Calcutta (13 page)

Sympathy in Government did not last long. There had been too many insurrections in Bengal since the Mutiny, mostly of peasants rising against indigo planters, who notoriously ran their properties on medieval principles. Acting Chief Justice Norman had been assassinated while entering the Town Hall in 1871 and that still cut deeply even after Lord Ripon had come and gone again. There was a strong element in the ICS who believed Ripon and his ideals were the feeblest possible responses to a situation requiring the most decisive and muscular central
administration
; talk of delegating some authority to Indians was to them the fatuity of the milksop. They got what they wanted. They celebrated Her Majesty’s Diamond Jubilee first with an earthquake. And within twelve months, in 1899, Lord Curzon arrived in Calcutta and began to be a real Viceroy.

He began by demanding a more efficient administrative
machine
. A bill to reconstitute Calcutta Corporation at once offended
him, so he scrapped it and produced a new measure himself, which reduced the elected representation and ensured that the Corporation would remain firmly under British control. He decided that the administration of Calcutta University had ‘fallen into the hands of a coterie of obscure native lawyers who regard educational questions from a political point of view’ so he
appointed
a commission of reform without a single Indian member. It was possibly the largest single insult that could have been offered to the highly self-conscious and educated bhadralok. And then Lord Curzon turned his attention to the vast and
increasingly
troublesome province in which his Viceregal throne was set.

At the turn of the century Bengal was administratively a
collection
of provinces, each with distinctive historical, sub-racial and cultural differences; besides Bengal proper it included Bihar, Chota Nagpur and Orissa. It contained 78 million people. For years the Government had toyed with the idea of dismantling this cumbersome unit, to make it more manageable for
hard-pressed
civil servants. One reason for Curzon’ s next move was
certainly
administrative convenience. A larger reason was totally political. In October 1905 a partition line drawn down the middle of Bengal proper created two provinces. To a new East Bengal was added Assam; to the western half of Bengal the people of Bihar, Chota Nagpur and Orissa remained attached. From now on East Bengal was overwhelmingly Muslim in character. And in Bengal to the west, the preponderantly Hindu Bengalis of Calcutta and its hinterland found themselves numerically dominated by Oriyas, Biharis and others with whom almost the only thing they shared was a religion. This meant that the bhadralok, entirely upper-caste Hindu in character, were isolated from most fellow Bengalis and surrounded by people of alien traditions. It was the bhadralok of Calcutta who for the past half century and more had been more vociferously and
intelligently
critical of British rule than anyone else in India. They were now to be cornered in the hope that their influence could be reduced; or at least, in the expectation that it could be
prevented
from spreading.

It was an obtuse miscalculation by Curzon. What his
partition
did was to trigger a form of revolution in Bengal that
continned
 
almost until the British finally left India in 1947, that incited other people in the sub-continent to imitate the Bengalis. It was to cripple the politically moderate unity of the Indian Congress. It was also to play its part in stirring the rivalries
between
Muslims and Hindus, which were to come home to
Calcutta
at their most ghastly extreme in 1946. Immediately, it set the land aflame with opposition. Curzon had already
experienced
something of Bengali intransigence. When he was meddling with Calcutta Corporation, Surendranath Banerjea had led twenty-eight Indian councillors out of the Town Hall with a vow never to return till official impositions were removed, and there had been press campaigns, protest meetings and angry deputations ever since. Something much tougher now began to happen, though Curzon did not stay to watch it. He resigned his Viceroyalty two months before his master plan was put into effect, and left Lord Minto to deal with the repercussions.

On the eve of partition a public meeting in the Town Hall announced that all true Bengalis would boycott all British goods from now on. They would vow themselves to the purchase and use only of swadeshi (literally, of one’s own country) things. And as the swadeshi movement began to swell, people began to open new schools dedicated to nationalism through education; Sarala Debi started a gymnasium in her father’s house at Old Ballygunge for the physical regeneration of Bengali youth. The Bengali newspapers, their columns hot with passionate
denunciations
of the Raj, found their circulations soaring;
Amrita
Bazaar
Patrika
went from 2,000 copies a day in 1904 to 7,500 in 1905,
The
Bengalee
rose from 3,000 to 11,000,
Sandhya
from 500 to 7,000.

Then terrorism began. Bengalis were reminded that Kali the Terrible had been created by the gods to destroy demons who would take their kingdom from them, and the parallel was obvious. Someone was sent off to Paris to learn about
revolutionary
explosives and before long there were backyard bomb factories from one end of Calcutta to the other. Young men organized into small and highly disciplined groups began to use them, not always finding their mark, aiming occasionally for a District Judge up-country but killing a couple of English
gentlewomen

women instead. Foreign newspapers such as
L
’
Humanité
applauded
their bearing when they were caught and stood their trial with composure. For the British turned fiercely on these assassins and the population that urged them on. Newspapers were suppressed, editors and printers were imprisoned, hundreds of Bengalis at a time were rounded up and grilled. Security officers descended almost daily on Calcutta University and its surrounding student bastions; and at the very least they would bear away any copy they could find of
War
and
Peace
or Jethro Brown’s
Underlying
Principles
of
Modern
Legislation
with that sinister first chapter entitled ‘The Challenge of Anarchy’; but they were almost as likely to haul somebody off for deportation on information laid by a secret agent previously insinuated into the campus.

This was to be one pattern of relationship between the British and the Bengalis until deep into the 1930s. It was not to be changed by Lord Minto, even though he had merely inherited another man’s blunder and wished to make real concessions to Bengali feelings. Together with John Morley, a new Liberal Secretary of State for India, he constructed an Indian Councils Act which would allow Indian majorities on legislative councils in every province. He got rid of the Lieutenant-Governor of East Bengal and Assam, the monocled Bampfylde Fuller, who ruled his province with a zeal that his patron Lord Curzon had
approved
and intended. But neither of these strategies cooled the Bengali hotheads. They continued to sling their bombs and they still preached anarchy, when Lord Minto returned to England and when Lord Hardinge took his place. They were not even restrained much when Lord Hardinge engineered part of what they asked for and when, on top of it, he infuriated the British in Calcutta as carefully as Curzon had antagonized the Bengalis with partition. Lord Hardinge, at least, knew exactly what he was doing.

When Hardinge came to Calcutta in November 1910 the population of the city was well over one million. There were perhaps 14,000 British among them, insulated from the native mob by 16,000 half-caste Anglo-Indians whose loyalty to the Raj established them in positions of minor responsibility on the
railways
,
in the post offices and along other vital lines of
communication
. The British themselves had a power quite separate from that of Government and they used it without scruple for the interests of anyone else; they applied pressure on Government through the Chamber of Commerce and through the columns of their four newspapers,
The
Englishman
,
The
Statesman
,
Capital
and
Commerce
;
and when these devices sometimes failed to
produce
desired results, they wrote letters home to influential friends lurking in and around Westminster. They were obstinate and they were arrogant (they inhabited the second city of the whole British Empire, after all) and Hardinge was to snub them utterly and unforgivably. So was someone else, and he was George V.

The King had visited India as Prince of Wales in 1905–6 and he had thought then that the partition of Bengal was a mistake. On his own throne he now told his Viceroy that he still thought so. After getting his bearings, Hardinge agreed. The King was anxious to return to India as Emperor, to attract in person the loyalty of his increasingly restless subjects there, and he
believed
that nothing but goodwill would follow if he told them face to face that Bengal was to be reunited. At this point the Viceroy’s Home Member in the Imperial Council, John Jenkins, suggested that Indians might be even more mollified if the Imperial throne were removed from Calcutta to Delhi. Delhi, after all, had a magnetism for both Hindus and Muslims that Calcutta could never match; it was where the Pandava Princes had engaged in epic struggles with the Kurawas in far distant times; it was where the Moguls had proudly ruled in the name of the Prophet. There was the additional thought that Imperial
Government
might function more coolly and more comfortably if it were shifted from the violent atmosphere of Bengal. So a decision was taken, and a magnificent Durbar was planned, and
memoranda
shuttled back and forth for six months between Lord Hardinge and Lord Crewe in the India Office at home. There was enormous and quite remarkable secrecy. Only a dozen people in each country were aware of what was to happen. Even Queen Mary hadn’t heard a thing until she arrived in India and Lord Hardinge brought the matter up in his first audience with the royal couple.

The King proclaimed his news on a Durbar field of brilliance in Delhi. His Queen wore a crown with 4,149 cut diamonds, 2,000 rose diamonds, 22 emeralds, four rubies and four
sapphires
. He had 20,000 of his British and Indian troops drawn up in full-dress parade before him. There were trappings of
Maharajahs
, Rajas and princelings galore to make that December day in 1911 a gorgeous memory for everyone present and there were 50,000 of them at least. And when King George said ‘We are pleased to announce to Our people that … We have decided upon the transfer of the seat of the Government of India from Calcutta to the ancient capital of India …’ there was first of all a stunned silence in his audience. Then there was wild and incredulous cheering all round.

In Calcutta that week, life had proceeded at its normally assured pace, with its customary sounds of turbulence from
certain
sections of the native community. The London Repertory Company was playing
The
Rivals
at the Grand Opera House and
The
Passing
of
the
Third
Floor
Back
was on at the Empire. There was some tut-tutting in the Bengal Club at the news of a hurricane on the South coast, which naturally meant somewhere between the Goodwin Sands and Portland Bill. The King
Emperor
would be visiting his capital city soon, when he had finished showing the flag in Delhi; full-scale Durbar quite proper, of course; the Mutiny had been at its worst up there, so it was a good idea to impress those people with maximum pomp and circumstance from time to time.

On Durbar day, five thousand troops paraded on the Maidan. As noon approached, when the King would speak in Delhi, a bugle call was followed by a royal salute of a hundred guns, then a feu de joie, after which the whole parade advanced on the flag while the band played ‘The British Grenadiers’. Captain Brancker, Quartermaster-General at Fort William, read the
proclamation
in a loud and clear voice which could be distinctly heard by troops and spectators. Half a mile away the Deputy Sheriff, Mr E. W. Foley, did the same from the steps of the Town Hall. The list of Durbar honours was read out, with a Kaiser-I-Hind Gold Medal for Mr Lindsay, joint secretary of the Calcutta Club, and a knighthood for Mr Justice Ashutosh
Mukherji. A Royal Clemency was announced for 651 prisoners in the Calcutta gaols. They included ten Europeans and a couple of political detainees, and many of them went straight down to Kalighat, to bathe in the river and to make sacrifice to Kali. They are said to have cheered when His Majesty’s name was mentioned and Bengalis generally were mightily pleased at the King Emperor’s news. At a meeting in College Square
sometime
later, Surendranath Banerjea said that future generations would point to December 12 as the start of a new epoch in
Bengali
history; he also said that reunification represented ‘the triumph of British justice and the vindication of constitutional methods in our political controversies’. Even the bully boys with bombs, who had long since decided against constitutional methods, briefly held their fire with gratification.

The British seem at first to have been totally crushed by the news. Their papers next day merely recorded events in Delhi, the bare facts of proclamation in Calcutta, and added that ‘
Durbar
day passed off quietly’ there. After that they let their feelings go, and these were infinitely more bitter and angry than the chagrin and disappointment’ Lord Crewe had foreseen among members of the commercial community in one of his memoranda to Hardinge.