‘I am a camera with its shutter open,’ wrote the novelist Christopher Isherwood on the opening page of his book Goodbye to Berlin; at the moment of writing, the camera was ‘recording’ a man shaving in a window and a woman in a kimono washing her hair. In this book I have also tried to be a camera with the shutter open, not quite as ‘passive [and] not thinking’ as Isherwood claimed to be, but one that has allowed the men and women in these pages to come before the lens, to speak their lines and walk about the stage without too much direction from me. I have not tried to put forward a thesis or make a particular argument: this book is a social history rather than a political one, and it is about individuals rather than institutions. Yet as ‘the British in India’ is a controversial subject, some concluding reflections may be appropriate.
I am not going to attempt to set up scales or produce a balance sheet, to weigh indigo planters who tyrannized Indian peasants against doctors who saved Indian lives, or to balance the undoubted violence of British soldiers against the deeds of a famine worker or a builder of canals. British individuals went to India for many different reasons and did very different things when they got there. Some went out to make money – as businessmen do everywhere – and some went out to do what they could to improve lives, in a spirit of altruism, in a world where there were no United Nations agencies and no World Health Organization.
Imperialism, which usually means the conquest and exploitation of one people by another, involves deaths and injustices, but that does not mean that it did nothing positive during its 3,000-year history. Nor does it mean that all imperialists were bad people, though this has been the view of many distinguished intellectuals and academics of our era. One of these was the late Edward Said, whom I knew, liked and admired – though less so when he wrote about history because then he became dogmatic and a generalizer, rather than a scholar who allowed his research to determine his argument. His insistence that Irish people could never be English any more than Cambodians could be French1 is refuted by some of the Irishmen in this book, who saw no contradiction in simultaneously being Irish nationalists and British imperialists. More pertinent to India was his assertion that in the nineteenth century ‘every European’ who wrote about the Orient was ‘a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric’.2
Such views – and those of Said’s many followers – are not only cocksure and sweeping but also fundamentally anti-historical, judging the past from the zeitgeist and morality of the present. If their exponents spent more time in the archives, they might discover Irishmen in India who were indeed very like Englishmen, and find Britons who were not racists and imperialists when they were writing about the place. And even if some Britons were both of these things – which were common to the age – they might not also be wicked human beings.
Complexity of motive is a theme permeating this book. British people might be imperialists yet decide on a course of action because religious, emotional or other factors outweighed their imperialism. Or they might recognize that they had a conjunction of motives which happily encouraged them to act as they did. When in 1911 the civil servant James Mackenna wrote his paper ‘The Rhinoceros Beetle … and Its Ravages in Burma’, he was hoping the work would be satisfying to himself, useful to the Indian government and helpful to the people of Burma. Greed and the quest for adventure are well-attested motives for young Britons setting out for India. Altruism has been largely forgotten, though it too is well recorded, not just in the memoirs of old people trying to justify their careers but also in the letters and diaries of young men and women describing the work they were doing at the time and about which they felt passionate and idealistic.
British officials in India too often pursued reforms with feelings of cultural superiority and a western Christian’s scorn for Hinduism, its traditions and its adherents. They were frequently insensitive in their treatment of the Indian people and in their attitudes to local customs and susceptibilities. But was it really wrong of them to aspire to change some of those customs – to campaign against female infanticide, to abolish the burning alive of widows, to prevent Naga tribesmen from scalping the women and children of other tribes and bringing home their trophies in triumph? If an NGO worked for such things in some remote place today, would we not be applauding it?
Apologists for the Raj used to say that the British ‘gave’ Indians this and ‘taught’ them that, usually with reference to subjects such as cricket, liberalism, education, the English language, the civil service, the rule of law (and the quality of that law), even parliamentary democracy. The verbs were not well chosen, although ‘bequeathed’ is a reasonable word to use in two of these examples because the successor states of the Raj adopted the law codes and the civil service of the British with few changes after Independence. Sunil Khilnani has rightly written that ‘democracy [was not] a gift of the departing British’, but ‘a concept of the state’ was, and so was ‘the principle of representative politics’.3 Indians may not have received many ‘gifts’, but of their own accord they used British ways and institutions to transform their lives and to create and fashion their new nations. As the Indian sociologist André Béteille has written, the universities established by the Raj ‘opened new horizons both intellectually and institutionally in a society that had stood still in a conservative and hierarchical mould for centuries’; these ‘open and secular institutions’ allowed Indians at last to question, among other things, ‘the age-old restrictions of gender and caste’.4
The British did not ‘teach’ Indians liberalism – which had a long-standing, if fitful, tradition in India already – but in the nineteenth century they took certain decisions on matters of law, education and the English language which made it almost inevitable that an Indian version of it would be adopted on the Subcontinent. As the historian C. A. Bayly has written, ‘Britain helped liberalism take root in India by institutionalizing it through schools and colleges, newspapers and colonial law courts, and thereby converted an entire generation of Indians to a way of thinking about their own future that led to today’s Indian democracy.’5 A great early leader of Congress, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, was a liberal as a result of his education at Elphinstone College in Bombay. The views of Mohandas Gandhi too owed much to British institutional influences, his years at the Inner Temple in London, his knowledge of English law, as well as his friendship with British liberals. Jawaharlal Nehru, a liberal both in his political sensibility and in his practice of secular democracy, had been a pupil at Harrow and Cambridge. He and his colleagues guided Indian nationalism towards that rare Asian phenomenon, an essentially liberal revolution: not communist, not fascist, not military, not even British – but liberal in an Indian fashion.
I have been visiting India over a period of nearly half a century and have never had a row – scarcely an argument – about the nature of the Raj. I have worked in several other countries, both in Europe and in Asia, but in none have I found it easier to make close and enduring friendships. Writing about the relationship between Britain and India today, the Indian historian Ramachandra Guha has said that it is of course political and economic, but it is social and cultural as well, and also emotional, adding that, ‘of all relations between former colony and erstwhile empire, this one is the least acrimonious’.6 No doubt the chief reason for this is the magnanimity of the Indian character, but another might be that British imperialism in India was not always quite so bad as its detractors (especially the home-grown ones) have claimed. There is, I realize, little hope of a consensus on the matter, but the best attempt at one that I have found was made by an Indian economist when he received an honorary degree at Oxford in 2005. His name was Manmohan Singh, and he happened to be his country’s prime minister at the time.
Today, with the balance and perspective offered by the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight, it is possible for an Indian prime minister to assert that India’s experience with Britain had its beneficial consequences too. Our notions of the rule of law, of a Constitutional government, of a free press, of a professional civil service, of modern universities and research laboratories, have all been fashioned in the crucible where an age-old civilization of India met the dominant Empire of the day. These are all elements which we still value and cherish. Our judiciary, our legal system, our bureaucracy and our police are all great institutions, derived from British-Indian administration, and they have served our country exceedingly well.