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

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

goods (especially textiles) in favour of local products as an expression

of Bengali patriotism. It was taken up by student groups and hastily

formed clubs or samitis. Soon there were signs of its being enforced

by caste associations and through coercive means.

Marches, demon-

strations and the singing of Bande Mataram as a national song were

an open challenge to the colonial power. The Civilians grew uneasy:

some had doubted the partition plan all along. But so too did their

opponents. For all his outrage at the Civilians’ ploy, Banerjea drew

back from a violent confrontation with the Raj. As the tempo of agi-

tation increased, he looked instead for some accommodation with the

embattled government. Relief was to come from a surprising quarter.

Curzon’s endorsement of partition had sprung from his urgent

geopolitical vision: of the coming struggle for Asia. Throughout his

term of ofﬁce, he argued ﬁercely for a ‘forward’ policy to contain the

Russian threat and safeguard India. Pressing his views on the British

cabinet, he claimed that he spoke for Indian opinion.

Without India,

he was to argue a few years later, Britain was scarcely a ﬁrst-class

power.

In Curzon’s geostrategic universe, it was intolerable to have

Congress snapping at his heels, denouncing India’s foreign wars and

blaming the size and cost of the Indian army for poverty, plague and

famine. If India was to take what the Viceroy saw as its rightful place in

the British system, its internal politics must be brought in line with its

imperial duty. But, by a painful irony (to Curzon at least), his insistence

upon the imperial status of the Indian government was to bring about

his downfall. Ministers in London were already annoyed by Curzon’s

presumption: in foreign policy they expected India to pay, to be seen

but not to be heard. They resented his opposition to the appeasement

of Russia. When Curzon was drawn into a bitter row with Lord Kitch-

ener, Commander-in-Chief in India and the Empire’s leading soldier,

to thwart his grip on the army’s bureaucracy, they gratefully accepted

his over-hasty resignation. But it was not so much a change of Viceroy

(in 1905) as a change of government in London that imposed a rough

political truce between the Civilians and the Congress.

With the new Liberal government in London came a new Indian

Secretary. John Morley had been an ardent Gladstonian, a radical and

a Home Ruler. He lost no time in warning Lord Minto, Curzon’s suc-

cessor as Viceroy, that a large radical phalanx in the House of Com-

mons was watching India closely.

Here was a clear signal, like that

in the 1880s, that the Civilians’ system must not become a ‘factory

206 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

of grievances’ and that some move must be made towards ‘reform’.

Morley himself began with a strong prejudice against Civilian rule. But

his real target was Curzon’s inadmissible claim to Indian inﬂuence in

British policy and the ‘jingo’ mentality of the Civilian regime. What he

cared about most, he told his closest adviser, was to ‘depose the Govern-

ment of India from their usurped position of an independent power’.

He himself was a fervent supporter of the entente with Russia reached

eventually in 1907. ‘Forward policy’ was out of date, and with it the

whole Curzonian ethos. In June 1906, six months into ofﬁce, he was

keen to announce reforms ‘in the popular direction’.

He may have

reasoned that a larger ‘popular’ element in Indian government would

curb its jingoistic excesses and forestall its obstruction of a Russian

entente.

Morley’s enthusiasm had been heightened by the prospect of

a tacit partnership with the Congress. The Congress leadership had

despaired of Curzon. Even Tilak agreed that nothing could be gained

by agitation in India: London was the only hope.

With Curzon’s fall

and a new Liberal government, Gladstonian in sympathy, they hoped

to turn the triangle of Anglo-Indian politics to their advantage. G. K.

Gokhale, now the pre-eminent Congressman, hastened to London. In

the classic language of Congress loyalism, he denounced Civilian rule

and afﬁrmed the bond of empire. Gokhale was a ﬁgure of impregnable

rectitude, a ‘moderate’ who repudiated the ‘extremism’ of Tilak, and an

appointed member of the Viceroy’s legislative council, the legislature of

the central government. He had made a good impression, Morley told

Minto.

To Gokhale he stressed the importance of Congress support;

its opposition would endanger reform.

The Viceroy and the Civilians could see the writing on the wall

but they were anything but cowed. Minto rejected the reversal of par-

tition. The Civilians turned their hand to ‘reform’. They were already

disillusioned with the Councils Act of 1892: here was the chance to

revise it. In the scheme they drafted, pride of place was given to a new

Chamber of Princes (to inﬂuence opinion in Britain and India) and a

‘native member’ of the Viceroy’s government (to prove the Indianness

of the Raj). The ‘natural leaders’ of Indian society, they argued, were

the chiefs, landholders, merchants and bankers. They had little sym-

pathy for Congress-type reform. But the legislative councils of 1892

had distorted the image of Indian opinion. Thirty-six per cent of coun-

cil members had been lawyers, only 23 per cent landowners. Reform

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

should reverse this trend. It should also give Muslims their own seats

in the councils.

The thinking behind these proposals was ampliﬁed in the

Reforms Despatch sent off to London in March 1907.Itwasaremark-

able manifesto of Civilian politics, perhaps the last great statement of

Civilian ideology. It acknowledged that the Congress had done much

to implant a sense of nationality across India, but insisted that most

of the ‘educated class’ had little sympathy with its programme. It saw

in Civilian rule the convergence of two great sources of authority: its

inheritance from the Mughal past and its role as the trustee of ‘British

principles’. The object of reform, it claimed, was to fuse them both in

a ‘constitutional autocracy’: the Civilian Raj would ‘govern by rule’,

merely reserving ‘the predominant and absolute power which it can

only abdicate at the risk of bringing back the chaos to which our rule

put an end’.

If the legislative councils were enlarged to represent ‘all

the interests that are capable of being represented’, and if the electorate

were refashioned to prevent its falling ‘into the hands of wire-pullers’,

a great common interest could be built up between the Raj and the

‘conservative classes’. ‘We are not without hope’, Minto’s government

concluded,

that in the course of a few years the constitution which we

propose to establish will come to be regarded as a precious

possession round which conservative sentiment will

crystallise and will offer substantial opposition to any

further change. We anticipate that the aristocratic elements

in society and the moderate men, for whom there is at

present little place in Indian politics, will range themselves

by the side of government, and will oppose any further

shifting in the balance of power and any attempt to

democratise Indian institutions.

The repudiation of the Congress demand for swifter progress towards

self-government, and the admission to power of the anglo-literate class,

could not have been blunter.

Morley’s response to this provocative document was curiously

tepid. He welcomed it, pressed the case for advisory councils in the

provinces and remarked on the need for greater representation of

European interests if the councils were enlarged. His caution was

208 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

understandable. Being seen to impose reform on the Indian government

was risky. He was nervous of Anglo-India-at-Home and its furious cor-

respondents. He knew that any constitutional scheme would have to

navigate the parliamentary rapids in the House of Lords with its pha-

lanx of former Viceroys. There Curzon lay in wait, and without the

support of Lord Lansdowne (Viceroy 1888–92) Morley had little hope

of winning over its Conservative majority. To make matters worse,

his Indian ally, the Congress, was in disarray and threatened him with

embarrassment.

The Congress faced a syndrome all too familiar to colonial

nationalists in the twentieth century. Their leverage on colonial rulers

was usually increased by signs of general unrest. The ofﬁcial world

became uneasy and more open to modest concession. But, if unrest

challenged colonial power too openly, ‘Home’ opinion was quickly

hardened against ‘agitators’ or ‘troublemakers’. Colonial ofﬁcials made

up lost ground by stigmatising their critics as rebels-in-the-making.

Without organised mass support, nationalist leaders then faced the

choice between promoting chaos or accepting impotence. After 1906,

the Congress lurched dangerously towards this political impasse. The

swadeshi agitation in Bengal radicalised bhadralok opinion and the

local Congress supporters. It gave a chance to Congressmen from other

provinces who favoured more ruthless tactics against the Civilian Raj:

now they might swing the Congress behind them. In January 1907,

B. G. Tilak launched his ‘New Party’ and attacked the policy of relying

on British goodwill and Morley’s reformism. The remedy, he declared,

‘is not petitioning but boycott’.

Boycott was the way to shatter the

illusion of British power, resting as it did on ‘our assistance’. For

‘every Englishman knows that you are weak and they are strong . . . We

have been deceived by such a policy so long.’

After the Congress

annual meeting in Calcutta in December 1906, it looked as if Tilak’s

programme – boycotting military service, revenue collection and the

administration of justice – would carry all before it.

In 1907, there

was serious unrest in the Punjab over land rights. In Bengal, young

bhadralok activists turned to assassination and bomb-throwing.

This

was hardly the right climate for Morley to force more reform on the gov-

ernment of India than it had proposed itself. The established Congress

leaders, for their part, were desperate to avoid the tag of extremism.

The next annual meeting at Surat broke up in disorder. The leader-

ship withdrew, and drafted its own manifesto, insisting on its loyalty

and rejecting unconstitutional action. The following year at Allahabad,

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

a new Congress constitution was drawn up to repudiate the Tilakite

heresy and declare that ‘colonial swaraj’ – self-government within the

Empire on the ‘white dominion’ model – was the grand objective. The

British helped by arresting Tilak for sedition and exiling him to Burma.

His ‘party’ in the Congress broke up. The Punjab unrest was appeased.

The Bengal bombing died down. The moderates regained control of the

Congress and imposed their new ‘creed’.

In this easier atmosphere, Morley, whose enthusiasm for reform

had been ebbing, was able to insist on two crucial principles which the

Civilians had hoped to bury. The new enlarged councils in the provinces

would have ‘unofﬁcial majorities’: a predominance of members who

were not required (as were ofﬁcial members) to vote with the govern-

ment as a condition of their place. Secondly, Morley insisted, against

the Civilians’ prejudice, that a substantial proportion of the unofﬁ-

cials would be chosen by electorates, not selected by interest groups.

This, together with the provision that Indians could be appointed to

the Viceroy’s executive council, was the heart of the ‘Morley-Minto’

reforms. A new political order seemed in the making. The Congress

received the prospect with enthusiasm. Morley, said Surendranath

Banerjea, was the ‘Simon de Montfort of India’.

The Congressmen

looked forward to ﬁlling the lion’s share of seats in the new provincial

councils. With more liberal rules on debate and interpellation in the

council chambers, they hoped for gradual progress towards a quasi-

parliamentary constitution. At the very least, Morley had blocked the

Civilians’ project for a ‘constitutional autocracy’ based on the part-

nership of princes and landowners. But it soon became clear that the

triumph of ‘British Indian nationalism’ was far from complete.

The stalemate

The struggle over the reforms had been fought on two levels and

between several parties. At the imperial level, it had been a trial of

strength between London and Simla, between Morley and the Viceroy’s

Civilian government. Morley had been determined to bring the Civil-

ians to heel. ‘It is not you or I who are responsible for [Indian] unrest’,

he told the Viceroy irritably in June 1908, ‘but the over-conﬁdent, over-

worked Tchinovniks who have had India in their hands for ﬁfty years

past.’

Morley had insisted on a Royal Commission to decentralise the

Indian government and chose as Minto’s successor the diplomat Lord

210 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

Hardinge (closely involved in negotiating the Anglo-Russian entente)

to underline that the days of Curzonism were over. The Viceroy’s gov-

ernment, remarked Morley’s under-secretary, and perhaps at his sug-

gestion, had acted as his ‘agent’ in making the reforms (a description

received badly in Simla).

Implicit in Morley’s whole policy was not so

much the graceful acceptance of Indian claims as the deliberate exten-

sion of London’s control. It was entirely in keeping with this that,

while he pressed for unofﬁcial majorities in the provincial councils, he

bluntly rejected one at the Indian centre (on the Viceroy’s legislative

council) where India’s budget and its military spending were settled. In

the strange constitutional minuet it danced to keep London at bay, it

had been the Viceroy’s government that had proposed this seemingly

radical innovation.

In the Indian arena the contest was much more confused. The

old struggle between the Civilians and Congress had widened out. The

partition of Bengal had shown the potential of mobilising support on

a larger scale and with a more emotive programme. Much of Tilak’s

‘new party’ plan was soon to be revived by Gandhi. For the moment,

this tendency had been checked by a tacit alliance between the British

and the Congress moderates. There was one signiﬁcant exception. The

Congress attack on partition had infuriated its main beneﬁciaries, the

Muslims of East Bengal. In 1906, their sympathisers in North India

formed the All-India Muslim League. Since Muslim loyalty was vital

to British rule across much of Northern India (especially in the United

Provinces and Punjab), the embattled Civilians looked kindly on these

likely allies. At a time of rising tension between Britain and Ottoman

Turkey, Morley had extra reasons for conceding the Muslim demand

for separate seats on the councils. ‘The Mahomedans’, he told Parlia-

ment, ‘have a special and overwhelming claim upon us.’

But, overall,

the surge of political unrest unleashed in 1905 produced a curiously

indecisive result in which none of the interested parties – London, the

Civilians, the Congress ‘moderates’, the ‘extremists’ or the Muslims

(partition was reversed in 1911) – gained a clear advantage.

But, for the time being, it was the Civilians who carried off most

of the spoils. As in 1892, London had been obliged to delegate the ‘small

print’ of reform to the local ofﬁcials. But, since the small print included

choosing electors and electorates, and deciding the membership of the

provincial councils, its importance was very large. The Civilians once

more took full advantage. Minto and his advisers had disliked the

idea of elections, but there was another string to their bow. ‘We shall

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

have to trust to a careful creation of electorates’, said the Viceroy

coolly.

And so they did. This creativity ensured that, in Bengal, out of

twenty-six elective ‘constituencies’, perhaps only four could have been

won by Congress and (in 1912–13) only three were won.

The same

tactic brought disillusion in the United Provinces. ‘They . . . are just

the opposite of reforms’, Motilal Nehru reported angrily. ‘The avowed

object of the so-called reforms is to destroy the inﬂuence of the educated

classes.’

The effects were soon seen. The provincial budget debate in

1910 was ‘a farce’, as a crowd of unofﬁcial members stood up not

to challenge the government but to praise it.

Nor were the Civilians

content with new allies in the councils. They armed themselves with

fresh weapons against attack in the press. Provincial governments were

given wide powers to close down papers on grounds of sedition

100

and

were encouraged to subsidise ‘selected loyal vernacular newspapers’.

101

The new Department of Criminal Intelligence stepped up the scale of

political surveillance.

102

There was little to choose between ‘extremists’

and ‘moderates’, said the Civilian in charge.

103

It was little wonder that

a senior ofﬁcial could say in 1910, after ﬁve years of upheaval, that, in

his province at least, ‘the executive has never been stronger’.

104

Nor was this all. The Civilians had been put on the defensive

by Morley’s alliance with the Congress moderates. But they were deter-

mined to recast Indian politics along lines of their own choosing. One

symptom was Minto’s appeasement of the Indian princes whom he

promised to free from the strict supervision imposed by Curzon.

105

The

next step was more daring. It was decided to reverse the partition of

Bengal to which the whole Hindu elite remained bitterly hostile. But the

quid pro quo would be the removal of the Indian capital from the ‘dis-

loyal’ city of Calcutta to Delhi. Here was a partial if belated fulﬁlment

of Curzon’s vision. The centre of Indian politics would be shifted from

the hectic lowlands of Bengal to the loyal heartlands of Upper India.

From Delhi, the Raj would assert its link to the Indian past, its legacy

from the Mughals, and the permanence of its rule.

106

A new imperial

city was planned, to echo the Mughal foundations at Fatehpur Sikri

and Shahjahanbad. At the grandiose Delhi Durbar in 1911, attended

by the new King-Emperor George V, the public fealty of the Indian

princes formed the climax of the ceremony. What better riposte to the

pretensions of ‘babu’ politics?

This new ‘Delhi Raj’ had still wider implications. In 1908,the

Civilians smothered the inquiry that Morley had launched into admin-

istrative decentralisation. The Financial Secretary dismissed ﬁnancial

212 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

devolution as a dream.

107

The commission accepted his view. Three

years later, as the new political landscape took form, decentralisation

began to look more attractive. In the famous ‘Delhi Despatch’ of 1911,

the new Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, sketched out a novel constitutional

framework. Power was to be devolved increasingly to provincial gov-

ernments and, indirectly, to the provincial councils and their carefully

constructed ‘electorates’.

108

But none of this was meant to upset the

ability of the central government to meet its imperial obligations, pay

the imperial dividend and impose, if necessary, the ultimate sanction of

coercive power. In its new imperial enclave in Delhi, magniﬁcently free

from provincial distractions, buoyed up by feudal loyalty, conﬁdently

manipulating the levers and limits of provincial politics, the Civilian

Raj would remain: indispensable and irremovable.

In the last years of peace, there was little time to test the new

model Raj. Morley’s successor in London, Lord Crewe, brusquely ruled

out the parliamentary future on which the Congress moderates had

pinned their hopes. ‘Fancy a Liberal Secretary of State . . . proclaiming

the impossibility of Self-Government for the Indian people on the

ground of their race’, said Srinavasa Sastri sadly.

109

The Congress lead-

ers grumbled but made the best of it. The reforms had reversed the

growing estrangement between British and Indians; they were beneﬁ-

cial for all their defects; they had revived the ‘drooping spirits’ of the

constitutional party.

110

The Delhi Despatch held out hope for provin-

cial autonomy.

111

Perhaps ﬁscal autonomy might be granted.

112

The

Congress goal remained ‘an autonomous Government . . . under the

suzerainty of the most powerful and progressive of modern nations’.

113

It was only the onset of war that changed the mood. ‘In Europe the war

of nations, now in progress, will knock off the last weights of mediaeval

domination of one man over many, of one race over another’, declared

the Congress president hopefully in December 1914.

114

A new phase

of the political struggle was about to begin.

The idea of India

Behind the slogans, schemes and manoeuvres of these decades lay a

deeper issue: the idea of India. In an age of such furious change – in

communications technology, geopolitical assumptions, social mobility,

cultural hierarchy, religious allegiance, economic structure, political

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

order – in India and beyond, it was hardly surprising that the sub-

continent evoked widely different and sharply contested visions of its

political and cultural future. The idea of India was being made and re-

made with exceptional urgency. New formulas were concocted. New

audiences were sought. The stakes were rising.

In London, the ofﬁcial and semi-ofﬁcial idea of India was pre-

dictably instrumental. As India grew more valuable, the costs of instabil-

ity went up, and imperial supervision became more rigorous. If India’s

relative economic importance had slipped with the huge growth of

British trade and investment in the Americas after 1900, it was still the

largest export market for Britain’s largest export. London’s oversight

(rather than Civilian rule) was Lancashire’s guarantee of an open door

for its cotton products. The continuing expansion of Indian trade and

the ever-growing frequency of its communications with Britain sug-

gested that India’s place in the British pattern of trade, investment and

payments was as important as ever. On the geostrategic front, the trend

seemed even stronger. London’s view of India had always been refracted

through the prism of its military assets. India was the strategic reserve

for the British system east (and sometimes west) of Suez. In 1899,

(British) troops rushed from India (not distant Britain) had stopped

the Boer dash for the sea and staved off disaster in the early phase of

the South African War. As the division of the world into spheres and

colonies speeded up, and the geopolitics of partition spread across Asia,

geostrategic control over India came to seem more and more critical to

the British world-system. This was the point of Curzon’s address on

‘India’s place in the Empire’. This was the point made by The Times

in 1911, when it drew the connection between command of India and

command of the sea. ‘India stands right across the greatest highway

in the world’, it proclaimed (with some hyperbole). ‘It is the centre of

the East . . . The Power which holds India must of necessity command

the sea. Supreme sea-power would be as difﬁcult to maintain without

control of India, as control of India without command of the sea. It

is . . . the centre of Imperial defence.’

115

Of course, the view from London was heavily coloured by the

vision of oriental backwardness so skilfully promoted in the literature

of Anglo-India. But implicit in London’s ‘idea’ was an unsentimental

regard for India’s utility and an indifference to those intra-Indian affairs

that had no imperial signiﬁcance. The Civilians would be backed to

the hilt if India’s imperial ‘duty’ was threatened by its politicians. But

214 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

London might be willing to cooperate with ‘loyal’ Indian ‘moderates’,

especially at the provincial level where its interests were not at risk.

There was always the claque of Anglo-India’s friends at home to face.

But, if the Civilian regime seemed a bar to modernising India imperially,

or to the partnership of its native elites in some larger imperial purpose,

it might yet ﬁnd its privileges cut down by the London government.

Before 1914, for all the sound and fury of Morley’s reforms, there was

little sign of this. The Civilians could not be replaced as the guardians

of the imperial stake while its strategic component was growing so

remorselessly in value.

Hence, perhaps, the continuing vigour and conﬁdence with

which the Civilians’ idea of India was propagated. The Civilians had

had to come to terms since the 1880s with the growth of an educated

class and with a vociferous press, both of which challenged the dogmas

of its rule. Their reaction had been to emphasise, by ‘scientiﬁc’ inquiry

and with wider publicity, their vision of India as a cultural and political

mosaic, a riot of castes, communities, religions and races, teetering on

the brink of violent disorder. More pragmatically, they modiﬁed their

bureaucratic despotism by limited devolution at local level and by the

careful deﬁnition of interest groups with privileged access to authority

and (after 1892) with seats on provincial councils. Under pressure from

Congress and London, this idea had expanded into something more

grandiose: India as a confederacy knit together by Civilian rule and

the neo-feudal loyalty of its landed classes. With provincial devolution,

‘conservative’ (rather than ‘Congress’) India would be brought to the

fore. The educated class would be revealed as one community among

many, special perhaps in its claims, but not dominant in its inﬂuence.

The horizontal and vertical links in this emergent India would remain

under Civilian control. An untrammelled authority at the Indian centre

would ensure that the Civilian Raj could pay the imperial dividend, the

secret of its lease of power from London. In the meantime, it made sense

for the Raj to identify itself more openly with Indian interests, where

the ‘dividend’ was not involved. In 1913, the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge,

expressed his government’s sympathy for the Ottoman Empire (reel-

ing from its Balkan defeats) as a fellow ‘Muhammadan power’.

116

promised to take up the grievances of Indian communities in settler

Africa.

117

‘Anglo-India’ and ‘Indian-India’ would be reconciled.

On the Congress politicians the travails of political struggle

since the 1880s had also left their mark. But to a remarkable extent the