as much from Whitehall and Westminster as from Indian opin-

ion. Another old India hand, Sir William Hunter, was sympathetic to

Congress but dismissed the ‘numerical principle of representation’.

Among the senior Civilians in India, insistence upon the ethnic (and

thus ineradicable) basis of India’s social divisions, and the incompati-

bility of the caste system with any form of representative government,

became the hallmark of the new ofﬁcial scholarship. Ethnographic and

census studies along these lines made Herbert Risley a rising star in the

1890s.

In the Punjab, where large-scale irrigation works were forming

a new ‘hydraulic society’ in the ‘canal colonies’,

the dominant school

among the Civilians insisted on the ‘tribal’ basis of rural society and

the need to prevent urban and commercial castes from buying land and

social inﬂuence in the countryside.

Elsewhere in India, the Civilians

actively sought new allies among the provincial elites.

In North India,

the ‘Mutiny syndrome’ could still be readily invoked.

The lesson of all this was clear enough. The Civilians were

determined to challenge what they saw as the absurd and potentially

dangerous pretensions of the anglo-literate elite to be representative of

India at large. Opinion at home had to be reminded of Indian ‘reali-

ties’; and Indian politics corrected to put the Congress in its place. Lord

Elgin was too much a Gladstonian to be sympathetic. But his succes-

sor as Viceroy (in 1899), Lord Curzon, brought a different outlook.

Curzon was of landed family but modest means. He had made his way

by academic talent, intense ambition, hard work and a ready pen. In

the early 1890s, he had entered politics with a reputation for expert

knowledge of Asia, especially of Central Asia and Persia (Iran) where

Anglo-Russian competition was greatest. He was the protege of Lord

Salisbury whom he served at the Foreign Ofﬁce.

By 1898–9, Salisbury

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

was deeply alarmed by Russia’s diplomatic advance towards India. A

Viceroy in tune with his thinking and with Curzon’s local knowledge

would secure London’s grip on Indian frontier policy. By an added

irony, Curzon was also expected (in London) to bring a more sympa-

thetic and imaginative approach to Indo-British relations and soften the

rule of the dour Civilians.

As Salisbury had intended, Curzon brought to India an intense

concern for its central Asian borderlands – the viewpoint of a Mughal

emperor. It was a crucial change of perspective. Like some latter-day

Mughal, Curzon saw Indian politics as the rightful preserve of princes

and landowners bound by neo-feudal allegiance to the imperial crown.

He attached great importance to the education and training of the

princes as a governing class in imperial service.

‘The native chief’,

he said, is ‘my colleague and partner.’

India’s vast treasury of ruins,

monuments, forts and palaces excited his imagination. Curzon had a

life-long passion for architecture as the visual key to both history and

politics. To maintain and restore the monuments of India was to link

the Raj to its Mughal past not to ‘babu’ modernity. To build new

landmarks – like the Victoria Memorial Hall on the Calcutta maidan –

was to make the imperial monarchy (and not the British Parliament)

the focus of Indian loyalty.

Curzon’s strategic preoccupations and his ‘Mughalist’ outlook

chimed well with the Civilians’ wish to curb the ambitions of the

Congress politicians. Curzon was readily persuaded that the inroads

of babu politics must now be reversed, and nowhere more urgently

than in Bengal on the doorstep of the Indian government. The open-

ing salvoes were directed at two bastions of bhadralok inﬂuence: the

Calcutta city government and Calcutta University. The elected major-

ity on the Calcutta Corporation was removed. The autonomy of the

University was cut down.

But the Civilians’ real target was the Bengal

Legislative Council and the growing bhadralok inﬂuence in provin-

cial and All-India politics. They found a neat, if drastic, solution. The

sprawling Bengal Presidency had long been the target for administrative

surgery. It was over-centralised in Calcutta. Oriya-speakers in the west

and Muslims in the east were no match for Calcutta Hindus in catching

the attention of government. Assam, separated in 1874, was too small

to maintain its own cadre of Civilians. The administrative answer had

always been to divide Bengal. Now there was the will to do so. There

was little doubt about the motive. ‘Bengal united is a power’, remarked

204 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

Risley, now (as Home Secretary) the director of political strategy.

‘Bengal divided will pull in several different ways. That is one of the

merits of the scheme.’

Curzon faithfully repeated this logic to London.

‘The Bengalis’, he told the Secretary of State,

like to think of themselves as a nation . . . If we are weak

enough to yield to their clamour now we shall not be able

to dismember or reduce Bengal again, and you will be

cementing and solidifying on the eastern ﬂank of India a

force almost formidable, and certain to be an increasing

trouble in the future.

By the time the ﬁnal version of the plan was sent to London for approval,

the aim of partition had become still more explicit. Calcutta, said

Curzon,

is the centre from which the Congress party is manipulated

throughout the whole of Bengal, and indeed the whole of

India. Its best wire-pullers and its most frothy orators all

reside here . . . They dominate public opinion in Calcutta;

they affect the High Court; they frighten the Local

Government; and they are sometimes not without inﬂuence

on the Government of India . . . Any measure . . . that would

divide the Bengali-speaking population; that would permit

independent centres . . . to grow up; that would dethrone

Calcutta from its place as the centre of successful intrigue,

or that would weaken the inﬂuence of the lawyer class, who

have the entire organisation in their hands, is intensely and

hotly resented by them. The outcry will be very loud and

very ﬁerce.

It was an accurate prophecy. The Bengal Congressmen and

their allies elsewhere in India rightly saw the partition driven through

in 1905 as a frontal attack upon the claim of the anglo-literate class to

a political voice, and as a blatant attempt to stir up other religious or

ethnic groups against them. To rub salt into the wound there was no

pretence of consulting the legislative council: partition was by Viceregal

ﬁat. The result was a furious outcry which widened steadily beyond the

educated class. The swadeshi campaign was meant to boycott British