A History of the World (83 page)

Gandhi against Hitler would have been a rather shorter tale than Gandhi against the British Empire. But almost from the time of their original takeover of India, the British had dreamed of being good rulers. After the early decades of private looting by officials of the East India Company, Westminster had struggled to create a system of government that would be seen as fair and, in the long run, good for the subcontinent. Thereafter, the history of the British in India had been a see-saw, lurching between repression and reform.

The story had started in the 1750s with Robert Clive, a pudgy clerk who mysteriously evolved into a military genius, beat French and local
armies and established the East India Company’s dominance under the Mughal throne. But when he came home he was accused of having grabbed too much personal wealth, and committed suicide, aged forty-nine. After him, Warren Hastings arrived as governor-general, and over fourteen years built up a far more effective administrative system. His reward was to be impeached during a spectacular seven-year political trial at Westminster, again for corruption. He was acquitted, but left the stage a broken man. During that trial one of his tormentors, the Irish philosopher-politician Edmund Burke, complained that so far the British had simply taken from India, behaving no better than orang-utans or tigers: ‘England has erected [in India] no churches, no hospitals, no palaces, no schools; England has built no bridges, made no high roads, cut no navigations, dug no reservoirs.’
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Later administrators took his strictures to heart. Apart from banning some of the crueller Hindu traditions, such as suttee, when widows proved their devotion (or had it proved for them, by relatives) by flinging themselves alive on funeral pyres, cities were built and British-style laws were introduced; along with an army in which Indian regiments were formed on British lines and under British command. English education was promoted, and administrators such as the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay looked forward to eventual self-government. This was still a patchwork India, which some of the new British arrivals found hard to understand. Others would admiringly study the ancient cultures they had so easily subdued. Yet it is not possible to possess another culture and to look up to it; or not for long, anyway.

Colonialism would bring benefits to India, including the archaeological rediscovery of Hindu cultures all but forgotten by Muslim-ruled India, which had, after all, arrived through another once alien invader, the Mughals. But as Gandhi well understood, colonialism corrupts both sides. It brutalizes the colonial power, making it unable to live up to its own highest ideals; and it humiliates the colonized people, making it hard for them to respect either their rules or themselves. British India’s age of comparative imperial innocence was ended in 1857 in what British schoolchildren were told was the Indian Mutiny, and what Indian schoolchildren call the National Uprising, or the First War of Independence. It was bloody and desperate. It started over rumours about cow and pork fat being used to grease (Hindu and
Muslim) soldiers’ cartridges, but soon became a more general revolt against British rule. On paper, the British were lucky to hold on, given their tiny numbers. Many Indians, from princes to whole regiments, stood aside, while the rebels were divided and badly led. After massacres and heroic sieges, the mutineers were abominably treated, many being blown to pieces from the mouths of British cannon. Great Mughal monuments were despoiled and vandalized.

India now became a British possession in the full meaning of the word, and several generations of very clever, dedicated professionals were sent across the sea to run the Indian Civil Service. It is still remembered as one of the least corrupt and most efficient bureaucracies in human history.

Boys from the new public schools of England, drilled in classical literature and notions of fair play, arrived to collect taxes and administer justice to tens of thousands of people – whose unfamiliar languages they struggled to learn – and across vast areas. The high noon of the British Indian adventure brought the subcontinent not only churches and canals, but nearly thirty thousand miles of railway and a single common language – English replaced Persian, which had never been widely understood south of the Mughal heartland. They brought a system of common law. The British, who dominated for rather longer than the Mughals, left no Taj Mahal, but they did leave teeming modern cities and in New Delhi a magnificent capital. They oversaw the growth of a population that by 1901 was second only to China’s, and a rising, politically conscious if rather small middle class.
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They left cricket, too.

The classically educated civil servants could not, however, administer away the fundamental unfairness of imperialism. At times their lack of understanding of India, and the dogmatism of Christian evangelicalism and moralistic liberalism, made them intolerable. Many claimed Indians were naturally slothful, sly, treacherous, superstitious and, in general, no damn good. This meant that, as in Ireland, when famines came, the British rulers were too quick to stand aside, blaming the victims for their misfortune. So millions died. Even outside the famine years, India’s economy was unable to grow properly. First, her exports were sold to Britain, at low prices; then her industries were exposed without protection to the impossible competition of the British industrial revolution; and later still, when Indian businesses
were beginning to grow, they were hamstrung by tariffs and regulations.

On top of all this, the cost of administering and protecting the British Empire in India was ultimately met by the Indians themselves – British salaries, pensions, debts, interest and military adventures accounted for a quarter of the taxes levied in India.
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(Later, as Britain’s industrial might waned and her economy struggled, many British came to believe that they had not only civilized India but paid to do so. Not at all. Even empires that consider themselves high-minded rarely pillage the home country to aid the conquered.) Had India not fought in the First World War, or spent her capital buying British steam engines and manufactured goods, but reinvested her wealth in her own development, might she not have overtaken China long ago? It is impossible to say. But economic complaints, plus the growing humiliation of educated Indians excluded from a say in running their own country, made eventual revolt inevitable.

There were slow, cautious political reforms, from the introduction of indirect elections to Legislative Councils in 1892, to more elected members in 1910, and a vague promise of what sounded like Home Rule, made during the First World War when two million Indians volunteered. But none of this stilled the agitation and occasional bomb attacks, which were met with savage reprisals. The worst moment of later British rule in India was the ‘Amritsar Massacre’ of April 1919, when General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire, continuously and without warning, on a crowd in the Punjabi town. Some in the crowd were protesters, others were villagers celebrating a spring festival. The soldiers, with easy targets, fired 1,650 rounds and killed between 379 and 530 people (the figures are disputed), and seriously wounded more than 1,200 men, women and children. Dyer, who said he was taking revenge for an earlier riot which had left five Europeans dead, followed this up by forcing Indians to crawl on their bellies at the spot where a missionary had been attacked. He was relieved of his command but was entirely unrepentant, and treated as an imperial hero by Conservative newspapers when he returned home.
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If Dyer represents the brutal worst of the British in India, we have to set against him men like Allan Octavian Hume, who as an official had been infamous for taking the side of Indians and who in retirement founded the Indian National Congress in 1885. At first a
campaigning organization wanting self-government, it would evolve under Indian leadership into the prime political force leading the campaign for independence.

After Amritsar, Indian opinion hardened. Motilal Nehru, a moderate, strongly pro-British lawyer who had been active in Congress and had sent his son Jawaharlal to Harrow and Cambridge, took his homburg hats, his expensive London suits and ties, his wife’s dresses and the rest, and burned them in a bonfire. He got rid of his British furniture and dressed himself in Gandhi-style cotton. His son would go on to announce India’s independence in 1947, become its first and longest-serving prime minister and the only man to rival Gandhi in modern Indian history. In a sense, his trajectory was sparked by Amritsar, the moment when British reform and appeasement of Indian opinion was drowned out by gunfire.

After Amritsar, Gandhi’s campaigns of non-cooperation, as well as violent strikes, riots and attacks, made India increasingly hard for the British to govern. Gandhi’s global authority grew to the point where, much to Winston Churchill’s disgust, he was leading discussions with successive viceroys. When he came to London for round-table talks on India’s future in 1931, he was invited to Buckingham Palace by King George V and mobbed by workers. Yet Gandhi was unable to placate either the Muslim politicians or the more extreme Hindu nationalists at home. British reform plans were real and substantial. After elections, Indian provinces were run by Congress politicians, with British civil servants taking orders from them. But because of the opposition of the princes, who feared – rightly – that they would lose their authority in their semi-autonomous states, and because of political skulduggery in London, plans for a new, Indian-dominated regime in New Delhi were never fulfilled.

During the Second World War, when India was threatened by Japan, some Indian nationalists went over to the enemy. Congress had a policy of non-cooperation with the British authorities. Nehru was interned and Gandhi was jailed, though both were later released. At times the British authorities struggled to keep control. The British Labour politician Stafford Cripps was sent out to offer terms for postwar self-government, but these were considered insufficiently democratic and were rejected by both Gandhi and Nehru. Gandhi
wanted Britain to win the struggle, but remained bizarrely convinced that non-violence was a better way of defeating Nazism. During the Battle of Britain he suggested the British should invite Hitler and Mussolini to invade: ‘Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls nor your minds.’ The idea was politely rejected in favour of anti-aircraft batteries and Spitfires.
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By the middle of the war it was clear that India would be independent, one way or another. Britain’s loss of prestige after the Japanese assault, and her bankruptcy after six years of fighting, left only the details of the separation to be agreed. With the election of a Labour government in 1945, the royally connected Lord Mountbatten was sent out to conclude the final arrangements, to a tight schedule set from London. However, despite Gandhi’s best efforts, the Muslim–Hindu divide had widened during the years when Congress had led the independence struggle.

Snubbed by the Hindu leaders, the fastidious lawyer Mohammad Ali Jinnah led his Muslim League in a different direction, campaigning for their own statehood in the north-west, the Punjab and Bengal. Based on an acronym derived from the first letters of the Muslim-majority provinces, this would be called Pakistan There would be no single successor-state to the British Raj. Gandhi himself had campaigned hard for unity. As brutal intercommunal killing broke out, he went on another of his walks, preparing to fast, and pleaded with Hindus and Muslims to regard one another as brothers. But once the line of demarcation had been drawn between India and Pakistan (then including faraway Bangladesh in the east), a huge migration began, in both directions, accompanied by frenzied killing.

Mutual suspicions and dislike going back to the Mughal period, and which the British over two centuries had been unable or unwilling to smooth over, now erupted. In the Punjab in particular, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs declared war and it may be that a million people died, hacked to death, shot, bludgeoned, burned, or simply from lack of food and water. Around ten million people moved north or south of the new border, the biggest such forced removal in history, even bigger than those in Germany and Russia a few years before. It was a hideous conclusion to Gandhi’s peaceful lifelong campaign. He was grief-stricken, and began another fast in protest against the violence,
refusing to celebrate India’s independence day. Hindu extremists now regarded him as a traitor. On 30 January 1948, one of them assassinated him.

Playing the lead part in the drama that ended British rule in India, and creating a new model for protest against injustice, Gandhi can be seen as one of the most successful politicians of the twentieth century. But the country that emerged was utterly alien to his original vision for it. A lifelong follower of Tolstoy and his vision of the simple peasant life, Gandhi had looked forward to a spiritual India, one that would turn its back on railways, factories and great cities and return to the self-sufficient life of the village. He was a radical conservative, a peaceful version of those Communists who wanted to reject all Western civilization. Many of his English friends had also been idealist vegetarian-ruralists who looked forward to mankind returning to hamlets, orchards and hand ploughs. He also wanted, of course, a single India of Muslims, Christians and Hindus living together in harmony.

What happened instead was partition, capitalism, urbanization and two mutually hostile states, still arguing today over Kashmir and both of them nuclear-armed. The pantomime of military hatred enacted at border ceremonies is about as far removed from Gandhi’s dream as it is possible to imagine. India herself is now one of the most powerful economies in the world, with bustling cities, factories, a well educated middle class and a democracy which, despite corruption, occasional assassinations and resurgent Hindu extremism, has been more successful than most postcolonial nations. With a population of 1.2 billion people and a GDP roughly twice that of Britain, it is one of the countries that are likely to dominate the next century. It is not, however, the country that Great-Souled Gandhi wanted.