Gandhi & Churchill (6 page)

New words expanded and enriched the English vocabulary: palanquin, coolie, bungalow, jungle (from the Hindi
jangal
), cash (from the Tamil
kasu
), loot, tycoon, pundit, dinghy, dungaree, nabob, memsahib, thug (named after the Thugees, the murderous worshippers of Kali), and juggernaut (from the town of Jugarnath, where religious festivals included a great chariot under whose wheels worshippers would sometimes throw themselves). At the same time khaki (from the Hindi
khoko,
meaning “dusty”), puggarees (the cloth band covering a pith helmet), gymkhanas, cots, bangalores, and dum dum bullets (made at the Indian munitions factory in Dum Dum) became fixtures of British military life, not only in India but throughout the empire.

India deeply affected Britain’s relations with other countries. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the need to protect British interests there had fueled the rivalry with France (Napoleon’s own conquest of Egypt of 1798 had been conceived as only a stepping-stone for restoring France’s dominance in India) as well as Russia. It spurred close ties with the rulers of Egypt (home of the Suez Canal) and Turkey, whose sultan was the spiritual leader for millions of Indian Muslims. By 1884 protecting India was essential to British foreign policy. Virtually any diplomatic deal Britain struck with non-Western powers from Egypt and Abyssinia to China and Japan had to pass the scrutiny of the viceroy from his headquarters at Calcutta or lodgings nearby in Barrackpore, or was even handled directly by his personal envoys.

Finally, India taught Britons the habits of empire. It served as the training ground for generations of soldiers from Wellington to Lord Wavell; administrators from Elihu Yale (a former governor of Madras who also founded Yale College in America) to Thomas Raffles and Viscount Halifax (the man who almost replaced Winston Churchill as prime minister during World War II). Experiences there inspired writers from Thomas Macaulay and Kipling to E. M. Forster and George Orwell,
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and philosophers James Fitzjames Stephen and James Mill.

The Indian Civil Service even helped to keep Britain’s exclusive public schools in business, as Eton, Harrow, and the rest churned out young men by the hundreds, trained in Latin and Greek, who were useless for any jobs in a modern society but were willing to go to some remote Northwest Frontier hill station or to serve in the jungles of East Bengal as district commissioner for £300 a year. John Bright’s famous remark (falsely attributed to John Stuart Mill) that the British Empire was a “vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes” applied more to India than anywhere else.
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But India also taught Britons the habits of racial prejudice. The Raj thrived on an ugly pattern of racial and cultural attitudes that belied British protestations about their concerns for Indians’ welfare and that undercut the moral basis of British rule.

This prejudice was largely the result of the Mutiny. In Clive’s day or even Dalhousie’s, race per se had counted for little in British India; social class or religion, much more.
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Anglo-Indians of mixed race like Cawnpore’s William Shepherd, although completely shunned by the Hindu community, were crucial to the building of the Raj. Eyre Coote, victor of Wandiwash, had been one; so was James Skinner, who created arguably the best regiment of the Indian Army, Skinner’s Horse, just as the British Army’s most distinguished soldier, Field Marshal Sir Frederick Roberts, was the grandson of a Rajput princess. An Anglo-Indian even became prime minister of England. Lord Liverpool, who oversaw the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, was the grandson of a Calcutta woman who had married one of Clive’s cronies.
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Liverpool had been a deeply controversial, even hated figure, but at the time none of his Whig opponents saw fit to mention his ancestry. Fifty years later any politician with Liverpool’s racial background would have been instantly denounced as a “half-caste” or even “black.” One reason for this change was the new theories about race and culture coming from the Continent, reinforced by Charles Darwin.
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But at its core was the experience of the Mutiny. The events of 1857–58 left a permanent stamp of race fear in England, just as the uprising’s defeat reinforced the lesson that the British were born to rule and the Indians to obey.

After 1858 Britons in India sensed they were a garrisoned community. “We are among the natives,” as one of them put it, “as a ship on the wide and fathomless ocean constantly at the mercy of the wind, waves, and hidden rocks.”
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Uncertainty and anxiety turned India into an increasingly segregated society. Unlike the laws of South Africa or the American South, Indian laws were ostensibly, even ostentatiously, color blind. But the new railways carefully reserved first-class compartments for whites only. Public restrooms were marked “European” and “Native.” In some Anglican churches Indian Christians were not allowed to sit in the cooler parts of the church or under the fans.
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So paradoxically, even as the British were coming to India in record numbers and were becoming more involved in organizing Indian life than ever, they also were becoming more distant. The only natives with whom most Indian Britons had contact were servants or other passive objects of British rules and regulations. After work whites retreated to their bungalows or their private clubs, which excluded natives or even persons of mixed race. The basic attitude was summed up in one of Kipling’s epigrams: “Let the White go to the White, and the Black to the Black.” This policy not only seemed the best way to prevent racial discord, or even another Mutiny; it also ensured that whites and only whites remained in charge.

By 1884 British society in India had become a collection of self-enclosed boxes, each more exclusive and narrower than the one before. Class, education, and even ethnic distinctions (for example, Irish versus Scot and English versus Jew) sharply compartmentalized white society, from the Viceregal Lodge in Calcutta to the most remote hill stations. But these barriers bowed down to the most important distinction of all, the one that separated European from the native—even from the richest or highest-born native. The social and physical distance reinforced cultural and racial stereotypes that would carry right through into Winston Churchill’s day.

Hindus, for example, were supposed to be weak and superstitious but also “intriguing, cunning…Falsehood and dissimulation, the most contemptible and degrading vices of which human beings can be guilty, are the national vices of Hindus.”
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Muslims, on the other hand, were considered physically strong but intellectually dim, while Sikhs were loyal but unstable, “the most militant and turbulent race in India.”
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This system of racial stereotyping was born in the Indian Army. For decades its British commanders preferred to recruit their soldiers from the sturdy (mostly Muslim) peasant stock of northwestern India or from mountain tribes like Gurkhas and Garhwalis of the Himalaya foothills, rather than from the upper-caste Hindus who had dominated the pre-1857 army and were suspected of fomenting the Great Mutiny. What had begun as a strategy for avoiding a second national uprising became a rough-and-ready classification of Indians into those who were intelligent and educated but also weak and cowardly and the “martial races,” those who were strong and brave but slow and backward. “Only British gentlemen combined both the intelligence and courage” needed to command troops in battle or to govern a subcontinent like India.
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On the whole, the average white in India believed that a typical native might make a good servant or a loyal soldier. In a few cases, a Bengali or high-caste Rajput might be ready to absorb a full Western education, studying Shakespeare sonnets and Latin grammar at Elphinstone College in Bombay or the Muslim Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh. In truly extraordinary cases, he might even test into the Indian Civil Service. (Satyendranath Tagore was the first to do so, in 1863.)

But to the British they were still all “niggers,” incapable of accomplishing anything without British help. Race allowed a half-educated Irish shipping clerk in Bombay to dismiss Tagore or his Nobel Prize–winning poet brother Rabindranath as pencil-pushing “babus.” As late as 1922 one British colonel would directly attribute Gandhi’s success to his support among the so-called nonfighting classes, “educated, discontented, cowardly agitators” who would quickly back down if the Raj stood firm—a view echoed by Winston Churchill a decade later.
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But as in all apartheid societies, beneath the contempt lay fear—especially fear for white women. The horrors in the garden at Bibighar cast an enormous and lurid shadow over British attitudes for nearly a century, especially as the numbers of British women in India grew after 1858. In a world in which whites were outnumbered ten thousand to one, and white women even more so, informal rules of sexual as well as racial segregation were rigorously applied.

White women were never to travel, or meet alone, with an Indian man; Indian males were never to speak to a European woman unless spoken to, let alone stare at or touch one. Those who dared to transgress those rules, male or female, became objects of scandal, even physical violence. Such incidents became the subject of sensational fiction from Kipling to E. M. Forster’s
A Passage to India
. Bizarre as they were, the rules lasted almost as long as the Raj. As late as 1925 an Indian newspaperman could remember not being allowed to wander near a beach reserved for white women, in case an Indian male caught sight of an English lady in her bathing costume.
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The Raj taught that Indians were incapable of self-restraint, self-discipline, or self-help, let alone self-rule. J. F. Stephen, law member of the viceroy’s council in the early 1870s, stated the case plainly and succinctly. Centuries, even thousands of years, of conflict and native misrule had left India “worn to the bone.” It was white rule, and the Raj’s absolute authority, that had brought “peace, order, the supremacy of law, the prevention of crime [and] the construction of public works” to the subcontinent. Native rule would mean a return to chaos. The English mission in India was to impose “European principles” of law and progress and peace on a people who had known none. It was a just peace, Stephen stated, but ultimately a “peace compelled by force.”
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So when Victoria was declared empress of India in 1877 (taking on, as it were, the formal mantle of the Mughals), she was, for all her maternal interest in her Indian subjects, also shutting the door on any change in their servile status. The only hope for Indians in the future, according to Sir John Strachey, a prominent post-Mutiny official in the Indian Civil Service, was “the long continuance of the benevolent but strong government of Englishmen”—whether Indians liked it or not.
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Yet even in the midst of India’s official celebrations of Victoria’s new title in 1877, to which the viceroy, Lord Lytton, invited nearly seventy thousand guests and seventy-seven rajas and princes in their jeweled robes and finery, famine was breaking out across India. The monsoons had failed that year. Starvation soon spread to Bombay and Madras and Hyderabad, touching nearly thirty million people and lasting until mid-1878.
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Lytton, the son of novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton and a friend of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, was like most viceroys conscientious and hardworking. He set in motion a famine-control program that would, with only a single exception, prevent another major outbreak for nearly seventy years.
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Yet his attitude about India and Indians was typical. He believed that the majority of Indians were “an inert mass,” incapable of generating effort or taking care of themselves, while the Western-trained elite were feckless “Baboos whom we have educated to write semi-seditious articles in the Press.” The best the British could hope for, Lytton insisted, was good relations with the princes and the large landowners, who in turn kept the rest of the population in line. “We certainly cannot afford to give them any increased political power independent of our own.”
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His successor in 1881, George Frederick Robinson, Lord Ripon, son of a Liberal prime minister (he had even been born at Number 10 Downing Street), stood at the opposite pole to the conservative Lytton. In fact, Lytton and Ripon set off a debate about what to do about India that would last right down to the end of the Raj—and shape the lives and attitudes of both Gandhi and Winston Churchill.

Like Lytton, Ripon firmly believed in Britons’ imperial mission in India. But he also believed that the Indians themselves had a role to play. His ideal was to create a nation of people who would be, as Thomas Macaulay stated in his famous
Minute on Indian Education
of 1835, “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” Ripon believed building a bond of trust and cooperation with educated Indians was crucial to creating the kind of color-blind India embodied in the Queen’s Proclamation and to ensuring the future of the Raj. “We must make [the natives] feel that England wishes to govern India not only
for
India but
through
India.”
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It was a noble dream, but Ripon’s efforts to implement it would set off a firestorm, later called the White Mutiny, that seared away the moral facade of British rule and its self-justifications.

At issue were native judges in the civil service. When Ripon found out they were not allowed to try white defendants, only native ones, he and his equally liberal and high-principled law member of the Council, Courtenay Ilbert, introduced a bill in 1883 to correct this anomaly. The Ilbert Bill affected only a handful of senior judges, barely twenty in all of India. But the reaction from the British community was furious, even hysterical.