Gandhi & Churchill (5 page)

From Hyderabad Clive went to Bengal, the Mughal Empire’s richest province, where he and his barefoot sepoys did the same thing. By the time Clive routed France’s Bengali allies at the Battle of Plassey in 1758, he had turned the East India Company’s mercenary army into an unstoppable engine of conquest. The emperor in Delhi was forced to appoint Clive governor of Bengal, with British control over Bihar and Orissa as part of the deal.

The pattern for the future was set. With a rising tide of conflict and chaos on the subcontinent, no Indian prince could afford to be without British help. Yet the more a prince relied on British help, the more it weakened his own ability to control events or maintain order, leading to more conflict and chaos. Under these uncertain conditions, the one sure bet was the East India Company and its invincible army. And the company’s soldiers, horses, and cannon were all paid for by revenues of the territories it conquered, which were then collected and administered by the local princes it left in place. Only eight years after Clive appeared on the scene, the East India Company had become a power, and a law, unto itself.

It was a setting that inevitably led to corruption. Clive himself set the standard with his looting of Bengal. As another future East India Company servant put it, Clive “walked between heaps of gold and silver, crowned with rubies and diamonds, and was at liberty to help himself.” It took two hundred boats to carry the first load of booty down to Calcutta. It was estimated that in 1757 alone Clive and his cronies extorted more than 1.2 million pounds sterling from the ruler of Bengal, enough to build a duplicate Blenheim Palace. By 1781 the figure rose to nearly five million pounds.
¹⁷
Yet the remaining wealth of Bengal made even that amount seem paltry. “My God,” Clive exclaimed when questioned in the House of Commons, “at this moment I stand astonished by my own moderation.”

Clive bought a fabulous estate in Shropshire (where eventually he succeeded in taking his own life). Another company general, Eyre Coote, came away with enough to buy country homes in Ireland, estates in Hampshire and Wiltshire, and a comfortable house in London. The golden age of the nabob had arrived, as other company men used their trade monopoly with Bengal to make their fortunes.
¹⁸
Meanwhile the Bengalis starved and the company itself teetered on bankruptcy.

The situation got so bad that London finally dispatched Warren Hastings as governor-general to straighten things out, giving him executive powers over the East India Company’s enclaves in Bombay and Madras as well. Hastings’s reforms, along with the Regulating Act of 1773 and India Act of 1783, finally regularized British rule in India. They set up a governing council in Calcutta headed by a governor-general, as well as a board of control in London; and they made the East India Company and all its military and civil staff functionaries of the British government.

It was a pivotal moment. The bulk of the country, of course, was still in Indian hands, with a Mughal emperor still in Delhi. Neither Whitehall nor Leadenhall Street nor the council in Calcutta wanted to change that. But their refusal to assume responsibility for the fate of the rest of the Mughal Empire did not allow the British to escape dealing with its problems. Predatory outside powers, aggressive and well-armed local princes, independent-minded Indian
nawabs
or viceroys with their own power base, and self-assertive warrior communities like the Maharathas and the Sikhs were all poised to make their own bid for hegemony on the subcontinent.

Maintaining law and order was a problem going back millennia in India. “Whoever is superior in power shall wage war,” wrote the author of the fifteen-hundred-year-old
Arthashastra
or
Treatise on State-Craft,
“whoever is rising in power shall break the agreement of peace.” In thirty centuries of history, no Indian ruler had ever managed to defeat every challenger or fend off every marauder. Yet the English, in their arrogance and ignorance, were willing to give it a try.

So one by one the independent princelings and their armies of followers fell to British armies of sepoys and sowars, increasingly backed by white European troops. Hyderabad’s ruler, the nizam, surrendered his last shreds of independence in 1798. Then the rulers of Mysore and the armies of the Maratha Confederacy were defeated in a series of campaigns that established Sir Arthur Wellesley’s reputation as Britain’s most brilliant soldier since the Duke of Marlborough.
^*8

Then it was the turn of the marauding Pindaris; the peshwa of Poona, the last great Maratha prince, was defeated in 1818. Then the Rajputs; then the amir of Sind, followed by the Sikhs. With the annexation of Lower Burma in 1826, the Punjab in 1849, and the kingdom of Oudh in 1854, the map of British India that Winston Churchill would study as a schoolboy at Harrow was almost complete.

To the process of conquest and governance, the East India Company itself had become more and more irrelevant. Its trade monopoly was abolished in 1833. What was left was a military, judicial, and administrative network dominating the lives of tens of millions of Indians and affecting millions more. The government of India had gone through reforms since Warren Hastings, but it remained relatively simple. Beyond keeping order and collecting taxes, it largely left locals to their own devices, for better or—when famine or epidemic hit—for worse. Governor-General William Bentinck had set a precedent of cracking down on Hindu practices that were the most egregious in Western eyes, such as
suttee,
or burning widows to death on their husbands’ funeral pyres, and
thugee,
the ritual murders committed by fanatical worshippers of the goddess Kali.

But on the whole, although they never doubted their superiority over Indians, British administrators were careful to avoid any head-on conflict with the indigenous culture. When Henry Lawrence took over administration of the Punjab in 1850, his only instructions to his young subordinates, some of whom were taking over districts the size of England, were: “Settle the country; make the people happy; and take care there are no rows.”
¹⁹

It was when Governor-General Lord Dalhousie tried to exceed these minimalist bounds that Indian resentment of British rule exploded into the Great Mutiny of 1857. By any standard, Dalhousie’s progressive program was well meant. It brought India its first railways and telegraphs; it created a national postal service; it included laws banning child marriage and female infanticide, and it set up the first school for girls in India.
²⁰
In his eight years in office, from January 1848 to February 1856, Dalhousie brought more changes to India than it had seen for centuries—more, in fact, than Indians could stomach. The sepoys’ revolt against rumors of animal-greased cartridges was only the pretext. (It was also Dalhousie who cut off Nana Sahib’s pension.) Offended Hindus and outraged Muslims all across north central India rose up in a ferocious attempt to turn back the clock and drive the British out.

They failed. The British used their victory in 1858 to clear away any alternative to their authority, whether military or political—or, just as important, moral. The last vestiges of the East India Company disappeared; native Indian regiments lost their artillery, and the number of British soldiers in India increased from just under 35,000 to 65,000.
²¹
The last Mughal emperor lost his throne, and every other prince forfeited his independent authority, including his private armies. The British emerged from the Mutiny stronger than ever, unquestioned masters of more than 250 million people. The Raj had begun.

But the British were careful to wear that mastership lightly. On November 1, 1858, Queen Victoria proclaimed the new order in India. Henceforth everyone, brown or white, rich or poor, Hindu or Muslim, Sikh or Christian, would “enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law,” she assured her Indian subjects. Any interference or intrusion on their religious beliefs would incur “our deepest displeasure.” All would be “freely or impartially admitted to offices of our service.” The proclamation ended with a promise and a prayer, penned by Victoria herself:

In their prosperity will be our strength, in their contentment our security, and in their gratitude our best reward…. And may the God of all power grant to us, and those in authority under us, strength to carry out these our wishes for the good of our people.
²²

The Queen’s proclamation would be the founding document of the British Raj. Behind the displays of fireworks and celebrations, from cites like Calcutta to remote hill stations like Massoorie, lay hope for a better future after the violence and bitterness of the Mutiny. Years later Mohandas Gandhi would remember the Queen’s Proclamation as a model of benevolent motherly power.

Queen Victoria herself took up learning Hindi. She took on two Indian servants, one of whom became her confidential secretary. Meanwhile the British loosed their creative energies to remake India in their own image and, they believed, make India better. They built bridges, roads, railroads (by the 1860s there were more than five thousand miles of track), and factories generating iron and textiles.
²³
They organized ambitious irrigation schemes to help feed India’s masses and public health measures to reduce disease.

They set up schools and even universities for educating Indian youth, creating an elite of Western-educated Hindus and Muslims who edited and read English-language newspapers, wrote novels, studied law and engineering, and quoted Shakespeare and Keats. In 1861 the British introduced a legal code that was more impartial and more progressive than the one in Britain. (It protected, for instance, the right of married women to their own property.)
²⁴
They maintained an efficient police force and a corps of judges and administrators in every province and district who would make the Indian Civil Service the model of paternal government for the rest of the world.

The British also kept order along the volatile Northwest Frontier, where mountain tribes fought each other as they had for centuries; it had been the gateway for foreign invaders since Alexander the Great. In the eighteenth century the chief threat to India had been from Persia. Under the British, and even before the Mutiny, the challenge seemed to be imperial Russia, which was busy building its own eastern empire through Tashkent and Khokand right up to the Pamir Mountains, the Bam-y-Dunya or Roof of the World, which lay only a few miles from the Indian frontier.
²⁵

The need for anti-Russian countermeasures gave birth to the so-called Great Game, which became both an imperial strategy and a geopolitical outlook. For some members of the Indian Civil Service, who are immortalized in the works of Rudyard Kipling, it became almost a calling. The Great Game required generations of political officers to work to maintain a cat’s cradle of alliances with the various mountain tribes, as well as armed garrisons to patrol the rugged lunar landscape of the tribal areas. It meant keeping Afghanistan as a neutral buffer, while being on alert for any sudden Russian moves in Persia or Central Asia.

The Great Game also justified maintaining a large and active secret service in India (immortalized in Rudyard Kipling’s
Kim
), in order to spy on the local population for any signs of Russian-inspired subversion or agitation against British rule (or later, any nationalist sentiment). It justified keeping a large native Indian army, 153,000 men in 1887 and all at the expense of Indian taxpayers,
²⁶
ostensibly to protect them from the Russian Menace but also to help secure the Raj’s authority as well as garrison tropical outposts of the empire from Egypt and Somalia to Hong Kong and Singapore.

In the two and a half decades after the Mutiny, the Raj fulfilled the queen’s promise, or so it seemed. India’s population was on the increase; average life expectancy rose from twenty-one years to thirty-two; even the per capita income of Indians was showing improvement (albeit an invisible one by British home standards).
²⁷
The Indian Civil Service was a byword for incorruptibility, diligence, and dedication, symbolized by Kipling’s
Binks of Hezabad:

“Why is my district death-rate low?”

Said Binks of Hezabad.

“Wells, drains and sewage-outfalls are

My own peculiar fad.”

But if Britain had changed India, India had also changed Britain.

Britain enjoyed, for example, a host of Indian products from the imperial relationship. There was tea, which the East India Company had been exporting from China since the seventeenth century until a Scottish scientist discovered how to grow it in India. By the time Winston Churchill was born in 1874, production from Darjeeling had reached four million pounds weight a year, and Indian tea was becoming a mainstay of the British diet.

There was also jute, woven into ropes, cordage, and sturdy sacks for agricultural and industrial products. The jute industry became one of the fastest-growing and most profitable enterprises in both India and Britain. It virtually put the industrial city of Dundee on the map. Then there was cotton: when the American Civil War interrupted Britain’s vital imports of cotton from the southern states, the Indian version kept the mills of Lancashire turning and the profits growing. By the same token, India got the bulk of its finished cotton cloth from England and was thus a crucial market for the output of Britain’s Industrial Revolution.
²⁸

Finally there was opium, which the East India Company had smuggled from the poppy fields of India into China for decades until the Convention of Peking of 1861 legalized its sale, fatally weakening the Chinese empire and leading to the establishment of the British colony at Hong Kong. Similarly, it was an East India Company employee, Thomas Raffles, who founded Singapore in 1819, and another, James Brooke, who established a British presence in Sarawak. In short, the British Empire in India fostered important imperial offshoots, indeed demanded them, from Asia to Suez and the Horn of Africa (the last two being vital for the sea link to India).