Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (31 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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Napier’s victory was the archetypal mid-Victorian surgical strike: what was known at the time as a ‘butcher and bolt’ operation. Vast superiority in logistics, firepower and discipline had overthrown an emperor with the minimum of British casualties. The victor returned in triumph, bearing with him not only the freed hostages but also such spoils of war as he and his men had been able to find – notably 1,000 ancient Abyssinian Christian manuscripts and the Emperor’s necklace, for the delectation of Disraeli. His delighted sovereign had no hesitation in conferring a peerage on Napier, not to mention the inevitable equestrian statue, which now stands stiffly erect in the gardens of the old Viceregal residency at Barrackpore.
The fact that Indian troops could be deployed as far afield as Ethiopia with such success spoke volumes about how India had changed since the 1857 Mutiny. Just ten years before Napier’s expedition, British rule in India had been shaken to its foundations by the Mutiny. But the British were determined to learn from that bitter experience. In the Mutiny’s aftermath, there was a transformation in the way they ruled India. The East India Company was finally wound up, ending the anomaly whereby a corporation had governed a subcontinent. Admittedly, some of the changes were merely a matter of labelling. The old Governor-General became the new Viceroy, and there were only minor changes to the structure of the six-member Cabinet which advised him. In theory, ultimate authority now rested with the Secretary of State for India in London, advised by his India Council (a combination of the old Court of Directors and Board of Control). But the assumption was that ‘the government of India must be, on the whole, carried out in India itself’. And in her proclamation of November 1858 the Queen gave her Indian subjects two assurances about how this government would be conducted. The first we know already: there would be no further meddling with traditional Indian religious culture, an implicit recognition of one of the principal causes of the Mutiny. But the proclamation also referred to ‘the principle that perfect equality was to exist, so far as all appointments were concerned, between Europeans and Natives’. This would subsequently prove to be an important hostage to fortune.
Of course, this still left India a despotism, without a shred of representation of the Queen’s millions of Indian subjects. As one later Viceroy put it, India was ‘really governed by confidential correspondence between the Secretary of State and the Viceroy’. Moreover, the conciliatory assurances in the proclamation were accompanied by practical measures on the ground which were altogether more confrontational. What happened in Lucknow reveals just how radically British rule was being reconstructed at the grassroots. Even as the dust settled after the Mutiny, it was clear to at least one man, a brigadier in the Bengal Engineers, that only the most profound changes could prevent a repetition of the events of 1857. As he observed in his ‘Memorandum on the Military Occupation of the City of Lucknow’, ‘The city of Lucknow, from its vast extent, and from the absence of any very prominent features of the ground on which it stands, must always remain difficult to control except by a large body of troops’. The engineer’s name was Robert Napier, the same man who would later lead the British to victory at Magdala, and his solution to the Lucknow problem was devised in much the same methodical spirit:
That difficulty may be greatly diminished by establishing a sufficient number of military posts ... and by opening broad streets through the city ... so that troops may move rapidly in any direction ... All suburbs and cover ... which would interrupt the free movement of troops ... must be swept away ... With regard to the [new] streets ... they are absolutely necessary ... Hardship will no doubt be inflicted upon individuals whose property may be destroyed, but the community generally will benefit, and may be made to compensate the individual sufferers.
 
First, therefore, the population was expelled from the city; then the demolitions began. By the time Napier had finished, he had knocked down around two-fifths of the old town and added insult to injury by converting the principal mosque into a temporary barracks. And it was all paid for by the inhabitants, who were not allowed to return until they had settled their tax bills.
As in every major Indian city, the main garrison was now placed outside the built-up area, in a ‘cantonment’ from which their soldiers could emerge at a moment’s notice to quell any challenge to British rule. Within the cantonment, each officer was housed in his own bungalow which had a garden – varying in size according to his rank – servants’ quarters and a carriage house. The British troops had their brick barracks in close proximity, while the native troops lived further away in thatched huts which they were expected to build for themselves. Even the new Lucknow railway station was designed with the preservation of order in mind, for the building itself was structured like a fortress and its long platforms were purpose-built for disembarking reinforcements, should they be needed. Outside it, Napier’s broad boulevards ensured that British troops would have a clear field of fire. It is often said that Victorian Britain did nothing to match Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris for Napoleon III. At Lucknow they came close.
Napier’s re-engineering of Lucknow illustrates a basic and inescapable fact about the British Raj in India. Its foundation was military force. The army here was not just an imperial strategic reserve. It was also the guarantor of the internal stability of its Asian arsenal.
Yet British India was not ruled solely by the mailed fist. As well as martinets like Napier, it also had its mandarins: the civilian administration which actually governed India, dispensing justice and grappling with an infinity of local crises, ranging from petty disputes about broken bridges to full-blown famines. Though it was a thankless and sometimes hellish job, the elite who did it gloried in their nickname: ‘the heaven born’.
The View from the Hills
 
Every year, towards the end of March, the Indian plains become intolerably hot and stay that way right through the monsoon rains until late September:
Every door and window was shut, for the outside air was that of an oven. The atmosphere within was only 104°, as the thermometer bore witness, and heavy with the foul smell of badly-trimmed kerosene lamps; and this stench, combined with that of native tobacco, baked brick, and dried earth, sends the heart of many a strong man down to his boots, for it is the smell of the Great Indian Empire when she turns herself for six months into a house of torment.
 
Before the advent of air conditioning, India in the summer was indeed ‘a house of torment’ for Europeans, a torment scarcely relieved by the ineffectual fanning of the punkah wallahs. As they sweated and swore, the British yearned to escape from the enervating heat of the plains. How could they govern a subcontinent without succumbing every year to heat exhaustion? The solution was found in the foothills of the Himalayas, where the midsummer weather offered a passable imitation of the climate back in ‘the old country’.
There were several lofty refuges for chronically sunburned Britons – Darjeeling to the east, Ootacamund in the south – but one particular hill station was in a league of its own. If you take the train that runs northwards from Delhi and winds its way up into the mountains of what is now Himachal Pradesh, you follow the path taken by generations of British soldiers and administrators, not to mention their wives and sweethearts. Some of them went there on leave, to promenade, party and pair off. But most went because for seven months every year it was the seat of the government of India itself.
Simla is just over 7,000 feet above sea level and more than 1,000 miles from Calcutta. Until the railway from Kalka was built in 1903, the only way to get up there was to ride or be carried in a
dooly
or a
dandy
. When the rivers flooded, elephants were required. To the modern visitor, Simla seems even more remote than that suggests. With its breathtaking mountain views, its towering pines and its exquisitely chilled air – not to mention the occasional rain cloud – it looks more like the Highlands than the Himalayas. There is even a Gothic kirk and a Gaiety Theatre. It comes as no surprise that it was a Scotsman who founded it, one Charles Pratt Kennedy, who built himself the first hilltop house there in 1822. To the Victorians, taught by Romanticism to idealize the Caledonian mountains, Simla seemed a paradise: the mountain air, one early visitor enthused, ‘seemed to have instilled ether in my veins, for I felt as I could have bounded headlong into the deepest glens, or spring nimbly up their abrupt sides with a daring ease ...’ The men who ruled in India soon picked up the scent of this rejuvenating air. Lord Amherst visited Simla as Governor-General as early as 1827, and in 1864 it became the Viceroy’s official summer residence. From then on, the Viceregal Lodge atop Observatory Hill became the summer seat of power.
Perched on its mountaintop, Simla was a strange, little hybrid world – part Highlands, part Himalayas; part powerhouse, part playground.
45
It was a world no one understood better than Rudyard Kipling. Born in Bombay in 1865, Kipling had spent more of the first five years of his life with his Indian
ayah
than with his parents, had spoken Hindustani before he spoke English and had loathed England when he was sent there to be educated at the age of five. He returned eleven years later to take up a post as assistant editor of the Lahore-based
Civil and Military Gazette
, which he soon enlivened with a stream of jaunty verses and stories depicting Anglo-Indian life with (in his own phrase) ‘no half-tints’. As a keen cub reporter, Kipling loved to wander in search of good copy through the bazaars of Lahore (‘that wonderful, dirty, mysterious ant hill’) bantering and bargaining with Hindu shopkeepers and Muslim horse-traders. This was the real India, and he found its assault on his senses intoxicating: ‘[The] heat and smells of oil and spices, and puffs of temple incense, and sweat, and darkness, and dirt and lust and cruelty, and, above all, things wonderful and fascinating innumerable’. At night, he even took to visiting opium dens. A prim man who yearned to be risqué, Kipling thought the drug ‘an excellent thing in itself’.
By contrast, Kipling was ambivalent about Simla. Like everyone who came there, he relished the ‘champagne air’ of the mountains and delighted in the ‘grass-downs swelling like a woman’s breasts ... the wind across the grass, and the rain among the deodars say[ing] “Hush-hush-hush”’. He found the social life a diverting whirl of ‘garden-parties, and tennis-parties, and picnics, and luncheons at Annandale, and rifle-matches, and dinners and balls; besides rides and walks’. At times, life at Simla seemed ‘the only existence in this desolate land worth the living’. Half seriously, Kipling acknowledged in his own ‘Tale of Two Cities’ (Calcutta and Simla):
That the Merchant risks the perils of the Plain For gain.
Nor can Rulers rule a house that men grow rich in, From its kitchen.
 
He could understand perfectly well why
... the Rulers in that City by the Sea Turned to flee –
Fled, with each returning spring-tide from its ills To the Hills.
 
Besides the pleasant weather, there was the fun of flirting with other men’s wives consigned to the hills for the good of their health by trusting husbands sweating it out down in the plains.
Still, Kipling could not help wondering if it was entirely wise that the Viceroy and his advisers should choose to spend half the year ‘on the wrong side of an irresponsible river’, as cut off from those they governed as if they were ‘separated by a month’s sea voyage’. Fond though he was of Simla’s grass widows, Kipling’s sympathies were always with his countrymen who stuck it out down in the plains: Kim, the orphan son of a British soldier, ‘going native’ along the Great Trunk Road; the stoical squaddie Corporal Terence Mulvaney, speaking his strange patois, half Irish, half Hindustani; and, above all, the District Officers of the Indian Civil Service, sweltering in their sun-baked outposts. They might, as he once put it, be ‘cynical, seedy and dry’. They might, like poor Jack Barrett, be betrayed by their wicked wives up in the hills.
46
But the ‘Civilians’ were the men who held the Raj together.

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