India: A History. Revised and Updated (82 page)

Thereabouts the combined insurgents were again worsted, but on 1 June 1858 they responded with the boldest move of the whole Rebellion. Just when the British thought they had finally dislodged them from Bundelkhand, Lakshmi Bai and Tatya Topi seized Gwalior. As Scindia’s capital and still the greatest natural stronghold in India, Gwalior was well-chosen for a final stand. Scindia himself, while remaining loyal to the British, had been pretending sympathy for the insurgents as a way of detaining the large body of mutinous troops based in Gwalior. An appeal in the name of the peshwa, Scindia’s one-time superior in the Maratha hierarchy, failed to sway him; but it did serve to disabuse his troops. With their collaboration, Tatya Topi and the rani entered the city, paid their forces from its accumulated riches, and duly ensconced themselves on central India’s ‘Heights of Abraham’.

This tableau, so dear to nationalist lore, lasted barely three weeks. It ended when Lakshmi Bai died the death of the heroine she undoubtedly was. While riding round the ramparts, she was hit by a spray of bullets as the British launched their first assault. She was cremated nearby, ‘the only man among the rebels’ according to one of her British adversaries. Three days later the citadel fell and with it the last attempt at concerted action by the insurgents. Tatya and his followers would roam through Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh for another year of improbable and much-embellished escapades before he was betrayed, captured and executed. Meanwhile the Nana Sahib and the rump of the Awadh insurgents were penned ever closer to the Nepalese border. By 1860 even these ‘embers’ had been doused or
dispersed. Their cause was anyway hopeless, not least because many of the grievances on which it rested had by then been addressed.

Measured in terms of concessions the Great Rebellion was far from being a disaster for the insurgents. Obviously the British made sure that military vulnerability would never again be the undoing of the Raj. By 1863 the Indian component in the Bengal, Bombay and Madras armies had been reduced by about 40 per cent and the British component increased by nearly 50 per cent. This gave an Indian–British ratio of less than 3:1, which was henceforth considered the bare minimum; in 1857 it had been more like 9:1. No Indian troops were now given artillery training; recruitment was increasingly switched from Awadh and Bihar to the Panjab and marginal hill regions whose supposedly ‘martial peoples’ were deemed more reliable and less paranoid about caste-loss; at the same time deployment was so organised as to avoid a concentration anywhere of units with the same composition. Rapid expansion of the railway system and of the telegraph further precluded the danger of mutiny. The 250 kilometres of track laid by 1856 had become 6400 by 1870 and sixteen thousand by 1880. Moreover in 1869 the opening of the Suez Canal slashed journey times between Europe and India, while the 1870 completion of an overland telegraph link brought closer co-ordination of imperial policies and more supervision from London.

The issue of the offending cartridges had, of course, long since been resolved. The troops now greased them themselves with whatever lubricant they preferred; moreover in 1867 the whole procedure became unnecessary when the breech-loading rifle made its Indian debut. Other concessions which addressed the underlying causes of the ‘mutiny’ were much more significant. In recognition of the fact that the mutineers had genuinely feared conversion to Christianity, missionary activity was curtailed and the public funding of mission schools reduced. Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858 specifically disclaimed any ‘desire to impose Our convictions on any of Our subjects’ and ordered British officials to abstain from interfering with Indian beliefs and rituals ‘on the pain of Our highest displeasure’.

The reforming zeal of the Bentinck era was also repudiated. Already out of fashion in Britain, the presumed omniscience of Utilitarians and Benthamites was recognised as particularly inappropriate in India and the attempt to legislate away discriminatory traditions and eccentric practices was largely abandoned. An exception was made in respect of education; more schools were part-funded by government and the English language continued to be promoted. But the idea that extending the benefits of British rule to all Indians was a moral imperative lost favour. In particular
the process of absorbing the Indian states and of eliminating hereditary revenue farmers was reversed. The
taluqdars
of Awadh, stigmatised as parasites in 1856 and rebels in 1857, had only to clear themselves of shedding British blood to emerge as faithful allies in 1858. Recognised as having a genuine hold on the loyalties as well as the remittances of their cultivating subordinates, they were confirmed in the hereditary possession of their rights and also co-opted into the British administration as local magistrates. Like Bengal’s
zamindars
and other rural aristocracies they joined the British Indian hierarchy as rajas and rais and became some of its most stalwart supporters.

Likewise their princely brethren of the Indian states. Although annexed states like Awadh were not restored, there were to be no further annexations. Existing treaties with India’s five hundred princes were now to be ‘scrupulously maintained’ while the detested ‘doctrine of lapse’ did just that; it lapsed. With few exceptions, the princes had remained loyal during the rebellion; in British eyes such loyalty now commanded a higher premium than enlightened rule.

The status of the princes was further enhanced by a new constitutional relationship between Britain and India. The royal proclamation of 1858 announced a decision of the British Parliament that all rights previously enjoyed by the East India Company in India were being resumed by the British Crown. Victoria thereby became Queen of India as well as of the United Kingdom, and India’s governor-general became her viceroy as well as the British government’s chief executive in India. The fiction of Company rule thus finally ended. Long as irrelevant as the Mughal, the Company now shared his fate as a casualty of the Rebellion. Instead of pining away in Rangoon, it would linger on for a few more years in a London office ‘unhonoured and unsung, but maybe not altogether unwept’.

So India had a new sovereign; and just as in Britain the monarch’s position was buttressed by a hierarchy of hereditary nobles and by the award of honours, so in India similar structures were created. The Star of India, a royal order of Indian knights, was introduced in 1861, and the first tour by a member of the British royal family took place in 1869. Meanwhile India’s aristocracy of ‘feudatory’ princes, chiefs, rajas, nawabs and so on was being further stratified and grouped to conform to British ideas of hierarchy. The grading of gun salutes and other minutiae of protocol provided a ready reckoner of status, status itself being assessed on the basis of historical and territorial credentials, good governance, charitable activities and, of course, demonstrations of loyalty.

Only when this structuring was complete was the keystone installed. In
1876, on the advice of Disraeli, the Queen announced to the British Parliament that, satisfied that her Indian subjects were ‘happy under My rule and loyal to My throne’, she deemed the moment appropriate for her to assume a new ‘Royal Style and Titles’. The style, it was later revealed, was to be imperial and the titles, in English, ‘Empress of India’ and, for the benefit of her Indian subjects, the rather unfortunate ‘Kaiser-i-Hind’.

In January 1877, in a vast tented city around the Ridge whence British forces had recaptured Delhi twenty years earlier, the new imperium was solemnised at an Imperial Assemblage. The official attendance of eighty-four thousand included nearly all of India’s ‘sixty-three ruling princes’ and ‘three hundred titular chiefs and native gentlemen’. Lord Lytton, the presiding viceroy whose arrangements would provide a blueprint for all future imperial durbars, took some delight in listing those present. Here were the princes of Arcot and Tanjore from the deep south, the principal ‘Talukdars of Oudh’, ‘Alor Chiefs of Sindh’, Sikh Sardars, rajputs and Marathas, ‘the semi-independent Chief of Amb’, ‘Arabs from Peshawar’, ‘Biluch Tommduis from Dera Ghazi Khan’, and envoys from Chitral and Yassin in the high Hindu Kush ‘who attended in the train of the Maharajah of Cashmere and Jammu’. Also included in Lytton’s litany were quite a few ex-princes like the grandson of Tipu Sultan, the son of the last Nawab of Awadh and ‘members of the ex-Royal family of Delhi’.

The presence of these descendants of the former great ruling houses of India imparted some of the flavour of a Roman triumph to the assemblage. The British conception of Indian history thereby was realised as a kind of ‘living museum’, with the descendants of both the allies and the enemies of the English displaying the period of the conquest of India.
²⁹

Conservation was now the order of the day. The riot of privilege and particularism, once seen as an indictment of British rule, was to be preserved as imperial pageantry. And with the British apparently disclaiming plans for the rapid transformation of Indian society, the initiative now slowly passed from these hereditary representatives of the old dynastic order to a new elite, English-educated and city-based.

18
Awake the Nation
1880–1930

TRAINS AND DRAINS

I
NDIA’S RURAL LANDSCAPE
looks rather different from that of most tropical ex-colonies. In particular it lacks those bold and regimented patterns of cultivation associated with large-scale agri-business. Tousled hectares of banana and coconut, rows of pineapples receding over the horizon, or gloomy ranks of regulation rubber trees are comparatively rare. There are exceptions: tea estates muffle the hills of Assam and Kerala in what are major enterprises by any standards, and cotton in the Deccan monopolises the black soil for mile upon featureless mile. But for the most part, rural India is a patchwork of more intimate fields, often eccentric in their layout, not over-capitalised in terms of machinery, and devoid of that plantation logic which is the usual legacy of colonial agrarian development.

It could have been otherwise. Expectations of white settlement and European enterprise transforming Indian agriculture had surfaced in the blueprints of early-nineteenth-century reformers. In respect of two highly valuable crops, the opium poppy and the indigo vetch, they had been partially realised. British investment in the processing necessary to produce China’s favourite narcotic and to extract the blue dye for assorted European uniforms led to some contentious involvement in the supply and cultivation of these crops, particularly in Bengal and Bihar. But the East India Company had been generally opposed to European settlement, and the extortionate conduct of such quasi-planters had done nothing to change attitudes. In 1859–61, just as the British were congratulating themselves on having isolated Bengal itself from the traumas of the Great Rebellion (or sometimes the ‘red mutiny’), serious riots (known as the ‘indigo’ or ‘blue mutiny’) had broken out amongst the oppressed indigo cultivators of west Bengal. Championed by Calcutta’s press, which obligingly pointed out that the
planters were mostly British, and not without some official sympathy, the rioting
ryots
duly won relief from their supply contracts. Thus by 1861 ‘the cultivation of indigo was virtually wiped out from the Bengal districts.’
¹
Elsewhere indigo cultivators had a longer wait for redress. In neighbouring Bihar it would be over fifty years before their cause was adopted by an eccentric outsider, lately arrived from Africa, called Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Also in 1861, while the ‘blue mutiny’ was in progress, Mr J.W.B. Money, a Calcutta-born Englishman with interests in indigo, returned from a trip to the Netherlands East Indies. Nursing new thoughts on India’s colonial management, Money promptly wrote a book. The Dutch, according to his provocatively entitled
Java, or How to Manage a Colony
, had responded to the demise of their own East India Company by introducing a ‘Cultivation System’ whereby the cultivator was obliged to set aside part of his land and labour for the production of specified quantities of an export crop. These yields, usually of sugar or coffee, were then rendered to the government or its contractors in lieu of land rent. Natives, seemingly, did not want rights and legal redress. They wanted a chance to prosper, and that was precisely what the system offered in that it also guaranteed the purchase of any surplus. It thus encouraged the circulation of money, said Money, and improved native purchasing power.
²

That the system was advantageous to the Netherlands was sensationally obvious. By 1860 a third of that state’s annual revenue derived from its East Indies colony. Domestic taxation was reduced and the entire Dutch state railway network was built on the proceeds. Why could India, cowed by the suppression of the Great Rebellion, not now be managed to mutual advantage in the same way?

But Money’s cheerful endorsement of the Dutch system overlooked the fact that most Javanese were not in fact enriched. Rather were they reduced to a state of rural bondage which was quite irreconcilable with either Munro-ite ideals of a sturdy peasantry or Cornwallisite ideals of a benign landed gentry. Mr Money also ignored the prevailing spirit of
laissez faire
which had earlier deprived the English East India Company of its trade monopolies and had since witnessed a steady withdrawal of government from many other areas of economic management. In the Americas and elsewhere, including even the Netherlands East Indies, British exporters and business houses were doing very well without the paraphernalia of empire; free trade, not state management, was the key.

Furthermore, and perhaps decisively, the idea of introducing a plantation economy was precluded by the extent to which in India land, and
the extractive surplus/revenue rights to which it was subject, had become marketable assets. In Bengal, for example, the Raja of Burdwan had recently divided up part of his
zamindari
into lots, or
patnis
, on condition that the purchasers, or
patnidars
, paid the revenue on these lots. The
patnidars
then ‘sometimes sold lots to others known as
dar-patnidars
, and they too sold lots to others below them, known as
das-dar-patnidars
… By 1855 it was estimated that some two-thirds of Bengal were held on tenures of this sort, and there is a presumption that many of the purchasers had urban connections.’
³
Inheritance laws encouraged a similar fragmentation; and city-based merchants, moneylenders and financiers were indeed prominent amongst the purchasers.