The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (38 page)

Attempts to enlist allies among magnates outside the immediate area of the outbreak made little headway since they were reluctant to declare themselves until they knew which way the war would go. This depended on the outcome of the sieges. These in turn consumed men who might have been better employed in guerrilla operations against the enemy’s extended and fragile lines of communication to Calcutta. These were left alone and the British were given a breathing space in which to improvise armies and transport them and their supplies to the front in Oude.

From the end of July British troops began to pour into India. The government had asked for 39,000 from Britain, but these were not expected until the end of the year. In the meantime there were reinforcements from Burma, Mauritius and the China Expeditionary Force, which was diverted to Calcutta. The nature of the revolt made it obvious that white soldiers would restore a white man’s raj, but there was invaluable assistance from Ghurkas and Sikhs, of whom there were 23,000 in arms by the end of the revolt.

Manpower shortages and innumerable transport hitches made life difficult for the commanders of field armies during the first counter-offensives in June, July and August. It was the hot season and when bullock carts, palanquins, river-boats and elephants were unavailable, men marched. Lieutenant George Barker of the 78th Highlanders, attached to General Sir Henry Havelock’s column between Allahad and Cawnpore, estimated that more men died from sunstroke than mutineers’ fire. Casualties from all causes, but mainly heat exhaustion and dysentery, were exceptionally high during the siege of Delhi, where in four weeks the 52nd Light Infantry were reduced from 600 to 242.

Only a superhuman will kept men in the field during these and later phases of the campaign. This was fuelled by a universal desire to take revenge on an inhuman foe who had murdered women and children. Worst of all was the mass murder of civilians in Cawnpore, after they had been promised safe conduct by Nana Sahib at the end of June. Prisoners and anyone suspected of sympathising with or assisting the rebels were executed randomly, and at Cawnpore all those implicated in the massacre were defiled or stripped of their caste before being hanged. In the eyes of their captors the rebels were less than wild beasts and many eyewitness accounts of operations used hunting metaphors to describe the fighting. A gunner officer approvingly recorded the actions of a colleague who, on the march near Bareilly, suspected some mutineers of taking refuge in a field of corn. ‘Forming his line precisely as he would have beaten a field of turnips for game, a scene commences which baffles all description: pea fowl, partridges, and Pandie [mutineers] rose together: the latter giving the best sport.’
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Through ruthlessness and iron stamina the British were getting the upper hand by early autumn. The turning point was the capture of Delhi on 19 September, a psychological blow which 30,000 or more rebels had anticipated when they deserted the city in the four weeks before the final assault. Further south, Havelock and General Sir James Outram cut their way through to Cawnpore and relieved Lucknow, but were trapped there by superior numbers of the mutineers. In October, the siege of Agra was raised by a column from Delhi and a month later the garrison and civilian population of Lucknow was evacuated. The war of containment was ending, and as the new year approached preparations were in hand for the campaign of pacification under the new commander-in-chief, General Sir Colin Campbell, a grizzled Glaswegian veteran who had first seen action as a fifteen-year-old ensign in Portugal in 1808.

1858 saw the crushing of almost all the remaining resistance. Campbell with 20,000 men advanced on Lucknow, which was retaken in March, and smaller-scale subsidiary operations pacified the outlying centres of the revolt, Rohilkhand, Gwalior and Jhansi, whose Amazonian rani was killed in a cavalry skirmish.

Participants in the war had no doubt as to why the raj had triumphed. One evening during the campaign in Oude, Garnet Wolseley, then a junior officer, had watched some Sikhs exercising with clubs and had been impressed by their physiques and dexterity. He turned to the strongest British soldier in his company and asked if he could match them. ‘No sir,’ was the reply. ‘But I’ll fight any three of those fellows.’ Remembering the episode over forty years later, Wolseley concluded, ‘It is that belief in the superior pluck and fighting qualities of our race that won us India and still enables us to hold it. Had our men no such confidence in themselves we should never have relieved Lucknow nor retaken Delhi.’
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And yet, as his anecdote suggests, there were plenty of Indians willing to stand by the raj.

The Indian Mutiny was a civil war. Thousands of Indians fought alongside the British, including traditionally militant Pathans from the North-West Frontier, who defied calls to fight for Islam against the infidels. Dost Muhammad, the Afghan amir and no friend of Britain, made no hostile move. Others who had suffered at the hands of the British also refused to commit themselves; Judge George Edmondson, a fugitive in June 1857, found one prince willing to assist him even though the government ‘had reduced his army and taken away his guns’.
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Like many other benevolent neutrals, this magnate recognised that the Mutiny was primarily a soldiers’ rebellion, which had temporarily got out of hand because the government lacked the forces to contain it. It was localised, negative in its objectives, destructive in nature and therefore limited in appeal.

The Mutiny pushed India into the forefront of British political life and there was much heart-searching as to what had gone wrong and why. The immediate result was the dissolution of the East India Company in 1858. Henceforward, a secretary of state and ultimately parliament were responsible for the government of India, with local law and policy-making in the hands of a viceroy and provincial governor-generals, assisted by councils composed of bureaucrats and a handful of Indian princes. Admission to a reconstituted Indian civil service was through an examination and was, theoretically, open to educated Indians.

In the year of the Mutiny twelve Indian doctors had graduated from the newly-founded medical school at Agra, a fact which would have more long-term significance for India’s future than the battles in the Oude. These doctors would join a steadily growing élite of educated Indians who had undergone instruction in English in government schools, colleges and universities. By the mid-1880s it was estimated that there were 8,000 Indians with degrees and a further half a million who had graduated from secondary schools. All had been taught in English and had been exposed to British political ideas.

The experience of one Western-trained Indian, Romesh Chunder Dutt, is instructive, not only about the type of education available to Indians but its effect on their thinking about themselves and their country. Dutt was born in Calcutta in 1848, the son of a middle-ranking administrator, whose family had become westernised through several generations of service to the Company. Dutt attended school until he was sixteen, developing a fondness for English literature, in particular the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott. He proceeded to University College, Calcutta, then highly popular with the sons of priests, government clerks, merchants and zamindars, and set his sights on entry to the Indian civil service. To this end he travelled to London to cram for an exam geared for English entrants – Latin and Greek carried higher marks than Arabic and Sanskrit.
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He passed, well up the list, and entered the Middle Temple.

Dutt was fascinated by British life. He travelled widely while studying, once touring Scotland to view scenes familiar from his reading of Scott, and took an intense interest in British political life. He witnessed the 1868 general election, parliament in action, and had discussed Indian affairs with British Radicals and Liberals, including John Bright who had championed Indian causes in the Commons. Then and later, Indian students gravitated towards those British progressive circles which were anti-imperialist in sentiment.

When Dutt returned to take up his administrative duties in Bengal in 1871, he was keen to apply the liberal principles of self-help and enlightened self-interest which he had absorbed in Britain. Furthermore, he hoped that he could show the British that an educated Indian was equally adept as them in the arts of government, and that India could be changed from
within
by Indians as well as from above. What he had observed in Britain gave him a powerful sense of what could be achieved by the middle class and he had returned home convinced that its Indian equivalent deserved the same political power. Dutt’s intellectual development and the conclusions he reached were similar to those of many other educated Indians, who believed that what they had learned gave them equality with the British.

This was certainly not a view shared by the majority of the British in India. There were widespread protests in 1883 at a government proposal to extend the jurisdiction of Indian local magistrates to Europeans, and the Viceroy, Lord Ripon, was forced to withdraw the measure. Educated Indians felt affronted at what was an assertion of racial superiority. This slight led indirectly to the formation in 1885 of the Indian National Congress, an association of educated Indians from all professions, which met annually to discuss issues relating to their country. In its early days it was compared to an earnest public-school debating club, but its membership soon grew and by the end of the century it had become an influential forum for Indian opinion.

The emergence of what was essentially a highly respectable and respectful assembly of Indians imbued with British political ideas caused some alarm. Ripon’s successor, Lord Dufferin, a Liberal appointee, had no time for the ‘Bengali Babu’, whom he found ‘a most irritating and troublesome gentleman’. He also detected a ‘Celtic perverseness, vivacity and cunning’ among educated Indians, qualities which he believed they shared with contemporary Irish nationalists. Certainly there was much in common between the proto-Indian nationalists and their Irish counterparts: both lobbied sympathisers in Britain and knew how to manipulate public opinion through the press and public meetings. The Indians did not, however, go as far as the Irish in their demands, which were largely confined to the assimilation of more and more of their educated countrymen into the middle and higher ranks of the government.

Of course, this was rightly seen as the prelude to Indian self-government, which was why Curzon (viceroy from 1898 to 1905) steadfastly refused to consider greater Indian particpation in government. He rejected in forthright terms the request made by Dutt, Congress president in 1901, for the appointment of Indians to the viceregal council. The Marquess’s adamantine position on the advancement of Indians to senior posts, and his well-known view that the Congress was an unrepresentative and disruptive body, had the effect of beginning its metamorphosis into a focus for active political opposition to the raj.

A collision between westernised Indians and the government had been predicted at the onset of the government’s educational reforms in the 1830s. Although in many ways a despotism, British India had never been a totalitarian state in which the government proscribed books, newspapers and foreign travel and banned political debate. If Indians were allowed free access to British political and philosophical writers, it was inevitable that they would apply what they read to their own country, and ask why they were excluded from those political rights which were their rulers’ birthright. It was a tricky question which Curzon and those of like mind could only answer with reference to the peculiar conditions of India. Divisions of religion, wealth, caste and clan were so profound and a source of so much fission that only a disinterested and fairminded British government could command the loyalty of all Indians, protect them and secure internal order. Reference was frequently made to the state of India before British rule when life had been precarious and anarchy was endemic. Above all was the fear that democracy and moves towards self-determination would, in the words of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, a rigorous and plain-dealing administrator who served in India from 1885 to 1919, release ‘the demon of discord’ so that the country would be convulsed by ‘all the latent feuds and hatreds’ hitherto reined in by men of his stamp.
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On another and all-too-common level, Indian aspirations towards self-determination were countered on racial grounds. These were candidly expressed by Sir George Younghusband, who served with the Indian army intermittently between 1878 and 1918:

It is never wise to stand studied impertinence, or even the semblance of it, from any Oriental. Politeness, and courtesy, by all means, and even camaraderie, as long as these are reciprocated, and all is fair, and square, and above board. But the moment there is a sign of revolt, mutiny, or treachery, of which the symptoms not unusually are a swollen head, and a tendency to incivility, it is wise to hit the Oriental straight between the eyes, and to keep on hitting him thus, till he appreciates exactly what he is, and who is who.
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Younghusband spent some time putting this doctrine into practice on the northern frontiers of India in the endless small wars of punishment and pacification. Their common purpose was summed up by one of Younghusband’s colleagues after a bout with the Chins of the Assam frontier when he had taught them ‘that the only thing that mattered was the Great White Queen across the waters’.
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Resistance was toughest and most persistent among the tribes along the North-West Frontier, a remote, mountainous region where British control was always precarious.

There was a special romance about the North-West Frontier campaigns largely because they were contests in which the British usually managed to overcome brave, resourceful and daring warriors on their home ground. Of course technology mattered and probably tipped the balance, but there were plenty of close shaves, since the tribesmen were adept at ambushes. Two campaigns were needed in 1888 and 1890 against the recidivists of the Hazara district, who defiantly refused to pay fines for raiding and sniped at patrols. On the first occasion 14,000 men were sent against them, and on the second, 8,000, of whom at least a quarter were British, a custom established after the Mutiny.