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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780857285171 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2012 |
| Series: | Anthem Perspectives in History |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 228 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
Britain in India, 1858-1947
By Lionel Knight
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2012 Lionel KnightAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-527-0
CHAPTER 1
CROWN RULE TO 1880
1. Coercion or Collaboration?
Although the 1860s saw a drive to put a modern infrastructure into place, the opportunity for political initiatives was not taken. The viceroy John Lawrence, apparently baffled by the new bureaucratic world and nostalgic for patriarchal rule in the Punjab, appeared, 'like a senior foreman waiting for orders' in the words of the historian Sarvepalli Gopal. Caution was the watchword. After 1857, the government was careful to pay attention to those notables and groups who spoke two languages, metaphorically and sometimes literally – the supporters or 'collaborators' who could transmit and interpret alien rule.
The question of how to explain the rule of a small minority of foreigners has exercised historians. For some, simple force is sufficient. The British could bring to bear at particular points coordinated military and financial resources. Purnaiya, Tipu Sultan's minister and diwan of Mysore, had said that it was not what he could see of British power that he feared, but what he could not see. 1857 revealed that the British were prepared to unleash colossal violence to maintain their position. The possibility of repetition hung like a menacing cloud on the horizon. It was not only a possibility; at Mala Kota in 1871 there was fighting involving the Kukas, a reforming Sikh sect who had been responsible for attacks on cattle slaughterhouses. After a trial, 49 men were blown from guns and 16 hanged; though Mayo disowned the action and dismissed the officer responsible.
However, the positive response of many Indians to aspects of British rule and the scale of their involvement has encouraged other approaches. Ronald Robinson's Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration (1972) argues that imperial domination was 'only practicable insofar as alien power is translated into terms of indigenous political economy ... the financial sinew, the military and administrative muscle of imperialism was drawn through the mediation of indigenous elites from the invaded countries themselves'. The ambiguous connotations of the term 'collaborator' have proved controversial. Does the word not conceal the extreme inequality of the relationship? It defines populations in terms of their association with or antipathy to British rule. Yet relationships between rulers and ruled may not always have been as asymmetrical as they seem. Without the knowledge and authority which collaborators provided, British power would have been magnificently helpless, as R. F. Frykenberg showed in his influential study Guntur district, 1788–1848. In return, the position of notables could be strengthened by British recognition and patronage and by access to the new legal procedures established by a government which knew little and enquired less of what passed at local level.
Governance after 1858
The Crown inherited the Company's methods, men and paperwork. The legal foundations of British India, the Code of Civil Procedure (1859), the Penal Code (1860) and the Code of Criminal Procedure (1861) were the outcome of several decades of preparatory work. The main changes introduced by the Government of India Act (1858) were a secretary of state responsible to Parliament and advised by a Council of India of 15 with experience of Indian government. In Calcutta, the governor-general, now given the title of viceroy, ran the Supreme Government through an Executive Council of five, and later six, members, all senior officials. After 1861 there were Legislative Councils in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, and their nominated non-official members included Indians. They could only advise on the legislation that they ratified but their proceedings were public. Overall, the trend was towards greater concentration of authority. An Act of 1870 allowed the governor-general to overrule the Executive Council, and Lord Salisbury (Secretary of State, 1866–68, 1874–78) showed that a strong minister could ignore his council.
Below the viceroy were 900 men of the Indian Civil Service (ICS). These civilians were fresh graduates chosen, after the abolition of patronage in 1853, by competitive examination. Salaries were probably higher than in any other bureaucracy in the world. Most retired after 25 years service to enjoy a pension of a thousand pounds a year whatever their final rank. High, too, were the expectations of integrity and initiative. Most were assigned to the 235 districts of British India where they were responsible for the land revenue, criminal justice and just about everything else. Some moved into judicial work, others into the Political Service which dealt with the states. Carrying out their orders were 13,000 other civil servants earning 75 rupees a month, about half of whom were Eurasian or European. Below them were ten times as many Indians in the most lowly paid jobs. At the very top, a tenth of the 900 were in the central secretariats working an empire of paper. As Lord Curzon (Viceroy, 1899–1905) wrote, 'Round and round, like the diurnal revolution of the earth, went the file, stately, solemn, sure and slow.'
What made the life of senior ICS men even more detached was the annual move to the hills. When Lord Lawrence was offered the viceroyalty, he had recently retired to London. Pleading age and health, and a dislike of Calcutta, he made his acceptance dependent on permission to spend the hot weather in Simla. A government train took the officials, the clerks, the files and the families 1,200 miles to this small town at 7,000 feet in the Himalayan foothills. Here, surrounded by the headquarters staff of the Supreme Government, the only viceroy who was ever fluent in an Indian language worked as far away from the people of India as could be imagined. As a personal concession became the rule, every provincial government began to follow suit, except for that of Assam, whose capital, Shillong, was already in the hills. Bombay moved twice each year, to Mahabaleshwar, then on to Poona. The Madras government was later spending more time at Ootacamund in the Nilgiri hills than it did in Madras.
By the time of Lord Lytton's arrival (Viceroy, 1876–80), Indian entry to the ICS had become a pressing question. The promise of the Queen's Proclamation was unambiguous, as it declared:
[I]t is our further will that, so far as may be, our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to offices in our services, the duties of which they may be qualified, by their education, ability and integrity, duly to discharge.
However, the promise had been given before there were any university graduates. When the first Indian, Satyendranath Tagore, passed the examination in 1863, the Civil Service commissioners nervously responded by changing the marking scheme to impede future Indian candidates. Despite this and the cost of coming to London, four Indians managed to pass in 1869, surviving claims that they had falsified their ages. One of these, Surendranath Banerjea, was dismissed from his post a couple of years later for a misdemeanour that many thought would have received only internal censure had he been British. In 1875 as numbers of applicants were picking up, Salisbury reduced the examination age from 21 to 19, an even bigger obstacle for Indian candidates.
It is likely, however, that Salisbury's decision was made in reference to British candidates to the ICS. Competitive examinations had replaced patronage in the Home Civil Service only in 1870, and a debate still raged in England and in India about their value. The proponents had a particular version of the meritocratic argument. They wanted educated young men of the upper classes and thought that examinations would, as Gladstone put it, show their 'immense superiority'. ICS experience, however, was giving grounds for second thoughts. In The Competition Wallah (1864), G. O. Trevelyan caricatured the new men: 'The natives say that another caste of Englishmen has come out.' Instead of the old official 'secure with a favourite hogspear in hand and a double-barrelled Purdey slung across his shoulders', the new type could 'be seen walking with his arm round his wife's waist in the bazaar'. Lawrence thought the competition wallahs' know books better than men' but, citing a spectacular innings in a recent cricket match, conceded that there were, nevertheless, some active men among them. In other words, examinations were letting in the wrong sort, especially in the eyes of aristocratic politicians. Sir Charles Wood thought that increasing the marks for Latin and Greek would keep at bay 'wild Irishmen ... [and] middle class examination students'.
If there were doubts about the British intake, the attitude to potential Indian recruitment was clear-cut. Bengali bhadralok (see Glossary) might, as uncovenanted officials, run government offices from the Punjab to South-east Asia. Nevertheless, British references to the Babus – a polite form of address in Bengali – were generally contemptuous. Lytton was sure they had no value as collaborators, describing them as 'the Baboos, whom we have educated to write semi-seditious articles in the Native Press, and who really represent nothing but the social anomaly of their own position'. Yet some of them, despite the obstacles, were capable of passing the examination. A tiny trickle, slowed by official manipulation, would not satisfy Indians. But large-scale entry was unthinkable. The ICS was the core institution of British control. Its very existence was considered evidence of British superiority. Lord Mayo had earlier told his foreign secretary, 'Teach your subordinates that we are all British gentlemen engaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race.'
How could this exclusiveness be reconciled with the Queen's Proclamation? On resolving the problem 'lies practically the fate of the empire', thought Fitzjames Stephen (Law Member, 1869–72). Lytton's solution was radical. He wrote in a secret note, 'We all know that these claims and expectations never can, or will be fulfilled. We have to choose between prohibiting them or cheating them ...' His answer was two services, one British and competitive, the other fairly generously provided for nominated Indians. But Lord Cranbrook (Secretary of State, 1878–80) doubted whether the necessary legislation for a partial return to patronage not to mention rescinding the Queen's Proclamation would pass the House of Commons. Thus was born Lytton's compromise, the Statutory Civil Service of 1879. A few Indians would continue to take the London examination, while others from upper-class families would be appointed to positions on the recommendation of the provincial governments. These governments dragged their feet, and there was little demand from upper-class young men for arduous work in the bureaucracy. The service only lasted eight years, during which 57 appointments were made.
Angry disappointment was voiced in a furious press campaign, a major cause of the censorship introduced by the 1878 Vernacular Press Act. The Indian Association took up the cudgels on behalf of the western-educated. One of its founders, Surendranath Banerjea, went on a successful speaking tour of north India. For the first time western-educated groups were drawn together in an all-India response to a political question.
The Army
The Pax Britannica was not as peaceful as it might seem. Internal security required the army's support of the civil authorities to repress many mute protests whose voices have been recovered in the last generation by the Subaltern School of historians. Three developments, in particular, triggered these outbreaks.
First, official interest in 'waste lands' and 'reserved forests' most affected the tribal peoples. The ban on shifting cultivation after 1867 and the 1878 Forest Act provoked numerous outbreaks, of which the rebellion in Chodavaram in the Godavari Agency from 1879–80, was especially violent. Second, British conceptions of property strengthened landlord rights at the expense of those who relied on customary entitlements. Third, rising rents, land revenue, taxes on salt and the excise triggered many protests. The Deccan Riots of 1875 targeted moneylenders in the context of rising revenue demands and the collapse of the cotton boom as the US economy recovered from the Civil War. Though local, these protests sometimes presented a significant challenge to British rule. In the aftermath of the Deccan famine in 1876–77, a Brahman clerk, Phadke, gathered a band of high and low caste youths to disrupt communications and restore some kind of Hindu raj.
There was a police force, about a third armed, numbering some 158,000 in 1879 at the time of the Eden Commission. It was similar to the rural Irish constabulary, but poorly paid and of low calibre. The army, therefore, remained vital for the stability of the Raj. As late as 1899–1901, it was called out 69 times to help the civil authorities.
The most basic support of British rule was the army. After 1858 its main purpose was internal security. First, it had to be made secure itself. Artillery was now exclusively in British hands. The number of sepoys was reduced from 238,000 to 140,000 and the ratio to European troops set at two to one. The Peel Commission of 1858 received much advice on how to 'divide and rule'. Mixing castes and nationalities throughout regiments was recommended to avoid the dangerous esprit de corps so recently in evidence in the Bengal army. Despite the promise of appointment on merit in the public services, there were now to be no Indian officers. 'So far as the [Indian] army is concerned, the Queen's Proclamation ... is a dead letter.' General Chesney explained, 'The studious exclusion of Indians from all but the humblest places in the army is so conspicuous that only one inference can be placed on it – that we are afraid to trust them.' Behind the sepoys were the British troops, their lesser numbers compensated by the strategic character of much of the new railway system, which was staffed by Europeans and Eurasians. They were barracked in 'the great cantonments – the lairs where British power lies silent and almost unseen, but ready to rush forth at a moment along every spider-thread of the network of railways which is now enveloping India'.
The Indian army was also vital for the projection of British power across the Indian Ocean, and for Britain's standing as a great power. With over 200,000 troops in India as well as approximately 90,000 in the United Kingdom it was, at least before 1870–71, on a par with France and Russia. After its first duty in support of British rule, the Indian army campaigned to push out the frontiers in Baluchistan, 1876–79, Afghanistan, 1878–80 and Upper Burma, 1885. Then, as the second centre of the British Empire, it provided the manpower for numerous overseas expeditions. Under the Company, sepoys had been sent abroad as early as the Java Wars after 1810. If Aden and the Persian war of 1856 were part of the protection of the route to India, Britain's imperial interests seemed paramount elsewhere: the China Wars of 1839, 1856, 1860; Malaya in 1875; Egypt in 1882; the Sudan in 1896–98; the East African actions of the 1890s. The year 1867 had seen a strong but unavailing financial protest to London by Lawrence against Indian military participation in the invasion of Abyssinia.
The attraction of the Indian army was cost. Keeping European soldiers in India was vastly expensive. A Royal Commission of 1863 had noticed that in an average year, out of the 60,000–70,000 soldiers, 4,800 would die and 5,800 would be hospitalized; in the Madras army a quarter were treated for venereal diseases. Florence Nightingale showed that battle casualties were only a third of those caused by sickness. The figures for the sepoys were incomparably lower, and the costs of the Indian army were born by the Indian taxpayer. In Salisbury's brutal words, India was 'an English barracks in the Oriental Seas from which we may draw any number of troops without paying for them'.
After 1880 attention switched to the fighting efficiency of the army. The Eden Commission recommended a move from general mixture to 'class company' regiments. These socially homogeneous regiments would be increasingly recruited from the 'martial races'. Sir Frederick Roberts (Commander-in-Chief, 1885–93), who was the driving force behind these changes, began to focus the army on the north-west frontier. He believed the threat now was from Russia and that an army recruited and organized with internal security as its prime objective would not be equal to the challenge. 'Martial races' meant communities supposedly with the physical and psychological toughness the army now required, and they did not include Madrasis or Bengalis. The Madras army was run down, and the three armies were finally merged into one in 1893–5. This meant a turn to Sikhs and Gurkhas who had been so helpful in 1857. By 1904, the percentage of soldiers who came from the Punjab, the frontier and Nepal was at 57 and growing. A third of the army was Muslim, a fifth Sikh. Towns were shunned; rural communities with lower than average literacy were preferred as recruiting grounds. By 1912, some began to reconsider the prudence of this narrow recruiting policy. The Nicholson Committee recommended a broader approach for the sake of safety, but without effect.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Britain in India, 1858-1947 by Lionel Knight. Copyright © 2012 Lionel Knight. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements; Preface; Introduction; Chapter 1. Crown Rule to 1880; Chapter 2. Liberal Imperialism, 1880–1899; Chapter 3. The Consequences of Lord Curzon: India or the Empire, 1899–1916; Chapter 4. The First World War, 1914–1922; Chapter 5. Dyarchy and Depression, 1922–1939; Chapter 6. The Impact of War, 1939–1945; Chapter 7. Independence, 1945–1947; Conclusion; Appendix; Chronology; Notes; Glossary; Further Reading; Questions; IndexWhat People are Saying About This
‘This is a well-written and thoughtful narrative of British rule in India from 1858 to 1947. Composed unapologetically from a British point of view, it offers a balanced treatment of the main historiographical debates, supported by good guidance to further reading. This book will be of great value for sixth form and first-year university teaching.’ —Francis Robinson, Professor of the History of South Asia, Royal Holloway, University of London