Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (36 page)
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Authors: Niall Ferguson
BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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Complementary to the restoration, preservation or (where necessary) invention of traditional hierarchies was the elaboration of the Empire’s own administrative hierarchy. Protocol in India was strictly governed by the ‘warrant of precedence’, which in 1881 consisted of no fewer than seventy-seven separate ranks. Throughout the Empire, officials thirsted after membership of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George, whether as CMG (‘Call Me God’), KCMG (‘Kindly Call Me God’) and, reserved for the very top tier of governors, GCMG (‘God Calls Me God’). There was, declared Lord Curzon, ‘an insatiable appetite [among] the British-speaking community all the world over for titles and precedence’.
There was also, he was sure, an appetite for grand architecture. Under Curzon, the Taj Mahal and Fatehpur Sikri were restored and the Victoria Memorial was built in Calcutta. Significantly, the place in India Curzon most disliked was the place the Victorians themselves had built from scratch: Simla. It was, he complained, ‘nothing more than a middle class suburb on a hilltop’, where he had to lunch with ‘a set of youths interested only in polo and dancing’. The Viceroy’s Lodge struck the Curzons as odiously vulgar. (‘I keep trying not to be disappointed’, confessed Lady Curzon. ‘A Minneapolis millionaire would revel in it’.) The company at dinner made them feel that they were dining ‘every day in the housekeeper’s room with the butler and the lady’s maid’. It got so bad that they took to camping in a field near the Simla golf course. The sad truth was that the British in India were just too unbearably common.
The zenith of Curzon’s Tory-entalism was the Delhi Durbar of 1903, a spectacular display of pomp and ceremony which he personally staged to mark the accession of Edward VII. The Durbar – or ‘Curzonation’, as it was dubbed – was the perfect expression of the Viceroy’s pseudo-feudal view of India. Its highlight was a richly symbolic elephant procession in which the Indian princes played a prominent role. It was, as one observer said,
a magnificent sight, and all description must fail to give an adequate idea of its character, its brilliancy of colour and its ever-changing features, the variety of howdahs and trappings and the gorgeousness of the dress adorning the persons of the Chiefs who followed in the wake of the Viceroy ... A murmur of admiration, breaking into short-lived cheers, rose from the crowd.
There they all were, from the Begum of Bhopal to the Maharaja of Kapurtala, swaying atop their elephants behind the Grand Panjandrum himself. One journalist covering the Durbar ‘carried away the impression of blackbearded Kings who swayed to and fro with each movement of their gigantic steeds ... The sight was not credible of our nineteenth century [
sic
]’. Amid this extravaganza, there came a message for the absent King-Emperor, which so neatly expressed the Viceroy’s own view that it can only have been penned by Curzon:
sic
]’. Amid this extravaganza, there came a message for the absent King-Emperor, which so neatly expressed the Viceroy’s own view that it can only have been penned by Curzon:
His Empire is strong ... because it regards the liberties and respects the dignities and rights of all his feudatories and subjects. The keynote of the British policy in India has been to conserve all the best features in the fabric of native society. By that policy we have attained the wonderful measure of success: in it we recognise an assured instrument of further triumphs in the future.
There was, however, a fatal flaw in all this.
58
The Durbar was splendid theatre, no doubt; but it was a façade of power, not the real thing. After the Indian army, the true foundation of British power was not the Maharajas on their elephants but the elite of Anglicized lawyers and civil servants Macaulay had called into being. Yet these were the very people Curzon regarded as a threat. Indeed, he pointedly shunned the so-called ‘Bengali babus’. When asked why so few natives were promoted in the covenanted Civil Service under him, he replied dismissively: ‘The highly placed native is apt to be unequal to [the task], does not attract the respect of his subordinates, European or even Native, and is rather inclined to abdicate, or to run away’.
58
The Durbar was splendid theatre, no doubt; but it was a façade of power, not the real thing. After the Indian army, the true foundation of British power was not the Maharajas on their elephants but the elite of Anglicized lawyers and civil servants Macaulay had called into being. Yet these were the very people Curzon regarded as a threat. Indeed, he pointedly shunned the so-called ‘Bengali babus’. When asked why so few natives were promoted in the covenanted Civil Service under him, he replied dismissively: ‘The highly placed native is apt to be unequal to [the task], does not attract the respect of his subordinates, European or even Native, and is rather inclined to abdicate, or to run away’.
Just two years after the Durbar, Curzon launched a premeditated attack on the ‘babus’. He announced – ostensibly for the sake of administrative efficiency – that their homeland would be divided in two. As the capital of both Bengal and India, Calcutta was the power-base of the Indian National Congress, which had by now ceased to be (if it ever was) a mere safety-valve for native disgruntlement. Curzon knew full well that his plan for partition would incense the emergent nationalist movement. The capital was, as he himself put it, ‘the centre from which the Congress party is manipulated ... Any measure in consequence that would divide the Bengali-speaking population ... or that would weaken the influence of the lawyer class, who have the entire organization in their hands, is intensely and hotly resented by them’. So unpopular was the proposal that it unleashed the worst political violence against British rule since the Mutiny.
The nationalists began by organizing, for the first time, a boycott of British goods, invoking the ideal of
swadeshi
, Indian economic self-sufficiency. This was the strategy endorsed by moderates like the writer Rabindranath Tagore.
59
There were also widespread strikes and demonstrations. But some protesters went further. Throughout Bengal, there was a rash of violent attacks on British administrators, including several attempts on the life of the Governor of Bengal himself. At first the authorities assumed the violence was the work of poor, uneducated Indians. But on 30 April 1908, when two British women were killed by a bomb meant for the Mazafferpur District Judge, J. D. Kingsford, police raids uncovered the more disturbing truth: this was an altogether different threat from that posed by the mutinous sepoys of 1857. They had been simple soldiers, defending their traditional religious culture against British interference. This, by contrast, was modern terrorism: extreme nationalism plus nitroglycerine. And the ringleaders were anything but poor coolies. One of the terrorist organizations, known as the Anushilan Samiti, was led by Pramathanath Mitra P. Mitra, a Calcutta High Court barrister. When the Special Branch swooped on five eminently respectable Calcutta addresses, they found them stuffed with bomb-making equipment. Twenty-six young men – not the suspected coolies, but members of Bengal’s Brahmin elite – were arrested.
swadeshi
, Indian economic self-sufficiency. This was the strategy endorsed by moderates like the writer Rabindranath Tagore.
59
There were also widespread strikes and demonstrations. But some protesters went further. Throughout Bengal, there was a rash of violent attacks on British administrators, including several attempts on the life of the Governor of Bengal himself. At first the authorities assumed the violence was the work of poor, uneducated Indians. But on 30 April 1908, when two British women were killed by a bomb meant for the Mazafferpur District Judge, J. D. Kingsford, police raids uncovered the more disturbing truth: this was an altogether different threat from that posed by the mutinous sepoys of 1857. They had been simple soldiers, defending their traditional religious culture against British interference. This, by contrast, was modern terrorism: extreme nationalism plus nitroglycerine. And the ringleaders were anything but poor coolies. One of the terrorist organizations, known as the Anushilan Samiti, was led by Pramathanath Mitra P. Mitra, a Calcutta High Court barrister. When the Special Branch swooped on five eminently respectable Calcutta addresses, they found them stuffed with bomb-making equipment. Twenty-six young men – not the suspected coolies, but members of Bengal’s Brahmin elite – were arrested.
Those who subsequently stood trial at Alipore could hardly have had more respectable backgrounds. One of the defendants, Aurobindo Ghose, was in fact a former head boy at St Paul’s School in London and scholar at King’s College, Cambridge. He even turned out to be an exact contemporary of one of the magistrates who tried him; indeed, Ghose had beaten him at Greek in the ICS exam and had failed to secure an ICS place only because he missed the riding test. As one of the other British lawyers involved in the case noted, it was
a matter for regret that a man of Arabindo’s [
sic
] mental calibre should have been ejected from the Civil Service on the ground he could not, or would not, ride a horse ... Had room been found for him in the Educational Service for India I believe he would have gone far not merely in personal advancement but in welding more firmly the links which bind his countrymen to ours.
But it was too late for regrets now. The British had set out to create Indians in their own image. Now, by alienating this Anglicized elite, they had produced a Frankenstein’s monster. Aurobindo Ghose personified the nationalism that would soon manifest itself throughout the Empire precisely because he was the product of the ultimate English education.
Yet the Alipore case was revealingly different from the Morant Bay trials of just over forty years before. Instead of the summary justice meted out then, this trial lasted nearly seven months, and in the end Aurobindo Ghose was acquitted. Even the death sentence passed on the group’s ringleader – his brother Barendra Kumar Ghose – was later commuted, despite the fact that he admitted during the trial to having authorized the assassination of the chief prosecutor. The final humiliating climbdown came in 1911, when the decision to partition Bengal was itself revoked. That would have to wait – ironically, until Indian independence. This show of weakness was not calculated to put a stop to terrorism. It did not.
Meanwhile, however, the British had devised a better way of chastising Bengal’s unruly capital. They decided to move the seat of government to Delhi, the erstwhile capital of the Mughal emperors. Once, before the advent of the bothersome Babu, Calcutta had been the natural base for an Empire based on the profit motive. Delhi would be a headquarters altogether more suitable to the Tory-ental era; and New Delhi would be the supreme expression of that era’s ineffable snobbery.
It was Curzon’s misfortune that he did not survive in office long enough to see the great canvas city he had constructed for the Durbar turned into a real city of glowing pink stone. The architects of New Delhi, Herbert Baker and Edwin Lutyens, had no doubt that their objective was to build a symbol of British power that would match the achievements of the Mughals. This, they understood at once, was to be the ineradicable legacy of the Tory-ental Empire: as Lutyens himself confessed, simply being in India made him feel ‘very Tory and pre-Tory feudal’ (he even married Lord Lytton’s daughter). Baker at once recognized ‘the political standpoint in a political capital’; the aim, he thought, was to ‘give them Indian sentiment where it does not conflict with grand principles, as the Government should do’. What the two men created was and is an astounding achievement: the British Empire’s one architectural masterpiece. New Delhi is grandiose, certainly. The Viceroy’s Palace alone covered four and a half acres, and had to be staffed by 6,000 servants and 400 gardeners, fifty of whom were solely employed to chase birds away. But it is undeniably beautiful. It would take a very hard-hearted anti-imperialist not to be moved by the sight of the changing of the guard at what is now the President’s Palace, as the great towers and domes glow in the hazy rays of dawn. Nevertheless, the political message of New Delhi is clear; so clear that it does not have to be inferred from the symbolism of the architecture. For Baker and Lutyens crowned their creation with an inscription on the walls of the Secretariat that must be the most condescending in the entire history of the Empire:
LIBERTY DOES NOT DESCEND TO A PEOPLE.
A PEOPLE MUST RAISE THEMSELVES TO LIBERTY.
IT IS A BLESSING THAT MUST BE EARNED
BEFORE IT CAN BE ENJOYED.
Not Curzon’s words, to be sure – but in their patronizing tone, distinctly Curzonesque.
The supreme irony was that this architectural extravagance was paid for by none other than the Indian taxpayer. Clearly, before they earned their liberty the Indians would have to go on paying for the privilege of being ruled by the British.
Was it a privilege worth paying for? The British took it for granted that it was. But even Curzon himself once admitted that British rule ‘may be good for us; but it is neither equally, nor altogether, good for them’. Indian nationalists agreed wholeheartedly, complaining that the wealth of India was being drained into the pockets of foreigners. In fact, we now know that this drain – the colonial burden as measured by the trade surplus of the colony – amounted to little more than 1 per cent of Indian net domestic product a year between 1868 and 1930. That was a lot less than the Dutch ‘drained’ from their East Indies empire, which amounted to between 7 and 10 per cent of Indonesian net domestic product in the same period.
And on the other side of the balance sheet were the immense British investments in Indian infrastructure, irrigation and industry. By the 1880s the British had invested £270 million in India, not much less than one-fifth of their entire investment overseas. By 1914 the figure had reached £400 million. The British increased the area of irrigated land by a factor of eight, so that by the end of the Raj a quarter of all land was irrigated, compared with just 5 per cent of it under the Mughals. They created an Indian coal industry from scratch which by 1914 produced nearly 16 million tons a year. They increased the number of jute spindles by a factor of ten. There were also marked improvements in public health, which increased Indian average life expectancy by eleven years.
60
It was the British who introduced quinine as an anti-malarial prophylactic, carried out public programmes of vaccination against smallpox – often in the face of local resistance – and laboured to improve the urban water supplies that were so often the bearers of cholera and other diseases. And, although it is simply impossible to quantify, it is hard to believe that there were not some advantages in being governed by as incorruptible a bureaucracy as the Indian Civil Service. After independence, that idiosyncratic Anglophile Chaudhuri was sacked from All India Radio for dedicating his
Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
to ‘the memory of the British Empire in India ... because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British Empire’. That was willful overstatement. But it had a grain of truth, which was of course why it so outraged Chaudhuri’s nationalist critics.
60
It was the British who introduced quinine as an anti-malarial prophylactic, carried out public programmes of vaccination against smallpox – often in the face of local resistance – and laboured to improve the urban water supplies that were so often the bearers of cholera and other diseases. And, although it is simply impossible to quantify, it is hard to believe that there were not some advantages in being governed by as incorruptible a bureaucracy as the Indian Civil Service. After independence, that idiosyncratic Anglophile Chaudhuri was sacked from All India Radio for dedicating his
Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
to ‘the memory of the British Empire in India ... because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British Empire’. That was willful overstatement. But it had a grain of truth, which was of course why it so outraged Chaudhuri’s nationalist critics.
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