India: A History. Revised and Updated (79 page)

Whether patronising or pessimistic, such early-nineteenth-century attitudes had, however, become anathema by mid-century. A sea-change had come over British perceptions of responsible government. ‘The general opinion of the natives’ was no longer worthy of mention. The chance of any ‘prejudice in their favour’ had faded forever. And the ‘Orientalist’ ideal
of a government conforming to Indian traditions, already tarnished by the rapacious nabobs, had been obliterated by a compound of cold utilitarian logic, cloying Christian ideology, and molten free-trade evangelism.

The free-trade lobby insisted that India’s economy be opened to British investment and enterprise, and thus challenged the monopoly of eastern trade on which the East India Company had been founded. Subject to increasing supervision by the British government from the late 1770s and to direct management by a government Board of Control from 1785, the Company had already lost its political independence and much of its patronage. Its commercial assets were now stripped in the name of free trade. Backed by manufacturing interests in Britain anxious to obtain access to India’s markets, and by British business houses in Asia keen to compete in the out-and-back carrying trade and exploit Indian production, the government made the periodic renewals of the Company’s royal charter contingent on the surrender of its commercial privileges. In a wasting process not unlike that experienced by Mysore or the Maratha states, the Company was thus forced to make concessions in 1793, to surrender its monopoly of trade with India in 1813, and its monopoly of the even more valuable trade with China in 1833.

Stripped of its commercial assets, the Company’s surviving function was mainly as a political front and a military scapegoat. London’s ignorance and India’s distance might commend the Company’s continuance, but so did the fiction of its being less accountable than a government department; ‘Company mismanagement’, after all, sounded a lot less damaging than ‘official maladministration’. Even, therefore, as its armies streamed triumphantly across the subcontinent, the Honourable Company’s power and direction had drained away. The Afghan, Sind and Sikh campaigns were either prompted by the British government or provoked by its appointees. The Company acquiesced because it had, in effect, been nationalised. Like the Nawabs of Awadh living their extravagant pageant under British ‘protection’ at Lucknow, or like the ex-peshwa on his pension at Kanpur, or the Mughal himself rattling about the airless chambers of his Delhi fort, the Honourable Company had become just another of India’s waxwork despots, dripping beneath the trappings of a defunct sovereignty.

Amongst other conditions of the Company’s charter renewal in 1813 had been its reluctantly-given agreement to allow Christian missions to operate in India. The danger of Hindus and Muslims perceiving British rule as a threat to their religions had long been appreciated. But with the evangelical Clapham Sect in London making converts of a governor-general (Sir John Shore) and a leading Company director, as well as exercising a
powerful influence in Westminster, the pressure from missionary enterprises became irresistible. William Wilberforce, the anti-slavery champion who was also a member of the Clapham Sect, declared missionary access to India to be ‘that greatest of all causes, for I really place it before Abolition [of the slave trade]’.
¹⁷
It was so very important, he told the House of Commons in 1813, because ‘our religion is sublime, pure and beneficent [while] theirs is mean, licentious and cruel.’ Echoing the Muslim horror of idolatry, he declared the Hindu deities ‘absolute monsters of lust, injustice, wickedness and cruelty’, a sentiment with which James Mill, author of
The History of British India
(published in 1820), readily agreed. Since Hinduism was ‘the most enormous and tormenting superstition that ever harassed and degraded any portion of mankind’, Hindus were indeed ‘the most enslaved portion of the human race’.
¹⁸
Emancipating them from this ‘grand abomination’ was as much the sacred duty of every Christian as emancipating Africans from slavery.

With Lord William Bentinck, an Evangelical sympathiser, as governor-general (1828–35) a start was made on India’s ‘reformation’ with legislation to outlaw practices like widow-burning (
sati
, suttee) and ritualised highway killing (
thagi
, thuggee). Neither was particularly common, nor were they in any sense central or peculiar to Hindu orthodoxy. The effect of legislating against them, whilst it probably saved some lives, was principally to stigmatise Hinduism as indeed abominable to Christian consciences. Although Indian converts to Christianity were few and although Indians were shielded from the worst tirades of Evangelicalism, its assertive new ideology gained a degree of acceptance amongst the British in India. Their rule itself became increasingly imbued with a sense of divine mission, their earlier toleration and even support of Indian religions evaporated, their conviction of Christianity’s moral superiority grew, and their solicitude for the taboos of their subjects was eroded by carelessness and ignorance. When an ambitious army chaplain or a well-meaning subaltern favoured the sepoys under his command with a homily on ‘Christian values’, they might once have indulged him. Now, apprised of a rumoured conversion or smarting under a caste affront, they fidgeted with apprehension.

Wilberforce had never been to India. Nor had James Mill who, as a historian and then as an influential employee of the Company in London, subjected the theory and practice of government in India to the scientific analysis of Utilitarian political thought. Inexperience of India’s beguiling humanity and its bewildering diversity lent great clarity to such exercises. To Mill and his associates, including his son and successor in the employ of the Company, John Stuart Mill, it was axiomatic that ‘the greatest
happiness of the greatest number’ depended on the formulation of laws whose ‘utility’ and morality were to be judged by simple, quantifiable criteria of maximum benefit. In Britain the Industrial Revolution had sparked expectations of a steady steam-driven progress towards ever greater prosperity and betterment, in which all would be entitled to participate through social and electoral reform. Although a pre-industrial society such as India’s was clearly no candidate for enfranchisement, there too reform and modernisation were deemed the order of the day.

‘Light taxes and good laws – nothing more is wanting for national and individual prosperity all over the globe,’ declared the elder Mill. Bentinck concurred, and during his long governor-generalship he pruned expenditure, legislated furiously, and pushed through a variety of modernising reforms. But pruning expenditure was not without effect on the army, where allowances were reduced; nor did it lead to lighter taxes. Taxes being principally land revenue, a voluminous controversy was underway between advocates of the ‘Permanent’ revenue settlement introduced in Bengal by Cornwallis and those of the
ryotwari
system favoured by Munro in the south. The former, influenced by existing Bengali practice and by British ideas of a propertied aristocracy, made the major
zamindars
responsible for collection and payment; recognised as lords of the land, they became in effect landlords. The Munro system, influenced by the more self-sufficient traditions of south Indian villages, depended on direct collection from individual ‘ryots’, or peasant farmers, and regarded all superior intermediaries as parasites. Utilitarian thought naturally favoured the latter which, with considerable modification, was eventually applied in the Maratha lands and then in what the British called the ‘North-West Provinces’ around Delhi and Agra.

But in heated argument over the respective merits of the two systems, it was often overlooked that both rested on some novel assumptions of disturbing potential: revenue responsibility was taken to indicate actual ownership of the lands in question; default in payment was taken as grounds for dispossession by legal process; and enthusiasm for all such settlements presumed a maximum of assessment and a minimum of exception. The cultivator, unless he was also the revenue payer, thus became a mere tenant; and, by both tenant and landlord, security of tenure could no longer be taken for granted. Heavy assessments were no novelty, although they had usually been interspersed with periods of respite or relaxation. Under the British the demand was inelastic and inexorable. If debts incurred to meet the demand went unpaid, creditors foreclosed, and ‘properties’ were distrained by the courts, then sold on the open market. Although the accusation
that the British Collector in alliance with the Indian moneylender undermined the country’s rural economy may be an oversimplification, government intervention on a continuous and disruptive basis could not but attract such criticism and occasion deep hostility.

This was heightened by a flurry of legislation in the name of Mill’s ‘good laws’. To assist Bentinck in their formulation, Thomas Babington Macaulay, the son of an eminent Evangelical leader, was sent to India as Law Member on the Governor-General’s Council. His model Penal Code was not introduced until two decades later, and his most telling contribution to the cause of reform proved to be in the field of education. The missionaries had identified literacy and education as essential to their promotion of Christianity. Macaulay, with a Utilitarian’s belief in European science and culture as the epitome of modernity and enlightenment, insisted that it be English literacy and a Western curriculum. His object was, as he put it, to create ‘a class of persons Indian in colour and blood, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect … who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern’.
¹⁹
The available funds were paltry but the principle was accepted and, as of 1835, for government as for education, English became the officially recognised language. Instead of the British essaying a slender command of Indian languages and then venturing across the cultural chasm to accommodate India’s institutions and traditions, Indians were to be encouraged onto the rungs of Anglicisation and thence into the realms of Western thought and science.

It was a momentous decision which Indian opinion would eventually applaud. Demands for independence, when they materialised, would be couched in the language, and based on the principles, of Western liberal thought; the British would thus be hoist on their own petard. Arguably it also spared India the revolutions which would eventually overtake China and Russia. But it was not made without severing support for the study of Sanskrit and Persian, alienating those brahmans and
maulvis
(Muslim educators) who taught and cherished these languages, and savagely disparaging the arts, literature and traditions of ancient India. In arguing his case on the grounds that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’, Macaulay was betraying even the scholarship of his fellow-countrymen. His notorious tirade against ‘medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long, and geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter’, though meant as ridicule, now reads as merely ridiculous.

Just as with the Evangelical condemnation of India’s religions, so this assault on India’s literary heritage affected the rulers as much as the ruled. For the British the cultural chasm was no longer a challenge. Secure in the conviction that their own intellectual achievements, artistic tastes and moral precepts were infinitely superior and would, if assiduously practised, soon be emulated, they increasingly withdrew into a way of life that owed as little as possible to India. As communications improved, wives and daughters opted to join their menfolk not just in the cities but also in the garrison towns of the upcountry ‘
mofussil
’ (the hinterland, as opposed to the ‘presidency’, cities). Here gardens bloomed brightly behind thickets of prickly pear, amateur dramatics flourished, and the tailor turned dressmaker. But with memsahibs about, the servants had perforce to be removed to an outhouse; the club closed its doors to Indians; and the vicar often came to tea. The British were drawing apart, losing touch, becoming less approachable.

Although after Bentinck the cause of reform faltered as the Afghan, Sind and Sikh wars consumed the attentions of government, the conviction remained that British rule was indisputably the best on offer. That its benefits should therefore, in accordance with Christian duty and Utilitarian logic, be extended to as many Indians as possible seemed self-evident to Governor-General Lord Dalhousie. Under his vigorous direction, reform and modernisation were resumed in the 1850s. New laws protecting the rights of Hindu widows to remarry and of lapsed Hindus (mostly Christian converts) to retain their inheritance rights were eminently reasonable, but again ventured into the contentious domain of established practice. Meanwhile public works of undoubted utility, like surveys, roads, railways, telegraph lines and irrigation schemes, were bringing government into direct contact with the rural masses and dramatically demonstrating its power as an agency for change. On the new maps it looked as if India was about to be ensnared in a steel tangle of wires and railway tracks.

Caste taboos were not allowed to impede the march of progress, and there was much fuss over railway carriages not offering caste seclusion. To Dalhousie and his advisers it was equally obvious that the native states, or ‘those petty intervening principalities’ as he called them, should not interrupt the advance of the train and telegraph. Nor was there any reason why those who had had the misfortune to be born under a native dispensation should be excluded from the benefits of such progress and modernity. Hence Dalhousie’s insistence on ‘consolidating the territories which already belong to us by taking possession of States that may lapse in the midst of them’.