Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (25 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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The campaign began in the New London Tavern with a meeting of the ‘Committee of the Protestant Society’, which called for the ‘speedy and universal promulgation’ of Christianity ‘throughout the regions of the East’. In vain did directors of the East India Company protest. By the time Parliament voted, 837 petitions had been sent in from eager Evangelicals all around the country, urging an end to the exclusion of missionaries from India. Altogether nearly half a million people signed them. Twelve of these petitions can still be seen in the House of Lords library, most of them from the south of England. It is a sign of how well oiled the machinery of extra-Parliamentary pressure now was that nearly all use exactly the same preamble:
The inhabitants of the populous regions in India which form an important portion of the British Empire, being involved in the most deplorable state of moral darkness, and under the influence of the most abominable and degrading superstitions, have a pre-eminent claim on the most compassionate feelings and benevolent services of British Christians.
 
One group of petitioners ‘beheld with poignant grief the horrible rites and the degrading immorality which prevail among the immense population of India, now our fellow subjects and ... fondly cherished the hope that we can introduce them to the religious and sound blessings which the inhabitants of Great Britain enjoy’. This was also a formula, originally adopted at a Church Missionary Society meeting in Cheapside in April 1813 and disseminated through Evangelical newspapers like
The Star
.
Here was another carefully coordinated public campaign to challenge the
status quo
; and just as had happened when the issue was the slave trade, it was Clapham that prevailed over the vested interests. In 1813 a new East India Act not only opened the door to missionaries, but also provided for the appointment of a bishop and three archdeacons for India. At first, these representatives of the church Establishment were reluctant to antagonize the company by admitting missionaries. When the missionary George Gogerly arrived in India in 1819 he was amazed to discover that
missionaries had nothing to expect in the way of encouragement, either from the Government or the European inhabitants of the place. The morality of the latter was of the most questionable character, and the presence of the missionary was a check on their conduct which they did not choose to tolerate; whilst the officers of the Government looked upon them with suspicion. Both parties did all in their power to make them appear contemptible in the eyes of the natives; describing them as low-caste people in their own country and quite unfit to hold conversation with the learned Brahmins.
 
But the second Bishop of Calcutta, Reginald Heber, offered the missionaries more encouragement after his appointment in 1823. Nine years later there were fifty-eight Church Missionary Society preachers active in India. The clash of civilizations had begun.
To many of the missionaries, the subcontinent was a battleground in which they, as soldiers of Christ, were struggling against the forces of darkness. ‘Theirs is a cruel religion’, Wilberforce had bluntly declared. ‘All practices of this religion have to be removed’. Indian reactions only served to harden such attitudes. Just as he was about to begin a service in his own bungalow, George Gogerly found himself assailed by two men ‘as filthy in their appearance as it is possible to imagine, with blood-shot eyes and demoniacal look, evidently under the influence of some powerful stimulating drug’.
In loud threatening tones [they] commanded us to be silent. Then, turning to the people they declared that we were the paid agents of the Government, who not only had robbed them of their country, but who were determined by force to put down both Hindooism and Mohammedanism and to establish Christianity throughout the land; that their home would be defiled by the killers of the sacred cow, and eaters of her flesh; that their children would be taught in their schools to revile the holy Brahmins and discontinue the worship of the gods. Pointing to us they then exclaimed, ‘These men come to you with honeyed words, but there is poison in their hearts; they intend only to deceive that they may destroy’.
 
Gogerly was indignant at this interruption, particularly when the crowd set upon him and his colleagues, beat them and chased them through the streets (though he ‘rejoic[ed] that we were counted worthy to suffer shame for His name’). But the ‘Boiragees’ who attacked him were quite right. The missionaries did indeed intend much more than simply to convert Indians to Christianity. Almost as important as the Evangelical project was the idea that India’s whole culture needed to be Anglicized.
It was not only the missionaries who took this view. Increasingly influential in mid-nineteenth-century India was the more secular doctrine of Liberalism. The eighteenth-century classical liberals, notably Adam Smith, had been hostile to imperialism. But the greatest of the Victorian Liberal thinkers, John Stuart Mill, took a very different view. In ‘A Few Words on Non-intervention’, Mill asserted that England was ‘incomparably the most conscientious of all nations ... the only one whom mere scruples of conscience ... would deter’ and ‘the power which of all in existence best understands liberty’. It was therefore in the best interests of Britain’s colonies in Africa and Asia – so he argued in
Considerations on Representative Government
(1861) – that they enjoy the benefits of her uniquely advanced culture:
first, a better government: more complete security of property; moderate taxes; a more permanent ... tenure of land. Secondly, improvement of the public intelligence; the decay of usages or superstitions which interfere with the effective implementation of industry; and the growth of mental activity, making the people alive to new objects of desire. Thirdly, the introduction of foreign arts ... and the introduction of foreign capital, which renders the increase of production no longer exclusively dependent on the thrift or providence of the inhabitants themselves, while it places before them a stimulating example.
 
The crucial phrase here is ‘the decay of usages or superstitions which interfere with the effective implementation of industry’. Like Livingstone, Mill saw the cultural transformation of the non-European world as inextricably linked to its economic transformation. These twin currents of the Evangelical desire to convert India to Christianity and the Liberal desire to convert it to capitalism flowed into one another, and over the entire British Empire.
Nowadays, the modern equivalents of the missionary societies campaign earnestly against ‘usages’ in far-flung countries that they regard as barbaric: child labour or female circumcision. The Victorian non-governmental organizations were not so different. In particular, three traditional Indian customs aroused the ire of British missionaries and modernizers alike. One was female infanticide, which was common in parts of north-western India. Another was thagi (then usually spelt ‘thuggee’), the cult of assassin-priests, who were said to strangle unwary travellers on the Indian roads. The third, the one the Victorians most abhorred, was sati (or ‘suttee’): the act of self-immolation when a Hindu widow was burned alive on her husband’s funeral pyre.
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The British had been aware that certain Indian communities engaged in female infanticide since the late 1780s; the principal reason seems to have been the excessive cost to high-caste families of marrying off their daughters. However, it was not until 1836 that James Thomason, then the Magistrate of Azamgarh and later Lieutenant-Governor of the North Western Provinces, took the first active steps to stamp it out. In 1839 the Maharaja of Marwar was persuaded to pass a law prohibiting the practice. This was only the beginning of a sustained campaign. A systematic survey in 1854 found that the practice was endemic in Gorakhpur, Ghazipur and Mirzapur. After further research – including detailed analyses of village census data – anew act was passed in 1870, initially applying only to the North Western Provinces but later extended to the Punjab and Oudh.
30
The campaign against thagi was pursued with equal zeal, though the extent of the practice was altogether more doubtful. It was a Cornishman named William Sleeman – asoldier turned investigating magistrate – who set out to extirpate what he maintained was a complex and sinister secret society, dedicated to the ritual murder of Indian travellers. According to an influential article on the subject published in the
Madras Literary Gazette
in 1816, the ‘thugs’,
... skilled in the arts of deception ... enter into conversation and insinuate themselves, by obsequious attentions, into the confidence of travellers of all descriptions ... When [they] determine to attack a traveller, they usually propose to him, under the specious plea of mutual safety or for the sake of society, to travel together and on arriving at a convenient place and a fit opportunity presenting one of the gang puts a rope or sash round the neck of the unfortunate persons, while others assist in depriving him of his life.
 
Modern scholars have suggested that much of this was a figment of the overheated expatriate imagination, and that what Sleeman was actually dealing with was an increase in common or garden highway robbery owing to the demobilization of hundreds of thousands of native soldiers as the British extended their power into new Indian states. Nevertheless, his dedication to his self-appointed task well illustrates how seriously the British took their mission to modernize Indian culture. By 1838 Sleeman had captured and tried a total of 3,266 Thugs; several hundred more were in prison awaiting trial. In all 1,400 were either hanged or transported for life to the Andaman Islands. One of those he interrogated claimed to have murdered 931 people. Appalled, Sleeman asked him whether he ever felt ‘remorse for murdering in cold blood, and after the pretence of friendship, those whom you have beguiled into a false sense of security’. ‘Certainly not!’ replied the accused. ‘Are you yourself not a
shikari
(big-game hunter) and do you not enjoy the thrill of stalking, pitting your cunning against that of an animal, and are you not pleased at seeing it dead at your feet? So with the Thug, who regards the stalking of men as a higher form of sport’. One of the judges who presided over a major trial of alleged Thugs was moved to declare:
In all my experience in the judicial line for upwards of twenty years I have never heard of such atrocities or presided over such trials, such cold-blooded murder, such heart-rending scenes of distress and misery, such base ingratitude, such total abandonment of every principle which binds man to man, which softens the heart and elevates mankind above the brute creation.
 
If proof of the degeneracy of traditional Indian culture were needed, here it was.
Above all, there was sati. This certainly was no imaginary construct. Between 1813 and 1825 a total of 7,941 women died this way in Bengal alone. Even more shocking than the statistics were the lurid accounts of particular cases. On 27 September 1823, for example, a widow named Radhabyee fled twice from the burning pyre on which her husband’s corpse lay. According to the evidence given by one of the two officers who were eyewitnesses, the first time she ran out of the fire she was only burned on the legs. Indeed, she would have survived had she not been forced back on to the pyre by three men, who flung wood on top of her in order to keep her there. When she escaped again and plunged into the river, this time with ‘almost every inch of skin on her body burnt’, the men followed her and held her under the water in order to drown her. Incidents like this were, of course, exceptional and sati was far from ubiquitous. Indeed, a number of eminent Indian authorities – notably the scholars Mrityunjay Vidyalankar and Rammohun Roy – denounced the practice as inconsistent with Hindu law. Yet many Indians persisted in regarding a widow’s self-immolation as the supreme act not just of marital fidelity but of female piety. Although traditionally associated with higher caste Hindus, sati increasingly appealed to lower castes, not least because it neatly solved the problem of which family members should look after an impecunious widow.
For years the British authorities had tolerated sati in the belief that a clampdown would be seen as an unwarranted interference in Indian religious customs. Now and then individual officials, following the example of the founder of Calcutta, Job Charnock,
31
would intervene where it seemed possible to save a widow; but official policy remained strictly
laissez-faire
. Indeed, a regulation of 1812 requiring the presence of an official – to ensure that the widow was not under sixteen, pregnant, the mother of children under the age of three or under the influence of drugs – seemed to condone sati in all other circumstances. Inevitably, it was the Clapham Sect who led the campaign for a ban, and it followed the now familiar pattern: emotive speeches in Parliament, graphic reports in the
Missionary Register
and
Missionary Papers
and a pile of public petitions. In 1829 the recently appointed Governor-General, William Bentinck, responded. Under Regulation XVII, sati was banned.
Of all the Victorian Governors-General, Bentinck was perhaps the most strongly influenced by both the Evangelical and the Liberal movements. Bentinck was a modernizer. ‘Steam navigation is the great engine of working [India’s] moral improvement’, he told Parliament in 1837. ‘In proportion as the communication between the two countries shall be facilitated and shortened, so will civilized Europe be approximated, as it were, to these benighted regions; as in no other way can improvement in any large stream be expected to flow in’. An improving landlord in Norfolk, he saw himself as ‘chief agent’ to a ‘great estate’, and could hardly wait to drain the marshes of Bengal – as if the province were one giant fen. Bentinck regarded Indian culture as equally in need of drainage. In the debate which raged between Orientalists and Anglicists over education policy in India, he unhesitatingly sided with the Anglicists, whose object was, in the words of Charles Trevelyan, ‘to educate Asiatics in the sciences of the West’, not to clutter up good British brains with Sanskrit. Here too was a way the British could contribute to ‘the moral and intellectual regeneration of the people of India’: by establishing ‘our language, our learning, and ultimately our religion in India’. The aim, Trevelyan argued, was to produce Indians ‘more English than Hindus, just as the Roman provincials became more Romans than Gauls or Italians’.

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