Churchill's Secret War (3 page)

Mill asserted that the British conquest of India was ordained by the inexorable progress of humankind. Ascendant societies had many enemies; as a result, he wrote, “one of the first applications of knowledge is, to improve the military art.” Superiority in the battlefield was a sign of cultural advancement. Muslims such as the Mughal emperors had ruled India for centuries, which indicated to Mill that their civilization was superior to that of Hindus—and the reins had naturally passed from them to Christians.
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The distinction between Hindus and Muslims, originally one of uncountable fissures in multifarious India, had sharpened with colonial attempts to classify the subcontinent’s populace. Having encountered Muslims for centuries, the British believed that they knew them: a valiant, warlike, monotheistic people who, despite being occasionally savage, deserved respect. Indian Muslims were in truth far more varied and sophisticated than such a caricature would allow; Sufi saints, for instance, preached love rather than war. But once Muslims had been pegged, Hindus came to be defined by their perceived differences with their Islamic compatriots.
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Hindu
was originally an ancient Arab or Persian appellation for anyone living east and south of the Indus River: it signified residence rather than religion. The myriad beliefs of Hindus, ranging from the extreme nonviolence of some to the human sacrifices by others, could scarcely be classified as a single faith. Nevertheless, Mill and others believed Hindus to be endowed with distinct characteristics, at the core of which lay effeminacy and its corollary, dishonesty. Unable to face what Mill called “the manliness and courage of our ancestors,” the defeated Hindus with their “slavish and dastardly spirit” were wont to employ “deceit and perfidy” in achieving their ends. Over time, educated Indians came to internalize such distinctions between Hindus and Muslims—although the illiterate continued to worship at one another’s shrines.
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A succession of nineteenth-century authors developed the argument that British rule conferred the benefits of a superior civilization to a people who had hitherto floundered in superstition and strife, and was justified thereby. In 1885, Tory politician Lord Randolph Churchill
elaborated on the theme. “Our rule in India is, as it were, a sheet of oil spread out over a surface of, and keeping calm and quiet and unruffled by storms, an immense and profound ocean of humanity,” he declared. “Underneath that rule lie hidden all the memories of fallen dynasties, all the traditions of vanquished races, all the pride of insulted creeds; and it is our task, our most difficult business, to give peace, individual security, and general prosperity to the 250 millions of people who are affected by those powerful forces; to bind them and to weld them by the influence of our knowledge, our law, and our higher civilisation, in process of time, into one great, united people; and to offer to all the nations of the West the advantages of tranquillity and progress in the East. That is our task for India. That is our
raison d’être
in India. That is our title to India.”
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BENEATH THE SHEET of oil, the colony bubbled and foamed. Between 1760 and 1850 the Company’s troops had to be diverted to suppress more than forty serious rebellions in different regions. In 1857, the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Plassey, central and northern India erupted in unison, with thousands of villagers joining sepoys of the Indian Army and disaffected princes in violent opposition to British rule.
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A medley of social and economic grievances had combined to produce the Sepoy Mutiny, as the British called it, or the Rebellion of 1857, as historians know it today. Many of the sepoys were onetime farmers who resented the deprivations that had forced them to enlist as mercenaries, the racial discrimination that kept them from ever becoming officers, and the threats to religious purity entailed by certain army practices. Villagers hated the new revenue system, and royals feared the loss of their kingdoms. The most memorable of the rebel commanders was the Rani of Jhansi, who ruled a small principality in central India, and who led into battle not only her own forces but also those of two nawabs. Her death by gunfire, when she was about twenty, marked the end of the uprising. It was a bloody affair indeed. The rebels killed several hundred white men, women, and children; the 50,000 British soldiers imported to put down the uprising avenged these murders a thousand
times over. Such at least was the claim of General Hugh Rose, who sacked the city of Jhansi.
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After suppressing the rebellion, the United Kingdom dissolved the East India Company and formally assumed the reins of government. On November 1, 1858, Queen Victoria proclaimed that henceforth the British Empire would be ruled for the benefit of all its subjects. In practice, control over India would rest with the British public, acting through their Parliament and a secretary of state for India based at the India Office in London. The governor-general in Calcutta acquired the title of viceroy, underlining his status as the Queen’s representative. Loyal native princes retained their kingdoms but remained subservient to the viceroy. A “mutiny charge” of £50 million, the cost of importing British soldiers to put down the uprising, was deducted from the colony’s account.
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Military strategists decreed that sufficient numbers of white troops should always be stationed in India to forestall further mutinies. And British officers painstakingly rebuilt the native portion of the Indian Army with “martial races”—mainly tall and light-skinned farmers from the northwest. They were Sikh, Muslim, or Rajput, the last group being Hindus who were believed to have retained fighting qualities possessed by their ancestors. Furthermore, because sepoys of diverse regions and religions had united in attacking their superiors, the generals segregated such groups and trained the regiments so that “Sikh might fire into Hindu, Gurkha into either, without any scruple in case of need.” (Gurkhas are a mountain-dwelling people from Nepal.) By the end of the nineteenth century, the Indian Army was a formidable force called up in British battles from Africa and Afghanistan in the west to Burma and China in the east.
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EVEN AS THEY brought the recalcitrant sepoy under control, the British rulers of India came to perceive an even more potent threat: the educated Hindu male, or
babu
. Many of the babus were conversant with Western thought and were asking to be treated according to Enlightenment principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. A few had
entered the Indian civil service by traveling to London to take the requisite examinations, and their presence in the system emphasized the conflict inherent in the British Raj. Equality under the law was held by the conquerors to be one of the great benefits bestowed upon Indians, but native judges were not permitted to preside over cases involving whites. In 1883, Lord Ripon, one of the rare liberals who attained the office of viceroy, resolved to remove this discrepancy—only to provoke a furious outcry. For, as historian Thomas Metcalfe points out, it was “no easy matter at once to treat Indians and Europeans equally, and then to claim the right to rule a conquered India.” All said and done, it was faith in racial superiority—the belief that natives were incapable of the supervisory tasks that whites performed—that supplied the theoretical foundation of the British Raj.
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English men and women, many of them based in Calcutta, penned furious attacks on the babu (often spelling it
baboo
to suggest a link with the primate). Mill had declared that “the Hindu, like the eunuch, excels in the qualities of a slave,” and the popular historian Thomas Babington Macaulay had dwelt on the emasculation of Bengalis, who’d “found the little finger of the Company thicker than the loins” of the prince Siraj-ud-daula. Several authors now embellished these images. The writer Rudyard Kipling repeatedly portrayed the Bengali civil servant as a nincompoop who in a crisis fled the scene and left the real men to pick up the pieces. It was the Bengali male’s “extraordinary effeminacy,” as evinced by his diminutive physique, his flowing clothes, and his worship of goddesses, that best illustrated why he, and by extension India, had to be guided by the firm, benevolent hand of a supremely masculine race.
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Even as the babus realized with a shock how contemptible they were to the British, a popular novel suggested how they might prove their manliness. In 1882, a Bengali civil servant named Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay had dramatized in the novel
Anandamath
the insurrection that followed the famine of 1770. In a conscious response to Macaulay’s jibes, the writer imagined the rebels as warrior-saints who readily shed blood in defense of their motherland. The novel was a
covert call to arms that offered visions of heroic self-sacrifice to angry youths and inaugurated an era of Bengali militancy.

A rather more sedate group of Indians, mainly lawyers and civil servants, came together in Bombay in 1885 to form the Indian National Congress. They hoped to articulate native grievances and seek redress from within the British imperial system, and over the next two decades they won greater representation for Indians on legislative councils. (These had negligible power but would form the basis of the more substantive legislatures of the future.) In 1905, when Viceroy George Nathaniel Curzon announced a plan to sever the large and unwieldy province of Bengal into two parts, the Congress initiated a mass public protest.

The province was to be divided into a predominantly Hindu western fragment and a largely Muslim eastern one. “Bengal united, is power, Bengal divided, will pull several different ways. . . . [O]ne of our main objects is to split up and thereby weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule,” explained a British civil servant. Curzon, who regarded Muslims as potential allies against the largely Hindu nationalists, visited the city of Dacca in eastern Bengal to inform the region’s Muslim zamindars how partition would enhance their influence. In 1906 the All India Muslim League came into being in Dacca and declared its support for the viceroy’s partition plan.
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The Congress, which opposed partition, introduced a powerful weapon of Irish invention: a boycott of British goods. Thousands of students foreswore foreign fabrics. Bonfires flared on Calcutta’s streets, consuming jackets, trousers, and other Western clothes. In the first year of the agitation alone, the importation of cotton goods fell by a quarter. Dadabhai Naoroji, a mathematician and businessman who headed the Congress, declared the greater goal of the movement to be
swaraj
, or self-rule. In 1911 a new viceroy succumbed to the persistent economic pressure and revoked the partition.
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The large province of Bengal was instead broken up along linguistic lines, with Bihar and Orissa becoming separate states. India itself would no longer be administered from Calcutta but from New Delhi, far beyond Bengal. “[I]t will be a very good idea to move the Government
offices away from the Bengali Babus, who now swarm in every office,” noted a visitor to the city. “No Englishman has a good word for them: they are said to have less character and backbone than any other Indians, and to be intolerably conceited, besides being seditious.” In 1912, when the viceroy ceremonially entered the newly built capital city on a caparisoned elephant, some revolutionaries lobbed a bomb that seriously injured him. The chief conspirator, who escaped to Japan, turned out to be a Bengali babu.
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“Bengal is the seat of bitterest political unrest—the producer of India’s main crop of anarchists, bomb-throwers and assassins,” observed American writer Katherine Mayo in
Mother India
, a 1927 travelogue that described Hindu males as pedophiles enervated by excessive sex. “Bengal is also among the most sexually exaggerated regions of India; and medical and police authorities in any country observe the link between that quality and ‘queer’ criminal minds—the exhaustion of normal avenues of excitement creating a thirst and a search in the abnormal for gratification.” This book, the outcome of a tour organized by British intelligence, would so captivate Winston Churchill that he would pass it around among friends.
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ON AUGUST 4, 1914, the British Empire went to war against Germany. India presented £100 million to the United Kingdom as a contribution for war expenses and sent troops to the Middle East and Europe; more than 60,000 of its soldiers would die fighting World War I. In rural India, wartime inflation, the export of grain to the war theaters, and drought made it difficult for the poor to afford enough food. Epidemic forestalled famine: the Spanish flu, which soldiers brought home from the icy trenches of Europe, thrived on emaciated frames and killed an estimated 12 million.
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Mainstream Indian nationalists cooperated with the British war effort and expected political concessions as a reward. So when the Government of India hailed the end of World War I by enacting a repressive law, Indian rage boiled over. Among other provisions, the Rowlatt Act of 1919 allowed the government to imprison indefinitely and sentence
by tribunal—not trial—anyone suspected of sedition. A visionary leader, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, stepped to the fore and called for civil disobedience against what he termed a “devilish” law.

Gandhi was forty-nine and had returned to India a few years earlier, after a twenty-two-year sojourn in southern Africa. Born in Gujarat in western India in 1869, he had trained as a lawyer in England and moved to Natal, a British colony, to set up a practice. There Gandhi had come to identify with impoverished Indian laborers who worked on plantations and mines, and had championed their rights. In the process he had forged a political and moral weapon that he called
satyagraha
, transliterated as “passion for truth.” Someone who offered satyagraha—by, for instance, refusing to obey an unjust law—had to follow a path “as sharp as the sword’s edge,” Gandhi wrote. He or she had to abjure violence and bear no animosity toward the opponent, no matter how intense the hardship: “Satyagraha postulates the conquest of the adversary by suffering in one’s own person.”
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