After Tamerlane (59 page)

In this phase of upheaval across so much of South West Asia, ‘Islamic' politics had been a notable absentee. A sense of Muslim identity had undoubtedly played an important part in solidifying resistance to foreign control. But the nationalist movements in Turkey, Iran, Egypt and the Arab lands were strongly secular. In Syria especially, Christians had been among the most ardent promoters of an Arab nationalism whose bond of union was to be linguistic and cultural, not primarily religious. Where Islamic influence played a much larger part was further east, in India. Among Indian Muslims, the sense of their place in the larger Islamic world had been rising sharply before 1914. The shock of the war between the British and the Ottomans had been all the greater, for the Ottoman sultan was (if only in name) also the
khalifa
, the ‘Commander of the (Muslim) Faithful'. With so many Muslim soldiers in its Indian army (much of which was sent to fight the Ottoman forces), the British Indian government was quick to
repress even the mildest expression of pan-Islamic feeling by Muslim politicians and newspapers, and several leading Indian Muslims spent most of the war in jail. It was from this quarter particularly that there was strong resentment when the British promise of reform (a much larger share for elected Indian leaders in provincial affairs) was coupled with the threat that special wartime powers of arrest and detention under the so-called Rowlatt Act would be continued indefinitely.
¹⁹
It was the protest against this, orchestrated by Gandhi in his first great campaign as a political leader at the all-India level, that had helped set off the violence in 1919 and led indirectly to the Amritsar massacre – General Dyer's savage revenge for the killing of Europeans in the city.
²⁰

Gandhi at first sight was an unlikely ally for Indian Islam. He was a Hindu reformer who wanted to harness a simpler and more spiritual version of Hinduism to a programme of social and moral improvement. Temperance, chastity, self-restraint and modesty were all Gandhian ideals. But, as we saw in the last chapter, in his pre-war manifesto
Hind Swaraj
Gandhi had linked these virtues to Indian self-rule. They could only really be practised, so his argument ran, in the self-sufficient village communities of which India had once been made up. This was a fanciful version of the Indian past that owed something to the histories produced by British officials and a lot to the influence of later writing by Tolstoy (d. 1910) and his idealized viewof the peasant commune in Russia. But in a country that was still overwhelmingly rural its appeal was enormous. Yet it was Gandhi's insistence that remoralizing India could begin only once British rule had ended that made his message so radical. British rule was the vehicle through which the West's alien culture had corrupted India. Its overthrowwas urgent – though by moral pressure, not physical force. What Gandhi wanted was a vast campaign of psychological liberation to end Indian subjecthood. For it was Indians who
allowed
the British to rule, deferring to their systems of justice and law, adopting their ideas about economics and politics, copying their approach to education and culture. Breaking the grip of this mental servitude, asserting the freedom to think in Indian not British terms, using
satyagraha
(‘truthforce') against physical power, was the surest, indeed only, way in which a real independence could be won quickly for India.

These ideas were a world away from those of the mainstream of Indian nationalist politics. The Indian National Congress had campaigned for self-rule since the 1880s. But its leaders wanted to take charge of the British Indian state, not destroy its authority over rural society or create an anarchist utopia. They admired British institutions like representative government and the civil service, and sawthem as building blocks for a newIndian nation – built down from above, not up from below. Far from favouring a complete break with Britain, their aim was to be a self-governing dominion (like Canada), loyal to the Crown and inside the empire. They regarded Gandhi's ideas (all the more extraordinary in an English-educated lawyer who had spent twenty years of his life in Britain or South Africa – Gandhi was forty-six when he returned to India in 1915) as those of a crank, harmless or dangerous according to taste. The Congress leaders had hoped that India's loyalty in the war would earn a political reward. Up to a point it did. But the ‘reforms' they were offered in 1918 were a big disappointment. They made almost no concession to the Congress demand for a parliamentary system with Indian ministers in the central government – on the ‘white dominion' model. Instead, they made the province the main arena of politics, with the transparent purpose (many Congress leaders believed) of inflating the differences between India's regions and blocking the path to a true nation state. Frustration with reform made Gandhi's direct methods of political action look much more attractive – until they were discredited by the violence and disorder of 1919 (most Congress politicians were respectable property-owners). But in 1920 Gandhi discovered a different way of winning the Congress over.
²¹

The secret lay in the rising anger among leading Muslims at the terms of peace imposed by the victor powers on the Ottoman Empire. Indian Muslims had been alarmed by Ottoman defeat and the break-up of the last great Islamic empire. They were concerned about the guardianship of Islam's holy places: indeed, those in Jerusalem had already fallen under British control. But they were incensed at the plans to deny Turkish rule in Constantinople, which they saw as a deliberate humiliation of the sultan/
khalifa
and a direct attack on the prestige of Islam as a world religion. To bring pressure to bear on the British government – the chief author of these plans – they launched
a campaign to mobilize outrage among the Indian faithful against the Christian attack on the ‘Khilafat' or caliphate, the sultan's hereditary office of Commander of the Faithful. Gandhi's response was inspired. He coupled the brutal repression of his Punjab
satyagraha
campaign (the ‘Punjab wrong') with the ‘Khilafat wrong', and called on Muslims and Hindus to support mass civil disobedience to achieve ‘
swaraj
[self-rule] in one year'. Muslims were encouraged to enter the Congress and elect the delegates sent to its annual conference. The result was a coup. With heavy Muslim backing, Gandhi forced the Congress old guard to back direct action. He turned what had been an elitist political club into a popular movement with a nominal membership fee and a real grass-roots presence. He transformed a political talking-shop into a fighting machine to harass the Raj, and to pose where it could as a parallel government.

From late 1920 until early 1922, with the Indian National Congress as his tool, Gandhi waged a form of pacific war against British colonial rule. Demonstrations and marches, boycotting government courts and schools, refusing to buy imported British goods and rejecting the reforms the government had offered (including a sharing of power at the provincial level) made up ‘Non-Cooperation' – the withdrawal of consent to British authority. Coinciding as it did with so much disturbance elsewhere, and threatening to lapse into large-scale disorder, Non-Cooperation was a source of acute alarm to India's British masters. But what they feared most was the Islamic element in Gandhi's campaign, the religious appeal of the Khilafat cause to the Muslim masses, the influence of the imams, and a sudden upsurge of Islamic fervour that might spread unchecked to the police and army – both disproportionately Muslim.
²²
In fact Gandhi's campaign reached a shattering climax. It began with the assault of poor Muslim tenants upon their Hindu landlords in part of South India – the ‘Moplah' rising, which cost 10,000 lives – and ended with the burning of a North Indian police station by an angry mob, killing twenty-two men. Amid signs that Non-Cooperation had got out of control, Gandhi called off the struggle in March 1922, and was jailed soon after. Within a couple of years, the mass participation in Congress had dwindled away. The Khilafat campaign suffered a similar fate. In 1924 the office of
khalifa
was abolished not by the British but by
Mustafa Kemal's secular Turkish republic. The Muslim–Hindu alliance to win India self-rule lost its rhyme and reason. The great Gandhian experiment seemed to end with a whimper.

The British certainly hoped so. But the revolutionary phase in Indian politics left a powerful legacy. It showed for the first time how British rule could be challenged by an organized mass movement right across the subcontinent. Non-Cooperation's collapse had been a bitter blow to Gandhi's close disciples. Its obvious meaning was how hard it was to control such a movement and sustain its momentum. Yet, for their part, the British could nownever be sure when they might have to face a newround of mass action to corrode their prestige and unravel the loyalty that bound Indian soldiers, policemen, public servants and local notables to their system of rule. Indeed, fear of a repeat dominated their policy for the next twenty-five years. Secondly, Gandhi's attack upon the British Raj had been an ideological triumph. Many Indian nationalists were still deeply attracted to the representative institutions the British had created. Gandhi's achievement was to persuade a huge newconstituency of potential supporters that his version of nationalism, with its social and moral content, would meet the needs and wants of India's rural masses, and that Indian problems required Indian answers. He created, in short, an Indian rather ‘British-Indian' nationalism. Thirdly (and partly in consequence), Gandhi made nationalism – and the Congress – a grass-roots movement, drawing in peasants, women, industrial workers, the ‘tribal' peoples of the forests and hills, and the untouchables. Of course the level of popular interest and the scale of Congress membership could rise and fall (as they did after 1922). But the cadre of Gandhians pursuing ‘village uplift', or promoting Gandhi's schemes of education and hygiene, formed a network of activists ready and waiting for the next
satyagraha
campaign. It remained to be seen when their chance would come.
²³

For the time being, however, even nominal self-rule of the kind granted to Egypt remained a distant prospect. Gandhi had shaken British self-confidence badly. But the ‘steel frame' of Britain's Raj – the army, police and bureaucracy – with its tens of thousands of loyal Indian servants, was still in place. The religious and social divisions that Gandhi had been so anxious to bridge made a grand nationalist
coalition against alien control something to hope for, not a practical basis for political action in the immediate future.

China was different. Between 1919 and 1922, against all the odds, Chinese leaders successfully asserted China's right to full sovereignty that had seemed at such risk after 1890. They won China a place on the newLeague Council, the steering committee of the League of Nations. By refusing to sign the Treaty of Versailles (because of the clause on Shantung), they eventually forced a newsettlement for East Asia in the Washington treaties of 1921–2. They even secured what had seemed almost impossible before 1914: a programme to reverse the ‘unequal treaties' – winning tariff autonomy, abolishing extraterritorial privilege, and shutting down (gradually) the numerous foreign enclaves on Chinese soil. China's revolt against a global order in which empire was the norm was far more complete than almost anywhere else in the Afro-Asian world.
²⁴

Of course, part of the reason was that, although the West had encroached upon China's independence in the nineteenth century (a number of Western countries enjoyed extraterritorial rights, including the USA, Brazil, Peru and Bolivia), the Chinese had fiercely resisted reduction to a form of semi-colonial dependence in the crucial decade before 1914. Instead, the need to turn China into a nation state (not a dynastic empire) with a republican government to express the popular will was accepted with astonishing rapidity among the educated class. The explosion of feeling in May 1919 when China's claim to Shantung was rejected in Paris showed that this new style of patriotism had not stopped there. The May Fourth movement began among students in Peking. But it quickly became a much wider protest, enlisting merchants and artisans in its demonstrations and boycotts, and spreading far beyond the capital. It was graphic proof that foreign business interests could be badly damaged by popular outrage, and that the angry crowds would take their cue from the nationalist rhetoric of the newliterati. Yet this newpopular mood was not translated into a strong national government. Between 1919 and 1922, China had a government in Canton as well as one in Peking. The Peking government was a cockpit of factions, and its writ hardly ran beyond the walls of the city.
²⁵
Across much of China, the real voice of authority was the provincial
dujun
, the military commander or (a hostile translation)
‘warlord'.
²⁶
By 1922 the simmering hostility of these provincial bosses and their factional groupings had set off the civil wars that dominated China's politics until the capture of Peking by Chiang Kai-shek in 1928. The enthusiastic endorsement of China's sovereign statehood and the solemn promises to respect it in the Washington treaties are thus somewhat puzzling. If anything, the domestic turmoil of post-imperial China seemed to invite the interference of the foreign powers as much if not more so than before 1914.

It had certainly seemed so during the First World War. In January 1915, as soon as they grasped the gigantic scale of the European conflict, the Japanese presented their famous Twenty-One Demands to the Chinese government, on War Office paper ‘watermarked with machine guns and dreadnoughts'.
²⁷
They proposed the mother and father of unequal treaties. China was pressed to agree to a Japanese takeover of German claims in Shantung, to extend Japanese concessions and leases in Manchuria for the rest of the century, not to borrowforeign capital without Japan's permission to develop Fukien (a coastal province far to the south of Japan's usual sphere), and to take on Japanese advisers ‘in political, financial and military affairs'.
²⁸
To all intents, they proposed a virtual protectorate. Without allies or arms, the Chinese government gave in, and the treaty was signed. It opened the way for the rapid entrenchment of Japanese influence in the Chinese north, and the increasing dependence of the Peking government on loans from Tokyo. The fall of the tsar and the break-up of his empire ended the last real check upon Japanese dominance: neither Britain nor the United States was willing to challenge Tokyo at this stage of the war. When they did agree to intervene in Siberia to stop Russia falling under German control (the expected result of the Brest-Litovsk treaty in March 1918), it was Japan that supplied much the largest force, and expected to reap much the largest gain: extending its influence deep into Inner Asia. The Shantung decision in 1919 was thus of a piece with the massive shift of power in wartime East Asia. As China's unity fractured (the rival Canton government had appeared in 1917), and its provincial bosses took the Japanese shilling, it seemed that it might become part of a vast informal empire whose centre was Tokyo.