The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (22 page)

To the east, in Burma, which had been progressively absorbed from the 1820s to the fall of Mandalay in 1885, there was no great game against a rival imperial power—at least until World War II and the invasion by the Japanese—but there were extraordinary adventures in the jungles with
British officers leading small detachments of troops (often Gurkhas) to hunt down dacoits, dodge poisoned arrows (not to mention slithering leeches and malarial mosquitoes), and stamp out nasty old Burmese habits like child sacrifice and slavery, customs the British were still fighting between the World Wars.

But the Northwest Frontier and Burma were the wild peripheries of the empire. In what we might think of as India proper, the word for the dawning twentieth century was nationalism. India, a land of two thousand languages and two hundred castes, had never been a unified nation, but Britain had given its educated classes a common language, it had provided them with freedom of the press (and Indian newspapers could publish the most inflammatory rubbish), it had offered them places as lawyers and junior civil servants, and it had given them English ideals, including the ideal of representative democracy. The question was not whether the Indians would be given a greater say in their government but when and how.

All that was put on hold, however, when the guns of August 1914 erupted and Britain went to war against the Central Powers. Indian princes pledged their loyalty. The Empire was united, and the Indian army, all volunteers, contributed more than a million men—virtually none of them, it should be noted, from the educated elite—who served from Mesopotamia to the shell-rocked trenches of France. Despite the efforts of a variety of nationalist agitators and a Turkish-German campaign to inspire a jihad against the British, the Indians, with few exceptions, stayed loyal.

It was generally agreed that India's loyalty merited some reward. For a conservative like the former viceroy Lord Curzon that meant gradually increasing the Indians' role in what he liked to call “responsible government.” Liberals and socialists (in the Labour Party), however, wanted to
push for full Indian self-government. Conservatives were cautious not only out of imperial principle but because of the new danger of Bolshevism. The Bolsheviks had as their top foreign policy goal the destruction of the British Empire. To that end, though atheists, they called Muslims to jihad, and their seditious hand was seen behind nationalist Indian riots and protests.

Another agitator for Indian nationalism was a wizened, eccentric lawyer and holy man, Mohandas Gandhi, who had inexplicably—to both educated Indians and the British—become a prominent political figure. He and other Indian leaders called for protests against new anti-terrorist laws that stripped normal judicial protections from criminals accused of sedition. The protests, despite Gandhi's entreaties, inevitably turned violent. The agitation spread across India, absorbing other grievances and giving mobs an excuse for a rioter's holiday in what was supposed to be a program of passive disobedience. Many in the British Raj felt that now was not the time to show conciliation. The pressures on the Raj blew up at Amritsar.

In April 1919, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer arrived in Amritsar to find a city in the grips of an Indian mob. Europeans had been killed, a white female missionary had been knocked off her bike and assaulted, and European women and children had been forced to seek shelter at a fort, while gangs of Indians burned and pillaged. Everything he saw outraged him, and rightly so. Dyer was a hero of the old school. He had been born in India and spent his childhood there before being educated in Ireland and at Sandhurst. He had a gallant record that extended from service in the Northwest Frontier to Burma. He knew India well and spoke several of its languages in addition to Persian. Most of all, he was a man who stood by the British imperial principles of justice, fair play, and decency—delivered by force if necessary—and who believed that a mob that attacked women and threatened children deserved condign punishment. Amritsar was put under martial law, and Dyer ordered that, for a five-day period, any Indians wishing to go down the street where the missionary had been attacked had to crawl on their bellies, because in Dyer's Christian, British, chivalric view “We look upon women as sacred, or ought to.”
⁸

Dyer was charged with keeping order over more than three thousand square miles of the Punjab, not to mention Amritsar (the population of which was 150,000 in 1919). He had fewer than 1,200 troops. He ordered a complete ban on public protests and gatherings of any kind in Amritsar, stating explicitly that any public demonstrations would be fired upon. The message was broadcast throughout the city. But on 13 April 1919, 15,000 to 20,000 Indians gathered in a bordered area called the Jillianwala Bagh, near the Sikh's Golden Temple of Amritsar. Dyer brought fewer than a hundred troops (mostly Gurkhas), not all of them armed with rifles, to confront the mob, many of whose members were armed with metal-tipped sticks. Dyer ordered his men into line and without delay gave the order to fire: 379 Indians were killed and more than 1,000 were wounded. The mob was dispersed—and so was the feared rebellion in the Punjab.

Dyer became a hate figure to anti-colonialists, and was repudiated by liberal opinion and the British government at home. But he was praised by old India hands, the conservative press (which linked the Indian rebellion to international Bolshevism), and the lieutenant governor of the Punjab, Michael O'Dwyer (who was assassinated by an Indian terrorist in 1940). Perhaps more telling, Dyer's actions were supported by many Indians, especially businessmen, who feared the mob; Dyer was even made an honorary Sikh.

Called by some “the savior of India,” he was nevertheless an embarrassment to the British government. He was stripped of his command and shoved into forced retirement. His enemies (who included Winston Churchill, though privately he held some sympathy for Dyer) believed that he had betrayed every element of justice for which Britain stood. Dyer believed he had only done what was necessary to restore peace to Amritsar
and the Punjab. He did not deny the horror of the massacre, but he took a frontier soldier's view that doing harsh and terrible things was sometimes necessary to preserve the peace. In retirement, he was battered by a succession of strokes, and the day before he died (in 1927) he said that he had no desire to recover, “I only want to die and know from my Maker whether I did right or wrong.”
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Gandhi meanwhile continued to preach non-cooperation with the British government. The political vehicle he had made his own, the Indian National Congress, began expanding its reach from the Indian lawyer class to the peasants, who garlanded Gandhi as a sort of mystical savior who would overturn their eternal lot—though Gandhi's goal was somewhat different: a nation of self-sufficient spinners untainted by industrialism and Western influence (he opposed Western medicine and vaccinations as well). Indians tended to read into Gandhi what they wanted to find, which was why, again, his campaign of peaceful non-cooperation degenerated into violence in practice: the mob wasn't interested in the finer points of Gandhi's philosophy of
satyagraha
, and it—sometimes joined to a combination of Islamism and Bolshevism with which it had very little in common—became an excuse for riot and insurgency. As the death toll stacked up, Gandhi was imprisoned for sedition in 1922 (he served two years of a six-year sentence). The British Raj, relying on loyal Indian princes, brave British officers, and reliable Indian soldiers, police, and civil servants, endured.

Gandhi continued to preach his gospel of primitive self-sufficiency, homeopathic cures, and alleged religious enlightenment that would cure all political evils. In 1930, his program of professedly peaceful protests again roiled India with violence. The British viceroy negotiated with Gandhi; concessions, it appeared, had to be made to Indian nationalism. Opposing this tide was Winston Churchill, who was convinced that Britain alone spared India communal bloodshed and granted it the benefits of humane, liberal government. It was during this period of British appeasement of
Gandhi and the Indian National Congress that Churchill made his famous comment: “It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience. . . . ”
¹⁰

British policy was to lead India to becoming a self-governing dominion, an exotic version of Canada. There were elections giving Indians a greater voice in the government, but that voice was hardly united. A Muslim League, calling for an independent Muslim state, rose as a rival to the largely Hindu Indian National Congress. The princely states tried to isolate themselves from a nationalism of which they wanted no part.

By 1939, of course, the British were somewhat distracted by a World War against Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and imperial Japan. Gandhi advised that the British should foil the Nazis by surrendering unconditionally to them and thus defeat them through moral example. Gandhi's nemesis Winston Churchill (who became prime minister in May 1940) had other, more robust ideas. As in the First World War, Indians flocked to the colors: the Indian army, all volunteers, grew to number more than 2,644,000 men—and this despite the opposition of the Indian National Congress (the Muslim League supported the war, as did the Indian princes).

The Indian National Congress, inspired by Gandhi (who would soon be imprisoned again) sponsored an anti-British “Quit India” campaign that called on Indians to act as saboteurs, blowing up trains, cutting telegraph wires, and rioting in the streets (in one such riot, two Canadian pilots were murdered). There was also Subhas Chandra Bose, an Indian nationalist of a more militant stripe, who tried to raise a pro-Nazi Indian Legion from Indian soldiers captured by the Germans and Italians. This proved a bust, but when he took his appeal to the Japanese he found a cleverer audience. The Japanese immediately segregated Indian prisoners and pumped them
full of propaganda about how Asians should unite to crush the British. They had some takers, enough for Bose to form an “Indian National Army.” Bose, however, found that the Japanese held a lower opinion of Indian soldiers than did the British—in fact, they were far more racist, delegating the Indians to the most menial of roles, including labor details. They even put Bose under arrest. But he labored on, dubbing himself the
führer
of the “Provisional Government of Free India” and as such declared war on Britain and the United States. (His government was recognized by President Eamon de Valera of the Irish Republic.) The low Japanese opinion of the Indian National Army proved well-founded; numbering about 40,000 troops at its height, it was plagued by desertion and its men proved no match for the loyal British Indian Army, whose troops took a special pleasure in gunning them down. With the Japanese empire collapsing and Burma regained by Britain, Bose attempted to flee to Soviet Russia and lead a Soviet invasion of India. Instead, he died from petrol burns suffered after his plane crashed.

Of the Indian National Army prisoners of war, the British deemed that most were merely dupes. Some were reinstated into the army, many were simply discharged; fewer than 6,200 were deemed true traitors; fewer than twenty faced courts-martial; and none was given a death sentence. The British authorities feared making martyrs of traitors whom Gandhi was praising, and for whom parts of India were rioting. Indian nationalists took this as a sign of weakness, and it appeared they were right, for the British had had enough of India. Conscript Britons wanted to go home, and Indian agitators wanted the British out of India—apparently so they could get on with the business of killing each other. The Muslim League of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, demanding an independent Pakistan, launched a “Direct Action Day,” which became the excuse for sectarian violence. Gandhi and the Indian National Congress continued to fan the flames of mutiny and rebellion, and India's fissiparous tendencies found expression in the Sikhs' claiming a right to an independent Khalistan. The old idea of an India of
diverse peoples and 565 princely states united in one federated dominion with a limited central government run by peacekeeping Britons was rapidly giving way to the noxious modern politics of violent, segregated national-isms. A new viceroy was appointed in February 1947, Lord Louis Mountbatten, who declared that India would be granted its independence on 15 August 1947. The Raj was packing up, giving in to Indian lawyers like Gandhi (University College London, Inner Temple), Jawaharlal Nehru (Harrow, Cambridge, Inner Temple), and Ali Jinnah (Lincoln's Inn), that it had educated and trained.