2. INDIA

Conquest and the Spoils

In the history of modern empires the British has far the most important place, and in the British empire India. The main patterns of all British colonial administration were formed there; and to the public, empire with all its romantic associations meant chiefly India. In fact the whole complex of relationships among continents and races was deeply influenced by the great and astonishing fact – as astonishing as the Spanish conquest of America – of the subjection of this country, with its immemorial culture and vast population, to a small land in the West, four or five months distant from it before steam shortened the journey. If the British had been driven out in 1857 the history of the world, not of Britain and India alone, would have gone differently.

Seen first at the height of their power, the Mogul rulers had impressed Europe strongly if vaguely with their splendour, whose memory passed into legend. A hundred years after they had dwindled to phantoms in the Red Fort at Delhi, a young lady in Scotland would write in her diary that a laird who was giving a ball and making a splash meant to ‘act the Great Mogul’.¹ Dryden wrote a very unrealistic play about his contemporary Aurangzeb, who with equal unrealism was guiding the empire back into the old ruts that the cumbrous wagon of middle-Asian history had rumbled along for so many centuries. With Portuguese, English and French trading settlements on their coast India’s rulers could have got to know far more than they did of Western resources, from which they were content to hire a few artillerymen for their wars. They were in touch with Turkey, Indian pilgrims went to Mecca, they could have sent missions to Europe itself. But the sea and the peoples of the sea had no place in the tradition they belonged to.

On the Western side there was not much more curiosity. The Portuguese had gone to sleep in Goa, the English worked out a routine of trade that satisfied them, and for the rest ate, drank, died – usually quickly – or went home. It was not their ambition that precipitated change, but the crumbling of Mogul authority, never complete in the south, and then the world-wide rivalry of England and France that helped to push both of them into the maze of Indian politics and wars, complicated by Persian and Afghan invasion. All the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth century was a time of confusion, raging in other areas long after Plassey and the establishment of East India Company rule over Bengal. A conviction was fixed in the British mind, unshakeable in later days, that India without British rule must fall a prey to anarchy and invasion.

To be bringing order out of such chaos could be regarded as justification enough for British conquest, if any were asked for; Order was from first to last the grand imperial watchword. In Bengal, where more than in any later acquisition it had to cover a multitude of British sins, there was added the idea of liberation, of downtrodden Hindus rescued from Muslim tyranny. Early inclination to think of Brahmins as wonderful creatures lent it a further persuasiveness. There were sterner struggles with the Marathas, and sternest of all with the Sikhs of the Panjab; both of these had a strong popular spirit, and they had long ago shaken off the Muslim yoke by themselves. But it had a permanent effect on the British that the peoples they first came in contact with, in the seaboard provinces, southerners and Bengalis, were so much less warlike than those of the north, where most of Indian political history had been made. Experience of Bengal in particular led to its inhabitants being considered extraordinarily spiritless and docile, and despised accordingly except by a man like the missionary Carey, who praised them as ‘the most mild and inoffensive people in the world’, sunk unhappily in superstition.2 To a layman they were simply ‘timid and cowardly’.³ A Frenchman noticed the ‘thorough contempt’ of most Englishmen for them, as ‘the tamest, and most pusillanimous set of men, on the face of the earth’. It was 1789, and he added: ‘But beware!’⁴ Much later than this Europeans were puzzled by their apparent passivity, ‘that strange insensibility, which so strongly characterizes the natives’,⁵ and which gave Macaulay a purple patch for his essay on Warren Hastings.6 A similar conception was carried over to India at large, aided perhaps by the fortuitous circumstance that ever since Columbus the term ‘Indian’ had been current in the sense of what the nineteenth century called a ‘native’, and had been applied to backward peoples, most of them easily subdued, all over the Americas and the Pacific.

Also because initial contact was with the south and Bengal, and Calcutta remained the capital until the removal to Delhi in 1911. Englishmen habitually thought of Indians in general as ‘black’. Thackeray remembered coming to England as a child in the care of a ‘black servant’ from Calcutta.⁷ It was customary for a long time to talk of the inhabitants as black, even up-country where skins were much fairer than in Bengal. After a mutiny in 1844 it came out that an English officer was in the habit of calling his men the black soldiers, ‘which displeased the sepoys very much’.⁸ Englishmen were already prone to this racialism as a result of long involvement with African slavery, and there was some coming and going in early days of planters, traders and troops, between the East and West Indies. An Indian environment was likely to magnify it, since Hindus themselves were acutely conscious of race, in the form of varna – colour, or caste – and Bengalis, largely non-Aryan in origin, attached an inflated importance to shades of complexion.⁹ They called the European the Gora, or pale-face; the old British quarter of Burhanpur is still known as the ‘Gora Bazaar’.

The later eighteenth century being the heyday of English slave-trading and slave-owning in Jamaica, English standards of conduct in India could hardly be elevated. Slaves were bought and sold for domestic service in Calcutta too. ‘Europeans lord it over the conquered natives with a high hand,’ wrote Trelawney, the friend of Byron and Shelley. ‘Every outrage may be committed almost with impunity.’¹⁰ Men were as completely emancipated from conscience or criticism as the Spaniards in their worst years in America. They went to India to make fortunes, and wanted to get home and spend them before they died of fever or debauchery. Those ‘Nabobs’ who did get home with their ill-gotten gains were welcomed for their money but detested for their insolence, and for the dissoluteness that was said to be infecting English society and even subverting the Constitution.

Yet this first and (except for 1857) worst chapter of British rule was also the time when Englishmen were most fully immersed in Indian life. They were few and scattered, and English wives still fewer. Their close social intercourse with Indians has often been sentimentalized in retrospect, and its abandonment regretted; but it was intercourse generally with the worst elements: tax-farmers, money-lenders, women of the sort that foreigners could stock harems with. The dreadful famine of 1770, which may have swept off a third of the population of Bengal, was in part man-made. This was no new thing in Indian history; and it may be supposed that the new masters, at once rulers and traders, and working through the agency of Indians accustomed to the old ways, picked up old tricks from them.

‘The horrid scene that is now acting by the English Government in the East Indies,’ wrote Tom Paine in 1792, ‘is fit only to be told of Goths and Vandals.’11 ‘All their discourse,’ we hear in 1793, on the other hand, of these Goths or Nabobs at Calcutta, ‘is about the vices of the natives.’¹² By thinking the worst of their subjects they avoided having to think badly of themselves. Even years later when they were on better terms – sometimes too easy terms – with their consciences, Englishmen went on thinking of Indians as hopelessly demoralized by climate, or social habits, or ages of Oriental misrule, and therefore permanently in need of foreign tutelage. In 1820 one of them asked why this country with a fertile soil and ‘a mild and paternal government’ was so poor, and, shutting his eyes to any evils of taxation, found the cause ‘in a natural debility of mind, and in an entire aversion to labour’, which put the Indian at the mercy of the usurer.¹³ ‘It is but a too common practice,’ another wrote a generation further on, ‘to dwell upon the shortcomings of the natives of India, to enlarge upon their fraud, falsehood, or extortions.’ Such charges were quite true, he admitted, but bank crashes and scandals in India proved that many Europeans gave way to temptation just as readily, and in full view of their subjects.¹⁴

It was easy to find targets for criticism in a land that had gone for two or three thousand years without a really drastic spring-cleaning. There had been Hindu reformers, Islam had done something, Westernism was doing something now, but a lot of the dust swept up merely settled down again in other corners. British conquest came at a time of moral as well as political enfeeblement, affecting both Hindus and Muslims. Hinduism in its more obtrusive aspects has usually repelled outsiders because, as a result of caste division, it kept the masses quiet with a ragbag of garish crudities, while reserving its esoteric subtleties for the initiated. Grotesque idols and superstitions had disgusted the Muslim invaders, and now disgusted the Protestant or agnostic British. Some features of Hindu social life were even more repulsive, most of all suttee – the burning of a Hindu widow on her husband’s funeral pyre. This was one Indian institution that all Europe heard of, and must have helped to make even Jules Verne’s countrymen feel that British power over India had some warrant.15 The Incas are said to have justified their conquests by denouncing the barbarous customs of the tribes they subdued, and the Spaniards made a great deal of the human sacrifices they found in Mexico – as the Romans did long before of those of Carthage.¹⁷

Impulses of Reform

Gradually British rule grew from mere collection of loot (one of the words the English language owes to India) into an orderly, if still burdensome, administration. Things were changing at home, in the England of the Utilitarians, the Evangelicals, the Parliamentary-reform and anti-slavery agitators. Currents of change reached India more slowly, but little by little a regular civil service was being formed, with a strong corporate spirit and a sense of responsibility. Over it were men from the aristocracy. One of England’s peculiarities was this class, no longer in power after 1832 but still active, useful in a variety of ways to the reigning bourgeoisie, and finding fresh pastures in the colonies. An earl sent out to govern was less likely than an upstart Nabob to be intoxicated by wealth and pomp. He might be dazzled by the glory of a war and another province annexed, like a Roman proconsul desirous of a triumph. But he might also be, as Dalhousie was, a man of energy and zeal for improvement, eager to employ talents that were ceasing to find employment in Britain. And a Canning could exercise some check on the frenzy for reprisals after the Mutiny in a way that no professional administrator could have done.

Under these dignitaries the run of officials belonged to the type of the gentleman who was evolving in Victorian England. An amalgam of the less flighty qualities of the nobility with the more stodgy of middle-class virtues, he had a special relevance to the empire, and indeed was partly called into existence by its requirements, made to measure for it by England’s extraordinary public-school education. In India he was a rough diamond compared with his metropolitan self, less tainted by the vices that public schools were often accused of spreading from the upper to the middle classes, but roughened by life in outposts, coarsened by too much power. Hotels sometimes hung up notices requesting him not to beat the servants. All the same this English gentleman was to make a marked impression on the world, including India. Indians, groping from one epoch into another, have sometimes been more sensitive to the social standards he imperfectly embodied than Englishmen ordinarily are, and have been proud to have the title extended to them. A president of the National Congress in the last days of the British Raj was gratified when a Viceroy said at a banquet that the ‘Congress leaders were gentlemen’.18

Reformers were finding their way to India by the 1820s and 1830s; their first task was to reform their own seniors. One earnest young man, C. E. Trevelyan, began by bringing to light the peculation indulged in by the head of his department, and was vilified for a while by nearly all the other English. ‘Trevelyan is a most stormy reformer,’ wrote Macaulay, whose sister he married. ‘… He is quite at the head of that active party among the younger servants of the Company who take the side of improvement.’¹⁹ This active party wanted to sweep away medieval cobwebs with an iron broom. Most of its adherents were slower to grasp the need for a constructive programme, of irrigation for example, and even the sweeping away was done lopsidedly, with priority for what British interests were supposed to require. Old land-tenures were replaced by British laws inspired by competitive individualism, with the effect of ruining a good part of both the peasantry, accustomed to a semi-communal occupancy of village lands, and the old gentry. Where alteration of Indian custom for India’s own benefit was in question, on the contrary, there was cautious prudence instead of peremptory decree. In the official view interference with his religion was the one thing that would goad the timorous Indian into rebellion; and practically any government action, outside the sphere of revenue sacred to British needs, could be construed as interference with religion.

A salient instance was suttee. Muslim rule in earlier times had discountenanced it, and British rule did the same, but not resolutely enough to satisfy reformers either British or Hindu. ‘I have often beheld with regret the indifference which is generally manifested by my Country men upon this most important subject,’ wrote ‘Britannus’ in 1820. An incident had just taken place, however, of two English officers interposing, at some risk from a crowd, to prevent a woman from being burned obviously against her will.20 It was not the first, for there had been cases even in the seventeenth century of widows rescued by Englishmen, and ‘very thankfull for ye saving of their lives’.²¹ There were many vacillations of policy before suttee was prohibited in 1829.²² In later years the same arguments were repeated for and against meddling with other time-honoured usages, like child marriage.

As early again as the seventeenth century an occasional Englishman had found fault with his countrymen for making no effort to preach the Gospel, in the pockets of territory they then occupied – ‘although it be their secular interest as well as their spiritual to make as many of their subjects as they can of their owne Religion that soe they may be the firmer united to them’.²³ Britain, by contrast with Spain and Portugal earlier, felt no need of such support, and preferred the negative policy of non-irritation. The Company loudly disclaimed any design of converting India, and for a long time missionaries were banned; possibly because the ‘Nabobs’ did not want such people spying on them – some of them may have heard of Las Casas. Kiemander who came to Calcutta in 1758, the first Protestant missionary there, was a Swede; others who followed were Germans; and William Carey, the first English missionary in Bengal, who came out in 1793, had to reside in the small Danish settlement of Serampore, now an up-river suburb of Calcutta where the college he founded still flourishes.

From there he could see across the Ganges the daily smoke of funeral pyres, and he believed that England was incurring a deep guilt by holding Bengal and not suppressing suttee.24 Carey was a Baptist, a humble Northamptonshire shoemaker, and belonged to a missionary tradition tinctured with radicalism that went back to the Moravians and was an overflow of reform movements in Europe. He believed in the mission of Europe to carry civilization abroad; he was as firmly convinced as anyone in India that without the British the country would relapse into ‘rapine, plunder, bloodshed, and violence’.²⁵ But he wanted to see Britain doing far more for India’s good. He and his associates lived on equal terms with their converts; they had to persuade the high-caste convert to treat his low-caste brother as an equal.

That missionary activity came to be allowed, though not positively welcomed by authority, was one symptom of the new reformism. A letter to an editor from ‘Christianus’ argued that Europeans had a debt to discharge, having hitherto adopted native morality instead of imparting Christian principles: they had ‘done everything but renounce the religion of their forefathers’.²⁶ ‘Moderator’ revived the old contention that Christianity would make more peaceful and loyal subjects.²⁷ Another symptom of change was a concern for education, one of the causes that Trevelyan had at heart. Here again Englishmen had to begin by educating themselves, and Fort William College at Calcutta, founded in 1800, was meant primarily to introduce them to Indian languages, laws, customs. It drew inspiration from the work of Sir William Jones, the judge and Orientalist who had lately started the Asiatic Society and translated Shakuntala – ‘that celebrated and illustrious man’, as the Indian Observer called him at his death in 1794, ‘who has opened the long-hidden mines of Oriental literature, and displayed them to the European world’²⁸ – ‘accomplish’d JONES’, as a Cambridge man apostrophized him in a prize poem ‘On the Restoration of Learning in the East’.²⁹

There were some who wanted the College also to introduce Indians to Western knowledge, and enthusiasts could think of it as a University of the East, a lighthouse darting the ray of reason through Asia’s old night. In every generation a handful of Englishmen made friends with Indians and worked with them for India’s good, and one such was David Hare, a watchmaker forty years in India, who devoted himself to getting schools set up in Calcutta. With the encouragement of a few men like this there grew up in the city from 1815 the circle of Ram Mohun Roy, leader of a reforming, modernizing movement within the Hindu fold, who agitated against suttee, and showed a breadth of vision that extended to sympathy with Ireland and jubilation at the French Revolution of 1830.30 He died in England in 1833. By that date higher education was running into the problem of the choice between English or Indian languages as the medium. Some of the vernaculars were looking up. It has been said that ‘the foundation of Bengali prose was laid in the Fort William College’;³¹ Carey, who taught there, loved it. But the issue was settled in 1835 in favour of English by Macaulay’s famous Minute.

Macaulay, who was president of the Committee of Public Instruction, held up the example of Russia, rescued from its ignorance by learning Western languages, and asserted that in works of information, at any rate, the superiority of European to Oriental literature was ‘absolutely immeasurable’. In later days he was abused by Indian nationalists. No doubt he knew little about the wisdom of the East, and spent too much of his time at Calcutta reading Greek poetry; and he ought to have recollected that the Russian peasant was still at least as ignorant as he was before Peter the Great, and more cut off from the educated classes. Either decision would have meant loss as well as gain; but Ram Mohun Roy had come out strongly on the side of English, as Sir Saiyad Ahmad, leader of a similar modernizing movement among the Muslims half a century later, was to do,³² The problem arose in other colonial countries, and Indonesians suspected that Dutch talk of an indigenous plan of education really meant a plan to keep Western knowledge hidden from them. In Great Britain itself one school of thought urged that patronizing Eisteddfods and keeping the Welsh language alive must keep the Welsh people ignorant and backward. All Indian vernaculars were harmfully tied to their classical languages, Sanskrit or Arabic, whose professors were religious obscurantists. The Indian mind had walled itself up inside such a prison that only a new language could give it a ladder of escape.

Some Bengalis revelled in English literature and Western ideas for their own sake; a bigger number wanted to learn English, as under Mogul rule they had learned Persian, to qualify for posts in government service. This Western-educated class, or a good part of it, was prepared to admire Britain, the bringer of light to the East, more fervently than that country has ever been admired, except by itself, before or since. A section went so far in snobbish imitation of English ways, some even adopting Christianity, that they grew ‘denationalized and hyper-westemized’.33 This ‘Young Bengal’, led till his death in 1831 by a Eurasian, Derozio, was a somewhat freakish trend, whose manners and tight pantaloons lent themselves to ridicule both English and Indian.³⁴ Such extravagances were for a time inevitable; but what was really only a fringe of the ‘Bengal Renaissance’ gave the whole of it a damagingly eccentric look; and it lacked a solid programme. Others were developing the new Bengali literature that culminated at the end of the century in Tagore. Ram Mohun had been discriminating in his welcome of the West, and from the outset there was a critical current as well as admiration. After about 1840 this was swollen by impatience for admission to higher government posts. In 1833 the Act revising the East India Company Charter had made government service rather easier to enter, but the British wanted a supply of assistants or clerks, not colleagues. In 1851 a number of groups joined to form a ‘British Indian Association’, which in 1853, when the Charter was again up for renewal by Parliament, presented a petition about jobs and other grievances, even asking for an Indian legislature.

British Isolation : Splendid or Perilous?

This, four years before the Mutiny, marked the emergence of a relatively mature, modem-minded class, though one mostly confined to western Bengal and the three ‘Presidency towns’, Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. Britain could take some credit for it, and could, had it wished, have begun to collaborate with it. But few even of the reformers had any such wish: their motto was that of the benevolent despots in Europe – ‘everything for the people, nothing by the people’. Any new governing class or nation, even when it sets out to remould its subjects, is partially remoulded by them, because it is impelled to adopt the same postures as its predecessors in order to command the same respect with least effort. India had always been ruled from elephant-back, and Englishmen quickly learned to ride the high elephant themselves, striking oriental attitudes at first unthinkingly, later – with Disraeli and his empress and his durbars – deliberately.

There was the same refusal to contemplate anything like a partnership with the other chief class of Indians genuinely willing to admire and work with the English – the sepoy officers. Indian regiments were doing most of the work of conquering India for the English; Indians were employed before 1857 in all branches, including the artillery; they could appreciate both the military equipment of the West and the ‘discipline of the wars’, the leadership that England brought. Those in the ‘Bengal Army’, biggest of the three Presidency forces, were not Bengalis, but ‘Hindostanis’, men of the Gangetic provinces northward from Bengal towards Delhi, which abounded in professional soldiers and martial traditions. Most even of the rank and file were Hindus of high caste. Between sepoy officer and Bengali intellectual there was scarcely a point of contact, a fact which allowed their rulers to look down on both all the more comfortably. Officers who might come from families of note could only rise very slowly to a modest rank, and were treated as unceremoniously as English corporals, their loyalty taken for granted as purely mercenary. Lord Combermere, when commander-in-chief from 1825 to 1830, was exceptional in his approach to them: he ‘holds levees for them’, Bishop Heber’s wife wrote home, ‘enquires into their histories and seems to consider them as his equals, instead of despising them’.35 If his example had been oftener followed the Mutiny might not have happened. One who followed it was Lord Auckland, when governor-general. At the end of a tour in 1838 he held a reception for the Indian officers of his escort, and performed the old feudal ceremony of presenting betel-nut to each. Their gratitude was pathetic. ‘G. is quite of opinion’, Lord Auckland’s sister noted, ‘that there is too much neglect of meritorious natives, and that it is only marvellous our dominion over them has resisted the system of maltreatment.’³⁶

There had in fact been occasional mutinies, sometimes ending in ringleaders being blown from the mouths of cannon – a style of military execution that told its own tale about this new empire. One mischief was that Indian troops might be put in charge of raw cadets from England, young louts given to vicious pranks and duelling.³⁷ A better type was coming out in the decades of improvement, in the army as among the civilians, a truly English jumble of habits older and newer. ‘Subaltern’, who published his journal of a campaign in the Panjab, came of a respectable church-going family – was famishing for promotion and prize-money, or plunder – felt shocked at scenes of carnage, quickly consoled at the prospect of medals – played cricket and the flute, scribbled verses, did his duty, and was not overly interested in Indians, who were niggers, or Sikhs, who were rebels.³⁸ Auckland’s sister met with one English major in Indian uniform – ‘everything most theatrical’ – which scarcely suited his figure, but did go with his fatherly relationship with his squadron-leaders. ‘He doats on his wild horsemen.’³⁹ But these were irregulars, outside army convention. General Outram as a young officer was ‘sincerely attached’ to the primitive Bhil tribesmen whom he organized for service in the hills.⁴⁰

The aristocratic streak in these English rulers made for an aloof and chilly manner, and Indian environment stiffened it. They came to think of themselves, it has been remarked, as a caste, infinitely above all the rest.⁴¹ If Hindus complained of being looked down on, they could always be reminded that their own treatment of one another, especially of untouchables, was worse. In Britain itself something like a caste mentality among retired Anglo-Indians reinforced social divisions already deep. A book was written about the castes of Edinburgh, one of them consisting of the Scottish capital’s numerous pensioners from India.42 ‘Brahmin’ came into use to mean a nob, someone boasting pedigree and blue blood.⁴³

European life in India was lived as far as possible apart. There was no intercourse with the inhabitants, someone said in 1812, except in a small way at Calcutta where it was confined to the lowest Europeans and native-born Portuguese; and whenever he came on drunkenness or insolence among Indians he put it down to such contacts.⁴⁴ The Presidency towns were all European creations, and each was really from the start two distinct towns. At Calcutta, ‘the city of palaces’, the English occupied stately homes round the wide green space of the Maidan, and never went near what they called the ‘Black Town’ if they could help it. Wherever else the British settled it was in new suburbs, the civil or military ‘Lines’, well outside the old Indian cities which were in any case too congested and too little amenable to sanitation.⁴⁵ An Englishman’s bungalow was very much his castle, standing in a large walled space or ‘compound’, a miniature of the squire’s park, where he could be out of sight or sound of any Indians but his own underlings.

Britain had many enemies, but India was so divided that most Englishmen felt safe in their splendid isolation. They rejected any but strictly official contacts with Indians, a critic wrote in 1815, ‘from the false idea, that it is inconsistent with the dignity of their status’.⁴⁶ Young men were too apt, an experienced senior wrote privately in 1848, to think it ‘unbecoming of us to pay any regard to popular feeling’.⁴⁷ The Honourable Company was so thickly wrapped up in its cloak of dignity that to the protected kingdom of Oudh, shortly before the annexation that was one of the starting-points of the Mutiny, it was ‘a terrible myth’; the very ignorant imagined it as a huge dragon issuing from a den in some strange land. ‘All, high and low, go in awe of “Koompanny Bahador”.’⁴⁸

There was always a platoon of pessimists who felt uneasy about this state of affairs. As a rule they argued from a conservative standpoint, not as advocates of an approach to the common people or to new sprigs like ‘Young Bengal’. They took for granted that a foreign government could only tax the masses, it could have no moral contact with them except through their own hereditary leaders. It was perilous, they maintained, to sweep away all old families of note and wealth, leaving no buffer between government and people. Several witnesses recorded in the famous Fifth Report of 1812 dwelt on the government’s ‘extreme unpopularity’ with the land-owning classes, which had lost much under it, and wished that posts in the services had been reserved for the ‘native gentry’, to attach them to its interests.49

Against this there were two objections. One was that of pride and prejudice, confidence in the Englishman’s ability to do without any assistance from Indians except those he hired as drudges. The second, felt more by reformers, was that the ‘native gentry’ were stragglers from bad old days, feudal relics to be cleared away for the sake of progress. Sir John Malcolm was the most judicious spokesman of the case for taking them by the hand. He united arguments of prudence with a desire for progress. England, he thought, could guide the upper classes towards reform, and through them the country, by slower but safer methods than those of the iconoclasts. His Scottish birth may have helped to give him both a respect for feudal rights and some freedom from prejudice against Indians as Asiatics. Early in his career, in 1799, he was pointing out how sepoy loyalty might be undermined by the ‘cold, confined, and depressive’ tone of British officers, and on campaign, all through the day’s march, he made a point of conversing with Indians of every sort.⁵⁰ When he drew up instructions for his staff in Central India in 1821 he called on them to go beyond cold civility and display real fellow-feeling. Englishmen as individuals had no sweeping advantage over Indians. He was not for adopting Indian habits, and pointed out that rich Indians who adopted European ways only forfeited the respect of their countrymen without winning that of the foreigner;⁵¹ what he wanted was that each should take the other on his merits. In 1828 he warned the India Board of the harm being done by ‘an overweening sense of our superiority’ and the exclusion of Indians from all positions of trust.52

This led on to the question of whether it was wise to continue annexing territories still under Indian rule. Motives for annexation were a blend of philanthropy, stirred by the evils of native despotism, and greed, excited by the Company’s chronic need for more revenue. Malcolm saw that between them they did not make good sense. He was ‘sickened’, he told a governor-general, Bentinck, by the ‘mawkish morality’ that wanted Britain to intervene against abuses in native states, when there were often more crying abuses in British provinces.⁵³ Undoubtedly in the period before 1857 when annexation was in vogue, the evils of princely rule were luridly portrayed – as in Knighton’s account of Oudh in its final phase of imbecility⁵⁴ – and those of British rule were left in the shade. Yet in 1842 the peasantry of Bengal was said to be ‘trembling on the remotest verge of human misery and brutalization’, while responsible Englishmen knew nothing of how it was being preyed on by their native agents.⁵⁵ And this was largely the outcome of the creation by the Permanent Settlement of 1793 of an artificial class of big landlords, more rapacious than the older sort who were got rid of in other provinces. A few years later a writer drew attention to the contrast between the peasantry of British India at large, ‘ground down to the lowest possible condition, physically and morally debased’, and the foreigner ruling over them ‘in all the luxury of Eastern splendour … the yearly income of one of these tillers of the soil will be smoked in cheroots by a junior civilian in a week’.⁵⁶

The Mutiny and its Effects

Richard Burton, who did not like Indians (he liked very few of the innumerable peoples he met on his wanderings), pointed out a few years before 1857 how ignorant Britons were of Indian feeling, and of how Indians hated them.⁵⁷ The early, unwholesome mixing had been succeeded by no better relationship, except among a few individuals; the changes that British rule was bringing about went far enough to antagonize many interests, not far enough to create many new interests as a support. The revolt that Burton foresaw was the first massive revolt of Asia against Europe. It was a rising of soldiers, led or abetted by old feudal groups, and aided by peasants, and it had some early tinge of an Indian national feeling: the army represented both the great religious communities. Englishmen had chosen to rely on India being divided against itself, rather than attached to them, and now there seemed an end to ‘that antagonism of the Asiatic races, which’, the historian of the Mutiny frankly declared, ‘had ever been regarded as the main element of our strength and safety’.58 They were saved by other divisions, even more than by their own better organization and gunnery. For the most part the rising was confined to the old Hindostan, and the Sikhs of the newly-conquered Pan jab proved eager to serve their new British masters against their old Muslim enemies. None the less the sudden discovery by the British of their true position after so many years in India was a shock, which helped to unbalance them.

It was a contest on both sides of heroism and, as usual in such wars, of atrocities. After victory there were savage reprisals. For the first time on such a scale, but not the last, the West was trying to quell the East by frightfulness. ‘History shudders,’ wrote G. O. Trevelyan, nephew of Macaulay, who went to India a few years later to make inquiries, ‘at the recollection of the terrible “Spanish fury” which desolated Antwerp in the days of William the Silent; but the “English fury” was more terrible still.’⁵⁹ Some of the facts that have come down to us almost stagger belief, even after the horrors of Europe’s own twentieth-century history. Nothing worse was ever done against Negro rebels in the Americas. Public opinion in England could not be a restraining influence; it was in one of its two grand fits of hysteria of that century – the other coming on in the Boer War. In the folk-memory of India these things lingered for many years.⁶⁰

Let us rule by virtue, one of the more idealistic Englishmen wrote during 1857, ‘and we shall reign over these poor Asiatics with infinitely greater security and more power than if we had in India the whole grand army of Napoleon’.⁶¹ Robespierre in the midst of his reign of terror dreamed of a reign of virtue. When revenge was satisfied the prime need of profit from India remained, and necessarily took precedence. And the old sleepwalker’s certainty of the British there, the carefree assumption that they knew what was good for the natives and that the natives, like children with nasty medicine, would learn to be thankful, was gone for good. India was never forgiven for what it did in 1857, still less perhaps for what it exasperated the English into doing, or allowing to be done, which most of them before long ceased to speak of, and would very likely have been glad to stop thinking of. The bitterness that India had always felt was now felt on both sides, and the gulf had become impassable.

Trevelyan felt the change sadly. He gave the British official credit for incorruptibility, and for more devotion to duty than ever before, a ‘fire of zeal which glows in every vein’ – ‘but that duty is no longer a labour of love’. There had been a time, he believed, when some Englishmen had not been afraid to call Indians their friends, and would have been ashamed to call them niggers.62 This opprobrious term was brought back into common parlance by the Mutiny. Writing in 1857 Karl Marx quoted from an Englishman’s letter in a newspaper: ‘Every nigger we meet with we either string up or shoot.’⁶³ It went on being used by Europeans among themselves after coming to be officially discouraged in public. In a collection of sketches of life in a small station the author jocularly catches himself in a slip of the pen when he speaks of its well-paved streets being a pleasure ‘to the niggers – I mean to the Oriental gentlemen – whose duties attract them to Kabob’.⁶⁴

The worst mischief of the ‘damned nigger’ mentality deplored by Trevelyan⁶⁵ was that it ruled out a new approach to the newer, more progressive sections of Indian opinion. After the Mutiny the East India Company was abolished at last, and India given an empress instead, a more rational administrative structure, and, with railways, the basis for a more modern economy. During the crisis the Bengali intelligentsia was torn between fear that rebel success would mean relapse into another dark age, and disgust at British ferocity. It tried to rally behind Canning, the governor-general, as a moderate.⁶⁶ Its behaviour went unthanked, in the then mood of the rulers. ‘Young Bengal’ – still their uncomplimentary name for the whole class – was dismissed by one of them as ‘remarkable generally for conceit, disloyalty, and irréligion’.67

One reason for the failure of education to bring about a meeting of minds was the way it had developed since Macaulay. What was wrong with it was not the English medium but the content, far too literary and academic. It was the same or worse in England, where fossilized universities and public schools went on teaching young gentlemen to compose imbecile verses in dead languages and to ignore science and technology as undignified; but there games, and the prospect of active careers ahead, were a partial corrective, and school-books were quickly forgotten. Indians lacked this, and if they took greedily to their new learning it was partly because it had much in common with their old. They were meeting new philosophers, Rousseau or Mill, and new poets, instead of old ones; Shakespeare had an astonishing effect; but none of this had any direct connection with the country’s practical problems, and abstract ideas left mind and muscle disastrously separated as they had always been in India. The result was not calculated to win the hearts of Englishmen, mostly philistines who tossed Rousseau and Shakespeare to India with careless indifference, as good enough to teach clerks. Their respect was bestowed more readily on an Agha Khan, who understood racehorses: ‘Perhaps that goes pretty far towards pleasing the British residents,’ wrote an opponent of his bitterly.⁶⁸ A later Agha Khan was to win far more hearts in England with his horses than Tagore with his verses. And while Indians, unlike Britons, are excellent linguists, few had opportunity to gain a colloquial, as they did a literary, mastery of English, and their way of talking sounded comical to Englishmen. England was a country where the educated classes derived perennial entertainment from the faulty speech of the uneducated. ‘Babu Jabberjee’ became a stock figure of fun.⁶⁹

There was a great deal of prejudice in the British attitude to educated Indians, but not prejudice alone. Behind any academic defects lay the legacy of all that was amiss in an old, degenerate society. An individual like Ram Mohun Roy could shake it off swiftly, and prove that there was a reservoir of pent-up mental and moral energy in the old India whose release was England’s true, but imperfectly fulfilled, mission of liberation. A whole class could not shake it off so soon. In 1866 a Hindu from the south discussed its problems in a candid lecture at Benares. He had unbounded faith in Western knowledge and principles as Asia’s salvation. ‘A man that has received a thorough English education is fit for everything that is good and laudable.’ He had only one serious grievance against the British, that ‘they look upon us as beings of an inferior order … Does not this sort of conduct… tend to demoralize us and to estrange us?’ At the same time he confessed that Indians were already demoralized by their own past. ‘We lie; we steal; we deceive; we commit rape … and then early in the morning we bathe in the Ganges, whose filthy waters wash away our sins.’70

This was precisely what Europeans said, in and out of season. The most open-minded of them were often repelled by what they saw, in Bengal particularly, even now when suttee was a thing of the past. There Britain had brought new light, but also a new darkness in the form of a vicious landlordism that was fast reducing the countryside to a worse than Irish condition; and between intellectuals and landlords there were unhealthily close ties of class and family. Trevelyan deeply regretted that ‘the habit of sneering at our dark fellow-subjects is so confirmed in some people, that they lose sight of sense and logic’;⁷¹ but he himself felt baffled. Physically these better-off Bengalis struck him, as they struck all Englishmen brought up on a cult of the athletic, as disgustingly flabby – ‘the most helpless, feeble set of beings in the universe’. Morally too they appeared very lax, deficient in ‘the earnestness of purpose which a Briton carries into his business, his pleasures, even his vices’.⁷² They were of course Hindus, and a lack of any sense of a lie being something to feel shame for had always been a Muslim reproach against Hinduism, as it was now a British reproach. ‘Unfortunately,’ wrote Trevelyan, too sweepingly, ‘this want of truthfulness leavens the whole being of the Bengalee … the mass of Bengalees have no notion of truth and falsehood.’⁷³

It made a singular impression on him, as it well might in the land of the Permanent Settlement, to hear a schoolroom commenting with Johnsonian orotundity on The Deserted Village.⁷⁴ This aptitude of the Bengali for Western literature and thought was amazing, but he asked himself whether it was more than skin-deep; and added, with insight: ‘In fact, it may be doubted whether he knows himself.’75 A man or a people can only know themselves through the test of action, and Bengal, absorbing at second-hand so much of the experience of another continent, had as yet no experience of its own to serve as touchstone either of what it read or of its own soul. A polygamous young man bloated with messy sweets, declaiming tirades from Julius Caesar while his peasants starved, was certainly an incongruous spectacle. He might really love both his sweets and his Shakespeare; every nation and class suffers from its own peculiar form of schizophrenia; only the ordeal of action could teach him what he was really born for. A sharper vision of truth and not-truth would come with the emergence of a collective ideal and duty, a public cause, such as Europeans had always had, if they were seldom worthy of it. The national movement and its demands were to reveal what part of the seed of new ideas had fallen on fertile or on stony soil. There was a rehearsal in 1859–60, when agitation against abuses on British-owned plantations swept the province and roused the intellectuals, giving them for the first time something serious to declaim about. As to physical courage and endurance, one Bengali revealed unexpected reserves before long by exploring forbidden Tibet alone, in disguise, as a secret agent of the Indian government.⁷⁶

The royal proclamation of 1858 promising free entry on merit to all government posts was hailed at first as a pledge of alliance with a new India. But statues of Queen Victoria were to multiply faster than jobs for Indians in the higher civil and military grades. Disappointment over this was one of the starting-points of a decade of agitation in Bengal, leading to the National Congress movement that began in 1886, with independence gradually becoming its goal.⁷⁷ If for Indians concessions to nationalism meant first and foremost more jobs, for Englishmen they meant fewer jobs. Hence there was a professional incentive to the latter to convince themselves and British opinion that an Indian, however well-trained and intelligent, could never have a character equal to real responsibility. The old type of nominated civil servant was bitterly resentful of the new type of Englishman, the much-derided ‘Competition-wallah’ now coming in through public examination; the thought of having to make room for Indians as well was unbearable. The Briton was always finding fault with his Indian subordinate or colleague for not having manliness and independence enough. His own overbearing behaviour was more likely to snuff out these qualities than to foster them, and he was not free from a tendency to think of colour, rather than culture, as the true index of worth.

Still, India’s narrow specializations of caste and community really had hindered the all-round development of mind, body and character that a gentleman and an efficient district official was supposed to have. India was running true to its old self when Bengalis took to English literature, Parsees to English commercial methods, and Panjabis, who cared for neither, to English bayonets, and all three moved further away from one another than they had been before. Bengalis spreading over India in the lower and middle cadres of the administration often earned unpopularity in other provinces, through both friction over jobs and clashes of temperament. It was easy for a long time to dismiss nationalists as a small selfish minority. Most of them were higher-caste Hindus, not free from an ancestral disdain for the mass of their countrymen, Hindu or Muslim. Only British obduracy compelled them, from the early years of this century, to turn to the common people and think of a mass movement and a struggle instead of painless adoption of the élite into the British framework. It was no use ‘licking the boots of the English’, said a distinguished Bengali scholar who had seen them at close quarters. ‘The English are afraid of fighting … entreaties do not move them in the least.’

Rebuilding an Alien Power

Meanwhile the Raj had been rebuilt on other foundations. In 1857 isolation had proved more dangerous than splendid, and the arguments of men like Malcolm against it became irresistible. But whereas Englishmen earlier had felt impatience at India’s unwillingness to change, now they were in a mood to feel disquiet at the eagerness of some Indians for change. Like the reform programme earlier, the reconstruction programme was one-sided and too largely negative. Pillars of Indian society would be preserved, and encouraged to stand still. The remaining princes would be allowed to survive, as Malcolm advocated, but not left to their own devices, to work out some modern relationship with their subjects – instead they were placed urnder imperial guarantee, and their States built into the British fabric as buttresses of conservatism. Political progress in them was ruled out; and in British India, thus shored up, any really searching reform could be comfortably postponed.

Rulers of the kind lately vilified as Oriental tyrants were now eulogized as the natural leaders of their people. Leaving a third of the country under princely rule could be speciously represented as a concession to Indian feeling; and if, as was increasingly the case, conditions were worse there than in British India, nationalists could be invited to contemplate the consequences of self-government. This plan of utilizing puppet rulers may have owed something to Dutch practice in Indonesia; in turn it may have helped to decide French or Russian administrators to adopt similar policies. It was copied in other parts of the British empire, and was in fact a hallmark of all the later imperialism.

Most of the surviving princes were Hindu, but among the land-owners, who shared their feudal mentality, were a good many Muslims, like some of those taluqdars of Oudh who, reprieved from confiscation after the Mutiny, took care thereafter to be loyal. With official patronage they could take the lead in the Muslim community, which, having fallen far behind the Hindu, could not hope to catch up without government aid. More forward-looking Muslims quite agreed about this. Their leader Sir Saiyad Ahmad had the same unquestioning regard for Western knowledge and its channel, the English language, and for British administration, as the Bengali Hindus had formerly had. In a speech in 1867 he thanked God for rescuing India from slavery by sending it a government founded on ‘intellect, justice and reason’.79 In practice this came to mean better relations between government and a Muslim élite than between either of them and Hindus. Once the ‘liberator’ of Hindu India from Muslim oppression, Britain was now the ‘protector’ of Muslim India against Hindu economic domination. Insensibly there crept back – in the end more intensely than anyone had desired – the communal antagonism so alarmingly absent at first in 1857.

In the army the British contingent had been greatly strengthened, and given sole charge of the artillery; the sepoy forces were rebuilt, with the Panjab, split among Muslim, Hindu and Sikh, and politically inert, as the chief northern recruiting-ground. Very few Indians were admitted to commissioned rank; but the British officer, drawn from an army undergoing changes at home too, developed a closer relationship with his men, and campaigns outside India favoured the growth of an esprit de corps that both could share. They helped also to fashion an ‘Indian Army’ which even nationalists could take a certain pride in, and which independent India has taken over with little change beyond substitution of Indian officers. Britons were free to consider its successes their own, since it was an article of faith that native troops could learn to be good soldiers only by virtue of European training and leadership. For them as for the British rank and file the officer wore the air of a superman, born to command the lower race as well as the lower class. To this day a junior Indian officer has to establish himself in the eyes of his men by comparison with the still lingering image of the departed Briton.80

Between the recruiting-districts and the army there grew a hereditary attachment. The official category of ‘martial races’ was not fictitious. Panjabis or Rajputs did have fighting traditions that Bengalis or Gujeratis lacked. Practically the whole Pakistani army today is drawn from areas of the western Panjab and the adjoining Frontier province that the old Indian army drew on. To the government the essential point was that these martial races of the interior belonged to pre-industrial societies of feudal landlord and peasant, blissfully untouched by the political ideas that the big cities were breeding. Simple, manly fellows, they were far more congenial to it than the Bombay bania or shopkeeper-moneylender, or the voluble Bengali babu or clerk, or the Madrasi lawyer, heir of a long line of Brahminical logic-choppers; all of whom the villager despised or feared as instinctively as the Englishman did. Officers or district magistrates could think complacently of Sikhs and Jats under their charge as a bold peasantry, their country’s pride. ‘To know the simple, unsophisticated tiller of the soil in the village is to love him,’ wrote a Scot who went out in 1905. ‘He is wonderfully contented despite his illiteracy, poverty and low standard of living.’81

An old general, to whom the only thing that made India bearable was the ‘shootin”, spoke warmly to Somerset Maugham of his shikaris – ‘except for their colour pukka white men’.⁸² Very likely they returned his esteem. A civilian was not as a rule so null and void, but he too preferred the guileless rustic, the faithful domestic, the army veteran, stock characters in the neat little play with a happy ending to which he liked to reduce life: the Englishman in the colonies was, revealingly, a great one for amateur theatricals. He was not fond of townsmen in general, and the educated sort who were getting above themselves in particular. The mental stiffness or indolence that went with his physical and moral energy disinclined him to put himself on a level with men who might well be cleverer and better-informed than he was. He had small desire to hobnob even with the most staunchly loyal, except for an occasional shoot in their forests. The fashioning of conservative alliances was not his affair; he left high policy to the Serene Highnesses at Calcutta and London, and continued to occupy in his own sphere the splendid isolation that the Raj could no longer indulge in.

It was not surliness alone. Britons were still few, and their ability to control a vast population, whether for good or for ill, depended more on moral ascendancy than on physical force. There is a picture in one of Kipling’s stories, sublime in its way, of a solitary Englishman quietly riding towards a town seized by an outbreak of mob passions, not doubting for a moment that at his appearance the angry waves will be stilled.⁸³ This enormous confidence rested partly on a record of success in arms, almost unbroken save for 1857 and then almost miraculously recovered. But it owed much also to the studied remoteness of the English, as of a race more than human in civil as in military life, capable by divine warrant of that art of government, that ‘mystery’ which rulers, as James I held, must keep strictly to themselves. Men being what they are, all leadership of men or command over men, whether by Napoleon or by a deputy-commissioner at Ambala, must be half charlatanism. A Cambridge lecturer coolly turning over the fossil bones of history could afford to doubt whether the size of Britain’s empire really proved any ‘invincible heroism or supernatural genius for government’.84 Practical men knew better. ‘For a century,’ wrote a former cabinet minister in 1892, ‘the Englishman has behaved in India as a demi-god … Any weakening of this confidence in the minds of the English or of the Indians would be dangerous.’⁸⁵

For a demi-god to begin abdicating his power is still harder than for a dictator. For him to be civil and chatty with ordinary beings is too much to ask. In public the Englishman had to be perpetually on his dignity, wearing what was half a naturally supercilious expression, half a mask. In private he had to be able to relax, to groan at the vile weather and the worse politicians at Westminster, to drink his own health as often as he felt it required. He had therefore to keep Indians, except servants, at a distance. No man is a hero to his fellow-club-member. Then, at an age (it came to be fixed at fifty-five) long before senility, his service ended and he vanished abruptly to England. India never saw the giant old and feeble.

This detachment was not without its value for India as well as for the rulers. All India’s governments had been too personal, too much a matter of sifarish or backstairs influence. So had Europe’s, but the West was learning now to think in terms of an administrative machine dealing impersonally with objective facts. In Asia, in spite of some valiant efforts by righteous Muslims, the concept of equality of rights before the law was virtually unknown. Englishmen picked it up more readily in some ways in India than they did at home, where a minister taking office in mid-century was still expected, like Lord John Russell, to remember his relatives while not forgetting his friends. Among Indians they had no relatives and no friends. Government as a machine without sensibility, incapable of yielding to the generous impulse that makes a man in office happy to oblige his acquaintances at the expense of the public, was uncongenial to Indians, and its foreignness made it still more distasteful. And it could of course perform no more than a bureaucracy can perform. Only the tidal wave of a great popular movement could renovate India fundamentally, but that was not yet a possibility. In the meantime a bureaucracy that often blundered and was always expensive, but seldom gave way to favouritism or caprice, was – as Indians have been willing to admit – useful for propelling the country out of feudalism into modernity, for draining the political marsh and creating solid standing-ground. In the princely States the alternative, the old ways, were plainly in view.

Harmfully as the rulers were cut off from Indian life, this was a much lesser evil than the kind of intercourse that existed in the days of the Nabobs. Memories of those depraved times lingered among Englishmen; the moral they drew was not so much that their forefathers had wronged India, but that the unwholesome, decadent East had blighted the native virtue of Englishmen too intimately acquainted with it. In a novel of these later, more austere days (by a woman) an old hand puts a newcomer on his guard against the quicksand waiting to swallow him. ‘Oriental life has an irresistible fascination for some natures; the glamour, the relief from convention … the lure of attractive and voluptuous women, idleness, ease, luxury, drugs! I could tell you of an officer who went crazy about a beautiful Kashmeri …86

Such Delilahs, luckily for British morale, were less easy to meet with in life than in novels. Godlike aloofness was greatly facilitated by the absence of Indian women from the social scene. Since Roman times Europe had allowed women of all ranks a latitude unique among the higher civilizations. In England it had gone further than in most of Europe, in India it was more severely curtailed than in most of Asia. The Englishman could excuse his stand-offishness when it began to come under criticism, by arguing that he brought his wife and daughters into the drawing-room and the Indian did not. In later years the Hindu was to use exactly the same argument against the Muslim.

A Miss Walker was an ornament of the royal harem of Oudh in its last days, and another Englishwoman had married into a respectable Muslim family and written an intelligent book about Muslim life.87 But these were very rare cases; and while in Indonesia a certain number of white men continued to have legitimate native wives (far more had concubines), in India there was very heavy pressure of opinion against any such unions, as well as against irregular ones, and corresponding prejudice against their offspring.⁸⁸ Aristocratic dislike of the mésalliance had weight; but in any case Indian women of good status were quite inaccessible. A Muslim lady could not even be seen, a Hindu lady could not marry a Hindu of different caste, to say nothing of a foreigner; and neither, until near the end of the epoch, began to learn English or come by any modern education.

Intermarriage could have promoted good feeling with only a very few Indians, at the cost of illwill and suspicion among many more. But the taboo on it did have the bad effect of worsening the tinge of racialism always present in the British make-up. When the Englishman turned his back on the invisible Indian beauty, as on a poisonous orchid or a sour grape, he was in a way turning his back on India altogether. His wife, whose susceptibility to the ravages of the climate was notorious, was less uneasy about him because he ostentatiously avoided all Indian society. It may be surmised that a broad moat between the races helped the white paterfamilias also to feel easy in his mind. There were other too well-known effects of a hot climate; young Indian men were often handsome, in a raffish Italian style; they were believed by prudish Victorians to be inordinately, unnaturally lascivious.⁸⁹ Altogether, the peace and quiet of the family were safer if Indian company was excluded from the spacious bungalow. And the peace and quiet of the empire were safer if the bungalow set a good example to the barracks; for Tommy Atkins to go wandering among women would foment endless rows, and undermine discipline.

Another acquaintance of Somerset Maugham, the Prince of Berar, son and heir of His Exalted Highness the Nizam, complained of not being allowed to set foot in the fashionable Yacht Clubs of Bombay and Calcutta.⁹⁰ Good understanding with the princes was strictly a matter of political convenience. Much later, one year before independence, Gandhi’s son was refused admission to a European restaurant at Shillong.91 Apartheid carried so absurdly far helped to stiffen the self-esteem of the British, wilting in the later decades of the Raj, and, still more, to bind together their upper and lower ranks, especially the ruling caste and the common soldier. Racialism is always in one aspect a spurious leveller of class distinctions. Mogul emperors married Rajput princesses; for an English viceroy to do so would have been more disgraceful and unthinkable than for him to marry an English parlour-maid. The indispensable Tommy Atkins got a poor share of what Britain made out of India, but as a white man he had the privilege, for what it was worth to him, of seeing all Indians from Highness to sweeper officially regarded as his inferiors.

We have scant record of how he felt about this, or about the rest of his existence in India. In later times he was not stuck there for good, awaiting death or discharge, as in the old Company army. But the royal army too was recruited from Ireland, the Highlands, and the poorest classes in England, whose refuge from pauperism it was in youth as the workhouse was in age. The soldier suffered more than his comfortably lodged superiors from a climate that only wealth or electricity can make tolerable. In the post-Mutiny decade sixty-five of every thousand European soldiers in Bengal died or were invalided out each year.⁹² He was more or less illiterate, and his notions of this strange land where he strangely found himself must have been as bizarre as his versions of Indian names, with Siraj-ul-Daulah, villain of the Black Hole, refracted into Sir Roger Dowler, and Shah Shaja’-ul-Mulk into ‘Cha sugar and milk’. Most of the time he must have accepted the attitude to Indians of those above him as natural and proper. In 1857 official Anglo-India, itself wild enough for revenge, could not help feeling amused at his simple conviction that all blackies, down to the most harmless-looking, ought to be knocked on the head.⁹³

Children everywhere slip through some of the entanglements of grown-up conduct. Tommies on the walls of Lahore Fort would exchange good-humoured abuse with the urchins playing below at bat and ball.⁹⁴ An Indian novel shows us some of them through the admiring eyes of a sweeper-boy cleaning their latrines, to whom they were in a rough way much friendlier than his own high-caste countrymen.95 Unable often to afford a wife, the private soldier also saw more than his betters usually did of Indian women, chiefly in the army brothels; but whatever secrets he and they shared with one another they have carried with them into a longer exile.

It was a dominant fact throughout that there was no big resident population of non-official Europeans. When the Company lost its commercial monopoly in 1813 private individuals were able to enter more freely: not usually intending to lay their bones in India, though some families did stay, but to make money and go back home. Friends of India like Carey hoped that their presence would be helpful to Indian progress, as men like Livingstone hoped in Africa. Missionaries were prone to the mistake of fancying other Europeans as well-meaning as themselves. In some directions the settlers in India were useful; they started newspapers, criticized the bureaucracy, helped to generate something like a political atmosphere for Indians to breathe. But their own interests came first with them, and only accidentally coincided with Indian interests; and what officialdom lacked in friendliness towards Indians was very far from being made good by settlers.

Their two leading categories were merchants in the ports and planters. In feudal Asia commerce was not the most admired vocation, and so far as skill at it went Indian traders were admittedly, as one writer said, ‘possessed of great sagacity and foresight’.⁹⁶ Foreigners could not pretend to more sagacity, but they could put on airs to raise them above the vulgar associations of trade, and aped the demeanour of the officials who set the social tone. Planters on their estates were dealing with Indians of the most unlettered kind, and their standards of conduct had been formed too much by the American slave-plantation. Like Shylock they assumed that anything the law did not explicitly forbid, they might do cheerfully; unlike Shylock they had a hand in making the law. Indigo was their first love, and gave them an unsavoury reputation. Charges against them of flogging and otherwise maltreating peasants were found by the authorities in 1810 to be undeniable;⁹⁷ but the evils went on.

The Mutiny prompted the thought that British power – if not Indian progress – would be firmer if there were more Europeans. A Select Committee recommended a more liberal policy of admission, as in Ceylon; it heard complaints that officialdom – ‘as it were, the nobility of India’ – resented outsiders and tried to keep the door shut.98 The idea was to attract men with capital, not labourers and the like for whom there was little room and whose presence would have defaced the image of the ruling race. Capital could not make up for want of other desirable attributes, and the civil servant was not merely snobbish in looking down on those who came: most of them were not gentlemen morally any more than socially.

Trevelyan found these two classes on opposite sides of every question, and in their attitude towards Indians the settlers vastly the worse of the two. Any notion of a British duty to India they dismissed as ‘execrable hypocrisy’.⁹⁹ The official class as well as the public at home was, he thought, a good deal ashamed of the frenzy of 1857, but the settlers not at all: they were still talking about all natives or niggers with ‘rabid ferocity’.¹⁰⁰ Decent mutual respect between the races, the most that in his opinion could be hoped for, was ‘simply impossible’ while the settlers behaved as they did.¹⁰¹ He was at first the guest of indigo planters, but was shaken by the violence of the ‘antinative journals’,¹⁰² and realized that the whole plantation economy ‘had become an instrument of intolerable oppression’.¹⁰³ An inquiry had to be held, and the evidence laid before it ‘proved the horrible tendency of the existing system’.¹⁰⁴ Trevelyan might have noticed more than he did the activity of progressive Bengalis in making the inquiry fruitful.

Planters had strong backing at home, and officials disliked them more than they interfered with them. After what had been brought to light about indigo, evils of a similar kind were allowed to gather round tea, which from the middle of the century was becoming the biggest commercial crop, pioneered and always mainly controlled by British capital and management. Suitable land for tea-growing lay in remote hill areas, the Assam valley being the best, where labour was scarce. Recruitment of ‘coolies’ from other parts of India formed a murky chapter in the history of the ‘indentured labour’ system which in many parts of the colonial world replaced the slavery that was being abandoned. Workers were easiest to procure from poor regions of hill or jungle like Chota Nagpur, where primitive, often aboriginal, communities eked out a bare existence. Native contractors got hold of them, frequently by trickery, and a great many perished on the way to Assam before any government regulation was imposed.

Planters could prevent coolies from going away before finishing the terms of years they bound themselves to, and employed bands of ruffians to maintain discipline, as big Indian landlords did on their estates; an instance of the level at which East and West were too apt to learn from each other. While tea-drinking refined English manners at home, tea-growing in Assam hardened and brutalized. In 1866 the Commissioner of Assam started some prosecutions, and expressed surprise that such ‘cold-blooded revolting cruelty’ could be perpetrated.105 From the 1880s Indian newspapers were agitating against the abuses. It was another of the issues that brought educated Indians to defend their humbler countrymen, and to feel disillusionment over Britain’s civilizing mission. Isolated and ignorant, a great proportion of them women, the workers were learning to defend themselves. In 1884 when a new manager who had ‘made himself unpopular by excess of zeal’ caned one of them, ‘the coolies retaliated and beat him severely’.¹⁰⁶

When modern forms of industry began British capital led the way, but with equally little desire to set a humane example. On the contrary it combined, as Western industry in the other continents usually did, the harshness of Europe’s own industrial revolutions with the harshness of feudalism. It was content to point out that in Indian-owned enterprises, most of them smaller and less efficient, conditions were worse still. This was true for instance on the Bihar coalfield, which like the tea districts drew on easily exploited labour, including men and women of backward tribes like Bhuiyas or Manjhis. They were enrolled and dragooned by native ‘sardars’ or gang-bosses, who squeezed money out of them on every pretext while the European owner or manager looked no further than his ledger. For such workers the cheapest living conditions were judged suitable; as late as 1939 an inquiry committee’s report described company housing as ‘the merest pretence of housing, incredibly dark, damp, ill ventilated, filthy, with no privacy or sanitation’. Few collieries employed personnel officers, and the report emphasized the ‘deep cleavage between the ranks and supervisory grades’, here as in Indian industry at large.107 This cleavage reproduced that between government and people in the political sphere, with the gang-bosses and contractors performing in their smaller way functions not unlike those of the feudal landlords and princes.

Missionaries and Indian Religion

In one of Quiller-Couch’s novels an East India Company man of the old days was suddenly gripped by remorse when on the point of sailing for home with his pile. He left the ship disguised as an old Indian beggar, was helped ashore by a light-hearted kick from an English seaman by way of good-bye to India, and spent the rest of his life as an ascetic in a cave in the hills.¹⁰⁸ No real Nabob, no planter, or mine-owner, is known to have succumbed like this. But Britain in the nineteenth century made as great a profession of Christianity as any European country, partly because it had the biggest empire; since then the two attributes have passed together to the USA. India thanks to its tormented past was the most religious country in Asia; Indians still make conversation about God as Englishmen do about the weather. Here was one meeting-point of interests, if an awkward one, and on the whole the contact between the two countries strengthened the religious proclivities of both.

Conservative Anglo-Indians after the Mutiny could forget their sins of omission or commission by putting the blame on indiscreet proselytizing, which they said had made Hindus and Muslims feel that their religions were under attack. Others argued on the contrary that British rule ought to have won allegiance by showing itself far more Christian than it had ever done. The Quaker journal, The Friend, which protested that ‘The cry for indiscriminate vengeance is a disgrace to a Christian nation’, called for wider promotion in India of both Christianity and commerce.¹⁰⁹ Even the best of Victorians were over-ready to regard these two as parallel roads to human felicity.

Missionary work was resumed, but under the long shadow of the gallows of 1857. Neither before nor after this date were conversions numerous. It was an accepted axiom that Muslims were impossible to convert, and Hindus were not much more malleable. Converts came mostly, as they had done from Hinduism to Islam, from the humblest classes, and a good many of them were Catholic: they were thus doubly cut off from official Anglo-India. But whatever their status they would not have been taken much notice of: no familiarity with the Bible, any more than with Shakespeare, could after the fact that a native was a native. Here again standoffishness had its good side; it deterred the growth of a multitude of ‘rice-Christians’ dependent on government patronage and serving as auxiliaries of British power, like a section of the Catholic minority that was growing in French Indochina. In a more roundabout way missionaries did bring the government some aid and comfort. Their work’s disappointing results made them feel, and through them the public at home, not precisely that Christianity was too good for Indians, but that Indians were too bad for Christianity, and, a fortiori, for self-rule.

Preachers whose sermons fell on such deaf ears could not help forming a darker view of Indian nature than the optimistic Carey, convinced that only official obstruction stood between the country and conversion. We have a picture of his heroic contemporary Henry Martyn, who went out from Cambridge in 1805 and died after many wanderings in 1812, preaching at Cawnpore to an audience of holy men disfigured by self-inflicted deformities, whose repulsive exterior was ‘but a faint emblem of their inward depravity and moral vileness’.110 Unpromising material indeed for an Anglican congregation; but men who identified Christianity with civilization and morality always saw things in these black and white terms, the West robed in light, the East clothed in darkness. One of them tersely summed up the Hindu character as ‘obsequious, deceitful, licentious, and avaricious’, adding that the worst hardship of missionary life was having to dwell among a people ‘destitute of all that is good, and distinguished by almost all that is evil’.¹¹¹ Another in a survey of the spiritual condition of Calcutta hinted at indescrible depths of wickedness among some of the Hinaus there.112 At the end of the century a missionary bishop was still laying it down that ‘The Hindu is inherently untruthful and lacks moral courage’.¹¹³ This was to ignore very much, including all the changes under way in the past hundred years; and the more condemnatory the missionaries grew, the fewer converts they were likely to win.

As the vision of a Christian India faded, effort was attracted more into social service, educational and medical work. This was invaluable, but it too brought Indians before the foreign eye in an unfavourable light. Panjabis were far from being the feeble shiftless creatures that ‘inhabitants of Eastern lands are supposed to be’, a Scottish Church mission allowed, but they were scandalously ‘indifferent and apathetic’ about health, or their children’s welfare; ‘they are essentially a dirty people, and have a great abhorrence of soap and water’.¹¹⁴ India’s faults, like Cassius’s, were set in a notebook, learned and conned by rote, to cast into its teeth; there was less alertness to faults of the imperial power, whose shelter alone made it possible for missionaries to preach at all. Some foreign workers may have been more sensitive to these British failings, but were not in a position to call attention to them; German Lutherans, for instance, living among the abjectly poor and sharing their poverty in order to reach their hearts,¹¹⁵ in a way that no British family could respectably do. It may have helped them with the Indians to be known as not British. Carey had been a radical, but preoccupied with evils of Indian society; his successors took no great part in protests against conditions on British-owned plantations or in British-protected States. The other clergy, those of the official establishment, of course took for granted that with statues of Queen Victoria on every hand things must be as well as in this bad land they could be.

Where all this was leading in the later years can be seen epitomized in an Englishman still remembered in Kashmir for his fifty years’ work there as pioneer of modern schools, Canon Tyndale-Biscoe. The contrast could hardly be more complete between Carey the shoemaker and this country gentleman who went out a century later. He personified what was coming to be called ‘muscular Christianity’, and made little distinction between the superiority of his religion and that of his nation or race. A firm upholder of all constituted authority, he had no sympathy with Indian nationalism, and not much with the unrest of the Muslim majority in Kashmir, though he could not help seeing how it was tyrannized over by the Hindu prince and selfish Hindu minority to whom British policy had abandoned the Valley. Modern schools would benefit directly only the well-off minority, and cynical Englishmen told Tyndale-Biscoe that it was a mistake to teach them, because ‘an educated thief is more dangerous than an uneducated one’.116 It was a sombre Kashmir that he went into, where ten thousand coolies were yearly conscripted to carry supplies over the ‘death road’ to Gilgit in the far north, and where an official could be seen torturing extra money out of a peasant with iron hand-squeezers.¹¹⁷ But his faith in God and the British Raj, under whose joint countenance these enormities took place, never wavered. He put them down to the foulness of human nature, and his remedy was to fashion a new breed of MEN (he writes the word often in capitals), by character-building discipline and manly sports, a small devoted band ready like Arthur’s Knights ‘to set wrong right, to defend the weak against the oppressor; in short, knight-errantry’.¹¹⁸

Such a man would see the bad side of Indian life more clearly than the good, and be repelled most of all by the ill-treatment he saw of women and of animals. Perhaps men of all nations are stung most keenly by criticism of their behaviour to their women, and an old judge once lost his temper with Tyndale-Biscoe and retorted that women were worse off in England.¹¹⁹ He had not been there, or he might have produced cogent evidence about how mill-hands and match-girls fared. The Canon could hardly know much about them. His relatives were Army and Navy men, and visits to other parts of the empire made him glow with pride. ‘Thank God for the British Navy!’ A brother of his had been in it as a midshipman, and helped to chase Arab slave-dealers: he then settled in Rhodesia, dug for gold, fought the Matabele and the Mashona, and ‘developed a great affection for the African’.¹²⁰

At bottom Tyndale-Biscoe’s was a pessimistic philosophy; and pessimism about India as a land too overburdened by its past for any regeneration, afflicted by woes that British rule could do no more than put some check on, was deepening among Englishmen of the more conscientious kind in the later years of the Raj. They were seldom aware of the contradictions between imperial self-interest and good intentions, but nationalism was putting them on the defensive. Those who were really trying to plough a small furrow in a land that seemed all stones and misery toiled on doggedly, in something like the spirit preached there ages before by the Gita, devotion to duty without thought of success or reward.121

One Indian reaction to Christian or Western strictures was to fall back on the claim of an inborn gift of spirituality, above vulgar material concerns. It supplied an excuse for lack of material achievement, and, to conservatives, for neglect of social reform. This morbid reaction helped to give Europe its semi-comic picture of the Hindu perpetually gazing at his own navel or climbing up a magic rope. More positively Christian pressure, which converted few Hindus or Muslims, led many to increase their efforts to put their own religious houses in order. On one side this revivalism meant an ominous growth of fanaticism; more healthily it gave new life to traditional charities, and colleges and hospitals were founded in emulation of those run by the missions. It even inspired Hinduism to renew its own activity abroad, after an interval of many ages. Vivekananda visited England in 1895 and 1896, travelled in Europe, and before his death in 1902 made neo-Hindu philosophy known there and in America.¹²² Western life, he once said, was gay on the outside, tragic within; Eastern life gloomy on the outside, inwardly carefree because it knew the universe to be only a divine plaything.¹²³ He was himself half-Westem, in being social worker and reformer as well as saint; he was also a patriot, who, as his English disciple and biographer Sister Nivedita records, had a struggle to reconcile his mysticism with ‘his love of his country and his resentment of her suffering’.¹²⁴

By that time Christian certainties, in many of the less muscular minds, were growing blurred, partly through finding themselves confronted with the certainties of other faiths. A few Europeans in India had always felt the attraction of its philosophy; not always laudably, as in the case of the man who was angry with Carey for attacking suttee and wanted to see this upstart rolled in the dust by some learned – and aristocratic – Brahmin.125 A Colonel Oswald who was out with a Highland regiment took up with some Brahmins and turned vegetarian, but subsequently joined the French Revolution.¹²⁶ Sir George Everest, who was there from 1806 to 1844 and rose to be surveyor-general and give his name to a mountain, went out at the age of sixteen, got into close touch with Indians and their thinking, and came home at last convinced that Christianity had no truths except those common to all creeds.¹²⁷ His niece Mary Boole credited the Indian mind with an intuitive perception of mathematical as well as spiritual principles.¹²⁸ It was out of such notions that Theosophy arose. Some critics accused it of pandering to reaction by being too tolerant of Brahminism and by expecting India to be rejuvenated by its own ancient doctrines, destitute they maintained of any ethical sense, any message of righteousness. ‘It is this,’ said one, ‘more than anything else, that keeps back the Hindus from attaining the place in the world that their intelligence and ability fit them to occupy.’¹²⁹

Yet Theosophy in its curious way, strengthened by a number of women less tied (like the suffragettes) than their men to hidebound opinions, did provide a meeting-ground of East and West, political as well as moral, at a time when the two were so far apart that only a species of flying carpet could bring them together. The Labour Party growing in England before 1914 might have been expected to provide a more rational and effective contact; but on India, then and later, it had scarcely anything different from the older parties to say.¹³⁰ Mrs Boole’s advice to India – to treat its British rulers as a set of noisy children, and ignore them except when they interfered with its sacred things¹³¹ – was not very helpful; but Mrs Annie Besant was actually beginning to play a considerable part as a leader of the Indian national movement. She had been a feminist and a socialist for years before coming under the spell of Mme Blavatsky, the Russian adept initiated in Tibet, and was never completely carried off her Anglo-Saxon feet by the balloon of the higher mysteries.

Imperfect Sympathies

Indian philosophy, whatever its merits, and most Indian sculpture, painting and architecture, were very old; and Europeans were free to think of this country as one that, like Greece, had once been great but had long ceased to create. Some new stirrings of genius, in Urdu poetry or the Bengali novel, went unnoticed. Still, the same Forbes who wrote on Rajput history132 was also in 1864 the first president of the Gujerati Sabha (Society), founded to promote the literature of the province and its study. In scholarship the work of the Asiatic Society went on, adorned by a line of distinguished orientalists. Not all Englishmen were philistines, and they left behind them a vast body of research into Indian history, geography, sociology, linguistics. By these investigations they were revealing India to itself, as well as to the world, giving Indians a tangible motherland to belong to in place of the shadowy Bharat of legend.

Indians were soon joining in the task, but here too there were obstacles to co-operation, especially in the field of history. Like the Muslim conquerors before them the British were bound to see Indian history from a standpoint of their own; and when Elliot a few years after the Mutiny planned his monumental collection of records it was avowedly with the design of showing Indian readers how barbarous and bloodstained their past was, and how fortunate they were to have been redeemed by Britain’s intervention.¹³³ With the rise of nationalism his work was vehemently assailed as a falsification of Indian history, calculated to embitter Hindus against their former rulers, the Muslims.¹³⁴ National sentiment crystallized round opposite assertions of past grandeur and prosperity, sometimes as subjective and inaccurate as anything in the British version. Forced to seek support among the masses, nationalism was under the usual temptation to rely on emotion instead of on a programme of social reform for their benefit. There was even some turning away from the Western intellectual tradition because of its association with foreign rule. Spaniards in the same spirit had rejected the enlightenment carried into their country on Napoleon’s bayonets.

No people is easily understood, and India had always been a separate world, hard for any outsider, Eastern or Western, to penetrate. It was a freakish destiny that brought it and England together. ‘Of all Orientals,’ wrote the censorious Burton, ‘the most antipathetical companion to an Englishman is, I believe, an East Indian.’135 Not all Britons felt this hostility, but nearly all felt the strangeness. ‘Two races could scarcely be more alien from each other than the English and the Hindus,’ said Seeley.¹³⁶ A temperamental affinity could be felt with the chivalrous Rajput, the sturdy Panjabi, the idol-hating Muslim; but these Indians were mentally the most stuck in the mud of the past, while the nimble-minded southerner, readiest for a jump into the present, seemed in all other ways the most un-European. G. O. Trevelyan saw more of Bengalis than of any others, and despaired of comprehending them. ‘Their inner life still remains a sealed book to us.’ To them, he conjectured, Britons must be a special race of demons, with an aptitude for fighting arid administration, but ‘foul and degraded’ in their habits.¹³⁷ In Bombay about the same time an English newspaper warned its readers not to lose sight of ‘the fact of our dense ignorance of the inner and instinctive feelings and modes of thought among large classes of the native community’.¹³⁸

Of what Englishmen were to Indians born a generation later, much can be gleaned from the autobiography of Nirad Chaudhuri, among all modern Indians one of those most fully saturated with European ideas. Growing up in a village of eastern Bengal, he and his boyhood friends were aware of Britain as of something immeasurable, ‘like the sky above our head’.¹³⁹ They took an intense interest in the Boer War, with minds divided between hope of British victory and defeat.¹⁴⁰ (A British sea-captain at Penang was told by way of a joke how loyally the Chinese there had felt during the war – ‘pig-tailed, sliteyed fellows talking of “we Britishers – our defeats – our successes’” – and commented briefly: ‘D—d cheek.’¹⁴¹) A few years more and Chaudhuri’s generation was feeling ‘an immense elation’ at the Japanese victory over Russia,¹⁴² as Asians did wherever a national movement was alight. In Calcutta he saw Indian spectators habitually beaten and knocked about by the police when crowds flocked to gape at British military or naval displays.143 In Tsarist Russia, with the same primitive exhibition of strength, spectators at a coronation would be thrashed or ridden down by the Cossacks.¹⁴⁴ Indians knew less about Cossacks, and the English were chronically nervous about Russian propaganda – Tsarist, later Soviet – and how India would act when the long-expected Russian invasion came.

Indian habits often seemed, not to Englishmen alone, Indian oddity; and the educated class was awkwardly suspended between two worlds, at home in neither. Arnold Wilson as a young cadet, priding himself on getting on well with Persians and Arabs, was stumped by Indians. He tried to make friends with two on shipboard, who always wanted tea when everyone else was having coffee and were ‘very self-conscious and rather apt to take offence at quite imaginary rebuffs’.¹⁴⁵ Collectively Indians had suffered too many real rebuffs, and the consciousness of not being masters in their own country was festering. A few individuals struck up friendships, of an odd sort as often as not, like the one between E. M. Forster, an exceptional Englishman only temporarily in India, and the eccentric little Maharaja whose private secretary he became – nominally an ally, not a subject, of the Raj. Forster was in India shortly before the Great War, and again shortly after. Writing home in 1921 he lamented that England was having to pay now for ‘the insolence of Englishmen and Englishwomen out here in the past … English manners out here have improved wonderfully in the last eight years. Some people are frightened, others seem really to have undergone a change of heart. But it’s too late.’¹⁴⁶

NOTES

1. Parties and Pleasures. The Diaries of Helen Graham 1823–1826, ed. J. Irvine (Edinburgh, 1957), p. 212.

2. G. Smith, The Life of William Carey (1909), p. 45.

3. A. F. Tytler, Considerations on the Present Political State of India (1815), Vol. 1, p. 270.

4. Preface by Raymond in 1789 to his translation of the Seir-Mutaqherin of Ghulam Husain Khan (Calcutta, n.d. (1903)).

5. H. Boyd, The Indian Observer (1798), p. 365.

6. T. B. Macaulay, ‘Warren Hastings’, in Critical and Historical Essays (8th edn, Edinburgh, 1854), Vol. 3, pp. 235–7.

7. W. M. Thackeray, The Four Georges (1855): ‘George the Third’, para. 2.

8. A. N. Barat, The Bengal Native Infantry (Calcutta, 1962), p. 247.

9. See on this N. C. Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), Book II, Chapter 4.

10. E. J. Trelawney,The Adventures of a Younger Son (1831), p.57 (World’s Classics edn).

11. Rights of Man (Part 2, 1792), p. 146 (ed. H. B. Bonner, 1907).

12. G. Smith, op. cit., p. 60. A Briton home from Bengal described its people as ‘Hottentots’ but without their virtues (The Asiatic Journal, Vol. 1, 1816, pp. 537–9).

13. Selections from Indian Journals, Vol. 2, Calcutta Journal, 1820 (Calcutta, 1965), pp. 363–4.

14. J. Capper, The Three Presidencies of India (1853), p. 474. The habit of defending British rule by painting India in the darkest colours showed itself strongly again in the last days of the Raj; see K. Mayo, Mother India (1927), and B. Nichols, Verdict on India (1944).

15. See Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), Chapter 14, where a rajah’s widow is rescued by the resourceful Frenchman, Passepartout.

16. Spaniards boasted of having cured their Indians of human sacrifice, idolatry, sodomy, etc. See e.g. L. Hanke, ‘More Heat and some Light on … the Conquest of America’, in Hispanic American Historical Review (Vol. XLIV, No. 3, August 1964), pp. 296–7.

17. On the Incas see T. J. Hutchinson, Two Years in Peru (1873), Vol. 2, p. 224, citing Garcilaso; on the Romans, B. H. Warmington, Carthage (Penguin edn, 1964), p. 25.

18. Maulana A. K. Azad, India Wins Freedom (Bombay, 1959), p. 107.

19. Letter of 7 December 1834, in Sir G. O. Trevelyan, Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (1876), Chapter 6.

20. Selections from Indian Journals, Vol. 2, p. 95 and pp. 85 ff.

21. John Marshall’s Notes on India (1670): Harleian MS.4,254, British Museum.

22. These vacillations in one province are described in K. Ballhatchet, Social Policy and Social Change in Western India 1817–1830 (Oxford, 1957).

23. Memorandum with Dr H. Prideaux to Archbishop of Canterbury, 27 March 1665, in S. A. Khan, Sources for the History of British India, in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1926), pp. 324–6.

24. G. Smith, op. cit., pp. 78, 145, etc.

25. ibid., p. 234.

26. The Asiatic Journal, Vol. 1, pp. 111–13.

27. ibid., p. 417.

28. H. Boyd, op. cit., p. 295.

29. Extract in The Asiatic Annual Register, Vol. 7 (1805). The prize of £100 had been offered by a clergyman at Calcutta.

30. See Iqbal Singh, Rammohun Roy (1958).

31. J. C. Ghosh, Bengali Literature (Oxford, 1948), p. 100.

32. J. M. S. Baljon, The Reforms and Religious Ideas of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (3rd edn, Lahore, 1964), pp. 53–4.

33. J. C. Ghosh, op. cit., p. 113.

34. Amit Sen, Notes on the Bengal Renaissance (Bombay, 1946), pp. 155 if.

35. R. H. Cholmondeley, The Heber Letters 1783–1832 (1950), p. 334.

36. Emily Eden, Up the Country (1866), pp. 122–3 (ed. E. Thompson, Oxford, 1937). A. Barat speaks of the ‘gradual, yet marked worsening in the relationship between the European officers and their sepoys over the period of 1796 to 1852’ (op. cit., p. 79).

37. A. Barat, op. cit., pp. 75 ff.

38. Leaves from the journal of a Subaltern (Edinburgh, 1849), pp. 25–6, 140, etc.

39. E. Eden, op. cit., p. 76.

40. L. J. Trotter, The Bayard of India (1909), p. 38.

41. A. L. Basham, The Wonder that was India (Indian edn., Bombay, 1963), p. 481.

42. J. Heiton, The Castes of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1859). Chapter 12 is on ‘Our Retired Indians’. ‘With no high caste originally of their own (we admit exceptions), they have gone to get one among a people of castes’ (p. 159).

43. Like the genteel London gathering ‘Of highest caste – the Brahmins of the ton’, in Byron’s Don Juan, Canto 13, stanza 83. The late Mrs Subbarayan told me an anecdote of Ramsay MacDonald when premier saying to her at a dinner that his son was ‘engaged to a Brahmin’.

44. Fifth Report from the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company (1812), Vol. 1, pp. 706–7.

45. cf. Patrick Geddes in India, ed. J. Tyrwhitt (1947). pp. 19–21.

46. A. F. Tytler, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. xv.

47. Major-General Sir W. H. Sleeman, Journey through the Kingdom of Oude in 1849–50 (1858), p. xxxiv.

48. W. Knighton, The Private Life of an Eastern King (1855), p. 122 (ed. S. B. Smith, Oxford, 1921).

49. Fifth Report, Vol. 1, pp. 758, 769.

50. J. W. Kaye, The Life and Correspondence of Major-General Sir John Malcolm (1856), Vol. 1, pp. 95–7, 102. It is noteworthy that the Life appeared one year before the Mutiny.

51. Sir J. Malcolm, The Political History of India from 1784 to 1823 (1826), Vol. 2, App. 8.

52. Sir J. Malcolm, The Government of India (1833), p. 57.

53. ibid., p. 163.

54. W. Knighton, op. cit.

55. ‘The Rural Population of Bengal’, in Calcutta Review, Vol. 1 (3rd edn, Calcutta, 1846), pp. 189–91.

56. J. Capper, op. cit., p. 478.

57. R. F. Burton, A Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1855), Vol. 1, pp. xii, 37–40 (Bohn Library edn).

58. J. W. Kaye, History of the Sepoy War in India (1865), Vol. 1, p. 565.

59. Competition Wallah (2nd edn, 1866), pp. 244–5; cf. pp. 342 ff. See also R. C. Majumdar, The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857 (2nd edn, Calcutta, 1963), Book II, Chapter 5: ‘Atrocities’.

60. See P. C. Joshi, ‘Folk Songs on 1857’, in Rebellion 1857, ed. P. C. Joshi (Delhi, 1957), pp. 271 ff.

61. H. T. Lambrick, John Jacob of Jacobabad (1960), p. 346.

62. G. O. Trevelyan, op. cit., pp. 124, 238, 240.

63. Article of 4 September 1857, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The First Indian War of Independence 1857–1859 (Moscow edn, 1959). p. 93

64. Captain G. F. Atkinson, ‘Curry and Rice’ (3rd edn, n.d.), 5th sketch.

65. G. O. Trevelyan, op. cit., p. 218.

66. See B. Ghose, ‘Bengali Intelligentsia and the Revolt’, in P. C. Joshi, op. cit., pp. 119 ff.; and S. B. Chaudhuri, Theories of the Indian Mutiny 1857–59 (Calcutta, 1965), pp. 120 ff.

67. M.R.Gubbins, An Account of the Mutinies in Oudh (1858), p. 84.

68. A Voice from India. An Appeal … by the Khojahs of Bombay …, by a Native of Bombay (1864).

69. ‘F. Anstey’, Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. (1897).

70. Lingam Lakshmaji Pantlu Garu, The Social Status of the Hindus (Benares, 1866), pp. 20, 35, 28.

71. G. O. Trevelyan, op. cit., p. 49.

72. ibid., p. 218.

73. ibid., p. 221.

74. ibid., pp. 50 ff.

75. ibid., p. 331.

76. Sarat Chandra Das. See his Narrative of a Journey to Lhasa in 1881–82 (Calcutta, 1885), and the edition by W. W. Rock-hill (1902); and my article on ‘India, China and Tibet in 1885–86’, in Journal of the Greater India Society, Vol. XIV (1955).

77. See on this period Hira Lal Singh, Problems and Policies of the British in India 1885–1898 (Bombay, 1963).

78. R. C. Dutt, cited in I. M. Reisner and N. M. Goldberg (ed.), Tilak and the Struggle for Indian Freedom (Indian edn, Delhi, 1966), pp. 260–61.

79. J. M. S. Baljon, op. cit., p. 71. For some less formal Muslim Indian impressions of the British and of Europe, see M. Mujeeb, The Indian Muslims (1967), pp. 491 ff.

80. I was told this by Colonel Prabjinder Singh, an old student whom I had the pleasure of meeting again in 1965. On the rebuilding of the army after 1857 cf. F. G. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence. British Imperialism in India (Princeton, 1967), pp. 176 ff.

81. D. Clouston, From the Orcades to Ind (Edinburgh, 1936), p. 21.

82. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook (1949), pp. 264–5 (Penguin edn).

83. I have failed to trace this story, and can only say that Kipling either wrote it or ought to have written it.

84. J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (1883), p. 342 (2nd edn, 1895).

85. Sir C. W. Dilke and S. Wilkinson, Imperial Defence (revised edn, 1897), p. 80.

86. Bithia Mary Croker, In Old Madras (1913), p. 11 (Tauchnitz edn).

87. Mrs Meer Hassan Ali, Observations on the Mussulmans of India (1832). She met her husband in England, and returned there after twelve years in India.

88. cf. the degraded status of the two Eurasians in George Orwell’s novel, Burmese Days (1934), Chapter 10.

89. See e.g. A. F. Tytler, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 296. The idea is luridly developed in K. Mayo, op. cit.

90. Somerset Maugham, op. cit., pp. 255–6.

91. Sudhir Ghosh, Gandhi’s Emissary (1967), p. 69.

92. G. O. Trevelyan, op. cit., p. 179.

93. J. W. Sherer, Havelock’s March on Cawnpore (1857), pp. 108, 151–2 (Nelson edn, n.d.).

94. A reminiscence of my friend Dr Nazir Ahmad of Lahore.

95. Mulk Raj Anand, The Untouchable (1935).

96. A. F. Tytler, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 351.

97. R. Reynolds, The White Sahibs in India (1937), p. 173 and n. 3.

98. Report of Select Committee on Progress and Prospects … of European Colonization and Settlement in India (1859) p. iii.

99. G. O. Trevelyan, op. cit., p. viii.

100. ibid., pp. 263, 255. cf. 256, on ‘a Reign of Terror’ directed by some of these ‘low Europeans’ in a big town.

101. ibid., pp. 349–50; cf. the brutal episode of which Trevelyan was a witness, p. 352.

102. ibid., p. vii.

103. ibid., p. 265.

104. ibid., pp. 365–6.

105. S. K. Bose, Capital and Labour in the Indian Tea Industry (Bombay, 1954), p. 72.

106. Cited ibid., p. 89.

107. Report of the Labour Committee, 1939.

108. A. T. Quiller-Couch, Hetty Wesley (1903), Prologues to Book I and Book III.

109. Editorial, January 1858. I owe this reference to my colleague Mr W. H. Marwick, a member of the Society of Friends and a student of its history. On Quaker interest in India in that epoch see J. H. Bell, British Folks and British India Fifty Years Ago (Manchester, n.d.).

110. Mrs Weitbrecht, Missionary Sketches in North India (1858), p. 401.

111. J. Smith, The Missionary’s Appeal to British Christians on behalf of Southern India (1841), pp. 149, 153.

112. J. Mullens, Foreign Secretary of the London Missionary Society, London and Calcutta Compared … (1868), p. 53.

113. H. H. Montgomery, Foreign Missions (1902), p. 35.

114. Rev. J. F. W. Youngson, Forty Years of the Panjab Mission of the Church of Scotland 1855–1895 (Edinburgh 1896), pp. 18, 275–6.

115. G. O. Trevelyan, op. cit., pp. 296–7.

116. Tyndale-Biscoe of Kashmir. An Autobiography (n.d.), p. 79.

117. ibid., pp. 126, 255–6.

118. ibid., p. 240.

119. ibid., p. 119.

120. ibid., pp. 250–51.

121. Like Alden, in E. Thompson’s novel An Indian Day (1927), p. 247 (Penguin edn).

122. See the collection of lectures given by him on his return from the West: From Colombo to Almora, ed. F. H. Müller (Madras, 1897).

123. Sister Nivedita (Margaret E. Noble), The Master as I saw him (1910), p. 139 (4th edn, 1930).

124. ibid., p. 59. The temple dedicated to Vivekananda is one of the sights of Calcutta today, and was designed architecturally to symbolize the unity of religions.

125. G. Smith, op. cit., pp. 250–51.

126. J. A. C. Sykes, France in Eighteen Hundred and Two (1906), pp. 70–71.

127. Mary Everest Boole (Sir George Everest’s niece), The Psychologic Aspect of Imperialism (1911), pp. 16–17.

128. ibid., p. 5, etc.

129. E. S. Oakley, Holy Himalaya (Edinburgh, 1905), p. 12.

130. See G. Fischer, Le parti travailliste et la décolonisation de l’Inde (Paris, 1966), and my article on this work in New Left Review (London), No. 42, 1967.

131. Mrs Boole, op. cit., p. 36.

132. A. K. Forbes, author of Ras Mala, on the history of Gujerat (1856).

133. See Sir H. M. Elliot’s Preface to India’s History as told by its own Historians, ed. J. Dowson, Vol. 1 (1867).

134. For a balanced view of this see S. H. Hodivala, Studies in Indo-Muslim History (Bombay, 1939), Preface.

135. R. F. Burton, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 37.

136. J. R. Seeley, op. cit., p. 213.

137. G. O. Trevelyan, op. cit., pp. 345, 347.

138. Bombay Times and Standard, 9 May 1861, cited in A Voice from India (see note 68).

139. N. C. Chaudhuri, op. cit. (Indian edn, Bombay, 1964), pp. 100–101.

140. ibid., p. 108.

141. J. J. Abraham, The Surgeon’s Log. Impressions of the Far East (1911), p. 88 (18th edn, 1933).

142. N. C. Chaudhuri, op. cit., p. 107.

143. ibid., pp. 297, 313.

144. M. K. Waddington, Letters of a Diplomat’s Wife, 1883–1900 (1903), letter from Moscow, 22 May 1883.

145. Sir A. Wilson, S.W. Persia (1942), p. 14.

146. E. M. Forster, The Hill of Devi (Penguin edn, 1965), p. 153.