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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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Our image of British India tends to be that of the official classes, the soldiers and civil servants described so vividly by Kipling, E. M. Forster and Paul Scott. As a result it is easy to forget how few of them there actually were. In fact they were outnumbered several times by businessmen, planters and professionals. And there was a profound difference in attitude between those in government employ and the business community. Men like Hugh Maxwell felt threatened by the growth of an educated Indian elite, not least because it implied that they themselves might be dispensable. After all, why should not a properly educated Indian be every bit as good at running a textile factory as a member of the Maxwell family?
When people feel threatened by another ethnic group, their reaction is usually to disparage it, in order to affirm their own superiority. This was the way the Anglo-Indians behaved after 1857. Even before the Mutiny, there had been a creeping segregation of the white and native populations, a kind of informal apartheid that divided towns like Cawnpore in two: the white town behind the ‘Civil Lines’ and ‘Blacktown’ on the other side. Between the two ran what Kipling called ‘the Borderline, where the last drop of White blood ends and the full tide of Black sets in’. While the most progressive liberals in London looked forward to a distant future of Indian participation in government, the Anglo-Indians increasingly used the language of the American South to disparage the native ‘niggers’. And they expected the law to uphold their superiority.
This expectation was to be shattered in 1880 when the newly formed Gladstone government appointed George Frederick Samuel Robinson, Earl de Grey and Marquess of Ripon, as Viceroy. Even Queen Victoria was ‘greatly astounded’ to hear of the appointment of this notably progressive figure, who also happened to be a convert to Catholicism (a black mark in her eyes). She wrote to warn the Prime Minister that she ‘thought it a very doubtful appointment, as, though a very good man, he was weak’. It did not take Ripon long to vindicate her doubts. No sooner had he arrived in Calcutta than he began to meddle in matters old India hands like Hugh Maxwell took very seriously indeed.
Between 1872 and 1883 there was a crucial difference between the powers of British district magistrates and session judges in the Indian countryside – the
Mofussil
– and their native-born counterparts.
54
Although both were members of the covenanted civil service, the Indians were not entitled to conduct trials of white defendants in criminal cases. In the eyes of the new Viceroy, this was an indefensible anomaly; so he requested a bill to do away with it. The task fell to the Law Member of his Council, Courtenay Peregrine Ilbert. As earnest a Liberal as his chief, Ilbert was in many ways the antithesis of Hugh Maxwell. Maxwell’s family had been born and bred in India for generations; Ilbert had only just arrived there, a rather timid little lawyer who had seen little of the world beyond his rooms in Balliol and his chambers in Chancery. Nevertheless, he and Ripon had no hesitation in putting principle before experience. Under the legislation Ilbert drafted, suitably qualified Indians would be allowed to try defendants regardless of the colour of their skin. Justice would henceforth be colour-blind, like the blindfolded statue representing her in the gardens of the Calcutta High Court.
In practice, the change affected the position of no more than twenty Indian magistrates. To the Anglo-Indian community, however, what Ilbert proposed was an insupportable assault on their privileged status. Indeed, the reaction to the Ilbert Bill was so violent that some called it a ‘White Mutiny’. On 28 February 1883, within just a few weeks of the Bill’s publication, and after a preliminary bombardment of irate letters to the press, a crowd of several thousand gathered inside Calcutta’s imposing neo-classical Town Hall to hear a series of inflammatory speeches directed against the educated Indian civil servant, the despised ‘Bengali Babu’. The charge was led by the imposing J.J.J. ‘King’ Keswick, a senior partner in the tea and trading firm Jardine Skinner & Co. ‘Do you think’, Keswick asked his audience, ‘that native judges will, by three or four years’ residence in England, become so Europeanized in nature and character, that they will be able to judge as well in false charges against Europeans as if they themselves were bred and born? Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?’ Educating the Indians had done no good:
The education which the Government has given them ... they use chiefly to taunt it in a discontented spirit ... And these men ... now cry out for power to sit in judgment on, and condemn the lion-hearted race whose bravery and whose blood have made their country what it is, and raised them to what they are[!]
 
To Keswick, training Indians to be judges was simply pointless, since an Indian was incapable by both birth and upbringing of judging a European. ‘Under these circumstances’, he concluded to rousing cheers, ‘is it any wonder that we should protest – if we should say that these men are not fit to rule over us, that they cannot judge us, that we will not be judged by them?’ It was a peroration only outdone in its crudeness by the evening’s second main speaker, James Branson:
Truly and verily the jackass kicketh at the lion. (Thunders of applause.) Show him as you value your liberties; show him that the lion is not dead; he sleepeth, and in God’s name, let him dread the awakening. (Cheers, and shouts from all sides.)
 
Across the street, in Government House, Ripon was taken aback by this audibly hostile reaction to the Ilbert Bill. ‘I quite admit’, he confessed to the Colonial Secretary Lord Kimberley, ‘that I had no idea that any large number of Englishmen in India were animated by such sentiments’.
I deserve such blame as may be attached to me for not having found out in a residence of 2½ years in India the true feeling of the average Anglo-Indian toward the natives among whom he lives. I know them now, and the knowledge gives me a feeling akin to despair as to the future of this country.
 
Ripon nevertheless resolved to press on, in the belief ‘that as we have taken the question up, we had better go through with it, and get it settled out of the way of our successors’. As far as he could see, the question was clear-cut: was India to be ruled ‘for the benefit of the Indian people of all races, classes, and creeds’, or ‘in the sole interest of a small body of Europeans’?
Is it England’s duty to try to elevate the Indian people, to raise them socially, to train them politically, to promote their progress in material prosperity, in education, and in morality; or is it to be the be-all and the end-all of her rule to maintain a precarious power over what Mr Branson calls ‘a subject race with a profound hatred of their subjugators’?
 
Ripon was right, of course. The opposition of the Calcutta business community was based not just on visceral racial prejudice but on narrow self-interest: put simply, men like Keswick and Branson were used to having the law their own way in the Mofussil, where their firms’ jute, silk, indigo and tea plantations were located. But now that their opposition to the Ilbert Bill was out in the open, the Viceroy needed to think about practicalities as well as principles. Unfortunately, he let precedent dictate his tactics. Having dropped his bombshell on the white community, Ripon left Calcutta almost immediately. Summer was approaching, after all, and nothing could alter the Viceroy’s sacrosanct routine. It was time for him to take the annual trip to Simla, so off to Simla he went. This retreat to the hills was never an option to the businessmen in the Calcutta counting houses; business went on as usual down in the plains, whatever the temperature. The spectacle of Ripon swanning off to Simla was not calculated to mollify the likes of ‘King’ Keswick.
Also heading for the hills – for Chapslee, his elegant Simla residence – was the author of the controversial bill himself. Ilbert’s strategy was to sit out the summer and hope the fuss would go away. ‘As to the kind and amount of feeling which the Bill was likely to excite’, he wrote anxiously to his Oxford mentor Benjamin Jowett, ‘I had no knowledge of my own ... and ... certainly did not anticipate such a storm’. ‘I am intensely sorry’, he told another friend, ‘that the measure should have disclosed and intensified racial animosities’. From the Board of Trade, his friend Sir Thomas Farrer wrote to reassure Ilbert that Liberal opinion was on his side:
The struggle between lust of dominion, pride of race [and] mercantile avarice ... on the one hand and true self-regard, humanity, justice to inferiors, sympathy (Sermon on the Mountism – what an abominable word) on the other, goes on like the fight between the angel and the devil ... for the soul of man.
 
As that suggests, the Ilbert Bill was polarizing opinion not just in India but in England as well. To Liberals like Farrer, this was a moral struggle. The enlightened devotees of the Sermon on the Mount were, however, less numerous in Calcutta than they were in Clapham. Indeed, the deepening crisis over the Ilbert Bill was about to illustrate perfectly the perils of ruling a continent
from
a Mount.
Across the country, in the searing heat of the Indian summer, the agitation spread. Committees were formed and money was raised as non-official Anglo-India mobilized. Kipling weighed in, accusing Ripon of ‘sketch[ing] a swart utopia, nourishing the Babu’s pride / On the fairy-tales of justice – with a leaning to his side’. This, he complained, was the Viceroy’s policy: ‘turmoil and babble and ceaseless strife’. From Cawnpore, Hugh Maxwell too joined in the chorus of dissent. It had been, he declared dourly, ‘unwise’ of the government ‘to provoke so much race animosity’. Why could Ripon and Ilbert not see ‘how unfit the native mind is to appreciate and sympathize with European ideas of administering the government of a country and people’?
This ‘White Mutiny’ was intimately connected with memories of the original Indian Mutiny, just twenty-five years before. Then every white woman in Cawnpore had been killed – and, as we have seen, a legend soon sprang up of rape as well as murder, as if every Indian man only awaited the opportunity to ravish the nearest memsahib. In a strangely similar vein, a recurrent theme of the anti-Ilbert campaign was the threat posed by Indian magistrates to English women. In the words of an anonymous letter to the
Englishman
: ‘One’s wife may be walked off for an imaginary offence and ... what would more please our fellow subjects – than to bully and disgrace a wretched European woman? ... The higher her husband’s station and the greater respectability, the greater the delight of her torturer’. Writing in the same vein to the
Madras Mail
, a correspondent demanded to know: ‘Are our wives to be torn from our homes on false pretenses [to] be tried by men who do not respect women, and do not understand us, and in many cases hate us? ... Fancy, I ask you Britishers, her being taken before a half-clad native, to be tried and perhaps convicted ...’ Such language laid bare one of the odder complexes of the Victorian Empire: its sexual insecurity. It is no coincidence that the plots of the Raj’s best-known novels – Forster’s
A Passage to India
and Scott’s
The Jewel in the Crown
– begin with an alleged sexual assault by an Indian man against an English woman, followed by a trial presided over by an Indian judge. Such cases did in fact occur. As the anti-Ilbert campaign reached its climax, an Englishwoman named Hume accused her sweeper of raping her and, though the allegation turned out later to be false (they had in fact been lovers), in the febrile atmosphere of the time it seemed somehow to prove the point.
The question is why the threat of Indian judges trying Englishwomen was so often linked to the danger of sexual contact between Indian men and British women. After all, there was no shortage of such contact in the other direction, between British men and Indian women: until 1888 there had even been legalized brothels for British soldiers. Yet somehow the Ilbert Bill seemed to threaten to break down the walls not just of the cantonment but of the bungalow bedroom too. Ninety thousand white people who claimed to rule 350 million brown ones saw equality before the law as the high road to inter-racial rape.
55
When Ripon finally returned to Calcutta from Simla in December, it was to a mixed – or rather a racially divided – reception. As he crossed the bridge from the railway station the streets were packed with applauding Indians, cheering their ‘friend and saviour’. But at Government House he was hissed, booed and jeered by a crowd of his own countrymen, one of whom was moved to call him a ‘damned old bugger’. At public dinners, only officials were prepared to drink the Viceroy’s health. There were even rumours of a plot to kidnap him and pack him off back to England. An effigy of the hapless Ilbert was publicly burned.
BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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