Freedom at Midnight (3 page)

From the outset, her intent was always to relinquish the possessions she had so inadvertently acquired. As early as 1818, the Marquess of Hastings noted that "a time, not very remote, will arrive when England will, on sound principles of policy, wish to relinquish the domination which she has gradually and unintentionally assumed over this country." Empires, however, were more naturally acquired than disposed of, and the moment foreseen by Hastings was to be considerably more remote than the Marquess might have imagined.

British rule nonetheless brought India benefits of considerable magnitude—Pax Britannica and reasonable facsimiles of Britain's own legal, administrative and educational institutions; above all, it gave India the magnificent gift which was to become the common bond of its diverse peoples and the conduit of their revolutionary aspirations, the English language.

The first manifestation of those aspirations came in a savage army mutiny in 1857. The providential aid of a handful of maharajas kept the edifice from crumbling until the English could rally their forces and crush the uprising with a brutality rivaling that displayed by the men who had risen against them.

The most important consequence of the mutiny was an abrupt change in the manner in which Britain governed India. After 258 years of fruitful activities, the Honorable East India Company's existence was terminated as it had begun, with a royal decree, signed on August 12, 1858. The same act transferred the responsibility for the destiny of 300 million Indians to the hands of a thirty-nine-year-old woman whose tubby figure would incarnate the vocation of the British race to rule the world, Queen Victoria. Henceforth, Britain's authority was to be exercised by the Crown, represented in India by a kind of nominated king ruling a fifth of humanity, the viceroy.

Thus began the Victorian era, the period which the world would most often associate with the British Indian experience. Its predominant philosophy was a concept frequently enunciated by its self-appointed poet laureate, Rudyard Kipling, that white Englishmen were uniquely fitted to rule "lesser breeds without the law." The responsibility for governing India, Kipling proclaimed, had been "placed by the inscrutable design of providence upon the shoulders of the British race."

Ultimately, responsibility was exercised at any given time by a little band of brothers, 2,000 members of the Indian Civil Service (the I.C.S.) and 10,000 British officers of the Indian Army. Their authority over 300 million people was sustained by 60,000 British regular soldiers and 200,000 native troops of the Indian Army. No statistics could measure better than those the nature of Britain's rule in India after 1857 or the manner in which the Indian masses were long prepared to accept it.

The India of those men was that picturesque romantic India of Kipling's tales. Theirs was the India of gentleman officers wearing plumed shakos and riding at the head of their turbaned sepoys; of district magistrates lost in the torrid wastes of the Deccan; of sumptuous imperial balls in the Himalayan summer capital of Simla; of cricket matches on the manicured lawns of Calcutta's Bengal Club; of polo games on the sunburnt plains of Rajputana; of tiger hunts in Assam; of young men sitting down to dinner in black ties in a tent in the middle of the jungle, solemnly proposing their toast in port to the King-Emperor while jackals howled in the darkness around them; of officers in scarlet tunics scaling the rock defiles of the Khyber Pass or pursuing rebellious Pathan tribesmen in the sleet or the unbearable heat of the Northwest Frontier; of a caste unassailably certain of its superiority, sipping whiskey and soda on the veranda of its Europeans Only clubs. Those men were generally the sons of families of impeccable breeding, but less certain wealth; the offspring of good Anglican country churchmen; talented second sons of the landed aristocracy destined to be deprived of a heritage by primogeniture; the sons of schoolmasters, classics professors and minor aristocrats who had managed to squander their family fortune. They mastered on the playing fields and in the classrooms of Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, Charterhouse, Haileybury, the disciplines that would fit them to rule an empire: excellence at games, a delight in "manly pursuits," the ability to absorb the whack of a headmaster's cane or declaim the Odes of Horace and the verses of Homer. "India," noted James S. Mill, "was a vast system of outdoor relief for Britain's upper classes."

It represented challenge and adventure, and its boundless spaces an arena in which England's young men could find a fulfillment that their island's more restricted shores

and social climate might deny them. They arrived on the docks of Bombay at nineteen or twenty barely able to raise a stubble on their chins. They went home thirty-five or forty years later, their bodies scarred by bullets, by disease, a panther's claws or a fall on the polo field, their faces ravaged by too much sun and too much whiskey, but proud of having lived their part of a romantic legend.

A young man's adventure usually began in the theatrical confusion of Bombay's Victoria Station. There, under its red-brick Neo-Gothic arches, he discovered, for the first time, and with a shock, the face of the country in which he had chosen to spend his life. It was a whirlpool of frantically scurrying, shoving, shouting human beings, darting in and out among jumbles of cases, valises, bundles, sacks, bales, all scattered in the halls of the station without any apparent regard for order. The heat, the crisp smell of spices and urine evaporating in the sun were overwhelming. Men in sagging dhotis and flapping nightshirts, women in saris, bare arms and feet jangling with gold bracelets on their wrists and ankles, Sikh soldiers in scarlet turbans, emaciated sadhus in orange and yellow loincloths, deformed children and beggars thrusting out their stunted limbs for baksheesh—all assailed him. The relief of a young lieutenant or newly appointed officer of the I.C.S. on boarding the dark-green cars of the Frontier Mail or the Hyderabad Express was usually enormous. Inside, behind the curtains of the first-class carriages a familiar world waited, a world of deen-brown upholstered seats and a dining car with fresh white linen and champagne chilling in silver buckets—above all, a world in which the only Indian face he was likely to encounter was that of the conductor collecting his ticket. That was the first lesson a young officer learned. England ran India, but the English dwelt apart.

A harsh schooling, however, awaited the Empire's young servants at the end of their first passage to India. They were sent to remote posts, reached by primitive roads and iungle tracks, inhabited by few if any Europeans. By the time they were twenty-four or twenty-five, they often found themselves with the sole responsibility for handing down justice and administering the lives of a million or more human beings in areas larger than Scotland.

Like some Middle Eastern trader, the young officer

moved from village to village, walking or riding at the head of a caravan of servants, bodyguards, clerks, followed by donkeys, camels or bullock carts carrying his office tent, his sleeping tent, his mess tent, his bath tent, and the food and wine to sustain him for as much as a month.

On some dusty plain in a jungle clearing, he stopped and pitched the tent that became his office and courthouse. There in a camp chair, behind a folding desk, a servant driving off the flies with a fan, he administered justice, the representative of the Crown responsible for almost anything. Absolutely alone, the only white man within hundreds of miles, with no communication except by messenger on horseback, and only his lawbooks to guide him, the young man three or four years out of Oxford was a sovereign.

At sunset, he repaired to his bath tent, where a servant filled a goatskin tub with buckets of water warmed over a fire. Religiously he donned his dinner jacket or uniform and, all alone—screened by a mosquito net, his tent illuminated by a hurricane lamp, the black night around him pierced by the call of jungle birds or the distant roar of a tiger—sat down to his evening meal. At dawn, he packed up his camp and moved off to take up the white man's burden in the next corner of his domain.

His apprenticeship in those remote districts eventually qualified a young officer to take his privileged place in one of the green and pleasant islands from which the aristocracy of the raj ran India, "cantonments," golden ghettos of British rule appended like foreign bodies to India's major cities.

Inevitably, each enclave included its green expanse of garden, its slaughterhouse, its bank, its shops and a squat stone church, a proud little replica of those in Dorset or Surrey. Its heart was always the same. It was an institution that seemed to grow up wherever more than two Englishmen gathered, a club. There, in the cool of the afternoon, the British of the cantonment could gather to play tennis on their well-kept grass courts, or slip into white flannels for a cricket match. At the sacred hour of sundown, they sat out on their cool lawns or on their rambling verandas while white-robed servants glided past with their "sundowners," the first whiskey of the evening.

In each of those clubs there was a corner in which a

man could briefly escape from India back to the land he had left behind, perhaps forever. Settled into a leather armchair, turning the worn pages of a month-old Times or Illustrated London News, he kept track of Parliament's disputes, the Empire's growth, the sovereign's doings, and the marriages and births, and most particularly the deaths of contemporaries he had not seen for twenty years. His reading completed, a man could go to the club's dining room. There, coddled by dark servants in flaring turbans, under a swinging punkah, or later a whirring fan, the walls around him hung with the heads of tiger and wild buffalo tracked down in a nearby jungle, he dined on the heavy fare of his distant homeland.

The parties and receptions in imperial India's principal cities—Bombay, Calcutta, Lahore, Delhi, Simla—were lavish affairs. "Everyone with any standing had a ballroom and a drawing room at least 80 feet long," wrote one grande dame who lived in Victorian India. "In those days, there were none of those horrible buffets where people go to a table with a plate and stand around eating with whomsoever they choose. The average private dinner was for thirty-five or forty, with a servant for each guest. Shopkeepers and commercial people were never invited; nor, of course, did one ever see an Indian socially, anywhere.

"Nothing was as important as precedence, and the deadly sin was to ignore it. Ah, the sudden arctic air that could sweep over a dinner party if the wife of an I.C.S. joint secretary should find herself seated below an army officer of rank inferior to that of her husband."

There were the little traditions. Two jokes greeted every visitor: "Everything in India smells except the roses"; and "The government of India is a depotism of dispatch boxes made bearable by the regular loss of their keys." One never gave in to the climate. No right-thinking Englishman would be found without a coat and tie even in the most torrid weather. Mad dogs and Englishmen went out in the noonday sun; but when Englishmen or ladies did, they made sure to put on their topee, the high-domed, white sun helmet that was one of the familiar symbols of imperial India.

Much of the tone of Victorian India was set by the memsahibsy the British wives. To a large extent, the social separation of the English and the Indians was their doing.

Their purpose, perhaps, was to shield their men from the exotic temptations of their Indian sisters, a temptation to which the first generations of Englishmen in India had succumbed with zest, leaving behind, suspended between two worlds, a new Anglo-Indian society.

The great pastime of the British in India was sport. A love of cricket, tennis, squash and field hockey would be, with the English language, the most enduring heritage they would eventually leave behind. Golf was introduced in Calcutta in 1829, thirty years before it reached New York, and the world's highest course was laid out in the Himalayas at 11,000 feet. No golf bag was considered more elegant on those courses than one made of an elephant's penis—provided, of course, that its owner had shot the beast himself.

Every major city had its hunt, its hounds imported from England. Regularly its members went galloping off in their pink coats and white breeches chasing over the hot and dusty plains after the best substitute India offered for a fox—a jackal. The most dangerous sport was pigsticking, riding down wild boar with steel-tipped wooden lances. The foolhardy, it was claimed, even went after jackals, panthers and, on occasion, a tiger that way. The Indian national game, polo, was avidly taken up by the British and became a British institution.

The British played in India, but they died there, too, in very great numbers, often young, and frequently in tragic circumstances. Every cantonment church had its adjacent graveyard to which the little community might carry its regular flow of dead, victims of India's cruel climate, her peculiar hazards, her epidemics of malaria, cholera, jungle fever. No more poignant account of the British in India was ever written than that inscribed upon the tombstones of those cemeteries.

From the oldest recorded English grave in India, that of a woman, Elizabeth Baker, who died in childbirth two days out of Madras aboard the S.S. Roebuck en route to join her husband at Fort St. George, to the lonely grave of Lieutenant George Mitchell Richmond of the 20th Punjab Infantry, killed in the Eagles Nest picket in the Khyber Pass in 1863, those graveyards marched across India, marking with their presence the price of British conquest and the strains of British rule.

Even in death India was faithful to its legends. Lieu-

tenant St. John Shawe, of the Royal Horse Artillery, "died of wounds received from a panther on May 12th, 1866, at Chindwara." Major Archibald Hibbert died June 15, 1902, near Raipur after "being gored by a bison"; and Harris McQuaid was "trampled by an elephant" at Saugh, June 6, 1902. Thomas Henry Butler, an accountant in the Public Works Department, Jubbulpore, had the misfortune in 1897 to be "eaten by a tiger in Tilman Forest."

Indian service had its bizarre hazards. Sister Mary of the Church of England Foreign Missionary Services died at the age of thirty-three, "killed while teaching at the Mission School Sinka when a beam eaten through by white ants fell on her head." Major General Henry Marion Durand, of the Royal Engineers, met his death on New Year's Day 1871 "in consequence of injuries received from a fall from a howdah while passing his elephant through Durand Gate, Tonk." Despite his engineering skill, the general had failed that morning to reach a just appreciation of the difference in height between the archway and his elephant. There proved to be room under it for the elephant, but none for him.