Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750–1914. Richard Holmes
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were reinforced in January 1877 when a vast gathering, auspiciously on Delhi ridge, solemnised Queen Victoria’s assumption of the title ‘Empress of India’. A delighted Lord Lytton, the viceroy, recorded the presence of ‘sixty-three ruling princes’ and ‘three hundred titular chiefs and native gentlemen’, maharajas, rajas, raos, nawabs, sheikhs, dewans, rawals, tharkurs and desais from Cape Cormorin to the Hindu Kush and from the deserts of Sind to the hills of Assam. The viceroy received three salutes of thirty-one guns apiece with a feu de joie in between the salutes. Val Prinsep, the official artist, thought that the musketry ‘was splendidly executed and with the desired effect, for it made the rajas jump and raised quite a stampede among the elephants, who “skedaddled” in all directions, and killed a few natives’.110 Almost 16,000 prisoners were released, and an amnesty was granted to all those exiled after the Mutiny, except Prince Firoz Shah, a relative of the late King of Delhi.
This distant reference to the Mughals was singularly apt, for the new empire had something in common with the old. The hierarchy of feudatory princes, the most senior distinguished by graded gun salutes, the establishment in 1861 of the Order of the Star of India, and even the creation of Indian heraldry, with elephants and alligators doing duty for the mythical beasts of European heraldry, were all designed to buttress the empress’s position. There was even an ‘Indian Eton’, Rajkumar College, established in 1870 for the sons of princely houses. Rulers could be decorated or given extra guns for good governance, charitable activities and demonstrations of loyalty, or demoted or even deposed for excesses or manifest injustice. In 1869 Porbander, for example, was demoted to a third-class state after its ruler cut off the ears and nose of one of his courtiers for allegedly corrupting his son. But there were times when even prim, official India turned a blind eye to rough justice. The Maharaja of Kashmir passed a labouring convict who begged exoneration because it was only a ‘little matter’ that had led to his incarceration. He explained what he had done.
‘Oh,’ said the Maharajah, ‘bring pen and ink.’ The convict was stripped and laid on the ground, and the Maharajah took the pen and drew a line down and then across his trunk. Then a sawyer was ordered to saw the man in four pieces. ‘One piece shall be sent north, one south, one east and one west,’ said the Maharajah. ‘For I want my people to know that I do not regard the murder of a little girl for the sake of her ornaments as a little matter.’111
One authority suggests that there were 629 princely states in India, with more than 300 in the Bombay presidency alone, ranging from ‘backyard principalities’ to the huge Baroda, second in size only to Hyderabad.112 Between 1857 and 1947 about one-third of the subcontinent and one-fifth of its people had native rulers, with British influence applied through residents and political agents. It was ironic that British support for the old order came at a time when ‘a new elite, English educated and city based’ was demanding change.113 The establishment of an Indian National Congress in 1885 helped focus demands that Britain should help Indians advance to the state where they could manage their own affairs, but there was no agreement as to quite when or how self-government might come about. There were more extreme expressions of nationalist sentiment in the press, mirrored by violent outbursts of imperialist rage, especially amongst non-official Europeans, jammed uncomfortably between the subject mass and the ruling elite, resentful at the first signs of what they saw as the creeping Indianisation of local justice and administration.
The Indian Civil Service, ‘one vast club’ according to one of its members, and ‘the heaven-born’ by general consent, was tiny, with around 1,000 members. Not only was it well paid, with starting salaries for assistant commissioners of £300 a year, £2,700 for judges and collectors, and £8,000 for lieutenant governors, but its members qualified for a pension of £1,000 a year after twenty-five years’ service. 114 From 1854 onwards entrance was by competitive examination, and there had been a shift away from what Henry Lawrence had called ‘men who will mix freely with the people, and will do justice in their shirt-sleeves’, towards clever young men who could deal with examinations with a heavy classical bias. The first Indian passed the exam in 1863, but there were no more passes until 1869, when three Indians were successful. Two who were then rejected for being over-age, duly sued the Secretary of State for India and were reinstated. One, Surendranath Banerjea, was dismissed during his first year of service for signing an inaccurate return. It was an indication of the system’s reluctance to accept the inevitable. There were many who saw the writing on the wall. Sir Henry Cotton pointed out that:
Men who speak English better than most Englishmen, who read Mill and Comte, Max Müller and Maine, who occupy with distinction seats on the judicial bench, who administer the affairs of native States with many millions of inhabitants, who manage cotton mills and conduct the boldest operations of commerce, who edit newspapers in English and correspond on equal terms with the scholars of Europe …
could not be expected to salaam whenever they met an Englishman in the street.115 It was hard for even those who had been liberal and paternalistic to adjust, not least because of social and religious difficulties in meeting Indian women or enjoying a meal together.
The best that can be said is that most viceroys and the majority of their officials cared passionately about their task, even if they were not sure quite how to let go of the reins. Lord Curzon, viceroy from 1898 to 1905, and architect of the Delhi Durbar of 1902, publicly and controversially censured a regiment which had failed to punish two of its soldiers who beat a cook so badly that he died. The Earl of Willingdon, viceroy in 1931–36, founded the Willingdon Club in Bombay as a protest against the racist attitude of his own club. Philip Woodruff, writing after Independence, argued that ‘if today the Indian peasant looks to the new district officer of his own race with the expectation of receiving justice and sympathy, that is our memorial.’116
On my ride across the North-West Frontier of what is now Pakistan, I halted for the night in a tiny village somewhere west of the Shandur Pass, and met a man who had travelled some distance to show me a rifle Lord Curzon had given to his grandfather. Asked if I knew the gentleman who had been assistant district commissioner at the time of Partition, I replied that I did not but I feared he might now have been gathered to his fathers, as it was some time ago. This was a pity, it was agreed, for he had been wise and honest, which was more than could be said for too many of his successors.
With domestic politics changing, the Raj still pursued an imperial foreign policy. Burma was annexed in discrete mouthfuls, with three Burma wars in 1824–26, 1852–53 and 1885–87, with a period of guerrilla warfare thereafter. But the main external preoccupation of the Government of India remained the Russian threat to the North-West Frontier, with Kipling warning about ‘a shifty promise, an unsheathed sword/ And a grey-coat guard on the Helmund ford’ and the Russian Colonel Terentiev gleefully predicting, in his book Russia and England in the Struggle for the Markers of Central Asia, that the Cossack boot would soon kick the whole rotten structure down. We may now seriously doubt the logistic feasibility of any such attack, but with the pace of the Russian advance across Central Asia – Tashkent in 1865 and Samarkand in 1868 – there were repeated bursts of alarm and Russophobia in both London and Calcutta.117
The ‘Great Game’, played out between rival explorers and intelligence agents, occasionally became deadly serious. The First Afghan War was triggered by British fears of Russian involvement in Afghanistan, and the root of the second was much the same. In the summer of 1878, when there was already an international crisis in the Near East, the Amir Sher Ali of Afghanistan agreed to accept a Russian envoy, but not to receive a British embassy. Lord Lytton at once ordered an invasion. Kabul was taken with deceptive ease, Sher Ali fled, and Sir Louis Cavagnari was installed as envoy to his successor, Yakub Khan. In September 1879 there was a rising in which Cavagnari and his escort were murdered. A column under Major General Frederick Roberts duly took Kabul