Plain Tales from British India

Exactly 150 years ago, on September 14, 1857, at the height of the Great Uprising against the British in India, British forces attacked Delhi. They entered the besieged city through a breach in the walls near the Kashmiri Gate. Then they proceeded to massacre not just the combatants that were ranged against them—their own rebellious infantrymen (or sepoys), supported by freelance Muslim jihadis armed with battle-axes—but also the ordinary defenseless citizens of the old Mughal capital. In one muhalla (neighborhood) alone, Kucha Chelan, some 1,400 unarmed citizens of Delhi were cut down. “The orders went out to shoot every soul,” recorded Edward Vibart:

It was literally murder…. I have seen many bloody and awful sights lately but such as I witnessed yesterday I pray I never see again. The women were all spared but their screams, on seeing their husbands and sons butchered, were most painful…. Heaven knows I feel no pity, but when some old grey bearded man is brought and shot before your very eyes, hard must be that heart that can look on with indifference….

Those city dwellers who survived the killing were driven out into the countryside to fend for themselves. Delhi, a sophisticated city of maybe half a million souls, was left an empty ruin. Though the Mughal imperial family had surrendered peacefully, most of the Emperor’s sixteen sons were tried and hanged, while three were shot in cold blood, having first given up their arms, then been told to strip and hand over their jewels: “In 24 hours I disposed of the principal members of the house of Timur the Tartar,” Captain William Hodson wrote to his sister. “I am not cruel, but I confess I did enjoy the opportunity of ridding the earth of these wretches.”

The father of the princes was the Emperor Bahadur Shah II, known by his pen name, Zafar. Zafar was the last Mughal emperor, and the direct descendant of Genghis Khan and Timur, of Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan. He was born in 1775, when the British were still a relatively modest power in India, looking inward from three enclaves on the Indian shore. In his lifetime he had seen his own dynasty reduced to insignificance, while the East India Company transformed itself from a group of vulnerable traders into an aggressively expansionist military force. Captured soon after the fall of Delhi, Zafar was put on trial in his own palace and prosecuted as a rebel and traitor—despite the fact that the company had long acknowledged, even on its own seal, its legal status as the Emperor’s vassal. The court sentenced him to be banished to Burma. There he died and was buried in an unmarked grave. The Emperor, a noted poet, lamented in one of his last lyrics:

My life now gives no ray of light,
I bring no solace to heart or eye;
Out of dust to dust again,
Of no use to anyone am I.
Delhi was once a paradise,
Where Love held sway and reigned;
But its charm lies ravished now
And only ruins remain.

The violent suppression of the Great Uprising of 1857—the largest anticolonial revolt against any European empire anywhere in the world in the entire course of the nineteenth century—was a pivotal moment in the history of British imperialism in India. It marked the end of both the East India Company and the Mughal dynasty, the two principal forces that had shaped Indian history over the previous three hundred years, and replaced both with undisguised imperial rule by the British government.

Not long after Zafar’s lifeless corpse had been tipped into its anonymous Burmese grave, Queen Victoria accepted the title “Empress of India” from Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, initiating a very different period of direct imperial rule.

The year 1857 can usefully be taken to mark an important frontier in the changing nature of British rule. Before the uprising, and especially in its eighteenth-century heyday, the East India Company—a multinational trading corporation dedicated to the pursuit of its shareholders’ profits—was intermittently a corrupt, aggressive, and rapacious force, which impoverished once-prosperous Indian provinces and destroyed indigenous industries, arts, and institutions.

Most terrible of all was the plunder of Bengal following its conquest by the British in 1757. The British commander Robert Clive returned to Britain with the huge fortune of £300,000, making him one of the richest self-made men in Europe; after one single battle—Plassey—he transferred to the company treasury no less than £2.5 million that he had seized from the defeated nawab of Bengal. The conquered province was left devastated by war and high taxation, and stricken by the famine of 1769. Its wealth rapidly drained into British bank accounts, while its prosperous weavers and artisans were coerced “like so many slaves” by their new British masters, and the markets were flooded with British products. As the contemporary historian Alexander Dow put it:

At that time, Bengal was one of the richest, most populous and best cultivated kingdoms in the world…. We may date the commencement of decline from the day on which Bengal fell under the dominion of foreigners.¹

On the other hand, the rule of the East India Company was also marked, especially in the first two centuries from 1600 to 1800, by a surprising degree of interaction between the colonized and the colonizer—ranging from ties of business and finance, political alliances, and collaboration to friendships, love affairs, and not infrequently marriage. It was not just that Indian moneylenders and ambitious courtiers allied themselves with the rising power of the company; during the eighteenth century, it was almost as common for Westerners to take on the customs and even the religions of India as the reverse. Contrary to stereotype, a surprising number of company men responded to India by slowly shedding their Britishness like an unwanted skin and adopting Indian dress and taking on the ways of the Mughal governing class they came to replace—what Salman Rushdie has called “chutnification.”

These White Mughals were far from an insignificant minority: between 1780 and 1785, the wills of company officials show that one in three were leaving everything to Indian wives, often accompanied by moving declarations of love—asking their close friends to care for their “well beloved” Indian partners, or as one put it, “the excellent and respectable Mother of my two children for whom I feel unbounded love and affection and esteem.” Family portraits from the period are remarkable for the ease with which two races and religions cohabit, with British men dressed in turbans and kurta pajamas, while their Indian wives sit in the European manner on European furniture.

One official, the Boston-born Sir David Ochterlony, who every evening used to take all thirteen of his Indian consorts around Delhi, each on the back of her own elephant, went so far as to build a Mughal garden tomb for himself and his chief wife, where the central dome was topped by a cross and flanked by a forest of minarets. A note from Ochterlony gives a measure of the surprisingly multireligious tone of this period: “Lady Ochterlony,” he reported to Calcutta, “has applied for leave to make the Hadge to Mecca.”

In contrast, during the later half of British rule that followed the suppression of the Uprising of 1857, especially during the high Raj of the late nineteenth century, there was almost complete apartheid, an almost religious belief in racial differences, and little friendship or marriage across strictly policed racial and religious boundaries. But the Victorian administrators, unlike their eighteenth-century predecessors, were widely celebrated—even by freedom fighters such as Nehru and Gandhi—for their integrity and incorruptibility.

In the light of so much postcolonial disapproval, it is worth remembering the reputation Victorian rule in India once enjoyed, even from Britain’s fiercest critics. Theodore Roosevelt thought that Britain had done “such marvellous things in India” that they might “transform the Indian population…in government and culture, and thus leave [their] impress as Rome did hers on Europe.” While company men openly came to the East intent on making their fortune, the Victorian administrators saw themselves as part of an altruistic project, taking up the “sacred responsibility” to bring good government to the benighted heathen, what Lord Curzon characterized, without any apparent irony, as “the most unselfish page in history…. We found strife and we have created order.” Providence, he concluded, had sent Britain to India “for the lasting benefit of millions of the human race.”

Today, of course, this benevolent self-image of the Victorians is a subject of heavily contested and often bitter debate. Niall Ferguson’s deeply controversial—if impressively eloquent—celebration of the British Empire and what he sees as its central role in the spread of capitalism, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, was first published in 2003, the same year that the US went into Iraq. He did not hesitate to make explicit comparisons between the old British and the new American empires, and his industrious stream of books, Op-Eds, Foreign Affairs essays, and television documentaries encouraged the US to embrace empire, just as Kipling had urged America to take up the White Man’s Burden a century before.

Partly as a result of Ferguson’s work in so publicly and popularly commemorating what he saw as the joys of imperialism, over the past four years imperial historians have suddenly found their subject the center of frenzied debate. Academic discussions on Lawrence of Arabia’s views on Iraq, the revolt of the Mahdi in Khartoum, the British Mandate in Palestine, and the Wahhabi Uprisings of the North-West Frontier have all taken on an entirely new importance as perspectives changed in the light of recent horrors in Baghdad, Falluja, Darfur, Gaza, and Kabul. Postcolonial studies were always a heavily politicized and angrily polemical academic field, but after September 11 they became a central focus of protest against American foreign policy. Indeed events moved so fast that the very phrase “postcolonial” came to be redundant, as the cadaver of Western colonialism emerged shuddering from its shallow grave. The study of imperialism, in short, was suddenly about the present as much as the past.²

As anyone who has ever studied the story of the rise of the British in India will know well, there is nothing new about the neocons. The cynical old game of regime change—of installing puppet regimes propped up by the West for its own political and economic ends—is one that the British had perfected by the late eighteenth century. Sometimes the similarities are almost uncanny. By the end of the 1790s, the hard-liners who were calling for regime change found that they now had a president who was not prepared to wait to be attacked: he was a new sort of conservative, aggressive in foreign policy, bitterly anti-French, and intent on turning his country into the unrivaled global power. It was best, he believed, preemptively to remove hostile Muslim regimes that presumed to resist the West.

The first to be targeted was a Muslim dictator who had usurped power in a military coup. According to misleading British sources, this focus of anti-Western opposition was a “furious fanatic,” who had “perpetually on his tongue the projects of Jihad.” He was also deemed to be “oppressive and unjust, [and a] perfidious negociator.” Yet in this case, the dictator was not Saddam but Tipu, sultan of Mysore, and the president, Henry Dundas, the president of Parliament’s Board of Control. In 1798 Dundas sent Richard Wellesley to India with instructions to replace Tipu with a Western-backed puppet prince. Mysore was duly invaded and Tipu was killed in the lucrative war of 1799.

Given the issues involved, it is hardly surprising that there is little neutral territory in the complex and politically supercharged debate on empire. Did Western mercantile imperialism bring high capitalism and free trade to Asia, as its supporters would have us believe; or did it irrevocably destroy millennia-old trading networks? Did it bring democracy to a part of the world inured to despotism and tyranny; or did it remove political freedom of expression from lands with long traditions of debate and public expression of dissent, as argued by Amartya Sen? Did it bring in constitutional guarantees of the freedom of the individual; or promote slavery, exploitation, indentured labor, and forced migration? Did the British bring just governance and irrigate the deserts; or did they plunder natural resources, drive a succession of species to extinction, and preside over a succession of famines which left many millions dead while surplus grain was being shipped to Britain? Most important of all, did the British promote religious tolerance, or did they rather sow the seeds of religious conflict with cynical policies of sectarian divide and rule—thus laying the scene for the politico-religious divisions we see around us, and what Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington would have us believe are today’s civilizational clashes?

Two new books on the British in India, both of them sophisticated works by established scholars, demonstrate how polarized the debate has now become. For Nicholas Dirks, who concentrates on the India of the East India Company, the British Empire is a terrible blot on world history comparable to slavery and fascism; to be neutral or even balanced on the issue is to tolerate the intolerable, and even to become complicit in oppressive violence and tyranny. For David Gilmour, however, working on the later period of the high Raj, the Victorian administrators of the Indian Civil Service could certainly be eccentric and fallible, but far from being oppressive exploiters they in fact “represented the British Empire at its best and most altruistic.” It is difficult to imagine two books, on similar subjects, which have less common ground.

Dirks’s book concentrates on one of the most remarkable spectacles in the history of British imperialism: the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first British governor general in India, for oppression, corruption, and gross abuse of power.

On February 13, 1788, huge crowds gathered outside Parliament to witness the members of the House of Lords troop into Westminster Hall to sit in judgment on Hastings. Tickets for the few seats reserved for spectators were said to have changed hands for as much as £50. In the audience was the great society actress Sarah Siddons, as well as Edward Gibbon, Joshua Reynolds, the novelist Fanny Burney, the Queen of England and two of her daughters, and most of the ambassadors in London.

For all the theater of the occasion—indeed one of the prosecutors was the playwright Richard Sheridan—this was not just the greatest political spectacle in the age of George III: it was the nearest the British ever got to putting the empire on trial, and they did so with one of their greatest orators at the helm—Edmund Burke, supported by the no less eloquent Charles James Fox. No wonder the trial has been of as great and constant interest to historians as it was to contemporaries.

The trial dragged on for nearly a decade, during which the British press got a full glimpse both of the extraordinary wealth then being made by the East India Company and its servants, and of the gross abuses that were alleged to have been committed in its gathering. Warren Hastings stood accused of nothing less than the rape of India—or as Burke put it in his opening speech:

cruelties unheard of and devastations almost without name… crimes which have their rise in the wicked dispositions of men—in avarice, rapacity, pride, cruelty, malignity, haughtiness, insolence—in short everything that manifests a heart blackened to the very blackest—a heart dyed in blackness—a heart gangrened to the core…. We have brought before you the head, the captain general of iniquity—one in whom all the fraud, all the tyranny of India are embodied.

When Burke began to describe the violation of Bengali virgins and their mothers by the rapacious tax collectors the British employed—“they were dragged out, naked and exposed to the public view, and scourged before all the people…they put the nipples of the women into the sharp edges of split bamboos and tore them from their bodies”—Mrs. Sheridan was so overpowered that she “swooned and had to be carried from the hall.”

The problem was that the target was in many ways the wrong man. Earlier in his career, Burke—who never visited India—had defended Robert Clive, a genuinely unprincipled mass plunderer, against parliamentary inquiry. Now he directed his ire against Warren Hastings, a man who by virtue of his position, as governor general, was certainly the symbol of an entire system of mercantile oppression, but who had personally done much to begin the process of regulating and reforming the company.

Hastings was fluent in Hindustani, collected Indian religious manuscripts, had many close Indian friends, and regarded himself as an honorable champion of justice. Indeed his interest and affection for India led him to declare in his introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita, whose first translation into English he had sponsored, “in truth I love India a little more than my own country.”³ He did not even look the part of the rapacious plunderer. Far from being a typically ostentatious and loud-mouthed new-rich “nabob,” Hastings cut a sympathetic and dignified figure: “of spare habit, very bald, with a countenance placid and thoughtful, but when animated, full of intelligence.”

As governor general, Hastings had encouraged for the first time the serious study by company officials of India’s history. He agreed to be the active patron of a new “Society for enquiring into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia,” founded by the pioneering Sanskrit scholar Sir William Jones in response to the explosion of interest in the culture of what Jones called “this wonderful country.” Hastings rightly predicted that “such studies, independent of utility, will diffuse a generosity of sentiment…. [After all, the Indian classics] will survive when the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist.” Under Jones and Hastings, the Asiatic Society became the catalyst for an outpouring of scholarship on Indian civilization, as it formed enduring relations with the Bengali intelligentsia and led the way to uncovering the deepest roots of Indian history and civilization. In India, Jones wrote, he had found Arcadia. It was a moment, rare in the history of empire, of genuine cross-cultural appreciation.

Dirks’s polemic, however, completely ignores such interplay of cultures in the early colonial period. Instead he paints a somewhat reductionist picture of simple binary oppositions. He omits any reference to the fascinating new work on the surprisingly fluid and porous racial boundaries of the period opened up by Michael Fisher or a new generation of South Asia scholars such as Durba Ghosh and Maya Jasanoff, whose important new books break genuinely original ground in the study of the relationships between colonized and colonizer.⁴ In this sense, the book has a slightly old-fashioned feel, recalling the work produced by Dirks’s Chicago teacher, Bernard Cohn, and his late Columbia colleague, Edward Said, in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Moreover, Dirks concentrates his attention on the rhetoric and theater of Hastings’s impeachment—a subject much described by many other historians, most notably and fruitfully by the veteran historian of the East India Company Peter Marshall.⁵

While Dirks is rightly appalled by the spectacle of the company’s plunder of Bengal, his passionate Anglophobia and the parallels he draws with modern imperial scandals such as Abu Ghraib are really all that is new about his account. He points out eloquently that historians of empire must never lose “any sense of what empire meant to those who were colonized” and that “empire was always a scandal for those who were colonized.” Moreover, he demonstrates intelligently how Hastings’s ultimate acquittal acted to enhance the reputation of empire in British eyes, and went some way to make governance of other peoples seem justifiable, opening the way to later Victorian attitudes about the British Civilising Mission.

Yet as with his previous book, Castes of Mind (2001), Dirks makes little reference to primary manuscript sources, and none at all to non-English sources, except for a single reference to an eighteenth-century English translation of a Persian-language history of India, the Seir Mutaqherin, which was dedicated to Hastings himself, who had encouraged and patronized its publication. This is a surprising omission considering Dirks’s background as an anthropologist of South Asia who might be expected to have understood the vital importance of using indigenous sources. So for all that he is skeptical of British sources of their proceedings in India, he makes no attempt to access the voluminous Persian, Urdu, or Bengali sources which could have given him an Indian perspective. Instead he relies principally on the evidence of Burke, who was notably ill-informed about India, and who like Dirks—and unlike Hastings—had none of the relevant North Indian languages.

Moreover, Dirks fails to put the British pursuit of empire in the context of previous Indian empires—such as that of the Imperial Cholas who conquered Sri Lanka from southern India in the tenth century, the Ghurid Turks who established an empire based in Delhi in the thirteenth, the Tughluks in the fourteenth, or the Great Mughals who invaded India from Central Asia in the sixteenth. It was the Mughals to whose empire the British succeeded, and whose laws and ceremonial forms they in part adopted and adapted. Nor does Dirks make even passing reference to other contemporary land-based empires, such as the aggressive westward spread of both China and the United States throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at the cost of the indigenous peoples they conquered.

This is an important omission, for the reality is that empire was in the eighteenth century regarded as one of the facts of life, and the normal form of government in many different regions of the globe. Dirks may well be correct to regard empire as inherently scandalous from a contemporary perspective; but it is questionable how far indignation at the actual concept of empire would have meant anything to anyone during the period in question.

More seriously, Dirks’s work is peppered with major factual errors. The governor general of India who introduced a newly aggressive approach to extending British dominion and preempting aggression by the company’s Islamic enemies was not Wellington, the “Iron Duke,” but the Duke’s vain elder brother Richard Wellesley, a very different man indeed, who never spent a day in the army. Equally, the Marathas—a Hindu people from central and western India—did not fill the vacuum left by the fall of Vijayanagara in 1565; instead it was the different Deccani Sultanates who parceled out the lands of the former Hindu empire well over a century before the beginning of the rise of the Marathas.

In some ways, David Gilmour is the mirror image of Nicholas Dirks as a historian of India. The much-praised biographer of Rudyard Kipling and Lord Curzon, Gilmour is uninterested in postcolonial theory; but in his account of “The Ruling Caste” he makes constant and extensive use of unpublished primary manuscript sources and knows intimately both the public and the private correspondence of the Victorian administrators he is writing about. His prose is fluent, elegant, and witty, while Dirks’s can at times be a little preachy and stodgily academic. Indeed The Ruling Caste is a joy to read, and probably the best-written and most thoroughly researched social history of the Victorian British in India.

Yet like Dirks’s book, Gilmour’s suffers from the absence of any Indian perspective: in neither book do we get any idea of what Indians thought about being ruled by the British. We get the impression very clearly of what both authors think about the institution of empire, but there is almost complete silence from those who were actually colonized.

Gilmour’s book is not a piece of neo-imperial polemic in the manner of Niall Ferguson, but immersed as Gilmour is in the memoirs and letters of the Victorian administrators he clearly likes and admires, his book is certainly sympathetic to the colonial administrators that form its subject, and who he believes to have been grotesquely caricatured and misrepresented: “The ICS [Indian Civil Service] passed into history,” he writes, “its motives increasingly denigrated, its policies post-colonially mocked,” with independent India paying them only “the implicit compliment of modelling their successor, the Indian Administrative Service, very closely upon them.” For the civil servants shunted by Indian independence into premature retirement it was an upsetting fate: “They could not comprehend how now, after years of labour and self-denial, they were ending up derided for their intentions and consigned by history to the role of oppressors.”

That said, Gilmour is alive to the ironies and hypocrisies of the British in India, and quizzically amused by the absurdities of his subjects’ imperial snobberies and their obsession with protocol. He is particularly good on the many cross-cultural misunderstandings of the period. Typical is the section on the troubled relations between the officers of the ICS and the Indian princes:

Curzon might rail against “the category of half-Anglicised, half-denationalised, European women-hunting, pseudo-sporting, and very often in the end spirit-drinking young native chiefs.” But he realized that it was Britain’s fault that the category had come into existence. In 1888 the AGG in Central India informed the Foreign Secretary that in his zone of responsibility the result of “an English training for princely youths” so far was “sodomites 2, idiots 1, sots 1…[and a] gentleman …prevented by chronic gonorrhoea from paying his respects on the Queen’s birthday.” Twelve years later Curzon did not spare his sovereign details of the “frivolous and sometimes vicious spendthrifts and idlers” that constituted such a large proportion of her princely subjects. The Rana of Dholpur was “fast sinking into an inebriate and a sot,” the Maharajah of Patiala was “little better than a jockey,” the Maharajah Holkar was “half-mad” and “addicted to horrible vices,” and the Raja of Kapurthala was only happy philandering in Paris.

The Ruling Caste is arranged so that it opens with the recruitment of ICS officers and closes with their disgruntled retirements, in which many found returning to suburban lives in England “torture”; as one sad exile wrote, India had “burnt itself into” him, making him dread “the cold and wet country of [his] birth.” We learn about the changing methods of selecting candidates for the ICS; about the wholly inadequate preparation they received for their job; about the extraordinary range of duties they performed on arrival—ranging from colonizing deserts and tackling herds of wild elephants to supervising the building of jails and breeding cattle; and about their long summers sweating it out in the plains, writing tracts on Baluchi irregular verbs, while their wives indulged in adultery and amateur theatricals in the hills of Simla.

Throughout it is striking how utterly different the world described is from that of Warren Hastings. His contemporary Sir David Ochterlony, with his thirteen wives, amazed Bishop Heber, the Anglican primate of Calcutta, by receiving him sitting on a divan wearing a “choga and pagri” (kaftan and turban) while being fanned by peacock-feather punkhas. David Gilmour’s officials, however, invariably dressed in dinner jackets even when dining alone in the jungle, and would no more have thought of taking a “native” wife than they would have taken a bribe. Gone were the dancing girls and water pipes beloved of East India Company officials; instead an evening’s entertainment revolved around the racially exclusive club, where most seemed to have obeyed Gladstone’s injunction that “one whisky and soda was sufficient for a man in India,” and where the pleasures revolved around dogs, cards, and horses rather than “nautch girls”—the seductive dancers favored by company officials.

Gilmour defines his task clearly at the beginning of his book as giving a social history of the ICS, and he succeeds in this aim so well that it is perhaps unfair to complain that he fails to give the wider picture. But amid all the tales of hard work and evenhanded justice, you never get any impression of the many clearly negative effects that British rule had on India. For all the irrigation projects, new railways, and imperviousness to bribes, the Raj presided over the destruction of Indian political institutions and cultural and artistic self-confidence, while the economic figures speak for themselves. In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8 percent of the world’s GDP while India was producing 22.5 percent. By 1870, at the peak of the Raj, Britain was generating 9.1 percent, while India had been reduced a poor third-world nation, a symbol across the globe of famine and deprivation.

Today, things are slowly returning to their traditional pattern. Last year the richest man in the UK was for the first time an ethnic Indian, Lakshmi Mittal, and last month news has come that Britain’s largest steel manufacturer, Corus, has just been bought by Tata, an Indian company. Extraordinary as it is, the rise of India and China, seen from the wider perspective, is merely the rebalancing of the ancient equilibrium of world trade, with Europeans no longer appearing as gun-toting, gunboat-riding colonial masters but instead reverting to their traditional role—eager consumers of the much-celebrated manufactures, luxuries, and services of the East.