Gandhi & Churchill (7 page)

In February 1883 mass meetings were held in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras attacking the bill, Ripon, and the native Indians, the “Bengalee Baboos,” who seemed intent on promoting equality with whites. “It has always been an understood thing,” said a distinguished member of the Madras Chamber of Commerce, “that a European—a white man—wherever he went, represented the governing race,” and that any examination of his conduct would be only by a person “of the same class,” namely another European. Indians lacked the character to act as judges in cases involving whites. Even the best-educated Indians, declared Judge C. D. Field of the Calcutta High Court, “do not make a habit of speaking the truth.”
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Thousands turned out for the meeting in Calcutta’s town hall, where speakers conjured up images of scheming dark-skinned Indians deciding the fates of helpless white Britons—even of their wives and daughters. “We cannot govern the natives, putting them side by side with ourselves,” said one speaker. “We must either rule or we pander.” The meeting ended with a rousing chorus of “God Save the Queen,” while the
Bombay Gazette
reported that “the abuse of the natives set the audience beside itself with delight.”
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The race rage shocked Ripon. “I had no idea that any large number of Englishmen in India were animated by such sentiments,” he wrote. “The knowledge gives me a feeling akin to despair as to the future of this country.” The backlash extended to London, where a committee to represent the feelings of Indian Britons was formed and petitions sent to Parliament. The London
Times
itself took up their cause.

Meanwhile, in India, Britons wrote indignant letters to leading British newspapers accusing Ripon and Ilbert of betraying the interests of their race and even British womanhood. “Have we not enough to endure in India, isolated as we often are?” wrote one lady to the
Englishman
. “Has Lord Ripon no feeling of regard for his country women that he should seek to expose hundreds of them to an anxiety so real?”
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Ilbert was burned in effigy. Some proposed rebellion rather than allow their wives “to be torn from our homes…by half clad natives”: there was even a plot to kidnap the viceroy himself.

Shaken by the opposition both at home and in India, Ripon had to back down. He and Ilbert presented a watered-down version of the bill, which passed but satisfied no one. The Indian Briton community was now on guard, determined that they would never,
ever
relinquish their power and privilege—even as Indians themselves watched, listened, and learned.

It had been India’s worst crisis since 1857, and Conservatives were quick to blame the White Mutiny on Ripon and his liberal “meddling.” When the Tories came back into power in June 1885, it would be left to their new secretary of state for India, Lord Randolph Churchill, to pick up the pieces.

Chapter Two

LORD RANDOLPH TAKES CHARGE

Without India, England would cease to be a nation.

RANDOLPH CHURCHILL, MAY
1885

R
ANDOLPH
C
HURCHILL LEFT
L
ONDON IN
D
ECEMBER
1884, reached Bombay on New Year’s Eve, and did not return home until April 1885. It was no casual sightseeing expedition. His tour of India was part of his campaign to become the Conservatives’ leading expert on Indian politics, which he believed would ultimately propel him to Number 10 Downing Street and the premiership itself. His letters describing the tour were carefully preserved and later published by his son Winston.
¹
They provide a revealing look at the Raj in its heyday. They also form the background not only for Randolph’s tenure as secretary of state for India but for the issues that would pit Randolph’s son against Mohandas Gandhi.

On December 12 Randolph’s ship SS
Rohilla
passed through the Suez Canal. The canal was the vital gateway to India and shaved more than two months off the old voyage around the Cape of Good Hope. Although still relatively new, the canal had already made Egypt almost as crucial to the fate of the British Empire as India itself. Randolph found “very much what I expected,” he wrote to Jennie, “a dirty ditch with nothing remarkable except the multitudes of flamingos, pelicans, and wild fowl in the lakes we passed.”
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But it also enabled the
Rohilla
to reach Bombay by New Year’s Eve.

Once ruled by the Portuguese, Bombay was India’s Venice, a cosmopolitan commercial center where merchants from three continents and all races walked the streets and bazaars. Randolph found it enchantingly exotic. He told Jennie, “The complete novelty and originality of everything is remarkable, and one is never tired of staring and wondering.”
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The city was also residence of the governor-general of the Bombay Presidency and a thriving center for India’s Western-educated elite, who were still smarting from the racial backlash of the White Mutiny. They now hoped the progenitor of Tory Democracy might bring some of it their way. Many were prepared to greet Randolph Churchill as Lord Ripon reborn, and he did nothing to discourage them. B. M. Malabari, the editor of the
Indian Spectator,
India’s biggest native newspaper, arranged for him to meet with Indian intellectuals who “set forth with great ability their various grievances.” Churchill urged them to “instruct the British public…with their wants and wishes” regarding their desire to participate in some way in governing their country. Later he wrote enthusiastically to his friend T. H. S. Escott, “I feel little doubt that their moderation and caution is equal to their intelligence and their knowledge.” He added, “I never cease to rejoice that I was able to come out here.”
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Malabari was a Parsi. In Bombay Lord Randolph met with other leading members of the city’s most important religious minority and visited their famous Towers of Silence. Emigrants from Persia since the eighth century, the Parsis were Zoroastrians and still set out their dead to be consumed by vultures in the old manner. Randolph walked through the towers’ elaborate gardens, while clouds of great blackbirds swooped overhead. On the large flat towers lay the exposed bodies of men, women, and children, where the bones would be picked clean and then bleached by the sun and wind, and finally swept into the pit at the center of each tower.

The Parsis were more than just another exotic Indian religious group. The most literate of all Indians (with 40 percent able to read and write in 1872, compared to 15 percent of Hindus and even fewer Muslims), Parsi businessmen were transforming India. They had been shipbuilders in the eighteenth century and were becoming India’s cotton mill engineers and owners, iron and steel manufacturers, and mine owners. Whereas the Bombay Presidency had had only thirteen cotton mills in 1865, it had fifty-one in 1877, including three in Cawnpore. The largest of all was J. N. Tata’s Empress Mills in Nagpur, which had machinery equal to any factory in Liverpool or Manchester.
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Thanks to Parsis like Tata, a new India was being born in the midst of the old, one that Britons and Indians alike, including Mohandas Gandhi, would have to reckon with.

From Bombay Randolph traveled northeast to Gwalior, where fierce Maratha chieftains had once ruled from their white sandstone fortress which had been the last stronghold of the Mutiny, and then continued on to another former Maratha state, Indore. Both belonged to two of India’s nearly six hundred independent princes, whose states still covered more than a third of India. Englishmen liked to believe the Indian princes were spoiled despots, even slightly mad, and incapable of rule without British supervision. It was true that none could make treaties on their own or defend themselves without British help; many were eccentric, a few were spendthrifts, and some were drunkards. The raja of Kapurthala once told Viceroy Curzon he was only really happy drinking champagne in Paris.
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But Randolph found Indore’s maharaja, Holkar Tukoji Rao, and his son to be “most gracious and intelligent.” After dinner there were “fireworks, Hindoo drama, Nautch,
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conjurors etc.” In the morning the holkar arranged for a hunting party to chase black buck with a cheetah, but the cheetah “was sulky” and refused to hunt. So Randolph and his friend Colonel Thomas set out into the bush with rifles and bagged five deer between them.
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All this was of intense interest to Randolph’s ten-year-old son Winston. Winston Churchill had grown up the forgotten child, shuttled from one boarding school to another and scarcely noticed by his parents. His mother’s obsessions were flirting with fashionable young men and fox hunting: Winston’s most vivid early image of her would be her riding breeches, “fitting like a skin and beautifully spotted with mud.”
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Winston was now at school in Brighton, neglected and lonely, and his letters had a sad, plaintive air. “Do you think Papa will stay long in India?” he wrote to his mother on January 28. “Have you heard from him lately?”

On February 13 Winston wrote a letter to Randolph. “I hope you are enjoying yourself in India,” it read. “I hear you have been out shooting…and shot some animals. When are you coming home again? I hope it will not be long!” He then asked if Randolph was planning to go on a tiger hunt, adding: “Are the Indians funny?” And finally: “I am longing to see you so much.”
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In fact, Randolph had gone on a tiger hunt two weeks earlier in Dudna, in the foothills of the Himalayas, which he described in a letter not to his son but to his mother. It described how they had spent “all day careering around on elephants after game” and how he found elephants to be “the best means of conveyance I know…Nothing stops them; if tree [is] in the way they pull it down; never crash or fall and don’t run away.” He also described shooting his tiger, a nine-and-a-half-foot specimen: “Heavens! How he growled and what a rage he was in!” The tiger skin “will, I think, look very well in Grosvenor Square,” his mother’s London house where he and Jennie were now living. Tiger hunting, Randolph pronounced, was “the very acme of sport.”
¹⁰

By now Randolph had a guide and companion in Sir Lepel Griffin, government agent for Central India and the embodiment of the hard line since the White Mutiny. Indian Britons were seething about Randolph’s friendly visit with native politicians in Bombay. Griffin saw his chance to bring him around. Together they went to Agra, to see the Taj Mahal by moonlight, “an unequaled sight,” and to Lucknow on the twenty-first. Both cities had been besieged during the Mutiny. Both flanked Cawnpore, and the well at Bibighar with its memorial and marble angel, and the red brick Cawnpore Memorial Church. Everything here was a reminder of what hard-liners said would happen if the British grip on India slipped.

Then on February 7 Randolph and Griffin reached Calcutta, the residence of Viceroy Lord Dufferin and the capital of the Raj. There a single white man and his executive council directed the lives of a quarter billion people, with powers far surpassing those of any European head of state. The viceroy built and ran India’s railways; he controlled the sale of opium and salt; he supervised the manufacture of all the Indian Army’s supplies and ammunition and, together with its commander in chief, decided where and when it would fight. The Raj’s vast numbers of public works projects made him the largest employer in India. Compared to the prime minister in laissez-faire Britain, he supervised a “mixed economy” on a massive scale.

The viceroy surrounded himself with the pomp and splendor befitting his imperial powers, with echoes of Mughal ceremonial. When he traveled about the capital in his horse-drawn barouche, he was accompanied by eighteen postillions and guards. Each Indian servant was dressed in scarlet livery with the viceroy’s monogram set out in gold. When he arrived at any dinner with more than twenty-four guests, the band was required to play “God Save the Queen,” and all ladies were required to curtsy as he entered the room. At some ceremonies ladies found themselves having to curtsy eighteen separate times.

Randolph met Lord Dufferin at his country house in Barrackpore, north of the city. He found the viceroy “very kind and easy-going.” Dufferin’s children had just enjoyed a birthday party, complete with band, magician, and elephant rides.
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Elephants notwithstanding, life in Barrackpore, and in the viceroy’s summer residence in Simla (where Dufferin was building a magnificent Viceregal Lodge complete with ballroom for eight hundred people), looked to visitors far more like the Home Counties than India. Croquet on the lawn, tea in the afternoon, Gothic churches standing beside houses built in the Tudor timbered style: it must have seemed to Randolph like England in a dream.

But in Calcutta itself Randolph could not escape the darker side of British rule. Local police were rounding up the city’s water carriers to send them to the Sudan, where the British Army was organizing an expedition to relieve Gordon at Khartoum. For these poor low-caste Hindus, it meant separation from their families and almost certain death in the desert. Randolph told his mother that one poor wretch saw him standing nearby and threw himself at the English lord’s feet, begging not to be sent, until the police dragged him screaming away.

The whole incident shocked Lord Randolph and made him “very angry.” He confessed that it “goes far to explain why we make no progress in popularity among the people. The arrogance or rather self-complacency of Indian officials is beyond all belief.” He was “shattered” by the “great gulf between the government and the natives,” he said: “the government know less than nothing of the native mind,” and “refuse to allow for a moment that anyone outside their circle can know anything.” At the same time he praised the Bengali intellectuals he met as “equal to any European in information, extent of reading, and public spirit.” Surely these were men with whom the British could form some sort of partnership for India’s future.
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