The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (68 page)

Most Indians, whatever their creed, were desperately poor, lived in villages, and made their living from the land. Gandhi who, from 1919, was the conscience of Congress, wished all Indians to remain a simple folk, and he encouraged them to cultivate the agrarian virtues which he believed would regenerate India. For this reason he spun cotton and spent much time persuading others to do so. He mistrusted the centralisation and industrialisation of the modern world, which he feared would erode all that was good in the traditional India. Gandhi also wanted to replace English as the language of education with Gujarati, and yet he and the upper echelons of his party had been taught in English (he was a Middle Temple barrister), and their political principles were essentially British.

In a sense the British-educated Congress élite were the product of the labours of those nineteenth-century idealists who had believed that education would emancipate India. A knowledge of Western philosophy and science would unlock the Indian mind and create a class of enlightened men, fit to run their own country. Education along British lines had spread throughout India, but unevenly. In Travancore (a princely state), 68 per cent of the population were literate, but there were other areas where the proportion was less than 20 per cent. A systematic attempt had been made to indoctrinate the sons of princes and business and professional men with the ideals of the British ruling classes through Indian public schools. These were reproductions of their British originals, and like them dedicated to the cultivation of ‘character’. The old boys of these academies were uncannily like their British counterparts, according to an official report of 1942:

The product may be limited in its intellectual range, narrow in its sympathies and arrogant in its assumptions, but at the same time it displays a capacity to set up and abide by standards of conduct and a readiness to accept responsibility.
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Government high schools fell short in this area, because unlike the Indian public schools they did not devote the same amount of time to the playing of team games.

‘Grinding grit into the Kashmiri’ was how Cecil Tyndale-Briscoe, headmaster of the Church Missionary school at Srinigar between 1890 and 1947 summed up his life’s work. An energetic, singleminded, muscular Christian and Cambridge rowing blue, he was abundantly qualified for the task. Cricket, rugger, soccer and boxing (which he imagined was an antidote to the sodomy he feared was too common among Kashmiri adolescents) were the backbone of his curriculum. Tyndale-Briscoe also encouraged, with equal vigour, a sense of public duty. His boys formed a fire brigade, learned to stand up for the weak and poor, were taught to treat animals with kindness, and did their bit in helping relief work during a cholera epidemic.
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There were others like him scattered across India, not only in schools, and on the whole what they did had a lasting value.

At university, Indian secondary-school pupils found themselves in surroundings where they were free to explore and discuss political ideas and apply what they learned to contemporary India. For instance, those who sat the University of Mysore’s history examination in 1924 were asked, ‘Democracy is a European invention and perhaps suited to the European race and European culture. Examine this in the light of Indian History’, and, ‘Comment on the change of name from Empire to Commonwealth – how does this change affect Indians, Celanese and South Africans?’
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Burke’s seminal speeches on American taxation were among the texts set for English students at Calcutta in 1922.

Generations of young Indians were therefore absorbing a tradition of political thought which emphasised the rights of the individual and the limitations of the legal power of the state. Those who had learned to reason in the British way imagined themselves the intellectual equals of their rulers, and naturally wished to be treated accordingly by the British. This was not easy for men and women who had been conditioned to believe themselves the representatives of a superior culture, and besides the educated élite of India was a very tiny segment of Indian society. Seen from above, the advancement of Indians was an inexorable but very slow process. Its completion, and with it the moment for self-government, was still very distant, certainly a matter of many decades. The standard, administrative view on this subject was expressed in 1916 by General Sir Edmund Barrow, a senior military official whose Indian service had begun nearly forty years before:

By bestowing liberty, justice and education in India we have done much to emancipate it from the shackles of caste and prejudice but it will take generations yet to reach the ideals of the philanthropists and philosophers and to satisfy the longings of an awakened India.
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After 1919 the pace of India’s march towards self-rule quickened, gathering a momentum which simultaneously increased the impatience of nationalists and frightened conservatives in India and Britain. The engine for change had been the war. India had shown extraordinary steadfastness between 1914 and 1918, its people had resisted German-inspired subversion, provided 500,000 extra fighting men, and donated £100 million to the imperial war chest.
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Effort on this scale deserved a generous response from Britain and, in August 1917, a grateful British government publicly committed itself to policies designed to set India along the road to ‘responsible government’ within the empire. Originally the promise had been for ‘self government’, but Curzon had objected.
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On one level this gesture, like the pledges given to the Arabs the following year, reflected the government’s willingness to accept that the principles of self-determination were, in theory, not racially exclusive. On another, less obvious level, the declaration was an admission that the government of India needed a thorough overhaul. Edwin Montagu, whom Lloyd George appointed Secretary of State for India in 1917, had previously observed that, ‘The government of India is too wooden, too iron, too inelastic, too antediluvian for the modern purposes we have.’ What he had in mind was the inflexibility and poverty of imagination of the Indian bureaucracy as revealed by the inquiry into the Indian army’s setbacks in Mesopotamia. The Indian army was all muscle and no brain, and in that condition could not be expected to uphold Britain’s status as an Asian power.

Montagu visited India in 1918, making him the first Secretary of State who bothered to find out about the country at first hand. He combined with the new Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, to produce a series of reforms which became law in March 1919. (Chelmsford was a rather unusual proconsul: the son of the luckless Zulu War general, he had served on the London County Council and then, like the hero of one of Belloc’s cautionary tales, been sent out to govern New South Wales.) They intended to give the Indians their first taste of responsible government through the creation of eleven autonomous provinces in which such ‘national building’ activities as public health, education and agriculture would be managed by elected Indian ministers. Finance and public order were placed in the hands of ministers, British or Indian, chosen by the Viceroy.

Congress had wanted India to stride rather than inch cautiously towards self-government, and its members were therefore disappointed by the measure and detected a niggardly spirit behind it. Moreover, the announcement of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms coincided with the introduction of the Rowlatt Acts, a sequence of laws devised to facilitate a clamp-down on subversion. This legislation symbolised all that was autocratic about the raj and so became a convenient focus for Congress agitation.

The struggle against the Rowlatt Acts was the first major contest between the raj and Congress. It also provided the testing ground for the principles of popular resistance which had been developed by Gandhi in his campaign for Indian rights in Natal twenty years before. Gandhi’s weapon was satyagraha, which he variously translated as ‘soul force’ or ‘love force’. As he explained to his followers during March 1919, they would harness metaphysics to political protest. Satyagraha was a spiritual state achieved by a man or woman which gave them the inner fortitude, patience and faith in God that were needed for passive resistance against an immoral authority. The degrees of physical suffering which the satyagraha acolyte endured would serve as a measure of his own integrity and that of his cause.
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On the surface, satyagraha was a perfect instrument with which to challenge the raj. His target was the conscience of Britain. For generations the British people had assured themselves that they ruled India with the consent of its people, an assumption which meant that they could accept the idea of empire with a good conscience. If, as Gandhi intended, thousands, perhaps millions of Indians signified, in the gentlest possible way, that this was no longer so, then the ethical basis of the raj vanished.

As well as introducing his followers to the arcane mysteries of satyagraha, Gandhi proposed a nationwide hartal on 6 April as a protest against the Rowlatt Acts. This was a traditional public demonstration of mourning or disapproval during which all shops, businesses and schools were closed and public transport halted, leaving large numbers free to take to the streets and form processions. There was a body of sophisticated, middle-class Congress members who could grasp the essence of satyagraha and submit to the self-discipline it demanded. Most who joined the hartal appreciated neither. Marches became riots in which demonstrators fought with the police, attacked and murdered Europeans and plundered and set fire to property. Even Gandhi was appalled by the depth and passion of anti-British feeling which had been released and seemed beyond his control.
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The upheavals were most aggravated in the Punjab, where Sir Michael O’Dwyer was governor. He was a forthright, pugnacious Irishman who had a strong sense of justice and ruled with an iron hand. O’Dwyer had faced sedition during the war and got the better of it, and in April 1919 he was determined to do so again. The most destructive riots were in Amritsar, where Europeans had been slaughtered and where, for a time, the government had lost all control. Here arrived Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer with instructions to impose martial law and restore civil peace. He was not the ideal man for the job; over twenty years before, when at staff college, a brother officer had described him as a soldier ‘happiest when crawling over a Burmese stockade with a revolver in his mouth’ and, in 1919, a painful illness sharpened his natural belligerence.

When local Congress leaders defied his ban on public meetings, and after he had received an inflammatory leaflet predicting a mutiny by Indian soldiers, Dyer decided on a show of force. He led a small detachment into Amritsar where a demonstration was underway at the Jalianwala Bagh, and ordered his men to fire into the crowd. The carefully directed volleys lasted for ten minutes, killed 379 Indians and wounded hundreds more. Afterwards, Dyer regretted that he had been unable to use the machine-guns mounted on two armoured cars which he had brought into the city. In the next few days, he had real and suspect miscreants flogged, and ordered Indians to crawl on their bellies along a street where a woman missionary had been assaulted by rioters, and, incidentally, rescued by other Indians.

1919 was a turning point in the history of India and Amritsar was the pivot. On 18 April, five days after the shooting there, Gandhi called off the hartal. He had clearly lost control over his followers, although he blamed the turbulence on the police, claiming, with astonishing naïveté, that Indian crowds were ‘the easiest in the world to disperse’.
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His faith in satyagraha was still firm, and in June he declared that the hartal had revealed ‘a new force and new power – a force that could prove irresistible under every conceivable circumstance provided that the truth was on our side.’
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And so it seemed to be, for the Amritsar massacre proved that British rule in India ultimately rested upon force. This was confirmed in the minds of Gandhi and the Congress by the events which followed the pacification of the Punjab.

News of what exactly had happened in Amritsar spread slowly, and once its enormity had been recognised the government set up an inquiry under a Scottish jurist, Lord Hunter. Dyer’s judgement was found wanting and he was effectively dismissed from the army, while O’Dwyer, who had ordered the bombing of rioters elsewhere in the Punjab, was exonerated. This verdict angered the British community in India, officers everywhere, and Conservatives in Britain who believed that the brigadier and the governor were heroes who had saved India from anarchy.

Dyer’s British champions raised his case in parliament. His motives and actions were the subject of a vinegary debate in July 1920, in which rightwing Conservatives bayed for Montagu’s blood. He was blamed for having been too soft on Indian sedition-mongers and too hard on an honourable man who had had the courage to deal firmly with them. Unperturbed, Montagu castigated Dyer for the ‘racial humiliation’ he had inflicted in Amritsar which violated the ‘principles upon which our Indian empire had been built’. He proceeded, amid catcalls, to denounce the racialism of Dyer’s allies:

An Indian is a person who is tolerable so long as he obeys your orders, but if he thinks for himself, if once he takes advantage of the educational facilities which you have provided for him, if once he imbibes the ideas of individual liberty which are dear to the British people, why then you class him as an educated Indian and an agitator.
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Churchill weighed in, damning what had occurred in Amritsar as a ‘monstrous event’, and rejecting the suggestion that Dyer had somehow saved India on the grounds that British power there did not rest on naked force. The diehards responded, under the leadership of Sir William Joynson-Hicks, with charges that Dyer had been made a scapegoat for a government which had gone too far in its appeasement of a vociferous minority.

The government won in the division, but there was still plenty of fight left in the Dyer camp. The
Morning Post
opened a fund for him, and within a few weeks over £26,000 had been collected from donors, who included Kipling. Army officers were particularly sour about the treatment of a man who had done his duty as he saw fit, and then had been deserted by a government which should have loyally supported its servant.
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