Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (35 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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As weak as his Queen had predicted he would be – and not helped by an ill-timed visit by her son, the Duke of Connaught, who dismissed Ripon as ‘the greatest fool in Asia’ – the Viceroy gave way. The Ilbert Bill was emasculated, giving white defendants in any criminal case that might be heard by an Indian magistrate the right to ask for a jury, not fewer than half of whose members must be English or American. That may sound as arcane a compromise as could be imagined. Yet it was a climb-down, and one that was pregnant with peril for the future of the Raj. To educated Indian magistrates and their friends, the contempt with which they were regarded by the majority of Anglo-Indians was now out in the open. As one of Ilbert’s colleagues observed uneasily, the tone of the press campaign against the bill had been recklessly intemperate. The letters had ‘teemed with wild invective and insulting domineering attacks against the Native, on whom every railway guard or indigo planter’s foreman pretends to trample, as a master upon serfs, with impunity’. The ‘political veil which the Government has always thrown over the delicate relations between the two races’ had been ‘rudely rent in twain’ by a ‘mob shaking their fists in the face of the whole Native population’. And now, just as he feared, the really important consequence of the Ilbert Bill became apparent: not the ‘White Mutiny’, but the reaction that this provoked among Indians. Quite unintentionally, Ripon had brought into being a genuine Indian national consciousness. As the
Indian Mirror
put it:
For the first time in modern history, Hindus, Mohammedans, Sikhs, Rajputs, Bengalis, Madrasis, Bombayites, Punjabis, and Purbiahs have united to join a constitutional combination. Whole races and classes, who never before took any interest in the affairs of their country, are taking it now with a zeal and an earnestness which more than atone for their former apathy.
 
Just two years after the White Mutiny, the first meeting of the Indian National Congress was held. Though initially intended by its British founder to channel and thereby defuse Indian disaffection, Congress would quickly become the crucible of modern Indian nationalism.
56
From the outset, it was attended by stalwarts of the educated class who served the British Raj, men like Janakinath Bose and an Allahabad lawyer named Motilal Nehru.
The latter’s son Jawaharlal would be the first Prime Minister of an independent India. Bose’s son Subhas Chandra would lead an army against the British in the Second World War. It is not too much to see the White Mutiny as the fount and origin of their families’ alienation from British rule.
India was the strategic core of the British Empire. If the British alienated the Anglicized elite that foundation would begin to crumble. But could another section of Indian society be found to prop up the British Raj? Somewhat improbably, the alternative to Asian apartheid was sought by some in the English class system.
Tory-entalism
 
For many British officials in India, toiling for years on end in a far-flung land, the thought of ‘home’ – not simulated in Simla, but the real thing, to which a man might one day retire – provided consolation in the heat of the plains. As the Victorian era drew to a close, however, the expatriates’ memories of home became increasingly at odds with the reality. Theirs was a nostalgic, romantic vision of an unchanging rural England, of squires and parsons, thatched cottages and forelock-tugging villagers. It was an essentially Tory vision of a traditional, hierarchical society, ruled by landed aristocrats in a spirit of benign paternalism. The fact that Britain was now an industrial giant – where as early as 1870 most people lived in towns with more than 10,000 inhabitants – was somehow forgotten.
A similar process happened in the other direction, however, as people in Britain imagined India. ‘What should they know of England, who only England know?’ Kipling once asked, a reproach to his countrymen who ruled a global Empire without setting foot outside the British Isles. He might have put the question to Queen Victoria herself. She was delighted when Parliament bestowed on her the title of Empress of India (at her own suggestion) in 1877. But she never actually went near the place. What Victoria preferred was for India to come to her. By the 1880s her favourite servant was an Indian named Abdul Karim, also known as the ‘Munshi’, or teacher. He came with her to Osborne in 1887, the personification of the India the Queen liked to imagine: courteous, deferential, obedient, faithful. Not long after that, the Queen-Empress added a new wing to Osborne House, the centrepiece of which was the spectacular Durbar Room. The work was overseen by Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard’s father, and was clearly inspired by the ornately carved interiors of Mughal palaces: indeed, parts of it look like a white version of Delhi’s Red Fort. The Durbar Room offers another distinctly backward-looking vision, giving no hint of the new India of railways, coalmines and cotton mills the British were bringing into being. In this, it was typical of the way the British liked to see India in the 1890s. It was a fantasy.
Then, in 1898, the Marquess of Salisbury’s Conservative government appointed a Viceroy whose whole career in India was an attempt to turn that fantasy into a reality.
To many of his contemporaries, George Nathaniel Curzon was a most insufferable man. Born into an aristocratic Derbyshire family who liked to trace their line back to the Norman Conquest, he had risen like an arrow through Eton, Oxford, the House of Commons and the India Office. In truth, there was nothing effortless about his famous superiority.
57
Entrusted as a child to a deranged governess, he was periodically forced to parade through the village wearing a large conical cap bearing the words ‘liar’, ‘sneak’ and ‘coward’. (‘I suppose’, he later mused, ‘no children well-born and well-placed ever cried so much or so justly’.) At school Curzon was ‘bent on being first in what I undertook and ... I meant to do it in my way and not theirs’. At Oxford – ‘that brief interval which must intervene between Eton and the Cabinet’, as someone joked – he was no less driven. Denied a First by the examiners, he determined to ‘show them they had made a mistake’, proceeding to win the Lothian Prize, the Arnold Prize and a Fellowship of All Souls in swift succession. Margot Asquith could not help being impressed by his ‘enamelled self-assurance’. Others were less gentle in their mockery. A cartoon of him addressing Parliament at the Dispatch Box was entitled ‘A Divinity addressing Black Beetles’.
When Curzon was appointed Viceroy he was not yet forty. It was a job for which he felt himself predestined. After all, was not the Viceroy’s magnificent Calcutta residence an exact replica of his family’s country seat at Kedleston? The Viceroyalty, he openly avowed, was ‘the dream of my childhood, the fulfilled ambition of my manhood, and my highest conception of duty to the State’. In particular, Curzon felt himself called to restore British rule in India, which Liberals like Ripon had been undermining. The Liberals believed all men should have equal rights, regardless of skin colour; the Anglo-Indians, as we have seen, preferred a kind of apartheid, so that a tiny white minority could lord it over the mass of ‘blacks’. But to a Tory aristocrat like Curzon, Indian society could never be as simple as these two opposing visions implied. Raised to see himself as very close to the pinnacle of a pyramid of status extending downwards from the monarch, Curzon thirsted above all after hierarchy. He and those like him sought to replicate in the Empire what they admired about Britain’s feudal past. An earlier generation of British rulers in India had immersed themselves in Indian culture to become true Orientalists. Curzon was what you might call a ‘Tory-entalist’.
The outlines of a feudal India were not far to seek. The so-called ‘princely states’ accounted for about a third of the area of India. There, traditional Maharajas remained nominally in charge, though always under the beady eye of a British Private Secretary (a role performed in other Oriental Empires under the title of ‘Grand Vizier’). Even in the areas directly ruled by the British, most rural districts were dominated by aristocratic Indian landowners. In Curzon’s eyes, it was these people who were the natural leaders of India. As he himself put it in a speech to Calcutta University’s Convocation in 1905:
I have always been a devoted believer in the continued existence of the native states in India, and an ardent well-wisher of the native princes. But I believe in them not as relics, but as rulers, not as puppets but as living factors in the administration. I want them to share the responsibilities as well as the glories of British rule.
 
The kind of people Curzon had in mind were men like the Maharaja of Mysore, who acquired a new Private Secretary in 1902 in the person of Evan Machonochie. The Maharaja was, in theory at least, the heir to the throne of Tipu Sultan, once the most dangerous of the East India Company’s foes. Those days, however, had long gone. This Maharaja had been educated by a senior ICS man, Sir Stuart Fraser; and it was thought, as Machonochie recalled, ‘that a private secretary drawn from the same service and equipped with the requisite experience would be able to relieve His Highness of drudgery, show him something of our methods of disposing of work and, while suppressing his own personality, exercise some influence in the direction desired’. Machonochie’s account of his seven years at the Mysore court neatly exemplifies the puppet-like role such princes were expected to play:
His Highness ... on young shoulders carried a head of extraordinary maturity, which was, however, no bar to a boyish and wholehearted enjoyment of manly sports ... He [also] had the taste and knowledge to appreciate western music as well as his own ...
We [meanwhile] got to work, cleared out the slums, straightened and widened the roads, put in a surface drainage system leading into the main sewers that discharged into septic tanks, provided new quarters for the displaced population, and tidied up generally.
 
The playboy Maharaja – wealthy, Westernized and weakened to the point of political impotence – was to become a familiar figure throughout India.
In return for running their kingdoms for them and granting them a generous allowance, the British expected only one thing: supine loyalty. Generally they got it. When Curzon paid a viceregal visit to Nashipur he was presented with a specially composed poem to mark the occasion:
Welcome to Thee, Oh Viceroy, Mighty Ruler of India,
Lo! Thousand eyes are eagerly waiting Thee to behold!
Over flowed are our hearts with joy transcendent,
Sanctified are we and our desires fulfilled;
And Nashipur is hallowed with the touch of Thy Feet.
 
 
Glorious and mighty is England’s rule in India.
Blessed are the people that have a Ruler so benevolent.
Constant has been Thy aim to promote Thy subjects’ welfare;
Loving and protecting them like a kind hearted father;
Oh! Where shall we get a Noble Ruler like Thee!
Where indeed?
In fact, Curzon’s preoccupation with hierarchy was nothing new. As Viceroy, Disraeli’s fellow romantic Lord Lytton had been even more extravagant in his hopes of the Indian ‘feudal nobility’, on the principle that ‘the further East you go, the greater becomes the importance of a bit of bunting’. Lytton had even tried to create a new section of the Indian Civil Service specifically earmarked for the sons of this Oriental aristocracy. The aim, as one Punjab official said in 1860, was to ‘attach to the state by timely concessions ... a body scattered throughout the country considerable by its property and rank’. Nor was Tory-entalism confined to India. In Tanganyika Sir Donald Cameron strove to reinforce the links from ‘the peasant ... up to his Headman, the Headman to the Sub-Chief, the Sub-Chief to the Chief, and the Chief to the District Officer’. In West Africa Lord Kimberley thought it better to ‘have nothing to do with the “educated natives” as a body. I would treat with the hereditary chiefs only’. Lady Hamilton, the wife of the Governor of Fiji, even regarded the Fijian chiefs as her social equals (unlike her children’s English nanny). ‘All Orientals think extra highly of a Lord’, insisted George Lloyd, before taking up his duties as the newly ennobled High Commissioner in Egypt. The whole purpose of the Empire, argued Frederick Lugard, the architect of Britain’s West African empire, was ‘to maintain traditional rulerships as a fortress of societal security in a changing world ... The really important category was status’. Lugard invented an entire theory of ‘indirect rule’ – the antithesis of the direct rule that had been imposed on the Jamaican planters in 1865 – according to which British rule could be maintained at minimal cost by delegating all local power to existing elites, retaining only the essentials of central authority (in particular the purse strings) in British hands.

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