In Britain in 1900 most people did their work with a roof over their heads. Farmers and fishermen obviously did not – nor did most rural folk – but the great majority worked under shelter in factories, mines, trains, warehouses, shops and offices. In India, by contrast, most of the British worked mostly out of doors, the chief exceptions being judges, bankers, businessmen and the civil servants who manned the secretariats. Almost every other profession demanded an outdoor life. India was crawling with surveyors – fiscal, cadastral, geological, mineralogical, topographical, trigonometrical – always on the move, always measuring things. Even the officials of the Opium Department lived and worked in the open. Richard Blair spent his entire career in the service, making his way up from assistant sub-deputy opium agent, moving from post to post in Bengal and the United Provinces, living much of his life in tents as he surveyed the poppy fields and the methods farmers used to cultivate their crop. Although described by a relative as a ‘superbly unadventurous’ man, at the age of thirty-nine he married a half-French girl barely half his age who came from a family working in Burma in boat-building and the teak trade. In 1898 the couple had a daughter, Marjorie, and five years later, at Motihari in Bengal, a son called Eric, who became a policeman in Burma; later he resigned from the service to become a writer and publish his books under the name of George Orwell.1
As we have seen, the district officer spent his summer as a magistrate sweltering in a court room, but in the autumn, after the monsoons, he put on his topi and became the collector, the man in charge of the revenue, whose job it was to tour his district and to see for himself what was going on, how the people were faring and how their crops were doing. On tour even his desk work was done outside, at a folding table under a tree near his tent, his dog at his feet, his chaprasis (messengers) hovering, and his clerks sitting cross-legged on the ground with inkhorns and bundles of paper. Before setting up this archetypal scene, the DO would have spent the morning riding through villages with Indian officials, inspecting the land and the buildings and talking to the patel, the patwari and local farmers. He would then have returned to his tents, had a bath in his zinc tub and eaten his tiffin while small groups of men congregated at the edge of his camp, litigants and petitioners, policemen (with prisoners) arriving with petty cases for him to try.
In much of India junior Civilians, the assistant magistrates or subdivisional officers, spent most of their year on tour, setting off in early November and returning to their station, if they got their timing right, just before the monsoon broke some time in June. As late as 1939 Maurice Zinkin was spending 210 days a year touring an area of the Bombay presidency still so remote that ‘shooting tigers which had been attacking the village cattle was a public duty’, though it was one at which he personally was ‘singularly ineffective’.*2 Seventy years earlier, Andrew Wingate had enjoyed his seven months a year on tour in the same province, ‘never knowing a dull day’ although he rarely met an Englishman or even spoke English during that time. Belonging to the intermediate generation in the Bombay service, Evan Maconochie appreciated ‘camp life thoroughly, the feeling of always being in the open air, the constant change of scenery and faces, the nature of the work and the feeling that you are doing something for the people about you even if it is in a very small way’. Although he often did ‘not see a white face for two or three months together’, his ‘seven months under canvas’ were ‘the pleasantest part’ of his life.3
The details of touring were amended over the years. By the 1930s much of it was done by motor car in the Plains, while in the Hills, in the tribal areas of Assam and the Central Provinces, officials sometimes took a portable gramophone, entertaining villagers with records of Jack Hulbert and Harry Lauder; in return a DO in the Lushai Hills might have to accept the headman’s hospitality and drink a lot of zu, the alcoholic beverage of the Hill Tracts. Yet the essence of the tour remained the same. It was the Civilian’s means of getting to know a district and its people and attempting to gain their confidence, which was always easier if he had some medical knowledge and some supplies for treatment. And it was good for him to leave his station, where he had spent the summer immersed in court cases, and go to the mofussil and encounter what Harcourt Butler termed ‘the orderly elements of the population’ or ‘the permanent and more agreeable side of oriental life’; later in his career, when he was governor of Burma, Butler reflected that ‘the world seems full of hope … when one is in the jungle’.4
A Civilian also got to know a district when he was made a settlement officer, a job that lasted three or four years during which he ‘assessed’ an area of some two or three thousand villages, surveying fields, computing yields and revenues, endeavouring to settle disputes about leases, tenancies and boundaries, and later writing an enormous report about what he had done. Yet another outdoor post for a Civilian was colonization officer, a man who was in charge of establishing and then regulating the ‘canal colonies’ of the Punjab created in the 1890s on the millions of acres of land irrigated by the Chenab and Jhelum schemes. He had to plan his colony, lay out the farms, roads and villages, and arrange for its new tenants – preferably solid yeoman types – to live productively and harmoniously with each other. Care was taken to group people coming from the same district into the same village and to keep Sikhs and Muslims apart. The chief task for one young officer in 1930 was to ensure that the tenants built themselves proper houses on the site allotted to them and lived in them instead of becoming absentee landowners staying in their old villages and coming to the colony just to harvest the crops.5
Going on tour was not something that was easy, quick or possible to do without a great deal of planning. Even a griffin on his first cold-weather tour would set off with eight or more bullock-carts carrying servants, tents and utensils; a DO or a commissioner might need as many as twenty-four of them, no doubt an impressive sight as they lumbered along in a line, although their maximum speed even on straight flat roads was only two miles an hour. We have seen that some district officers had to do their touring on camels, elephants and river launches, but most used horses for themselves and bullock-carts for their servants and equipment. As the carts were so slow, nearly everything had to be done in duplicate. While a Civilian sat listening to petitions outside his first tent, carts were already on their way to the next camp with his second so that it would be ready for him in the mango grove when he cantered up in the evening.
DOs would sometimes stay in a dak bungalow, where they might enjoy a shelf of old books and some out-of-date copies of Blackwood’s magazine, but they usually preferred their tents, which were provided by the government. These were not simple affairs that could be erected in a few minutes with a hammer and some tent-pegs. James Sifton, a young SDO, enjoyed his ‘gipsy life’ but admitted it was of a very ‘luxurious sort’. His father, he informed him, was mistaken if he thought his son and his fellow ‘tent-dwellers’ were in any way ‘roughing it’. ‘My tent is as big as your drawing room. I have a carpet, and a bathroom attached, and a verandah in front, tables, chairs, bed and everything comfortable’. An SDO would also have a kitchen, with plates, cutlery and lamps, a dog basket for his terrier and, if he had greyhounds, charpoys (string beds) for them to sleep on. As china was even more likely to be broken on tour than in his compound, he would probably eat and drink from enamel (unless he had heeded the memsahibs’ view that this was an error. ‘Enamel ware,’ pronounced Anne Wilson, author of Hints for the First Years of Residence in India, ‘is not pleasant to look at, nor palatable to drink out of, as the cup becomes too hot.’)6
Excluding family members and local officials who might join the cavalcade at certain stages, a DO’s retinue on tour would consist of some twenty people: clerks, servants and messengers. Even a forest officer would take a dozen men with him when camping in a forest: bearer, groom, cook, cook’s mate, sweeper, laundryman and half-a-dozen cartmen. The British were even more dependent on their servants on tour than they were at headquarters. Their cook would forage for vegetables in villages along the way and sometimes buy meat in a bazaar, although a glimpse of the village butcher’s, haunted by flies, often encouraged Civilians to bring their own meat supply with them. If they had Hindu servants, this obviously could not include cattle; Hindu coolies sometimes refused to carry even Oxo cubes because of the bull’s head on the packet. It was safer to take a small flock of sheep and hire a local Muslim butcher at the appropriate moment. Even in Hindu areas it was possible to bring a cow and her calf for milk, though the supply might be unreliable, and it would be dangerous if not boiled. Some men preferred to have buffaloes, but the best solution, especially for officials with children, was a goat, whose milk was non-tuberculous and safe. Clinton Dawkins, a forest officer who toured Burma with his wife, Enid, accompanied by their small sons slung in Moses baskets, thought goat’s milk the healthiest option for his children, but he kept a supply of alternative foods in case a tiger dashed out of the jungle and grabbed the goat.7
The tours of a governor or a viceroy were of course very different kinds of expeditions. Yet they had certain similarities, at least in intent, for the British were always trying to demonstrate their power with visits and inspections and displays of highly organized ceremonial. As early as 1866 Emily Eden was lamenting that the ‘splendour’ of a viceroy’s progress was at an end; she was remembering her years in India when her brother Lord Auckland was governor-general (1836–42), and she believed that the splendour she had known then had been destroyed because India had now ‘fallen under the curse of railroads’.8 Yet later viceroys and governors managed some fairly splendid ‘progresses’ by rail and, between the world wars, in a combination of trains and motor cars. We have mentioned Lord Goschen’s fondness for American vehicles, but a governor’s retinue and baggage could not fit into just six cars. For the journey from Madras to his summer capital of Ooty Goschen needed a train called the ‘stable special’ for his horses, silver and wine cases, although his bandsmen and their families would travel in the ordinary passenger train. A governor of Madras would not require his band or his silver when he was on tour from Ooty, but he would still need a butler, who travelled in a ‘lorry in charge of advance baggage’, as well as a wine butler, and a pastry cook as well as ordinary cooks. He was often entertained by other people – in a club, a Residency or a raja’s palace – but on the Plains he did most of his touring in a special train, which included a dining car and needed a staff.9
The governor’s military secretary (who was in fact a soldier acting as a social secretary) would arrange and then print the tour programme in advance, with details of visits, timings and uniforms to be worn. In their 1925 tour of the south-west of the province – Cochin, Tinnevelly, Travancore and the Anaimalai Hills – Lord and Lady Goschen divided their duties: while he was at the Hindu College of Tinnevelly, she was at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital; when he visited the Arts and Science Colleges of Trivandrum, she went off to the Maharaja’s College for Women. Together they inspected the Periyar Dam and the new harbour in Cochin, they visited tea estates and planters’ associations, they received delegations and listened to lengthy addresses, and on several occasions they were garlanded by ‘Indian worthies’. Among the garden parties, state banquets and other social occasions was a meal with the Bishop of Travancore and Cochin, which failed to impress one of Goschen’s ADCs, Captain Portal, who described it as ‘a sticky lunch (teetotal)’.10
Such tours created a great deal of work not only for a governor’s entourage but also for the people nervously waiting to greet it and desperately hoping that nothing would go badly wrong. If a governor was ‘in his old clothes’ because he had not been warned that a large guard of honour was waiting for him somewhere, the resulting crisis might sour a visit.11 When in 1922 George Lloyd, the governor of Bombay, ‘signified his intention’ of visiting Karachi and doing some shooting at Christmas in Sind, Civilians at the commissioner’s headquarters realized that their holidays would be ruined. One of the governor’s ADCs then sent a list of what His Excellency would require in his tents, which included fireplaces, a hatstand and ‘superior carpets’, demands which, according to Madge Green, who organized the bachelor commissioner’s social life, left ‘everyone … extremely fractious and peeved’. When Lloyd arrived, Madge’s social life was ‘a perfect whirlwind’ of garden party, state dinner and various lunches. Her ‘whole time’ seemed to be spent in ‘tearing wildly from one function to change one’s frock for the next, and at that function discussing the weather in all its aspects’. What was the point of such visits? Even Curzon’s private secretary, Walter Lawrence, was sceptical of the value of viceregal tours. They were so formally prepared and so rapidly completed; so much time was wasted going shooting and sightseeing; so little was achieved at receptions and state dinners; and officials were so nervous about meeting the viceroy and answering his questions that they were tongue-tied or said silly things.12 Yet it was good for the viceroy or governor to get away from Government House and look at different parts of India: it may have been good for people to see him and feel that he was taking an interest in their affairs; and it was probably good to keep officials on their toes.
Forest officers in Burma were teased by their colleagues in other parts of the empire for being ‘one tree men’, people who had no interest in any timber except teak trees and who had no professional programme except to protect them from fire.13 In the solitudes of the forests of Upper Burma a man might easily become obsessed by teak, and not only because it was a valuable wood for ships and furniture and contained a useful preservatory oil. He would spend much of his life searching for it, selecting the right specimens, choosing the moment when they were ready to cut, and later trying to ensure that the timber reached its destination without being stolen by river thieves. One retired forest officer, who acted as a steward at the annual show of the Bath and West Society, was almost overcome when a little rain fell on the exhibited furniture, and the aromatic scent of teakwood ‘tantalized’ his senses and made him remember his first days in the jungles of Asia. Others like him remained haunted by the beauty of the giant trees, their tops often invisible in the morning mists, by the vastness and mystery of the forests, the freshness of the air, the daily marches under bamboos that arched and swayed fifty feet above them.14
Clinton Dawkins was rather a ‘one tree’ person but fortunately he was married to Enid, the daughter and sister of forest officers, and she was also an enthusiast; in retirement they both gave lectures on teak to the Arts Guild and the Women’s Institute at Little Baddow in Essex. His uncle was another Clinton Dawkins, a friend of Curzon at Balliol who had served as finance member of the Viceroy’s Council before leaving Calcutta to work for Pierpont Morgan’s interests in London. The nephew also went to Balliol,* at his uncle’s expense, and in 1908, after his training in Germany, he went out to Burma, working his way up from assistant conservator of forests to deputy conservator and finally conservator in Pyinmana. ‘Clinton loves Burma,’ reported Enid to her mother, ‘and gets so annoyed with those numerous people who are always grousing at it.’ In the dry weather, from November to April, he toured the forests; during the rains he worked as an instructor in a forestry school, teaching Burmese students how to make maps, build bridges and lay out cart roads in the hills.15
Before he met Enid, Clinton went on tour with a fellow forest officer and a team of ‘elephant wallahs’, porters and ‘dak wallahs’, postal runners who ran through the forest with the mail, quite easy targets for tigers and bears even when they carried a spear. After a long morning of inspections, he dealt with his correspondence and then went out on an elephant to try to shoot a deer or a jungle-fowl for the next day’s supper; the undergrowth was so thick that it was impossible to see anything at ground level. ‘Without any feminine influence,’ he informed his mother, he and his colleague ‘always put on ties for dinner’; they also regularly brushed their hair and shaved every two or three days (a rare ritual for a jungle wallah). At nights they tied their dogs up inside a tent so that a panther would not steal them, then sat around a large camp fire with the rest of the party before going to sleep on a hard bamboo bed.16
Winter and early spring were the seasons for ‘girdling’ teak. It was ‘not a gregarious tree,’ noted Dawkins, by which he meant that it did not grow in clumps, where it would have been easy to find and to cut down. A suitable specimen for felling, which had to have a girth of at least seven feet, might be found only once in two or three acres of forest, and then often in precipitous terrain, surrounded by other trees and very dense undergrowth. As it was often hard to find, a forest officer would ‘let loose’ a ‘gang of half wild jungle folk with orders to search’ for large teak trees and ‘to shout when they had found one’. After he had selected a suitable tree, the officer marked it with a special hammer and then instructed a man to cut a deep girdle all around the trunk, through the bark and the living sapwood to the heartwood, thereby preventing sap rising from the roots. This effectively killed the tree but, as it did not ‘season’ very well when left lying on the ground, it was left standing until it became light enough to float down a Burmese river.
It was a ‘tragic sight’, Dawkins admitted, to see a great tree droop and die, and it looked even more tragic when he returned to the site three years later and saw ‘the gaunt white skeletons of the giants that had been girdled in readiness for this day … twig-less, bark-less and bare’. The officer had returned to keep an eye on the timber firms that had undertaken to saw up and remove the dead wood, and to make sure that no ungirdled trees were added to the crop. Bullocks were sometimes used by the firms, but elephants, though more expensive to keep, were much stronger and more effective in dragging the logs down hillsides into a watercourse that would be flooded during the monsoon. Elephants would be used again to sort out the inevitable ‘log-jams’ blocking streams and ravines and even rivers, the logs jumbled up in their hundreds and at all angles; as Kipling’s soldier remembered, ‘Elephints a-pilin’ teak / In the sludgy, squdgy creak / Where the silence ’ung that ’eavy you was ’arf afraid to speak!’ When the logs finally reached the rivers, the Irrawaddy or one of its affluents, they were caught and tied up into rafts, some two hundred together, their raftsmen living on them in little thatched huts as they floated down to a revenue-collecting station, where a forest officer saw them for the last time, assessing and charging the government’s royalty before letting them pass on to their destination, the timber firms’ depot and sawmills in Rangoon.
In retirement at Little Baddow, Clinton Dawkins was often asked what a forest officer or jungle wallah actually did – ‘go around the trees and prune them?’ As an official was in charge of a forest block of 1,200 or even 2,000 square miles, personal pruning would have had limited effect. His role was more that of inspector, touring his woods to see how they should be protected, how they could be improved, to plan what roads and bridges might be needed for the coming year; during the rainy season he returned to his desk to scrutinize proposals, prepare the estimates and write the inevitable report. Forest officers are often assumed to have exploited and even ‘plundered’ their areas for the benefit of the Raj, but in fact such plundering took place earlier, the work of speculators and timber merchants, before the establishment of the Forest Service and before Lord Dalhousie wrote his important memorandum on forest management and conservation in 1855. Yet jungle wallahs did of course have to try to balance the duty of conservation with both the needs of forest-dwellers and the economy of India. Apart from teak for boats and furniture, and other timber for railway sleepers and building poles, he had to encourage the production of ‘minor forest products’ such as lac or shellac for making gramophone records, and tendu, whose leaves were used to wrap tobacco and create bidis, the poor man’s cigarette. He himself would have a small team of Indian clerks and subordinates, but the large workforces in the forest were those of the big timber firms such as MacGregors in Burma, which employed two or three thousand men and 600 elephants for their operations. Elephants were useful too in time of war. Under the supervision of ‘Elephant Bill’ Williams, a senior forest officer, hundreds of the animals and their riders were taken out of timber work and used to build the bridges and roads needed to get large numbers of Indian refugees across the Chindwin and out of Burma along the Manipur route in the spring of 1942.17
The forest officer’s early job title of ‘superintendent’ was changed to ‘conservator’ of forests to reflect his primary duty. As Dawkins explained, ‘his basic principle [was] to allow no more to be taken out’ of the forest ‘than is replaced by nature, or by himself in replanting’. If it took a hundred years to grow a good tree, explained another jungle wallah, ‘then a forester is not justified in cutting more than a hundredth part of the growing stock annually’. The problem was that nature, animals and other human beings often conspired to remove a good deal more than 1 per cent. Natural regeneration could not take place if the dairy cattle of Darjeeling were turned out to graze in the forest; nor did a young plantation stand a chance of surviving if black bear were in the area ready to claw around the bark of each tree. Yet in established woods fire was a much greater danger than bears: each year about 4,500 fires in Indian forests were reported. In the woodlands of the Terai on the Nepalese border the forest officer’s Indian workers abandoned their boss in late March or April, after the Holi Festival, when malaria became prevalent in the area. Sainthill Eardley-Wilmot thus spent the dry season almost entirely alone, in the middle of an inflammable forest, alert for a glow at night or a plume of smoke in the day, waiting for reports from district fire-watchers and knowing that there was not much he could do before he found relief with the first burst of the monsoon.18
Forest officers recognized that local people needed bamboo and wood to build themselves houses and to use as fuel, but they had little sympathy for ancient woodland practices: they certainly refused to condone the ‘immemorial custom’ of kumri, of tribal hillmen burning patches of forest. In Burma Dawkins saw them sowing rice in the ashes, flooding the area, taking the crop, and then moving on. Up in the Terai Eardley-Wilmot found large tracts felled and burned to clear undergrowth for hunters and give graziers a crop of young grass. In central India James Best had to contend with the Baiga tribesmen, who had the ‘greatest contempt for tillers of the soil’ and who descended with their axes in the dry season, cut down and burned numerous trees and then chucked a few handfuls of seed on to the ashes.19 For such officials, who came from a country of settled agriculture in a temperate zone – and whose jobs were all about managing, improving and exploiting woodland – the practice of ‘shifting cultivation’ was anathema, and they made little attempt to understand it. Yet this type of agriculture was less haphazard than it appeared and, if practised over a large area by small numbers of people, was in fact an ecologically sustainable system of cultivation.
The experiences of a forest officer on tour were much the same as those of a district officer, except that he went to even more remote places and saw even fewer of his fellow countrymen; he also spent more time on elephants. Jungle wallahs who toured in both India and Burma testified to the relative luxury of the former existence: ‘the duplicated outfit of tents and camp-furniture laden on many carts, the horses and traps, the troupes of servants, and the patriarchal herds of cows, sheep and goats’, compared to the usual Burmese situation of two servants and three elephants in a primeval forest without roads and often without paths.20 One jungle wallah who did not care how primitive the conditions were was William Horsley, a Civilian who worked both for his official boss, the collector, and for the conservator of forests in the province of Bombay. Relishing his ‘very Bedouin sort of life’, he spent his time inspecting jungles, demarcating forest reserves and slipping away with his greyhounds to shoot something for supper. When offered a desk job that would have accelerated his promotion in the service, he rejected it because he preferred ‘independence and the healthy out of doors life’ that he led as an assistant collector ‘in charge of the Khandesh Forests knocking about his jungles in stained brown raiment, rifle in hand, often from early dawn to sunset, eating his breakfasts under a tree by the side of a running stream’.21
Most forest officers seem to have been happy in their wilderness, appreciating the charm and mystery of the hill forests, especially when they married and had children with them in camp, playing with pets such as mouse-deer and riding on the backs of elephants. Yet without a family the loneliness could be oppressive and even frightening. James Best did not mind his nickname of ‘Jungly’, but he realized that it was ‘not good for a man to go wholly “jungly”’, having dinner in his pyjamas and not bothering to shave, living on his own with nothing to do in the hot weather except stalk wild animals and keep a look-out for fires. Forest officers were encouraged to shoot game because the activity helped them get to know their woods and the people who lived in them. Before his marriage, Best recalled, it also ‘helped to save one’s reason’ because at certain seasons of the year it was his ‘sole recreation in a very lonely existence’.22 Yet even that solace was forbidden to one senior officer who seems to have spent too much time by himself in the jungles. He had become a believer in ‘transmigration’, he announced at dinners in camp; as a result he had decided to give up shooting for ‘fear of killing his deceased ancestors’.23
The East India Company never regarded policing as one of its priorities. For most of its existence it relied on a local militia to keep some sort of order in the presidency towns. In fact one cannot speak of a police force organized in any recognizable way until the middle of the nineteenth century when Bombay appointed a superintendent for each district. Bengal took its policing more seriously after the Rebellion, and within a few years the Indian provinces had established a senior hierarchy, ascending from assistant district superintendent of police (the rank at which British men joined the service after passing the exams in England) to inspector-general. In 1909 there were 670 officers (almost entirely British) within these ranks. Below them were thousands of sergeants and constables, mainly Indian but including a number of Tommies who had joined up because they wanted to stay in India.
The salaries of the new police officers allowed them to live reasonably well. A district superintendent might earn about half what a district officer was paid, yet in the mofussil even an inspector could afford a large bungalow and a dozen servants. The police service may have been less prestigious than the ICS, but it was not socially demeaning, not like being a tradesman or a planter. A police officer’s wife could even become a ‘master’ of the Ooty Hunt; Bombay’s commissioner of police might even be an Old Etonian and a graduate of Christ Church. It was hard, of course, to stay solvent as a junior officer, as it was for a subaltern. And while army officers received free medical care for themselves and their families, policemen (like Civilians) had to pay for their wives and children. As a junior police officer in Delhi in the 1930s, the married Vernon Bayley could only make ‘ends meet by reading the six o’clock news on Delhi Radio’.24
A district superintendent’s routine had much in common with that of a district officer (inspections) and an army officer (inspections and parades), inspecting the stables, the quarter guard and the police hospital, then taking the mounted police out for a cross-country ride. More varied work included hunting down bandit gangs in forests, pursuing tigers and panthers that had acquired a reputation for being ‘man-eaters’, and keeping an eye on fairs and pilgrimages, which provided fertile opportunities for pickpockets to operate disguised as sadhus and fakirs. These were also occasions for things to go wrong or get badly out of control in the form of stampedes, epidemics or asphyxia in a small and overcrowded temple: during the annual pilgrimage to Pandharpur in the 1880s, one of Superintendent Coles’s most important duties was pumping air into the ‘Holiest of Holies’.25 After the First World War the police had to deal increasingly with political and communal problems such as Hindu–Muslim rioting, the Moplah Muslim rebellion in Malabar against Hindu and British targets, and the rise, in defiance of Gandhi’s wishes, of violent political nationalism, especially in Bengal. Between 1930 and 1932 several police officers were assassinated in Dacca, Calcutta and Midnapore.
The urban work of a policeman had other, often seamier dimensions, especially in ports inhabited by different grades and species of ‘low life’. Traffic control took up much of Peter Hansen’s early work in Calcutta at the beginning of the twentieth century, but he was soon transferred to an area that included ‘Chinatown’, where he had to deal with gambling booths, opium dens and cocaine-smuggling, all of which survived and prospered thanks to the corruption of Indian policemen. All this happened in Bombay too, where until 1888 the police commissioner had the additional burden of running the city’s fire brigade. Fortunately the police in that city had some remarkable chiefs. We have already met the Eurasian Charles Forjett, who was brought up in India, spoke the vernaculars of Bombay and was a master of disguise; after a governor of the province, Lord Elphinstone, challenged him to get past all the sentries and staff at Government House, he turned up in the governor’s bedroom the following morning in the guise of a sweeper. One of his successors was Hartley Kennedy, who liked to dress up as an Arab, or even as a purdah nashin, a Muslim woman with a veil, and wander about the city at night, checking the behaviour of his officers at their police stations. Another commissioner with an intimate knowledge of Bombay was F. A. M. (‘Fatty’) Vincent, whose father had been commissioner in the 1890s, and whose knowledge of Marathi had come from his ayah. According to one of his subordinates, his language was colloquial and even indecent in its jests, but it ‘was not without a useful effect when dealing with people like the millhands of Bombay’. It also had its uses in dealing with crimes connected with prostitution.26
The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 brought many advantages to Bombay, increasing its trade, wealth and population. It also brought prostitutes from eastern Europe and their attendant pimps or procurers and ‘fancy-men’. Once the shipping companies had established their routes via Port Said – ‘an asylum for the riff-raff of Europe’ in the description of yet another Bombay commissioner – these people had an easy voyage to the city, and they soon established themselves in brothels along Grant Road and its neighbourhood. From time to time the police made efforts to deport the pimps, but they were generally content to let the women stay as a ‘necessary evil’. It was better for them to be in Grant Road, where they were controlled by a ‘mistress’ who housed and fed them and took 50 per cent of their earnings, than to be independent, ‘liable to thieve and quarrel’, looking for custom in restaurants or on the race course, and walking the streets of the European quarter.27
For purposes of protection, pimps and prostitutes naturally turned to policemen whom they thought they might be able to corrupt. In the early twentieth century several of the Bombay women were Jewish Russians, and so were some of the pimps. So also was Inspector Simon Favel, who had been born in Odessa, had become a naturalized British subject, and who liked to boast that he was ‘the only Jew in the Police who had won’ the King’s Police Medal. During the First World War, ‘Fatty’ Vincent recorded that Favel had been his ‘right-hand man’ in dealing with enemy aliens. He soon discovered that his inspector was also good at dealing with people for sexual and financial profit. With the help of Indian witnesses, including a tailor known as ‘Barny’, an hereditary dressmaker to the prostitutes of Bombay, Vincent was able to map out the hierarchy and chronology of the European procurers in the city. One Jewish Russian known as Adolph had been the ‘go-between’ for the police and the prostitutes, greeting the women from the ships, taking them to the Hotel Balcon, and introducing them to the ‘mistresses’ of the brothels. After his death he was succeeded by another, called Toster, who soon had a rival, Maurice Finckelstein, who allied himself to Favel, by now (1909) regarded as the unofficial supervisor of the European prostitutes. The two of them managed to force Toster out of Bombay and over to Karachi, but later they quarrelled over their portions of extortion money, and the inspector managed to get Finckelstein deported on the orders of Fatty Vincent.
Favel was now effectively the ‘godfather’ of the underworld. According to the evidence of brothel managers as well as Barny, he took commissions on everything, even when a bordello changed hands. Deportation, or the threat of deportation, was an especially lucrative business. After he had expelled a Japanese pimp, he received regular payments from Japanese girls and procurers who were anxious to stay in India. He deported Sophie, a German woman, but not Mina, an Austrian subject who gave him enough rupees to be allowed to remain. He also permitted another Austrian woman, Fritza, to stay because she married a British subject called Shalome. He may also have been influenced by the fact that Fritza had once been his mistress, though fidelity and sentimentality were not usually his strong points. According to Barny, he frequently visited ‘the brothels for the purpose of enjoying the girls’, though ‘on these occasions the Mistress of the House herself pays the girl so honoured. Mr Favel pays nothing.’
After surveying the evidence, Vincent summoned Favel, suspended him, and told him that he would be holding a departmental inquiry into the charges. His subordinate made no attempt to deny them. Instead, after begging the commissioner to let him resign, he handed over both a written letter of resignation and the King’s Police Medal he had been awarded only the year before. Vincent was lenient. In a letter to the Bombay government he explained that he had abandoned the plan of holding the inquiry because he ‘considered it highly impolitic publicly to disgrace, however much he might deserve it’, an officer who had so recently been lauded. The government of India was not impressed by this reasoning. Its secretary in the Home Department believed that, while a scandal would have been embarrassing, ‘the ruthless exposure of evil doing and heavy punishment of the culprit would inspire confidence in the public that Govt is determined to prevent such abuses’. In the circumstances he felt that Favel had been ‘fortunate in escaping a criminal prosecution, and still more fortunate in being allowed to leave the service without the public disgrace of dismissal’. Subsequently the government hoped it might be possible to deport Favel (as he was a naturalized British subject, it was not) or at any rate ensure that he would not receive a pension. The Bombay government assured it that he would not. Probably Favel had made enough money not to need one.28
Another city with a multi-ethnic society and the usual goings-on of a large port was Rangoon. An inadequately manned police force tried to control the brothels on the waterfront, the gambling dens across the city, and the lucrative trade in pornography, but its most complicated problem was its opium dens, which were concentrated in ‘China Town’ though they proliferated beyond the urban limits. In India users of the drug usually chewed a less harmful hemp known as ‘ghany’, but the addicts in Burma, many of them Chinese, smoked pipes of opium. Bill Tydd, a British police officer, spent much of his time in the 1930s raiding these insalubrious dens. Whenever he did so, he felt ‘more sorrow than anger for the emaciated and decrepit smokers lying around on filthy couches or floors, invariably looking years older than their real age’.29
The Indian Imperial Police had in Burma two unusual officers who both left the force to become writers. The first was Hector Monro, who was born in Burma in 1870, the son of a British Army officer. When his mother died, soon after his birth, his father took Hector and his older siblings to England, deposited them with their unmarried aunts at the family home in Devonshire, and returned to take up a new post as chief of the Burmese Police. According to the memoirs of Hector’s sister, Ethel, the aunts were imperious and bad-tempered, and their regime may have contributed to the streaks of cruelty and cynicism that underlie the witty and light-hearted stories Hector later wrote under his pen-name Saki. Acceding to pressure from his father, the boy followed his brother into the Burmese Police and spent about a year near Mandalay. After half a dozen fevers and a bout of malaria, he was invalided home, never to return.30
His Burmese experience appears to have had virtually no effect on Saki’s literary output. Very different was the case of Eric Blair, whose years in Burma inspired his novel Burmese Days and helped to form his ideas on politics and colonialism. As we have seen, Blair had been born in Bengal, where his father was a government official, but he had come home with his mother and sister and was educated (at reduced fees) at Eton, where he made a reputation as an independent-minded boy at ‘College’, the boarding house of the school’s scholars. Although he did not do enough work to gain a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge, his subsequent choice of career was odd: there would have been several openings more obviously appealing to an intelligent Old Etonian than life as a colonial policeman. Yet later it was remembered that at school he had often talked about ‘the East’, and he gave one friend the impression that he longed to go back there.31 In any event he applied to join the Indian Police and chose Burma as his province because of his mother’s relations there.* In 1922 he went to London to take the necessary exams, doing fairly well in the academic subjects but so badly in the riding that he was placed near the bottom of the list of successful candidates. A few weeks later he sailed to Burma to join the ninety British police officers who tried to keep order in that enormous province.
Blair spent five years an an imperial policeman in Burma. After learning his profession at the police training school at Mandalay, he was posted to the Irrawaddy Delta and thence to various other stations, including Moulmein, before he was sent to Katha in the forested hills of Upper Burma. There he got dengue fever, a debilitating disease for which there was no apparent cure. He applied for sick leave, and when this was approved, he sailed for England in July 1927. Like Monro, he never returned to Burma.
Eric Blair was a competent and well-paid policeman who liked the people and the landscapes of Burma. But he did not like the job, or at least the imperial essentials of it. He accepted that the British did some good things in the country: they ‘constructed roads and canals’, they ‘built hospitals, opened schools, and maintained national order and security’. Yet for him the relationship between Burman and Briton was all wrong: it was that of servant to master, and however good that master might be, it was not a relationship that he now wished to be part of. In his years abroad he had become increasingly sensitive about the hostility of the Burmese people, their ‘accusing looks’, the behaviour of young Buddhist priests who seemed to have nothing ‘to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans’. During his illness at Katha he realized that he could no longer continue a career as an agent of imperialism. So he went back to England, resigned the service, and told his parents that he wished to be a writer, a profession for which he had hitherto shown little aptitude. Richard Blair, who had spent thirty-five years in his Indian service, living alone for three-quarters of that time, was appalled. His son’s plan, he believed, sounded like that of a ‘dilettante’ – almost the last word one could associate with the character of the future George Orwell.32
Officers in the sappers and engineers were the most highly trained men in the Indian Army. Educated at Addiscombe Military Seminary and Chatham Royal Engineers Establishment, they were elite figures in Victorian India, able to enjoy a range of professional opportunities often only loosely connected with warfare. Lieutenant-General Sir Richard Strachey fought only in a single military campaign, the first Sikh War of 1845–6. The other seventy years of his service in India and work on Indian matters in London were spent digging canals, building railways, inspecting irrigation, investigating famine and administering public works. Completely unqualified though he was for the job, he even became finance member of the Viceroy’s Council in the late 1870s, deputizing for his brother John, who had to return to England for an eye operation.
Like Strachey, Jack Shaw Stewart was an engineer who became a general without seeing much combat: his activities in the field were limited to commanding the Madras Sappers in the expeditionary force to China in 1860 and directing various siege operations around Peking. Again like Strachey, he was in India during the Rebellion but did no fighting (he was stationed in unrebellious Madras), and like his colleague he devoted much of his career to railway engineering, famine relief and administration in the Public Works Department (PWD). A more military life was led by Richard Baird Smith, although his first job in the Bengal Engineers was the removal of a shipwreck in the River Hooghly. He spent most of his subsequent career in canal work and was sent to Lombardy to study irrigation (after which he published Italian Irrigation in two volumes) before he was appointed director of the Ganges Canal. Yet he was several times recalled to do the job he had been trained for, military engineering, and he took part in both Sikh wars, his involvement including ferrying troops with their artillery and baggage trains over the great River Chenab. In the Rebellion he held the crucial post of chief engineer at Delhi, responsible for maintaining and strengthening the defences of the British forces on the Ridge outside the city. During the final and successful assault on Delhi’s walls in September 1857 he saved the day by persuading General Wilson, the indecisive British commander who was inclined to withdraw, to remain resilient and press on.
One parallel career much practised by engineers was civil architecture. Those who went to Addiscombe had absorbed the rudiments of the art at the seminary, but their predecessors had been largely self-taught, basing their designs on books and treatises. As governor-general, Richard Wellesley had set a trend by appointing the unknown Captain Wyatt rather than Calcutta’s civil architect to build Government House, which he did to a plan based on a Palladian design also used for Robert Adam’s scheme for Kedleston in Derbyshire. The building inspired similar designs, even for Indian rulers, such as the nawab of Bengal’s palace in Murshidabad, built in 1837 by Duncan McLeod of the Bengal Engineers. The East India Company certainly encouraged its engineers to diversify: after several years of poor health (in India) and injury (while recuperating in Tasmania), Arthur Cotton was given a rest from his irrigation schemes along the River Cauvery and told to build a church in a healthy spot further north in the Godaveri delta.33 Some engineers managed to become distinguished architects. After a decade working for the PWD in Rajputana and as a field engineer in Aden, Lieutenant Swinton Jacob made a study of Rajput architecture that resulted in the formation of the Indo-Saracenic style he used for a series of remarkable buildings in Jaipur, Bikaner and other towns of the north and north-west; after his retirement as a colonel in the Indian Army in 1896, the Maharaja of Jaipur retained him as an adviser and superintending engineer in his state. Yet more often engineers made competent rather than inspired architects. There was just too much eclecticism in their large rambling buildings: a veneer of Venetian Gothic here, a touch of Swiss chalet there, some stern Scottish baronial somewhere else, and then on top, dominating the medley, an Italianate tower inspired by Prince Albert’s designs for Osborne on the Isle of Wight.
The Indian Army’s custom of allowing its most talented engineers to spend their careers designing buildings or digging canals was criticized by people who accused them of forgetting that they belonged to a military corps and were essentially soldier-engineers. Even Shaw Stewart, who was one of the elect, railed against a system in which a young officer was sent, as soon as he arrived in India, to a station in the interior, where for years his duties were purely civil, where he was not called on to do a day’s military duty or to wear uniform or ‘do anything which may in any way remind him that he is by profession a soldier’. Such a man almost invariably regarded ‘his military duties as of secondary importance’ and, although aware that he might be called upon to perform them, he would sometimes consider himself ‘unfortunate in being selected for service in the field’. In any case it was ridiculous for engineer officers to be sent on active service ‘without having had any previous knowledge or experience of their men’. Here Shaw Stewart was arguing from an informed position. Until he was sent to China, he ‘had never done duty with the sappers’, and outside Peking he ‘felt very greatly the want of a previous acquaintance with the men under [his] command’.34
No doubt he had a point. Yet Baird Smith’s career had shown how a good officer could successfully oscillate between civil and military work. And it would have been a great waste to keep educated engineers in barracks when they could be usefully employed in digging canals. Two engineers who each spent over thirty productive years working on large irrigation schemes were Proby Cautley and Arthur Cotton, who both went to Addiscombe in 1818. Like the younger Baird Smith, Cautley interrupted his work to visit northern Italy, where he studied drainage and distribution systems, and then returned to his principal project, the construction of the Ganges Canal, a massive waterway 350 miles long (excluding hundreds of miles of branch canals) that was built without any kind of mechanical assistance. While Cautley seems to have been motivated by a constructor’s ambition, to build bigger and better than anyone else, Cotton was inspired by a clear humanitarian vision. After witnessing the effects of a famine in 1833, he saw irrigation as a moral duty, a benefit that India’s rulers were obliged to provide for their subjects. His canals, aqueducts and dams along the Cauvery and Godavari rivers – two of the three great river systems flowing east from the Western Ghats – enormously increased the prosperity of the adjacent farmland. In 1987, forty years after Independence, a statue in his honour was erected in the state of Andhra Pradesh.35
Like canals, railways could also absorb the life of an engineer officer educated at Addiscombe or later at the Royal Indian Engineering College at Cooper’s Hill in Surrey. George Rose of the Public Works Department began his career in 1877 as an assistant engineer of the Indian State Railways and occupied a variety of other railway posts – executive engineer, deputy manager, superintendent of works and engineer-in-chief at Hyderabad – before retiring in 1904 as a consulting engineer to the government of India in Calcutta; while working on the Sind–Pishin Railways between 1884 and 1887 he won, according to his obituary in The Times, the ‘confidence of the gangs of wild border men – Afridi, Waziri, and Baluch – upon whose good will and exertions much of his subsequent success depended’.36
Railway construction expanded at such a rate after 1860 that the Indian Army could not possibly provide all the engineers needed to build all the lines and tunnels as well as the great cantilevered bridges over the rivers. Technicians, hired by contractors, were thus sent out from Britain to work on specific projects without the obligation of remaining in India after their work was done. Mark Carr worked on the Jubbulpore railway extension in the 1860s but then left India to build a railway in Hungary before becoming general manager of the Rio Tinto Mining Company in Spain. His contemporary Henry Le Mesurier, who had done his apprenticeship building breakwaters in Guernsey, also worked on the Jubbulpore scheme but later left India to work in Egypt and eventually become president of the Board of Administration of Egyptian Railways.37
Work as a maintenance engineer on the railways and canals meant a lonely, arduous and often anxious existence. As an assistant engineer on the nizam’s railways at Hyderabad, Cyril Lloyd Jones found himself always on the move, touring the lines on his ‘trolley’, inspecting tracks and bridges and seldom spending more than a day or two a month at the cantonment at Secunderabad, the base where he could relax and play tennis at the club. He had gone to India because he wished ‘to widen [his] engineering experience’ and because he was ‘attracted to an open air life with a spice for adventure’. He certainly found adventure during the monsoons, which brought the danger of floods damaging the line, collapsing the walls of a reservoir and washing away the girders of the piers of a bridge. Yet he loved the life, ‘being in the jungle and free of social demands’, with comforts limited to oil lamps, a rough cot and a canvas bath, and the day ending with camp fires and ‘the odour of burning wood’. When describing his routine in letters to his fiancée, Kathleen, he evidently exaggerated ‘the charms of life on line, trundling slowly along on a trolley through the heat of the day or tramping through the jungle with a gun’. As a young wife, Kathleen soon discovered that living alone (Lloyd Jones was always working) in an ‘antique rest house with a thatched roof harbouring all kinds of vermin and snakes’ was not ‘a glamorous alternative to consorting with interesting and amusing people of her own age, interspersed with theatres, concerts and art exhibitions’. In fact, according to their son, she became so ‘miserably unhappy’ and lonely that she ‘seriously thought of leaving her husband and returning to England’.38
The routine of a canal engineer was no friendlier to married life than that of a railwayman. He would have his own bungalow, often in an isolated and sometimes malarious spot somewhere along the line of his canal. Yet he was usually not in it, for his was a job that required him to be frequently on the move, staying at resthouses built along the banks as he checked the distributaries in the growing season, ensuring that each village received its share of water for its crops; he also had to see that the water in the canals flowed fast enough to prevent weeds growing on their beds but not so swiftly that it eroded the banks. Other professions gave their workers respite during the monsoon, but not his. He could not take a summer holiday when there was a risk of canals bursting their banks, flooding the countryside and endangering lives.39
Many British engineers working in India were not ‘covenanted’ officers like Cotton and Cautley, Strachey and Shaw Stewart. Without the job security provided by Chatham or Cooper’s Hill, they would go out to work for some company, which might sack them or go bust, leaving them to drift about on the Subcontinent, finding one job after another, often in different fields, finishing up in some backwater, cheroot in hand, telling yarns and never thinking of going ‘home’ to that street in Clacton or that cottage near Lyme Regis. John Beames found one such fellow, George Faulkner, who had ended up running the canal workshops at Cuttack in Orissa.
He looked like an old lion, a grand, jovial, coarse, hard-drinking old Viking, full of songs and jokes and highly improper stories. Utterly reckless and wild about money matters, always in debt, always full of wild schemes, and yet this rough old creature had the most exquisitely delicate taste as a designer, and the greatest skill and fineness of touch as an artisan. He painted, he carved, he moulded; he designed buildings, boats, bridges; he grew the most beautiful flowers, planned and laid out the most lovely gardens …
Faulkner and his sons read literature – they ‘loved their Ruskin’ – and his daughters, who had been sent to France, spoke French ‘with a pure Parisian accent’. Yet although he had lived in India for forty years, the father ‘could not speak a dozen words of any Indian language’. He was ‘thoroughly English in manners and feelings’ and spoke of England ‘with pride and affection’, yet he had no desire to return to a land where, so Beames believed, he would have been unhappy, out of place and misunderstood. For him India had become ‘a second mother-country’, and he needed to stay there.40
The indigo planter, it was said, lived and dreamed on horseback. ‘That noble animal’ dominated his life. He used it for work, for sport, for transport and for recreation; he admired it in action and in its stable; and it ‘formed the staple of his conversation’.41 Planters of indigo lived such isolated lives that they were prepared to ride forty or fifty miles for a party. At their ‘meets’, their occasional ‘get-togethers’, they would rise from a night’s feasting and go careering after polo balls, charging after wild boar and racing across the countryside. They were numerically a very small set, at their maximum size barely 200 of them in India.
Gerald Ritchie was a young magistrate posted in the 1870s to a district in Bengal dominated by the indigo business. Staying one night at a ‘palatial indigo bungalow’ and listening to stories about the crop and the Rebellion, he realized that the planters were a different type from any he had so far come across in British India. They were ‘rough, daring, practical colonists’, both cheery and resourceful, ‘great heroes in their own eyes’, though some had ‘an unpleasing note of excessive self-assertion and bravado’. In Ritchie’s description, their day at the ‘factory’ began very early with a long ride ‘round the cultivation, varied with a gallop after jackal, till the sun was straight overhead’. These activities were followed by ‘a bath and a very heavy breakfast [tiffin] with cool beer and whisky pegs’, followed by ‘a smoke and a game of billiards’ until ‘everybody went to bed for a siesta under the flapping punkah’. The sleep was succeeded by a drive or a polo match, which was followed by more pegs, ‘another bath, dinner with more beer and whisky, and sitting out in the cool [of the evening] with more pegs’. Observing this routine, Ritchie was not surprised that ‘the planters presented a sturdy, red-faced appearance, bubbling over with bucolic health, full of strange oaths, and delighting in practical jokes’.42
This narration might have been coloured by the fact that Ritchie was one of those overworked Civilians who believed, probably rightly, that nobody laboured as hard as they did. Other accounts suggest that the morning ride and the ‘gallop after jackal’ were in fact a fairly thorough inspection of horses, bullocks, ploughmen and cultivated land, which might last five hours, and that, although in the hot weather a siesta was permitted, this was followed by a spell with the office accounts and an evening inspection of the work done since the morning.43 In any case inspections were concentrated over quite a limited period, in summer when the crops were actually growing. In late June or early July, depending when the rains were expected, the planter had to oversee the cutting of the crop, its loading into carts, its conveyance to the factory and its emptying into a large number of vats. The steeping of the indigo, the beating of the water containing the dye, the subsequent boiling to improve the colour, followed by repeated straining until the grains were large enough to be collected and pressed into cakes, was a long and complicated process. When the violet-blue substance was finally dry, it was cut into cubes, packed into chests and sent by boat to Calcutta, where it was sold at auction and exported, mostly to Europe and America.44
Indigo was the earliest of the British plantation crops in India, long before coffee and tea, because an indigenous industry had long existed, although it was by then in decline. Encouraged by the East India Company, planters arrived in the late eighteenth century from Scotland and the West Indies and set up their factories in areas of Bengal that later became part of the state of Bihar. Although capable of engendering large profits, indigo was always an unpredictable business, prone to speculation and to market collapses when production was excessive. The crop was also dependent on the coming of the rains at the right time and in the right quantities; it would be fatal if it was still unripe when the waters came down. Like many other enterprises in the Indian plains, indigo plantations were in perennial danger of flooding. Twelve of the fourteen factories belonging to one indigo planter in Bengal were washed away in a single flood in 1878.45
A further problem for indigo farming was poor ‘industrial relations’, the worst in India, more acrimonious even than in the jute industry. Although the East India Company had encouraged the planters to come to India, it had refused to let them buy land there. Later it eased the restriction, but the system of plantations, as known in the Caribbean and later in East Africa, did not exist in India. The planters built the factory, processed the crop and sold the product in Calcutta. But they seldom owned the land on which it was grown, though they might sometimes lease it from a local zemindar. Nor did they have a relationship with the growers (peasant cultivators or ryots) like those of landowners or industrialists in other places: the ryots were not their serfs or their tenants or their sharecroppers or their factory workers. The usual system was for the planter and the ryots to make an agreement whereby he would advance the money to grow the indigo and would later buy it from them at a fixed price. It was when the ryots believed that the price was too low and chose to grow something more profitable, such as rice, that the problems began. Planters seldom believed in conciliation, or even in negotiation, and they were prone to using ‘bludgeon men’ to enforce their will upon the ryots. Their intimidatory behaviour was such that only a tough Civilian magistrate could stand up to them.
One of the reasons the ICS was disliked and distrusted by British planters was that it was regarded as inherently pro-peasant and pro-native. In Nadia in Bengal William Herschel was considered to be ‘excessively sympathetic’ to the ryots; so was John Beames in the same province. When he was posted to Purneah in eastern Bihar in 1862, Beames realized that his ‘duty was to see that the ryots were not oppressed’ at the same time that he tried to ‘keep on good terms with the planters’. In that area, where the indigo growers were usually quite amenable Eurasians, he succeeded. In his next posting, Champaran in north-western Bihar, he did not. Many of the original planters of the region had made enough money to return to England, leaving their estates in the hands of ‘rough, uneducated men, hard drinkers, loose livers and destitute of sympathy for the natives’. When Beames discovered that one of the principal managers in Champaran, a man called Baldwin, was using methods of eviction and forced labour to cow recalcitrant ryots, he decided he had no option but to confront him with a summons, impose a 500-rupee fine, and threaten to jail him if he did it again.46
Yet even a tough magistrate could not leave a legacy that endured. Planters remained so obdurate and exploitative that they inspired Gandhi to visit Champaran during the First World War and launch his first campaign of satyagraha (civil disobedience). At the end of the previous century their industry had in any case received a devastating blow when synthetic indigo was invented in Germany, aniline dyes that could be produced and sold very much more cheaply than real indigo. The business had been in trouble for some time, and some planters had diversified with sugar cane, another unreliable crop in India, but it was now in the long run doomed. Exports to the United States halved in the last four years of the nineteenth century. Gandhi’s opponents enjoyed a limited revival during the war, when the German invention was unobtainable, but they could not last, even if a couple of them survived for a while by exporting indigo to China, where carpet-makers preferred it to the synthetic dye.47
The chief problem for the planters was that the decline of their industry left them without assets. They did not often own the land, which could still be used for other crops, but they did own the factories, which were now useless. The British managers departed in search of new occupations, but the old planting families which had intermarried tended to stay put, living in crumbling mansions among empty factories and half-empty stables, hemmed in by a jungle that was gradually reclaiming the land that their ancestors had cleared.
Coffee and tea were more attractive crops to invest in than indigo or indeed opium. And for the cultivator it was more pleasant to work in the hills of Assam, in charge of a generally docile workforce, than to be in the Bengal plains dealing with resentful ryots. Yet no crops were immune to risk. Rubber plantations could be wrecked by elephants, cinchona (grown to produce quinine to combat malaria) could be undercut by Dutch rivals, tea seedlings could be destroyed by white ants, red spiders, crickets and ‘China blight’, and coffee could be damaged by borer insects and leaf rust, especially the Arabica variety brought from Yemen to Ceylon in the seventeenth century and subsequently cultivated by the British in southern India. Furthermore, while it might be cooler and healthier (if often malarious) in the hills, planters there were as isolated as anyone anywhere: they had to live on the estates they managed rather than congregate in towns. When in the 1840s William Knighton gave up coffee planting for journalism, he knew he would not miss ‘the leeches and solitude, the coolies and the lonely bungalow’.48
Coffee in India, which was produced in the south, in Mysore and the Nilgiris, never enjoyed the success of tea, whose planters, working at a harder and higher altitude, liked to sneer at coffee as ‘an orchard crop for idlers to grow’. In the late nineteenth entury it suffered from competition with the produce of Brazil and central America – and from the fact that the British themselves preferred to drink tea – yet it remained the planters’ principal crop in south India until the First World War. Tea cultivation, which had no history in India, first appeared in Assam around 1840 and then spread to Kumaon and the Kangra Valley, and later to Darjeeling. Yet the gardens were established with such speed and recklessness that the ‘tea rush’ ended in a ‘collapse’ and numerous bankruptcies in 1865. As demand in Britain was still on the increase, the industry picked itself up and expanded again, now also in the south, in the Nilgiris and in the High Ranges of Travancore, an area so effectively colonized by its planters that as late as the 1950s it was regarded by some as ‘white man’s country’, a place where the men grew tea, played rugby and fished for trout.49
Planters required patience and stamina and the strength to combat loneliness and ill health. Before a tea garden could be established, an area of jungle had to be cleared, usually with elephants, and a bungalow, a factory and shelter for the coolies all had to be built. One year of preparing the land and putting in the plants was followed by a second of tending and pruning the bushes, and it was only in the third year that plucking could begin, the leaves then going through various processes of rolling and fermenting before they were dried and packed in chests for sale.50
In 1881 there were fewer than 800 tea planters in India. As so often, there was a disproportionately high number of Scots, many of them with nicknames such as ‘Mac’ and ‘Wee Jimmy’, in this case largely because so many tea gardens in southern India were owned by the Glaswegian firm of James Finlay. ‘Glasgow’ might order Mac to make a new garden by felling, clearing and planting an area of jungle subsequently known as ‘the new clearings’. Or it might put him in charge of an established garden of some 300 acres, which had a factory, an estate office, a doctor and a small bazaar to cater for his Indian assistants, clerks, sirdars (who marshalled the workforce) and some 400 workers of both sexes. Mac began his working day at six in the morning with ‘muster’, sometimes announced by the blowing of a great conch shell – ‘a melancholy penetrating booming noise’ – after which he watched the sirdars take their gangs of coolies off to their allotted tasks. Like other planters, Mac would spend much of his day on horseback, supervising the work, perhaps like Mr Tolson, ‘a funny old card’ in the High Ranges who in the 1920s rode about, led by his ‘horse-keeper’, with ‘a big Trichy cigar in one hand’ and a ‘large open black umbrella in the other’. Eric Francis, one of Finlay’s men, would have preferred to ride a motorbike, but he also did his inspecting by horse because it ‘raised him to the ideal height above the fields’. One day of the week, Friday, was known as ‘Teaspit Day’, when ‘the week’s crops were subjected to formal group tea-tasting at HQ’.51
Mac would probably begin his career, and perhaps also his married life, in a decrepit bungalow with sparse wooden furniture, surrounded by jungle, with his nearest British neighbours five or six miles away along hill paths, and the nearest club even more distant. Most men in Mac’s position tended to combat their loneliness by occasional loud and exuberant forays into ‘matey’ social life, with ‘great drunken binges’ and ‘incredibly rough horseplay’, especially after games of rugby.52 Witnesses from outside the planters’ society often described its members as ‘raucous’ and ‘rowdy’. John Beames described those in Bengal as ‘rough, rowdy bachelors, hardly fit society for ladies and gentlemen, and all disposed to be hostile or at least unpleasant to officials’. Henry Cotton, who as chief commissioner in Assam had a good view of their habits, noted what vast amounts they drank of Bass beer and ‘brandy pawnee’.53
Hospitality and heavy drinking were perhaps inherent in the lives of planters of all sorts, an essential antidote to the routine and monotony, a reward for missing out on what people in Britain might take for granted – friendships, a social life, a visit to the pub and the music hall; they seem to have been a way of reassuring themselves that the sacrifices they were making (the loneliness, the bad climate and their frequent ill health) were worthwhile, that in spite of all the hardships they could live like barons on a magnificent scale. In the winter months, after the indigo had been dispatched, its planters liked to throw open the doors of their large two-storeyed ‘bungalows’, which they had sometimes castellated and usually surrounded by a park with mango groves. Their parties would last for three or four days, riding and hunting in the light, followed by feasting, dancing, billiards, card-playing and of course yarning into the night. One guest at an indigo mansion in Bengal in the 1870s described a ‘breakfast’ (presumably tiffin) with consecutive courses of ‘Nawabee Pillaw’ (piled on lamb or chicken), local and ‘splendid Biktee and Ruhoo fish’, wild duck in a savoury stew, ‘plump quail’ and ‘plumper ortolan’ (a bunting) and ‘piquant Bombay duck’ (a kind of dried fish). Another guest, the writer Emma Roberts, noted forty years earlier the ‘air of barbaric grandeur about these feasts’ that reminded her of what she had ‘read of the old baronial style of living’.54
Even the critical John Beames appreciated the ‘open-hearted, lordly hospitality’, the scale of living, the swarms of servants and animals, the indigo patriarch with his elephants and his horde of children, especially one genial planter with a paunch who would sometimes ‘take up a little coffee-coloured imp that was crawling about the veranda and look at it for some time before he was certain it was one of his offspring or not’. That particular patriarch, whom Beames referred to as ‘Joe’, was British-Indian, like most of the planters in Purneah, people who had been in India for two or three generations, who were seldom tempted to visit England, and who sent their children to schools in Darjeeling, Lucknow and Calcutta. Stubborn and independent though they often were, these men were easier to deal with than British planters and managers whose ancestors had not been in India. The latter too were friendly and generous, offering free meals to strangers, but as Beames soon realized when he was shown around the district of Tirhut, there was a glaring ulterior motive. They hoped to subvert the district officer by gregarious hospitality, but if that was not enough (and it seldom was enough), they aimed to cow him with a display of wealth and power to demonstrate that they and not the civil authorities effectively ran their district.
Beames described the tea planters of Bengal as being hostile or unpleasant to officials. Almost all planters seem to have been so. They had acquired the sense of independence of pioneers, of men with a sort of frontier mentality, rugged individuals who were determined to run their lands and businesses without the interference of meddling officials. Many of them, especially the indigo planters, were essentially ‘Indianized’ – most did not dream of retiring to England – but Indianized in a ‘settler’ sense, as men confident that they knew the land, knew the people who lived on it, and knew how to run the one with the other. Notions of ‘native’ rights or social reform or any kind of trade-union bargaining were completely alien to them. They were convinced that the only way to make the ryot or the coolie work was coercion, a policy that all too frequently involved physical force. If a DO tried to defend plantation workers, he could expect animosity and intimidation: one tea planter threatened to shoot any official who even attempted to inspect his tea garden.55 The lamentable consequence of such behaviour was that, when they were taken to court for maltreatment of their workers, planters often received extremely light sentences, sometimes a fine of a few rupees for a thrashing that had caused terrible injuries.
Before 1813 no British missionaries lived and practised their calling in British India. They might live and work for missions in other parts of India, as the Baptist William Carey did in the Danish settlement of Serampore, where the Protestant Danes were partly funded by the English Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. Yet they were not allowed to work in British India until their allies in the British Parliament forced the East India Company to end its restrictions on missionary activity in its territories.
Until the Charter Act of 1813, Christian ceremonies in the EIC’s dominions were performed by the Company’s chaplains, men who carried out the duties of an eighteenth-century parson to British congregations without excessive energy or zeal; the Church of England did not have a bishop in India or even an archdeacon. The East India Company had no desire to anglicize India or convert it to Christianity, and it was determined to avoid alarming Hindus and Muslims by giving them the impression that it did. Yet by the early nineteenth century there were enough Evangelicals at Westminster to insist that Indians should hear their message, however alarmed they might become. Their most powerful advocate was William Wilberforce, the politician and orator who claimed that, after the slave trade, ‘the foulest blot on the moral character’ of Britain was its irresponsibility in allowing its Indian subjects ‘to remain … under the grossest, the darkest and most degrading system of idolatrous superstition that almost ever existed upon earth’.56 One of his closest allies was Charles Grant, a former civil servant in India who had become an Evangelical Christian after two baby daughters had died there of smallpox. On his return to England, where he became both an MP and a senior director of the EIC, he argued that Hindus were so ‘exceedingly depraved’, so mired in superstition and vice, that Britain had a moral duty to introduce them to Christianity.57 This became the core Evangelical position on Hinduism: the religion was cruel and obscene, its scriptures (the Vedas) were also obscene, and so it was no wonder that its practitioners were cruel and lascivious, burners of widows and killers of female babies.
The 1813 act heralded two significant changes in the status of Western Christianity on the Subcontinent. The Church of England was now given a structure with a bishopric created for Calcutta and later two more for Bombay and Madras; the metropolitan see of Calcutta eventually became so enormous that in 1877 a new diocese was made at either end, in Lahore and Rangoon. More influential for the inhabitants of India was the arrival of the missionaries. When the British ones were finally allowed in, they faced a good deal of competition. Theirs was in fact the only occupation in the Subcontinent in which Britons were outnumbered by rivals from other parts of Europe and the United States.* The first Protestant missionaries were the Danes, but Catholics had long preceded them; Jesuits were working from the sixteenth century in Goa, where the Portuguese authorities used them and the Inquisition to make forced conversions of thousands of Hindus. During the nineteenth century a bewildering variety of European missions descended on India, such as Swedish Seventh Day Adventists and the Berlin Women’s Association for the Education of Females in the Orient. Yet the country that provided the greatest number of missionaries was the United States, whose Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists and others spread out to the three corners of the Subcontinent, to Assam and Burma, to the Tamil country in the south, and to the Punjab soon after the area was annexed by the British. Some observers were surprised that citizens of a country where slavery still flourished should be preaching the Christian message so far from home. Yet American missionaries were extremely persistent and fairly effective, especially Baptists working among the Nagas from their mission at Kohima in the north-east. Less effectual was a branch of the Assemblies of God at Basti, east of Lucknow, where the missionary, an elderly lady called Miss Gager, toured the area playing evangelistic records on her gramophone.58
The Church of Scotland sent several talented preachers to set up missions in India in the 1820s, but the Kirk’s impact was blunted by the Disruption or schism of 1843, when its adherents split between those who remained within it and those who entered the new Free Church. In Bengal all its missionaries immediately joined the Free Church, which possessed no place where they could work or worship, while the established Kirk kept the colleges and mission buildings although it had nobody to live in them except three chaplains of the East India Company. The Disruption did not, however, deter Presbyterian enthusiasts from training at the established universities or, if Congregationalists, at the Glasgow Theological Academy, and then setting out for India. In England the largest training colleges for early-nineteenth-century missionaries were the Church Missionary Society’s Institution in Islington and the London Missionary Society’s Seminary at Gosport. Other prominent suppliers were the Bristol Baptist College, the Newport Pagnell Evangelical Institution and the Wesleyan Theological Institution for Methodists.59
The activities of Christian missionaries in India took the form of proselytizing, educating and looking after the health of the people they had chosen to live among. Yet until 1830 the proclamation of the gospel, by preaching or by reading the Bible, was almost the only activity of missionaries in India. Their work later expanded to include education and, a generation later, medical care. The Rebellion convinced many people, in the administration and elsewhere, that proselytism had been a mistake, that ‘tampering with native religions’ had been one of the main causes of the terrible war. Yet many missionaries remained unconvinced: now was the time, some of them insisted, to redouble their efforts. Two years after the fighting had ended, the newly married Beatrice Batty set off for India, under the auspices of the Church Missionary Society, to promote ‘the kingdom of our blessed Lord among the nations still in heathen darkness or in ignorance of the gospel of Christ’.60 Fifty years later, there were still missionaries who believed that Hinduism could be overcome, that its ‘simple’ adherents could not indefinitely ‘bow in worship’ before the ‘bloodthirsty’ Kali, the destructive Siva, the sensuous Krishna and ‘the gross, elephant-headed god’ Ganesh.61 Even so clever a man as J. E. C. Welldon, bishop of Calcutta from 1898 to 1902, believed that a ‘native prince’ might become a ‘Constantine or Clovis’ and ‘by his personal influence or example convert’ India to Christianity. The prelate had been better suited to his previous job as headmaster of Harrow. He was so out of touch with India that he could not understand why Queen Victoria, their ruling sovereign, should be more popular with its inhabitants than Jesus Christ.62
Missionaries were seldom very popular with their compatriots. Queen Victoria herself, who felt maternal about her Indian subjects, especially the Muslims, said towards the end of her life that she ‘wished the Mohammedans could be let alone by missionaries’.63 Officials in India usually found them a nuisance and their activities dangerous; most of them shared the views of George Clerk, the two-time governor of Bombay, who believed that British rule could only be ‘securely maintained’ if it was administered ‘in a spirit of tolerant and reasonable respect for the usages and the religions of the different nations and tribes there’.64 In an article on ‘India and Christianity’ in the Theological Review in 1869, the Civilian Henry Beveridge admitted that missionaries might be ‘honest and god-fearing men’ who were good linguists and who came to India ‘for other purposes than to make a fortune’. But he did not wish for any more preachers and proselytizers, who were quite ‘mistaken when they imagine that they will ever convert the Hindoos’.65
Some missionary work was unobjectionable, even in Civilian eyes. If the London Missionary Society wished to subsidize Benjamin Rice’s two decades of revising a Kannada translation of the Bible in the mid-nineteenth century, the activity was no doubt harmless, if also rather futile (it had to be re-revised twice more by other scholars before the century was out).66 At the end of the eighteenth century William Carey had established a mission at Danish Serampore where with two assistants he embarked on the astonishing task of translating the whole Bible into Bengali, Hindi, Marathi and Sanskrit, as well as long portions of it into other Indian languages and dialects, including Kashmiri and Assamese. Impressive though the endeavour was, this one also turned out to be fairly futile. By the end of the nineteenth century not one of these volumes was still in use; the entire works, noted one missionary scholar, were ‘obsolete’ and ‘unserviceable’, ‘inaccurate in language’, ‘imperfect in idiom’ and ‘so faulty that they had to be replaced by completely new versions’.67
Another single-minded figure was George Shirt, who decided in his twenties that the translation of ‘the sacred scriptures’ into Sindhi was to be the main objective of his life. First, however, he had to learn Sindhi and its complicated script, then he had to produce a grammar of the language (which had not been done before) as well as compile a dictionary (which also did not exist). He then, according to his biographer, began ‘to elaborate the Sindhi Bible’, though he diverted himself along the way with translations of the Book of Common Prayer and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, always a favourite with Protestant missionaries.68 He died aged forty-four in 1887, a year after he had opened a new mission at Quetta.
Other aspects of Shirt’s missionary work were more controversial. In the hot weather (for some unknown reason) and with the Indus in flood, he and his ‘little band of evangelists’ would tie their boat up ‘at some convenient point’ and then ‘wend their way on foot to the nearest village’ or ‘enter the gates of some ill-savoured, insanitary city’ and start preaching in the bazaars, where they were hoping (but failing) to emulate the success of ‘that prince of itinerant preachers, St Paul’.69 According to an American tract of 1850, a missionary’s duties included ‘arguing with Brahmins, mingling with the thousands [of Hindus] who were congregating at annual festivals, and warning them of their sin and danger’.70 As we have noted, the young Gandhi found such behaviour at Hindu fairs unendurable, but few missionaries thought they were being provocative or wondered whether they themselves would tolerate ‘little bands’ of mullahs or Brahmin priests preaching at Canterbury or along the pilgrims’ road to Compostela. They did not seem to consider that they, belonging to a race that ate beef and drank alcohol, were bound to be regarded as innate enemies of the Hindus.71
The British might find missionaries annoying when they objected to badminton on Sundays or attempted to impose fines on men who used swear words in a club.72 Those involved were certainly angry – and embarrassed – when in the 1890s members of the ‘Bombay Midnight Mission’, led by American missionaries, began patrolling the red-light district of Bombay, parading up and down its main street, knocking on doors, singing hymns outside brothels, even accosting any ‘gentlemen’ found in the area and publishing their names in a journal which they then sent to the men’s clubs.73 Such busybodies also interfered, tactlessly and self-righteously, in Indian life, especially when sex or alcohol might be involved. In 1935 Lutheran missionaries in an area of Bihar sabotaged the silver-jubilee celebrations of King George V when their campaigns against dancing and drinking rice beer dissuaded villagers from taking part. A few years later, in a tribal area of Assam, American missionaries convinced a village of unhappy Miris that their converts there would go to hell if they contined to drink rice wine.74
Soon after their arrival in India in the nineteenth century, many missionaries became obsessed by connections between sex and religion. Temple girls dancing before idols were especially repellent to them; so were ‘nautch’ girls hired by wealthy Brahmins to perform in front of British guests. In the 1830s missionaries in Calcutta campaigned successfully to curtail such ‘disgraceful exhibitions’ by putting pressure on the Brahmins. What seems to have upset them more than anything was the sight of a lingam, the phallic symbol of Siva worship, an emblem ‘with all its disgusting and bestial rites’ that in the opinion of one woman writer ‘scarcely dispose[d] one to belief in the spirituality of Hindus as a nation’.75 ‘Lingamism,’ opined Macaulay in the House of Commons in 1843, ‘was ‘not merely idolatry, but idolatry in its most pernicious form’.76 Phallic symbols were not of course displayed as public sculpture in Britain, and the sight of a lingam was to some devout Christians unbearable. In southern India in the 1830s two Dissenter missionaries were ‘living completely among the natives’ and running a successful school until a missionary from outside arrived, ‘got hold of a man’s lingam, or badge of caste, and took it away’.* Although he was forced eventually to return it, the town was ‘in ferment at the insult’, most of the children left the school, and those who remained insisted on returning to ‘their own Heathen books’.77
The most controversial aspect of missionary activity was proselytism, especially when it was practised in provocative places, outside mosques or at Hindu fairs or pilgrimages. Although this clearly infuriated some Indian listeners, others seem to have been bemused by the spectacle of strange-looking people attempting to deliver a religious message in a language they could barely speak. In any case, in its primary aim – the conversion of caste Hindus and Muslims – proselytism was an almost total failure. Missionaries were naturally successful in converting many orphans, and often the children of orphans, and they were also able to convert thousands of illiterate non-Hindu tribal peoples as well as low-caste ‘untouchables’, who had little to lose by abandoning Hinduism. No doubt a good number of these people were genuine converts who accepted the faith and were grateful for the education and employment that Christian missions might offer them. Complexity of motive is a natural and perennial human condition.
Yet for the missionaries it was not very satisfying to convert so many others plainly more interested in the prospect of Christian charity – as directed towards themselves – than in doctrines of salvation. In the areas where missionary success might have had an influence on wider Indian society, the histories of missions are invariably similar: one or two converts in thirty years of preaching – and sometimes not even that. The Rev. A. F. Lacroix of the London Missionary Society, who led the offensive against the Calcutta nautches in the 1830s, was ‘reputed to have been the greatest vernacular preacher’ in Bengal. According to Julius Richter, a missionary historian writing in the early twentieth century,
he had command of Bengali such as was possessed by no other European. By his attractive delivery, his sympathetic expression, and the felicitous use of really idiomatic Bengali, he everywhere drew together vast crowds of listeners, and his convincing eloquence and his speech so rich in Oriental allusion charmed and fascinated the Hindus.
Another great itinerant preacher was McComby, a Baptist missionary who for forty-five years was indefatigable in the prosecution of long preaching tours, but who, like Lacroix, died without leaving a single convert, each furnishing a striking example of the relative fruitlessness of purely itinerant preaching.78
George Shirt’s admiring biographer had a similar tale to relate. His subject had spent years in Baluchistan, teaching as well as translating, and ‘it must have been a constant disappointment for him to find that he made few or no converts’. Nevertheless, he consoled himself with the thought that he was ‘the voice of one crying in the wilderness’; he had done his duty to God.79 That was also the attitude of other dispirited missionaries. In 1883 James Monro retired from the ICS in Bengal, where he had been inspector-general of police, went home to London to become commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, but then returned to India to start a medical mission at Ranaghat in Bengal. Yet as his friend Henry Beveridge observed, he was ‘under no delusion as to the prospect of Christianising the people’. Monro’s view was that he and his fellow Christians were ‘commanded to deliver their message’. It was the responsibility of his listeners to accept or reject it.80
A recurring theme of missionary endeavour was the desire to ‘break fresh ground’, the need to go somewhere really difficult and to target and try to convert very unpromising people. It was what inspired George Shirt to go to Quetta and Miss Annie Taylor to convert Tibetans (with similar lack of success); it was what drove the CMS to work among the Sikhs in Amritsar, the Methodists to tackle Shia Muslims in Bangalore, the Church of Scotland to establish a mission in the Himalaya among the ancient temples of Chamba. And it was what sent David Morling of the Strict Baptist Mission from High Wycombe to the Kolli Hills in south India, which he regarded as ‘one of the dark places of the earth, for no Protestant missionary or Christian teacher has ever been there, and we learn that the people are rude, unlettered, strange in their customs, and wholly given over to demonolatry’.81
While prospecting territory for a Baptist mission in 1906, the intrepid and naive Morling could ‘not help contrasting the poor, wretched, tumble-down houses, mere hovels’ of the inhabitants, with ‘the spacious, stone-built, gold-pinnacled temples that confront us at every turn’ – as if the Gothic cathedrals of Europe had not been surrounded by the squalor of the Middle Ages and later. As he continued his progress, Morling passed ‘oily shrines, gory altars’ and hundreds of ‘horses and elephants of baked clay, painted in the gaudiest of colours, for the nightly delectation of the gods and godlings as they scour the countryside’. Worst of all was that ‘incredible monstrosity – streets devoted by religion to commercialized vice’. Sometimes he and his companions were so overcome by what they saw that they had to read a passage from the Bible and then kneel on the floor of their cart to ‘place our burden upon the Lord, and beseech His guidance’. To Morling it was tragic that there had hitherto been ‘no Christian worker to sound forth the message of salvation from sin, shame and sorrow; not a single light to lead these poor deluded ones from the darkness of heathendom to the glory of God’s Kingdom’. Yet at least he had now ‘discovered the most needy part of the whole vast Tamil country’.82
Setting up a mission in a south Indian town was, as Morling soon discovered, a fraught and complicated business. ‘Our seasons are hot, hotter and hottest’, and he and his colleagues realized that they could not live in ‘native quarters’ because this would lead to ‘the ruin of health and the hindering of work’. Obtaining a lease of land for building the mission was difficult, because the landowners quarrelled among themselves, and it then took four years of blasting through granite rock before they could obtain a water supply. There were also difficulties in constructing their chapel because Hindu villagers intimidated and even physically attacked Morling’s team of builders. If the missionaries employed indigenous Christians* to help them, these were often ostracized, their houses stoned, and they themselves ‘refused the services of the barber and the village washerman’. Sometimes when Morling, his wife and child arrived in a village ‘highly redolent of cows and goats’, the inhabitants would refuse to sell them any supplies: ‘no water, no milk for the baby, no foodstuffs, cut off from the world as though marooned on a mudbank!’83
Preaching tours could sometimes be dispiriting. When Morling and his band approached a village, the ‘simple rustics’ often saw them coming and ran away, leaving the missionaries with an ‘entrapped audience’ of one crippled old woman and two thatchers who had not managed to get down in time from the roof of the house they were working on. Even when the villagers had not managed to escape, it was difficult to make much of an impact in a brief visit to a place ‘where Christ had not been heard of’, especially when the missionaries had problems in speaking Tamil and the people were illiterate and could not read the Bible. Morling and his followers had had great hopes of the town where they had gained their ‘first and most earnest enquirers’ and received their ‘first laurels in the shape of rejected idols and forsaken Hindu shastras [sacred writings]’. But years later – ‘oh, the disappointment of it all!… we have yet to win here the first trophy of a baptised convert from Hinduism’. In a life of repeated disappointment and tribulation, Morling remained convinced that it had all been worthwhile, that his decades in India had had a noble aim – ‘the glory of Christ in the salvation of souls’. It did not matter that so few Hindus had been able ‘to cross the Rubicon of baptism, to make the great and final break with the monster of caste’. God’s work among men could not be measured ‘with any rod of calculation, least of all in India’.84
At the time Morling began his mission he was already something of an anachronism. By 1906 a missionary in India was less likely to be a wandering preacher in a pith helmet than a teacher, a doctor or an administrator in a school or hospital. And by then most missionaries were females.85
* * *
When opening Wilson College’s new building at Bombay University in 1889, the local governor, the Scottish Lord Reay, told students that the new institution’s professors wished to ‘ennoble your hearts by imparting to you … that moral fibre which is the mainspring of the Scotch character’.86 Few men possessed as much moral fibre as Alexander Duff, one of the first Church of Scotland missionaries, who had arrived in India, following his brace of shipwrecks, in 1830.* A fine scholar and debater, this redoubtable product of St Andrews was the father of missionary education in India, and in his school in Calcutta the pupils were soon learning – and apparently enjoying – the poetry of Robbie Burns and Walter Scott. Duff’s heroes were the Scottish Covenanters of the seventeenth century, and he appealed to his contemporary Scots to show a similar spirit, not to worship fame and wealth and ‘perishable renown’ but to allow their children to go forth with ‘the army of the great Immanuel’ and to ‘win crowns of glory’ in his service by working among the heathens of India.87
Yet missionary education was a controversial issue, especially for those who believed it was not evangelical enough. Supporters of the missions in Britain usually preferred to convert the ‘heathen’ rather than educate them, and in 1892 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland even prohibited the expansion of education in its missions. Not only was it much cheaper to send out a preacher than to fund a school; it seemed to many people more in keeping with their fundamental aim, which was to ‘win souls’. The fact that many Indian children seemed to appreciate a British education without showing any interest in changing their religion appeared to prove their argument.88
Missionary schools continued, however, to convey an overt Christian message. Even as late as 1935, by which time proselytizing zeal had long been in decline, the Women’s Christian College in Madras declared that its ‘first aim’ was ‘to extend the Kingdom of God in the land in which’ it is planted and to present God’s truth ‘so clearly that it will have an irresistible attraction for those who hear it’.89 Such statements of intent inevitably provoked suspicion among the parents of potential pupils who had to weigh the advantages of education against the possibility that their children might be made to eat meat and kick a (leather) football or otherwise be turned against their Hindu or Muslim faith. In the 1890s the first girls’ school in Srinagar had to close down after it was rumoured that British guests at the first prize-giving ceremony had come there to kidnap the girls.90
It was in fact safer and more productive to start mission schools in hilly tribal areas where most of the inhabitants were neither Hindus nor Muslims but animists. Nagaland and neighbouring areas were especially congenial territory, where Welsh Calvinists and Methodists, English and American Baptists and continental Catholics managed to compete with apparent harmony for the souls of people who rated ‘headhunting’ in their neighbours’ villages as the primary masculine virtue. Most British visitors to the area had appreciative things to say about the activities of the Welsh missions. One IMS officer noted that in those villages of the Garos that were under the influence of European Catholics, the women used opium and ‘went about bare-breasted’, whereas in the villages near the Welsh Mission Hospital they refrained from opium and ‘were more or less clothed’.91
Writing at the end of the Victorian era, the Rev. A. R. Macduff described Kashmir as a beautiful land yet one that was ‘morally a stagnant cesspool … the land of eternal snows and of everlasting dunghills’. It was, he declared, ‘the despair of all social reformers, Government officials, and others charged with bearing “the White Man’s burden”’.92 One man who did not despair was Cecil Earle Tyndale-Biscoe, who went to Kashmir in 1890 and was principal of the Church Missionary Society’s boys’ school in Srinagar for half a century. He agreed with Macduff about the cesspool – Srinagar’s ‘moral filth was even greater than’ its physical stench – but he was determined to try to cleanse it. Unhindered by feelings of self-doubt, he moulded an institution that was not a typical missionary school (conversion was not on the agenda), but its ethos was that of the ‘muscular Christianity’ then in vogue in British schools with their emphasis on character building and the physical exercise that allegedly helped boys to develop it. His pupils, most of them high-caste Hindus, offered different and more complicated challenges than the boys of schools such as Rugby and Loreto, but Tyndale-Biscoe was energetic, self-confident (and self-righteous), and he assembled a staff of Oxford and Cambridge graduates, most of them ordained, to assist him.
He soon learned not to offend Brahmin pupils by squashing an insect (taking life) or patting them on the back (defiling them) when they had done well. More difficult to deal with was the defilement caused by sport, kicking a football (that ‘unholy piece of leather’), catching a cricket ball (ditto) and boxing with leather gloves. In time all these issues were settled, in the case of boxing by substituting cloth gloves. In his overbearing way Tyndale-Biscoe encouraged Pathan youths to regard fists not knives as the schoolboys’ best weapons, and he personally gave boxing lessons for purposes of self-defence. As a schoolboy at Bradfield, he had nearly been raped, and he was determined to protect his pupils from the Kashmiri pederasts of the Srinagar Sodomy Club, whose leaders he eventually managed to catch and hand over to the police.93
The parents, who had sent their sons to the school to pass exams and thence obtain jobs, were ‘quite against what they call waste of time in sports’. So were the boys, who thought them beneath the dignity of a Brahmin: only a low-caste person would handle an oar or row a boat, and anyway the boys had no wish to develop muscles. When a pupil was ordered to have a swimming lesson, he refused, explaining that he was a gentleman ‘not a coolie’. Yet Tyndale-Biscoe was adamant, arguing that, apart from the intrinsic merit of swimming, the boy might need to rescue his mother if she accidentally fell into a river. Despite the boy’s reply that he would order a coolie to pull her out, the tenacious schoolmaster overcame Brahmin opposition by increasing the school fees in annual increments for those who had not passed a swimming test by the age of thirteen. He subsequently claimed that his aquatic pupils, who regularly swam the Dal Lake, annually saved up to twenty of their fellow Kashmiris from drowning in the water.94
The least controversial and most appreciated of the Christian vocations in India was the work of the medical missions. Two generations of proselytizers had gone to India before the Free Church of Scotland sent out a doctor to work as a medical missionary in 1856. Before then itinerant preachers had of course often found themselves in places where potential converts had begged them for medical help. If, as was usually the case, the missionary possessed no medical training, then his aid was, as he sometimes confessed, ‘quack work’. Every missionary, admitted F. Colyer Sackett, who spent decades as one in Hyderabad, ‘became a quack doctor’. His remedies were ‘perhaps a bit risky’, but fortunately the ‘results were never tabulated’, and in any case they must have been ‘a trifle better than the work of the village barber! Alas,’ reflected the honest missionary, ‘that was not saying much.’95
Scottish missionary societies may sometimes have admitted an ulterior aim – ‘The work of the doctor is to open the door, that the evangelist may enter in’ – though this was an objective that was probably not often attained. As one Brahmin put it, ‘the doctrine of the Christians is bad but their medicine is good’. Yet whatever their aims, the missionary societies that set up hospitals and sanatoria insisted that their medical missionaries were properly qualified. The Bombay Missionary Conference of 1892–3 emphasized this position, passing a resolution that all medical missionaries in India should possess a medical degree or diploma that would qualify them to practise in the West.96
‘Clinical Christianity’, as it was sometimes called, had an impressive record. By 1936 its missions in India maintained nearly two hundred hospitals, more than one hundred dispensaries, and a large number of leper asylums and sanatoria; in these places they employed several hundred European and American doctors, rather more Indian doctors, and over 2,000 nurses.97 As in so many fields of British India, medical missions sometimes became dynastic. Ronald Holland was born in 1914 in Quetta, where his father Henry had founded the Church Missionary Society Hospital and pioneered the idea of eye-camps.* After studying at Edinburgh University, he joined his father and elder brother at the mission hospital, and together the family was soon running a mobile eye-camp covering 2,000 miles from Kashmir to Baluchistan; the three men were credited with saving the eyesight of 150,000 Indians.† Missionaries might annoy people in their daily work and yet provoke admiration for their self-sacrifice and energy in a crisis. One forestry officer admitted that he had ‘not always been pro-missionary’ himself and had sometimes ‘found them a great nuisance’, but when the influenza plague hit the villages in his area after the First World War, the ‘Quaker missionaries were splendid in their work of relief’. They organized the pupils who, ‘led by their teachers, gave the finest example of real Christian work’.98
In 1900 there were a similar number of male and female British missionary doctors in India, yet from then on the proportion of women increased. Many of them were graduates of the London School of Medicine for Women and of the new women’s colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. Women began medical work in India in the 1860s, often opening and running dispensaries, but they came in greater numbers from the late 1880s, after Lady Dufferin set up the National Association for Supplying Female Medical Aid to the Women of India. Like some of their male counterparts, women sometimes wished to be itinerant preachers, wandering from place to place or even setting up home in an Indian village, where their very presence was bound to excite interest in a patriarchal society. But most of them preferred more practical occupations, working as teachers in schools or doctors in hospitals. One of their most popular destinations was a zenana mission such as the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, which built a string of hospitals in the Punjab and later opened others both in Bangalore and at Krishnagar in Bengal. In the zenana, where Indian women in purdah led lives of almost unimaginable restrictions, they felt they could help not only with medical problems but also with human sympathy for their situation and perhaps even with friendship. As one woman noted in 1903, ‘I think one gets a kind of passion for one’s own sex out here; it is so downtrodden, and so much nicer than the other, in spite of everything.’99