Gandhi & Churchill (12 page)

This was the result of the land tenure “reform” wrought by Governor-General Lord Charles Cornwallis in the 1790s. Cornwallis, fresh from his defeat at the hands of the Americans in Yorktown, had been determined to make this imperial venture succeed. He turned the old sliding scale of rents paid by peasants to their landlords, or
zemindars,
into a permanent fixed amount, to be collected by the zemindar; any disagreements were to be adjudicated in the local district court instead of by often-corrupt officials on the ground.

The reforms were well meant, according to Western standards of fairness and efficiency, but they broke the back of the old village communities. Local landlords who could not collect the fixed amount in times of shortage or famine simply sold their land to the highest bidder, including new merchants from cities like Bombay and Calcutta now getting rich from British trade.
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As the practice spread from Bengal and Bihar to the other presidencies, the result was a rural landscape of destitute peasants and absentee landlords, and a growing wall of separation between the values of urban and rural India. It was this impoverished world that Gandhi would find when he toured the villages of Bihar more than a hundred years later, in 1917.

Cornwallis’s land reform scheme was also part of a growing shift in British attitudes. The collapse and breakdown of civil order in eighteenth-century India (to which the British had contributed more than any other single power) had revised their opinion of Indians downward. Clive had fought beside and against Hindus and Muslims, made friends with them, and cheated and lied to them more or less as equals. Even Warren Hastings, the first governor-general, had said, “The people of this country do not require our aid to furnish them with a rule of conduct or a standard for their property.”
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But their successors took a very different approach. “Every native of India, I verily believe,” Cornwallis said, “is corrupt,” and he dismissed every native official who worked for the East India Company. As one historian has put it, “He thought of the English as ruling Indians for their own good, but on European rather than Indian lines.”
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As their power grew, the English came to see India as a social science experiment, to be studied, to be worked over and tinkered with, regardless of how Indians themselves felt—especially since, from the European standpoint, Indian values and culture were at the root of the problem.

James Mill, writing his
History of British India
for the East India Company, pronounced Hindu caste society a cesspool of injustice and superstition.
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Fifteen years later in 1835, while sitting in Calcutta on the governor-general’s executive council, historian Thomas B. Macaulay concluded that “a single shelf of books from a good European library was worth more than the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”
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The debate had become not whether the British were going to change India but how. Macaulay and others pushed for funding a Western-style education system that would supplant and eventually replace traditional Hindu learning, with its “medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, [and] astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school.” To have found “a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition, to have so ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title to glory all our own,” Macaulay affirmed.
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But without realizing it, the British were playing with cultural dynamite. Indian soldiers were proud to serve the British according to a military tradition reaching back to the Aryans. The Bengali writer Ram Mohan Roy could see that English rule, “though a foreign yoke, would lead most speedily and surely to the amelioration of the native inhabitants,” including an end to suttee, which Roy calculated cost the lives of more than three hundred widows a year in Calcutta alone. At the same time British Orientalist scholars like William Jones and Henry Colebrooke were rediscovering and editing some of Sanskrit’s most precious texts, including the
Bhagavad Gita,
and passing that knowledge to successive generations of Indian students.
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However, if British rule meant a daily assault on millennia-old traditions and beliefs; or a daily challenge to Hindus and Muslims by aggressive Christian missionaries sanctioned by the government; or legal changes that undermined the status of India’s elites and its last autonomous rulers—then Indian cooperation, which the British took for granted, was going to turn into fierce resistance.

All these things happened and reached their culmination under Governor-General Lord Dalhousie. He took office in 1848, the year revolutions were convulsing the capitals of Europe. From Government House in Calcutta, Dalhousie would set off one of his own. He pushed radical reform on every front, economic, cultural, and political, including annexing Indian states like the kingdom of Oudh, whose rulers failed to produce a male heir. Dalhousie’s annexations were a direct challenge to India’s remaining power-holders, even as their rural tenants were finding their world turned upside down by legal and economic forces they could not understand.
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Dalhousie left India “in peace within and without,” as he put it, in 1856. But it was already too late to prevent the explosion of the Great Mutiny.

The Mutiny of 1857 was a watershed event not just in the history of British rule in India but for India. In May the native regiments in Meerut rose up, murdered their British officers, and marched on Delhi, where they proclaimed the last Mughal emperor, the powerless and pitiful seventy-year-old Bahadur Shah II, their ruler. Some who joined were encouraged by prophecies that the one hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Plassey would see the end of British rule. Others believed rumors that a Russian army would march down to help them restore Mughal rule and Muslim supremacy.
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Still others, like the Maratha Nana Sahib, joined in hopes of restoring lost pride and glory; others in hopes of plunder; and some because they were afraid not to, if the British really were driven out.

But all agreed that the cumulative effect of a half-century of British rule had been to make them feel like strangers in their own country, and that the only way to turn back the tide was to drive the British out. For almost a year the mutineers controlled an area the size of Britain. Some local Hindu rulers and communities in northern and central India joined the revolt, but most of the subcontinent, like the Gandhis’ hometown of Porbandar, remained quiet. The fact that the Sikhs, the Hindu military-religious brotherhood in the Punjab who had fought every power-holder in India since the fifteenth century, remained loyal to the British cause probably did more to smash the Mutiny than any other single factor. Certainly none of the mutineers or their princely allies had the skills or experience necessary to beat the British Army once it was fully aroused and mobilized.

By June 1858 British troops had crushed the sepoys and the last rebel prince, the Maharaja of Gwalior. British rule, having survived its gravest crisis, was stronger than ever. It was now “the Raj,” successor to the Mughals and fount of all order and authority. But if the crisis of the Mutiny drove the British together, it ultimately drove Indians apart. Sikh loyalty, and apathy in southern India, doomed the revolt, but so did the limited and often self-interested motives of its organizers. In order to defeat the British, the mutineers had summoned up the spirits of the past: the Meerut mutineers looked to a restored Mughal empire, Nana Sahib and his followers to a revived Maratha confederacy of faith and resistance. They had failed. The result, paradoxically, was that now Indians were more dependent on the British than ever. For millions of Indians after 1858, the Raj was the one remaining fixed point in a world permanently in flux. Wherever it led, they had no choice but to follow.

For the British, too, there was no going back. The changes that the new India Office and the Queen’s Proclamation brought were all based on a single principle: that the British would never again let down their guard. They would be patient with the Indians, and they would be more circumspect in introducing change. They would even consult with Indians, when necessary (as in 1886, when Viceroy Dufferin included Indians in a commission to study admitting more natives to the civil service). But the prospect vanished that the British would ever trust the Indians or give them any significant role in running their own affairs.

Meanwhile economic and communication growth, with the coming of factories, mines, and railroads, was creating a new industrial India side by side with the old. This too was a legacy of the Mutiny’s defeat. The end of the last independent states removed the final barriers to India’s integration into the British imperial economy. Only a few years after the massacre in the Bibighar, Cawnpore became a major textile center, “the Manchester of the East.” Likewise Ahmedabad, some three hundred miles east of Rajkot, was where cotton grown in Gujarati fields was woven into cloth for India’s toiling millions. Ahmedabad’s Indian millionaires would become Gandhi’s first important political contributors.

Yet by the 1890s India’s mills were still producing only about eight percent of its cloth consumption.
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While India’s economy was
de jure
free from interference from the government in London (which was why Randolph Churchill and his son could talk about India’s “free markets”),
de facto
British rule kept it a captive market for British industrial goods, including cotton—even as the Indian national currency, the rupee, became subject to the fluctuations of the British pound and British exports. Some Indians benefited from the imperial economy, like the Parsis and other enterprising businessmen in the cities. But the vast majority of Indians remained trapped in a system of rural poverty, interspersed with cycles of floods, drought, and famine. They paid the taxes, including a tax on salt, that subsidized British rule. But they saw little or no return for shouldering most of the imperial burden. For most, the British present was no worse than the Mughal or even Gupta past. But apart from famine relief and other humanitarian efforts, it was hardly much better.

In the meantime traditional India, as embedded as ever, could offer no alternative to British rule. The defeat of the Mutiny had fractured the old order and destroyed the credibility of the traditional political class of rajas and
zemindar
landlords. Instead, what the future held for India would depend even more on a new elite, a Western-educated one, that saw the imperial relationship with Britain in a wholly new light.

This new elite was the product of the sweeping educational reforms set in motion by Thomas Macaulay and his successors. In 1838 there were forty English schools operating under the supervision of the General Committee of Public Instruction. By the 1870s some 6,000 Indian students were enrolled in English-speaking colleges and universities and another 200,000 in secondary schools. When Randolph Churchill did his tour of India in 1885, there were more than twenty-one colleges in Bengal alone and twenty-four in Madras.

The students were almost entirely Hindu and almost all upper caste, drawn from distinguished families like the Boses, Ghoses, and Tagores of Bengal—and all males. Only a few went into a business or technical field; most became lawyers, teachers, and journalists. Fully a fifth entered the government, even though by 1880 only four Indians had managed to enter the exalted ranks of the Indian Civil Service. These Western-educated Indians were inspired by an earlier figure, Ram Mohan Roy, the Brahmin-born intellectual and civil servant who could read Latin and Greek as well as Persian and Arabic.

“Perhaps no other Bengali,” writes one distinguished scholar, “with the exception of Rabindranath Tagore, has been so thoroughly identified with the cultural self-image of the Indian people,” or at least its educated elite.
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Roy published India’s first home newspaper. He lived in England as the Mughals’ ambassador until his death in 1833. Roy also claimed to find in the
Upanishads
and other Hindu works a theory of reason and human rights equal to that of the West. He was also the first to advocate a new cultural pluralism for India, one that incorporated Christian ideals alongside Hindu and Muslim texts, just as Gandhi would do a century later.

This Ram Mohan Roy–inspired, Western-educated elite was never monolithic its views, including its views on British rule. It included fierce loyalists like Bholanath Chunder, whose
Travels of a Hindu,
published the year Gandhi was born, argued that the British constitution was the greatest in the world and that India had had no real political culture until the British arrived. It included fierce critics like Sayyid Ahmad Khan, whose
Causes of the Indian Revolt
put the rebellion’s blame squarely on the British and warned that “security never [will be] acquired unless the people are allowed a share in the consultations of government.”
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The elite included many who proudly imbibed the Hindu classics alongside the Western ones (ignoring the irony that it was in British schools that they received the most rigorous education in their own culture). Still others discovered in writers like Milton, Locke, Edmund Burke, and John Stuart Mill an ideal of national self-government and asked why it should apply to whites but not to nonwhites.

These were the kind of men whom Randolph Churchill met during his tour of India and who had impressed him with their keen intelligence and understanding. Indian traditionalists considered them traitors for abandoning traditional ways and taking up Western dress and manners. The British in India mocked them as “babus.” It was against them that the White Mutiny of 1883 was directed, and it was they who organized a massive rally in support of Lord Ripon when he left India, which Randolph Churchill described as “the first real assertion of the people of India of their…right and intention to exercise a more or less controlling influence over Indian Government.”
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And it was this same Western-educated elite who set up the Indian National Congress three years later.